Read Ebook: Uppingham by the Sea: A Narrative of the Year at Borth by Skrine John Huntley

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Instantly realizing that this was only a flimsy pretense, and deeply hurt by his friend's behavior, the mystified man arose at once and left without another word. He was now determined to solve this mystery at any cost. What could be the meaning of the words on that infernal piece of pasteboard?

Profiting by his humiliating experiences, he took good care not to show the card to any one at the hotel where he now established himself,--a comfortable little place near the Grand Opera House.

"It is better," he said, "that monsieur should not know the nature of this document for the present. I will do myself the honor to call upon monsieur to-morrow at his hotel, and then monsieur shall know everything."

"Then it is really serious?" asked the unfortunate man.

"Very serious," was the answer.

The next twenty-four hours Burwell passed in a fever of anxiety. As his mind conjured up one fearful possibility after another he deeply regretted that he had not torn up the miserable card at the start. He even seized it,--prepared to strip it into fragments, and so end the whole affair. And then his Yankee stubbornness again asserted itself, and he determined to see the thing out, come what might.

"After all," he reasoned, "it is no crime for a man to pick up a card that a lady drops on his table."

Crime or no crime, however, it looked very much as if he had committed some grave offense when, the next day, his detective drove up in a carriage, accompanied by a uniformed official, and requested the astounded American to accompany them to the police headquarters.

"What for?" he asked.

"It is only a formality," said the detective; and when Burwell still protested the man in uniform remarked: "You'd better come quietly, monsieur; you will have to come, anyway."

An hour later, after severe cross-examination by another official, who demanded many facts about the New Yorker's age, place of birth, residence, occupation, etc., the bewildered man found himself in the Conciergerie prison. Why he was there or what was about to befall him Burwell had no means of knowing; but before the day was over he succeeded in having a message sent to the American Legation, where he demanded immediate protection as a citizen of the United States. It was not until evening, however, that the Secretary of Legation, a consequential person, called at the prison. There followed a stormy interview, in which the prisoner used some strong language, the French officers gesticulated violently and talked very fast, and the Secretary calmly listened to both sides, said little, and smoked a good cigar.

"I will lay your case before the American minister," he said as he rose to go, "and let you know the result to-morrow."

"But this is an outrage. Do you mean to say--"Before he could finish, however, the Secretary, with a strangely suspicious glance, turned and left the room.

That night Burwell slept in a cell.

The next morning he received another visit from the non-committal Secretary, who informed him that matters had been arranged, and that he would be set at liberty forthwith.

"I must tell you, though," he said, "that I have had great difficulty in accomplishing this, and your liberty is granted only on condition that you leave the country within twenty-four hours, and never under any condias features of high strategic importance. A tour of the rooms was made at once, and an exact estimate taken of the possible number of beds. Besides two other members of the staff, who joined the pioneers at Borth, the school medical officer had come down to meet us, and reported on what lay within his province. Meanwhile two of the party were conducted by mine host to explore a "cricket-ground" close to the hotel, or at least a plot of ground to which adhered a fading tradition of a match between two local elevens. The "pitch" was conjecturally identified among some rough hillocks, over the sandy turf of which swept a wild northwester, "shrill, chill, with flakes of foam," and now and then a driving hailstorm across the shelterless plain. So little hospitable was our welcome to a home from which we were sometime to part not without regretful memories.

Next day, March 16th, a contract was signed, which gave us the tenancy of the hotel till July 21st, with power to renew the contract at will for a further term after the summer holidays. Our landlord, Mr. C. Mytton, was to provide board and bed for all who could be lodged in his walls, and board for the whole party; to supply the service for the kitchen, and to undertake the laundry. Servants for attendance on the boys were to be brought by the masters. The payment was to be 1 pound a head per week for all who were lodged and boarded, or boarded only, in the hotel. For washing, and one or two other matters, an extra charge was admitted. We have only to add that the bargain was one with which both parties, under their respective circumstances, had reason to be satisfied; and that the arrangement worked not more stiffly than could be expected where the large margin of the unforeseen left so much to subsequent interpretation. Even Dido and Hiarbas were not agreed about the precise width of a bull's- hide. We do not, however, wish it to be inferred from this classical parallel, that our settlers claim to have rivalled the adroitness of the Punic queen in her dealings with the barbarian prince:

Ten days after the reconnaissance described in the last chapter, the pioneers of the school were again upon the ground.

