HOW THEY STARTED FOR THE MOTHER OF RIVERS.
Beatrice had promised to meet Burrough at the moor gate on Monday
morning, that they might start for Cranmere. The weather was
gloriously fine. There was scarcely any breeze. A better morning could
not have fallen to their lot. Burrough felt curiously elate while he
made his preparations for wandering into the wilderness. He talked all
the time to the lineal descendant of the great Grimalkin, who occupies
the same position among the feline race of the West Country as is held
by King Arthur in the minds of men.
“This is a great day, King o’ the Cats. A day to be noted by red
letters and marked with a white stone. I’m going a roaming across
rivers and rocks, through bogs and quags; and she is coming too. The
Queen of Trevalyor is coming, Peterkin. She likes me a little--she
must, or she wouldn’t be alone with me all day. I’m not too old after
all. What’s thirty-five when you feel strong and well, and look it
too? I’m young, my brindled monarch. I’m still a boy. No wrinkles yet,
no grey hairs. I am not yet old enough to make my own living. If that
is not a sign of infancy, what is? Out of the way, or I shall tread
upon your royal tail. It pleases us to be merry to-day, for we have
issued our decree commanding our loving subjects to make holiday.
Don’t you hear the pixies scampering up and down the gorge? They are
crying as loud as they can, ‘Ho and away for Cranmere Pool.’”
Peter jerked his tail and stalked outside, perhaps considering that,
if there were any basis of truth for this statement, a plump pixy
would make a pleasant change of diet. Burrough stuffed his knapsack
with provisions for the journey, and hurried outside to find his
ashplant which was to serve him for alpenstock.
Burrough’s private idea was that the great plateau, which Beatrice and
he proposed reaching that day, was not strictly speaking in England at
all, because Dartmoor had neither been conquered nor legally annexed.
The inhabitants had a perfect right to raise the flag of a republic
and proclaim Dartmoor as a sort of English San Marino. Dartmoor was
still Little Britain. Although it was attacked often by the Saxons it
remained impregnable. The Celtic inhabitants of the moor retained
their language until near the dawn of modern England, until long after
the county which surrounded it had been incorporated within the
western realm. As an independent and unconquered state it passed into
the jurisdiction of the Duchy of Cornwall, although the Duchy obtained
no legal title to it. Legally Dartmoor was not in Devonshire;
politically it was not in England. If an adventurer were to seize the
moor, and proclaim himself First Emperor, none except the commoners
would have a legal right to evict him.
Once upon a time Dartmoor was an immense mountain of granite. The
ladies and gentlemen of that period probably wore hair and tails, and
had not progressed far enough to talk scandal or to be troubled by
politics. That mountain is now ruined. Nothing but the stump remains.
It has been worn away by the winds and rain of ages. It may have taken
a hundred years to wear away a few grains of that tough granite which
still cannot be cut by any tool. Frost, storm, and showers wore that
huge mountain away. The softer portions went first, and the rivers
following the line of least resistance cut and scraped and hollowed as
they ran unceasingly, until the defiles, cleaves, and gorges were
made, to be a delight to quite a new race of beings, who had abandoned
the fashion of wearing tails, and instead of hair cumbered their
bodies with a vast amount of superfluous clothing. The harder portions
naturally resisted the action of the elements longer, and they appear
now as the hills and ranges of the moor, capped each one by unusually
tough masses of granite which are called tors. Some of these masses
look as if they had been built by some Permian or Damnonian corvée;
others take upon themselves the shapes of giants or monstrous beasts;
others in pure playfulness will log or rock upon persuasion.
Where one would expect to find hills there is only a plateau. The big
hills are upon the borders of the moor; the central part is a more or
less flat-topped surface, broken by small hillocks having each its
distinctive tor, named usually after the form it is supposed to
represent. Between stretch the peat bogs, springy in summer, spongy in
winter. The peat when cut in its dry state is as soft and lovely a
brown as a woman’s hair. Here the shaggy cattle wander, the wild
ponies frisk, and the horned sheep browse. The wildness is extreme,
the solitude intense. There are no trees upon the moor, nothing but
the stone clatters, the bogs and rivers, the heather, whortleberry,
and gorse. The greater gorse blooms during winter and spring; the
smaller species flowers in summer and autumn; thus all the year round
the fairies’ gold is lying upon the moor.
