Certain Delightful English Towns. William Dean Howells
and fruits from the Scilly Isles, while the spring is coming slowly up our way at home by fast-freight, through Georgia and the Carolinas and Virginia.
So many things were strange to me that I might have thought I had never been in Plymouth before, and so many things familiar that I might have fancied I had always been there. The long unimpressive stretches of little shops might have been in any second-class American city, which would likewise have shown the same exceptional number of large department stores. What it could not have shown were the well-kept streets, the reverently guarded heritage from the past in here and there a bit of antique architecture amid the prosperous newness; the presence of lingering state in the mansions peering over their high garden wall, or standing withdrawn from the thoroughfares in the quiet of wooded crescents or circles.
I doubt if any American city, great or small, has the same number of birds, dear to poetry, singing in early March, as Plymouth has. That morning as we walked in the town, and that afternoon as we rode on our tram-top into the country, they started from a thousand lovely lines of verse, finches and real larks, and real robins, and many a golden-billed blackbird, and piped us on our way. Overhead, in the veiled sun, circled and swam the ever-cawing rooks, as they jarred in the anxieties of the nesting then urgent with them. They were no better than our birds; I will never own such a recreant thing. If I do not quite prefer a crow to a rook, I am free to say that one oriole or redbird or hermit-thrush is worth all the English birds that ever sang. Only, the English birds sing with greater authority, and find an echo in the mysterious depths of our ancestral past where they and we were compatriots.
Viewed from the far vantage of some rising ground the three towns of Plymouth, Stonehouse, and Devonport, which have grown together to form one Plymouth, stretch away from the sea in huge long ridges thickly serried with the gables, and bristling with the chimneypots of their lines of houses. They probably look dense. Her built than they are through the exaggerative dimness of the air which lends bulk to the features of every distant prospect in England; but for my pleasure I would not have had the houses set any closer than they were on the winding, sloping line of the tram we had taken after luncheon. It was bearing us with a leisurely gait, inconceivable of an American trolley, but quite swiftly enough, towards any point in the country it chose; and after it had carried us through rows and rows of small, low, gray stone cottages, each with its pretty bit of garden at its feet, it bore us on where their strict contiguity ceased in detached villas, and let us have time to look into the depths of their encompassing evergreenery, their ivy, their laurel, their hedges of holly, all shining with a pleasant luster. So we came out into the familiar provisionality of half-built house lots, and at last into the open country quite beyond the town, with green market-gardens, and brown ploughed fields, patching the sides of the gentle knolls, laced with white winding roads, that lost their heads in the haze of the horizon, and with woodlands calling themselves "Private,'' and hiding the way to stately mansions withdrawn from the commonness of our course.
When the tram stopped we got down, with the other civilian persons of our tram-top company, and with the soldiers and the girls who formed their escort, and hurried beyond hearing of the loud-cackling, hard-mouthed, red-cheeked, black-eyed young woman, whom one sees everywhere in some form, and in whose English version I saw so many an American original that I was humbled with the doubt whether she might not have come out on the Mayflower. There were many other people more inoffensive coming and going, or stretching themselves on the damp new grass in a defiance of the national rheumatism which does not save them from it. At that time, though, I did not know but it might, and I enjoyed the picturesqueness of their temerity with an untroubled mind. I noted merely the kind looks which prevail in English faces of the commoner sort, and I thought the men better and the women worse dressed than Americans of the same order. Then, after I had realized the prevalence of much the same farming tradition as our own, in the spreading fields, and holloed my fancy up and away over the narrow lines climbing between them to the sky, there was nothing left to do but to go to town by a different tram-line from that which brought us. The man I asked for help in this bold enterprise had a face above the ordinary in a sort of quickness, and he seemed to find something unusual in my speech. He answered civilly and fully, as all the English do when you ask them a civil question, without the friendly irony with which Americans often like to visit the inquiring stranger. Then he stopped short, checking the little boy he was leading by the hand, and said, abruptly, " You're not English!''
"No,'' I said, "we're Americans," and I added, "From New York."
"Ah, from New York!" he said, with a visible rush of interest in the fact that it never afterwards brought to another English face, so far as I could see. " From New York! Americans!'' and he stood clutching the hand of the little boy, while I felt myself in the presence of a tacit drama, which I have not yet been able to render explicit. Sometimes I have thought it not well to try. It might have been the memory of sad experiences which had left a rancor for our country in his heart, and held him in doubt whether he might not fitly wreak it upon the first chance American he met. Again I fancied it might have been the stirring of some long-deferred hope, some defeated ambition, or the rapture of some ideal of us which had never had the opportunity to disappoint itself. I only know that he looked like a man above his class: an unhappy man anywhere, and probably in England most unhappy. I stupidly hurried on, and after some movement to follow me he let me leave him behind. Whoever he was or whatever his emotion, I hope he was worthy of the sympathy which here offers itself too late. If I could I would perhaps go back to him, and tell him that if he sailed for New York he might never find the America of his vision, but only a hard-workaday world like the one he was leaving, where he might be differently circumstanced, but not differently conditioned. I dare say he would not believe me; I am not sure that I should believe myself, though I might well be speaking the truth.
The next day being Monday, it was quite fit that we should go to work with the rest of the world in Plymouth, and we set diligently about the business of looking up such traces of the Pilgrim Fathers as still exist in the town which was so kind to them in their great need of kindness. I will not pretend that the pathetic story recurred to me in full circumstance during our search for the exact place from which the Mayflower last sailed, when after she had come with her sister ship, the Speedwell, from Holland to Southampton, and then started on the voyage to America, she had been forced by the unseaworthiness of the Speedwell to put back as far as Plymouth. Mr. W. E. Griffin, in his very agreeable and careful little book, The Pilgrims in their Three Homes, is able only to define the period of their stay there as "some time," but he tells us that the disappointed voyagers "were treated very kindly by the people of the Free Church, forming what is now the Grange Street Chapel, the Mayflower meanwhile lying off the Barbican." The weather was good while the two ships stayed, but when they sailed again the Speedwell returned to London with some twenty of the homesick or heart-sick, while all her other people stowed themselves with their belongings in the little Mayflower as best they could, and she once more put out to sea: a prison where the brutal shipmen were their jailers; a lazar where the seeds of death were planted in many that were soon to fill the graves secreted under the snow of the savage shore they were seeking.
I believe it was the visiting association of American librarians who caused, a few years ago, a flagstone in the pavement of the quay where the Mayflower lay to be inscribed with her name and the date 1620, as well as a more explicit tablet to be let into the adjacent parapet. Perhaps our driver could have found these records for us, or we could have found them for ourselves, but I am all the same grateful for the good offices of several unoccupied spectators, especially a friendly matron who had disposed of her morning's stock of fish, and had now the leisure for indulging an interest in our search. She constituted herself the tutelary spirit of the neighborhood, which smelt of immemorial catches of fish, both from the adjacent market and from the lumpish, quaintly rigged craft crowding one another in the docks and composing in an unsurpassable picturesqueness; and she directed us wherever we wanted to go.
The barbican of the citadel from which the Mayflower sailed, before there was either citadel or barbican, is no great remove from the Hoe, which may justly enough boast itself "the finest promenade in England" but it is quite in another world: a seventeenth-century world of narrow streets crooking up hill and down, and overhung by the little bulging houses which the pilgrims must have seen as they came and went on their affairs with the ship, scarcely bigger than the fishing -boats now nosing