That evening I got into a third-class carriage on my way for Keswick, and
was followed almost immediately by a burly man in brown clothes. This
fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease, and kept continually putting
his head out of the window, and asking the bystanders if they saw _him_
coming. At last, when the train was already in motion, there was a
commotion on the platform, and a way was left clear to our carriage door.
_He_ had arrived. In the hurry I could just see Smethurst, red and
panting, thrust a couple of clay pipes into my companion’s outstretched
band, and hear him crying his farewells after us as we slipped out of the
station at an ever accelerating pace. I said something about it being a
close run, and the broad man, already engaged in filling one of the
pipes, assented, and went on to tell me of his own stupidity in
forgetting a necessary, and of how his friend had good-naturedly gone
down town at the last moment to supply the omission. I mentioned that I
had seen Mr. Smethurst already, and that he had been very polite to me;
and we fell into a discussion of the hatter’s merits that lasted some
time and left us quite good friends at its conclusion. The topic was
productive of goodwill. We exchanged tobacco and talked about the
season, and agreed at last that we should go to the same hotel at Keswick
and sup in company. As he had some business in the town which would
occupy him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to improve the time and
go down to the lake, that I might see a glimpse of the promised wonders.
The night had fallen already when I reached the water-side, at a place
where many pleasure-boats are moored and ready for hire; and as I went
along a stony path, between wood and water, a strong wind blew in gusts
from the far end of the lake. The sky was covered with flying scud; and,
as this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of shadow and
moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering water. I had to hold my
hat on, and was growing rather tired, and inclined to go back in disgust,
when a little incident occurred to break the tedium. A sudden and
violent squall of wind sundered the low underwood, and at the same time
there came one of those brief discharges of moonlight, which leaped into
the opening thus made, and showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter
and disorder. It was as though they had sprung out of the ground. I
accosted them very politely in my capacity of stranger, and requested to
be told the names of all manner of hills and woods and places that I did
not wish to know, and we stood together for a while and had an amusing
little talk. The wind, too, made himself of the party, brought the
colour into their faces, and gave them enough to do to repress their
drapery; and one of them, amid much giggling, had to pirouette round and
round upon her toes (as girls do) when some specially strong gust had got
the advantage over her. They were just high enough up in the social
order not to be afraid to speak to a gentleman; and just low enough to
feel a little tremor, a nervous consciousness of wrong-doing—of stolen
waters, that gave a considerable zest to our most innocent interview.
They were as much discomposed and fluttered, indeed, as if I had been a
wicked baron proposing to elope with the whole trio; but they showed no
inclination to go away, and I had managed to get them off hills and
waterfalls and on to more promising subjects, when a young man was
descried coming along the path from the direction of Keswick. Now
whether he was the young man of one of my friends, or the brother of one
of them, or indeed the brother of all, I do not know; but they
incontinently said that they must be going, and went away up the path
with friendly salutations. I need not say that I found the lake and the
moonlight rather dull after their departure, and speedily found my way
back to potted herrings and whisky-and-water in the commercial room with
my late fellow-traveller. In the smoking-room there was a tall dark man
with a moustache, in an ulster coat, who had got the best place and was
monopolising most of the talk; and, as I came in, a whisper came round to
me from both sides, that this was the manager of a London theatre. The
presence of such a man was a great event for Keswick, and I must own that
the manager showed himself equal to his position. He had a large fat
pocket-book, from which he produced poem after poem, written on the backs
of letters or hotel-bills; and nothing could be more humorous than his
recitation of these elegant extracts, except perhaps the anecdotes with
which he varied the entertainment. Seeing, I suppose, something less
countrified in my appearance than in most of the company, he singled me
out to corroborate some statements as to the depravity and vice of the
aristocracy, and when he went on to describe some gilded saloon
experiences, I am proud to say that he honoured my sagacity with one
little covert wink before a second time appealing to me for confirmation.
The wink was not thrown away; I went in up to the elbows with the
manager, until I think that some of the glory of that great man settled
by reflection upon me, and that I was as noticeably the second person in
the smoking-room as he was the first. For a young man, this was a
position of some distinction, I think you will admit. . . .
III.