It is the rivers which are the pride and glory of the little republic
of Dartmoor. Broadly it may be said that all have their origin upon
the most inaccessible, the loneliest, most solemn and dreary, and the
highest of all Dartmoor plateaus--the Mother of Rivers, Cranmere. Dart
and Teign are the fairest rivers in the world. To walk by the Teign in
the bluebell season is to be in fairyland. To trace the windings of
the Dart is to become the central figure of a dream. There is also the
Okement, river of ferns--it was this which flowed through Beatrice’s
Blissland--and the noisy river Taw; and many another, with rattling
brooks innumerable, all streaming from the breasts of Mother Cranmere
to irrigate the green valleys of Devon, which was once a part of
heaven, but broke off one day and fell to earth.
These rivers of Dartmoor have a beauty and romance all their own, as
they dash their cold, sweet water to the western towns, where
England’s commercial prosperity was built up, and whence her sailors
pushed away to conquer Spain. There is one beauty of the Alps, and
another of English hills; one beauty of the Rhine, and another of the
Dart. Nothing is big, and nothing little, when referred to its proper
scale. Cramping smallness is usually more lovely, if less sublime,
than oppressive largeness. The crystal rivers of the moor run down
between brown banks of peat decked with ferns and asphodel. Here they
flow into wizard pools; there they thrill from one rocky ledge to
another in a succession of sparkling stickles or little falls. They
are always bright, always laughing, and possess a wondrous freshness.
Sometimes these rivers forget they have risen upon Cranmere, and are
destined to flow through merely terrestrial scenes. They revert
sometimes to their former state, when Devon was a part of the heavenly
country; or they lose their way, as it were, to find themselves,
somewhere about the month of May, passing through some land that never
was. Thus one reach of the Tavy passes through Arcady; one reach of
the Teign through fairyland; one reach of the Dart through dreamland.
And the dreams of that land are good!
Not many legends of the wild Cymric imagination remain. Arthurian
legend has become forgotten. Board-schools have killed the pixies.
Only the more vulgar fancies remain. One of them is connected with the
Dart, which was originally not so much a river bringing water to the
people as a god who demanded tribute from them. That tribute was a
human heart each year--one year the heart of a maid, the next that of
a man, and so on for ever.
In the vast and wild solitude of the moor it is curious to consider
that here was once the Birmingham of England. Beside the rivers appear
grass-grown mounds which betray the former working places of the
tin-streamers. Here and there may be seen the ruins of their huts and
homes. Their bridges across the rivers--huge slabs of granite known as
clappers--are in use to-day probably in very much the same condition
as they were a thousand years ago. During the Bronze Age the demand
for tin was about equal to the present demand for steel, and the tin
of “Dertymore” was famous before the Roman empire had declined. Upon
Crockern Tor, an equal distance from the Stannary Towns, the Tinners’
Parliament was held in the open air. Offenders against its laws were
sentenced to death and torture in its horrible dungeon of Lydford,
more foul a prison than any devised by the intelligence and cruelty of
the Spanish Inquisitors.
Cranmere is the practical summing-up of all that is wild and weird
upon Dartmoor, and of all that is lonely and drear. It is a great
watershed up among the clouds, the roof, as it were, of the moor. The
so-called Pool in its centre may be reached by any active pedestrian
during the summer months on those days when the gunners of the British
artillery are not sending their shells across its boggy surface. In
winter it is practically inaccessible alike to man and beast. There is
danger then. Wool-like mists may encircle the wanderer suddenly, or
the driving snowstorm spring up.
In every part the peaty soil has been rent into fissures. These
crevasses present the most striking feature of the region. They are
innumerable, and some are deep, while all are treacherous. The
traveller jumps one to find himself balancing insecurely upon the
brink of another in every respect identical with that he has just
crossed. Their angular crookedness is amazing. They curve and zigzag
into all manner of snaky shapes. Their crumbling edges are often
hidden by tufts of bleached grass or knotted heather, and a false step
may mean a sudden descent into slime and mud. One would imagine that
the entire region had been tortured by earthquake, or that some Titan
had fallen in frenzy upon the plateau and rent it with his hands and
teeth.
Each of these crevasses is, in its humble way, a water-course. Each is
a vein which does its part in the great act of river-making. During
the summer months the mud with which they are choked is of a glue-like
consistency. As autumn approaches the mass loosens and becomes
oil-like, until in winter the mud vanishes and water begins to flow.
