AFOOT IN ENGLAND
By W.H. Hudson
CONTENTS
[ Chapter One. ] Guide-Books, An Introduction
[ Chapter Two. ] On Going Back
[ Chapter Three. ] Walking and Cycling
[ Chapter Four. ] Seeking a Shelter
[ Chapter Five. ] Wind, Wave, and Spirit
[ Chapter Six. ] By Swallowfield
[ Chapter Seven. ] Roman Calleva
[ Chapter Eight. ] A Gold Day At Silchester
[ Chapter Nine. ] Rural Rides
[ Chapter Ten. ] The Last of His Name
[ Chapter Eleven. ] Salisbury and Its Doves
[ Chapter Twelve. ] Whitesheet Hill
[ Chapter Thirteen. ] Bath and Wells Revisited
[ Chapter Fourteen. ] The Return of the Native
[ Chapter Fifteen. ] Summer Days on the Otter
[ Chapter Sixteen. ] In Praise of the Cow
[ Chapter Seventeen. ] An Old Road Leading Nowhere
[ Chapter Eighteen. ] Branscombe
[ Chapter Nineteen. ] Abbotsbury
[ Chapter Twenty. ] Salisbury Revisited
[ Chapter Twenty-One. ] Stonehenge
[ Chapter Twenty-Two. ] The Village and "The Stones"
[ Chapter Twenty-Three. ] Following a River
[ Chapter Twenty-Four. ] Troston
[ Chapter Twenty-Five. ] My Friend Jack
Chapter One: Guide-Books: An Introduction
Guide-books are so many that it seems probable we have more than any other country—possibly more than all the rest of the universe together. Every county has a little library of its own—guides to its towns, churches, abbeys, castles, rivers, mountains; finally, to the county as a whole. They are of all prices and all sizes, from the diminutive paper-covered booklet, worth a penny, to the stout cloth-bound octavo volume which costs eight or ten or twelve shillings, or to the gigantic folio county history, the huge repository from which the guide-book maker gets his materials. For these great works are also guide-books, containing everything we want to learn, only made on so huge a scale as to be suited to the coat pockets of Brobdingnagians rather than of little ordinary men. The wonder of it all comes in when we find that these books, however old and comparatively worthless they may be, are practically never wholly out of date. When a new work is brought out (dozens appear annually) and, say, five thousand copies sold, it does not throw as many, or indeed any, copies of the old book out of circulation: it supersedes nothing. If any man can indulge in the luxury of a new up-to-date guide to any place, and gets rid of his old one (a rare thing to do), this will be snapped up by poorer men, who will treasure it and hand it down or on to others. Editions of 1860-50-40, and older, are still prized, not merely as keepsakes but for study or reference. Any one can prove this by going the round of a dozen second-hand booksellers in his own district in London. There will be tons of literary rubbish, and good stuff old and new, but few guidebooks—in some cases not one. If you ask your man at a venture for, say, a guide to Hampshire, he will most probably tell you that he has not one in stock; then, in his anxiety to do business, he will, perhaps, fish out a guide to Derbyshire, dated 1854—a shabby old book—and offer it for four or five shillings, the price of a Crabbe in eight volumes, or of Gibbon's Decline and Fall in six volumes, bound in calf. Talk to this man, and to the other eleven, and they will tell you that there is always a sale for guide-books—that the supply does not keep pace with the demand. It may be taken as a fact that most of the books of this kind published during the last half-century—many millions of copies in the aggregate—are still in existence and are valued possessions.
There is nothing to quarrel with in all this. As a people we run about a great deal; and having curious minds we naturally wish to know all there is to be known, or all that is interesting to know, about the places we visit. Then, again, our time as a rule being limited, we want the whole matter—history, antiquities, places of interest in the neighbourhood, etc. in a nutshell. The brief book serves its purpose well enough; but it is not thrown away like the newspaper and the magazines; however cheap and badly got up it may be, it is taken home to serve another purpose, to be a help to memory, and nobody can have it until its owner removes himself (but not his possessions) from this planet; or until the broker seizes his belongings, and guide-books, together with other books, are disposed of in packages by the auctioneer.
In all this we see that guide-books are very important to us, and that there is little or no fault to be found with them, since even the worst give some guidance and enable us in after times mentally to revisit distant places. It may then be said that there are really no bad guide-books, and that those that are good in the highest sense are beyond praise. A reverential sentiment, which is almost religious in character, connects itself in our minds with the very name of Murray. It is, however, possible to make an injudicious use of these books, and by so doing to miss the fine point of many a pleasure. The very fact that these books are guides to us and invaluable, and that we readily acquire the habit of taking them about with us and consulting them at frequent intervals, comes between us and that rarest and most exquisite enjoyment to be experienced amidst novel scenes. He that visits a place new to him for some special object rightly informs himself of all that the book can tell him. The knowledge may be useful; pleasure is with him a secondary object. But if pleasure be the main object, it will only be experienced in the highest degree by him who goes without book and discovers what old Fuller called the "observables" for himself. There will be no mental pictures previously formed; consequently what is found will not disappoint. When the mind has been permitted to dwell beforehand on any scene, then, however beautiful or grand it may be, the element of surprise is wanting and admiration is weak. The delight has been discounted.
My own plan, which may be recommended only to those who go out for pleasure—who value happiness above useless (otherwise useful) knowledge, and the pictures that live and glow in memory above albums and collections of photographs—is not to look at a guide-book until the place it treats of has been explored and left behind.
The practical person, to whom this may come as a new idea and who wishes not to waste any time in experiments, would doubtless like to hear how the plan works. He will say that he certainly wants all the happiness to be got out of his rambles, but it is clear that without the book in his pocket he would miss many interesting things: Would the greater degree of pleasure experienced in the others be a sufficient compensation? I should say that he would gain more than he would lose; that vivid interest and pleasure in a few things is preferable to that fainter, more diffused feeling experienced in the other case. Again, we have to take into account the value to us of the mental pictures gathered in our wanderings. For we know that only when a scene is viewed emotionally, when it produces in us a shock of pleasure, does it become a permanent possession of the mind; in other words, it registers an image which, when called up before the inner eye, is capable of reproducing a measure of the original delight.
In recalling those scenes which have given me the greatest happiness, the images of which are most vivid and lasting, I find that most of them are of scenes or objects which were discovered, as it were, by chance, which I had not heard of, or else had heard of and forgotten, or which I had not expected to see. They came as a surprise, and in the following instance one may see that it makes a vast difference whether we do or do not experience such a sensation.
In the course of a ramble on foot in a remote district I came to a small ancient town, set in a cuplike depression amidst high wood-grown hills. The woods were of oak in spring foliage, and against that vivid green I saw the many-gabled tiled roofs and tall chimneys of the old timbered houses, glowing red and warm brown in the brilliant sunshine—a scene of rare beauty, and yet it produced no shock of pleasure; never, in fact, had I looked on a lovely scene for the first time so unemotionally. It seemed to be no new scene, but an old familiar one; and that it had certain degrading associations which took away all delight.
The reason of this was that a great railway company had long been "booming" this romantic spot, and large photographs, plain and coloured, of the town and its quaint buildings had for years been staring at me in every station and every railway carriage which I had entered on that line. Photography degrades most things, especially open-air things; and in this case, not only had its poor presentments made the scene too familiar, but something of the degradation in the advertising pictures seemed to attach itself to the very scene. Yet even here, after some pleasureless days spent in vain endeavours to shake off these vulgar associations, I was to experience one of the sweetest surprises and delights of my life.
The church of this village-like town is one of its chief attractions; it is a very old and stately building, and its perpendicular tower, nearly a hundred feet high, is one of the noblest in England. It has a magnificent peal of bells, and on a Sunday afternoon they were ringing, filling and flooding that hollow in the hills, seeming to make the houses and trees and the very earth to tremble with the glorious storm of sound. Walking past the church, I followed the streamlet that runs through the town and out by a cleft between the hills to a narrow marshy valley, on the other side of which are precipitous hills, clothed from base to summit in oak woods. As I walked through the cleft the musical roar of the bells followed, and was like a mighty current flowing through and over me; but as I came out the sound from behind ceased suddenly and was now in front, coming back from the hills before me. A sound, but not the same—not a mere echo; and yet an echo it was, the most wonderful I had ever heard. For now that great tempest of musical noise, composed of a multitude of clanging notes with long vibrations, overlapping and mingling and clashing together, seemed at the same time one and many—that tempest from the tower which had mysteriously ceased to be audible came back in strokes or notes distinct and separate and multiplied many times. The sound, the echo, was distributed over the whole face of the steep hill before me, and was changed in character, and it was as if every one of those thousands of oak trees had a peal of bells in it, and that they were raining that far-up bright spiritual tree music down into the valley below. As I stood listening it seemed to me that I had never heard anything so beautiful, nor had any man—not the monk of Eynsham in that vision when he heard the Easter bells on the holy Saturday evening, and described the sound as "a ringing of a marvellous sweetness, as if all the bells in the world, or whatsoever is of sounding, had been rung together at once."
Here, then, I had found and had become the possessor of something priceless, since in that moment of surprise and delight the mysterious beautiful sound, with the whole scene, had registered an impression which would outlast all others received at that place, where I had viewed all things with but languid interest. Had it not come as a complete surprise, the emotion experienced and the resultant mental image would not have been so vivid; as it is, I can mentally stand in that valley when I will, seeing that green-wooded hill in front of me and listen to that unearthly music.
Naturally, after quitting the spot, I looked at the first opportunity into a guide-book of the district, only to find that it contained not one word about those wonderful illusive sounds! The book-makers had not done their work well, since it is a pleasure after having discovered something delightful for ourselves to know how others have been affected by it and how they describe it.
Of many other incidents of the kind I will, in this chapter, relate one more, which has a historical or legendary interest. I was staying with the companion of my walks at a village in Southern England in a district new to us. We arrived on a Saturday, and next morning after breakfast went out for a long walk. Turning into the first path across the fields on leaving the village, we came eventually to an oak wood, which was like an open forest, very wild and solitary. In half an hour's walk among the old oaks and underwood we saw no sign of human occupancy, and heard nothing but the woodland birds. We heard, and then saw, the cuckoo for the first time that season, though it was but April the fourth. But the cuckoo was early that spring and had been heard by some from the middle of March. At length, about half-past ten o'clock, we caught sight of a number of people walking in a kind of straggling procession by a path which crossed ours at right angles, headed by a stout old man in a black smock frock and brown leggings, who carried a big book in one hand. One of the processionists we spoke to told us they came from a hamlet a mile away on the borders of the wood and were on their way to church. We elected to follow them, thinking that the church was at some neighbouring village; to our surprise we found it was in the wood, with no other building in sight—a small ancient-looking church built on a raised mound, surrounded by a wide shallow grass-grown trench, on the border of a marshy stream. The people went in and took their seats, while we remained standing just by the door. Then the priest came from the vestry, and seizing the rope vigorously, pulled at it for five minutes, after which he showed us where to sit and the service began. It was very pleasant there, with the door open to the sunlit forest and the little green churchyard without, with a willow wren, the first I had heard, singing his delicate little strain at intervals.
The service over, we rambled an hour longer in the wood, then returned to our village, which had a church of its own, and our landlady, hearing where we had been, told us the story, or tradition, of the little church in the wood. Its origin goes very far back to early Norman times, when all the land in this part was owned by one of William's followers on whom it had been bestowed. He built himself a house or castle on the edge of the forest, where he lived with his wife and two little daughters who were his chief delight. It happened that one day when he was absent the two little girls with their female attendant went into the wood in search of flowers, and that meeting a wild boar they turned and fled, screaming for help. The savage beast pursued, and, quickly overtaking them, attacked the hindermost, the youngest of the two little girls, anal killed her, the others escaping in the meantime. On the following day the father returned, and was mad with grief and rage on hearing of the tragedy, and in his madness resolved to go alone on foot to the forest and search for the beast and taste no food or drink until he had slain it. Accordingly to the forest he went, and roamed through it by day and night, and towards the end of the following day he actually found and roused the dreadful animal, and although weakened by his long fast and fatigue, his fury gave him force to fight and conquer it, or else the powers above came to his aid; for when he stood spear in hand to wait the charge of the furious beast he vowed that if he overcame it on that spot he would build a chapel, where God would be worshipped for ever. And there it was raised and has stood to this day, its doors open every Sunday to worshippers, with but one break, some time in the sixteenth century to the third year of Elizabeth, since when there has been no suspension of the weekly service.
That the tradition is not true no one can say. We know that the memory of an action or tragedy of a character to stir the feelings and impress the imagination may live unrecorded in any locality for long centuries. And more, we know or suppose, from at least one quite familiar instance from Flintshire, that a tradition may even take us back to prehistoric times and find corroboration in our own day.
But of this story what corroboration is there, and what do the books say? I have consulted the county history, and no mention is made of such a tradition, and can only assume that the author had never heard it—that he had not the curious Aubrey mind. He only says that it is a very early church—how early he does not know—and adds that it was built "for the convenience of the inhabitants of the place." An odd statement, seeing that the place has every appearance of having always been what it is, a forest, and that the inhabitants thereof are weasels, foxes, jays and such-like, and doubtless in former days included wolves, boars, roe-deer and stags, beings which, as Walt Whitman truly remarks, do not worry themselves about their souls.
With this question, however, we need not concern ourselves. To me, after stumbling by chance on the little church in that solitary woodland place, the story of its origin was accepted as true; no doubt it had come down unaltered from generation to generation through all those centuries, and it moved my pity yet was a delight to hear, as great perhaps as it had been to listen to the beautiful chimes many times multiplied from the wooded hill. And if I have a purpose in this book, which is without a purpose, a message to deliver and a lesson to teach, it is only this—the charm of the unknown, and the infinitely greater pleasure in discovering the interesting things for ourselves than in informing ourselves of them by reading. It is like the difference in flavour in wild fruits and all wild meats found and gathered by our own hands in wild places and that of the same prepared and put on the table for us. The ever-varying aspects of nature, of earth and sea and cloud, are a perpetual joy to the artist, who waits and watches for their appearance, who knows that sun and atmosphere have for him revelations without end. They come and go and mock his best efforts; he knows that his striving is in vain—that his weak hands and earthy pigments cannot reproduce these effects or express his feeling—that, as Leighton said, "every picture is a subject thrown away." But he has his joy none the less; it is in the pursuit and in the dream of capturing something illusive, mysterious, and inexpressibly beautiful.
Chapter Two: On Going Back
In looking over the preceding chapter it occurred to me that I had omitted something, or rather that it would have been well to drop a word of warning to those who have the desire to revisit a place where they have experienced a delightful surprise. Alas! they cannot have that sensation a second time, and on this account alone the mental image must always be better than its reality. Let the image—the first sharp impression—content us. Many a beautiful picture is spoilt by the artist who cannot be satisfied that he has made the best of his subject, and retouching his canvas to bring out some subtle charm which made the work a success loses it altogether. So in going back, the result of the inevitable disillusionment is that the early mental picture loses something of its original freshness. The very fact that the delightful place or scene was discovered by us made it the shining place it is in memory. And again, the charm we found in it may have been in a measure due to the mood we were in, or to the peculiar aspect in which it came before us at the first, due to the season, to atmospheric and sunlight effects, to some human interest, or to a conjunction of several favourable circumstances; we know we can never see it again in that aspect and with that precise feeling.
On this account I am shy of revisiting the places where I have experienced the keenest delight. For example, I have no desire to revisit that small ancient town among the hills, described in the last chapter; to go on a Sunday evening through that narrow gorge, filled with the musical roar of the church bells; to leave that great sound behind and stand again listening to the marvellous echo from the wooded hill on the other side of the valley. Nor would I care to go again in search of that small ancient lost church in the forest. It would not be early April with the clear sunbeams shining through the old leafless oaks on the floor of fallen yellow leaves with the cuckoo fluting before his time; nor would that straggling procession of villagers appear, headed by an old man in a smock frock with a big book in his hand; nor would I hear for the first time the strange history of the church which so enchanted me.
I will here give an account of yet another of the many well-remembered delightful spots which I would not revisit, nor even look upon again if I could avoid doing so by going several miles out of my way.
It was green open country in the west of England—very far west, although on the east side of the Tamar—in a beautiful spot remote from railroads and large towns, and the road by which I was travelling (on this occasion on a bicycle) ran or serpentined along the foot of a range of low round hills on my right hand, while on my left I had a green valley with other low round green hills beyond it. The valley had a marshy stream with sedgy margins and occasional clumps of alder and willow trees. It was the end of a hot midsummer day; the sun went down a vast globe of crimson fire in a crystal clear sky; and as I was going east I was obliged to dismount and stand still to watch its setting. When the great red disc had gone down behind the green world I resumed my way but went slowly, then slower still, the better to enjoy the delicious coolness which came from the moist valley and the beauty of the evening in that solitary place which I had never looked on before. Nor was there any need to hurry; I had but three or four miles to go to the small old town where I intended passing the night. By and by the winding road led me down close to the stream at a point where it broadened to a large still pool. This was the ford, and on the other side was a small rustic village, consisting of a church, two or three farm-houses with their barns and outbuildings, and a few ancient-looking stone cottages with thatched roofs. But the church was the main thing; it was a noble building with a very fine tower, and from its size and beauty I concluded that it was an ancient church dating back to the time when there was a passion in the West Country and in many parts of England of building these great fanes even in the remotest and most thinly populated parishes. In this I was mistaken through having seen it at a distance from the other side of the ford after the sun had set.
Never, I thought, had I seen a lovelier village with its old picturesque cottages shaded by ancient oaks and elms, and the great church with its stately tower looking dark against the luminous western sky. Dismounting again I stood for some time admiring the scene, wishing that I could make that village my home for the rest of my life, conscious at the same time that is was the mood, the season, the magical hour which made it seem so enchanting. Presently a young man, the first human figure that presented itself to my sight, appeared, mounted on a big carthorse and leading a second horse by a halter, and rode down into the pool to bathe the animals' legs and give them a drink. He was a sturdy-looking young fellow with a sun-browned face, in earth-coloured, working clothes, with a small cap stuck on the back of his round curly head; he probably imagined himself not a bad-looking young man, for while his horses were drinking he laid over on the broad bare backs and bending down studied his own reflection in the bright water. Then an old woman came out of a cottage close by, and began talking to him in her West Country dialect in a thin high-pitched cracked voice. Their talking was the only sound in the village; so silent was it that all the rest of its inhabitants might have been in bed and fast asleep; then, the conversation ended, the young man rode out with a great splashing and the old woman turned into her cottage again, and I was left in solitude.
Still I lingered: I could not go just yet; the chances were that I should never again see that sweet village in that beautiful aspect at the twilight hour.
For now it came into my mind that I could not very well settle there for the rest of my life; I could not, in fact, tie myself to any place without sacrificing certain other advantages I possessed; and the main thing was that by taking root I should deprive myself of the chance of looking on still other beautiful scenes and experiencing other sweet surprises. I was wishing that I had come a little earlier on the scene to have had time to borrow the key of the church and get a sight of the interior, when all at once I heard a shrill voice and a boy appeared running across the wide green space of the churchyard. A second boy followed, then another, then still others, and I saw that they were going into the church by the side door. They were choir-boys going to practice. The church was open then, and late as it was I could have half an hour inside before it was dark! The stream was spanned by an old stone bridge above the ford, and going over it I at once made my way to the great building, but even before entering it I discovered that it possessed an organ of extraordinary power and that someone was performing on it with a vengeance. Inside the noise was tremendous—a bigger noise from an organ, it seemed to me, than I had ever heard before, even at the Albert Hall and the Crystal Palace, but even more astonishing than the uproar was the sight that met my eyes. The boys, nine or ten sturdy little rustics with round sunburnt West Country faces, were playing the roughest game ever witnessed in a church. Some were engaged in a sort of flying fight, madly pursuing one another up and down the aisles and over the pews, and whenever one overtook another he would seize hold of him and they would struggle together until one was thrown and received a vigorous pommelling. Those who were not fighting were dancing to the music. It was great fun to them, and they were shouting and laughing their loudest only not a sound of it all could be heard on account of the thunderous roar of the organ which filled and seemed to make the whole building tremble. The boys took no notice of me, and seeing that there was a singularly fine west window, I went to it and stood there some time with my back to the game which was going on at the other end of the building, admiring the beautiful colours and trying to make out the subjects depicted. In the centre part, lit by the after-glow in the sky to a wonderful brilliance, was the figure of a saint, a lovely young woman in a blue robe with an abundance of loose golden-red hair and an aureole about her head. Her pale face wore a sweet and placid expression, and her eyes of a pure forget-me-not blue were looking straight into mine. As I stood there the music, or noise, ceased and a very profound silence followed—not a giggle, not a whisper from the outrageous young barbarians, and not a sound of the organist or of anyone speaking to them. Presently I became conscious of some person standing almost but not quite abreast of me, and turning sharply I found a clergyman at my side. He was the vicar, the person who had been letting himself go on the organ; a slight man with a handsome, pale, ascetic face, clean-shaven, very dark-eyed, looking more like an Italian monk or priest than an English clergyman. But although rigidly ecclesiastic in his appearance and dress, there was something curiously engaging in him, along with a subtle look which it was not easy to fathom. There was a light in his dark eyes which reminded me of a flame seen through a smoked glass or a thin black veil, and a slight restless movement about the corners of his mouth as if a smile was just on the point of breaking out. But it never quite came; he kept his gravity even when he said things which would have gone very well with a smile.
"I see," he spoke, and his penetrating musical voice had, too, like his eyes and mouth, an expression of mystery in it, "that you are admiring our beautiful west window, especially the figure in the centre. It is quite new—everything is new here—the church itself was only built a few years ago. This window is its chief glory: it was done by a good artist—he has done some of the most admired windows of recent years; and the centre figure is supposed to be a portrait of our generous patroness. At all events she sat for it to him. You have probably heard of Lady Y—?"
"What!" I exclaimed. "Lady Y—: that funny old woman!"
"No—middle-aged," he corrected, a little frigidly and perhaps a little mockingly at the same time.
"Very well, middle-aged if you like; I don't know her personally. One hears about her; but I did not know she had a place in these parts."
"She owns most of this parish and has done so much for us that we can very well look leniently on a little weakness—her wish that the future inhabitants of the place shall not remember her as a middle-aged woman not remarkable for good looks—'funny,' as you just now said."
He was wonderfully candid, I thought. But what extraordinary benefits had she bestowed on them, I asked, to enable them to regard, or to say, that this picture of a very beautiful young female was her likeness!
"Why," he said, "the church would not have been built but for her. We were astonished at the sum she offered to contribute towards the work, and at once set about pulling the small old church down so as to rebuild on the exact site."
"Do you know," I returned, "I can't help saying something you will not like to hear. It is a very fine church, no doubt, but it always angers me to hear of a case like this where some ancient church is pulled down and a grand new one raised in its place to the honour and glory of some rich parvenu with or without a brand new title."
