Baby Broadstairs has known better how to guard its dignity and its beauty; so that Dickens might still look from Bleak House on as dainty a scene as in the days when he lounged on the dear old, black, weather-beaten pier. I spent a week at Broadstairs in the height of a Dynamite Mystery. We were very proud of the Mystery, we of Broadstairs, and of the space we filled in the papers. Ramsgate, with its contemporaneous murder sensation, we turned up our noses at, till Ramsgate had a wreck and redressed the balance. For the rest, we made sand-pies, and bathed and sailed, and listened to a band that went wheezy on Bank Holiday. Broadstairs boasts of one drunkard, who does odd jobs as well. He is tall, venerable, and melancholy, and has the air of a temperance orator. "Joe's one of the best chaps on the pier when he's sober," said his mate to me sorrowfully; "but when he's drunk he makes a fool of himself." This was not quite true; for Joe was not always foolish. Why, when two gentlemen came down from London in a gipsy caravan to teach us Theosophy, and all Broadstairs fluttered towards their oil-lamp, leaving the band to tootle to the sad sea waves, I could not get him to mount the Cheap Jack rostrum in opposition! The most I could spur him to was an indignant defence of London against the lecturer's denunciation of it as an immoral city, a pit of unrighteousness. "'T ain't true!" he thundered raucously. "Many's the gent from Lunnon as has behaved most liberal to me." One day there was an attempt to disturb Joe's monopoly as drunkard, and I am afraid I had a hand in it. A human caricature in broken boots addressed me as I lay on the beach (writing with a stylographic pen and blotting the sheets with the sand), and besought me to buy sprigs of lavender. He proved to me by ocular demonstration that he had no money in his pockets; whereupon I proved to him by parity of reasoning that I had none in mine either. However, I remembered me of a penny postage-stamp (unlicked), and tendered it diffidently, and he received it with disproportionate benedictions. Later in the day he reappeared under my window, hurling up maudlin abuse. He had got drunk on my postage-stamp!
I told him to get along with him, which he did. For some time he staggered about Broadstairs in search of its policeman. He came across him at last, and was straightway clapped into an open victoria and driven across the sunny fields to Ramsgate. Meantime, Broad-stairs was left unprotected-perhaps Joe kept an eye on it.
Broadstairs has also a jolly old waterman, who paddles about apparently to pick up exhausted bathers. One morning as I was swimming past his boat he warned me back. "Any danger?" I asked. "Ladies," he replied, ambiguously enough. It thus transpired that his function is to preserve a scientific frontier between the sexes. Considering that the ladies one meets at sea are much more clothed than the ladies whose diaphanous drapery one engirdles in ball-rooms, this prudery is amusing. It is consoling to remember that the Continental practice prevails in many a quaint nook along our coasts, and that the ladies are sensible enough to walk to and from their bathing tents, clothed and unashamed. Strange to say, Broadstairs has placed its ladies' machines nearest the pier, for the benefit of loungers armed with glasses; and I must not forget to mention that the boatman himself holds a daily levee of mermaidens, who make direct for his boat and gambol around the prow. If anything needs reforming in our marine manners, it is rather the male costume. Why we men are allowed to go about like savages, clothed only in skins (and those our own), is to me one of the puzzles of popular ethics. What is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. At Folkestone, where the machine-people are dreadfully set against ladies and gentlemen using the same water, promiscuous bathing flourishes more nakedly than anywhere on the Continent; and the gentlemen have neither tents nor costumes. In Margate and Deal the machines are of either sex, and the gentlemen are clad in coloured pocket-handkerchiefs. At Birchington I bathed from a boat which was besieged by a bevy of wandering water-nymphs, begging me to let them dive from it. And they dived divinely!
Though the profanum vulgus takes possession of our strands, and Edwin and Angelina are common objects of the sea-shore, yet I cannot help thinking that there is many a vulgar British beach that would ravish us did we light upon it in other lands. Oh, how picturesque! What a gay grouping of colour! What an enchanting medley of pink parasols and golden sand and chintz tents and white bathing-machines, and blue skies and black minstrels and green waters, and creamy flannels and gauzy dresses! And-ciel! what cherubic children! and-corpo di Bacco!-what pretty women! What frank abandon to the airy influences of the scene! What unconventionality! What unrestraint! See how that staid old signor allows himself to be buried and excavated by the bambino. Watch that charming maman unblushingly bathing bebe. Note that portly matrona careering upon the asino! What cares she for her dignity? Listen to the babel-"[Greek lettering]" "Drei shies a pfennig!" "Your photograph, senorita?" Look! the coquettish contadina is slapping the face of the roguish vetturino! How the good-natured crowd, easily pleased, gathers round the Ethiopian troubadour, trolling in unison his amorous catches!-
Daisy, Daisy, donne-moi ta reponse.
And hark! Do you not hear in the distance the squeak of Puncinello? Ah! why have we none of this happy carelessness in England?-we who take our pleasures moult tristement-why have we not this lightheartedness, this camaraderie of enjoyment? Why cannot we throw aside our insular stiffness, our British hauteur, and be natural?
I journeyed to Broadstairs, late at night, riding in a three-horsed brake with many a jocund passenger. And then something happened. Something ineffably trivial, and yet a matter of life and death. We were bowling merrily along the country lanes in the fragrant air. It was a dark, starless night, but so warm that the easterly sea-breeze fanned us like a zephyr. And through the gloom a flash-light leaped and waned, flickered and died and gleamed again with electric brilliance-"the Winnaker(?) light from France," a garrulous inhabitant assured us; a rare phenomenon to be seen only once in a decade, when an east wind clarifies the atmosphere, and allows the rays to pierce through two dozen miles of strait. It seemed like La Belle France winking amicably to us across the waters. And a little to the left twinkled "The Green Man"-no friendly public-house, but a danger-signal from behind the Goodwin Sands, likewise visible but by miracle.
And as we marvelled at these jewels of the night, that shamed the absentee stars, the brake stood still with a jolt and a shock that threw our gay company into momentary alarm. But it was nothing. Only a horse fallen down dead! One of our overworked wheelers had suddenly sunk upon the earth, a carcase. Dust to dust! Who shall tell of the daylong agony of the dumb beast as he plodded pertinaciously through the heat, ministering to the pleasures of his masters? Had he been a man, how we should have praised him, belauded the beauty of his end, telling one another sanctimoniously that he had died in harness. As it was we merely stripped him of his harness and deposited it in the brake! We unhitched the leader and put him between the shafts, side by side with the other horse, both incurious and indifferent, wasting nor glance nor nasal rub upon their defunct comrade. We men feign better. And then we drew him to the edge of the track, a rigid, lumbering mass; and the garrulous inhabitant discussed the value of the carcase, and the driver cracked his whip, and the living horses stirred their haunches, and in a moment we were spanking along, leaving our fellow-creature to darkness and solitude. Only the flashlight from France glimmered upon the poor dead beast, coming all the way to cheer him; only the green eye from beyond the Goodwins blinked upon his unheaving flanks.