Mimosa Bugg. But Convol- veyance. She loved long names, vulus was rather a happy name. The long white face of the child, with the delicately-veined pink about the mouth and nose, her narrow shoulders and the disproportionate width below the waist-especially on Sundays, when all the Bugg children wore white-put one in mind of a convolvulus-the drooping kind and strange names-names consecrated by legend, names evocative of scenic grandeur. "Harethusa arose From her couch of snows In the Hacroceraunian mountains." Convolvulus battled bravely with her aspirates, and in the buted her paleness and droopend conquered them. I attriing white delicacy to these and "The tremulous convolvulus, whose kindred exercises. The spirit closing blue eye misses The faint shadow on the dial that foretells the evening hour." of romance had much to contend with. Like the moon of her recitations, the eldest Miss Bugg was "pale from weariness herth." I was too tactful to ask her if she liked books, if she was fond of reading. Instead, I Of climbing 'eaven and gazing on the drew her on to talk about her favourite authors. Her taste at the age of nine was mature and catholic. Byron and Shakespeare pleased her best. She commended Byron's "Juvenilia." "And Shakespeare?" I asked her. After a little reflection, she said, "I like his Lamb's Tales best." The next year when I visited the inn I made her a present of an anthology. The pink veins in the convolvulus face deepened with pleasure. She discovered new favourites. Lord Byron suffered an eclipse; it was Mr Anon's turn now. The warm June smell of the box border between the porch of the inn and the boat-house is associated in my mind with recitations. Like Milton, Convolvulus loved a sounding name. Number Two, "Occasion's pupil," must have remembered that when he drafted the con Convolvulus, I think, was conscious of certain inhibitions in the Bugg household. There was stabling in plenty at the inn, but none for Pegasus. I remember asking her once "Supposing some fairy godmother were to offer you the choice of the thing you wanted most in the world, what would you ask for?" "I should like a castle," she She's going to be a little lady, Wellington's sangars, glides she is." I missed my annual visit to the fishing inn for several years, but I heard of Convolvulus occasionally. She became a pupil-teacher, then a "school marm." The last I heard of her was that she had married. A kindred spirit, one may be sure, a man of culture, and fully aspirated. This would be important, as Convolvulus Bugg became Convolvulus Huggins. And Huggins was a warm man in the lap-robe trade, and could have bought several castles. At Fontarabia, of course, he would have to spend a trifle on repairs. But the shell of the castle is solid enough to stand the attacks of the elements for another thousand years. And there are oddments of ecclesiastical furniture scattered about that Convolvulus would like to keep, gilded capitals, coffin-shaped painted chests, canopies with ornate pillars like the retablo in the church, and a lusty winged cherub in knee-breeches blowing a trumpet. I should like to conduct Convolvulus over the castle and interpret the panorama from the roof, point out to her the lighthouse that commands Bayona's hold and the Jumeaux, the twin rose-pink rocks of Hendaye, and Hendaye's grey, old, red-tiled church on the hill with La Rhune behind it, a pyramid like the tomb of Cestius, and Cap Figuier, where Jaizquibel, the last spur of the Western Pyrenees, crowned by gently into the sea. But this will be Huggins' business, of course, a small reward for the translation of Convolvulus. I look for the notice of the villagiatura every day in the column of the Times' or 'Morning. Post' under the Court Circular. Señora Convolvulus Huggins (née Bugg) has left The Laburnums, East Dulham, for the Castillo Carlo Quinto, Fontarabia, Spain. From the roof in June she would look down on the tops of the poplars and elms, and cherry-trees in fruit. The pink valerian, then, the lighter kind, covers a hundred feet of wall like an invasion, the flood of colour sparsely relieved by the black ivy berries. On three sides she would look down on roofs of the dark-brown drainpipe tiles of the Midi, so much more restful to the eye than red. The little town is clustered underneath. The walls only enclose a few acres ; the castle and the great rambling church fill the greater part of it. The castle is the crown of the knoll on which Fontarabia is built; only the steeple of the church surmounts it. One could throw a ball from the roof of the castle into the window of the belfry. The four bells are open to the four winds. At service-time a small boy climbs a ladder, and swings one of them round by a projecting lever with his hand. Or there is a carillon, and the pious chimes of Spain are borne across the estuary to Hendaye. Convolvulus might lie flat on the parapet the wall is ten feet thick, so there is no danger of falling over-and look down into the tiny plaza below, no bigger than a pelota court, for hours at a time without seeing any movement, unless it were in response to this bell. How seductively the Calle Mayor, the narrow alley bisecting the town, drops down from the plaza to the Puerta de Santa Maria, with the Trois Couronnes, the last bold peak of the Pyrenees, exactly framed in the aperture between the double eaves, projecting one above the other, and almost meeting across the street! Convolvulus would love the carved griffin brackets that support the eaves and balconies, and the heavy stone escutcheons over the doors, and the tranquillity that in these legendary towns is sister to romance. One would think that since the