COWFOLD
COWFOLD, half village, half town, lies about three miles to the west of
the great North Road from London to York. As you go from London, about
fifty miles from the Post-Office in St. Martin’s le Grand—the fiftieth
milestone is just beyond the turning—you will see a hand-post with three
arms on it; on one is written in large letters, “To LONDON;” on the
second, in equally large letters, “To YORK;” and on the third, in small
italic letters, “_To Cowfold_.” Two or three years before the events
narrated in the following chapters took place—that is to say, about
twenty years after the death of Zachariah’s second wife—a hundred coaches
a day rolled past that hand-post, and about two miles beyond it was a
huge inn, with stables like cavalry barracks, where horses were changed.
No coach went through Cowfold. When the inhabitants wished to go
northwards or southwards they walked or drove to the junction, and waited
on the little grassy triangle till a coach came by which had room for
them. When they returned they were deposited at the same spot, and the
passengers who were going through from London to York or Scotland, or who
were coming up to London, always seemed to despise people who were taken
up or who were left by the roadside there.
There was, perhaps, some reason for this contempt. The North Road was at
that time one of the finest roads in the world, broad, hard-metalled, and
sound in the wettest weather. That which led to Cowfold was under the
control of the parish, and in winter-time was very bad indeed. When you
looked down it it seemed as if it led nowhere, and indeed the inhabitants
of the town were completely shut off from any close communication with
the outer world. How strange it was to emerge from the end of the lane
and to see those wonderful words, “To LONDON,” “To YORK!” What an
opening into infinity! Boys of a slightly imaginative turn of mind—for
there were boys with imagination even in Cowfold—would, on a holiday
trudge the three miles eastward merely to get to the post and enjoy the
romance of those mysterious fingers. No wonder; for the excitement
begotten by the long stretch of the road—London at one end, York at the
other—by the sight of the _Star_, _Rover_, _Eclipse_, or _Times_ racing
along at twelve miles an hour, and by the inscriptions on them, was worth
a whole afternoon’s cricket or wandering in the fields. Cowfold itself
supplied no such stimulus. The only thing like it was the mail-cart,
which every evening took the letters from the post-office, disappeared
into the dark, nobody could tell whither, and brought letters in the
morning, nobody could tell whence, before the inhabitants were out of
bed. There was a vague belief that it went about fifteen miles and
“caught” something somewhere; but nobody knew for certain, except the
postmistress and the mail-cart driver, who were always remarkably
reticent on the point. The driver was dressed in red, carried a long
horn slung at the side of the cart, and was popularly believed also to
have pistols with him. He never accosted anybody; sat on a solitary
perch just big enough for him; swayed always backwards and forwards a
little in a melancholy fashion as he rode; was never seen during the
day-time, and was not, in any proper sense, a Cowfold person.
Cowfold had four streets, or, more correctly, only two, which crossed one
another at right angles in the middle of the town, and formed there a
kind of square or open place, in which, on Saturdays, a market was held.
The “Angel” was in this square, and the shops grouped themselves round
it. In the centre was a large pump with a great leaden spout that had a
hole bored in it at the side. By stopping up the mouth of the spout with
the hand it was possible through this hole to get a good drink, if a
friend was willing to work the handle; and as the square was a public
playground, the pump did good service, especially amongst the boys, all
of whom preferred it greatly to a commonplace mug. On Sundays it was
invariably chained up; for although it was no breach of the Sabbath to
use the pump in the backyard, the line was drawn there, and it would have
been voted by nine-tenths of Cowfold as decidedly immoral to get water
from the one outside. The shops were a draper’s, a grocer’s, an
ironmonger’s, a butcher’s and a baker’s. All these were regular shops,
with shop-windows, and were within sight of one another.
There were also other houses where things were sold; but these were mere
dwelling-houses, and were at the poorer and more remote ends of Cowfold.