On Monday, March 27th, a goods train of eighteen trucks, chartered by the Uppingham masters, was unloading three hundred bedsteads, with their bedding, on Borth platform. These were to be distributed among the quarters of their respective owners, in some dozen different houses, which we had engaged in addition to the hotel. The workmen were mostly Welshmen, anxious to be doing, but understanding imperfectly the speech of their employers. With the eagerness of their temperament, they went at the trucks, and Babel began. Amid a confused roar of contradictory exhortations, with energetic gesture, and faces full of animation and fire, they were hauling away, to any and every place, the ton-loads of mattresses, and the fragments of unnumbered bedsteads. It was time for the owners to interpose; and those of the school party who were present, knowing that time was very precious, and that example is better than precept, especially precept in a foreign language, put their own hands to the work, the Headmaster being foremost, and earned a labouring man's wage at unloading the trucks and carrying the goods to their billets. Some of our new acquaintances watched the scene with a shocked surprise that authorities should share in the manual labour, instead of looking on and paying for it. But their feelings at last determined to admiration. "Why, sirs," they exclaimed, "you get it done as if you were used to move every three weeks." But, in fact, there was so much to be done, and so few days to do it in, that the exigencies of the work spared neither age, sex, nor degree of our party. None were exempt, and those who were not employed in porterage and rough carpentry might be found shifting furniture, or stitching curtains, or jointing together bedsteads.

Then there was the care of providing supplementary house-room for many purposes: rooms for music practice, and for the boys' studies , and for hospital uses. Ordinary "sick-room" accommodation was soon obtained by paying for it, but a fever hospital was also a requirement which, with our experiences, we were not likely to forget, and this was less easy to secure. We had to scour the neighbourhood, knocking at the door of many a farmhouse and country homestead, before we were provided.

The house-room being secured, came the labour of furnishing; the distribution of tables, benches, bookshelves, &c, for the class-rooms, and of furniture for the needs of masters and their families; the ticketing of the bed-room doors, the beds, the chests of drawers, and each drawer in them, with the name of the occupant--with many like minutiae, which it took longer to provide than it does to detail them. The task was not rendered easier by being shared in part with our hosts, who had hardly taken the measure of our requirements. It became necessary at the last moment to telegraph to the Potteries for a large consignment of bed-room ware, which, in spite of protestations, had been laid in only in half quantities. The world of school has marched forward since the days when three or four basins sufficed for the toilet of a dozen boys.

While the elementary needs of the colony were being attended to, its more advanced wants were not neglected. There were those whom the anxiety of providing for the school amusements, and in particular its cricket, suffered not to sleep. We believe that the first piece of school property which arrived on the scene was the big roller from the cricket- field. Resolved to gather no moss in inglorious ease at home, it had mounted a North-Western truck, and travelled down to Bow Street station, where it was to disembark for action. It cost the Company's servants a long struggle to land it, but once again on terra firma it worked with a will and achieved wonders, reducing a piece of raw meadow land in a few weeks' space to a cricket-field which left little to be desired. This meadow lay within a few hundred yards of Bow Street station, four miles by rail from Borth. It is the property of Sir Pryse Pryse, of Gogerddan, who gave the school the use of it at a peppercorn rent.

This was but one of the many acts of unreserved generosity shown by this gentleman to the school. It is not often that the opportunity offers of winning so much and such hearty gratitude as our neighbour of Gogerddan has won by his prompt liberality; still less often is the opportunity occupied with such thoughtful and ungrudging kindness.

