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During these gentle revisitations of the days that are no more I sometimes enliven my imagination by resorting to an Ordnance Survey map of those parts of Kent and Sussex with which I am concerned. The Survey was made in 1866 and brought up to date and the map re-engraved in 1893; so it enables me to lose sight of the arterial road makings and other tyrannies of mechanized trafficry which have since altered the character of so much of the countryside. Far back in the ’90’s my mother had acquired it for finding her way to distant meets of the hounds; and in later years I myself never failed to unfold it after a day’s hunting. It is therefore an old and valued friend, and no map could be more imbued with memorial associations and finger-marks.

My most recent porings over it have been for the purpose of measuring a few of the distances I drove with friends at whose houses I stayed for balls, in the days before motor-cars were much in use. For I was an enthusiastic dancer, though I can’t claim ever to have been to more than about half-a-dozen important ones in a twelve-month. An earnest rather than volatile performer with my patent-leather pumps, I never ‘sat out’ anything—not even ‘The Lancers’—and I was hard at it until the band had played its final bar—unless some beckoning and unevadable chaperon decreed that her party must leave before the finish. ‘Such a long way home for the horses’ was the reason given for our reluctant departure—including the customary concession of ‘Well, just one more, Marjorie, and that really must be the last’. And ten miles home on frosty roads frequently justified it.

‘Do you reverse?’ ... How those words bring my silly self back to me, with my inability to make my white ties look as effortless as other young men’s, and my white gloves which always would split in at least one place before the ‘supper extras’ emptied the floor for some really strenuous waltzing. I was particularly proud of my reversing, but I suspect that the young ladies found it a somewhat left-handed experience. One just went resolutely round the other way and made sketchy movements with the feet. ‘The music seems to be playing specially for us, doesn’t it?’ murmured some light-footed partner, while we swayed to the soul-transporting strains of Songe d’Automne. And in my white simplicity I agreed with her, unaware that the remark was an artless variation of that traditional suggestion ‘the world seems to have been made specially for us two!’ I remember one unromantic evening in a ballroom of Italianate design which contained a picture by Burne-Jones called ‘The Hours’. The room was overcrowded, and while I bumped into people and apologized I was seldom unmindful of those languid and sedentary Praeraphaelite ladies who were presiding over our exertions—‘wall-flowers’ they were, every one of them, like the shyly stoical girls whose programmes were so depressingly full of blanks.

‘The Hours’ were six in number—just about the duration of the dance—and I have mentioned them because it now seems so peculiar that I should have been revolving beneath them for so many hours on end, and that I should now be putting their presence in my past on paper. One might be excused for moralizing about it. But the implications of the picture are obvious—many of the dancers and most—if not all—of the sedately watchful dowagers having since then asked for their carriages and departed for some destination beyond the reach of gilt-edged invitation cards. Would one willingly invite them back, to be as they then were in the world darkness of to-day? I cannot think so. And I remember—with a sigh—how more than once I have thought that it was well for my old friends that they went when they did.

Meanwhile I am still overhearing the muffled thrum and throb of music from ballrooms thirty years ago—overhearing, perhaps, that ‘Blue Hungarian Band’ which we all thought so wonderful. And I get a glimpse of myself, waiting impatiently for an overdue partner in some empty ante-room of mirrors that reflect my flushed and callow countenance. But the gaiety and the sentiment of what then was—do not these forbid me to make further game of old dancing days, reminding me, not of laborious toe-treading couples, but of those who took the floor triumphally and carried the music along with them in their controlled and graceful career—exemplifying, for older eyes that watched them, the momentary conquest of youth and the pathos of its unawareness?

Anyhow, here I am, with the dear old map yet again unfolded—quite in the mood to revisit one of those Queen Anne country houses where I awoke on the morning after a dance and drowsily observed the discreet man-servant putting a hot-water can into the hip-bath, wondering whether he was expecting me to give him half-a-sovereign or whether five bob would be decent, until he’d creaked away along the passage and I was up and looking out at frosted lawns and the sun just breaking through mist beyond the elm avenue. Revisiting some such house I should go there in summer—preferably on a dozy July morning. I should find myself in an upstairs room, leaning out of the tall sash-window from a sun-warmed window-seat. It is an unfrequented room, seeming to contain vibrations of vanished life. A summer room, too, where the cushions along the window-seat have had the colour faded out of them by many a morning such as this. Year after year the sunlight has come past half-drawn curtains to slant idly along the oak floor and up the panelled wall, at certain seasons creeping across the portrait above the fireplace—a girl in eighteenth-century dress with a little posy in her hands. ‘The past is over and gone,’ the sunlight seems to be saying, ‘but the present is only that mottled butterfly fluttering dryly against the ceiling, and the old white pony pulling the mowing-machine to and fro on the lawn.’ Down in the drawing-room the young lady of the house is practising Grieg’s Schmetterling with rippling rapidity and a proper appreciation of its lyrical tenderness. And ‘The past ought always to be like this’, I tell myself. ‘Music with a heart-ache of happiness in it, overheard from the upstairs room of one’s acquiescent mind, where the present is only waiting to become the past and be laid up in lavender for commemorative renewal.’ But I must be getting back to realities again—or to such realities as I can muster-up from my obsolete Ordnance Map.

