HE day had been wet and mellow after a longish drought. The soil sucked at the warm flood, as a thirsty horse swills at a trough, drawing in its satisfaction quietly and intently; the cottage windows twinkled under their brows of dripping thatch; the hills, misty and phantasmic, seemed to roll like leviathans in a fog of descending water. And it was under such circumstances of weather that I first saw Balmworth.
One could not conceive a village more faithful to its etymology. It saunters down a gentle slope, half a mile long, from the hills to the sea; slips without a stumble into a tiny cove—landlocked for nine-tenths of its circumference, and green as an aquamarine set in a loop of silver chalk—and elsewhere and on all sides is made comfortable in its place with cushions of velvet down. Coming from the little station-village of Flock—itself a drowsy portal to the hills—one ascends a three-mile rise, traverses a short tableland, and goes straight down, smiling, into the harbourage of the tranquil valley. What does it concern one that those slumberous green pillows which contain it are neighboured on either side by populous and popular "seaside resorts"? The hills are ramparts as well as boundaries, and the vulgar, confined to s and high roads, essay to storm them but fitfully. Their flying visits but serve, in fact, to accent the peace, as the casual rush of a motor-car outside lonely windows leaves a profounder silence in its wake.
And the inhabitants are all in keeping. Here are no sharks of landladies, hungering to feed on the inexperienced adventurer; no maximum of cost for a minimum of service; no cracked pianos at a shilling a thump; no castors estimated in the weekly bill at a figure which would keep a furrier in pepper for a year; no priceless china, cheapened from the nearest crockery store, and put up on brackets to be accidentally broken, and paid for; no charge for the attendance which is ever lacking; no suffering protests, no extortion, no inflated prices whatever. No fleas, I would fain add; but that would not be true. Yet even they feed delicately, with ever a gentle consideration for the provision of the only man in the place who sells Keating.
Balmworth, to be sure, lets lodgings (indeed, in the "season" it is so greatly affected by those who love not the swarming warrens of August that it is difficult to secure a bed there), but on an artless Arcadian plan. It is as ready to take in the houseless traveller as it would be to be taken in by him. Any Jeremy Diddler so inclined might steal his dirty week's toll of its hospitality. Its landladies tot up their bills, all wrong, with infinite travail, and finally beg the good graces of their lodgers to help them to screw and pummel the items into some correspondence with the totals. They smile; they confide; they are on pleasant personal, but not in the least self-obtrusive terms with you from the outset. Supercilious or baronial-nosed people discomfort them. Sometimes they entreat your acceptance of a basket of blackberries or rosy apples. They are mostly the wives and mothers of the boatmen, to whom appertaineth the conduct of the Cove, sailing and fishing, the letting out of craft, the exploiting, in short, of little Balmworth as a sea pleasure-garden.
It is a very quaint and pretty basin among the cliffs, is this Cove—something like Mother Carey's Peace-pool. It is just a mile in circumference; and the land's fond arms, not quite meeting round it, leave open a narrow water-way, through which pleasuring steamers can creep in in all but stormy weather. They do not trouble one much. The life of the Cove congregates all the morning about the eastern side, to which they do not come, and where cluster the little white bathing-huts which are the real lodgings of Balmworth. For this pool of translucent water, on whose floor sixteen feet down one may see the weeds swaying pale as if in moonlight, is very grateful to the bather; and there be those who will camp all day among the little huts, that they may undress and plunge at pleasure.