THESE YELLOW SANDS
By E. L. WOODW N.RD AI. S a child had always been a little afraid of Swanage. I was told that Special Services for Children were held on the sands. On week-days. Now I may say without boasting that I have never -been unwilling to render unto Caesar, &c., with the corresponding obliga- tion elsewhere ; but even years ago I could not help thinking that these sea-beach services —on week-days- rather upset the balance, and were something of an encroachment on Caesar's legitimate preserves. Our own vicar was a very pleasant man. I never minded listening to him on Sunday afternoons and in church. He had a sense of fair play, and I could not see him advancing in full canonicals, with a white-robed choir, to trample down my sand-castles and destroy my elaborate trench work at high noon on a week-day morning. No : he would never have done this ; but I could not answer for the vicar of Swanage. It appeared that he was a clergyman like the Pope, who, so I learned in my pro- testant upbringing, asserted himself far too much for the. likings of Englishmen from King Henry VIII to my own father.
I had also a more sinister fear. One heard of people, the elder brothers and sisters of one's own friends, who went to Swanage entirely carefree and unpledged, and found that a call to the mission field had been fastened upon them:. At these services. On week-days. Unlike Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, you could not throw off this burden. Once called, you had to go. I admired missionaries. I admire them still. I have seen them in China, when they represented to me the un-western quality of infinite patience ; I have seen them in Africa, when they represented something which was not capitalist exploitation. As a child I wanted to go to China and Africa ; I did not want to be a missionary. Yet this call might overwhelm one. There would be no escape. I thought of it as an awful game of hide-and-seek in which the last home was pounced upon by Inscrutable Pro- vidence. I had not read Dr. James' story Whistle and I quill come, but the ghost leaping over the groins on a wide beach just fits the case. I do not know whether Dr. James ever attended one of those services, and was nearly called, and translated this psychical experience into a ghost story.
. At all events, my fears at that time were corroborated by further evidence which was not merely hearsay. I was shown .a picture of a globe at Swanage. There were texts on tablets of stone near this globe. Real texts. Brought down, no doubt, with the other tablets of stone from Mt. Sinai. I have come to Swanage. I have seen the globe, aid the texts. I was not frightened. In these soft January days on the Dorset coast one thinks of nothing but the great beauty of sea and land ; the beauty of the Riviera without the jaggedness of the rocks or the presence of the Very Rich. Curiously enough the country seems. as remote as my own childhood. There arc , indeed three Swanages. There is a hideous triangle of red and half-timbered houses below Ballard Down ; New Swanagc. There is the old stone town, half hidden, and beyond it, a green down and charming wilderness reaching from my excellent hotel to Durlston Head. I know that the word and the thing are old-fashioned, but I can only call this third Swanage romantic. The wilderness was a pleasure- garden, planted once upon a time by careful hands. The pillars and posts marking the paths are true to the dream-like air of the place. They are the old parish boundary posts from Soho and Bloomsbury and the City of London, brought here, heaven knows why. One passes from the boundary of St. Anne's, Soho, to a walk through a neglected pinewood which falls steeply to the sea. The man who planned the walks put seats here and there. The seats are • gone, but their stone supports remain, and each stone has the name of some nineteenth- century worthy . . such as were King Arthur and Sir Walter Scott: You reach a pseudo 'fifteenth-century castle ; you find carved on its walls those disjointed pieces of information which people once thought improving for the minds of artisans ; the time of day all over the world when it is noon at Greenwich ; the height of the tides in the west of Ireland, Southampton, and elsewhere ; the distance of a score of places from Swanage. You read one of those ennobling thoughts with which John Bright cheered Richard Cobden, and Richard Cobden cheered John •Bright : "The seas but join the nations they divide." They do indeed. England and Germany, the U.S. and Spain, Russia. and Japan.
When you leave the sheltered walks, you find yourself on a splendid wind-swept path leading, up and down, to St. Alban's, or St. Aldhelm's Head. Here are the Southern English, the commoners as proud of England as the lords, and here is one of their finest headlands. Yet these West Saxons arc timidly or carelessly indifferent to the West Saxon name of their headland. The Irish have turned a suburb of Dublin from Kingstown to its ancient name of Dun Laoghairc, or, as the English say, Dunleary. Would any stiff-collared German Wodenist allow an Alban to take the place of a good Teutonic Aldhelm ? St. Aldhclm was one of the greatest of the West Saxons. He could write as well as read. Yet- even the Government does not support him ; the Ordnance Map will not decide between these two saints, and gives Alban and Aldhelm. You may take your choice. One can guess who will be chosen by a nation which has put the statue of an Angevin King, with a French name Coeur de Lion, outside their Parliament—though this king knew little of England and less of Parliament ; while there is no monument in London to any of the Kentish or West Saxon or Mercian Lawgivers. I notice with satisfaction that Swanage has given London a lead in this matter. There is a memorial column on the promenade to one of Alfred's victories over the Danes ; the column is topped with what appears to be a pyramid of cannon balls I Alban or Aldhelm, the headland is lovely beyond belief. You have wide bays, with black and white and grey cliffs ; downs and hanging woods ; the long shadow of Portland to the west, and, to the east, the chalk of the Isle of Wight rising like Samothrace across the Aegean from Athos, the prow of the ship of Victory. Coast and cape are still unspoiled. A gash of bungalows at Worth Matravers is hidden, and you need not look' at the slovenly litter of old tin cans near the coastguard cottages. Bournemouth is happily a good many 'miles off. You can see the lights from Swanage, a string of gold sequins under the moon.
Under the moon. The beach of which I was once afraid is quiet now, the tide almost soundless. I might walk there with men of the century before the nineteenth, the men who disliked enthusiasm. The game of hide- and-seek is over, and if we met anyone, surely it would be jesting Pilate, and he, like Time, would not stay for an answer.
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