None of the regular shops aforesaid were strictly what they professed to
be. Each of them diverged towards “the general.” The draper sold boots
and shoes; the grocer sold drugs, stationery, horse and cow medicines,
and sheep ointment; and the ironmonger dealt in crockery. Even the
butcher was more than a butcher, for he was never to be seen at his
chopping block, and his wife did all the retail work. He himself was in
the “jobbing” line, and was always jogging about in a cart, in the hind
part of which, covered with a net, was a calf or a couple of pigs. Three
out of the four streets ran out in cottages; but one was more
aristocratic. This was Church Street, which contained the church and the
parsonage. It also had in it four red brick houses, each surrounded with
large gardens. In one lived a brewer who had a brewery in Cowfold, and
owned a dozen beer-shops in the neighbourhood; another was a seminary for
young ladies; in the third lived the doctor; and in the fourth old Mr.
and Mrs. Muston, who had no children, had been there for fifty years; and
this, so far as Cowfold was aware, was all their history. Mr. and Mrs.
Muston and the seminary were the main strength of the church. To be sure
the doctor and the landlord of the “Angel” professed devotion to the
Establishment, but they were never inside the church, except just now and
then, and were charitably excused because of their peculiar calling. The
rest of Cowfold was Dissenting or “went nowhere.” There were three
chapels; one the chapel, orthodox, Independent, holding about seven
hundred persons, and more particularly to be described presently; the
second Wesleyan, new, stuccoed, with grained doors and cast-iron railing;
the third, strict Baptist, ultra-Calvinistic, Antinomian according to the
other sects, dark, down an alley, mean, surrounded by a small
long-grassed graveyard, and named ZOAR in large letters over the long
window in front. The “went nowhere” class was apparently not very
considerable. On Sunday morning at twelve o’clock Cowfold looked as if
it had been swept clean. It was only by comparison between the total
number of church-goers and chapel-goers and the total population that it
could be believed that there was anybody absent from the means of grace;
but if a view could have been taken of the back premises an explanation
would have been discovered. Men and women “did up their gardens,” or
found, for a variety of reasons, that they were forced to stay at home.
In the evening they grew bolder, and strolled through the meadows. It
is, however, only fair to respectable Cowfold to say that it knew nothing
of these creatures, except by employing them on week-days.
With regard to the Wesleyan Chapel, nothing much need be said. Its creed
was imported, and it had no roots in the town. The Church disliked it
because it was Dissenting, and the Dissenters disliked it because it was
half-Church, and, above all, Tory. It was supported mainly by the
brewer, who was drawn thither for many reasons, one of which was
political. Another was, that he was not in trade, and although he
objected to be confounded with his neighbours who stood behind counters,
the Church did not altogether suit him, because there Mr. and Mrs. Muston
and the seminary stood in his way. Lastly, as he owned beer-shops,
supplied liquor which was a proverb throughout the county, and did a
somewhat doubtful business according to the more pious of the Cowfold
Christians, he preferred to be accredited as a religious person by
Methodism than by any other sect, the stamp of Methodism standing out in
somewhat higher relief.
As for Zoar, it was a place apart. Its minister was a big, large-jawed,
heavy-eyed man, who lived in a little cottage hard by. His wife was a
very plain-looking person, who wore even on Sundays a cotton gown without
any ornament, and who took her husband’s arm as they walked down the lane
to the chapel. The Independent minister, the Wesleyan minister, and, of
course, the rector had nothing to do with the minister of Zoar. This was
not because of any heresy or difference of doctrine, but because he was a
poor man and poor persons sat under him. Nevertheless he was not in any
way a characteristic Calvinist. The Calvinistic creed was stuck in him
as in a lump of fat, and had no organising influence upon him whatever.
He had no weight in Cowfold, took part in none of its affairs, and his
ministrations were confined to about fifty sullen, half stupid, wholly
ignorant people who found in the Zoar services something sleepier and
requiring less mental exertion than they needed elsewhere; although it
must be said that the demands made upon the intellect in none of the
places of worship were very extensive. There was a small endowment
attached to Zoar, and on this, with the garden and house rent free, the
minister lived. Once now and then—perhaps once in every three or four
years—there was a baptism in Zoar, and at such times it was crowded. The
children of the congregation, as a rule fell away from it as they grew
up; but occasionally a girl remained faithful and was formally admitted
to its communion. In front of the pulpit was an open space usually
covered; but the boards could be taken up, and then a large kind of tank
was disclosed, which was filled with water when the ceremony was
performed. After hymns had been sung the minister went down into the
water, and the candidate appeared dressed in a long white robe very much
like a night-gown. The dear sister, during a short address, stood on the
brink of the tank for a few moments, and then descended into it beside
the minister, who, taking her by the neck and round the waist, ducked her
fairly and completely. She emerged, and walked dripping into the vestry,
where it was always said that hot brandy and water was ready.