"You are not hurting me in the least," he replied, with that change which came from time to time in his eyes as if the flame behind the screen had suddenly grown brighter. "I agree with every word you say; the meanest church in the land should be cherished as long as it will hold together. But unfortunately ours had to come down. It was very old and decayed past mending. The floor was six feet below the level of the surrounding ground and frightfully damp. It had been examined over and over again by experts during the past forty or fifty years, and from the first they pronounced it a hopeless case, so that it was never restored. The interior, right down to the time of demolition, was like that of most country churches of a century ago, with the old black worm-eaten pews, in which the worshippers shut themselves up as if in their own houses or castles. On account of the damp we were haunted by toads. You smile, sir, but it was no smiling matter for me during my first year as vicar, when I discovered that it was the custom here to keep pet toads in the church. It sounds strange and funny, no doubt, but it is a fact that all the best people in the parish had one of these creatures, and it was customary for the ladies to bring it a weekly supply of provisions—bits of meat, hard-boiled eggs chopped up, and earth-worms, and whatever else they fancied it would like—in their reticules. The toads, I suppose, knew when it was Sunday—their feeding day; at all events they would crawl out of their holes in the floor under the pews to receive their rations—and caresses. The toads got on my nerves with rather unpleasant consequences. I preached in a way which my listeners did not appreciate or properly understand, particularly when I took for my subject our duty towards the lower animals, including reptiles."
"Batrachians," I interposed, echoing as well as I could the tone in which he had rebuked me before.
"Very well, batrachians—I am not a naturalist. But the impression created on their minds appeared to be that I was rather an odd person in the pulpit. When the time came to pull the old church down the toad-keepers were bidden to remove their pets, which they did with considerable reluctance. What became of them I do not know—I never inquired. I used to have a careful inspection made of the floor to make sure that these creatures were not put back in the new building, and I am happy to think it is not suited to their habits. The floors are very well cemented, and are dry and clean."
Having finished his story he invited me to go to the parsonage and get some refreshment. "I daresay you are thirsty," he said.
But it was getting late; it was almost dark in the church by now, although the figure of the golden-haired saint still glowed in the window and gazed at us out of her blue eyes. "I must not waste more of your time," I added. "There are your boys still patiently waiting to begin their practice—such nice quiet fellows!"
"Yes, they are," he returned a little bitterly, a sudden accent of weariness in his voice and no trace now of what I had seen in his countenance a little while ago—the light that shone and brightened behind the dark eye and the little play about the corners of the mouth as of dimpling motions on the surface of a pool.
And in that new guise, or disguise, I left him, the austere priest with nothing to suggest the whimsical or grotesque in his cold ascetic face. Recrossing the bridge I stood a little time and looked once more at the noble church tower standing dark against the clear amber-coloured sky, and said to myself: "Why, this is one of the oddest incidents of my life! Not that I have seen or heard anything very wonderful—just a small rustic village, one of a thousand in the land; a big new church in which some person was playing rather madly on the organ, a set of unruly choir-boys; a handsome stained-glass west window, and, finally, a nice little chat with the vicar." It was not in these things; it was a sense of something strange in the mind, of something in some way unlike all other places and people and experiences. The sensation was like that of the reader who becomes absorbed in Henry Newbolt's romance of The Old Country, who identifies himself with the hero and unconsciously, or without quite knowing how, slips back out of this modern world into that of half a thousand years ago. It is the same familiar green land in which he finds himself—the same old country and the same sort of people with feelings and habits of life and thought unchangeable as the colour of grass and flowers, the songs of birds and the smell of the earth, yet with a difference. I recognized it chiefly in the parish priest I had been conversing with; for one thing, his mediaeval mind evidently did not regard a sense of humour and of the grotesque as out of place in or on a sacred building. If it had been lighter I should have looked at the roof for an effigy of a semi-human toad-like creature smiling down mockingly at the worshippers as they came and went.
On departing it struck me that it would assuredly be a mistake to return to this village and look at it again by the common lights of day. No, it was better to keep the impressions I had gathered unspoilt; even to believe, if I could, that no such place existed, but that it had existed exactly as I had found it, even to the unruly choir-boys, the ascetic-looking priest with a strange light in his eyes, and the worshippers who kept pet toads in the church. They were not precisely like people of the twentieth century. As for the eccentric middle-aged or elderly person whose portrait adorned the west window, she was not the lady I knew something about, but another older Lady Y—, who flourished some six or seven centuries ago.
Chapter Three: Walking and Cycling
We know that there cannot be progression without retrogression, or gain with no corresponding loss; and often on my wheel, when flying along the roads at a reckless rate of very nearly nine miles an hour, I have regretted that time of limitations, galling to me then, when I was compelled to go on foot. I am a walker still, but with other means of getting about I do not feel so native to the earth as formerly. That is a loss. Yet a poorer walker it would have been hard to find, and on even my most prolonged wanderings the end of each day usually brought extreme fatigue. This, too, although my only companion was slow—slower than the poor proverbial snail or tortoise—and I would leave her half a mile or so behind to force my way through unkept hedges, climb hills, and explore woods and thickets to converse with every bird and shy little beast and scaly creature I could discover. But mark what follows. In the late afternoon I would be back in the road or footpath, satisfied to go slow, then slower still, until—the snail in woman shape would be obliged to slacken her pace to keep me company, and even to stand still at intervals to give me needful rest.
But there were compensations, and one, perhaps the best of all, was that this method of seeing the country made us more intimate with the people we met and stayed with. They were mostly poor people, cottagers in small remote villages; and we, too, were poor, often footsore, in need of their ministrations, and nearer to them on that account than if we had travelled in a more comfortable way. I can recall a hundred little adventures we met with during those wanderings, when we walked day after day, without map or guide-book as our custom was, not knowing where the evening would find us, but always confident that the people to whom it would fall in the end to shelter us would prove interesting to know and would show us a kindness that money could not pay for. Of these hundred little incidents let me relate one.
It was near the end of a long summer day when we arrived at a small hamlet of about a dozen cottages on the edge of an extensive wood—a forest it is called; and, coming to it, we said that here we must stay, even if we had to spend the night sitting in a porch. The men and women we talked to all assured us that they did not know of anyone who could take us in, but there was Mr. Brownjohn, who kept the shop, and was the right person to apply to. Accordingly we went to the little general shop and heard that Mr. Brownjohn was not at home. His housekeeper, a fat, dark, voluble woman with prominent black eyes, who minded the shop in the master's absence, told us that Mr. Brownjohn had gone to a neighbouring farm-house on important business, but was expected back shortly. We waited, and by and by he returned, a shabbily dressed, weak-looking little old man, with pale blue eyes and thin yellowish white hair. He could not put us up, he said, he had no room in his cottage; there was nothing for us but to go on to the next place, a village three miles distant, on the chance of finding a bed there. We assured him that we could go no further, and after revolving the matter a while longer he again said that we could not stay, as there was not a room to be had in the place since poor Mrs. Flowerdew had her trouble. She had a spare room and used to take in a lodger occasionally, and a good handy woman she was too; but now—no, Mrs. Flowerdew could not take us in. We questioned him, and he said that no one had died there and there had been no illness. They were all quite well at Mrs. Flowerdew's; the trouble was of another kind. There was no more to be said about it.
As nothing further could be got out of him we went in search of Mrs. Flowerdew herself, and found her in a pretty vine-clad cottage. She was a young woman, very poorly dressed, with a pleasing but careworn face, and she had four small, bright, healthy, happy-faced children. They were all grouped round her as she stood in the doorway to speak to us, and they too were poorly dressed and poorly shod. When we told our tale she appeared ready to burst into tears. Oh, how unfortunate it was that she could not take us in! It would have made her so happy, and the few shillings would have been such a blessing! But what could she do now—the landlord's agent had put in a distress and carried off and sold all her best things. Every stick out of her nice spare room had been taken from them! Oh, it was cruel!
As we wished to hear more she told us the whole story. They had got behindhand with the rent, but that had often been the case, only this time it happened that the agent wanted a cottage for a person he wished to befriend, and so gave them notice to quit. But her husband was a high-spirited man and determined to stick to his rights, so he informed the agent that he refused to move until he received compensation for his improvements.
Questioned about these improvements, she led us through to the back to show us the ground, about half an acre in extent, part of which was used as a paddock for the donkey, and on the other part there were about a dozen rather sickly-looking young fruit trees. Her husband, she said, had planted the orchard and kept the fence of the paddock in order, and they refused to compensate him! Then she took us up to the spare room, empty of furniture, the floor thick with dust. The bed, table, chairs, washhandstand, toilet service—the things she had been so long struggling to get together, saving her money for months and months, and making so many journeys to the town to buy—all, all he had taken away and sold for almost nothing!
Then, actually with tears in her eyes, she said that now we knew why she couldn't take us in—why she had to seem so unkind.
But we are going to stay, we told her. It was a very good room; she could surely get a few things to put in it, and in the meantime we would go and forage for provisions to last us till Monday.
It is odd to find how easy it is to get what one wants by simply taking it! At first she was amazed at our decision, then she was delighted and said she would go out to her neighbours and try to borrow all that was wanted in the way of furniture and bedding. Then we returned to Mr. Brownjohn's to buy bread, bacon, and groceries, and he in turn sent us to Mr. Marling for vegetables. Mr. Marling heard us, and soberly taking up a spade and other implements led us out to his garden and dug us a mess of potatoes while we waited. In the meantime good Mrs. Flowerdew had not been idle, and we formed the idea that her neighbours must have been her debtors for unnumbered little kindnesses, so eager did they now appear to do her a good turn. Out of one cottage a woman was seen coming burdened with a big roll of bedding; from others children issued bearing cane chairs, basin and ewer, and so on, and when we next looked into our room we found it swept and scrubbed, mats on the floor, and quite comfortably furnished.
After our meal in the small parlour, which had been given up to us, the family having migrated into the kitchen, we sat for an hour by the open window looking out on the dim forest and saw the moon rise—a great golden globe above the trees—and listened to the reeling of the nightjars. So many were the birds, reeling on all sides, at various distances, that the evening air seemed full of their sounds, far and near, like many low, tremulous, sustained notes blown on reeds, rising and falling, overlapping and mingling. And presently from the bushes close by, just beyond the weedy, forlorn little "orchard," sounded the rich, full, throbbing prelude to the nightingale's song, and that powerful melody that in its purity and brilliance invariably strikes us with surprise seemed to shine out, as it were, against the background of that diffused, mysterious purring of the nightjars, even as the golden disc of the moon shone against and above the darkening skies and dusky woods.
And as we sat there, gazing and listening, a human voice came out of the night—a call prolonged and modulated like the coo-ee of the Australian bush, far off and faint; but the children in the kitchen heard it at the same time, for they too had been listening, and instantly went mad with excitement.
"Father!" they all screamed together. "Father's coming!" and out they rushed and away they fled down the darkening road, exerting their full voices in shrill answering cries.
We were anxious to see this unfortunate man, who was yet happy in a loving family. He had gone early in the morning in his donkey-cart to the little market town, fourteen miles away, to get the few necessaries they could afford to buy. Doubtless they would be very few. We had not long to wait, as the white donkey that drew the cart had put on a tremendous spurt at the end, notwithstanding that the four youngsters had climbed in to add to his burden. But what was our surprise to behold in the charioteer a tall, gaunt, grey-faced old man with long white hair and beard! He must have been seventy, that old man with a young wife and four happy bright-eyed little children!
We could understand it better when he finally settled down in his corner in the kitchen and began to relate the events of the day, addressing his poor little wife, now busy darning or patching an old garment, while the children, clustered at his knee, listened as to a fairy tale. Certainly this white-haired man had not grown old in mind; he was keenly interested in all he saw and heard, and he had seen and heard much in the little market town that day. Cattle and pigs and sheep and shepherds and sheepdogs; farmers, shopkeepers, dealers, publicans, tramps, and gentlefolks in carriages and on horseback; shops, too, with beautiful new things in the windows; millinery, agricultural implements, flowers and fruit and vegetables; toys and books and sweeties of all colours. And the people he had met on the road and at market, and what they had said to him about the weather and their business and the prospects of the year, how their wives and children were, and the clever jokes they had made, and his own jokes, which were the cleverest of all. If he had just returned from Central Africa or from Thibet he could not have had more to tell them nor told it with greater zest.
We went to our room, but until the small hours the wind of the old traveller's talk could still be heard at intervals from the kitchen, mingled with occasional shrill explosions of laughter from the listening children.
It happened that on the following day, spent in idling in the forest and about the hamlet, conversing with the cottagers, we were told that our old man was a bit of a humbug; that he was a great talker, with a hundred schemes for the improvement of his fortunes, and, incidently, for the benefit of his neighbours and the world at large; but nothing came of it all and he was now fast sinking into the lowest depths of poverty. Yet who would blame him? 'Tis the nature of the gorse to be "unprofitably gay." All that, however, is a question for the moralist; the point now is that in walking, even in that poor way, when, on account of physical weakness, it was often a pain and weariness, there are alleviations which may be more to us than positive pleasures, and scenes to delight the eye that are missed by the wheelman in his haste, or but dimly seen or vaguely surmised in passing—green refreshing nooks and crystal streamlets, and shadowy woodland depths with glimpses of a blue sky beyond—all in the wilderness of the human heart.
Chapter Four: Seeking a Shelter
The "walks" already spoken of, at a time when life had little or no other pleasure for us on account of poverty and ill-health, were taken at pretty regular intervals two or three times a year. It all depended on our means; in very lean years there was but one outing. It was impossible to escape altogether from the immense unfriendly wilderness of London simply because, albeit "unfriendly," it yet appeared to be the only place in the wide world where our poor little talents could earn us a few shillings a week to live on. Music and literature! but I fancy the nearest crossing-sweeper did better, and could afford to give himself a more generous dinner every day. It occasionally happened that an article sent to some magazine was not returned, and always after so many rejections to have one accepted and paid for with a cheque worth several pounds was a cause of astonishment, and was as truly a miracle as if the angel of the sun had compassionately thrown us down a handful of gold. And out of these little handfuls enough was sometimes saved for the country rambles at Easter and Whitsuntide and in the autumn. It was during one of these Easter walks, when seeking for a resting-place for the night, that we met with another adventure worth telling.
We had got to that best part of Surrey not yet colonized by wealthy men from the City, but where all things are as they were of old, when, late in the day, we came to a pleasant straggling village with one street a mile long. Here we resolved to stay, and walked the length of the street making inquiries, but were told by every person we spoke to that the only place we could stay at was the inn—the "White Hart." When we said we preferred to stay at a cottage they smiled a pitying smile. No, there was no such place. But we were determined not to go to the inn, although it had a very inviting look, and was well placed with no other house near it, looking on the wide village green with ancient trees shading the road on either side.
Having passed it and got to the end of the village, we turned and walked back, still making vain inquiries, passing it again, and when once more at the starting-point we were in despair when we spied a man coming along the middle of the road and went out to meet him to ask the weary question for the last time. His appearance was rather odd as he came towards us on that blowy March evening with dust and straws flying past and the level sun shining full on him. He was tall and slim, with a large round smooth face and big pale-blue innocent-looking eyes, and he walked rapidly but in a peculiar jerky yet shambling manner, swinging and tossing his legs and arms about. Moving along in this disjointed manner in his loose fluttering clothes he put one in mind of a big flimsy newspaper blown along the road by the wind. This unpromising-looking person at once told us that there was a place where we could stay; he knew it well, for it happened to be his father's house and his own home. It was away at the other end of the village. His people had given accommodation to strangers before, and would be glad to receive us and make us comfortable.
Surprised, and a little doubtful of our good fortune, I asked my young man if he could explain the fact that so many of his neighbours had assured us that no accommodation was to be had in the village except at the inn. He did not make a direct reply. He said that the ways of the villagers were not the ways of his people. He and all his house cherished only kind feelings towards their neighbours; whether those feelings were returned or not, it was not for him to say. And there was something else. A small appointment which would keep a man from want for the term of his natural life, without absorbing all his time, had become vacant in the village. Several of the young men in the place were anxious to have it; then he, too, came forward as a candidate, and all the others jeered at him and tried to laugh him out of it. He cared nothing for that, and when the examination came off he proved the best man and got the place. He had fought his fight and had overcome all his enemies; if they did not like him any the better for his victory, and did and said little things to injure him, he did not mind much, he could afford to forgive them.
Having finished his story, he said good-bye, and went his way, blown, as it were, along the road by the wind.
We were now very curious to see the other members of his family; they would, we imagined, prove amusing, if nothing better. They proved a good deal better. The house we sought, for a house it was, stood a little way back from the street in a large garden. It had in former times been an inn, or farm-house, possibly a manor-house, and was large, with many small rooms, and short, narrow, crooked staircases, half-landings and narrow passages, and a few large rooms, their low ceilings resting on old oak beams, black as ebony. Outside, it was the most picturesque and doubtless the oldest house in the village; many-gabled, with very tall ancient chimneys, the roofs of red tiles mottled grey and yellow with age and lichen. It was a surprise to find a woodman—for that was what the man was—living in such a big place. The woodman himself, his appearance and character, gave us a second and greater surprise. He was a well-shaped man of medium height; although past middle life he looked young, and had no white thread in his raven-black hair and beard. His teeth were white and even, and his features as perfect as I have seen in any man. His eyes were pure dark blue, contrasting rather strangely with his pale olive skin and intense black hair. Only a woodman, but he might have come of one of the oldest and best families in the country, if there is any connection between good blood and fine features and a noble expression. Oddly enough, his surname was an uncommon and aristocratic one. His wife, on the other hand, although a very good woman as we found, had a distinctly plebeian countenance. One day she informed us that she came of a different and better class than her husband's. She was the daughter of a small tradesman, and had begun life as a lady's-maid: her husband was nothing but a labourer; his people had been labourers for generations, consequently her marriage to him had involved a considerable descent in the social scale. Hearing this, it was hard to repress a smile.
The contrast between this man and the ordinary villager of his class was as great in manners and conversation as in features and expression. His combined dignity and gentleness, and apparent unconsciousness of any caste difference between man and man, were astonishing in one who had been a simple toiler all his life.
There were some grown-up children, others growing up, with others that were still quite small. The boys, I noticed, favoured their mother, and had commonplace faces; the girls took after their father, and though their features were not so perfect they were exceptionally good-looking. The eldest son—the disjointed, fly-away-looking young man who had conquered all his enemies—had a wife and child. The eldest daughter was also married, and had one child. Altogether the three families numbered about sixteen persons, each family having its separate set of rooms, but all dining at one table. How did they do it? It seemed easy enough to them. They were serious people in a sense, although always cheerful and sometimes hilarious when together of an evening, or at their meals. But they regarded life as a serious matter, a state of probation; they were non-smokers, total abstainers, diligent at their work, united, profoundly religious. A fresh wonder came to light when I found that this poor woodman, with so large a family to support, who spent ten or twelve hours every day at his outdoor work, had yet been able out of his small earnings to buy bricks and other materials, and, assisted by his sons, to build a chapel adjoining his house. Here he held religious services on Sundays, and once or twice of an evening during the week. These services consisted of extempore prayers, a short address, and hymns accompanied by a harmonium, which they all appeared able to play.
What his particular doctrine was I did not inquire, nor did I wish for any information on that point. Doubtless he was a Dissenter of some kind living in a village where there was no chapel; the services were for the family, but were also attended by a few of the villagers and some persons from neighbouring farms who preferred a simpler form of worship to that of the Church.
It was not strange that this little community should have been regarded with something like disfavour by the other villagers. For these others, man for man, made just as much money, and paid less rent for their small cottages, and, furthermore, received doles from the vicar and his well-to-do parishioners, yet they could not better their position, much less afford the good clothing, books, music, and other pleasant things which the independent woodman bestowed on his family. And they knew why. The woodman's very presence in their midst was a continual reproach, a sermon on improvidence and intemperance, which they could not avoid hearing by thrusting their fingers into their ears.
During my stay with these people something occurred to cause them a very deep disquiet. The reader will probably smile when I tell them what it was. Awaking one night after midnight I heard the unusual sound of voices in earnest conversation in the room below; this went on until I fell asleep again. In the morning we noticed that our landlady had a somewhat haggard face, and that the daughters also had pale faces, with purple marks under the eyes, as if they had kept their mother company in some sorrowful vigil. We were not left long in ignorance of the cause of this cloud. The good woman asked if we had been much disturbed by the talking. I answered that I had heard voices and had supposed that friends from a distance had arrived overnight and that they had sat up talking to a late hour. No—that was not it, she said; but someone had arrived late, a son who was sixteen years old, and who had been absent for some days on a visit to relations in another county. When they gathered round him to hear his news he confessed that while away he had learnt to smoke, and he now wished them to know that he had well considered the matter, and was convinced that it was not wrong nor harmful to smoke, and was determined not to give up his tobacco. They had talked to him—father, mother, brothers, and sisters—using every argument they could find or invent to move him, until it was day and time for the woodman to go to his woods, and the others to their several occupations. But their "all-night sitting" had been wasted; the stubborn youth had not been convinced nor shaken. When, after morning prayers, they got up from their knees, the sunlight shining in upon them, they had made a last appeal with tears in their eyes, and he had refused to give the promise they asked. The poor woman was greatly distressed. This young fellow, I thought, favours his mother in features, but mentally he is perhaps more like his father. Being a smoker myself I ventured to put in a word for him. They were distressing themselves too much, I told her; smoking in moderation was not only harmless, especially to those who worked out of doors, but it was a well-nigh universal habit, and many leading men in the religious world, both churchmen and dissenters, were known to be smokers.
Her answer, which came quickly enough, was that they did not regard the practice of smoking as in itself bad, but they knew that in some circumstances it was inexpedient; and in the case of her son they were troubled at the thought of what smoking would ultimately lead to. People, she continued, did not care to smoke, any more than they did to eat and drink, in solitude. It was a social habit, and it was inevitable that her boy should look for others to keep him company in smoking. There would be no harm in that in the summer-time when young people like to keep out of doors until bedtime; but during the long winter evenings he would have to look for his companions in the parlour of the public-house. And it would not be easy, scarcely possible, to sit long among the others without drinking a little beer. It is really no more wrong to drink a little beer than to smoke, he would say; and it would be true. One pipe would lead to another and one glass of beer to another. The habit would be formed and at last all his evenings and all his earnings would be spent in the public-house.
She was right, and I had nothing more to say except to wish her success in her efforts.
It is curious that the strongest protests against the evils of the village pubic, which one hears from village women, come from those who are not themselves sufferers. Perhaps it is not curious. Instinctively we hide our sores, bodily and mental, from the public gaze.
Not long ago I was in a small rustic village in Wiltshire, perhaps the most charming village I have seen in that country. There was no inn or ale-house, and feeling very thirsty after my long walk I went to a cottage and asked the woman I saw there for a drink of milk. She invited me in, and spreading a clean cloth on the table, placed a jug of new milk, a loaf, and butter before me. For these good things she proudly refused to accept payment. As she was a handsome young woman, with a clear, pleasant voice, I was glad to have her sit there and talk to me while I refreshed myself. Besides, I was in search of information and got it from her during our talk. My object in going to the village was to see a woman who, I had been told, was living there. I now heard that her cottage was close by, but unfortunately, while anxious to see her, I had no excuse for calling.
"Do you think," said I to my young hostess, "that it would do to tell her that I had heard something of her strange history and misfortunes, and wished to offer her a little help? Is she very poor?"
"Oh, no," she replied. "Please do not offer her money, if you see her. She would be offended. There is no one in this village who would take a shilling as a gift from a stranger. We all have enough; there is not a poor person among us."