Meanwhile I will ask to be allowed to do it affectionately, taking my own time. Leaning on the sun-blistered white paint of the window-ledge, I must enjoy my final stare at the garden; listen to the stable clock striking twelve; hear the clink of a bucket as the stable-boy finishes washing the carriage-wheels, and then one of the horses neighing and snorting while the coachman goes to the corn bin with his sieve. From somewhere beyond a yew hedge comes a murmur of voices, talking contentedly as people do while sitting out of doors on a fine summer day—talking, I like to think, about the new standard roses which have done so well this year; with an afterword that perhaps it would be as well to have iced-coffee besides claret-cup for the small tennis party this afternoon.... And now I emerge from the upstairs room—a half-ghost, soundless from the shades of the future. Down the wide and slippery oak stairs I go, as I used to do when dressed and button-holed for a ball; and across the lofty panelled hall with its bland periwigged portraits and great open fireplace where huge smouldering logs sent out their pungent woodsmoke smell—that hall where I had danced Sir Roger de Coverley on stormy winter nights when I was only an awkward excited little boy. Then out by the big double doors, and away under the whispering trees, pausing near the homely farm buildings for a last look at the gracious red brick front of the house. Here it all is on my map; a name, and a few marks and dots; and just beyond the farm, the tiny river Bewlt joining the tiny river Teise.

For on the map they are both awarded the rank of River, though the youthful Bewlt in its five-mile wanderings had never been more than a brook; while the stripling Teise, which had yet another ten miles to travel before merging itself in the Medway at Yalding, was content to saunter past orchards, copses, pastures, and hop-gardens without achieving the dignity of working a watermill or even earning a rent for its fishing-rights. I had never seen much of the Bewlt; but the windings of the Teise were well-known to me, with the added interest that, for some seven miles before it met its tiny tributary, this pleasant alder-shaded stream formed the boundary between Kent and Sussex. The bit of it which I knew best was in Squire Morland’s park at Lamberhurst, for it flowed past the fourth green of the nine-hole golf course, and many a time I had almost been into it with my second shot after topping my drive. And since the Teise was never more than a few miles from my home, I had always looked upon it as our local river, and as such had wished it well where it gurgled under little bridges.

Meanwhile I feel inclined to compare it—not only to this dallying digression—but also to the whole narrative thread of this discursive chapter. For I began my chapter with an unparticularized intention of amusing myself by memories of the adolescence of the auto-car; but I am already well away from the main roads, and glad of any excuse for continuing my journey by field paths and bridle tracks. ‘For most, I know, thou lov’st retirèd ground’ ... I could quote several stanzas of The Scholar Gipsy in support of my propensity for meditative ramblings in the by-ways of my mind. I have never liked following the telegraph-poles on the straightest road to a populous destination. Give me the manor-farmstead that can only be reached after opening half-a-dozen gates, and the unassuming stream which never tells you what parish it intends to pass through next.

Squire Morland’s park, which I mentioned not far back, provides yet another excuse for dawdling a bit longer in the vicinity of the river Teise. Some of my readers will recognize the scene, since I have described it—more briefly than it deserved—in an earlier volume of Memoirs. But that was fully a dozen years ago, so I may be forgiven this renewed retrospection of a place which I was fond of, and have always enjoyed thinking about. Let me add that although the course wasn’t at all a good one I must have played many more rounds there than on any other. The worst thing about Lamberhurst golf was that it provided very poor practice for playing anywhere else. In fact one could almost say that it was ‘a game of its own’. For one thing, you were perpetually hoicking the ball out of tussocky lies; and for another, the greens had justifiably been compared to the proverbial postage-stamp. If you pitched adroitly on to a green, it was more than likely that you wouldn’t remain there. If, on the other hand, your ball fell short, you stopped where you were, which was in the rough grass. And the otherwise almost hazardless charm of our local links didn’t always atone for these disadvantages, especially when one happened to be playing a medal-round at the Spring or Autumn Meeting. During the summer months the course got completely out of control and nobody bothered to play there except Squire Morland himself, and he had seldom done the nine holes in under fifty at the best of times. Go there on a fine April day, however, and there was nothing to complain of, provided that one gave the idyllic pastoral surroundings their due and didn’t worry about the quality of the golf. I say ‘pastoral’ because the place was much frequented by sheep, and I cannot visualize it without an accompaniment of bells and baa-ings.