We had help in the same kind from the Bishop of St. David's, who put at our service a field close to the hotel; a rather wild one, but in which little plots and patches for a practising wicket were discovered by our experts. The firm sands to the north were reported to yield an excellent "wicket;" with the serious deduction, however, that the pitch was worn out and needed to be changed every half-dozen balls.

Among such cares the week rolled away only too speedily, and brought the day of the school's arrival upon us. If we have failed, as we have, to convey a true impression of the serious labour and anxieties which crowded its hours, we will quote the summary of a writer who described it at the time, and knew what he was describing: "It was like shaking the alphabet in a bag, and bringing out the letters into words and sentences; such was the sense of absolute confusion turned into intelligent shape."

AN EPIC FRAGMENT.

The careful general who has completed his disposition without one discoverable flaw, who has foreseen all emergencies, and anticipated every possible combination, may await the action with a certain moral confidence of success. But he would be a man of no human fibre, were he not to feel some disquiet in his inmost soul when he gets upon horseback with his enemy in sight, and listens for the boom of the first gun. Not very different, except for the absence of a like confidence in the completeness of their dispositions, were the emotions of the masters who manned the platform of Borth Station, when the gray afternoon of Tuesday, April 4th, drew sombrely towards its close. The station was crowded with spectators from Aberystwith and Borth itself, curious to watch the entry of the boys. Expectation was stimulated by the arrival of a train, which set all the crowd on tip-toe, and then swept through the station--a mere goods train. Half an hour's longer waiting, and the right train drew up, and discharged Uppingham School on the remote Welsh platform. It struck a spark of home feeling in the midst of the lonely landscape, and the chill of strange surroundings, to see well-known faces at the windows, and to meet the grasp of familiar hands. But there was no time for sentiment that stirring evening. The station was cleared with all speed of boys and spectators, the former turning in to tea at those endless tables, the latter strolling away to carry home their first impressions of their invaders. Then one group of masters and servants set to work to sort the luggage which cumbered the platform, while others received it at the hotel door, and distributed it to the various billets. Light was scant, hands were not too numerous, and the work was not done without some confusion. But it was done; and the tired workers went to their beds, thankful for what was finished, and full of good hopes for the work which was yet to be begun.

And the boys--how did they feel? As they stepped out from the railway carriage into those bare, vasty corridors and curtainless dormitories, did some little sense of desolateness in the new prospect temper its excitement? Did some homesickness arise in the exile as he pondered on the retirement and comfort of the "house" at Uppingham, and his individual ownership of the separate cubicle, and the study which was "his castle?" He was a unit now, not of a household, but of a camp. Small blame to him if life seemed to have lost its landmarks, and things round him to be "all nohow," as he sat down in some bare hall upon a schoolfellow's book-box , to while away with a story-book the listless interval before bed-time, under the niggard light of a smoking lamp, or a candle flickering in the draught. What exactly he felt or thought, however, we do not pretend to know. We only know that there was not one of them but felt proud to be out campaigning with his school, and would have counted "ten years of peaceful life" not more than worth his share in that honourable venture.

Next morning the school was called together, and the Headmaster addressed them, feeling, perhaps, somewhat like a general publishing a manifesto to his troops before a campaign. It was a great experiment, he said, in which they were sharing; let them do their best to make the result a happy one for themselves, and for the people among whom they had come. They were "making history," for this experience was a wholly new one, which might not impossibly prove helpful some day to others in like circumstances.

It is pleasant to record that the appeal was not wasted.

At the dinner-hour to-day, the full numbers being now on the spot, the resources of the commissariat were put to the test. Some anxiety was relieved when the supply proved sufficient; it would have been small cause for reproach if the caterers had failed in their estimate on the first experiment. But of the commissariat we shall say more presently.

The secondary necessities of life, fire and light, were not forthcoming with quite the same promptness. There was a twilight period in many houses before lamps were furnished in sufficient abundance. The place of fuel was supplied by the genial weather of the first week; and perhaps few were aware of what we were doing without. Next week the east winds and the coal arrived together.

They stand in pause where they should first begin, And all neglect.

