Dr. Wainright's Patient
A Novel
9781465634672
330 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Beachborough, where, in obedience to the strident voice of the railway porter--voice combining the hardness of the Dorset with the drawl of the Devon dialect--you, if you be so disposed, "Change for Sandington Cove and Waverley," is a very different place from what it was even ten years ago. To be sure the sea is there, and the beach, and the fishing-luggers with the red sails; but in everything else what changes! Now there is, as has been said, a railway-station, a forlorn little oasis of white planking in a desert of sandy heath, inhabited by a clerk--a London young man, who "went too fast" in the metropolis, and has been relegated to Beachborough as a good healthy place where there is no chance of temptation--and a porter, a native of the place, a muscular person great at wrestling, who is always inviting the male passers-by of his acquaintance to "come on," and supplying them, on their doing so, with a very ugly throw known as a "back-fall." There are not many passers-by, for the newly-formed road leads to no where in particular, and those who tramp through its winter slush, or struggle through its summer dust, are generally either tradesmen of the place anxious about overdue parcels, or servants, sent to make inquiries about the trains, from some of the houses on the Esplanade. The Esplanade! Heavens! if old Miss Gollop, who lived at the Baths, and who used to supply very hot water and very damp towels, and the greatest number of draughts ever known to be got together into one small room, to the half-dozen county families to whom Beachborough was then known as a watering-place--if old Miss Gollop could revisit the glimpses of the moon, and by its light look upon the Esplanade, it would, I am certain, be impossible for that worthy old lady to recognise it as Mussared's Meadow, where she picked cowslips and sucked sorrel when she was a girl, and which was utterly untainted by the merest suspicion of brick and mortar when she died twenty years ago. She would not recognise it any more than in The Dingo Arms--that great white-faced establishment, with its suites of apartments, its coffee-room, wine-office, private bar, and great range of stabling, patronised by, and in its sanctum sanctorum bearing an heraldic emblazonment of the arms of, Sir Hercules Dingo Dingo, Bart., bloody hand, four-quartered shield and all--she would have recognised The Hoy, a tiny "public" where they used to sell the hardest beer and the most stomach-ache-provoking cider, and which in her day was the best tavern in the village. The white-faced terrace has sprung up in Mussared's Meadow; the Esplanade in front of it is a seawall and a delightful promenade for the Misses Gimp's young ladies, who are the admiration of Dingo Terrace, and who have deadly rivals in Madame de Flahault's demoiselles, whose piano-playing is at once the delight and the curse of Powler Square; the cliffs, once so gaunt and barren and forlorn, are dotted over with cottages and villakins, all green porch and plate-glass windows; the old barn-like church has had a fresh tower put on to him, and a fresh minister--one with his ecclesiastical millinery of the newest cut, and up to the latest thing in genuflexions--put into him; there is a Roman Catholic chapel close to the old Wesleyan meeting-house; and they have modernised and spoiled the picturesque tower where Captain Derinzy wore away a portion of his days. Great improvements, no doubt. Pavement and gas, and two policemen, and a railway, and a ritualistic incumbent, and shops with plate-glass windows, where you can get Holloway's pills and Horniman's teas, and all the things without which no gentleman's table is complete.
