they got to Oxford for tea and had time to go and see David's rooms before they left for Stratford. But David would let them see nothing else. "No," he said; "it would be a shame to hurry over your first sight. You must come here after Stratford. I'll take rooms for you at the Mitre. I want to show you Oxford on a May morning."
It was quite dark when they reached Stratford. To Jean it seemed strange and delicious thus to enter Shakespeare's own town, the Avon a-glimmer under the moon, the kingcups and the daisies asleep in the meadows.
The lights of the Shakespeare Hotel shone cheerily as they came forward. A "boots" with a wrinkled, whimsical face came out to help them in. Shaded lights and fires (for the evenings were chilly) made a bright welcome, and they were led across the stone-paved hall with its oaken rafters, gate-legged tables, and bowls of spring flowers, up a steep little staircase hung with old prints of the plays, down winding passages to the rooms allotted to them. Jean looked eagerly at the name on her door.
"Hurrah! I've got 'Rosalind.' I wanted her most of all."
Jock and Mhor had a room with two beds, rather incongruously called "Anthony and Cleopatra." Jock was inclined to be affronted, and said it was a silly-looking thing to put him in a room called after such an amorous couple. If it had been Touchstone or Mercutio, or even Shylock, he would not have minded, but the pilgrims of love got scant sympathy from that sturdy misogynist.
CHAPTER XXIV
"It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green corn-fields did pass,
In the spring-time, the only pretty ring time…."
As You Like It.
Next morning Jean's eyes wandered round the dining-room as if looking for someone, but there was no one she had ever seen before among the breakfasters at the little round tables in the pretty room with its low ceiling and black oak beams. To Jean, unused to hotel life and greatly interested in her kind, it was like a peep into some thrilling book. She could hardly eat her breakfast for studying the faces of her neighbours and trying to place them.
Were they all Shakespeare lovers? she wondered.
The people at the next table certainly looked as if they might be: a high-browed, thin-faced clergyman with a sister who was clever (from her eye-glasses and the way her hair was done, Jean decided she must be very clever), and a friend with them who looked literary—at least he had a large pile of letters and a clean-shaven face; and they seemed, all three, like Lord Lilac, to be "remembering him like anything."
There were several clergymen in the room; one, rather fat, with a smug look and a smartly dressed wife, Jean decided must have married an heiress; another, with very prominent teeth and kind eyes, was accompanied by an extremely aged mother and two lean sisters.
One family party attracted Jean very much: a young-looking father and mother, with two girls, very pretty and newly grown up, and a boy like Davie. They were making plans for the day, deciding what to see and what to leave unseen, laughing a great deal, and chaffing each other, parents and children together. They looked so jolly and happy, as if they had always found the world a comfortable place. They seemed rather amused to find themselves at Stratford among the worshippers. Jean concluded that they were of those "not bad of heart" who "remembered Shakespeare with a start."
Jock and Mhor were in the highest spirits. It seemed to them enormous fun to be staying in a hotel, and not an ordinary square up-and-down hotel, but a rambling place with little stairs in unexpected places, and old parts and new parts, and bedrooms owning names, and a long, low-roofed drawing-room with a window at the far end that opened right out to the stable-yard through which pleasantries could be exchanged with grooms and chauffeurs. There was a parlour, too, off the hall—the cosiest of parlours with cream walls and black oak beams and supports, two fireplaces round which were grouped inviting arm-chairs, tables with books and papers, many bowls of daffodils. And all over the house hung old prints of scenes in the plays; glorious pictures, some of them—ghosts and murders over which Mhor gloated.
They went before luncheon to the river and sailed up and down in a small steam-launch named The Swan of Avon. Jean thought privately that the presence of such things as steam-launches were a blot on Shakespeare's river, but the boys were delighted with them, and at once began to plan how one might be got to adorn Tweed.
In the afternoon they walked over the fields to Shottery to see Anne Hathaway's cottage.
Jean walked in a dream. On just such an April day, when shepherds pipe on oaten straws, Shakespeare himself must have walked here. It would be different, of course; there would be no streets of little mean houses, only a few thatched cottages. But the larks would be singing as they were to-day, and the hawthorn coming out, and the spring flowers abloom in Anne Hathaway's garden.
She caught her breath as they went out of the sunshine into the dim interior of the cottage.
This ingle-nook … Shakespeare must have sat here on winter evenings and talked. Did he tell Anne Hathaway wonderful tales? Perhaps, when he was not writing and weaving for himself a garment of immortality, he was just an everyday man, genial with his neighbours, interested in all the small events of his own town, just Master Shakespeare whom the children looked up from their play to smile at as he passed.
"Oh, Jock," Jean said, clutching her brother's sleeve. "Can you really believe that he sat here?—actually in this little room? Looked out of the window—isn't it wonderful, Jock?"
Jock, like Mr. Fearing, ever wakeful on the enchanted ground, rolled his head uncomfortably, sniffed, and said, "It smells musty!" Both he and Mhor were frankly much more interested in the fact that ginger-beer and biscuits were to be had in the cottage next door.
They mooned about all afternoon vastly content, and had tea in the garden of a sort of enchanted cottage (with a card in the window which bore the legend, "We sell home-made lemonade, lavender, and pot-pourri"), among apple trees and spring flowers and singing birds, and ate home-made bread and honey, and cakes with orange icing on them. A girl in a blue gown, who might have been Sweet Anne Page, waited on them, and Jean was so distressed at the amount they had eaten and at the smallness of the bill presented that she slipped an extra large tip under a plate, and fled before it could be discovered.
It was a red-letter day for all three, for they were going to the theatre that night for the first time. Jean had once been at a play with her father, but it was so long ago as to be the dimmest memory, and she was as excited as the boys. Their first play was to be As You Like It. Oh, lucky young people to see, for the first time on an April evening, in Shakespeare's own town, the youngest, gayest play that ever was written!
They ran up to their rooms to dress, talking and laughing. They could not be silent, their hearts were so light. Jean sang softly to herself as she laid out what she meant to wear that evening. Pamela had made her promise to wear a white frock, the merest wisp of a frock made of lace and georgette, with a touch of vivid green, and a wreath of green leaves for the golden-brown head. Jean had protested. She was afraid she would look overdressed: a black frock would be more suitable; but Pamela had insisted and Jean had promised.
As she looked in the glass she smiled at the picture she made. It was a pity Pamela couldn't see how successful the frock was, for she had designed it…. Lord Bidborough