Many of us have felt that we would give all our books if we could but see
with our own eyes how a single day was passed by a single ancient Jewish,
Greek, or Roman family; how the house was opened in the morning; how the
meals were prepared; what was said; how the husband, wife, and children
went about their work; what clothes they wore, and what were their
amusements. Would that the present historian could do as much for
Cowfold! Would that he could bring back one blue summer morning, one
afternoon and evening, and reproduce exactly what happened in Cowfold
Square, in one of the Cowfold shops, in one of the Cowfold parlours, and
in one Cowfold brain and heart. Could this be done with strictest
accuracy, a book would be written, although Cowfold was not Athens, Rome,
nor Jerusalem, which would live for many many years longer than much of
the literature of this century. But alas! the preliminary image in the
mind of the writer is faint enough, and when he comes to trace it, the
pencil swerves and goes off into something utterly unlike it. An
attempt, however, to show what the waking hours in Cowfold Square were
like may not be out of place. The shopkeeper came into his shop at
half-past seven, about half an hour after the shutters had been taken
down by his apprentice. At eight o’clock breakfast was ready; but before
breakfast there was family worship, and a chapter was read from the
Bible, followed by an extempore prayer from the head of the household.
If the master happened to be absent, it was not considered proper that
the mistress should pray extempore, and she used a book of “Family
Devotions.” A very solid breakfast followed, and business began. It was
very slow, but it was very human—much more so than business at the
present day in the City. Every customer had something to say beyond his
own immediate errand, and the shop was the place where everything
touching Cowfold interests was abundantly discussed. Cowfold too, did
much trade in the country round it. Most of the inhabitants kept a gig,
and two or three times, perhaps, in a week a journey somewhere or other
was necessary which was not in the least like a journey in a railway
train. Debts in the villages were collected by the creditor in person,
who called and invited his debtors to a most substantial dinner at the
inn. At one o’clock Cowfold dined. Between one and two nobody was to be
seen in the streets, and the doors were either fastened or a bell was put
upon them. After dinner the same duties returned in the shop; but inside
the house dinner was the turning-point of the day. When the “things were
washed, up,” servant and mistress began to smarten themselves, and
disappearing into their bedrooms, emerged at four, to make preparations
for tea, the meal most enjoyed in all Cowfold. If any spark of wit slept
in any Cowfoldian male or female, it appeared then. No invitations to
dinner were ever heard of; but tea was the opportunity for hospitality,
especially amongst women. The minister, when he visited, invariably came
to tea. The news circulated at tea, and, in fact, at tea between five
and six, Cowfold, if its intellect could have been measured by a properly
constructed gauge, would have been found many degrees higher in the scale
than at any other hour. Granted that the conversation was personal,
trivial, and even scandalous, it was in a measure philosophical.
Cowfold, though it knew nothing, or next to nothing of abstractions, took
immense interest in the creatures in which they were embodied. It would
have turned a deaf ear to any debate on the nature of ethical obligation;
but it was very keen indeed in apportioning blame to its neighbours who
had sinned, and in deciding how far they had gone wrong. Cowfold in
other words believed that flesh and blood, and not ideas, are the school
and the religion for most of us, and that we learn a language by the
examples rather than by the rules. The young scholar fresh from his
study is impatient at what he considers the unprofitable gossip about the
people round the corner; but when he gets older he sees that often it is
much better than his books, and that distinctions are expressed by a
washerwoman, if the objects to be distinguished eat and drink and sleep,
which he would find it difficult to make with his symbols. Moreover, the
little Cowfold clubs and parties understood what they were saying, and so
far had an advantage over the clubs and parties which, since the days of
penny newspapers, now discuss in Cowfold the designs of Russia, the
graduation of the Income Tax, or the merits and demerits of the
administration. The Cowfold horizon has now been widened, to use the
phrase of an enlightened gentleman who came down and lectured there on
the criminality of the advertisement duty; but unfortunately the eyes
remain the same. Cowfold now looks abroad, and is very eloquent upon the
fog in the distance, and the objects it thinks it sees therein; but,
alas! what it has gained in inclusive breadth it has lost in definition.