Rivers have humble origins; they are not born great, but they have
greatness thrust upon them. The source of any particular river can
hardly be discovered. It is merely a muddy crevasse amid a hundred
others. But the hundred are destined finally to feed the one, until
the river casts its slough and appears fresh.
While the maze is penetrated, by means of jumps and scrambles, there
are pools--small ragged patches of black and sullen water fringed by
cotton-grass and bleached sedges. The water is so thick that the wind
hardly ruffles it. Probably these pools are crowded with invisible
insect life, but to the eye they might be poison-pits, so dead are
they and so black. One cannot wonder if the Celtic moormen should have
peopled this desolate region of crevasse and tarn with the souls of
sinners. Here was once the site of purgatory. There was a time when
the West-Welsh inhabitants of Dartmoor feared to climb upon the great
plateau because of the piteous cries issuing from the crevasses.
Nothing could be more suggestive of souls in agony than the groaning
of the wind across Cranmere. With the sun “sinking in its roaring
home,” with the wind sounding like grated doors heavily creaking, and
the dripping clouds of mist around; with the fissures and the tarns
below, the desolate peat-wastes, the deep black sheets of mud; with
the solitude and lifelessness on every side, the imaginative Celt
might well have hastened to find an easier way by which to escape from
that haunted region to his home.
In the centre of this saturated waste was once a pool of some size.
There are moormen who remember the sedge-choked sheet of black water.
It was surrounded by beds of rushes. The rushes have gone, and the
pool which nurtured them has gone too, drained by the turve-cutters.
The finest peat in the world is cut upon the edge of Cranmere. What
was the Pool is now an almost oval depression in the surface. The
spongy bank of peat slopes gradually, and a cairn appears made of
turves and marble-like stones, and topped by a sad post, to which from
time to time a flag has been fastened, only to be torn to fragments
and utterly demolished by the furious winter gales. Two tin boxes are
pushed into a hole at the side of the cairn. The one contains a book
to receive names and addresses of visitors who succeed in conquering
Cranmere: the other is a post-box. They who reach the Pool leave
letters and postcards to various friends and relations. The next
arrival takes these missives, and upon returning to civilisation posts
them without delay. Letters posted at Cranmere do not often miscarry,
even though they may not reach their destination until many months
later.
There is little to be seen upon Cranmere. Nature is naked and
unrelieved. She is cold, hard and fierce. She is there not the Nature
which smiles and is kind. She is the Nature which is exceedingly
cruel. All the epithets usually applied to tragedy may be applied to
Cranmere. Yet peace, and not sorrow, is the dominant note. On a calm
day--and there are few perfectly calm at so great an altitude--the
stillness is weird. It is unnatural. Perhaps there is not a region in
all the world more silent than Cranmere. There is no life; all around
there is death. But by one of Nature’s little ironies, Cranmere is the
centre of life and the source of it. For she is the mother of nearly
all the rivers in Devon.
Burrough had not long to wait beside the moor gate, for Beatrice was
punctual. He went forward to meet her as she tripped along, fresh and
sparkling like a part of the morning. She was attired like the
practical Cornish girl she could be when she liked. She wore a short
grey skirt which did not reach her ankles, and a tight-fitting jersey
of white wool, over which was slung a little satchel, which she
declared contained everything that could possibly be required for the
expedition from a packet of pins to a white elephant. Her little feet
were shod with two absurd miniatures of men’s Dartmoor
boots--thick-soled and hob-nailed. Her head was uncovered, and so were
her hands.
“Since it’s necessary to commence with the weather,” she cried, “what
a day!”
“Ready to start?” asked Burrough.
“Ay, ready,” cried Beatrice.
The moor gate banged behind, and they were off.
“It’s up, everlasting up,” she said. “It’s drag, climb, and jump,
henceforth and for ever, and we mustn’t talk too much. I’ll tell you
why,” she rattled on, anxious to ignore her own advice. “Once I made
this trip alone. I hope you’re impressed. I went to Cranmere alone,
and I wondered why I was so little tired when I got back. It was
because I had no talking or laughing to do. Talking and laughing are
very exhausting.”
“We cannot walk like mutes,” he objected.
“The thing is difficult, but not impossible. We might make signs.
Point, gesticulate, raise our eyebrows, shrug our shoulders. Do you
know the deaf and dumb alphabet? But that wouldn’t do. It’s eyes on
your feet hereabouts, or great is the fall. Now this is a breathless
bit. We won’t talk for ten minutes.”