"What a happy village!" I exclaimed. "Perhaps you are all total abstainers."
She laughed, and said that they all brewed their own beer—there was not a total abstainer among them. Every cottager made from fifty to eighty gallons, or more, and they drank beer every day, but very moderately, while it lasted. They were all very sober; their children would have to go to some neighbouring village to see a tipsy man.
I remarked that at the next village, which had three public-houses, there were a good marry persons so poor that they would gladly at any time take a shilling from any one.
It was the same everywhere in the district, she said, except in that village which had no public-house. Not only were they better off, and independent of blanket societies and charity in all forms, but they were infinitely happier. And after the day's work the men came home to spend the evening with their wives and children.
At this stage I was surprised by a sudden burst of passion on her part. She stood up, her face flushing red, and solemnly declared that if ever a public-house was opened in that village, and if the men took to spending their evenings in it, her husband with them, she would not endure such a condition of things—she wondered that so many women endured it—but would take her little ones and go away to earn her own living under some other roof!
Chapter Five: Wind, Wave, and Spirit
The rambles I have described were mostly inland: when by chance they took us down to the sea our impressions and adventures appeared less interesting. Looking back on the holiday, it would seem to us a somewhat vacant time compared to one spent in wandering from village to village. I mean if we do not take into account that first impression which the sea invariably makes on us on returning to it after a long absence—the shock of recognition and wonder and joy as if we had been suffering from loss of memory and it had now suddenly come back to us. That brief moving experience over, there is little the sea can give us to compare with the land. How could it be otherwise in our case, seeing that we were by it in a crowd, our movements and way of life regulated for us in places which appear like overgrown and ill-organized convalescent homes? There was always a secret intense dislike of all parasitic and holiday places, an uncomfortable feeling which made the pleasure seem poor and the remembrance of days so spent hardly worth dwelling on. And as we are able to keep in or throw out of our minds whatever we please, being autocrats in our own little kingdom, I elected to cast away most of the memories of these comparatively insipid holidays. But not all, and of those I retain I will describe at least two, one in the present chapter on the East Anglian coast, the other later on.
It was cold, though the month was August; it blew and the sky was grey and rain beginning to fall when we came down about noon to a small town on the Norfolk coast, where we hoped to find lodging and such comforts as could be purchased out of a slender purse. It was a small modern pleasure town of an almost startling appearance owing to the material used in building its straight rows of cottages and its ugly square houses and villas. This was an orange-brown stone found in the neighbourhood, the roofs being all of hard, black slate. I had never seen houses of such a colour, it was stronger, more glaring and aggressive than the reddest brick, and there was not a green thing to partially screen or soften it, nor did the darkness of the wet weather have any mitigating effect on it. The town was built on high ground, with an open grassy space before it sloping down to the cliff in which steps had been cut to give access to the beach, and beyond the cliff we caught sight of the grey, desolate, wind-vexed sea. But the rain was coming down more and more heavily, turning the streets into torrents, so that we began to envy those who had found a shelter even in so ugly a place. No one would take us in. House after house, street after street, we tried, and at every door with "Apartments to Let" over it where we knocked the same hateful landlady-face appeared with the same triumphant gleam in the fish-eyes and the same smile on the mouth that opened to tell us delightedly that she and the town were "full up"; that never had there been known such a rush of visitors; applicants were being turned away every hour from every door!
After three miserable hours spent in this way we began inquiring at all the shops, and eventually at one were told of a poor woman in a small house in a street a good way back from the front who would perhaps be able to taken us in. To this place we went and knocked at a low door in a long blank wall in a narrow street; it was opened to us by a pale thin sad-looking woman in a rusty black gown, who asked us into a shabby parlour, and agreed to take us in until we could find something better. She had a gentle voice and was full of sympathy, and seeing our plight took us into the kitchen behind the parlour, which was living- and working-room as well, to dry ourselves by the fire.
"The greatest pleasure in life," said once a magnificent young athlete, a great pedestrian, to me, "is to rest when you are tired." And, I should add, to dry and warm yourself by a big fire when wet and cold, and to eat and drink when you are hungry and thirsty. All these pleasures were now ours, for very soon tea and chops were ready for us; and so strangely human, so sister-like did this quiet helpful woman seem after our harsh experiences on that rough rainy day—that we congratulated ourselves on our good fortune in having found such a haven, and soon informed her that we wanted no "better place."
She worked with her needle to support herself and her one child, a little boy of ten; and by and by when he came in pretty wet from some outdoor occupation we made his acquaintance and the discovery that he was a little boy of an original character. He was so much to his mother, who, poor soul, had nobody else in the world to love, that she was always haunted by the fear of losing him. He was her boy, the child of her body, exclusively her own, unlike all other boys, and her wise heart told her that if she put him in a school he would be changed so that she would no longer know him for her boy. For it is true that our schools are factories, with a machinery to unmake and remake, or fabricate, the souls of children much in the way in which shoddy is manufactured. You may see a thousand rags or garments of a thousand shapes and colours cast in to be boiled, bleached, pulled to pieces, combed and woven, and finally come out as a piece of cloth a thousand yards long of a uniform harmonious pattern, smooth, glossy, and respectable. His individuality gone, he would in a sense be lost to her; and although by nature a weak timid woman, though poor, and a stranger in a strange place, this thought, or feeling, or "ridiculous delusion" as most people would call it, had made her strong, and she had succeeded in keeping her boy out of school.
Hers was an interesting story. Left alone in the world she had married one in her own class, very happily as she imagined. He was in some business in a country town, well off enough to provide a comfortable home, and he was very good; in fact, his one fault was that he was too good, too open-hearted and fond of associating with other good fellows like himself, and of pledging them in the cup that cheers and at the same time inebriates. Nevertheless, things went very well for a time, until the child was born, the business declined, and they began to be a little pinched. Then it occurred to her that she, too, might be able to do something. She started dressmaking, and as she had good taste and was clever and quick, her business soon prospered. This pleased him; it relieved him from the necessity of providing for the home, and enabled him to follow his own inclination, which was to take things easily—to be an idle man, with a little ready money in his pocket for betting and other pleasures. The money was now provided out of "our business." This state of things continued without any change, except that process of degeneration which continued in him, until the child was about four years old, when all at once one day he told her they were not doing as well as they might. She was giving far too much of her time and attention to domestic matters—to the child especially. Business was business—a thing it was hard for a woman to understand—and it was impossible for her to give her mind properly to it with her thoughts occupied with the child. It couldn't be done. Let the child be put away, he said, and the receipts would probably be doubled. He had been making inquiries and found that for a modest annual payment the boy could be taken proper care of at a distance by good decent people he had heard of.
She had never suspected such a thought in his mind, and this proposal had the effect of a stunning blow. She answered not one word: he said his say and went out, and she knew she would not see him again for many hours, perhaps not for some days; she knew, too, that he would say no more to her on the subject, that it would all be arranged about the child with or without her consent. His will was law, her wishes nothing. For she was his wife and humble obedient slave; never had she pleaded with or admonished him and never complained, even when, after her long day of hard work, he came in at ten or eleven o'clock at night with several of his pals, all excited with drink and noisy as himself, to call for supper. Nevertheless she had been happy—intensely happy, because of the child. The love for the man she had married, wondering how one so bright and handsome and universally admired and liked could stoop to her, who had nothing but love and worship to give in return—that love was now gone and was not missed, so much greater and more satisfying was the love for her boy. And now she must lose him. Two or three silent miserable days passed by while she waited for the dreadful separation, until the thought of it became unendurable and she resolved to keep her child and sacrifice everything else. Secretly she prepared for flight, getting together the few necessary things she could carry; then, with the child in her arms, she stole out one evening and began her flight, which took her all across England at its widest part, and ended at this small coast town, the best hiding-place she could think of.
The boy was a queer little fellow, healthy but colourless, with strangely beautiful grey eyes which, on first seeing them, almost startled one with their intelligence. He was shy and almost obstinately silent, but when I talked to him on certain subjects the intense suppressed interest he felt would show itself in his face, and by and by it would burst out in speech—an impetuous torrent of words in a high shrill voice. He reminded me of a lark in a cage. Watch it in its prison when the sun shines forth—when, like the captive falcon in Dante, it is "cheated by a gleam"—its wing-tremblings, and all its little tentative motions, how the excitement grows and grows in it, until, although shut up and flight denied it, the passion can no longer be contained and it bursts out in a torrent of shrill and guttural sounds, which, if it were free and soaring, would be its song. His passion was all for nature, and his mother out of her small earnings had managed to get quite a number of volumes together for him. These he read and re-read until he knew them by heart; and on Sundays, or any other day they could take, those two lonely ones would take a basket containing their luncheon, her work and a book or two, and set out on a long ramble along the coast to pass the day in some solitary spot among the sandhills.
With these two, the gentle woman and her quiet boy over his book, and the kitchen fire to warm and dry us after each wetting, the bad weather became quite bearable although it lasted many days. And it was amazingly bad. The wind blew with a fury from the sea; it was hard to walk against it. The people in hundreds waited in their dull apartments for a lull, and when it came they poured out like hungry sheep from the fold, or like children from a school, swarming over the green slope down to the beach, to scatter far and wide over the sands. Then, in a little while; a new menacing blackness would come up out of the sea, and by and by a fresh storm of wind would send the people scuttling back into shelter. So it went on day after day, and when night came the sound of the ever-troubled sea grew louder, so that, shut up in our little rooms in that back street, we had it in our ears, except at intervals, when the wind howled loud enough to drown its great voice, and hurled tempests of rain and hail against the roofs and windows.
To me the most amazing thing was the spectacle of the swifts. It was late for them, near the end of August; they should now have been far away on their flight to Africa; yet here they were, delaying on that desolate east coast in wind and wet, more than a hundred of them. It was strange to see so many at one spot, and I could only suppose that they had congregated previous to migration at that unsuitable place, and were being kept back by the late breeders, who had not yet been wrought up to the point of abandoning their broods. They haunted a vast ruinous old barn-like building near the front, which was probably old a century before the town was built, and about fifteen to twenty pairs had their nests under the eaves. Over this building they hung all day in a crowd, rising high to come down again at a frantic speed, and at each descent a few birds could be seen to enter the holes, while others rushed out to join the throng, and then all rose and came down again and swept round and round in a furious chase, shrieking as if mad. At all hours they drew me to that spot, and standing there, marvelling at their swaying power and the fury that possessed them, they appeared to me like tormented beings, and were like those doomed wretches in the halls of Eblis whose hearts were in a blaze of unquenchable fire, and who, every one with hands pressed to his breast, went spinning round in an everlasting agonized dance. They were tormented and crazed by the two most powerful instincts of birds pulling in opposite directions—the parental instinct and the passion of migration which called them to the south.
In such weather, especially on that naked desolate coast, exposed to the fury of the winds, one marvels at our modern craze for the sea; not merely to come and gaze upon and listen to it, to renew our youth in its salt, exhilarating waters and to lie in delicious idleness on the warm shingle or mossy cliff; but to be always, for days and weeks and even for months, at all hours, in all weathers, close to it, with its murmur, "as of one in pain," for ever in our ears.
Undoubtedly it is an unnatural, a diseased, want in us, the result of a life too confined and artificial in close dirty overcrowded cities. It is to satisfy this craving that towns have sprung up everywhere on our coasts and extended their ugly fronts for miles and leagues, with their tens of thousands of windows from which the city-sickened wretches may gaze and gaze and listen and feed their sick souls with the ocean. That is to say, during their indoor hours; at other times they walk or sit or lie as close as they can to it, following the water as it ebbs and reluctantly retiring before it when it returns. It was not so formerly, before the discovery was made that the sea could cure us. Probably our great-grandfathers didn't even know they were sick; at all events, those who had to live in the vicinity of the sea were satisfied to be a little distance from it, out of sight of its grey desolation and, if possible, out of hearing of its "accents disconsolate." This may be seen anywhere on our coasts; excepting the seaports and fishing settlements, the towns and villages are almost always some distance from the sea, often in a hollow or at all events screened by rising ground and woods from it. The modern seaside place has, in most cases, its old town or village not far away but quite as near as the healthy ancients wished to be.
The old village nearest to our little naked and ugly modern town was discovered at a distance of about two miles, but it might have been two hundred, so great was the change to its sheltered atmosphere. Loitering in its quiet streets among the old picturesque brick houses with tiled or thatched roofs and tall chimneys—ivy and rose and creeper-covered, with a background of old oaks and elms—I had the sensation of having come back to my own home. In that still air you could hear men and women talking fifty or a hundred yards away, the cry or laugh of a child and the clear crowing of a cock, also the smaller aerial sounds of nature, the tinkling notes of tits and other birdlings in the trees, the twitter of swallows and martins, and the "lisp of leaves and ripple of rain." It was sweet and restful in that home-like place, and hard to leave it to go back to the front to face the furious blasts once more. Rut there were compensations.
The little town, we have seen, was overcrowded with late summer visitors, all eager for the sea yet compelled to waste so much precious time shut up in apartments, and at every appearance of a slight improvement in the weather they would pour out of the houses and the green slope would be covered with a crowd of many hundreds, all hurrying down to the beach. The crowd was composed mostly of women—about three to every man, I should say—and their children; and it was one of the most interesting crowds I had ever come across on account of the large number of persons in it of a peculiarly fine type, which chance had brought together at that spot. It was the large English blonde, and there were so many individuals of this type that they gave a character to the crowd so that those of a different physique and colour appeared to be fewer than they were and were almost overlooked. They came from various places about the country, in the north and the Midlands, and appeared to be of the well-to-do classes; they, or many of them, were with their families but without their lords. They were mostly tall and large in every way, very white-skinned, with light or golden hair and large light blue eyes. A common character of these women was their quiet reposeful manner; they walked and talked and rose up and sat down and did everything, in fact, with an air of deliberation; they gazed in a slow steady way at you, and were dignified, some even majestic, and were like a herd of large beautiful white cows. The children, too, especially the girls, some almost as tall as their large mothers, though still in short frocks, were very fine. The one pastime of these was paddling, and it was a delight to see their bare feet and legs. The legs of those who had been longest on the spot—probably several weeks in some instances—were of a deep nutty brown hue suffused with pink; after these a gradation of colour, light brown tinged with buff, pinkish buff and cream, like the Gloire de Dijon rose; and so on to the delicate tender pink of the clover blossom; and, finally, the purest ivory white of the latest arrivals whose skins had not yet been caressed and coloured by sun and wind.
How beautiful are the feet of these girls by the sea who bring us glad tidings of a better time to come and the day of a nobler courage, a freer larger life when garments which have long oppressed and hindered shall have been cast away! It was, as I have said, mere chance which had brought so many persons of a particular type together on this occasion, and I thought I might go there year after year and never see the like again. As a fact I did return when August came round and found a crowd of a different character. The type was there but did not predominate: it was no longer the herd of beautiful white and strawberry cows with golden horns and large placid eyes. Nothing in fact was the same, for when I looked for the swifts there were no more than about twenty birds instead of over a hundred, and although just on the eve of departure they were not behaving in the same excited manner.
Probably I should not have thought so much about that particular crowd in that tempestuous August, and remembered it so vividly, but for the presence of three persons in it and the strange contrast they made to the large white type I have described. These were a woman and her two little girls, aged about eight and ten respectively, but very small for their years. She was a little black haired and black-eyed woman with a pale sad dark face, on which some great grief or tragedy had left its shadow; very quiet and subdued in her manner; she would sit on a chair on the beach when the weather permitted, a book on her knees, while her two little ones played about, chasing and flying from the waves, or with the aid of their long poles vaulting from rock to rock. They were dressed in black frocks and scarlet blouses, which set off their beautiful small dark faces; their eyes sparkled like black diamonds, and their loose hair was a wonder to see, a black mist or cloud about their heads and necks composed of threads fine as gossamer, blacker than jet and shining like spun glass-hair that looked as if no comb or brush could ever tame its beautiful wildness. And in spirit they were what they seemed: such a wild, joyous, frolicsome spirit with such grace and fleetness one does not look for in human beings, but only in birds or in some small bird-like volatile mammal—a squirrel or a marmoset of the tropical forest, or the chinchilla of the desolate mountain slopes, the swiftest, wildest, loveliest, most airy and most vocal of small beasties. Occasionally to watch their wonderful motions more closely and have speech with them, I followed when they raced over the sands or flew about over the slippery rocks, and felt like a cochin-china fowl, or muscovy duck, or dodo, trying to keep pace with a humming-bird. Their voices were well suited to their small brilliant forms; not loud, though high-pitched and singularly musical and penetrative, like the high clear notes of a skylark at a distance. They also reminded me of certain notes, which have a human quality, in some of our songsters—the swallow, redstart, pied wagtail, whinchat, and two or three others. Such pure and beautiful sounds are sometimes heard in human voices, chiefly in children, when they are talking and laughing in joyous excitement. But for any sort of conversation they were too volatile; before I could get a dozen words from them they would be off again, flying and flitting along the margin, like sandpipers, and beating the clear-voiced sandpiper at his own aerial graceful game.
By and by I was favoured with a fine exhibition of the spirit animating these two little things. The weather had made it possible for the crowd of visitors to go down and scatter itself over the beach, when the usual black cloud sprang up and soon burst on us in a furious tempest of wind and rain, sending the people flying back to the shelter of a large structure erected for such purposes against the cliff. It was a vast barn-like place, open to the front, the roof supported by wooden columns, and here in a few minutes some three or four hundred persons were gathered, mostly women and their girls, white and blue-eyed with long wet golden hair hanging down their backs. Finding a vacant place on the bench, I sat down next to a large motherly-looking woman with a robust or dumpy blue-eyed girl about four or five years old on her lap. Most of the people were standing about in groups waiting for the storm to blow over, and presently I noticed my two wild-haired dark little girls moving about in the crowd. It was impossible not to seen them, for they could not keep still a moment. They were here, there, and everywhere, playing hide-and-seek and skipping and racing wherever they could find an opening, and by and by, taking hold of each other, they started dancing. It was a pretty spectacle, but most interesting to see was the effect produced on the other children, the hundred girls, big and little, the little ones especially, who had been standing there tired and impatient to get out to the sea, and who were now becoming more and more excited as they gazed, until, like children when listening to lively music, they began moving feet and hands and soon their whole bodies in time to the swift movements of the little dancers. At last, plucking up courage, first one, then another, joined them, and were caught as they came and whirled round and round in a manner quite new to them and which they appeared to find very delightful. By and by I observed that the little rosy-faced dumpy girl on my neighbour's knees was taking the infection; she was staring, her blue eyes opened to their widest in wonder and delight. Then suddenly she began pleading, "Oh, mummy, do let me go to the little girls—oh, do let me!" And her mother said "No," because she was so little, and could never fly round like that, and so would fall and hurt herself and cry. But she pleaded still, and was ready to cry if refused, until the good anxious mother was compelled to release her; and down she slipped, and after standing still with her little arms and closed hands held up as if to collect herself before plunging into the new tremendous adventure, she rushed out towards the dancers. One of them saw her coming, and instantly quitting the child she was waltzing with flew to meet her, and catching her round the middle began spinning her about as if the solid little thing weighed no more than a feather. But it proved too much for her; very soon she came down and broke into a loud cry, which brought her mother instantly to her, and she was picked up and taken back to the seat and held to the broad bosom and soothed with caresses and tender words until the sobs began to subside. Then, even before the tears were dry, her eyes were once more gazing at the tireless little dancers, taking on child after child as they came timidly forward to have a share in the fun, and once more she began to plead with her "mummy," and would not be denied, for she was a most determined little Saxon, until getting her way she rushed out for a second trial. Again the little dancer saw her coming and flew to her like a bird to its mate, and clasping her laughed her merry musical little laugh. It was her "sudden glory," an expression of pure delight in her power to infuse her own fire and boundless gaiety of soul into all these little blue-eyed rosy phlegmatic lumps of humanity.
What was it in these human mites, these fantastic Brownies, which, in that crowd of Rowenas and their children, made them seem like beings not only of another race, but of another species? How came they alone to be distinguished among so many by that irresponsible gaiety, as of the most volatile of wild creatures, that quickness of sense and mind and sympathy, that variety and grace and swiftness—all these brilliant exotic qualities harmoniously housed in their small beautiful elastic and vigorous frames? It was their genius, their character—something derived from their race. But what race? Looking at their mother watching her little ones at their frolics with dark shining eyes—the small oval-faced brown-skinned woman with blackest hair—I could but say that she was an Iberian, pure and simple, and that her children were like her. In Southern Europe that type abounds; it is also to be met with throughout Britain, perhaps most common in the southern counties, and it is not uncommon in East Anglia. Indeed, I think it is in Norfolk where we may best see the two most marked sub-types in which it is divided—the two extremes. The small stature, narrow head, dark skin, black hair and eyes are common to both, and in both these physical characters are correlated with certain mental traits, as, for instance, a peculiar vivacity and warmth of disposition; but they are high and low. In the latter sub-division the skin is coarse in texture, brown or old parchment in colour, with little red in it; the black hair is also coarse, the forehead small, the nose projecting, and the facial angle indicative of a more primitive race. One might imagine that these people had been interred, along with specimens of rude pottery and bone and flint implements, a long time back, about the beginning of the Bronze Age perhaps, and had now come out of their graves and put on modern clothes. At all events I don't think a resident in Norfolk would have much difficulty in picking out the portraits of some of his fellow-villagers in Mr. Reed's Prehistoric Peeps.
The mother and her little ones were of the higher sub-type: they had delicate skins, beautiful faces, clear musical voices. They were Iberians in blood, but improved; purified and refined as by fire; gentleized and spiritualized, and to the lower types down to the aboriginals, as is the bright consummate flower to leaf and stem and root.
Often and often we are teased and tantalized and mocked by that old question:
Oh! so old—
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told—
of black and blue eyes; blue versus black and black versus blue, to put it both ways. And by black we mean black with orange-brown lights in it—the eye called tortoise-shell; and velvety browns with other browns, also hazels. Blue includes all blues, from ultramarine, or violet, to the palest blue of a pale sky; and all greys down to the grey that is almost white. Our preference for this or that colour is supposed to depend on nothing but individual taste, or fancy, and association. I believe it is something more, but I do find that we are very apt to be swayed this way and that by the colour of the eyes of the people we meet in life, according as they (the people) attract or repel us. The eyes of the two little girls were black as polished black diamonds until looked at closely, when they appeared a beautiful deep brown on which the black pupils were seen distinctly; they were so lovely that I, predisposed to prefer dark to light, felt that this question was now definitely settled for me—that black was best. That irresistible charm, the flame-like spirit which raised these two so much above the others—how could it go with anything but the darkest eyes!
But no sooner was the question thus settled definitely and for all time, to my very great satisfaction, than it was unsettled again. I do not know how this came about; it may have been the sight of some small child's blue eyes looking up at me, like the arch blue eyes of a kitten, full of wonder at the world and everything in it;
"Where did you get those eyes so blue?"
"Out of the sky as I came through";
or it may have been the sight of a harebell; and perhaps it came from nothing but the "waste shining of the sky." At all events, there they were, remembered again, looking at me from the past, blue eyes that were beautiful and dear to me, whose blue colour was associated with every sweetness and charm in child and woman and with all that is best and highest in human souls; and I could not and had no wish to resist their appeal.