Politics, however, were not unknown in Cowfold; for before 1832 it was a
borough, and after 1832 it was one of the principal polling-places for
the county. Nevertheless it was only on the eve of an election that
anybody dabbled in them, and even then they were very rudimentary. The
science to most of the voters meant nothing more than a preference of
blue to yellow, or yellow to blue; and women had nothing whatever to do
with it, excepting that wives always, of course, took their husbands’
colours. Politics, too, as a rule, were not mentioned in private houses.
They were mostly reserved for the “Angel,” and for the brandies and water
and pipes which collected there in the evening.
To return. After tea the master went back once more to his counter, and
the shutters were put up at eight. From eight to nine was an hour of
which no account can be given: The lights were left burning in the shops,
and the neighbour across the way looked in and remained talking till his
supper was ready. Supper at nine, generally hot, was an institution
never omitted, and, like tea, was convivial; but the conviviality was of
a distinctly lower order. Everybody had whisky, gin, or brandy
afterwards, and every male person who was of age smoked. There was, as a
rule, no excess, but the remarks were apt to be disconnected and woolly;
and the wife, who never had grog for herself, but always sipped her
husband’s went to sleep. Eleven o’clock saw all Cowfold in bed, and
disturbed only by such dreams as were begotten of the previous liver and
bacon and alcohol.
There were no villains amongst that portion of the inhabitants with which
this history principally concerns itself, nor was a single adventure of
any kind ever known to happen beyond the adventures of being born,
getting married, falling sick, and dying, with now and then an accident
from a gig. Consequently it might be thought that there was no romance
in Cowfold. There could not be a greater mistake. The history of every
boy or girl of ordinary make is one of robbery, murder, imprisonment,
death sentence, filing of chains, scaling of prison walls, recapture,
scaffold, reprieve, poison, and pistols; the difference between such a
history and that in the authorised versions being merely circumstantial.
The garden of Eden, the murder of Cain, the deluge, the salvation of
Noah, the exodus from Egypt, David and Bathsheba, with the murder of
Uriah, the Assyrian invasion, the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the
Resurrection from the Dead; to say nothing of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, the tragedy of Count Cenci, the execution of Mary Queen of
Scots, the Inquisition in Spain, and Revolt of the Netherlands, all
happened in Cowfold, as well as elsewhere, and were perhaps more
interesting there because they could be studied in detail and the records
were authentic.
Church Street, Cowfold—that is to say, the street in which the church
stood—was tolerably broad going east and west, so that the sun shone full
on the white window-frames and red brick of Mr. Muston’s house, in which
everything seemed to sleep in eternal calm. On the opposite side was the
seminary, also red brick and white paint, facing the north; but, to make
amends, the garden had a southern aspect, and the back of the house was
covered with a huge magnolia whose edges curled round to the western
side, so that it could be seen by wayfarers. It was a sight not to be
forgotten—the red brick, the white paint, the July sun; the magnolia
leaves, the flanking elms on the east high above the chimneys, the
glimpse of the acre of lawn through the great gates when they happened to
be open, the peace, so profound, of summer noon! How lovely it looks as
it hovers unsteadily before the eye, seen through the transfiguring haze
of so many years! It was really, there is no doubt about it, handsomer
than the stuccoed villa which stares at us over the way; but yet, if
Cowfold Church Street, red brick, white paint, elms, lawn, and midsummer
repose could be restored at the present moment, would it be exactly what
the vision of it is? What is this magic gift which even for the humblest
of us paints and frames these enchanting pictures? It is nothing less
than the genius which is common to humanity. If we are not able to draw
or model, we possess the power to select, group, and clothe with an ideal
grace, which is the very soul of art, and every man and woman, every
bush, nay, every cabbage, cup, and saucer, provided only it be not
actually before us, becomes part of a divine picture. Would that we
could do with the present what we do with the past! We _can_ do
something if we try.
