THE INTERLUDE OF HIGH BOWER
Ann must have had the bailiff’s visit in mind when she said, not long
after:
“Philip, what would you give to be back, all of you, at Abercorran?”
“Silly,” he answered, “I haven’t got anything good enough to give, you
know.... But I would give up going to Our Country for a whole year. I
would do anything.... But this isn’t bad, is it, Arthur?”
Depth of feeling was (to me) so well conveyed by those two mean words
that for the life of me I could only corroborate them with a fervent
repetition:
“Not bad.”
The words expressed, too, a sense of loyalty to the remote idea of
Abercorran town itself.
“But High Bower was better, wasn’t it,” said Ann, to tease him, and to
remind him of his duty to the old Abercorran.
“Come on, Arthur,” was his reply, “I have got a squirrel to skin.”
High Bower was the place in Wiltshire where the Morgan family had
paused between Abercorran and London. It was not quite a satisfactory
memory to some of them, because there seemed no reason why they should
have left Wales if they were going to live in the country; and,
then, in a year’s time they went to London, after all. Philip never
mentioned High Bower, but Mr Stodham knew it--what did he not know in
Wiltshire?--and one day he asked me to accompany him on a visit. He had
promised to look over the house for a friend.
The village was an archipelago of thatched cottages, sprinkled here
and there, and facing all ways, alongside an almost equal number of
roads, lanes, tracks, footpaths, and little streams, so numerous and
interlaced that they seemed rather to cut it off from the world than
to connect it. With much the same materials to use--thatch and brick,
thatch and half-timber, or tiles for both roof and walls--the builders
of it had made each house different, because thus it had to be, or the
man would have it so, or he could not help it, or thus time had decided
with the help of alterations and additions. All were on one side of
the shallow, flashing river, though it so twined that it appeared
to divide some and to surround others, and no bridges were visible.
Some of the houses were out in the midst of the mown fields with
their troops of tossers, rakers, and pitchforkers, and the high-laden
waggons like houses moving. Others were isolated in the sappy, unfooted
water-meadows full of tall sedge and iris that hid the hooting moorhen.
Remains of the old mill and mill-house, of red, zig-zagged bricks and
black timber in stripes, stood apparently on an island, unapproached
by road or path, the walls bathed and half-buried in dark humid weeds
and the foaming bloom of meadow-sweet. The village had two sounds, the
clucking of fowls disturbed from a bath in the road dust, and the gush
of the river over an invisible leafy weir, and this was no sound at
all, but a variety of silence.
At length I realised that the village was at an end, and before us
was a steep, flowery bank, along which at oblivious intervals a train
crawled out of beeches, looked a little at the world and entered
beeches again, then a tunnel. The train left the quiet quieter, nor
did it stop within five miles of High Bower. The railway, which had
concentrated upon itself at certain points the dwellings and business
of the countryside, left this place, which had resolved to remain where
it was, more remote than before.
As we went under the bridge of the embankment I thought we must have
missed the Morgans’ old house. I wondered if it could have been that
last and best farmhouse, heavy and square, that stood back, beyond a
green field as level as a pool and three chestnut-trees. Horses were
sheltering from the sun under the trees, their heads to the trunks. The
cows had gone to the shade of the house, and were all gazing motionless
towards the impenetrable gloom of the windows. The barns, sheds,
and lodges, were in themselves a village. The last outhouse almost
touched the road, a cart-lodge shadowy and empty but for a waggon with
low sides curving up forward like the bows of a boat, and itself as
delicate as a boat, standing well up on four stout, not ponderous,
wheels, and bearing a builder’s name from East Stour in Dorset. Now
this house and its appurtenances I thought entirely suitable to the
Morgans, and my thoughts returned to them as we went under the bridge.
Well, and there was the house we were making for, at the foot of the
embankment on the other side. It solved a small mystery at once. Our
road, before coming to the railway, had cut through a double avenue
of limes, which appeared to start at the embankment and terminate a
quarter of a mile away at the top of a gentle rise. They were fine
trees, many of them clouded with bunches of mistletoe as big as herons’
nests. What was the meaning of the avenue? At neither end was a house
to be seen. But, there, at the foot of the embankment, separated from
it by two pairs of limes, was the house belonging to the avenue--the
Morgans’ house, New House by name. The railway had cut through its
avenue; a traveller passing could easily have thrown a stone into any
one of the chimneys of New House.