Then came a new experience of the eye that is blue—a meeting with one who almost seemed to be less flesh than spirit. A middle-aged lady, frail, very frail; exceedingly pale from long ill-health, prematurely white-haired, with beautiful grey eyes, gentle but wonderfully bright. Altogether she was like a being compounded as to her grosser part of foam and mist and gossamer and thistledown, and was swayed by every breath of air, and who, should she venture abroad in rough weather, would be lifted and blown away by the gale and scattered like mist over the earth. Yet she, so frail, so timid, was the one member of the community who had set herself to do the work of a giant—that of championing all ill-used and suffering creatures, wild or tame, holding a protecting shield over them against the innate brutality of the people. She had been abused and mocked and jeered at by many, while others had regarded her action with an amused smile or else with a cold indifference. But eventually some, for very shame, had been drawn to her side, and a change in the feeling of the people had resulted; domestic animals were treated better, and it was no longer universally believed that all wild animals, especially those with wings, existed only that men might amuse themselves by killing and wounding and trapping and caging and persecuting them in various other ways.
The sight of that burning and shining spirit in its frail tenement—for did I not actually see her spirit and the very soul of her in those eyes?—was the last of the unforgotten experiences I had at that place which had startled and repelled me with its ugliness.
But, no, there was one more, marvellous as any—the experience of a day of days, one of those rare days when nature appears to us spiritualized and is no longer nature, when that which had transfigured this visible world is in us too, and it becomes possible to believe—it is almost a conviction—that the burning and shining spirit seen and recognized in one among a thousand we have known is in all of us and in all things. In such moments it is possible to go beyond even the most advanced of the modern physicists who hold that force alone exists, that matter is but a disguise, a shadow and delusion; for we may add that force itself—that which we call force or energy—is but a semblance and shadow of the universal soul.
The change in the weather was not sudden; the furious winds dropped gradually; the clouds floated higher in the heavens, and were of a lighter grey; there were wider breaks in them, showing the lucid blue beyond; and the sea grew quieter. It had raved and roared too long, beating against the iron walls that held it back, and was now spent and fallen into an uneasy sleep, but still moved uneasily and moaned a little. Then all at once summer returned, coming like a thief in the night, for when it was morning the sun rose in splendour and power in a sky without a cloud on its vast azure expanse, on a calm sea with no motion but that scarcely perceptible rise and fall as of one that sleeps. As the sun rose higher the air grew warmer until it was full summer heat, but although a "visible heat," it was never oppressive; for all that day we were abroad, and as the tide ebbed a new country that was neither earth nor sea was disclosed, an infinite expanse of pale yellow sand stretching away on either side, and further and further out until it mingled and melted into the sparkling water and faintly seen line of foam on the horizon. And over all—the distant sea, the ridge of low dunes marking where the earth ended and the flat, yellow expanse between—there brooded a soft bluish silvery haze. A haze that blotted nothing out, but blended and interfused them all until earth and air and sea and sands were scarcely distinguishable. The effect, delicate, mysterious, unearthly, cannot be described.
Ethereal gauze...
Visible heat, air-water, and dry sea,
Last conquest of the eye...
Sun dust,
Aerial surf upon the shores of earth,
Ethereal estuary, frith of light....
Bird of the sun, transparent winged.
Do we not see that words fail as pigments do—that the effect is too coarse, since in describing it we put it before the mental eye as something distinctly visible, a thing of itself and separate. But it is not so in nature; the effect is of something almost invisible and is yet a part of all and makes all things—sky and sea and land—as unsubstantial as itself. Even living, moving things had that aspect. Far out on the lowest further strip of sand, which appeared to be on a level with the sea, gulls were seen standing in twos and threes and small groups and in rows; but they did not look like gulls—familiar birds, gull-shaped with grey and white plumage. They appeared twice as big as gulls, and were of a dazzling whiteness and of no definite shape: though standing still they had motion, an effect of the quivering dancing air, the "visible heat"; at rest, they were seen now as separate objects; then as one with the silver sparkle on the sea; and when they rose and floated away they were no longer shining and white, but like pale shadows of winged forms faintly visible in the haze.
They were not birds but spirits—beings that lived in or were passing through the world and now, like the heat, made visible; and I, standing far out on the sparkling sands, with the sparkling sea on one side and the line of dunes, indistinctly seen as land, on the other, was one of them; and if any person had looked at me from a distance he would have seen me as a formless shining white being standing by the sea, and then perhaps as a winged shadow floating in the haze. It was only necessary to put out one's arms to float. That was the effect on my mind: this natural world was changed to a supernatural, and there was no more matter nor force in sea or land nor in the heavens above, but only spirit.
Chapter Six: By Swallowfield
One of the most attractive bits of green and wooded country near London I know lies between Reading and Basingstoke and includes Aldermaston with its immemorial oaks in Berkshire and Silchester with Pamber Forest in Hampshire. It has long been one of my favourite haunts, summer and winter, and it is perhaps the only wooded place in England where I have a home feeling as strong as that which I experience in certain places among the South Wiltshire downs and in the absolutely flat country on the Severn, in Somerset, and the flat country in Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, especially at Lynn and about Ely.
I am now going back to my first visit to this green retreat; it was in the course of one of those Easter walks I have spoken of, and the way was through Reading and by Three Mile Cross and Swallowfield. On this occasion I conceived a dislike to Reading which I have never quite got over, for it seemed an unconscionably big place for two slow pedestrians to leave behind. Worse still, when we did leave it we found that Reading would not leave us. It was like a stupendous octopus in red brick which threw out red tentacles, miles and miles long in various directions—little rows and single and double cottages and villas, all in red, red brick and its weary accompaniment, the everlasting hard slate roof. These square red brick boxes with sloping slate tops are built as close as possible to the public road, so that the passer-by looking in at the windows may see the whole interior—wall-papers, pictures, furniture, and oftentimes the dull expressionless face of the woman of the house, staring back at you out of her shallow blue eyes. The weather too was against us; a grey hard sky, like the slate roofs, and a cold strong east wind to make the road dusty all day long.
Arrived at Three Mile Cross, it was no surprise to find it no longer recognizable as the hamlet described in Our Village, but it was saddening to look at the cottage in which Mary Russell Mitford lived and was on the whole very happy with her flowers and work for thirty years of her life, in its present degraded state. It has a sign now and calls itself the "Mitford Arms" and a "Temperance Hotel," and we were told that you could get tea and bread and butter there but nothing else. The cottage has been much altered since Miss Mitford's time, and the open space once occupied by the beloved garden is now filled with buildings, including a corrugated-iron dissenting chapel.
From Three Mile Cross we walked on to Swallowfield, still by those never-ending roadside red-brick cottages and villas, for we were not yet properly out of the hated biscuit metropolis. It was a big village with the houses scattered far and wide over several square miles of country, but just where the church stands it is shady and pleasant. The pretty church yard too is very deeply shaded and occupies a small hill with the Loddon flowing partly round it, then taking its swift way through the village. Miss Mitford's monument is a plain, almost an ugly, granite cross, standing close to the wall, shaded by yew, elm, and beech trees, and one is grateful to think that if she never had her reward when living she has found at any rate a very peaceful resting-place.
The sexton was there and told us that he was but ten years old when Miss Mitford died, but that he remembered her well and she was a very pleasant little woman. Others in the place who remembered her said the same—that she was very pleasant and sweet. We know that she was sweet and charming, but unfortunately the portraits we have of her do not give that impression. They represent her as a fat common-place looking person, a little vulgar perhaps. I fancy the artists were bunglers. I possess a copy of a very small pencil sketch made of her face by a dear old lady friend of mine, now dead, about the year 1851 or 2. My friend had a gift for portraiture in a peculiar way. When she saw a face that greatly interested her, in a drawing-room, on a platform, in the street, anywhere, it remained very vividly in her mind and on going home she would sketch it, and some of these sketches of well known persons are wonderfully good. She was staying in the country with a friend who drove with her to Swallowfield to call on Miss Mitford, and on her return to her friend's house she made the little sketch, and in this tiny portrait I can see the refinement, the sweetness, the animation and charm which she undoubtedly possessed.
But let me now venture to step a little outside of my own province, my small plot—a poor pedestrian's unimportant impressions of places and faces; all these p's come by accident; and this I put in parenthetically just because an editor solemnly told me a while ago that he couldn't abide and wouldn't have alliteration's artful aid in his periodical. Let us leave the subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of her day who knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pass away every year and in a little while are no more remembered than the bright-plumaged bird that falls in the tropical forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some one has said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful thing. Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of another generation of all she was and did?
She was a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time. Anything that came from her pen had an immediate success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write, however poor, could fail. And she certainly did write a good deal of poor stuff: it was all in a sense poor, but books and books, poor soul, she had to write. It was in a sense poor because it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb says, "You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren." She was driven to fly, and gave her little wings too much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere little weak flutterings over the surface of the ground. A wren, and she had not a cuckoo but a devouring cormorant to sustain—that dear, beautiful father of hers, who was more to her than any reprobate son to his devoted mother, and who day after day, year after year, gobbled up her earnings, and then would hungrily go on squawking for more until he stumbled into the grave. Alas! he was too long in dying; she was worn out by then, the little heart beating not so fast, and the bright little brain growing dim and very tired.
Now all the ambitious stuff she wrote to keep the cormorant and,
incidentally, to immortalize herself, has fallen deservedly into
oblivion. But we—some of us—do not forget and never want to forget
Mary Russell Mitford. Her letters remain—the little friendly letters
which came from her pen like balls of silvery down from a sun-ripened
plant, and were wafted far and wide over the land to those she loved.
There is a wonderful charm in them; they are so spontaneous, so natural,
so perfectly reflect her humour and vivacity, her overflowing sweetness,
her beautiful spirit. And one book too remains—the series of sketches
about the poor little hamlet, in which she lived so long and laboured
so hard to support herself and her parents, the turtledove mated with a
cormorant. Driven to produce work and hard up for a subject, in a happy
moment she took up this humble one lying at her own door and allowed her
self to write naturally even as in her most intimate letters. This is
the reason of the vitality of Our Tillage; it was simple, natural, and
reflected the author herself, her tender human heart, her impulsive
nature, her bright playful humorous spirit. There is no thought, no mind
stuff in it, and it is a classic! It is about the country, and she has
so little observation that it might have been written in a town, out of
a book, away from nature's sights and sounds. Her rustic characters
are not comparable to those of a score or perhaps two or three score of
other writers who treat of such subjects. The dialogue, when she makes
them talk, is unnatural, and her invention so poor that when she puts in
a little romance of her own making one regrets it. And so one might go
on picking it all to pieces like a dandelion blossom. Nevertheless it
endures, outliving scores of in a way better books on the same themes,
because her own delightful personality manifests itself and shines in
all these little pictures. This short passage describing how she took
Lizzie, the little village child she loved, to gather cowslips in the
meadows, will serve as an illustration.
They who know these feelings (and who is so happy as not to
have known some of them) will understand why Alfieri became powerless,
and Froissart dull; and why even needlework, the most effective
sedative, that grand soother and composer of women's distress, fails
to comfort me today. I will go out into the air this cool, pleasant
afternoon, and try what that will do.... I will go to the meadows, the
beautiful meadows and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie and
May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make a cowslip ball. "Did
you ever see a cowslip ball, Lizzie?" "No." "Come away then; make haste!
run, Lizzie!"
And on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea,
past the workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide into the deep
narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over the water, and win our way
to the little farmhouse at the end. "Through the farmyard, Lizzie; over
the gate; never mind the cows; they are quiet enough." "I don't mind
'em," said Miss Lizzie, boldly and' truly, and with a proud affronted
air, displeased at being thought to mind anything, and showing by her
attitude and manner some design of proving her courage by an attack on
the largest of the herd, in the shape of a pull by the tail. "I don't
mind 'em." "I know you don't, Lizzie; but let them, alone and don't
chase the turkey-cock. Come to me, my dear!" and, for wonder, Lizzie
came.
In the meantime my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten into a scrape. She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow, till the animal's grunting had disturbed the repose of a still more enormous Newfoundland dog, the guardian of the yard.
The beautiful white greyhound's mocking treatment of the surly dog on the chain then follows, and other pretty scenes and adventures, until after some mishaps and much trouble the cowslip ball is at length completed.
What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was! Golden and sweet to satiety! rich in sight, and touch, and smell! Lizzie was enchanted, and ran off with her prize, hiding amongst the trees in the very coyness of ecstasy, as if any human eye, even mine, would be a restraint on her innocent raptures.
Here the very woman is revealed to us, her tender and lively disposition, her impulsiveness and childlike love of fun and delight in everything on earth. We see in such a passage what her merit really is, the reason of our liking or "partiality" for her. Her pleasure in everything makes everything interesting, and in displaying her feeling without art or disguise she succeeds in giving what we may call a literary expression to personal charm—that quality which is almost untranslatable into written words. Many women possess it; it is in them and issues from them, and is like an essential oil in a flower, but too volatile to be captured and made use of. Furthermore, women when they write are as a rule even more conventional than men, more artificial and out of and away from themselves.
I do not know that any literary person will agree with me; I have gone aside to write about Miss Mitford mainly for my own satisfaction. Frequently when I have wanted to waste half an hour pleasantly with a book I have found myself picking up "Our Village" from among many others, some waiting for a first perusal, and I wanted to know why this was so—to find out, if not to invent, some reason for my liking which would not make me ashamed.
At Swallowfield we failed to find a place to stay at; there was no such place; and of the inns, named, I think, the "Crown," "Cricketers," "Bird-in-the-Hand," and "George and Dragon," only one, was said to provide accommodation for travellers as the law orders, but on going to the house we were informed that the landlord or his wife was just dead, or dangerously ill, I forget which, and they could take no one in. Accordingly, we had to trudge back to Three Mile Cross and the old ramshackle, well-nigh ruinous inn there. It was a wretched place, smelling of mould and dry-rot; however, it was not so bad after a fire had been lighted in the grate, but first the young girl who waited on us brought in a bundle of newspapers, which she proceeded to thrust up the chimney-flue and kindle, "to warm the flue and make the fire burn," she explained.
On the following day, the weather being milder, we rambled on through woods and lanes, visiting several villages, and arrived in the afternoon at Silchester, where we had resolved to put up for the night. By a happy chance we found a pleasant cottage on the common to stay at and pleasant people in it, so that we were glad to sit down for a week there, to loiter about the furzy waste, or prowl in the forest and haunt the old walls; but it was pleasant even indoors with that wide prospect before the window, the wooded country stretching many miles away to the hills of Kingsclere, blue in the distance and crowned with their beechen rings and groves. Of Roman Calleva itself and the thoughts I had there I will write in the following chapter; here I will only relate how on Easter Sunday, two days after arriving, we went to morning service in the old church standing on a mound inside the walls, a mile from the village and common.
It came to pass that during the service the sun began to shine very brightly after several days of cloud and misty windy wet weather, and that brilliance and the warmth in it served to bring a butterfly out of hiding; then another; then a third; red admirals all; and they were seen through all the prayers, and psalms, and hymns, and lessons, and the sermon preached by the white-haired Rector, fluttering against the translucent glass, wanting to be out in that splendour and renew their life after so long a period of suspension. But the glass was between them and their world of blue heavens and woods and meadow flowers; then I thought that after the service I would make an attempt to get them out; but soon reflected that to release them it would be necessary to capture them first, and that that could not be done without a ladder and butterfly net. Among the women (ladies) on either side of and before me there were no fewer than five wearing aigrettes of egret and bird-of-paradise plumes in their hats or bonnets, and these five all remained to take part in that ceremony of eating bread and drinking wine in remembrance of an event supposed to be of importance to their souls, here and hereafter. It saddened me to leave my poor red admirals in their prison, beating their red wings against the coloured glass—to leave them too in such company, where the aigrette wearers were worshipping a little god of their own little imaginations, who did not create and does not regard the swallow and dove and white egret and bird-of-paradise, and who was therefore not my god and whose will as they understood it was nothing to me.
It was a consolation when I went out, still thinking of the butterflies in their prison, and stood by the old ruined walls grown over with ivy and crowned with oak and holly trees, to think that in another two thousand years there will be no archaeologist and no soul in Silchester, or anywhere else in Britain, or in the world, who would take the trouble to dig up the remains of aigrette-wearers and their works, and who would care what had become of their pitiful little souls—their immortal part.
Chapter Seven: Roman Calleva
An afternoon in the late November of 1903. Frost, gales, and abundant rains have more than half stripped the oaks of their yellow leaves. But the rain is over now, the sky once more a pure lucid blue above me—all around me, in fact, since I am standing high on the top of the ancient stupendous earthwork, grown over with oak wood and underwood of holly and thorn and hazel with tangle of ivy and bramble and briar. It is marvellously still; no sound from the village reaches me; I only hear the faint rustle of the dead leaves as they fall, and the robin, for one spied me here and has come to keep me company. At intervals he spurts out his brilliant little fountain of sound; and that sudden bright melody and the bright colour of the sunlit translucent leaves seem like one thing. Nature is still, and I am still, standing concealed among trees, or moving cautiously through the dead russet bracken. Not that I am expecting to get a glimpse of the badger who has his hermitage in this solitary place, but I am on forbidden ground, in the heart of a sacred pheasant preserve, where one must do one's prowling warily. Hard by, almost within a stone's-throw of the wood-grown earthwork on which I stand, are the ruinous walls of Roman Calleva—the Silchester which the antiquarians have been occupied in uncovering these dozen years or longer. The stone walls, too, like the more ancient earthwork, are overgrown with trees and brambles and ivy. The trees have grown upon the wall, sending roots deep down between the stones, through the crumbling cement; and so fast are they anchored that never a tree falls but it brings down huge masses of masonry with it. This slow levelling process has been going on for centuries, and it was doubtless in this way that the buildings within the walls were pulled down long ages ago. Then the action of the earth-worms began, and floors and foundations, with fallen stones and tiles, were gradually buried in the soil, and what was once a city was a dense thicket of oak and holly and thorn. Finally the wood was cleared, and the city was a walled wheat field—so far as we know, the ground has been cultivated since the days of King John. But the entire history of this green walled space before me—less than twenty centuries in duration—does not seem so very long compared with that of the huge earthen wall I am standing on, which dates back to prehistoric times.
Standing here, knee-deep in the dead ruddy bracken, in the "coloured shade" of the oaks, idly watching the leaves fall fluttering to the ground, thinking in an aimless way of the remains of the two ancient cities before me, the British and the Roman, and of their comparative antiquity, I am struck with the thought that the sweet sensations produced in me by the scene differ in character from the feeling I have had in other solitary places. The peculiar sense of satisfaction, of restfulness, of peace, experienced here is very perfect; but in the wilderness, where man has never been, or has at all events left no trace of his former presence, there is ever a mysterious sense of loneliness, of desolation, underlying our pleasure in nature. Here it seems good to know, or to imagine, that the men I occasionally meet in my solitary rambles, and those I see in the scattered rustic village hard by, are of the same race, and possibly the descendants, of the people who occupied this spot in the remote past—Iberian and Celt, and Roman and Saxon and Dane. If that hard-featured and sour-visaged old gamekeeper, with the cold blue unfriendly eyes, should come upon me here in my hiding-place, and scowl as he is accustomed to do, standing silent before me, gun in hand, to hear my excuses for trespassing in his preserves, I should say (mentally): This man is distinctly English, and his far-off progenitors, somewhere about sixteen hundred years ago, probably assisted at the massacre of the inhabitants of the pleasant little city at my feet. By and by, leaving the ruins, I may meet with other villagers of different features and different colour in hair, skin, and eyes, and of a pleasanter expression; and in them I may see the remote descendants of other older races of men, some who were lords here before the Romans came, and of others before them, even back to Neolithic times.
This, I take it, is a satisfaction, a sweetness and peace to the soul in nature, because it carries with it a sense of the continuity of the human race, its undying vigour, its everlastingness. After all the tempests that have overcome it, through all mutations in such immense stretches of time, how stable it is!
I recall the time when I lived on a vast vacant level green plain, an earth which to the eye, and to the mind which sees with the eye, appeared illimitable, like the ocean; where the house I was born in was the oldest in the district—a century old, it was said; where the people were the children's children of emigrants from Europe who had conquered and colonized the country, and had enjoyed but half a century of national life. But the people who had possessed the land before these emigrants—what of them? They, were but a memory, a tradition, a story told in books and hardly more to us than a fable; perhaps they had dwelt there for long centuries, or for thousands of years; perhaps they had come, a wandering horde, to pass quickly away like a flight of migrating locusts; for no memorial existed, no work of their hands, not the faintest trace of their occupancy.
Walking one day at the side of a ditch, which had been newly cut through a meadow at the end of our plantation, I caught sight of a small black object protruding from the side of the cutting, which turned out to be a fragment of Indian pottery made of coarse clay, very black, and rudely ornamented on one side. On searching further a few more pieces were found. I took them home and preserved them carefully, experiencing a novel and keen sense of pleasure in their possession; for though worthless, they were man's handiwork, the only real evidence I had come upon of that vanished people who had been before us; and it was as if those bits of baked clay, with a pattern incised on them by a man's finger-nail, had in them some magical property which enabled me to realize the past, and to see that vacant plain repeopled with long dead and forgotten men.
Doubtless we all possess the feeling in some degree—the sense of loneliness and desolation and dismay at the thought of an uninhabited world, and of long periods when man was not. Is it not the absence of human life or remains rather than the illimitable wastes of thick-ribbed ice and snow which daunts us at the thought of Arctic and Antarctic regions? Again, in the story of the earth, as told by geology, do we not also experience the same sense of dismay, and the soul shrinking back on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts desolate in time when the continuity of the race was broken and the world dispeopled? The doctrine of evolution has made us tolerant of the thought of human animals,—our progenitors as we must believe—who were of brutish aspect, and whose period on this planet was so long that, compared with it, the historic and prehistoric periods are but as the life of an individual. A quarter of a million years has perhaps elapsed since the beginning of that cold period which, at all events in this part of the earth, killed Palaeolithic man; yet how small a part of his racial life even that time would seem if, as some believe, his remains may be traced as far back as the Eocene! But after this rude man of the Quaternary and Tertiary epochs had passed away there is a void, a period which to the imagination seems measureless, when sun and moon and stars looked on a waste and mindless world. When man once more reappears he seems to have been re-created on somewhat different lines.
It is this break in the history of the human race which amazes and daunts us, which "shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation."
Here, in these words of Hermann Melville, we are let all at once into the true meaning of those disquieting and seemingly indefinable emotions so often experienced, even by the most ardent lovers of nature and of solitude, in uninhabited deserts, on great mountains, and on the sea. We find here the origin of that horror of mountains which was so common until recent times. A friend once confessed to me that he was always profoundly unhappy at sea during long voyages, and the reason was that his sustaining belief in a superintending Power and in immortality left him when he was on that waste of waters, which have no human associations. The feeling, so intense in his case, is known to most if not all of us; but we feel it faintly as a disquieting element in nature of which we may be but vaguely conscious.