She compressed her lips firmly and looked down. They began to ascend,
winding among the big blocks of granite. Beatrice kept glancing up
with a smile, and a saucy gesture _apropos_ of nothing. Presently she
pointed at the sun, then patted her hair. Burrough nodded, and wiped
his forehead, tacitly acknowledging the heat. Beatrice with difficulty
restrained a titter. Then Burrough held up one finger and shook his
head sadly. Beatrice nodded with equal gravity, and Burrough held up
two fingers, looking pleased and happy. The girl nodded again,
although she was entirely bewildered, and immediately held up three
pink fingers, which looked almost transparent in that clear light.
Burrough shook his head quite savagely.
“I must speak, or I shall burst,” cried Beatrice. “What ever do you
mean?”
“When I held up one finger, I meant to signify that during my previous
walks here I have been alone,” he answered. “Then I held up two, to
show how glad I was to have you for a companion; and when you held up
three, I took it that you meant there should be someone else with us.”
“That was much too deep for me,” said Beatrice. “I put up three
fingers just to beat your two. I couldn’t imagine what you were
driving at. So you thought I meant you ought to have a chaperon?”
He laughed at her wilful perversion, while she with a quick glance
went on, “We open-air Cornish girls can look after ourselves. We are
not hot-house plants by any manner of means. You’re an open-air
person, aren’t you?”
“Altogether,” Burrough answered, “through necessity, not from choice.”
“But you are all right now?” Beatrice suggested quickly.
“Quite well, so long as I am here,” he said.
“I’ve been always awfully strong,” Beatrice went on. “At home my
bedroom looks out upon the sea. I have the window open winter and
summer, in storm and fine weather, and my bed is close beside it. I
won’t have blind or curtains. I like to feel the salt breeze on my
face. I can lie and watch the moon rising out of the sea, or the
lightning flashing upon it, and I can watch the fishing boats sailing
by. Sometimes I get my pillows soaked with rain, or the spray which
dashes over the cliff. And after a stormy night my bed is in such a
mess. Dry leaves and dust, and bits of stick, and my hair is simply
filled with wreckage. Beetles and moths and bats come to visit me, and
more than once a bird has been flung in by the wind. I get up in the
morning feeling that I must dance and sing.”
“It’s the way to keep young and live long,” said Burrough, in his
pedantic manner.
“Of course it is. These commoners of Dartmoor could live as long as
they liked if they were not such fools. They sleep four or five in one
small room with every chink sealed up even in summer. They pass the
night undoing the good that the day has done. Nearly everyone on the
moor goes off between seventy and eighty. They break up suddenly and
go off, worn out by want of night air. Our fisher-folk in Cornwall are
just the same. It’s no good talking to them. I’ve tried lots of times.
‘Sleep with my window open! Why, ’twould kill me,’ is what they say.
One old woman sang quite a different song when I tackled her on the
subject. ‘Us don’t want to bide over a hundred years,’ she said. ‘Us
can’t afford it. Us bides too long as ’tis.’ You can’t argue against
that,” finished Beatrice with a laugh.
“We’re on our way back to wigwams and hut circles,” suggested
Burrough.
“Yes,” she laughed. “The house agent’s advertisement in the future
will be something like this: ‘A charming modern residence for sale.
Contains four large stones, carefully propped up and leaning securely
against one another; an admirable hearthstone, and roofed most
artistically with rushes. A perpetual current of cold east wind
guaranteed. Pretty but inexpensive.’ And here’s another from the same
list: ‘A few hurdles and a piece of sailcloth to be had cheap. Could
be converted into a nice suburban villa.’”
“How were you brought up?” Burrough asked.
“Why, in the most sensible manner possible. Just as if I’d been a
chicken. My father put up a ring-fence on the lawn, and I was dropped
inside to crawl about and roll as I pleased. There was a sort of
kennel for me to go to when it rained, but I think on the whole I
preferred the wet grass. And this is the result,” concluded Beatrice,
with a kind of shyness that was new to her.
Before Burrough could make the complimentary reply which he intended,
she anticipated him by an exclamation of pleasure and the cry--
“Away to the right, or we’ll be in the marsh!”
Burrough looked up and saw Steeperton standing beyond like Chrephren’s
pyramid, its grey peak pricking the soft blue sky, and the silvery
ribbon of Taw River winding round its base. He realised suddenly how
entirely alone they were.
“There’s a sort of pony-track this way--beneath the Tor,” said
Beatrice the guide.