A weedy track led out of the road on the right, along under the
embankment, up to the house. No smoke rose up from it, not a sound
came from the big square windows, or the door between its two pairs of
plain stone columns, or the stable on one hand or the garden on the
other. The sun poured down on it; it did not respond. It looked almost
ugly, a biggish, awkward house, neither native nor old, its walls
bare and weathered without being mellowed. In a window, facing anyone
who approached it from the road, it announced that it was “To be let
or sold” through a firm of solicitors in London. The flower borders
were basely neglected, yet not wild. Cows had broken in.... It was an
obvious stranger, and could only have seemed at home on the main road a
little way out of some mean town. It was going to the dogs unlamented.
As we were opening the door a cottage woman attached herself to us,
eager, as it proved, to be the first villager to enter since the
Morgans, “the foreigners,” had departed. The railway embankment, as
she explained, had driven them out, cut off the sun, and kept away new
tenants. She left no corner unexplored, sometimes alleging some kind
of service to us, but as a rule out of unashamed pure delight, talking
continually either in comment on what was there, or to complete the
picture of the Morgans, as seen or invented during those twelve months
of their residence.
They were foreigners, she said, who talked and sang in a foreign
language, but could speak English when they wanted to. They were not
rich, never entertained. Such ill-behaved children.... No, there was
nothing against them; they didn’t owe a penny.... She admired the big
rooms downstairs, with pillared doorways and mantelpieces--they had
a dingy palatial air. In the same rooms with the shiny columns were
broad, blackened, open fire-places, numerous small irregular cupboards,
cracked and split. Walls and doors were undoubtedly marked by arrows
and pistol-shot; someone had drawn a target in a corner--“Master
Roland,” said the woman. “He was a nice lad, too; or would have been if
he had been English.” The spider-webs from wall and ceiling might have
been as old as the house. “The maids had too much to do, playing with
all those children, to keep the place clean. Ignorant those children
were, too. I asked one of the little ones who was the Queen, and he
said ‘Gwenny....’ I don’t know ... some Jerusalem name that isn’t in
the history books.... I asked an older one what was the greatest city
in the world, and he said ‘Rome.’ They were real gentry, too. But
there was something funny about them. One of them came running into my
shop once and said to me, ‘I’ve found the dragon, Mrs Smith. Come and
see--I’ll protect you. He has four horns of ebony, two long and two not
so long, and two big diamond eyes a long way from his horns. He has a
neck as thick as his body, but smooth; his body is like crape. He has
no legs, but he swims over the world like a fish. He is as quiet as an
egg.’ And he took me down the road and showed me a black slug such as
you tread on by the hundred without so much as knowing it. They had no
more regard for the truth than if they were lying....
“You never saw the like of them for happiness. When I used to stop at
the gate and see them in the grass, perhaps soaking wet, tumbling about
and laughing as if they weren’t Christians at all, I said to myself:
‘Oh, dear, dear me, what trouble there must be in store for those
beautiful children, that they should be so happy now. God preserve
them, if it be his will.’ I whispered: ‘Hush, children, be a bit
more secret-like about it.’ It don’t do to boast about anything, let
alone happiness. I remember one of them dying sudden. She was little
more than a baby; such a child for laughing, as if she was possessed;
pretty, too, a regular little moorhen, as you might say, for darkness
and prettiness, and fond of the water. I saw one of the maids after
the funeral, and took occasion to remark that it was a blessing the
child was taken to a better world so soon, before she had known a
minute’s sorrow. She fired up--she was outlandish, too, as the maids
always were, and talked their tongue, and stood up for them as if they
were paid for it--and she says, looking that wicked, ‘Master says he
will never forgive it, and I never will. If she had been a peevish
child, I don’t say we shouldn’t have been wild because she had missed
everything, but to take away a child like that before she could defend
herself is a most unchristian act’ ... and that sort of thing. Oh,
there was wickedness in them, though they never wronged anybody.”
