Philistia | Page 8

a card of
introduction to go to Max Schurz's.'
'Excuse my interrupting your rhapsody, Ernest,' Herbert put in blandly,
'but will you have your own trousers tonight, Oswald, or will you wear
mine back to your lodgings now, and I'll send one of the servants round
with yours for them in the morning?'
'Thanks,' said Harry Oswald, slapping the sides of the unopened
dust-coat; 'I think I'll go home as I am at present, and I'll recover the
marks of the Beast again to-morrow. You see, I didn't betray my

evening waistcoat after all, now did I?'
And they parted at the corner, each of them going his own way in his
own mood and manner.

CHAPTER II.
THE COASTS OF THE GENTILES.
The decayed and disfranchised borough of Calcombe Pomeroy, or
Calcombe-on-the-Sea, is one of the prettiest and quietest little
out-of-the-way watering-places in the whole smiling southern slope of
the county of Devon. Thank heaven, the Great Western Railway, when
planning its organised devastations along the beautiful rural region of
the South Hams, left poor little Calcombe out in the cold; and the
consequence is that those few people who still love to linger in the
uncontaminated rustic England of our wiser forefathers can here find a
beach unspoiled by goat-carriages or black-faced minstrels, a tiny
parade uninvaded by stucco terraces or German brass bands, and an
ancient stone pier off which swimmers may take a header direct, in the
early morning, before the sumptuary edicts of his worship the Mayor
compel them to resort to the use of bathing-machines and the decent
covering of an approved costume, between the hours of eight and eight.
A board beside the mouth of the harbour, signed by a Secretary of State
to his late Majesty King William the Fourth, still announces to a
heedless world the tolls to be paid for entry by the ships that never
arrive; and a superannuated official in a wooden leg and a gold
cap-band retains the honourable sinecure of a harbour-mastership, with
a hypothetical salary nominally payable from the non-existent fees and
port dues. The little river Cale, at the bottom of whose combe the wee
town nestles snugly, has cut itself a deep valley in the soft sandstone
hills; and the gap in the cliffs formed by its mouth gives room for the
few hundred yards of level on which the antiquated little parade is
warmly ensconced. On either hand tall bluffs of brilliant red marl raise
their honeycombed faces fronting the sea; and in the distance the
sheeny grey rocks of the harder Devonian promontories gleam like

watered satin in the slant rays of the afternoon sun. Altogether a very
sleepy little old-world place is Calcombe Pomeroy, specially reserved
by the overruling chance of the universe to be a summer retreat for
quiet, peace-loving, old-world people.
The Londoner who escapes for a while from the great teeming human
ant-hill, with its dark foggy lanes and solid firmament of hanging
smoke, to draw in a little unadulterated atmosphere at Calcombe
Pomeroy, finds himself landed by the Plymouth slow train at Calcombe
Road Station, twelve miles by cross-country highway from his final
destination. The little grey box, described in the time-tables as a
commodious omnibus, which takes him on for the rest of his journey,
crawls slowly up the first six miles to the summit of the intervening
range at the Cross Foxes Inn, and jolts swiftly down the other six miles,
with red hot drag creaking and groaning lugubriously, till it seems to
topple over sheer into the sea at the clambering High Street of the old
borough. As you turn to descend the seaward slope at the Cross Foxes,
you appear to leave modern industrial England and the nineteenth
century well behind you on the north, and you go down into a little
isolated primaeval dale, cut off from all the outer world by the high
ridge that girds it round on every side, and turned only on the southern
front towards the open Channel and the backing sun. Half-way down
the steep cobble-paved High Street, just after you pass the big dull
russet church, a small shop on the left-hand side bears a signboard with
the painted legend, 'Oswald, Family Grocer and Provision Dealer.' In
the front bay window of that red-brick house, built out just over the
shop, Harry Oswald, Fellow and Lecturer of Oriel College, Oxford,
kept his big oak writing-desk; and at that desk he might be seen reading
or writing on most mornings during the long vacation, after the end of
his three weeks' stay at a London West-end lodging-house, from which
he had paid his first visit to Max Schurz's Sunday evening receptions.
'Two pounds of best black tea, good quality--yours is generally
atrocious, Mrs. Oswald--that's the next