Emperor Charles rode out of the gates Fontarabia had not stirred in its sleep. Many an hour have I spent in the streets and never seen any traffic or business there, or sign of occupation, beyond the postman-what communication can there be between these silent houses and the outside world-and a woman who drives a donkey with panniers of vegetables and fruit, and the cobbler who sits outside his shop in the square astride his last, an instrument of the shape of a big bassoon, and threads his alpargatas. Only when the single bell clangs there is a stir and a ripple. A nun with a crocodile of convent children crosses the plaza. An old lady rises from her bench under the limes. Two priests, who have been chaffering by the transept door, separate almost hurriedly. At Fontarabia, as everywhere in mediæval Spain, the people and shops look frugal and poor; only the priests, standing in corvine groups at the street corners, their black cassocks distended in ample folds in front, look glossy, prosperous, and fat, as if they had sucked the sustenance out of the place, and were no more likely to leave any morsels to pick up than the crows. Outside the walls there is more stir. The little port doesn't differ much from Hendaye on the other side of the water. The first thing one notices are the linden - trees clipped and tortured candelabra-wise as in France, with the red sardine-nets hanging on them, and the blue nets, the colour of the sea. The craft is the same, and the Basque fishermen in feature and build very like their cousins on the French side. Only a hundred yards or so from the quay one passes through the gate of the city, and one is in Spain. And there is a third and brighter Fontarabia for those who find old faded neutral tints and a uniformity of architecture depressing restaurants and a casino, trim gardens with monkey-trees and copper The tide is coming in, and the shaft of a rainbow rising from the Bidassoa bisects the tawny streamers of smoke that float behind the blue sardine-boats, the light at its edge intensifying the whiteness of the herringgulls' wings, making a bright mosaic of the estuary. The funnel of the Spanish gunboat by the quay flickers, ... but here Number Two is left alone to install Convolvulus Huggins (née Bugg), as is fit. beeches and variegated shrubs, gentle shower induces sleep. bright villas with their frontage of parti-coloured bricks, and blue and green glazed tiles, with the masonry framing the windows generally salmon-coloured or maroon, in the most striking and original relief from the rest of the building. All this, which is as satisfying to modern taste in Spain as in Great Yarmouth or new Calais, lies outside the walls and is hidden by them. The town itself, like most little, old, walled towns, as tight and compact in its ramparts as a snail in its shell, has defied modernity. One might take the tram from Irun to Fontarabia plage, and if one were sleepy and unobservant and had one's back to the Puerta de Santa Maria as one passed, one might spend the day on the sea-front without a suspicion that one had been anywhere in the neighbourhood of mediævalism. From the French side, too, looking across the Bidassoa, all one sees of the Fontarabia of Carlo Quinto is the castle and the church. The colours and contours of the modern exhalation are softened by distance. Convolvulus, of course, would come by water. A triumphal barge would await her at Hendaye Port. Don Huggins would see to that. Transport she must have worthy of her state. . . . Here Number One, lying flat on the castle walls in the June sun, and hypnotised by the genius of the place, is on the point of abdication. A Number One does not remember exactly what happened, but as Number Two is a competent master of ceremonies, one may take it that there was no hitch. At the point in the channel where the gunboat melted into thin air a galley heaves into view with white bellying sails and rich awnings emblazoned with arms-a title goes with the castle; Number Two never stints accessories : the figure-head on the skypointing poop is a mermaid in gules. Some subliminal voice is chanting, "Youth on the prow and pleasure at the helm." "But, no," interposes Number Two, who has become the ape of Don Huggins, "youth and pleasure together, if you please, both at the helm, or both at the prow. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may." And he improves on the bard with some doggerel of his own, which Number One cannot remember. But no matter. Youth is on his feet now, bowing to a lady who reclines on a saffron couch, a small lady with a large white round hat and a long white d'oiseau en passant-a narrow face, and eyes that keep peering, and ears that keep listening to catch the strange sights and sounds beyond the mist. To her Youth uncovers, doffs his sombrero. Youth is little evasive, by the way, a blend of Castile and Cockayne. Sometimes he wears a sombrero, sometimes a light grey Homburg hat; but whatever it is he wears he waves it at the castle as he bends over the white lady, who is named Convolvulus, so modestly pale and drooping is she, and whispers in her ear, “A little hymeneal surprise, Señorita mia, a nid mere trifle, but I thought it might please you,-one, I hope, of many castles in Spain." And here he began to troll; for in spite of his tight, grey, creased trousers and white spats and his tail-coat and hard bowler hat-it seems he had discarded the Homburg and the sombrero,-he carried a fiddle under his arm like a hidalgo on a Fontarabian fan. "Señorita mia," he trolled, Señorita mia." And he waved his bow at the castle. "Is there no method to tell her in Spanish June is twice June since she breathed it with me?" |