One poor nymph was discovered by a compassionate visitor dissolved in tears over her wash-tub. Such misery could not be permitted; and we transferred half the task at once to the laundries of Aberystwith.

On Friday came a piece of cheering news. Some sympathisers were intending to appeal to parents of boys in the school for subscriptions to a fund, which should help to defray the expense incurred by the masters in moving and resettling the school. The appeal met with a liberal response in many quarters; a large sum was raised, though from a number of subscribers smaller than the promoters of the fund expected. Men, who were feeling the double pressure at once of keen and novel cares, and of an outlay already large, which no one could see to the end of, will not forget that well-timed succour. Not least will it be remembered as a "material guarantee" that the subscribers believed the cause they aided to be worth a costly effort to save.

The week closed with an old scene on a new stage--a football match on Sir Pryse's field at Bow Street. It was the last of the house-matches, which had been interrupted at Uppingham to be played out here. The sight of the school swarming into the railway carriages, which carried us to the four-mile-distant ground, and then the mimic war of the red and white jerseys contrasting the gray Gogerddan woodlands which overhang the meadow, and the shouts of the English boys blending with the excited but unintelligible cries of the Welsh rustic children, who were rapt spectators of the game, brought home to us the piquant contrast between our unchanged school habits and the novelty of their framework.

The weather of this first week was dry and genial; and it had no pleasanter moments than those spent on the beach at sunset, whither the school flocked down after tea for half an hour's leisure in the after- glow. There is plenty of amusement for them on this broad reach of sand and shingle. Some are groping for shells or for pebbles, which the lapidary will transform for a trifle into dazzling jewels; others are playing ducks and drakes on the waves, or entertaining themselves like Prospero's elves,

That on the sands, with printless feet, Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back again.

More pensive spirits saunter up and down the grassy terrace which overlooks the beach, and watch the shifting line of dark figures seen against the white wall of the breaker, or note the fugitive tints on the dimpling surface of the water, or the wet margin of the tide. A group of villagers is clustered round the water-fountain a few yards away; the children chatter about us as they fill their pitchers; and the old women, creeping homewards, cast a glance under their bonnets at the boys, and exchange muttered comments with their gossips. Soon the cliffs of the southern headland grow duskier and more remote; the sea fades to a cold uniform gray; the colours of the brown twilight marsh and the violet hills are lost in one another; and so, with a refreshing breath of idyllic peacefulness, the stirring week came to an end. "Its evening closed on a quiet scene of school routine, as if doubt and risk, turmoil and confusion and fear, weary head and weary hand, had not been known in the place. The wrestling-match against time was over, and happy dreams came down on Uppingham by the Sea."

The primitive man, after he has satisfied the claims of appetite, stitched his skin-mantle, and thatched a hut, may begin to spare time for reflection on the quality and flavour of the prey he has eaten, or the picturesqueness of his cabin. Till then his estimate of things is quantitative. He asks not of what sort his food is, but whether there is enough of it, and regards less the cut of his coat than its thickness.

The analogy of our circumstances must be our excuse for postponing so long a description of our new settlement, its physical surroundings, and the complexion of our domestic and social life. Not in truth that we had returned to barbarism: but who could dilate on the beauty of mountain scenery, in sight of which he was perhaps to starve; who would criticise the pattern of his dinner-service, or be fastidious in carpets and wall- paper, before he could reckon upon dinner, or call shelter his own?

Those who had brought a family with them into camp were more seriously troubled with the cares of providing quarters, and pondered regretfully on the peace and roominess of home. Still as we are leaving no one houseless or dinnerless, we may turn aside to describe at more leisure the place we lived in and the manner of our life.

The stage on which our little history was enacted is a maritime plain of irregular semicircular shape, with a sea-front of five miles, and a depth inland of from two to three miles. This plain, a dead level stretch of peat, of which part is coming under cultivation, while part is still marsh, is surrounded by a ring of hills, which rise in successive well- defined ranges of increasing height, till they culminate in the summits of Cader Idris on one side and Plinlimmon on the other.