At the end of Church Street came the vicarage, and then the churchyard,
with the church. Beyond was the park, which half embraced Cowfold, for
it was possible to enter it not only from Church Street, but from North
Street, which ran at right angles to it. The Hall was not much. It was
a large plain stone mansion, built in the earlier part of the eighteenth
century; but in front of the main entrance was a double row of limes
stretching for a quarter of a mile, and the whole of the park was broken
up into soft swelling hills, from whose tops, owing to the flatness of
the country round, an almost immeasurable distance could be seen,
gradually losing itself in deepening mist of tenderest blue. The park,
too, was not rigidly circumscribed. Public roads led through it. It
melted on two or three sides into cultivated fields, and even the private
garden of the Hall seemed a part of it, for there was nothing between
them but a kind of grassy ditch and an almost invisible fence. The
domain of Cowfold Hall was the glory of Cowfold and the pride of its
inhabitants. The modern love of scenery was not known in Cowfold, and
still less was that worship of landscape and nature known which, as
before observed, is peculiar to the generation born under the influence
of Wordsworth. We have learnt, however, from Zachariah that even before
Wordsworth’s days people were sometimes touched by dawn or sunset. The
morning cheered, the moon lent pathos and sentiment, and the stars awoke
unanswerable interrogations in Cowfold, although it knew no poetry, save
Dr. Watts, Pollok’s _Course of Time_, and here and there a little of
Cowper. Under the avenue, too, whose slender columns, in triple rows on
either side, rose to an immense height, and met in a roof overhead with
all the grace of cathedral stone, and without its superincumbent weight
and imprisonment—a roof that was not impervious to the sunlight, but let
it pass and fall in quivering flakes on the ground—Cowfold generally took
off its hat, partly, no doubt, because the place was cool, but also as an
act of homage. Here and in the woods adjoining youths and maidens for
three hundred years had walked and made love, for, though the existing
house was new, it stood on the site of a far older building. Dead men
and women, lord and churl, gone to indistinguishable dust, or even beyond
that—gone perhaps, into vapour and gas, which had been blown to New
Zealand, and become men and women again—had burned with passion here, and
vowed a union which was to last beyond the Judgment Day. They wept here,
quarrelled here, rushed again into one another’s arms here, swore to one
another here, when Henry the Eighth was king; and they wept here,
quarrelled here, embraced here, swore here, in exactly the same mad
fashion, when William the Fourth sat upon the throne. Half-way up the
avenue was a stone pillar commanding a gentle descent, one way to the
Hall, and the other way to the lodge. It set forth the anguish of a
former lord of the time of Queen Anne, who had lost his wife when she was
twenty-six years old. She was beneath him in rank, but very beautiful,
and his affection for her had fought with and triumphed over the cruel
opposition of father, mother, and relations, who had other designs. He
had made enemies of them all; but he won his wife, and, casting her in
the scale, father, mother, and friends were as gossamer. She died two
years after the wedding—to the very day. Rich in her love, he had never
taken a thought to propitiate anybody, nor to make friends with the
Mammon of Unrighteousness, and when she suddenly departed, he turned
round and found himself alone. So far from knocking at men’s doors, he
more fiercely hated those who now, touched with pity, would gladly have
welcomed him. He broke from them all, lived his own life, was reputed to
be a freethinker, and when he came to his estate, a long while
afterwards, he put up the obelisk, and recorded in Latin how Death, the
foul adulterer, had ravished his sweet bride—the coward Death whom no man
could challenge—and that the inconsolable bridegroom had erected this
monument in memory of her matchless virtues. That was all: no blessed
resurrection nor trust in the Saviour. The Reverend John Broad, minister
of Tanner’s Lane Chapel, when he brought visitors here regularly
translated the epitaph. He was not very good at Latin, but he had
somehow found out its meaning. He always observed that it was not
classic, and consequently not easy to render. He pointed out, too, as a
further curiosity, which somewhat increased the difficulty to any
ordinary person, that V was used for U, and I for J. He never, as might
be expected, omitted to enlarge upon the omission of any reference to the
Atoning Blood and the Life to Come, and remarked how the poor man’s
sufferings would have been entirely “assuaged”—a favourite word with Mr.
Broad—if he had believed in those “remedies.” At the same time Mr. Broad
dwelt upon the “associations” of the avenue, which, he thought, added
much to its natural “attractiveness.” Cowfold thought so too, and
welcomed the words as exactly expressing what it felt. John Broad and
Cowfold were right, and more right, perhaps, than they knew. The
draper’s young man, who walked through the park with his arm round his
young woman’s waist, looked up at the obelisk, repeated its story, and
became more serious. Thus it came to pass that the old lord’s love lived
again somewhat in the apprentice, and that which to the apprentice seemed
most particularly himself was a little bit of the self of the Queen
Anne’s earl long since asleep in the vault under Cowfold Church.