The year 1905 had almost run out when this volume was finally decided upon, and then a good many things happened, according to expectation and otherwise. Christmas came, surprising the railway companies as usual, but not the public, and the resignation of Mr. Balfour's Government. The resignation of Mr. Balfour, with its corollary of a General Election, involved some unavoidable delay in opening this campaign of pilgrimages in East Anglia. For during that General Election almost everybody who owned a motor-car and could drive it, or thought he could drive it, was stirred to lend his car and his energies to the service of his party by motives of double cogency. He desired, more or less keenly at the outset, but always vehemently, and even passionately after he had tasted the joy of battle, to lend his aid to the political party of his choice; and he knew further that the General Election of 1906 had provided motorists with a priceless opportunity of doing missionary work among the electorate at a critical moment in the history of Automobilism. He felt that the Motor Act of 1903, of limited duration in any event, needed to be supplanted by a measure treating him as a reasoning and responsible being, rather than as a dangerous beast, and, having some hope that the Royal Commission then sitting would report in his favour (as, on the whole, it has reported), he recognized that enlightened self-interest made it desirable to educate public opinion into the frame of mind suitable for the reception of an enabling measure.
For these reasons, and some that are immaterial, it was not convenient to make the first raid into East Anglia until nearly the end of January, 1906, and that was a period calculated to try the reality of man's or woman's sincerity as a devotee of motoring by a somewhat severe test. How that test was applied it shall be my endeavour to tell in a narrative form, and to that form a preference will be given throughout the book, digressions being made, as occasion serves or fancy calls, to mention matters of practical utility or of intelligent interest.
Let me, therefore, "cut the cackle and come"—not to "the 'osses" by any means—but to the country and to the motor-cars. On Monday, January the 23rd, 1906, my daughter and I proceeded first to Oxford, and then to Cambridge by rail. Both journeys were an object lesson in the inferiority of the railway train, as it is arranged in England, to the motor-car, for purposes of cross-country travel. Our starting point being Abingdon, distant six miles only from Oxford, we were compelled to change trains at Radley en route. A long wait at Oxford would have been irritating if it had not been providential; as it was it furnished me with a private copy of Mr. F. J. Haverfield's Romano-British Norfolk, extracted from the "Victoria County History," and the dreadfully tedious journey to Cambridge allowed me to master that most accomplished and useful work. Cambridge we reached—not for the first time by any means—well after dusk, and there we lay, as they used to say in old times, at the Bull Hotel on King's Parade in reasonable comfort, an undergraduate kinsman of Trinity College having cheered us by his company at dinner.
Here let me pause for a moment to speak of an all-important matter. It has been written that we were comfortably entertained at the "Bull"; it might be added that the hotel seemed much cleaner and brighter than when I had last entered it, and that the charges were, for an English hotel, not unreasonable. Unfortunately, it must be said also that the charges at the "Bull" and throughout the United Kingdom are far in excess of those for which at least equal accommodation and at least equally palatable fare can be obtained on most parts of the Continent frequented by tourists, and that this fact is at once the most serious obstacle to tours by motor-cars at home, and the principal cause why Englishmen go touring abroad to the neglect of their own country, the prejudice of British hotel-keepers, and the profit of the foreigner. They do not, I think, desire to ignore the beauties of their own country; they are even anxious to study it in detail; but the hotel-keepers of the provinces, without quite killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, have a suicidal habit of making nesting accommodation so expensive that the bird, being a wise bird really, becomes perforce migratory as the swallow. More unwise in relation to the motorist even than in relation to the ordinary traveller—it will be observed that there is no special reference to the "Bull," and that we did not go there as motorists openly—hotel-keepers frequently behave as if they thought the owner of a motor-car must needs possess an endless supply of ready money, whereas the legitimate inference from his ownership of an expensive vehicle is that he has none to spare. Motor-cars of real value—and no sensible man will have them of any other kind—cannot be obtained on credit, and hotel-keepers might have learned from experience that a banking account is reduced, unless it be an overdraft, not increased, by drawing a heavy cheque upon it.
Some day, perhaps, there will be an improvement in this respect. In the meanwhile the path is not altogether clear before him who would fain play the part of guide to his fellow-men. So long ago as 1799 a correspondent of the Norfolk Chronicle wrote: "There is room for a most useful work in the form of an itinerary, which shall give an impartial account of the several inns of the kingdom under the heads of quality, cleanliness, beds," etc. There is still just as much room, but until the law of libel shall be changed the "most useful work" is not likely to be written. Certainly I am not going to write it—not that I lack the inclination nor the desire to be of service; not that I have not a nice taste for comfort, nor an experience of British and Irish hotels possessed by few men other than commercial travellers—simply because I cannot afford the time or the money to fight a series of actions, in which a verdict for the defendant would leave me still liable for the difference between my solicitor's bill of costs "as between solicitor and client," and the same bill taxed "as between party and party." The utmost that is possible, and at the same time prudent, is to point to examples of merit. Demerit, dearness, and dirt must go unchastised.
My arrangement with a friend, who had done as much electioneering as he and his car could endure, was that he should run down from London and pick us up at the "Bull" on Tuesday after luncheon.
Tuesday morning, therefore—a frosty, windless, somewhat misty morning—was spent in what in our domestic circle is called "abroading" in Cambridge, that is to say, in visiting places of paramount interest. But let the reader take heart. Some little knowledge of Cambridge, the fruit of many sojourns and of considerable reading, is not going to be made an excuse for a topographical, archæological, and architectural chapter upon a subject worthy of a long book, already treated in many volumes, grave and gay. Even if such a chapter could be legitimate here it would be wrong for a mere Oxford man to write it, and I shall never forget how, when I was staying at Cambridge a year or two ago, a Cambridge friend who took me out sight-seeing closed my mouth before it was opened, so to speak, by saying, "You are absolutely forbidden to ask where our 'High' is." As matters stand, remembering always that this Cambridge friend is not at my elbow, and firmly believing, with Mr. Ruskin, that "the High" at Oxford is not to be matched in the world as a whole, I am inclined to think King's College, as seen from King's Parade, leaves nothing to be desired, and that King's College Chapel has a claim almost equal to that of St. George's Chapel, Windsor, to be recognized as the most exquisite example of Perpendicular architecture to be found in England. Of course, the best way to see all there is at Cambridge, and to understand it, is to live at Cambridge; and the next best is to go there often and to study it piecemeal. To try to absorb impressions of Cambridge in one visit, even one of many days, is to submit the human brain to too severe an ordeal. On former occasions I had seen the Backs in summer, had spent an hour or two in the Senate House on a State occasion, had looked into the University Library and had admired the delightfully free-and-easy way in which graduates are permitted to borrow its books, had seen cricket played and had played football on Parker's Piece, had stayed in college rooms at Caius: and yet impressions remained a little confused in memory. This time we went to King's College, and to the chapel especially, again. If it falls behind St. George's at all, it is in point of lightness, in which St. George's is perfect. So to Trinity College, where we admired unfeignedly the Great Court, Nevile's Court and the Library, and spoke politely of the chapel, where the Grinling Gibbons' carvings are really good. But it was in the library that one would gladly have spent hours.
A lecture was in progress in the hall, so that was closed to us; but the library is perfect.