She pointed to the shot marks in a door, and pronounced that no good
could come to a family where the children did such things. At each
room she made guesses, amounting often to positive asseveration, as to
whose it had been. Few enough were the marks of ownership to untutored
eyes--chiefly the outlines, like shadows, of furniture and of books
that once had leaned against the wall. One door was marked by a series
of horizontal lines like those on a thermometer, where children’s
height had been registered at irregular intervals, the hand or stick
pressing down the curls for truth’s sake.
Upstairs the passages rambled about as in an old house, and when doors
were shut they were dark and cavernous. The rooms themselves were
light almost to dazzling after the passages. The light added to their
monotony, or what would have been monotony if we had known nothing of
their inhabitants. Even so, there were Megan and Ivor whom we had never
known. Ivor came between Roland and Philip, “He was the blackest of the
black,” said Mrs Smith, “brown in the face and black in the hair like a
bay horse. He was one for the water; made a vow he would swim from here
to the sea, or leastways keep to the water all the way. He got over the
second mill-wheel. He swam through the parson’s lawn when there was a
garden-party. But he had to give up because he kept tasting the water
to see how soon it got salt, and so half drowned himself. He came into
my shop just as he was born to remind me about the fireworks I had
promised to stock for Guy Fawkes day, and that was in September. But he
fell out of a tree and was dead before the day came, and, if you will
believe me, his brother bought up the fireworks there and then and let
them off on the grave.”
A wall in one room had on it a map of the neighbourhood, not with the
real names, but those of the early kingdoms of England and Wales. The
river was the Severn. Their own fields were the land of Gwent. Beyond
them lay Mercia and the Hwiccas. The men of Gwent could raid across the
Severn, and (in my opinion) were pleased with the obstacle. Later, the
projected embankment had been added to the map. This was Offa’s Dyke,
grimly shutting them out of the kingdoms of the Saxons. I recognised
Philip’s hand in the work. For his later Saxon fervour was due simply
to hate of the Normans: before they came he would have swung his axe as
lustily against the Saxons. From this room I could just see the tips of
some of the avenue trees beyond the embankment.
We had seen far more of the house than was necessary to decide Mr
Stodham against it, when Mrs Smith begged me to stay upstairs a moment
while she ran out; she wished me to mark for her a window which she
was to point out to me from below. “That’s it,” she said, after some
hesitation, as I appeared at last at the window of a small room
looking away from the railway. Nothing in the room distinguished it
from the rest save one small black disc with an auburn rim to it on
the dark ceiling--one disc only, not, as in the other rooms, several,
overlapping, and mingled with traces of the flames of ill-lighted
lamps. “Mrs Morgan,” I thought at once. Some one evidently had sat
long there at a table by night. “I never could make out who it was had
this room,” said Mrs Smith, coming up breathless: “It used to have
a red blind and a lamp always burning. My husband said it did look
so cosy; he thought it must be Mr Morgan studying at his books. The
milkers saw it in the early morning in winter; they said it was like
the big red bottles in a chemist’s window. The keeper said you might
see it any hour of night. I didn’t like it myself. It didn’t look to me
quite right, like a red eye. You couldn’t tell what might be going on
behind it, any more than behind a madman’s eye. I’ve thought about it
often, trying to picture the inside of that room. My husband would say
to me: ‘Bessy, the red window at New House did look nice to-night as I
came home from market. I’m sure they’re reading and studying something
learned, astrology or such, behind that red blind.’ ‘Don’t you believe
it, James’ says I, ‘learned it may be, but not _according_. If they
want to burn a light all night they could have a black blind. Who else
has got a red blind? It isn’t fit. I can’t think how you bear that
naughty red light on a night like this, when there are as many stars in
the sky as there are letters in the Bible.’ Now, which of them used to
sit here? Somebody sat all alone, you may depend upon it, never making
a sound nor a stir.”
Another room made her think of “Miss Jessie, the one that picked up the
fox when he was creeping as slow as slow through their garden, and hid
him till the hounds found another fox.... Oh, dear, to think what a
house this used to be, and so nice and quiet now ... dreadful quiet....
I really must be going, if there is nothing more I can do for you.”
