Upon an evening in early autumn, I, who had never owned an orchard
before, stood in my orchard; behind me were a phalanx of some sixty
trees bearing (miraculously, to my simplicity) a fine crop of apples and
plums--my apples and plums, and a mead of some two acres, my mead, upon
which I discerned possibilities of football and cricket; behind these
was a double greenhouse containing three hundred pendent bunches of
grapes of the dark and aristocratic variety which I thought I had seen
in Piccadilly ticketed at four shillings a pound--my grapes; still
further behind uprose the chimneys of a country-house, uncompromisingly
plain and to some eyes perhaps ugly, but my country-house, the lease
of which, stamped, was in my pocket. Immediately in front of me was a
luxuriant hedge which, long unclipped, had attained a height of at
least fifteen feet. Beyond the hedge the ground fell away sharply into
a draining ditch, and on the other side of the ditch, through the
interstices of the hedge, I perceived glimpses of a very straight and
very white highway.
This highway was Watling Street, built of the Romans, and even now
surviving as the most famous road in England. I had “learnt” it at
school, and knew that it once ran from Dover to London, from London
to Chester and from Chester to York. Just recently I had tracked it
diligently on a series of county maps, and discovered that, though only
vague fragments of it remained in Kent, Surrey, Shropshire, Cheshire,
and Yorkshire, it still flourished and abounded exceedingly in
my particular neighbourhood as a right line, austere, renowned,
indispensable, clothed in its own immortal dust. I could see but patches
of it in the twilight, but I was aware that it stretched fifteen miles
southeast of me, and unnumbered miles northwest of me, with scarcely a
curve to break the splendid inexorable monotony of its career. To me it
was a wonderful road--more wonderful than the Great North Road, or the
military road from Moscow to Vladivostock. And the most wonderful thing
about it was that I lived on it. After all, few people can stamp the top
of their notepaper, “Watling Street, England.” It is not a residential
thoroughfare.
Only persons of imagination can enter into my feelings at that moment. I
had spent two-thirds of my life in a town (squalid, industrial) and the
remaining third in Town. I thought I knew every creosoted block in Fleet
Street, every bookstall in Shoreditch, every hosier’s in Piccadilly.
I certainly did know the order of stations on the Inner Circle, the
various frowns of publishers, the strange hysteric, silly atmosphere
of theatrical first-nights, and stars of the Empire and Alhambra (by
sight), and the vicious odours of a thousand and one restaurants. And
lo! burdened with all this accumulated knowledge, shackled by all these
habits, associations, entrancements, I was yet moved by some mysterious
and far-off atavism to pack up, harness the oxen, “trek,” and go and
live in “the country.”
Of course I soon discovered that there is no such thing as “the
country,” just as there is no such thing as Herbert Spencer’s “state.”
“The country” is an entity which exists only in the brains of an urban
population, whose members ridiculously regard the terrene surface as a
concatenation of towns surrounded by earthy space. There is England, and
there are spots on England called towns: that is all. But at that time I
too had the illusion of “the country,” a district where one saw “trees,”
“flowers,” and “birds.” For me, a tree was not an oak or an ash or an
elm or a birch or a chestnut; it was just a “tree.” For me there were
robins, sparrows, and crows; the rest of the winged fauna was merely
“birds.” I recognised roses, daisies, dandelions, forget-me-nots,
chrysanthemums, and one or two more blossoms; all else was “flowers.”
Remember that all this happened before the advent of the nature-book and
the sublime invention of week-ending, and conceive me plunging into this
unknown, inscrutable, and recondite “country,” as I might have plunged
fully clothed and unable to swim into the sea. It was a prodigious
adventure! When my friends asked me, with furtive glances at each other
as in the presence of a lunatic, why I was going to live in the country,
I could only reply: “Because I want to. I want to see what it’s like.” I
might have attributed my action to the dearness of season-tickets on
the Underground, to the slowness of omnibuses or the danger of cabs: my
friends would have been just as wise, and I just as foolish, in
their esteem. I admit that their attitude of benevolent contempt, of
far-seeing sagacity, gave me to think. And although I was obstinate,
it was with a pang of misgiving that I posted the notice of quitting
my suburban residence; and the pang was more acute when I signed the
contract for the removal of my furniture. I called on my friends before
the sinister day of exodus.
“Good-bye,” I said.
“Au revoir,” they replied, with calm vaticinatory assurance, “we shall
see you back again in a year.”
*****
Thus, outwardly braggart, inwardly quaking, I departed. The quaking had
not ceased as I stood, in the autumn twilight, in my beautiful orchard,
in front of my country-house. Toiling up the slope from the southward,
I saw an enormous van with three horses: the last instalment of my
chattels. As it turned lumberingly at right angles into my private road
or boreen, I said aloud:
“I’ve done it.”
I had. I felt like a statesman who has handed an ultimatum to a king’s
messenger. No withdrawal was now possible. From the reverie natural
to this melancholy occasion I was aroused by a disconcerting sound of
collision, the rattle of chains, and the oaths customary to drivers in a
difficulty. I ran towards the house and down the weedy drive bordered
by trees which a learned gardener had told me were of the variety,
_cupressus lawsoniana_. In essaying the perilous manoeuvre of twisting
round three horses and a long van on a space about twenty feet square,
the driver had overset the brick pier upon which swung my garden-gate.
The unicorn horse of the team was nosing at the cupressus lawsoniana
and the van was scotched in the gateway. I thought, “This is an omen.” I
was, however, reassured by the sight of two butchers and two bakers each
asseverating that nothing could afford him greater pleasure than to
call every day for orders. A minute later the postman, in his own lordly
equipage, arrived with my newspapers and his respects. I tore open a
paper and read news of London. I convinced myself that London actually
existed, though I were never to see it again. The smashing of the pier
dwindled from a catastrophe to an episode.
*****