Most travelled Englishmen who have seen much of the world and resided for long or short periods in many widely separated countries would probably agree that there is a vast difference in the feeling of strangeness, or want of harmony with our surroundings, experienced in old and in new countries. It is a compound feeling and some of its elements are the same in both cases; but in one there is a disquieting element which the other is without. Thus, in Southern Europe, Egypt, Syria, and in many countries of Asia, and some portions of Africa, the wanderer from home might experience dissatisfaction and be ill at ease and wish for old familiar sights and sounds; but in a colony like Tasmania, and in any new country where there were no remains of antiquity, no links with the past, the feeling would be very much more poignant, and in some scenes and moods would be like that sense of desolation which assails us at the thought of the heartless voids and immensities of the universe.
He recognizes that he is in a world on which we have but recently entered, and in which our position is not yet assured.
Here, standing on this mound, as on other occasions past counting, I recognize and appreciate the enormous difference which human associations make in the effect produced on us by visible nature. In this silent solitary place, with the walled field which was once Calleva Atrebatum at my feet, I yet have a sense of satisfaction, of security, never felt in a land that had no historic past. The knowledge that my individual life is but a span, a breath; that in a little while I too must wither and mingle like one of those fallen yellow leaves with the mould, does not grieve me. I know it and yet disbelieve it; for am I not here alive, where men have inhabited for thousands of years, feeling what I now feel—their oneness with everlasting nature and the undying human family? The very soil and wet carpet of moss on which their feet were set, the standing trees and leaves, green or yellow, the rain-drops, the air they breathed, the sunshine in their eyes and hearts, was part of them, not a garment, but of their very substance and spirit. Feeling this, death becomes an illusion; and the illusion that the continuous life of the species (its immortality) and the individual life are one and the same is the reality and truth. An illusion, but, as Mill says, deprive us of our illusions and life would be intolerable. Happily we are not easily deprived of them, since they are of the nature of instincts and ineradicable. And this very one which our reason can prove to be the most childish, the absurdest of all, is yet the greatest, the most fruitful of good for the race. To those who have discarded supernatural religion, it may be a religion, or at all events the foundation to build one on. For there is no comfort to the healthy natural man in being told that the good he does will not be interred with his bones, since he does not wish to think, and in fact refuses to think, that his bones will ever be interred. Joy in the "choir invisible" is to him a mere poetic fancy, or at best a rarefied transcendentalism, which fails to sustain him. If altruism, or the religion of humanity, is a living vigorous plant, and as some believe flourishes more with the progress of the centuries, it must, like other "soul-growths," have a deeper, tougher woodier root in our soil.
Chapter Eight: A Gold Day At Silchester
It is little to a man's profit to go far afield if his chief pleasure be in wild life, his main object to get nearer to the creatures, to grow day by day more intimate with them, and to see each day some new thing. Yet the distance has the same fascination for him as for another—the call is as sweet and persistent in his ears. If he is on a green level country with blue hills on the horizon, then, especially in the early morning, is the call sweetest, most irresistible. Come away—come away: this blue world has better things than any in that green, too familiar place. The startling scream of the jay—you have heard it a thousand times. It is pretty to watch the squirrel in his chestnut-red coat among the oaks in their fresh green foliage, full of fun as a bright child, eating his apple like a child, only it is an oak-apple, shining white or white and rosy-red, in his little paws; but you have seen it so many times—come away:
It was not this voice alone which made me forsake the green oaks of Silchester and Pamber Forest, to ramble for a season hither and thither in Wiltshire, Dorset, and Somerset; there was something for me to do in those places, but the call made me glad to go. And long weeks—months—went by in my wanderings, mostly in open downland country, too often under gloomy skies, chilled by cold winds and wetted by cold rains. Then, having accomplished my purpose and discovered incidentally that the call had mocked me again, as on so many previous occasions, I returned once more to the old familiar green place.
Crossing the common, I found that where it had been dry in spring one might now sink to his knees in the bog; also that the snipe which had vanished for a season were back at the old spot where they used to breed. It was a bitter day near the end of an unpleasant summer, with the wind back in the old hateful north-east quarter; but the sun shone, the sky was blue, and the flying clouds were of a dazzling whiteness. Shivering, I remembered the south wall, and went there, since to escape from the wind and bask like some half-frozen serpent or lizard in the heat was the highest good one could look for in such weather. To see anything new in wild life was not to be hoped for.
That old grey, crumbling wall of ancient Calleva, crowned with big oak and ash and thorn and holly, and draped with green bramble and trailing ivy and creepers—how good a shelter it is on a cold, rough day! Moving softly, so as not to disturb any creature, I yet disturbed a ring snake lying close to the wall, into which it quickly vanished; and then from their old place among the stones a pair of blue stock-doves rushed out with clatter of wings. The same blue doves which I had known for three years at that spot! A few more steps and I came upon as pretty a little scene in bird life as one could wish for: twenty to twenty-five small birds of different species—tits, wrens, dunnocks, thrushes, blackbirds, chaffinches, yellowhammers—were congregated on the lower outside twigs of a bramble bush and on the bare ground beside it close to the foot of the wall. The sun shone full on that spot, and they had met for warmth and for company. The tits and wrens were moving quietly about in the bush; others were sitting idly or preening their feathers on the twigs or the ground. Most of them were making some kind of small sound—little exclamatory chirps, and a variety of chirrupings, producing the effect of a pleasant conversation going on among them. This was suddenly suspended on my appearance, but the alarm was soon over, and, seeing me seated on a fallen stone and, motionless, they took no further notice of me. Two blackbirds were there, sitting a little way apart on the bare ground; these were silent, the raggedest, rustiest-looking members of that little company; for they were moulting, and their drooping wings and tails had many unsightly gaps in them where the old feathers had dropped out before the new ones had grown. They were suffering from that annual sickness with temporary loss of their brightest faculties which all birds experience in some degree; the unseasonable rains and cold winds had been bad for them, and now they were having their sun-bath, their best medicine and cure.
By and by a pert-looking, bright-feathered, dapper cock chaffinch dropped down from the bush, and, advancing to one of the two, the rustiest and most forlorn-looking, started running round and round him as if to make a close inspection of his figure, then began to tease him. At first I thought it was all in fun—merely animal spirit which in birds often discharges itself in this way in little pretended attacks and fights. But the blackbird had no play and no fight in him, no heart to defend himself; all he did was to try to avoid the strokes aimed at him, and he could not always escape them. His spiritlessness served to inspire the chaffinch with greater boldness, and then it appeared that the gay little creature was really and truly incensed, possibly because the rusty, draggled, and listless appearance of the larger bird was offensive to him. Anyhow, the persecutions continued, increasing in fury until they could not be borne, and the blackbird tried to escape by hiding in the bramble. But he was not permitted to rest there; out he was soon driven and away into another bush, and again into still another further away, and finally he was hunted over the sheltering wall into the bleak wind on the other side. Then the persecutor came back and settled himself on his old perch on the bramble, well satisfied at his victory over a bird so much bigger than himself. All was again peace and harmony in the little social gathering, and the pleasant talkee-talkee went on as before. About five minutes passed, then the hunted blackbird returned, and, going to the identical spot from which he had been driven, composed himself to rest; only now he sat facing his lively little enemy.
I was astonished to see him back; so, apparently, was the chaffinch. He started, craned his neck, and regarded his adversary first with one eye then with the other. "What, rags and tatters, back again so soon!" I seem to hear him say. "You miserable travesty of a bird, scarcely fit for a weasel to dine on! Your presence is an insult to us, but I'll soon settle you. You'll feel the cold on the other, side of the wall when I've knocked off a few more of your rusty rags."
Down from his perch he came, but no sooner had he touched his feet to the ground than the blackbird went straight at him with extraordinary fury. The chaffinch, taken by surprise, was buffeted and knocked over, then, recovering himself, fled in consternation, hotly pursued by the sick one. Into the bush they went, but in a moment they were out again, darting this way and that, now high up in the trees, now down to the ground, the blackbird always close behind; and no little bird flying from a hawk could have exhibited a greater terror than that pert chaffinch—that vivacious and most pugnacious little cock bantam. At last they went quite away, and were lost to sight. By and by the blackbird returned alone, and, going once more to his place near the second bird, he settled down comfortably to finish his sunbath in peace and quiet.
I had assuredly witnessed a new thing on that unpromising day, something quite different from anything witnessed in my wide rambles; and, though a little thing, it had been a most entertaining comedy in bird life with a very proper ending. It was clear that the sick blackbird had bitterly resented the treatment he had received; that, brooding on it out in the cold, his anger had made him strong, and that he came back determined to fight, with his plan of action matured. He was not going to be made a fool every time!
The birds all gone their several ways at last, I got up from my stone and wondered if the old Romans ever dreamed that this wall which they made to endure would after seventeen hundred years have no more important use than this—to afford shelter to a few little birds and to the solitary man that watched them—from the bleak wind. Many a strange Roman curse on this ungenial climate must these same stones have heard. Looking through a gap in the wall I saw, close by, on the other side, a dozen men at work with pick and shovel throwing up huge piles of earth. They were uncovering a small portion of that ancient buried city and were finding the foundations and floors and hypocausts of Silchester's public baths; also some broken pottery and trifling ornaments of bronze and bone. The workmen in that bitter wind were decidedly better off than the gentlemen from Burlington House in charge of the excavations. These stood with coats buttoned up and hands thrust deep down in their pockets. It seemed to me that it was better to sit in the shelter of the wall and watch the birds than to burrow in the crumbling dust for that small harvest. Yet I could understand and even appreciate their work, although it is probable that the glow I experienced was in part reflected. Perhaps my mental attitude, when standing in that sheltered place, and when getting on to the windy wall I looked down on the workers and their work, was merely benevolent. I had pleasure in their pleasure, and a vague desire for a better understanding, a closer alliance and harmony. It was the desire that we might all see nature—the globe with all it contains—as one harmonious whole, not as groups of things, or phenomena, unrelated, cast there by chance or by careless or contemptuous gods. This dust of past ages, dug out of a wheat-field, with its fragments of men's work—its pottery and tiles and stones—this is a part, too, even as the small birds, with their little motives and passions, so like man's, are a part. I thought with self shame of my own sins in this connection; then, considering the lesser faults on the other side, I wished that Mr. St. John Hope would experience a like softening mood and regret that he had abused the ivy. It grieves me to hear it called a "noxious weed." That perished people, whose remains in this land so deeply interest him, were the mightiest "builders of ruins" the world has known; but who except the archaeologist would wish to see these piled stones in their naked harshness, striking the mind with dismay at the thought of Time and its perpetual desolations! I like better the old Spanish poet who says, "What of Rome; its world-conquering power, and majesty and glory—what has it come to?" The ivy on the wall, the yellow wallflower, tell it. A "deadly parasite" quotha! Is it not well that this plant, this evergreen tapestry of innumerable leaves, should cover and partly hide and partly reveal the "strange defeatures" the centuries have set on man's greatest works? I would have no ruin nor no old and noble building without it; for not only does it beautify decay, but from long association it has come to be in the mind a very part of such scenes and so interwoven with the human tragedy, that, like the churchyard yew, it seems the most human of green things.
Here in September great masses of the plant are already showing a greenish cream-colour of the opening blossoms, which will be at their perfection in October. Then, when the sun shines, there will be no lingering red admiral, nor blue fly or fly of any colour, nor yellow wasp, nor any honey-eating or late honey-gathering insect that will not be here to feed on the ivy's sweetness. And behind the blossoming curtain, alive with the minute, multitudinous, swift-moving, glittering forms, some nobler form will be hidden in a hole or fissure in the wall. Here on many a night I have listened to the sibilant screech of the white owl and the brown owl's clear, long-drawn, quavering lamentation:
"Good Ivy, what byrdys hast thou?"
"Non but the Howlet, that How! How!"
Chapter Nine: Rural Rides
"A-birding on a Broncho" is the title of a charming little book published some years ago, and probably better known to readers on the other side of the Atlantic than in England. I remember reading it with pleasure and pride on account of the author's name, Florence Merriam, seeing that, on my mother's side, I am partly a Merriam myself (of the branch on the other side of the Atlantic), and having been informed that all of that rare name are of one family, I took it that we were related, though perhaps very distantly. "A-birding on a Broncho" suggested an equally alliterative title for this chapter—"Birding on a Bike"; but I will leave it to others, for those who go a-birding are now very many and are hard put to find fresh titles to their books. For several reasons it will suit me better to borrow from Cobbett and name this chapter "Rural Rides."
Sore of us do not go out on bicycles to observe the ways of birds. Indeed, some of our common species have grown almost too familiar with the wheel: it has become a positive danger to them. They not infrequently mistake its rate of speed and injure themselves in attempting to fly across it. Recently I had a thrush knock himself senseless against the spokes of my forewheel, and cycling friends have told me of similar experiences they have had, in some instances the heedless birds getting killed. Chaffinches are like the children in village streets—they will not get out of your way; by and by in rural places the merciful man will have to ring his bell almost incessantly to avoid running over them. As I do not travel at a furious speed I manage to avoid most things, even the wandering loveless oil-beetle and the small rose-beetle and that slow-moving insect tortoise the tumbledung. Two or three seasons ago I was so unfortunate as to run over a large and beautifully bright grass snake near Aldermaston, once a snake sanctuary. He writhed and wriggled on the road as if I had broken his back, but on picking him up I was pleased to find that my wind-inflated rubber tyre had not, like the brazen chariot wheel, crushed his delicate vertebra; he quickly recovered, and when released glided swiftly and easily away into cover. Twice only have I deliberately tried to run down, to tread on coat-tails so to speak, of any wild creature. One was a weasel, the other a stoat, running along at a hedge-side before me. In both instances, just as the front wheel was touching the tail, the little flat-headed rascal swerved quickly aside and escaped.
Even some of the less common and less tame birds care as little for a man on a bicycle as they do for a cow. Not long ago a peewit trotted leisurely across the road not more than ten yards from my front wheel; and on the same day I came upon a green woodpecker enjoying a dust-bath in the public road. He declined to stir until I stopped to watch him, then merely flew about a dozen yards away and attached himself to the trunk of a fir tree at the roadside and waited there for me to go. Never in all my wanderings afoot had I seen a yaffingale dusting himself like a barn-door fowl!
It is not seriously contended that birds can be observed narrowly in this easy way; but even for the most conscientious field naturalist the wheel has its advantages. It carries him quickly over much barren ground and gives him a better view of the country he traverses; finally, it enables him to see more birds. He will sometimes see thousands in a day where, walking, he would hardly have seen hundreds, and there is joy in mere numbers. It was just to get this general rapid sight of the bird life of the neighbouring hilly district of Hampshire that I was at Newbury on the last day of October. The weather was bright though very cold and windy, and towards evening I was surprised to see about twenty swallows in Northbrook Street flying languidly to and fro in the shelter of the houses, often fluttering under the eaves and at intervals sitting on ledges and projections. These belated birds looked as if they wished to hibernate, or find the most cosy holes to die in, rather than to emigrate. On the following day at noon they came out again and flew up and down in the same feeble aimless manner.
Undoubtedly a few swallows of all three species, but mostly house-martins, do "lie up" in England every winter, but probably very few survive to the following spring. We should have said that it was impossible that any should survive but for one authentic instance in recent years, in which a barn-swallow lived through the winter in a semi-torpid state in an outhouse at a country vicarage. What came of the Newbury birds I do not know, as I left on the 2nd of November—tore myself away, I may say, for, besides meeting with people I didn't know who treated a stranger with sweet friendliness, it is a town which quickly wins one's affections. It is built of bricks of a good deep rich red—not the painfully bright red so much in use now—and no person has had the bad taste to spoil the harmony by introducing stone and stucco. Moreover, Newbury has, in Shaw House, an Elizabethan mansion of the rarest beauty. Let him that is weary of the ugliness and discords in our town buildings go and stand by the ancient cedar at the gate and look across the wide green lawn at this restful house, subdued by time to a tender rosy-red colour on its walls and a deep dark red on its roof, clouded with grey of lichen.
From Newbury and the green meadows of the Kennet the Hampshire hills may be seen, looking like the South Down range at its highest point viewed from the Sussex Weald. I made for Coombe Hill, the highest hill in Hampshire, and found it a considerable labour to push my machine up from the pretty tree-hidden village of East Woodhay at its foot. The top is a league-long tableland, with stretches of green elastic turf, thickets of furze and bramble, and clumps of ancient noble beeches—a beautiful lonely wilderness with rabbits and birds for only inhabitants. From the highest point where a famous gibbet stands for ever a thousand feet above the sea and where there is a dew-pond, the highest in England, which has never dried up although a large flock of sheep drink in it every summer day, one looks down into an immense hollow, a Devil's Punch Bowl very many times magnified,—and spies, far away and far below, a few lonely houses half hidden by trees at the bottom. This is the romantic village of Coombe, and hither I went and found the vicar busy in the garden of the small old picturesque parsonage. Here a very pretty little bird comedy was in progress: a pair of stock-doves which had been taken from a rabbit-hole in the hill and reared by hand had just escaped from the large cage where they had always lived, and all the family were excitedly engaged in trying to recapture them. They were delightful to see—those two pretty blue birds with red legs running busily about on the green lawn, eagerly searching for something to eat and finding nothing. They were quite tame and willing to be fed, so that anyone could approach them and put as much salt on their tails as he liked, but they refused to be touched or taken; they were too happy in their new freedom, running and flying about in that brilliant sunshine, and when I left towards the evening they were still at large.
But before quitting that small isolated village in its green basin—a human heart in a chalk hill, almost the highest in England—I wished the hours I spent in it had been days, so much was there to see and hear. There was the gibbet on the hill, for example, far up on the rim of the green basin, four hundred feet above the village; why had that memorial, that symbol of a dreadful past, been preserved for so many years and generations? and why had it been raised so high—was it because the crime of the person put to death there was of so monstrous a nature that it was determined to suspend him, if not on a gibbet fifty cubits high, at all events higher above the earth than Haman the son of Hammedatha the Agagite? The gruesome story is as follows.
Once upon a time there lived a poor widow woman in Coombe, with two sons, aged fourteen and sixteen, who worked at a farm in the village. She had a lover, a middle-aged man, living at Woodhay, a carrier who used to go on two or three days each week with his cart to deliver parcels at Coombe. But he was a married man, and as he could not marry the widow while his wife remained alive, it came into his dull Berkshire brain that the only way out of the difficulty was to murder her, and to this course the widow probably consented. Accordingly, one day, he invited or persuaded her to accompany him on his journey to the remote village, and on the way he got her out of the cart and led her into a close thicket to show her something he had discovered there. What he wished to show her (according to one version of the story) was a populous hornets' nest, and having got her there he suddenly flung her against it and made off, leaving the cloud of infuriated hornets to sting her to death. That night he slept at Coombe, or stayed till a very late hour at the widow's cottage and told her what he had done. In telling her he had spoken in his ordinary voice, but by and by it occurred to him that the two boys, who were sleeping close by in the living-room, might have been awake and listening. She assured him that they were both fast asleep, but he was not satisfied, and said that if they had heard him he would kill them both, as he had no wish to swing, and he could not trust them to hold their tongues. Thereupon they got up and examined the faces of the two boys, holding a candle over them, and saw that they were in a deep sleep, as was natural after their long day's hard work on the farm, and the murderer's fears were set at rest. Yet one of the boys, the younger, had been wide awake all the time, listening, trembling with terror, with wide eyes to the dreadful tale, and only when they first became suspicious instinct came to his aid and closed his eyes and stilled his tremors and gave him the appearance of being asleep. Early next morning, with his terror still on him, he told what he had heard to his brother, and by and by, unable to keep the dreadful secret, they related it to someone—a carter or ploughman on the farm. He in turn told the farmer, who at once gave information, and in a short time the man and woman were arrested. In due time they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged in the parish where the crime had been committed.
Everybody was delighted, and Coombe most delighted of all, for it happened that some of their wise people had been diligently examining into the matter and had made the discovery that the woman had been murdered just outside their borders in the adjoining parish of Inkpen, so that they were going to enjoy seeing the wicked punished at somebody else's expense. Inkpen was furious and swore that it would not be saddled with the cost of a great public double execution. The line dividing the two parishes had always been a doubtful one; now they were going to take the benefit of the doubt and let Coombe hang its own miscreants!
As neither side would yield, the higher authorities were compelled to settle the matter for them, and ordered the cost to be divided between the two parishes, the gibbet to be erected on the boundary line, as far as it could be ascertained. This was accordingly done, the gibbet being erected at the highest point crossed by the line, on a stretch of beautiful smooth elastic turf, among prehistoric earthworks—a spot commanding one of the finest and most extensive views in Southern England. The day appointed for the execution brought the greatest concourse of people ever witnessed at that lofty spot, at all events since prehistoric times. If some of the ancient Britons had come out of their graves to look on, seated on their earthworks, they would have probably rubbed their ghostly hands together and remarked to each other that it reminded them of old times. All classes were there, from the nobility and gentry, on horseback and in great coaches in which they carried their own provisions, to the meaner sort who had trudged from all the country round on foot, and those who had not brought their own food and beer were catered for by traders in carts. The crowd was a hilarious one, and no doubt that grand picnic on the beacon was the talk of they country for a generation or longer. The two wretches having been hanged in chains on one gibbet were left to be eaten by ravens, crows, and magpipes, and dried by sun and winds, until, after long years, the swinging, creaking skeletons with their chains on fell to pieces and were covered with the turf, but the gibbet itself was never removed.
Then a strange thing happened. The sheep on a neighbouring farm became thin and sickly and yielded little wool and died before their time. No remedies availed and the secret of their malady could not be discovered; but it went on so long that the farmer was threatened with utter ruin. Then, by chance, it was discovered that the chains in which the murderers had been hanged had been thrown by some evil-minded person into a dew-pond on the farm. This was taken to be the cause of the malady in the sheep; at all events, the chains having been taken out of the pond and buried deep in the earth, the flock recovered: it was supposed that the person who had thrown the chains in the water to poison it had done so to ruin the farmer in revenge for some injustice or grudge. But even now we are not quite done with the gibbet! Many, many years had gone by when Inkpen discovered from old documents that their little dishonest neighbour, Coombe, had taken more land than she was entitled to, that not only a part but the whole of that noble hill-top belonged to her! It was Inkpen's turn to chuckle now; but she chuckled too soon, and Coombe, running out to look, found the old rotten stump of the gibbet still in the ground. Hands off! she cried. Here stands a post, which you set up yourself, or which we put up together and agreed that this should be the boundary line for ever. Inkpen sneaked off to hide herself in her village, and Coombe, determined to keep the subject in mind, set up a brand-new stout gibbet in the place of the old rotting one. That too decayed and fell to pieces in time, and the present gibbet is therefore the third, and nobody has ever been hanged on it. Coombe is rather proud of it, but I am not sure that Inkpen is.