AN AUTUMN EFFECT
1875
‘Nous ne décrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous nous
efforçons d’exprimer sobrement et simplement l’impression que nous en
avons reçue.’—M. ANDRÉ THEURIET, ‘L’Automne dans les Bois,’ Revue des
Deux Mondes, 1st Oct. 1874, p.562. {106}
A country rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may leave upon
us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed and dissipated if
we stayed longer. Clear vision goes with the quick foot. Things fall
for us into a sort of natural perspective when we see them for a moment
in going by; we generalise boldly and simply, and are gone before the sun
is overcast, before the rain falls, before the season can steal like a
dial-hand from his figure, before the lights and shadows, shifting round
towards nightfall, can show us the other side of things, and belie what
they showed us in the morning. We expose our mind to the landscape (as
we would expose the prepared plate in the camera) for the moment only
during which the effect endures; and we are away before the effect can
change. Hence we shall have in our memories a long scroll of continuous
wayside pictures, all imbued already with the prevailing sentiment of the
season, the weather and the landscape, and certain to be unified more and
more, as time goes on, by the unconscious processes of thought. So that
we who have only looked at a country over our shoulder, so to speak, as
we went by, will have a conception of it far more memorable and
articulate than a man who has lived there all his life from a child
upwards, and had his impression of to-day modified by that of to-morrow,
and belied by that of the day after, till at length the stable
characteristics of the country are all blotted out from him behind the
confusion of variable effect.
I begin my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours: that in
which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns his
back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he knows only by
the vague report of others. Such an one has not surrendered his will and
contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a railway. He may
change his mind at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, follow vague
preferences freely and go the low road or the high, choose the shadow or
the sun-shine, suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns
immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him
into the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some city, or a
range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low horizon.
In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a pang of
reproving conscience, or the least jostle to his self-respect. It is
true, however, that most men do not possess the faculty of free action,
the priceless gift of being able to live for the moment only; and as they
begin to go forward on their journey, they will find that they have made
for themselves new fetters. Slight projects they may have entertained
for a moment, half in jest, become iron laws to them, they know not why.
They will be led by the nose by these vague reports of which I spoke
above; and the mere fact that their informant mentioned one village and
not another will compel their footsteps with inexplicable power. And yet
a little while, yet a few days of this fictitious liberty, and they will
begin to hear imperious voices calling on them to return; and some
passion, some duty, some worthy or unworthy expectation, will set its
hand upon their shoulder and lead them back into the old paths. Once and
again we have all made the experiment. We know the end of it right well.
And yet if we make it for the hundredth time to-morrow: it will have the
same charm as ever; our heart will beat and our eyes will be bright, as
we leave the town behind us, and we shall feel once again (as we have
felt so often before) that we are cutting ourselves loose for ever from
our whole past life, with all its sins and follies and circumscriptions,
and go forward as a new creature into a new world.
It was well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage me up
the long hill above High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day for walking
at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull, heavy, and
lifeless. A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its colour reacted
on the colour of the landscape. Near at hand, indeed, the hedgerow trees
were still fairly green, shot through with bright autumnal yellows,
bright as sunshine. But a little way off, the solid bricks of woodland
that lay squarely on slope and hill-top were not green, but russet and
grey, and ever less russet and more grey as they drew off into the
distance. As they drew off into the distance, also, the woods seemed to
mass themselves together, and lie thin and straight, like clouds, upon
the limit of one’s view. Not that this massing was complete, or gave the
idea of any extent of forest, for every here and there the trees would
break up and go down into a valley in open order, or stand in long Indian
file along the horizon, tree after tree relieved, foolishly enough,
against the sky. I say foolishly enough, although I have seen the effect
employed cleverly in art, and such long line of single trees thrown out
against the customary sunset of a Japanese picture with a certain
fantastic effect that was not to be despised; but this was over water and
level land, where it did not jar, as here, with the soft contour of hills
and valleys. The whole scene had an indefinable look of being painted,
the colour was so abstract and correct, and there was something so
sketchy and merely impressional about these distant single trees on the
horizon that one was forced to think of it all as of a clever French
landscape. For it is rather in nature that we see resemblance to art,
than in art to nature; and we say a hundred times, ‘How like a picture!’
for once that we say, ‘How like the truth!’ The forms in which we learn
to think of landscape are forms that we have got from painted canvas.
Any man can see and understand a picture; it is reserved for the few to
separate anything out of the confusion of nature, and see that distinctly
and with intelligence.
The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got by
that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a labyrinth of
confined by-roads, my whole view brightened considerably in colour, for
it was the distance only that was grey and cold, and the distance I could
see no longer. Overhead there was a wonderful carolling of larks which
seemed to follow me as I went. Indeed, during all the time I was in that
country the larks did not desert me. The air was alive with them from
High Wycombe to Tring; and as, day after day, their ‘shrill delight’ fell
upon me out of the vacant sky, they began to take such a prominence over
other conditions, and form so integral a part of my conception of the
country, that I could have baptized it ‘The Country of Larks.’ This, of
course, might just as well have been in early spring; but everything else
was deeply imbued with the sentiment of the later year. There was no
stir of insects in the grass. The sunshine was more golden, and gave
less heat than summer sunshine; and the shadows under the hedge were
somewhat blue and misty. It was only in autumn that you could have seen
the mingled green and yellow of the elm foliage, and the fallen leaves
that lay about the road, and covered the surface of wayside pools so
thickly that the sun was reflected only here and there from little joints
and pinholes in that brown coat of proof; or that your ear would have
been troubled, as you went forward, by the occasional report of
fowling-pieces from all directions and all degrees of distance.