The River Dovey, which cleaves the circle of mountains, flows in a broad estuary along the base of the northward hills, under which, at the mouths of the estuary, lies the little port of Aberdovey. At the other end of the arc formed by the coastline, close under the slopes of the promontory which closes the plain at its north-west corner, stands the village of Borth, three-quarters of a mile of straggling dwellings, which vary in scale and character from the primitive mud-cabin of the squatter to the stately hotel which formed the headquarters of the school. The little town is irregular even to quaintness, without being picturesque. Its houses are not grouped according to size and character, but dropped as it were anyhow, in chance collocations, tall and low, thatched and slated together. Two or three gigantesque meeting-houses, featureless and sombre, domineer over the roofs around them. One or two others of a less puritan design, and not out of character with the church on a knoll a furlong off, compensate their severer rivals. The shape of the village is determined by the narrow ridge of terra firma, the mere heaping of the tides, between the quaking marsh and the encroaching sea. The nidus of the present settlement is the tiny hamlet of Old Borth, perched on a spur of the promontory, and well out of reach of flood tides. We are not sure that the mother may not outlive her colony, unless substantial measures are taken to guard against another 30th of January. Near Old Borth, through a gap in the hills, comes the River Lery, a trout-stream known to our anglers, thanks again to Sir Pryse who owns it. It races bubbling round the furze-clad knoll, whose Welsh name is translated Otter's Island, on which stands the church, and then is silenced in a blank straight-cut channel, which conveys it through the marsh into the estuary at Ynyslas. Up the gorge of the Lery runs the railway, which carried us so often past the massive church and steep pine-grown graveyard of Langfihangel-geneur-glyn, and across the broad meadows of Bow Street, to the civilisation of Aberystwith. For Aberystwith was our Capua, and used to draw large parties on many a blank afternoon for marketing or amusement.

Then there was the beach, four miles of it, from the rocks of Borth Head, where the waves could be watched breaking on the seaweed-covered reef, and sending up columns of white spray against the black face of the cliffs, away to the yellow sand dunes near the Dovey's mouth, and the reaches of wet sands where we noted on summer days "the landscape winking through the heat," almost with the effect of a mirage. These sands, firm and sound under foot, were a famous walking-ground at all times; but they changed their character very much with the seasons; at one time retreating and laying bare a beach of shingle under the pebble ridge; at another, swinging back to cover them up again. In the former state of the shore a suggestive phenomenon might be observed. At low-water mark there appeared certain dark shapeless lumps, which might be taken for rocks at a distance, but were in fact the roots and stumps of a submerged pine-forest. Remains of the same forest are found in the marsh. Wood can be cut from the buried trunks, looking as fresh in fibre as if the tree still grew. Here is the verification of the legend which records the fate of the Lost Lowland Hundred. Once on a time , a flourishing tract of country stretched at the foot of the hills which are now washed by the tides of Cardigan Bay. The fishermen of Borth, as they creep past the headlands in their fishing-smacks, have seen deep down in the clear waters, the firmly-cemented stones of a causeway, which must once have traversed the plain, and the line of which may be not indistinctly descried stretching far out to seaward from the mouth of a little combe. It is true that geologists whom we have consulted ridicule the fancy of masonry offering such resistance to the tides, and explain it away as a pebble-ridge built up by the action of currents. And perhaps we might mention in this connection, that one of our party, on the first view, was half persuaded he had seen a sea-serpent. Well, this prosperous country, defended against the sea by embankments, was during the heroic age of Wales laid under water by the opening of the sluices in a drunken frolic. A fragment of it, the marsh between the pebble-ridge of Borth and the hills, would seem to have been recovered; but it enjoys a precarious safety, and even within our experience the sea gave a meaning threat of claiming his own again. But that is a story which must be told in its own place.