That was one of three strange events in the life of the village which I heard: the other two must be passed by; they would take long to tell and require a good pen to do them justice. To me the best thing in or of the village was the vicar himself, my put-upon host, a man of so blithe a nature, so human and companionable, that when I, a perfect stranger without an introduction or any excuse for such intrusion came down like a wolf on his luncheon-table, he received me as if I had been an old friend or one of his own kindred, and freely gave up his time to me for the rest of that day. To count his years he was old: he had been vicar of Coombe for half a century, but he was a young man still and had never had a day's illness in his life—he did not know what a headache was. He smoked with me, and to prove that he was not a total abstainer he drank my health in a glass of port wine—very good wine. It was Coombe that did it—its peaceful life, isolated from a distracting world in that hollow hill, and the marvellous purity of its air. "Sitting there on my lawn," he said, "you are six hundred feet above the sea, although in a hollow four hundred feet deep." It was an ideal open-air room, round and green, with the sky for a roof. In winter it was sometimes very cold, and after a heavy fall of snow the scene was strange and impressive from the tiny village set in its stupendous dazzling white bowl. Not only on those rare arctic days, but at all times it was wonderfully quiet. The shout of a child or the peaceful crow of a cock was the loudest sound you heard. Once a gentleman from London town came down to spend a week at the parsonage. Towards evening on the very first day he grew restless and complained of the abnormal stillness. "I like a quiet place well enough," he exclaimed, "but this tingling silence I can't stand!" And stand it he wouldn't and didn't, for on the very next morning he took himself off. Many years had gone by, but the vicar could not forget the Londoner who had come down to invent a new way of describing the Coombe silence. His tingling phrase was a joy for ever.
He took me to the church—one of the tiniest churches in the country, just the right size for a church in a tiny village and assured me that he had never once locked the door in his fifty years—day and night it was open to any one to enter. It was a refuge and shelter from the storm and the Tempest, and many a poor homeless wretch had found a dry place to sleep in that church during the last half a century. This man's feeling of pity and tenderness for the very poor, even the outcast and tramp, was a passion. But how strange all this would sound in the ears of many country clergymen! How many have told me when I have gone to the parsonage to "borrow the key" that it had been found necessary to keep the church door locked, to prevent damage, thefts, etc. "Have you never had anything stolen?" I asked him. Yes, once, a great many years ago, the church plate had been taken away in the night. But it was recovered: the thief had taken it to the top of the hill and thrown it into the dewpond there, no doubt intending to take it out and dispose of it at some more convenient time. But it was found, and had ever since then been kept safe at the vicarage. Nothing of value to tempt a man to steal was kept in the church. He had never locked it, but once in his fifty years it had been locked against him by the churchwardens. This happened in the days of the Joseph Arch agitation, when the agricultural labourer's condition was being hotly discussed throughout the country. The vicar's heart was stirred, for he knew better than most how hard these conditions were at Coombe and in the surrounding parishes. He took up the subject and preached on it in his own pulpit in a way that offended the landowners and alarmed the farmers in the district. The church wardens, who were farmers, then locked him out of his church, and for two or three weeks there was no public worship in the parish of Coombe. Doubtless their action was applauded by all the substantial men in the neighbourhood; the others who lived in the cottages and were unsubstantial didn't matter. That storm blew over, but its consequences endured, one being that the inflammatory parson continued to be regarded with cold disapproval by the squires and their larger tenants. But the vicar himself was unrepentant and unashamed; on the contrary, he gloried in what he had said and done, and was proud to be able to relate that a quarter of a century later one of the two men who had taken that extreme course said to him, "We locked you out of your own church, but years have brought me to another mind about that question. I see it in a different light now and know that you were right and we were wrong."
Towards evening I said good-bye to my kind friend and entertainer and continued my rural ride. From Coombe it is five miles to Hurstbourne Tarrant, another charming "highland" village, and the road, sloping down the entire distance, struck me as one of the best to be on I had travelled in Hampshire, running along a narrow green valley, with oak and birch and bramble and thorn in their late autumn colours growing on the slopes on either hand. Probably the beauty of the scene, or the swift succession of beautiful scenes, with the low sun flaming on the "coloured shades," served to keep out of my mind something that should have been in it. At all events, it was odd that I had more than once promised myself a visit to the very village I was approaching solely because William Cobbett had described and often stayed in it, and now no thought of him and his ever-delightful Rural Rides was in my mind.
Arrived at the village I went straight to the "George and Dragon," where a friend had assured me I could always find good accommodations. But he was wrong: there was no room for me, I was told by a weird-looking, lean, white-haired old woman with whity-blue unfriendly eyes. She appeared to resent it that any one should ask for accommodation at such a time, when the "shooting gents" from town required all the rooms available. Well, I had to sleep somewhere, I told her: couldn't she direct me to a cottage where I could get a bed? No, she couldn't—it is always so; but after the third time of asking she unfroze so far as to say that perhaps they would take me in at a cottage close by. So I went, and a poor kind widow who lived there with a son consented to put me up. She made a nice fire in the sitting-room, and after warming myself before it, while watching the firelight and shadows playing on the dim walls and ceiling, it came to me that I was not in a cottage, but in a large room with an oak floor and wainscoting. "Do you call this a cottage?" I said to the woman when she came in with tea. "No, I have it as a cottage, but it is an old farm-house called the Rookery," she returned. Then, for the first time, I remembered Rural Rides. "This then is the very house where William Cobbett used to stay seventy or eighty years ago," I said. She had never heard of William Cobbett; she only knew that at that date it had been tenanted by a farmer named Blount, a Roman Catholic, who had some curious ideas about the land.
That settled it. Blount was the name of Cobbett's friend, and I had come to the very house where Cobbett was accustomed to stay. But how odd that my first thought of the man should have come to me when sitting by the fire where Cobbett himself had sat on many a cold evening! And this was November the second, the very day eighty-odd years ago when he paid his first visit to the Rookery; at all events, it is the first date he gives in Rural Rides. And he too had been delighted with the place and the beauty of the surrounding country with the trees in their late autumn colours. Writing on November 2nd, 1821, he says: "The place is commonly called Uphusband, which is, I think, as decent a corruption of names as one could wish to meet with. However, Uphusband the people will have it, and Uphusband it shall be for me." That is indeed how he names it all through his book, after explaining that "husband" is a corruption of Hurstbourne, and that there are two Hurstbournes, this being the upper one.
I congratulated myself on having been refused accommodation at the "George and Dragon," and was more than satisfied to pass an evening without a book, sitting there alone listening to an imaginary conversation between those two curious friends. "Lord Carnarvon," says Cobbett, "told a man, in 1820, that he did not like my politics. But what did he mean by my politics? I have no politics but such as he ought to like. To be sure I labour most assiduously to destroy a system of distress and misery; but is that any reason why a Lord should dislike my politics? However, dislike them or like them, to them, to those very politics, the Lords themselves must come at last."
Undoubtedly he talked like that, just as he wrote and as he spoke in public, his style, if style it can be called, being the most simple, direct, and colloquial ever written. And for this reason, when we are aweary of the style of the stylist, where the living breathing body becomes of less consequence than its beautiful clothing, it is a relief, and refreshment, to turn from the precious and delicate expression, the implicit word, sought for high and low and at last found, the balance of every sentence and perfect harmony of the whole work—to go from it to the simple vigorous unadorned talk of Rural Rides. A classic, and as incongruous among classics as a farmer in his smock-frock, leggings, and stout boots would appear in a company of fine gentlemen in fashionable dress. The powerful face is the main thing, and we think little of the frock and leggings and how the hair is parted or if parted at all. Harsh and crabbed as his nature no doubt was, and bitter and spiteful at times, his conversation must yet have seemed like a perpetual feast of honeyed sweets to his farmer friend. Doubtless there was plenty of variety in it: now he would expatiate on the beauty of the green downs over which he had just ridden, the wooded slopes in their glorious autumn colours, and the rich villages between; this would remind him of Malthus, that blasphemous monster who had dared to say that the increase in food production did not keep pace with increase of population; then a quieting down, a breathing-space, all about the turnip crop, the price of eggs at Weyhill Fair, and the delights of hare coursing, until politics would come round again and a fresh outburst from the glorious demagogue in his tantrums.
At eight o'clock Cobbett would say good night and go to bed, and early next morning write down what he had said to his friend, or some of it, and send it off to be printed in his paper. That, I take it, is how Rural Rides was written, and that is why it seems so fresh to us to this day, and that to take it up after other books is like going out from a luxurious room full of fine company into the open air to feel the wind and rain on one's face and see the green grass. But I very much regret that Cobbett tells us nothing of his farmer friend. Blount, I imagine, must have been a man of a very fine character to have won the heart and influenced such a person. Cobbett never loses an opportunity of vilifying the parsons and expressing his hatred of the Established Church; and yet, albeit a Protestant, he invariably softens down when he refers to the Roman Catholic faith and appears quite capable of seeing the good that is in it.
It was Blount, I think, who had soothed the savage breast of the man in this matter. The only thing I could hear about Blount and his "queer notions" regarding the land was his idea that the soil could be improved by taking the flints out. "The soil to look upon," Cobbett truly says, "appears to be more than half flint, but is a very good quality." Blount thought to make it better, and for many years employed all the aged poor villagers and the children in picking the flints from the ploughed land and gathering them in vast heaps. It does not appear that he made his land more productive, but his hobby was a good one for the poor of the village; the stones, too, proved useful afterwards to the road-makers, who have been using them these many years. A few heaps almost clothed over with a turf which had formed on them in the course of eighty years were still to be seen on the land when I was there.
The following day I took no ride. The weather was so beautiful it seemed better to spend the time sitting or basking in the warmth and brightness or strolling about. At all events, it was a perfect day at Hurstbourne Tarrant, though not everywhere, for on that third of November the greatest portion of Southern England was drowned in a cold dense white fog. In London it was dark, I heard. Early in the morning I listened to a cirl-bunting singing merrily from a bush close to the George and Dragon Inn. This charming bird is quite common in the neighbourhood, although, as elsewhere in England, the natives know it not by its book name, nor by any other, and do not distinguish it from its less engaging cousin, the yellowhammer.
After breakfast I strolled about the common and in Doles Wood, on the down above the village, listening to the birds, and on my way back encountered a tramp whose singular appearance produced a deep impression on my mind. We have heard of a work by some modest pressman entitled "Monarchs I have met", and I sometimes think that one equally interesting might be written on "Tramps I have met". As I have neither time nor stomach for the task, I will make a present of the title to any one of my fellow-travellers, curious in tramps, who cares to use it. This makes two good titles I have given away in this chapter with a borrowed one.
But if it had been possible for me to write such a book, a prominent place would be given in it to the one tramp I have met who could be accurately described as gorgeous. I did not cultivate his acquaintance; chance threw us together and we separated after exchanging a few polite commonplaces, but his big flamboyant image remains vividly impressed on my mind.
At noon, in the brilliant sunshine, as I came loiteringly down the long slope from Doles Wood to the village, he overtook me. He was a huge man, over six feet high, nobly built, suggesting a Scandinavian origin, with a broad blond face, good features, and prominent blue eyes, and his hair was curly and shone like gold in the sunlight. Had he been a mere labourer in a workman's rough clay-stained clothes, one would have stood still to look at and admire him, and say perhaps what a magnificent warrior he would have looked with sword and spear and plumed helmet, mounted on a big horse! But alas! he had the stamp of the irreclaimable blackguard on his face; and that same handsome face was just then disfigured with several bruises in three colours—blue, black, and red. Doubtless he had been in a drunken brawl on the previous evening and had perhaps been thrown out of some low public-house and properly punished.
In his dress he was as remarkable as in his figure. Bright blue trousers much too small for his stout legs, once the property, no doubt, of some sporting young gent of loud tastes in colours; a spotted fancy waistcoat, not long enough to meet the trousers, a dirty scarlet tie, long black frock-coat, shiny in places, and a small dirty grey cap which only covered the topmost part of his head of golden hair.
Walking by the hedge-side he picked and devoured the late blackberries, which were still abundant. It was a beautiful unkept hedge with scarlet and purple fruit among the many-coloured fading leaves and silver-grey down of old-man's-beard.
I too picked and ate a few berries and made the remark that it was late to eat such fruit in November. The Devil in these parts, I told him, flies abroad in October to spit on the bramble bushes and spoil the fruit. It was even worse further north, in Norfolk and Suffolk, where they say the Devil goes out at Michaelmas and shakes his verminous trousers over the bushes.
He didn't smile; he went on sternly eating blackberries, and then remarked in a bitter tone, "That Devil they talk about must have a busy time, to go messing about blackberry bushes in addition to all his other important work."
I was silent, and presently, after swallowing a few more berries, he resumed in the same tone: "Very fine, very beautiful all this"—waving his hand to indicate the hedge, its rich tangle of purple-red stems and coloured leaves, and scarlet fruit and silvery oldman's-beard. "An artist enjoys seeing this sort of thing, and it's nice for all those who go about just for the pleasure of seeing things. But when it comes to a man tramping twenty or thirty miles a day on an empty belly, looking for work which he can't find, he doesn't see it quite in the same way."
"True," I returned, with indifference.
But he was not to be put off by my sudden coldness, and he proceeded to inform me that he had just returned from Salisbury Plain, that it had been noised abroad that ten thousand men were wanted by the War Office to work in forming new camps. On arrival he found it was not so—it was all a lie—men were not wanted—and he was now on his way to Andover, penniless and hungry and—
By the time he had got to that part of his story we were some distance apart, as I had remained standing still while he, thinking me still close behind, had gone on picking blackberries and talking. He was soon out of sight.
At noon the following day, the weather still being bright and genial, I went to Crux Easton, a hilltop village consisting of some low farm buildings, cottages, and a church not much bigger than a cottage. A great house probably once existed here, as the hill has a noble avenue of limes, which it wears like a comb or crest. On the lower slope of the hill, the old unkept hedges were richer in colour than in most places, owing to the abundance of the spindle-wood tree, laden with its loose clusters of flame-bright, purple-pink and orange berries.
Here I saw a pretty thing: a cock cirl-bunting, his yellow breast towards me, sitting quietly on a large bush of these same brilliant berries, set amidst a mass of splendidly coloured hazel leaves, mixed with bramble and tangled with ivy and silver-grey traveller's-joy. An artist's heart would have leaped with joy at the sight, but all his skill and oriental colours would have made nothing of it, for all visible nature was part of the picture, the wide wooded earth and the blue sky beyond and above the bird, and the sunshine that glorified all.
On the other side of the hedge there were groups of fine old beech trees and, strange to see, just beyond the green slope and coloured trees, was the great whiteness of the fog which had advanced thus far and now appeared motionless. I went down and walked by the side of the bank of mist, feeling its clammy coldness on one cheek while the other was fanned by the warm bright air. Seen at a distance of a couple of hundred yards, the appearance was that of a beautiful pearly-white cloud resting upon the earth. Many fogs had I seen, but never one like this, so substantial-looking, so sharply defined, standing like a vast white wall or flat-topped hill at the foot of the green sunlit slope! I had the fancy that if I had been an artist in sculpture, and rapid modeller, by using the edge of my hand as a knife I could have roughly carved out a human figure, then drawing it gently out of the mass proceeded to press and work it to a better shape, the shape, let us say, of a beautiful woman. Then, if it were done excellently, and some man-mocking deity, or power of the air, happened to be looking on, he would breathe life and intelligence into it, and send it, or her, abroad to mix with human kind and complicate their affairs. For she would seem a woman and would be like some women we have known, beautiful with blue flower-like eyes, pale gold or honey-coloured hair; very white of skin, Leightonian, almost diaphanous, so delicate as to make all other skins appear coarse and made of clay. And with her beauty and a mysterious sweetness not of the heart, since no heart there would be in that mist-cold body, she would draw all hearts, ever inspiring, but never satisfying passion, her beauty and alluring smiles being but the brightness of a cloud on which the sun is shining.
Birds, driven by the fog to that sunlit spot, were all about me in incredible numbers. Rooks and daws were congregating on the bushes, where their black figures served to intensify the red-gold tints of the foliage. At intervals the entire vast cawing multitude simultaneously rose up with a sound as of many waters, and appeared now at last about to mount up into the blue heavens, to float circling there far above the world as they are accustomed to do on warm windless days in autumn. But in a little while their brave note would change to one of trouble; the sight of that immeasurable whiteness covering so much of the earth would scare them, and led by hundreds of clamouring daws they would come down again to settle once more in black masses on the shining yellow trees.
Close by a ploughed field of about forty acres was the camping-ground of an army of peewits; they were travellers from the north perhaps, and were quietly resting, sprinkled over the whole area. More abundant were the small birds in mixed flocks or hordes—finches, buntings, and larks in thousands on thousands, with a sprinkling of pipits and pied and grey wagtails, all busily feeding on the stubble and fresh ploughed land. Thickly and evenly distributed, they appeared to the vision ranging over the brown level expanse as minute animated and variously coloured clods—black and brown and grey and yellow and olive-green.
It was a rare pleasure to be in this company, to revel in their astonishing numbers, to feast my soul on them as it were—little birds in such multitudes that ten thousand Frenchmen and Italians might have gorged to repletion on their small succulent bodies—and to reflect that they were safe from persecution so long as they remained here in England. This is something for an Englishman to be proud of.
After spending two hours at Crux Easton, with that dense immovable fog close by, I at length took the plunge to get to Highclere. What a change! I was at once where all form and colour and melody had been blotted out. My clothes were hoary with clinging mist, my fingers numb with cold, and Highclere, its scattered cottages appearing like dim smudges through the whiteness, was the dreariest village on earth. I fled on to Newbury in quest of warmth and light, and found it indoors, but the town was deep in the fog.
The next day I ventured out again to look for the sun, and found it not, but my ramble was not without its reward. In a pine wood three miles from the town I stood awhile to listen to the sound as of copious rain of the moisture dropping from the trees, when a sudden tempest of loud, sharp metallic notes—a sound dear to the ornithologist's ears—made me jump; and down into the very tree before which I was standing dropped a flock of about twenty crossbills. So excited and noisy when coming down, the instant they touched the tree they became perfectly silent and motionless. Seven of their number had settled on the outside shoots, and sat there within forty feet of me, looking like painted wooden images of small green and greenish-yellow parrots; for a space of fifteen minutes not the slightest movement did they make, and at length, before going, I waved my arms about and shouted to frighten them, and still they refused to stir.
Next morning that memorable fog lifted, to England's joy, and quitting my refuge I went out once more into the region of high sheep-walks, adorned with beechen woods and traveller's-joy in the hedges, rambling by Highclere, Burghclere, and Kingsclere. The last—Hampshire's little Cuzco—is a small and village-like old red brick town, unapproached by a railroad and unimproved, therefore still beautiful, as were all places in other, better, less civilized days. Here in the late afternoon a chilly grey haze crept over the country and set me wishing for a fireside and the sound of friendly voices, and I turned my face towards beloved Silchester. Leaving the hills behind me I got away from the haze and went my devious way by serpentine roads through a beautiful, wooded, undulating country. And I wish that for a hundred, nay, for a thousand years to come, I could on each recurring November have such an afternoon ride, with that autumnal glory in the trees. Sometimes, seeing the road before me carpeted with pure yellow, I said to myself, now I am coming to elms; but when the road shone red and russet-gold before me I knew it was overhung by beeches. But the oak is the common tree in this place, and from every high point on the road I saw far before me and on either hand the woods and copses all a tawny yellow gold—the hue of the dying oak leaf. The tall larches were lemon-yellow, and when growing among tall pines produced a singular effect. Best of all was it where beeches grew among the firs, and the low sun on my left hand shining through the wood gave the coloured translucent leaves an unimaginable splendour. This was the very effect which men, inspired by a sacred passion, had sought to reproduce in their noblest work—the Gothic cathedral and church, its dim interior lit by many-coloured stained glass. The only choristers in these natural fanes were the robins and the small lyrical wren; but on passing through the rustic village of Wolverton I stopped for a couple of minutes to listen to the lively strains of a cirl-bunting among some farm buildings.
Then on to Silchester, its furzy common and scattered village and the vast ruinous walls, overgrown with ivy, bramble, and thorn, of ancient Roman Calleva. Inside the walls, at one spot, a dozen men were still at work in the fading light; they were just finishing—shovelling earth in to obliterate all that had been opened out during the year. The old flint foundations that had been revealed; the houses with porches and corridors and courtyards and pillared hypocausts; the winter room with its wide beautiful floor—red and black and white and grey and yellow, with geometric pattern and twist and scroll and flower and leaf and quaint figures of man and beast and bird—all to be covered up with earth so that the plough may be driven over it again, and the wheat grow and ripen again as it has grown and ripened there above the dead city for so many centuries. The very earth within those walls had a reddish cast owing to the innumerable fragments of red tile and tessera mixed with it. Larks and finches were busily searching for seeds in the reddish-brown soil. They would soon be gone to their roosting-places and the tired men to their cottages, and the white owl coming from his hiding-place in the walls would have old Silchester to himself, as he has had it since the cries and moans of the conquered died into silence so long ago.
Chapter Ten: The Last of His Name
I came by chance to the village—Norton, we will call it, just to call it something, but the county in which it is situated need not be named. It happened that about noon that day I planned to pass the night at a village where, as I was informed at a small country town I had rested in, there was a nice inn—"The Fox and Grapes"—to put up at, but when I arrived, tired and hungry, I was told that I could not have a bed and that the only thing to do was to try Norton, which also boasted an inn. It was hard to have to turn some two or three miles out of my road at that late hour on a chance of a shelter for the night, but there was nothing else to do, so on to Norton I went with heavy steps, and arrived a little after sunset, more tired and hungry than ever, only to be told at the inn that they had no accommodation for me, that their one spare room had been engaged! "What am I to do, then?" I demanded of the landlord. "Beyond this village I cannot go to-night—do you want me to go out and sleep under a hedge?" He called his spouse, and after some conversation they said the village baker might be able to put me up, as he had a spare bedroom in his house. So to the baker's I went, and found it a queer, ramshackle old place, standing a little back from the village street in a garden and green plot with a few fruit trees growing on it. To my knock the baker himself came out—a mild-looking, flabby-faced man, with his mouth full, in a very loose suit of pyjama-like garments of a bluish floury colour. I told him my story, and he listened, swallowing his mouthful, then cast his eyes down and rubbed his chin, which had a small tuft of hairs growing on it, and finally said, "I don't know. I must ask my wife. But come in and have a cup of tea—we're just having a cup ourselves, and perhaps you'd like one."
I could have told him that I should like a dozen cups and a great many slices of bread-and-butter, if there was nothing else more substantial to be had. However, I only said, "Thank you," and followed him in to where his wife, a nice-looking woman, with black hair and olive face, was seated behind the teapot. Imagine my surprise when I found that besides tea there was a big hot repast on the table—a ham, a roast fowl, potatoes and cabbage, a rice pudding, a dish of stewed fruit, bread-and-butter, and other things.
"You call this a cup of tea!" I exclaimed delightedly. The woman laughed, and he explained in an apologetic way that he had formerly suffered grievously from indigestion, so that for many years his life was a burden to him, until he discovered that if he took one big meal a day, after the work was over, he could keep perfectly well.
I was never hungrier than on this evening, and never, I think, ate a bigger or more enjoyable meal; nor have I ever ceased to remember those two with gratitude, and if I were to tell here what they told me—the history of their two lives—I think it would be a more interesting story than the one I am about to relate. I stayed a whole week in their hospitable house; a week which passed only too quickly, for never had I been in a sweeter haunt of peace than this village in a quiet, green country remote from towns and stations. It was a small rustic place, a few old houses and thatched cottages, and the ancient church with square Norman tower hard to see amid the immense old oaks and elms that grew all about it. At the end of the village were the park gates, and the park, a solitary, green place with noble trees, was my favourite haunt; for there was no one to forbid me, the squire being dead, the old red Elizabethan house empty, with only a caretaker in the gardener's lodge to mind it, and the estate for sale. Three years it had been in that condition, but nobody seemed to want it; occasionally some important person came rushing down in a motor-car, but after running over the house he would come out and, remarking that it was a "rummy old place," remount his car and vanish in a cloud of dust to be seen no more.
