III.—THE AMENITIES OF THE HIGH STREET

Every here and there between the shops in the High Street is a house that has survived the request—it never amounts to a demand in Mallingham—for “business premises.” Quite unpretentious is the appearance of all these houses, but the front door opens upon a hall that is a hall, and not a mere passage to a narrow staircase. Admirably proportioned rooms are to be found on every floor, and usually a door at the farther end of the hall admits one to a garden, and not a mere patch of green. Here are gardens that have been cultivated for hundreds of years and so artfully designed that each of them has the appearance of a park, with lawns, and terraces, and pergolas. Here, not thirty feet back from the street, are acres of orchard, with mulberry trees of the original stock introduced by James I. to make possible his scheme of English silk weaving. The arbutus has also a home in several of these surprising pleasure grounds, with several other rare but fully acclimatised flowering shrubs. Shady walks among giant lilacs and laburnums lead to banks of roses and beds of lilies, and hardy borders of brilliant colour such as a stranger could never fancy might be found in so unpromising a region.

The lucky residents in these wonderful houses are usually extremely exclusive—if they were not so, goodness only knows what might happen. When a lady of good family finds herself living next door to a grocer and an ironmonger, she is bound to take steps to prevent the possibility of any one fancying that she belongs to that galère, and the steps that some of them take with this fact in their mind are sometimes very diverting. They usually assume the form of ignoring the existence, not so much of the grocer and the ironmonger as of the other ladies similarly situated. If you call upon Miss Wheatly at No. 10 High Street and, after praising up her garden, refer to the garden of Miss Keightley at No. 20, Miss Wheatley will express great interest, saying she has often heard that Miss Keightley's garden is quite charming, but she has never seen it for herself. Miss Keightley on her side may go even further, and not merely pretend that she has never heard of Miss Wheatley's garden, but also that she had no idea that any one named Wheatley lived in the town. This is at first, but she occasionally betrays a scrupulous anxiety to be accurate by asking, “What did you say the name was? Wheatley? Oh yes, to be sure I remember hearing the other day that a Miss Wheatley lived at No. 10. And you say she has a nice garden?”

And these good ladies may have been living within a few doors of one another for forty odd years, and the father of the one may have been in the butter trade, while the father of the other was in eggs.

The social distinctions in a country town such as Mallingham are sometimes very pathetic. It might be thought that the people would find a bond of union in that illiteracy which they enjoy in common, or in that profound ignorance of everything connected, however distantly, with art or science in which they live from one end of the year to the other; but one does not find it so. Mallingham is perhaps the most ill-informed town in England on all matters pertaining to culture, whether literary or artistic. A stranger who was unacquainted with this fact thought he was scoring a point in a speech which he had been called on to make in the absence of the Member for the Division at the annual banquet of the Barham Trust—the most important incident of the winter in Mallingham—when he remarked that he felt that the town must be the centre of the greatest literary activity; for, motoring through the High Street, he found on one of the shop signs the name Swift, on another the name Smollett, a little farther on he came upon an Addison (great applause), and finally he found himself close to the house of Hume. Surely, he said, these names spoke for themselves.

They had need to, for none of the élite of Mailingham could speak for any of them, except Addison, for Mr. Addison was a pork butcher, who the day before had been elected a member of the Corporation, after a hard struggle with a saddler. It so happened that the bearers of all the other literary names were not applaudable people—two of them were definitely unpopular—but the name of Mr. Addison was received with cheers, not by reason of his connection with The Spectator, but simply because of his recent achievement, and no one at the banquet had the least idea what the orator was referring to in bringing forward that string of names. “He might surely have mentioned Mr. Fawley, who was twice Mayor, or George Hanson, who has just bought the saw mills,” a prominent burgess remarked to me when I was in his shop the next day. “But what has Peter Swift done, or Tom Smollett, or even Walter Hume? Decent enough men, I don't deny, but out of place when named in prominence at the Barham Banquet.”

I never met anyone in the town who had heard these names in any other connection than that of Mailingham shopkeepers.

Some time later a new curate at St Bartholomew's, when proposing a vote of thanks to the chairman of one of his social meetings (with a magic lantern and an amateur ventriloquist), became erudite and droll by referring to “what Dr. Johnson said about music.” The next day one of the churchwardens—a land agent—asked him how on earth he could attribute such a sentiment to Dr. Johnson. “I knew Dr. Johnson as well as most people, and there never was a man in the town who enjoyed a song better or knew better what a good song was,” he said; and when the perplexed curate recovered himself sufficiently to be able to explain that there was another Dr. Johnson who said things besides the person of the same name who had once enjoyed quite a large and lucrative practice as a fully qualified veterinary surgeon at Mallingham, the churchwarden smiled and shook his head. “As much as to say,” the clergyman added in telling me the story—“as much as to say that my excuse was far from plausible, but that he would accept it to prevent the matter going farther.”

That narrative I found to be beautifully typical of the literary erudition of Mallingham.