Standing near the quiet-flowing tree-shaded river at the foot of the park, one watches a pottering little group of golfers moving deliberately down the south-westerly slope. It is one of those after-luncheon foursomes in which the Squire delighted; and there he is, playing an approach-shot to the third hole in that cautious, angular, and automatic style of his. The surly black retriever is at his heels, and his golf-bag has a prop to it, so as to save him stooping to pick it up, and also to keep his clubs dry. The clock on the village school strikes three, and one is aware of the odour of beer-making from the Brewery. The long hole to the farthest corner of the park is known as ‘the Brewery Hole’. And now they are all on the green, and gallant old General Fitzhugh, who had conspicuously distinguished himself in the Afghanistan campaign some thirty years before, is taking tremendous pains over his put. The General has quite lately acquired one of those new Schenectady putters, mallet-shaped and made of aluminium, and popularized by Walter Travis, the first American who ever reached and won the Final of the Amateur Championship in England; and the non-success of his stroke is duly notified when he brandishes the weapon distractedly above his head. I now identify the stocky upright figure of my old friend Captain Ruxton, who evidently has ‘that for it’, and sinks the ball with airy unconcern; whereupon the Squire, I can safely assume, ejaculates ‘My word, that’s a hot ’un, Farmer!’ in his customary clipped and idiomatic manner.

The fourth member of the party, I observe—unless one includes a diminutive boy from the village who staggers under the General’s bristling armoury of clubs—is Mr. Watson, a tall, spectacled Scotsman, still in the prime of life, whose game is a good deal above Lamberhurst standards. Watson is a man well liked by everyone—without his ever saying much, possibly because he can’t think of anything to say. My mother once remarked that when Mr. Watson ran out of small talk at a tea-party he told her that he always gave his hens salad-oil for the good of their health. But his favourite conversational opening was ‘Have you been to Macrihanish?’—Macrihanish being an admirable but rather un-get-at-able golf course within easy reach of the Mull of Kintyre. A person of strict principles, he had never been heard to utter the mildest of expletives, even when he found one of his finest drives reposing in the footprint of a sheep. After making a bad shot he used to relieve his feelings, while marching briskly toward his ball, with a snatch of cheerful song. ‘Trol-de-rol-de-rol’ went Mr. Watson. But one had to have been to Macrihanish if one wanted to get much out of him in the way of conversation.

The friendly foursome is now well on toward the fourth green, where—in my mind’s eye—I am standing by the tin flag, which requires repainting and has been there ever since the Club was founded. Following the flight of their tee-shots, I have remembered with amusement that Squire Morland occupies what might be called a duplicated position in the realms of print. His name appears, of course, in Burke’s Landed Gentry and similar publications of lesser importance. But it also figures in The Golfing Annual as ‘green-keeper to the Lamberhurst Golf Club’. (Nine holes. Subscription 21/- per annum.) The Squire’s assumption of this sinecure appointment is due to the fact that by so doing he cannily obtains for himself and his cronies all the golf balls that he needs, at wholesale price. It is just conceivable that he does pull the light roller up and down about once a year; but I never heard of him doing so, though I myself had put in an hour’s voluntary worm-cast sweeping now and again—the green-man being rather apt to neglect his duties.

In the meantime the foursome has another fourteen holes to play before it adjourns to the House for tea and a stroll in the garden to admire the daffodils. And while those kindly ghosts gather round me on the green I can do no more than wish that I could be greeting them there again, on some warm April afternoon, with the sheep munching unconcernedly and the course—as the Squire used to say—‘in awful good condition’. But as the scene withdraws and grows dim I hear a blackbird warbling from the orchard on the other side of the river; and I know that his song on the springtime air is making even elderly country gentlemen say to themselves that one is only as old as one feels, especially when there is nothing forbidding about the foreground of the future—into which they are now, with leisurely solemnity, making ready to smite the ball.