The dead owner, I found, was much in the village mind; and no wonder, since Norton had never been without a squire until he passed away, leaving no one to succeed him. It was as if some ancient landmark, or an immemorial oak tree on the green in whose shade the villagers had been accustomed to sit for many generations, had been removed. There was a sense of something wanting something gone out of their lives. Moreover, he had been a man of a remarkable character, and though they never loved him they yet reverenced his memory.
So much was he in their minds that I could not be in the village and not hear the story of his life—the story which, I said, interested me less than that of the good baker and his wife. On his father's death at a very advanced age he came, a comparative stranger, to Norton, the first half of his life having been spent abroad. He was then a middle-aged man, unmarried, and a bachelor he remained to the end. He was of a reticent disposition and was said to be proud; formal, almost cold, in manner; furthermore, he did not share his neighbours' love of sport of any description, nor did he care for society, and because of all this he was regarded as peculiar, not to say eccentric. But he was deeply interested in agriculture, especially in cattle and their improvement, and that object grew to be his master passion. It was a period of great depression, and as his farms fell vacant he took them into his own hands, increased his stock and built model cowhouses, and came at last to be known throughout his own country, and eventually everywhere, as one of the biggest cattle-breeders in England. But he was famous in a peculiar way. Wise breeders and buyers shook their heads and even touched their foreheads significantly, and predicted that the squire of Norton would finish by ruining himself. They were right, he ruined himself; not that he was mentally weaker than those who watched and cunningly exploited him; he was ruined because his object was a higher one than theirs. He saw clearly that the prize system is a vicious one and that better results may be obtained without it. He proved this at a heavy cost by breeding better beasts than his rivals, who were all exhibitors and prizewinners, and who by this means got their advertisements and secured the highest prices, while he, who disdained prizes and looked with disgust at the overfed and polished animals at shows, got no advertisements and was compelled to sell at unremunerative prices. The buyers, it may be mentioned, were always the breeders for shows, and they made a splendid profit out of it.
He carried on the fight for a good many years, becoming more and more involved, until his creditors took possession of the estate, sold off the stock, let the farms, and succeeded in finding a tenant for the furnished house. He went to a cottage in the village and there passed his remaining years. To the world he appeared unmoved by his reverses. The change from mansion and park to a small thatched cottage, with a labourer's wife for attendant, made no change in the man, nor did he resign his seat on the Bench of Magistrates or any other unpaid office he held. To the last he was what he had always been, formal and ceremonious, more gracious to those beneath him than to equals; strict in the performance of his duties, living with extreme frugality and giving freely to those in want, and very regular in his attendance at church, where he would sit facing the tombs and memorials of his ancestors, among the people but not of them—a man alone and apart, respected by all but loved by none.
Finally he died and was buried with the others, and one more memorial with the old name, which he bore last was placed on the wall. That was the story as it was told me, and as it was all about a man who was without charm and had no love interest it did not greatly interest me, and I soon dismissed it from my thoughts. Then one day coming through a grove in the park and finding myself standing before the ancient, empty, desolate house—for on the squire's death everything had been sold and taken away—I remembered that the caretaker had begged me to let him show me over the place. I had not felt inclined to gratify him, as I had found him a young man of a too active mind whose only desire was to capture some person to talk to and unfold his original ideas and schemes, but now having come to the house I thought I would suffer him, and soon found him at work in the vast old walled garden. He joyfully threw down his spade and let me in and then up to the top floor, determined that I should see everything. By the time we got down to the ground floor I was pretty tired of empty rooms, oak panelled, and passages and oak staircases, and of talk, and impatient to get away. But no, I had not seen the housekeeper's room—I must see that!—and so into another great vacant room I was dragged, and to keep me as long as possible in that last room he began unlocking and flinging open all the old oak cupboards and presses. Glancing round at the long array of empty shelves, I noticed a small brown-paper parcel, thick with dust, in a corner, and as it was the only movable thing I had seen in that vacant house I asked him what the parcel contained. Books, he replied—they had been left as of no value when the house was cleared of furniture. As I wished to see the books he undid the parcel; it contained forty copies of a small quarto-shaped book of sonnets, with the late squire's name as author on the title page. I read a sonnet, and told him I should like to read them all. "You can have a copy, of course," he exclaimed. "Put it in your pocket and keep it." When I asked him if he had any right to give one away he laughed and said that if any one had thought the whole parcel worth twopence it would not have been left behind. He was quite right; a cracked dinner—plate or a saucepan with a hole in it or an earthenware teapot with a broken spout would not have been left, but the line was drawn at a book of sonnets by the late squire. Nobody wanted it, and so without more qualms I put it in my pocket, and have it before me now, opened at page 63, on which appears, without a headline, the sonnet I first read, and which I quote:—
How beautiful are birds, of God's sweet air
Free denizens; no ugly earthly spot
Their boundless happiness doth seem to blot.
The swallow, swiftly flying here and there,
Can it be true that dreary household care
Doth goad her to incessant flight?
If not How can it be that she doth cast her lot
Now there, now here, pursuing summer everywhere?
I sadly fear that shallow, tiny brain
Is not exempt from anxious cares and fears,
That mingled heritage of joy and pain
That for some reason everywhere appears;
And yet those birds, how beautiful they are!
Sure beauty is to happiness no bar.
This has a fault that doth offend the reader of modern verse, and there are many of the eighty sonnets in the book which do not equal it in merit. He was manifestly an amateur; he sometimes writes with labour, and he not infrequently ends with the unpardonable weak line. Nevertheless he had rightly chosen this difficult form in which to express his inner self. It suited his grave, concentrated thought, and each little imperfect poem of fourteen lines gives us a glimpse into a wise, beneficent mind. He had fought his fight and suffered defeat, and had then withdrawn himself silently from the field to die. But if he had been embittered he could have relieved himself in this little book. There is no trace of such a feeling. He only asks, in one sonnet, where can a balm be found for the heart fretted and torn with eternal cares; when we have thought and striven for some great and good purpose, when all our striving has ended in disaster? His plan, he concludes, is to go out in the quiet night-time and look at the stars.
Here let me quote two more sonnets written in contemplative mood, just to give the reader a fuller idea not of the verse, as verse, but of the spirit in the old squire. There is no title to these two:—
I like a fire of wood; there is a kind
Of artless poetry in all its ways:
When first 'tis lighted, how it roars and plays,
And sways to every breath its flames, refined
By fancy to some shape by life confined.
And then how touching are its latter days;
When, all its strength decayed, and spent the blaze
Of fiery youth, grey ash is all we find.
Perhaps we know the tree, of which the pile
Once formed a part, and oft beneath its shade
Have sported in our youth; or in quaint style
Have carved upon its rugged bark a name
Of which the memory doth alone remain
A memory doomed, alas! in turn to fade.
Bad enough as verse, the critic will say; refined, confined, find—what poor rhymes are these! and he will think me wrong to draw these frailties from their forgotten abode. But I like to think of the solitary old man sitting by his wood fire in the old house, not brooding bitterly on his frustrate life, but putting his quiet thoughts into the form of a sonnet. The other is equally good—or bad, if the critic will have it so:—
The clock had just struck five, and all was still
Within my house, when straight I open threw
With eager hand the casement dim with dew.
Oh, what a glorious flush of light did fill
That old staircase! and then and there did kill
All those black doubts that ever do renew
Their civil war with all that's good and true
Within our hearts, when body and mind are ill
From this slight incident I would infer
A cheerful truth, that men without demur,
In times of stress and doubt, throw open wide
The windows of their breast; nor stung by pride
In stifling darkness gloomily abide;
But bid the light flow in on either side.
A "slight incident" and a beautiful thought. But all I have so far said about the little book is preliminary to what I wish to say about another sonnet which must also be quoted. It is perhaps, as a sonnet, as ill done as the others, but the subject of it specially attracted me, as it happened to be one which was much in my mind during my week's stay at Norton. That remote little village without a squire or any person of means or education in or near it capable of feeling the slightest interest in the people, except the parson, an old infirm man who was never seen but once a week—how wanting in some essential thing it appeared! It seemed to me that the one thing which might be done in these small centres of rural life to brighten and beautify existence is precisely the thing which is never done, also that what really is being done is of doubtful value and sometimes actually harmful.
Leaving Norton one day I visited other small villages in the neighbourhood and found they were no better off. I had heard of the rector of one of these villages as a rather original man, and went and discussed the subject with him. "It is quite useless thinking about it," he said. "The people here are clods, and will not respond to any effort you can make to introduce a little light and sweetness into their lives." There was no more to be said to him, but I knew he was wrong. I found the villagers in that part of the country the most intelligent and responsive people of their class I had ever encountered. It was a delightful experience to go into their cottages, not to read them a homily or to present them with a book or a shilling, nor to inquire into their welfare, material and spiritual, but to converse intimately with a human interest in them, as would be the case in a country where there are no caste distinctions. It was delightful, because they were so responsive, so sympathetic, so alive. Now it was just at this time, when the subject was in my mind, that the book of sonnets came into my hands—given to me by the generous caretaker—and I read in it this one on "Innocent Amusements":—
There lacks a something to complete the round
Of our fair England's homely happiness
A something, yet how oft do trifles bless
When greater gifts by far redound
To honours lone, but no responsive sound
Of joy or mirth awake, nay, oft oppress,
While gifts of which we scarce the moment guess
In never-failing joys abound.
No nation can be truly great
That hath not something childlike in its life
Of every day; it should its youth renew
With simple joys that sweetly recreate
The jaded mind, conjoined in friendly strife
The pleasures of its childhood days pursue.
What wise and kindly thoughts he had—the old squire of Norton! Surely, when telling me the story of his life, they had omitted something! I questioned them on the point. Did he not in all the years he was at Norton House, and later when he lived among them in a cottage in the village—did he not go into their homes and meet them as if he knew and felt that they were all of the same flesh, children of one universal Father, and did he not make them feel this about him—that the differences in fortune and position and education were mere accidents? And the answer was: No, certainly not! as if I had asked a preposterous question. He was the squire, a gentleman—any one might understand that he could not come among them like that! That is what a parson can do because he is, so to speak, paid to keep an eye on them, and besides it's religion there and a different thing. But the squire!—their squire, that dignified old gentleman, so upright in his saddle, so considerate and courteous to every one—but he never forgot his position—never in that way! I also asked if he had never tried to establish, or advocated, or suggested to them any kind of reunions to take place from time to time, or an entertainment or festival to get them to come pleasantly together, making a brightness in their lives—something which would not be cricket or football, nor any form of sport for a few of the men, all the others being mere lookers-on and the women and children left out altogether; something which would be for and include everyone, from the oldest grey labourer no longer able to work to the toddling little ones; something of their own invention, peculiar to Norton, which would be their pride and make their village dearer to them? And the answer was still no, and no, and no. He had never attempted, never suggested, anything of the sort. How could he—the squire! Yet he wrote those wise words:—
No nation can be truly great
That hath not something childlike in its life
Of every day.
Why are we lacking in that which others undoubtedly have, a something to complete the round of homely happiness in our little rural centres; how is it that we do not properly encourage the things which, albeit childlike, are essential, which sweetly recreate? It is not merely the selfishness of those who are well placed and prefer to live for themselves, or who have light but care not to shed it on those who are not of their class. Selfishness is common enough everywhere, in men of all races. It is not selfishness, nor the growth of towns or decay of agriculture, which as a fact does not decay, nor education, nor any of the other causes usually given for the dullness, the greyness of village life. The chief cause, I take it, is that gulf, or barrier, which exists between men and men in different classes in our country, or a considerable portion of it—the caste feeling which is becoming increasingly rigid in the rural world, if my own observation, extending over a period of twenty-five years, is not all wrong.
Chapter Eleven: Salisbury and Its Doves
Never in my experience has there been a worse spring season than that of 1903 for the birds, more especially for the short-winged migrants. In April I looked for the woodland warblers and found them not, or saw but a few of the commonest kinds. It was only too easy to account for this rarity. The bitter north-east wind had blown every day and all day long during those weeks when birds are coming, and when nearing the end of their journey, at its most perilous stage, the wind had been dead against them; its coldness and force was too much for these delicate travellers, and doubtless they were beaten down in thousands into the grey waters of a bitter sea. The stronger-winged wheatear was more fortunate, since he comes in March, and before that spell of deadly weather he was already back in his breeding haunts on Salisbury Plain, and, in fact, everywhere on that open down country. I was there to hear him sing his wild notes to the listening waste—singing them, as his pretty fashion is, up in the air, suspended on quickly vibrating wings like a great black and white moth. But he was in no singing mood, and at last, in desperation, I fled to Salisbury to wait for loitering spring in that unattractive town.
The streets were cold as the open plain, and there was no comfort indoors; to haunt the cathedral during those vacant days was the only occupation left to me. There was some shelter to be had under the walls, and the empty, vast interior would seem almost cosy on coming in from the wind. At service my due feet never failed, while morning, noon, and evening I paced the smooth level green by the hour, standing at intervals to gaze up at the immense pile with its central soaring spire, asking myself why I had never greatly liked it in the past and did not like it much better now when grown familiar with it. Undoubtedly it is one of the noblest structures of its kind in England—even my eyes that look coldly on most buildings could see it; and I could admire, even reverence, but could not love. It suffers by comparison with other temples into which my soul has wandered. It has not the majesty and appearance of immemorial age, the dim religious richness of the interior, with much else that goes to make up, without and within, the expression which is so marked in other mediaeval fanes—Winchester, Ely, York, Canterbury, Exeter, and Wells. To the dry, mechanical mind of the architect these great cathedrals are in the highest degree imperfect, according to the rules of his art: to all others this imperfectness is their chief excellence and glory; for they are in a sense a growth, a flower of many minds and many periods, and are imperfect even as Nature is, in her rocks and trees; and, being in harmony with Nature and like Nature, they are inexpressibly beautiful and satisfying beyond all buildings to the aesthetic as well as to the religious sense.
Occasionally I met and talked with an old man employed at the cathedral. One day, closing one eye and shading the other with his hand, he gazed up at the building for some time, and then remarked: "I'll tell you what's wrong with Salisbury—it looks too noo." He was near the mark; the fault is that to the professional eye it is faultless; the lack of expression is due to the fact that it came complete from its maker's brain, like a coin from the mint, and being all on one symmetrical plan it has the trim, neat appearance of a toy cathedral carved out of wood and set on a green-painted square.
After all, my thoughts and criticisms on the cathedral, as a building, were merely incidental; my serious business was with the feathered people to be seen there. Few in the woods and fewer on the windy downs, here birds were abundant, not only on the building, where they were like seafowl congregated on a precipitous rock, but they were all about me. The level green was the hunting ground of many thrushes—a dozen or twenty could often be seen at one time—and it was easy to spot those that had young. The worm they dragged out was not devoured; another was looked for, then another; then all were cut up in proper lengths and beaten and bruised, and finally packed into a bundle and carried off. Rooks, too, were there, breeding on the cathedral elms, and had no time and spirit to wrangle, but could only caw-caw distressfully at the wind, which tossed them hither and thither in the air and lashed the tall trees, threatening at each fresh gust to blow their nests to pieces. Small birds of half a dozen kinds were also there, and one tinkle-tinkled his spring song quite merrily in spite of the cold that kept the others silent and made me blue. One day I spied a big queen bumble-bee on the ground, looking extremely conspicuous in its black and chestnut coat on the fresh green sward; and thinking it numbed by the cold I picked it up. It moved its legs feebly, but alas! its enemy had found and struck it down, and with its hard, sharp little beak had drilled a hole in one of the upper plates of its abdomen, and from that small opening had cunningly extracted all the meat. Though still alive it was empty as a blown eggshell. Poor queen and mother, you survived the winter in vain, and went abroad in vain in the bitter weather in quest of bread to nourish your few first-born—the grubs that would help you by and by; now there will be no bread for them, and for you no populous city in the flowery earth and a great crowd of children to rise up each day, when days are long, to call you blessed! And he who did this thing, the unspeakable oxeye with his black and yellow breast—"catanic black and amber"—even while I made my lamentation was tinkling his merry song overhead in the windy elms.
The birds that lived on the huge cathedral itself had the greatest attraction for me; and here the daws, if not the most numerous, were the most noticeable, as they ever are on account of their conspicuousness in their black plumage, their loquacity and everlasting restlessness. Far up on the ledge from which the spire rises a kestrel had found a cosy corner in which to establish himself, and one day when I was there a number of daws took it on themselves to eject him: they gathered near and flew this way and that, and cawed and cawed in anger, and swooped at him, until he could stand their insults no longer, and, suddenly dashing out, he struck and buffeted them right and left and sent them screaming with fear in all directions. After this they left him in peace: they had forgotten that he was a hawk, and that even the gentle mousing wind-hover has a nobler spirit than any crow of them all.
On first coming to the cathedral I noticed a few pigeons sitting on the roof and ledges very high up, and, not seeing them well, I assumed that they were of the common or domestic kind. By and by one cooed, then another; and recognizing the stock-dove note I began to look carefully, and found that all the birds on the building—about thirty pairs—were of this species. It was a great surprise, for though we occasionally find a pair of stock-doves breeding on the ivied wall of some inhabited mansion in the country, it was a new thing to find a considerable colony of this shy woodland species established on a building in a town. They lived and bred there just as the common pigeon—the vari-coloured descendant of the blue rock—does on St. Paul's, the Law Courts, and the British Museum in London. Only, unlike our metropolitan doves, both the domestic kind and the ringdove in the parks, the Salisbury doves though in the town are not of it. They come not down to mix with the currents of human life in the streets and open spaces; they fly away to the country to feed, and dwell on the cathedral above the houses and people just as sea-birds—kittiwake and guillemot and gannet—dwell on the ledges of some vast ocean-fronting cliff.
The old man mentioned above told me that the birds were called "rocks" by the townspeople, also that they had been there for as long as he could remember. Six or seven years ago, he said, when the repairs to the roof and spire were started, the pigeons began to go away until there was not one left. The work lasted three years, and immediately on its conclusion the doves began to return, and were now as numerous as formerly. How, I inquired, did these innocent birds get on with their black neighbours, seeing that the daw is a cunning creature much given to persecution—a crow, in fact, as black as any of his family? They got on badly, he said; the doves were early breeders, beginning in March, and were allowed to have the use of the holes until the daws wanted them at the end of April, when they forcibly ejected the young doves. He said that in spring he always picked up a good many young doves, often unfledged, thrown down by the dawn. I did not doubt his story. I had just found a young bird myself—a little blue-skinned, yellow-mouthed fledgling which had fallen sixty or seventy feet on to the gravel below. But in June, he said, when the daws brought off their young, the doves entered into possession once more, and were then permitted to rear their young in peace.
I returned to Salisbury about the middle of May in better weather, when there were days that were almost genial, and found the cathedral a greater "habitacle of birds" than ever: starlings, swifts, and swallows were there, the lively little martins in hundreds, and the doves and daws in their usual numbers. All appeared to be breeding, and for some time I saw no quarreling. At length I spied a pair of doves with a nest in a small cavity in the stone at the back of a narrow ledge about seventy feet from the ground, and by standing back some distance I could see the hen bird sitting on the nest, while the cock stood outside on the ledge keeping guard. I watched this pair for some hours and saw a jackdaw sweep down on them a dozen or more times at long intervals. Sometimes after swooping down he would alight on the ledge a yard or two away, and the male dove would then turn and face him, and if he then began sidling up the dove would dash at and buffet him with his wings with the greatest violence and throw him off. When he swooped closer the dove would spring up and meet him in the air, striking him at the moment of meeting, and again the daw would be beaten. When I left three days after witnessing this contest, the doves were still in possession of their nest, and I concluded that they were not so entirely at the mercy of the jackdaw as the old man had led me to believe.
It was, on this occasion, a great pleasure to listen to the doves. The stock-dove has no set song, like the ringdove, but like all the other species in the typical genus Columba it has the cooing or family note, one of the most human-like sounds which birds emit. In the stock-dove this is a better, more musical, and a more varied sound than in any other Columba known to me. The pleasing quality of the sound as well as the variety in it could be well noted here where the birds were many, scattered about on ledges and projections high above the earth, and when bird after bird uttered its plaint, each repeating his note half a dozen to a dozen times, one in slow measured time, and deep-voiced like the rock-dove, but more musical; another rapidly, with shorter, impetuous notes in a higher key, as if carried away by excitement. There were not two birds that cooed in precisely the same way, and the same bird would often vary its manner of cooing.
It was best to hear them during the afternoon service in the cathedral, when the singing of the choir and throbbing and pealing of the organ which filled the vast interior was heard outside, subdued by the walls through which it passed, and was like a beautiful mist or atmosphere of sound pervading and enveloping the great building; and when the plaining of the doves, owing to the rhythmic flow of the notes and their human characters, seemed to harmonize with and be a part of that sacred music.
Chapter Twelve: Whitesheet Hill
On Easter Saturday the roadsides and copses by the little river Nadder were full of children gathering primroses; they might have filled a thousand baskets without the flowers being missed, so abundant were they in that place. Cold though it was the whole air was laden with the delicious fragrance. It was pleasant to see and talk with the little people occupied with the task they loved so well, and I made up my mind to see the result of all this flower-gathering next day in some of the village churches in the neighbourhood—Fovant, Teffant Evias, Chilmark, Swallowcliffe, Tisbury, and Fonthill Bishop. I had counted on some improvement in the weather—some bright sunshine to light up the flower-decorated interiors; but Easter Sunday proved colder than ever, with the bitter north-east still blowing, the grey travelling cloud still covering the sky; and so to get the full benefit of the bitterness I went instead to spend my day on the top of the biggest down above the valley. That was Whitesheet Hill, and forms the highest part of the long ridge dividing the valleys of the Ebble and Nadder.
It was roughest and coldest up there, and suited my temper best, for when the weather seems spiteful one finds a grim sort of satisfaction in defying it. On a genial day it would have been very pleasant on that lofty plain, for the flat top of the vast down is like a plain in appearance, and the earthworks on it show that it was once a populous habitation of man. Now because of the wind and cloud its aspect was bare and bleak and desolate, and after roaming about for an hour, exploring the thickest furze patches, I began to think that my day would have to be spent in solitude, without a living creature to keep me company. The birds had apparently all been blown away and the rabbits were staying at home in their burrows. Not even an insect could I see, although the furze was in full blossom; the honey-suckers were out of sight and torpid, and the bloom itself could no longer look "unprofitably gay," as the poet says it does. "Not even a wheatear!" I said, for I had counted on that bird in the intervals between the storms, although I knew I should not hear his wild delightful warble in such weather.