For a long time this dropping fire was the one sign of human activity
that came to disturb me as I walked. The lanes were profoundly still.
They would have been sad but for the sunshine and the singing of the
larks. And as it was, there came over me at times a feeling of isolation
that was not disagreeable, and yet was enough to make me quicken my steps
eagerly when I saw some one before me on the road. This fellow-voyager
proved to be no less a person than the parish constable. It had occurred
to me that in a district which was so little populous and so well wooded,
a criminal of any intelligence might play hide-and-seek with the
authorities for months; and this idea was strengthened by the aspect of
the portly constable as he walked by my side with deliberate dignity and
turned-out toes. But a few minutes’ converse set my heart at rest.
These rural criminals are very tame birds, it appeared. If my informant
did not immediately lay his hand on an offender, he was content to wait;
some evening after nightfall there would come a tap at his door, and the
outlaw, weary of outlawry, would give himself quietly up to undergo
sentence, and resume his position in the life of the country-side.
Married men caused him no disquietude whatever; he had them fast by the
foot. Sooner or later they would come back to see their wives, a peeping
neighbour would pass the word, and my portly constable would walk quietly
over and take the bird sitting. And if there were a few who had no
particular ties in the neighbourhood, and preferred to shift into another
county when they fell into trouble, their departure moved the placid
constable in no degree. He was of Dogberry’s opinion; and if a man would
not stand in the Prince’s name, he took no note of him, but let him go,
and thanked God he was rid of a knave. And surely the crime and the law
were in admirable keeping; rustic constable was well met with rustic
offender. The officer sitting at home over a bit of fire until the
criminal came to visit him, and the criminal coming—it was a fair match.
One felt as if this must have been the order in that delightful seaboard
Bohemia where Florizel and Perdita courted in such sweet accents, and the
Puritan sang Psalms to hornpipes, and the four-and-twenty shearers danced
with nosegays in their bosoms, and chanted their three songs apiece at
the old shepherd’s festival; and one could not help picturing to oneself
what havoc among good peoples purses, and tribulation for benignant
constables, might be worked here by the arrival, over stile and footpath,
of a new Autolycus.
Bidding good-morning to my fellow-traveller, I left the road and struck
across country. It was rather a revelation to pass from between the
hedgerows and find quite a bustle on the other side, a great coming and
going of school-children upon by-paths, and, in every second field, lusty
horses and stout country-folk a-ploughing. The way I followed took me
through many fields thus occupied, and through many strips of plantation,
and then over a little space of smooth turf, very pleasant to the feet,
set with tall fir-trees and clamorous with rooks making ready for the
winter, and so back again into the quiet road. I was now not far from
the end of my day’s journey. A few hundred yards farther, and, passing
through a gap in the hedge, I began to go down hill through a pretty
extensive tract of young beeches. I was soon in shadow myself, but the
afternoon sun still coloured the upmost boughs of the wood, and made a
fire over my head in the autumnal foliage. A little faint vapour lay
among the slim tree-stems in the bottom of the hollow; and from farther
up I heard from time to time an outburst of gross laughter, as though
clowns were making merry in the bush. There was something about the
atmosphere that brought all sights and sounds home to one with a singular
purity, so that I felt as if my senses had been washed with water. After
I had crossed the little zone of mist, the path began to remount the
hill; and just as I, mounting along with it, had got back again, from the
head downwards, into the thin golden sunshine, I saw in front of me a
donkey tied to a tree. Now, I have a certain liking for donkeys,
principally, I believe, because of the delightful things that Sterne has
written of them. But this was not after the pattern of the ass at Lyons.
He was of a white colour, that seemed to fit him rather for rare festal
occasions than for constant drudgery. Besides, he was very small, and of
the daintiest portions you can imagine in a donkey. And so, sure enough,
you had only to look at him to see he had never worked. There was
something too roguish and wanton in his face, a look too like that of a
schoolboy or a street Arab, to have survived much cudgelling. It was
plain that these feet had kicked off sportive children oftener than they
had plodded with a freight through miry lanes. He was altogether a
fine-weather, holiday sort of donkey; and though he was just then
somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still gave proof of the levity of his
disposition by impudently wagging his ears at me as I drew near. I say
he was somewhat solemnised just then; for, with the admirable instinct of
all men and animals under restraint, he had so wound and wound the halter
about the tree that he could go neither back nor forwards, nor so much as
put down his head to browse. There he stood, poor rogue, part puzzled,
part angry, part, I believe, amused. He had not given up hope, and dully
revolved the problem in his head, giving ever and again another jerk at
the few inches of free rope that still remained unwound. A humorous sort
of sympathy for the creature took hold upon me. I went up, and, not
without some trouble on my part, and much distrust and resistance on the
part of Neddy, got him forced backwards until the whole length of the
halter was set loose, and he was once more as free a donkey as I dared to
make him. I was pleased (as people are) with this friendly action to a
fellow-creature in tribulation, and glanced back over my shoulder to see
how he was profiting by his freedom. The brute was looking after me; and
no sooner did he catch my eye than he put up his long white face into the
air, pulled an impudent mouth at me, and began to bray derisively. If
ever any one person made a grimace at another, that donkey made a grimace
at me. The hardened ingratitude of his behaviour, and the impertinence
that inspired his whole face as he curled up his lip, and showed his
teeth, and began to bray, so tickled me, and was so much in keeping with
what I had imagined to myself about his character, that I could not find
it in my heart to be angry, and burst into a peal of hearty laughter.