Downstairs again the sight of the shot marks in the door set Mrs Smith
off again, but in a sobered tone:
“You won’t take the house, I’m thinking, sir? No. I wouldn’t myself,
not for anything.... It would be like wearing clothes a person had died
in. They never meant us to see these things all in their disabill. ’Tis
bad enough to be haunted by the dead, but preserve me from the ghosts
of the living. It is more fit for a Hospital, now, or a Home.... Those
people were like a kind of spirits, like they used to see in olden
time. They did not know the sorrow and wickedness of the world as it
really is. ‘Can the rush grow up without noise? Can the flag grow
without water? Whilst it is yet in his greenness, and not cut down,
it withereth before any other herb.’ Yet you would think they meant
to live for ever by the way they went about, young and old.... One
night I was coming home late and I saw all these windows lit up, every
one, and there were people in them all. It was as if the place was a
hollow cloud with fire in it and people dancing. Only the red blind
was down, and as bright as ever. It called to my mind a story the old
Ann used to tell, about a fellow going home from a fair and seeing a
grand, gorgeous house close by the road, and lovely people dancing
and musicking in it, where there hadn’t been a house before of any
kind. He went in and joined them and slept in a soft warm bed, but in
the morning he woke up under a hedge. I sort of expected to see there
wasn’t any house there next morning, it looked _that strange_.”
While we were having tea in her parlour Mrs Smith showed us a
photograph of “Miss Megan,” an elder sister of Jack and Roland, whom
I had never heard of, nor I think had Mr Stodham. I shall not forget
the face. She was past twenty, but clearly a fairy child, one who,
like the flying Nicolete, would be taken for a fay by the wood-folk
(and they should know). Her dark face was thin and shaped like a
wedge, with large eyes generous and passionate under eyebrows that
gave them an apprehensive expression, though the fine clear lips could
not have known fear or any other sort of control except pity. The face
was peering through chestnut leaves, looking as soft as a hare, but
with a wildness like the hare’s which, when it is in peril, is almost
terrible. I think it was a face destined to be loved often, but never
to love, or but once. It could draw men’s lips and pens, and would fly
from them and refuse to be entangled in any net of words or kisses. It
would fly to the high, solitary places, and its lovers would cry out:
“Oh, delicate bird, singing in the prickly furze, you are foolish, too,
or why will you not come down to me where the valleys are pleasant,
where the towns are, and everything can be made according to your
desire?” Assuredly, those eyes were for a liberty not to be found among
men, but only among the leaves, in the clouds, or on the waves, though
fate might confine them in the labyrinth of a city. But not a word of
her could I learn except once when I asked Ann straight out. All she
said was: “God have mercy on Megan.”
Two years after our visit the New House was taken by a charitable lady
as a school and home for orphans. In less than a year she abandoned it,
and within a year after that, it was burnt to the ground. The fields
of Gwent and the lime avenue may still be seen by railway travellers.
Gypsies have broken the hedges and pitched their tents unforbidden.
All kinds of people come in December for the mistletoe. The place is
utterly neglected, at least by the living.
On the whole, I think, Mr Stodham and I were both sorry for our day at
High Bower. It created a suspicion--not a lasting one with me--that
Abercorran House would not endure for ever. Mr Stodham’s account made
Mr Torrance look grave, and I understood that he wrote a poem about New
House. Higgs remarked that if the Morgans had stayed at High Bower he
could not imagine what he should have done with his pigeons. Aurelius
enjoyed every detail, from the map to Megan’s photograph. Aurelius
had no acquaintance with regret or envy. He was glad of Mr Stodham’s
account of New House, and glad of Abercorran House in reality. He was
one that sat in the sunniest places (unless he was keeping Jessie out)
all day, and though he did not despise the moon he held the fire at
Abercorran House a more stable benefactor. Neither sun nor moon made
him think of the day after to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.
“Aurelius,” said Mr Morgan, “is the wisest man out of Christendom
and therefore the wisest of all men. He knows that England in the
nineteenth century does not allow any but a working man to die of
starvation unless he wants to. Aurelius is not a working man, nor does
he desire to starve. He is not for an age, but for to-day.”