Then, all at once, I beheld that very bird, a solitary female, flittering on over the flat ground before me, perching on the little green ant-mounds and flirting its tail and bobbing as if greatly excited at my presence in that lonely place. I wondered where its mate was, following it from place to place as it flew, determined now I had found a bird to keep it in sight. Presently a great blackness appeared low down in the cloudy sky, and rose and spread, travelling fast towards me, and the little wheatear fled in fear from it and vanished from sight over the rim of the down. But I was there to defy the weather, and so instead of following the bird in search of shelter I sat down among some low furze bushes and waited and watched. By and by I caught sight of three magpies, rising one by one at long intervals from the furze and flying laboriously towards a distant hill-top grove of pines. Then I heard the wailing cry of a peewit, and caught sight of the bird at a distance, and soon afterwards a sound of another character—the harsh angry cry of a carrion crow, almost as deep as the raven's angry voice. Before long I discovered the bird at a great height coming towards me in hot pursuit of a kestrel. They passed directly over me so that I had them a long time in sight, the kestrel travelling quietly on in the face of the wind, the crow toiling after, and at intervals spurting till he got near enough to hurl himself at his enemy, emitting his croaks of rage. For invariably the kestrel with one of his sudden swallow-like turns avoided the blow and went on as before. I watched them until they were lost to sight in the coming blackness and wondered that so intelligent a creature as a crow should waste his energies in that vain chase. Still one could understand it and even sympathize with him. For the kestrel is a most insulting creature towards the bigger birds. He knows that they are incapable of paying him out, and when he finds them off their guard he will drop down and inflict a blow just for the fun of the thing. This outraged crow appeared determined to have his revenge.
Then the storm broke on me, and so fiercely did the rain and sleet thrash me that, fearing a cold soaking, I fled before it to the rim of the plain, where the wheatear had vanished, and saw a couple of hundred yards down on the smooth steep slope a thicket of dwarf trees. It was, the only shelter in sight, and to it I went, to discover much to my disgust that the trees were nothing but elders. For there is no tree that affords so poor a shelter, especially on the high open downs, where the foliage is scantier than in other situations and lets in the wind and rain in full force upon you.
But the elder affects me in two ways. I like it on account of early associations, and because the birds delight in its fruit, though they wisely refuse to build in its branches; and I dislike it because its smell is offensive to me and its berries the least pleasant of all wild fruits to my taste. I can eat ivy-berries in March, and yew in its season, poison or not; and hips and haws and holly-berries and harsh acorn, and the rowan, which some think acrid; but the elderberry I can't stomach.
How comes it, I have asked more than once, that this poor tree is so often seen on the downs where it is so badly fitted to be and makes so sorry an appearance with its weak branches broken and its soft leaves torn by the winds? How badly it contrasts with the other trees and bushes that flourish on the downs—furze, juniper, holly, blackthorn, and hawthorn!
Two years ago, one day in the early spring, I was walking on an extensive down in another part of Wiltshire with the tenant of the land, who began there as a large sheep-farmer, but eventually finding that he could make more with rabbits than with sheep turned most of his land into a warren. The higher part of this down was overgrown with furze, mixed with holly and other bushes, but the slopes were mostly very bare. At one spot on a wide bare slope where the rabbits had formed a big group of burrows there was a close little thicket of young elder trees, looking exceedingly conspicuous in the bright green of early April. Calling my companion's attention to this little thicket I said something about the elder growing on the open downs where it always appeared to be out of harmony with its surroundings. "I don't suppose you planted elders here," I said.
"No, but I know who did," he returned, and he then gave me this curious history of the trees. Five years before, the rabbits, finding it a suitable spot to dig in, probably because of a softer chalk there, made a number of deep burrows at that spot. When the wheatears, or "horse-maggers" as he called them, returned in spring two or three pairs attached themselves to this group of burrows and bred in them. There was that season a solitary elder-bush higher up on the down among the furze which bore a heavy crop of berries; and when the fruit was ripe he watched the birds feeding on it, the wheatears among them. The following spring seedlings came up out of the loose earth heaped about the rabbit burrows, and as they were not cut down by the rabbits, for they dislike the elder, they grew up, and now formed a clump of fifty or sixty little trees of six feet to eight feet in height.
Who would have thought to find a tree-planter in the wheatear, the bird of the stony waste and open naked down, who does not even ask for a bush to perch on?
It then occurred to me that in every case where I had observed a clump of elder bushes on the bare downside, it grew upon a village or collection of rabbit burrows, and it is probable that in every case the clump owed its existence to the wheatears who had dropped the seed about their nesting-place. The clump where I had sought a shelter from the storm was composed of large old dilapidated-looking half-dead elders; perhaps their age was not above thirty or forty years, but they looked older than hawthorns of one or two centuries; and under them the rabbits had their diggings—huge old mounds and burrows that looked like a badger's earth. Here, too, the burrows had probably existed first and had attracted the wheatears, and the birds had brought the seed from some distant bush.
Crouching down in one of the big burrows at the roots of an old elder I remained for half an hour, listening to the thump-thump of the alarmed rabbits about me, and the accompanying hiss and swish of the wind and sleet and rain in the ragged branches.
The storm over I continued my rambles on Whitesheet Hill, and coming back an hour or two later to the very spot where I had seen and followed the wheatear, I all at once caught sight of a second bird, lying dead on the turf close to my feet! The sudden sight gave me a shock of astonishment, mingled with admiration and grief. For how pretty it looked, though dead, lying on its back, the little black legs stuck stiffly up, the long wings pressed against the sides, their black tips touching together like the clasped hands of a corpse; and the fan-like black and white tail, half open as in life, moved perpetually up and down by the wind, as if that tail-flirting action of the bird had continued after death. It was very beautiful in its delicate shape and pale harmonious colouring, resting on the golden-green mossy turf. And it was a male, undoubtedly the mate of the wheatear I had seen at the spot, and its little mate, not knowing what death is, had probably been keeping watch near it, wondering at its strange stillness and greatly fearing for its safety when I came that way, and passed by without seeing it.
Poor little migrant, did you come back across half the world for this—back to your home on Whitesheet Hill to grow cold and fail in the cold April wind, and finally to look very pretty, lying stiff and cold, to the one pair of human eyes that were destined to see you! The little birds that come and go and return to us over such vast distances, they perish like this in myriads annually; flying to and from us they are blown away by death like sere autumn leaves, "the pestilence-stricken multitudes" whirled away by the wind! They die in myriads: that is not strange; the strange, the astonishing thing is the fact of death; what can they tell us of it—the wise men who live or have ever lived on the earth—what can they say now of the bright intelligent spirit, the dear little emotional soul, that had so fit a tenement and so fitly expressed itself in motions of such exquisite grace, in melody so sweet! Did it go out like the glow-worm's lamp, the life and sweetness of the flower? Was its destiny not like that of the soul, specialized in a different direction, of the saint or poet or philosopher! Alas, they can tell us nothing!
I could not go away leaving it in that exposed place on the turf, to be found a little later by a magpie or carrion crow or fox, and devoured. Close by there was a small round hillock, an old forsaken nest of the little brown ants, green and soft with moss and small creeping herbs—a suitable grave for a wheatear. Cutting out a round piece of turf from the side, I made a hole with my stick and put the dead bird in and replacing the turf left it neatly buried.
It was not that I had or have any quarrel with the creatures I have named, or would have them other than they are—carrion-eaters and scavengers, Nature's balance-keepers and purifiers. The only creatures on earth I loathe and hate are the gourmets, the carrion-crows and foxes of the human kind who devour wheatears and skylarks at their tables.
Chapter Thirteen: Bath and Wells Revisited
'Tis so easy to get from London to Bath, by merely stepping into a railway carriage which takes you smoothly without a stop in two short hours from Paddington, that I was amazed at myself in having allowed five full years to pass since my previous visit. The question was much in my mind as I strolled about noting the old-remembered names of streets and squares and crescents. Quiet Street was the name inscribed on one; it was, to me, the secret name of them all. The old impressions were renewed, an old feeling partially recovered. The wide, clean ways; the solid, stone-built houses with their dignified aspect; the large distances, terrace beyond terrace; mansions and vast green lawns and parks and gardens; avenues and groups of stately trees, especially that unmatched clump of old planes in the Circus; the whole town, the design in the classic style of one master mind, set by the Avon, amid green hills, produced a sense of harmony and repose which cannot be equalled by any other town in the kingdom.
This idle time was delightful so long as I gave my attention exclusively to houses from the outside, and to hills, rocks, trees, waters, and all visible nature, which here harmonizes with man's works. To sit on some high hill and look down on Bath, sun-flushed or half veiled in mist; to lounge on Camden Crescent, or climb Sion Hill, or take my ease with the water-drinkers in the spacious, comfortable Pump Room; or, better still, to rest at noon in the ancient abbey—all this was pleasure pure and simple, a quiet drifting back until I found myself younger by five years than I had taken myself to be.
I haunted the abbey, and the more I saw of it the more I loved it. The impression it had made on me during my former visits had faded, or else I had never properly seen it, or had not seen it in the right emotional mood. Now I began to think it the best of all the great abbey churches of England and the equal of the cathedrals in its effect on the mind. How rich the interior is in its atmosphere of tempered light or tender gloom! How tall and graceful the columns holding up the high roof of white stone with its marvellous palm-leaf sculpture! What a vast expanse of beautifully stained glass! I certainly gave myself plenty of time to appreciate it on this occasion, as I visited it every day, sometimes two or three times, and not infrequently I sat there for an hour at a stretch.
Sitting there one day, thinking of nothing, I was gradually awakened to a feeling almost of astonishment at the sight of the extraordinary number of memorial tablets of every imaginable shape and size which crowd the walls. So numerous are they and so closely placed that you could not find space anywhere to put your hand against the wall. We are accustomed to think that in cathedrals and other great ecclesiastical buildings the illustrious dead receive burial, and their names and claims on our gratitude and reverence are recorded, but in no fane in the land is there so numerous a gathering of the dead as in this place. The inscription-covered walls were like the pages of an old black-letter volume without margins. Yet when I came to think of it I could not recall any Bath celebrity or great person associated with Bath except Beau Nash, who was not perhaps a very great person. Probably Carlyle would have described him as a "meeserable creature."
Leaving my seat I began to examine the inscriptions, and found that they had not been placed there in memory of men belonging to Bath or even Somerset. These monuments were erected to persons from all counties in the three kingdoms, and from all the big towns, those to Londoners being most numerous. Nor were they of persons distinguished in any way. Here you find John or Henry or Thomas Smith, or Brown, or Jones, or Robinson, provision dealer, or merchant, of Clerkenwell, or Bermondsey, or Bishopsgate Street Within or Without; also many retired captains, majors, and colonels. There were hundreds more whose professions or occupations in life were not stated. There were also hundreds of memorials to ladies—widows and spinsters. They were all, in fact, to persons who had come to die in Bath after "taking the waters," and dying, they or their friends had purchased immortality on the walls of the abbey with a handful or two of gold. Here is one of several inscriptions of the kind I took the trouble to copy: "His early virtues, his cultivated talents, his serious piety, inexpressibly endeared him to his friends and opened to them many bright prospects of excellence and happiness. These prospects have all faded," and so on for several long lines in very big letters, occupying a good deal of space on the wall. But what and who was he, and what connection had he with Bath? He was a young man born in the West Indies who died in Scotland, and later his mother, coming to Bath for her health, "caused this inscription to be placed on the abbey walls"! If this policy or tradition is still followed by the abbey authorities, it will be necessary for them to build an annexe; if it be no longer followed, would it be going too far to suggest that these mural tablets to a thousand obscurities, which ought never to have been placed there, should now be removed and placed in some vault where the relations or descendants of the persons described could find, and if they wished it, have them removed?
But it must be said that the abbey is not without a fair number of memorials with which no one can quarrel; the one I admire most, to Quin, the actor, has, I think, the best or the most appropriate epitaph ever written. No, one, however familiar with the words, will find fault with me for quoting them here:
That tongue which set the table on a roar
And charmed the public ear is heard no more.
Closed are those eyes, the harbingers of wit,
Which spake before the tongue what Shakespeare writ.
Cold is that hand which living was stretched forth
At friendship's call to succor modest worth.
Here lies James Quin, deign readers to be taught
Whate'er thy strength of body, force of thought,
In Nature's happiest mood however cast,
To this complexion thou must come at last.
Quin's monument strikes one as the greatest there because of Garrick's living words, but there is another very much more beautiful.
I first noticed this memorial on the wall at a distance of about three yards, too far to read anything in the inscription except the name of Sibthorpe, which was strange to me, but instead of going nearer to read it I remained standing to admire it at that distance. The tablet was of white marble, and on it was sculptured the figure of a young man with curly head and classic profile. He was wearing sandals and a loose mantle held to his breast with one hand, while in the other hand he carried a bunch of leaves and flowers. He appeared in the act of stepping ashore from a boat of antique shape, and the artist had been singularly successful in producing the idea of free and vigorous motion in the figure as well as of some absorbing object in his mind. The figure was undoubtedly symbolical, and I began to amuse myself by trying to guess its meaning. Then a curious thing happened. A person who had been moving slowly along near me, apparently looking with no great interest at the memorials, came past me and glanced first at the tablet I was looking at, then at me. As our eyes met I remarked that I was admiring the best memorial I had found in the abbey, and then added, "I've been trying to make out its meaning. You see the man is a traveller and is stepping ashore with a flowering spray in his hand. It strikes me that it may have been erected to the memory of a person who introduced some valuable plant into England."
"Yes, perhaps," he said. "But who was he?"
"I don't know yet," I returned. "I can only see that his name was Sibthorpe."
"Sibthorpe!" he exclaimed excitedly. "Why, this is the very memorial I've been looking for all over the abbey and had pretty well given up all hopes of finding it." With that he went to it and began studying the inscription, which was in Latin. John Sibthorpe, I found, was a distinguished botanist, author of the Flora Graeca, who died over a century ago.
I asked him why he was interested in Sibthorpe's memorial.
"Well, you see, I'm a great botanist myself," he explained, "and have been familiar with his name and work all my life. Of course," he added, "I don't mean I'm great in the sense that Sibthorpe was. I'm only a little local botanist, quite unknown outside my own circle; I only mean that I'm a great lover of botany."
I left him there, and had the curiosity to look up the great man's life, and found some very curious things in it. He was a son of Humphrey Sibthorpe, also a great botanist, who succeeded the still greater Dillenius as Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford, a post which he held for thirty-six years, and during that time he delivered one lecture, which was a failure. John, if he did not suck in botany with his mother's milk, took it quite early from his father, and on leaving the University went abroad to continue his studies. Eventually he went to Greece, inflamed with the ambition to identify all the plants mentioned by Dioscorides. Then he set about writing his Flora Graeca; but he had a rough time of it travelling about in that rude land, and falling ill he had to leave his work undone. When nearing his end he came to Bath, like so many other afflicted ones, only to die, and he was very properly buried in the abbey. In his will he left an estate the proceeds of which were to be devoted to the completion of his work, which was to be in ten folio volumes, with one hundred plates in each. This was done and the work finished forty-four years after his death, when thirty copies were issued to the patient subscribers at two hundred and forty guineas a copy. But the whole cost of the work was set down at 30,000 pounds! A costlier work it would be hard to find; I wonder how many of us have seen it?
But I must go back to my subject. I was not in Bath just to die and lie there, like poor Sibthorpe, with all those strange bedfellows of his, nor was I in search of a vacant space the size of my hand on the walls to bespeak it for my own memorial. On the contrary, I was there, as we have seen, to knock five years off my age. And it was very pleasant, as I have said, so long as I confined my attention to Bath, the stone-built town of old memories and associations—so long as I was satisfied to loiter in the streets and wide green places and in the Pump Room and the abbey. The bitter came in only when, going from places to faces, I began to seek out the friends and acquaintances of former days. The familiar faces seemed not wholly familiar now. A change had been wrought; in some cases a great change, as in that of some weedy girl who had blossomed into fair womanhood. One could not grieve at that; but in the middle-aged and those who were verging on or past that period, it was impossible not to feel saddened at the difference. "I see no change in you," is a lie ready to the lips which would speak some pleasing thing, but it does not quite convince. Men are naturally brutal, and use no compliments to one another; on the contrary, they do not hesitate to make a joke of wrinkles and grey hairs—their own and yours. "But, oh, the difference" when the familiar face, no longer familiar as of old, is a woman's! This is no light thing to her, and her eyes, being preternaturally keen in such matters, see not only the change in you, but what is infinitely sadder, the changed reflection of herself. Your eyes have revealed the shock you have experienced. You cannot hide it; her heart is stabbed with a sudden pain, and she is filled with shame and confusion; and the pain is but greater if her life has glided smoothly—if she cannot appeal to your compassion, finding a melancholy relief in that saddest cry:—
O Grief has changed me since you saw me last!
For not grief, nor sickness, nor want, nor care, nor any misery or calamity which men fear, is her chief enemy. Time alone she hates and fears—insidious Time who has lulled her mind with pleasant flatteries all these years while subtly taking away her most valued possessions, the bloom and colour, the grace, the sparkle, the charm of other years.
Here is a true and pretty little story, which may or may not exactly fit the theme, but is very well worth telling. A lady of fashion, middle-aged or thereabouts, good-looking but pale and with the marks of care and disillusionment on her expressive face, accompanied by her pretty sixteen-years-old daughter, one day called on an artist and asked him to show her his studio. He was a very great artist, the greatest portrait-painter we have ever had and he did not know who she was, but with the sweet courtesy which distinguished him through all his long life—he died recently at a very advanced age—he at once put his work away and took her round his studio to show her everything he thought would interest her. But she was restless and inattentive, and by and by leaving the artist talking to her young daughter she began going round by herself, moving constantly from picture to picture. Presently she made an exclamation, and turning they saw her standing before a picture, a portrait of a girl, staring fixedly at it. "Oh," she cried, and it was a cry of pain, "was I once as beautiful as that?" and burst into tears. She had found the picture she had been looking for, which she had come to see; it had been there twenty to twenty-five years, and the story of it was as follows.
When she was a young girl her mother took her to the great artist to have her portrait painted, and when the work was at length finished she and her mother went to see it. The artist put it before them and the mother looked at it, her face expressing displeasure, and said not one word. Nor did the artist open his lips. And at last the girl, to break the uncomfortable silence, said, "Where shall we hang it, mother?" and the lady replied, "Just where you like, my dear, so long as you hang it with the face to the wall." It was an insolent, a cruel thing to say, but the artist did not answer her bitterly; he said gently that she need not take the portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case he would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for the work. She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he never saw her again. And now Time, the humbler of proud beautiful women, had given him his revenge: the portrait, scorned and rejected when the colour and sparkle of life was in the face, had been looked on once more by its subject and had caused her to weep at the change in herself.
To return. One wishes in these moments of meeting, of surprise and sudden revealings, that it were permissible to speak from the heart, since then the very truth might have more balm than bitterness in it. "Grieve not, dear friend of old days, that I have not escaped the illusion common to all—the idea that those we have not looked on this long time—full five years, let us say—have remained as they were while we ourselves have been moving onwards and downwards in that path in which our feet are set. No one, however hardened he may be, can escape a shock of surprise and pain; but now the illusion I cherished has gone—now I have seen with my physical eyes, and a new image, with Time's writing on it, has taken the place of the old and brighter one, I would not have it otherwise. No, not if I could would I call back the vanished lustre, since all these changes, above all that wistful look in the eyes, do but serve to make you dearer, my sister and friend and fellow-traveller in a land where we cannot find a permanent resting-place."
Alas! it cannot be spoken, and we cannot comfort a sister if she cannot divine the thought; but to brood over these inevitable changes is as idle as it is to lament that we were born into this mutable world. After all, it is because of the losses, the sadnesses, that the world is so infinitely sweet to us. The thought is in Cory's Mimnernus in Church:
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them is because they die.
From this sadness in Bath I went to a greater in Wells, where I had not been for ten years, and timing my visit so as to have a Sunday service at the cathedral of beautiful memories, I went on a Saturday to Shepton Mallet. A small, squalid town, a "manufacturing town" the guide-book calls it. Well, yes; it manufactures Anglo-Bavarian beer in a gigantic brewery which looks bigger than all the other buildings together, the church and a dozen or twenty public-houses included. To get some food I went to the only eating-house in the place, and saw a pleasant-looking woman, plump and high-coloured, with black hair, with an expression of good humour and goodness of every description in her comely countenance. She promised to have a chop ready by the time I had finished looking at the church, and I said I would have it with a small Guinness. She could not provide that, the house, she said, was strictly temperance. "My doctor has ordered me to take it," said I, "and if you are religious, remember that St. Paul tells us to take a little stout when we find it beneficial."
"Yes, I know that's what St. Paul says," she returned, with a heightened colour and a vicious emphasis on the saint's name, "but we go on a different principle."
So I had to go for my lunch to one of the big public-houses, called hotels; but whether it called itself a cow, or horse, or stag, or angel, or a blue or green something, I cannot remember. They gave me what they called a beefsteak pie—a tough crust and under it some blackish cubes carved out of the muscle of an antediluvian ox-and for this delicious fare and a glass of stout I paid three shillings and odd pence.
As I came away Shepton Mallet was shaken to its foundations by a tremendous and most diabolical sound, a prolonged lupine yell or yowl, as if a stupendous wolf, as big, say, as the Anglo-Bavarian brewery, had howled his loudest and longest. This infernal row, which makes Shepton seem like a town or village gone raving mad, was merely to inform the men, and, incidentally, the universe, that it was time for them to knock off work.
Turning my back on the place, I said to myself, "What a fool I am to be sure! Why could I not have been satisfied for once with a cup of coffee with my lunch? I should have saved a shilling, perhaps eighteen-pence, to rejoice the soul of some poor tramp; and, better still, I could have discussed some interesting questions with that charming rosy-faced woman. What, for instance, was the reason of her quarrel with the apostle; by the by, she never rebuked me for misquoting his words; and what is the moral effect (as seen through her clear brown eyes) of the Anglo-Bavarian brewery on the population of the small town and the neighbouring villages?"
The road I followed from Shepton to Wells winds by the water-side, a tributary of the Brue, in a narrow valley with hills on either side. It is a five-mile road through a beautiful country, where there is practically no cultivation, and the green hills, with brown woods in their hollows, and here and there huge masses of grey and reddish Bath stone cropping out on their sides, resembling gigantic castles and ramparts, long ruined and overgrown with ivy and bramble, produce the effect of a land dispeopled and gone back to a state of wildness.
A thaw had come that morning, ending the severest frost experienced this winter anywhere in England, and the valley was alive with birds, happy and tuneful at the end of January as in April. Looking down on the stream the sudden glory of a kingfisher passed before me; but the sooty-brown water-ouzel with his white bib, a haunter, too, of this water, I did not see. Within a mile or so of Wells I overtook a small boy who belonged there, and had been to Shepton like me, noticing the birds. "I saw a kingfisher," I said. "So did I," he returned quickly, with pride. He described it as a biggish bird with a long neck, but its colour was not blue—oh, no! I suggested that it was a heron, a long-necked creature under six feet high, of no particular colour. No, it was not a heron; and after taking thought, he said, "I think it was a wild duck."
Bestowing a penny to encourage him in his promising researches into the feathered world, I went on by a footpath over a hill, and as I mounted to the higher ground there before me rose the noble tower of St. Cuthbert's Church, and a little to the right of it, girt with high trees, the magnificent pile of the cathedral, with green hills and the pale sky beyond. O joy to look again on it, to add yet one more enduring image of it to the number I had long treasured! For the others were not exactly like this one; the building was not looked at from the same point of view at the same season and late hour, with the green hills lit by the departing sun and the clear pale winter sky beyond.