Such then were the geographical details of the spot in which we had settled, and they made up a landscape, which, if it can be more than rivalled in other parts of the Principality, has yet a characteristic and impressive beauty. The following extract may serve, for lack of a better rendering, to describe how the scene looked to the eyes of someone who watched it on a June afternoon from the grassy slopes of Borth Head:

My eyes run on with the tide which drifts inland up the estuary, and, farther than vision can really follow, track the march of its glancing ripples, as they swim on past shoal and sand-dune and morass up to the dewy gates of the Spring, in among green-clad river meadows and crisp close-skirted woodlands which the salt breath of sea-winds restrains from a richer luxuriance, on past springing knolls plumed with dark firs, and dimpling valleys mellow with the contrasted gold of the oak's young leafage. Above these, hills moulded on a grander scale heave up their broad shoulders to the sunlight, which is reflected in pale but tender hues of blue or violet or rose from their bare rock masses, or the slopes hardly less bare, which are swept by great winds, and browsed yet closer by climbing mountain sheep. At this and the other point the bosses of the hills are lighted with the sparkle of gorse-thickets, or dusky with heather not yet kindled into bloom. Lower down there are belts of woodland, fencing off the pastures which strew the lowest terraces of the mountains from the barren wastes above them, and these pastures are brightly flecked with patches of white-walled homesteads down to the brown edge of the marsh. And so, ridge after ridge, the hills enclose the scene in a half-circle, of which this breezy headland, our "specular mount," is an extreme horn. But what the eye reposes on at last is the broad floor of marsh-land between mountain and sea. A broad smooth floor, which would be vacant and dull enough had not Nature taken thought to drape its formlessness the more lovingly and richly. She has unrolled on it a carpet of various and solemn-tinted stuffs, where pale breadths of rusted bents sometimes mellow into strips of verdurous pasture, sometimes deepen into belts of embrowned peat-beds, sometimes take a yellower barrenness in parched flats, still briny and unreclaimed, and shaggy with bristling reeds. It is a wilderness, but not unrelieved with here and there an oasis, where, like islands left high and dry in a deserted ocean bed, one and another rocky knoll lift up above the waste flats around them some acres of sweet grass, or a broad field of flowering mustard, shining with a splendour as of cloth of gold, and fringed with a loop or two of silver braid by the river winding at the base. There is animate life, too, sprinkled not stintedly over its surface, not only of visitant sea-fowl from the shore, or solitude- loving creatures native to the place--plover and duck and long-winged herons, but also of cattle and horses grazing on the cultivated edges of the marsh, which make us look for the homes of their human masters at no great distance. Why there they are, lying overlooked at our feet all the while, a straggle of lowly white-roofed dwellings clinging to the long pebble ridge like barnacles on a rock, breathing a thin smoke from their scattered chimneys, whence the blessed smell of peat-fires is wafted through the dry air to our nostrils. But one great house I notice with a crowd about its door-steps, and a flag waving over them a device I have somewhere seen before, where the kitchen chimney smokes with a most hospitable volume; guests must be plenty there. Yes; and if further signs of life be needed, you may listen to the puff of a farmer's steam-engine planted in the swamp, and see the glitter of the steel ropes, with which it draws its ploughshares, resistless as fate, through the oozy fallows. Well, if it is come to this, the farmers and their engines will soon civilise away the beauty of this romantic wild. But shall we complain? If they have begun to drain these intractable marshes, then there is a chance for other places, where the interest on the cost of drainage will be less problematical than here.

From our chapter on the geographical features of our settlement we pass on to describe how the settlers were housed and organised.

If a school be an institution for teaching purposes, its school-room and class-rooms should be the most essential portion of its plant. Without discussing the adequacy of the definition, we will begin with these. We were not ill provided; with an exception or two, the rooms appropriated for class-rooms answered the purpose well. Some of them were spacious; the rest were large enough for the wants of the classes, limited to an average of twenty. Nor would a Government Inspector have justly measured this adequacy by the "cubic capacity," if he failed to take into account the exhilarating five minutes' breathing time upon the beach, at eleven o'clock. There was a rare pleasure in those moments of escape from Greek verbs to the sparkle of the tide and the scent of the sea breeze.

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