This seemed to strike the ass as a repartee, so he brayed at me again by
way of rejoinder; and we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until
I began to grow aweary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell, turned
to pursue my way. In so doing—it was like going suddenly into cold
water—I found myself face to face with a prim little old maid. She was
all in a flutter, the poor old dear! She had concluded beyond question
that this must be a lunatic who stood laughing aloud at a white donkey in
the placid beech-woods. I was sure, by her face, that she had already
recommended her spirit most religiously to Heaven, and prepared herself
for the worst. And so, to reassure her, I uncovered and besought her,
after a very staid fashion, to put me on my way to Great Missenden. Her
voice trembled a little, to be sure, but I think her mind was set at
rest; and she told me, very explicitly, to follow the path until I came
to the end of the wood, and then I should see the village below me in the
bottom of the valley. And, with mutual courtesies, the little old maid
and I went on our respective ways.
Nor had she misled me. Great Missenden was close at hand, as she had
said, in the trough of a gentle valley, with many great elms about it.
The smoke from its chimneys went up pleasantly in the afternoon sunshine.
The sleepy hum of a threshing-machine filled the neighbouring fields and
hung about the quaint street corners. A little above, the church sits
well back on its haunches against the hillside—an attitude for a church,
you know, that makes it look as if it could be ever so much higher if it
liked; and the trees grew about it thickly, so as to make a density of
shade in the churchyard. A very quiet place it looks; and yet I saw many
boards and posters about threatening dire punishment against those who
broke the church windows or defaced the precinct, and offering rewards
for the apprehension of those who had done the like already. It was fair
day in Great Missenden. There were three stalls set up, _sub jove_, for
the sale of pastry and cheap toys; and a great number of holiday children
thronged about the stalls and noisily invaded every corner of the
straggling village. They came round me by coveys, blowing simultaneously
upon penny trumpets as though they imagined I should fall to pieces like
the battlements of Jericho. I noticed one among them who could make a
wheel of himself like a London boy, and seemingly enjoyed a grave
pre-eminence upon the strength of the accomplishment. By and by,
however, the trumpets began to weary me, and I went indoors, leaving the
fair, I fancy, at its height.
Night had fallen before I ventured forth again. It was pitch-dark in the
village street, and the darkness seemed only the greater for a light here
and there in an uncurtained window or from an open door. Into one such
window I was rude enough to peep, and saw within a charming _genre_
picture. In a room, all white wainscot and crimson wall-paper, a perfect
gem of colour after the black, empty darkness in which I had been
groping, a pretty girl was telling a story, as well as I could make out,
to an attentive child upon her knee, while an old woman sat placidly
dozing over the fire. You may be sure I was not behindhand with a story
for myself—a good old story after the manner of G. P. R. James and the
village melodramas, with a wicked squire, and poachers, and an attorney,
and a virtuous young man with a genius for mechanics, who should love,
and protect, and ultimately marry the girl in the crimson room.
Baudelaire has a few dainty sentences on the fancies that we are inspired
with when we look through a window into other people’s lives; and I think
Dickens has somewhere enlarged on the same text. The subject, at least,
is one that I am seldom weary of entertaining. I remember, night after
night, at Brussels, watching a good family sup together, make merry, and
retire to rest; and night after night I waited to see the candles lit,
and the salad made, and the last salutations dutifully exchanged, without
any abatement of interest. Night after night I found the scene rivet my
attention and keep me awake in bed with all manner of quaint
imaginations. Much of the pleasure of the _Arabian Nights_ hinges upon
this Asmodean interest; and we are not weary of lifting other people’s
roofs, and going about behind the scenes of life with the Caliph and the
serviceable Giaffar. It is a salutary exercise, besides; it is salutary
to get out of ourselves and see people living together in perfect
unconsciousness of our existence, as they will live when we are gone. If
to-morrow the blow falls, and the worst of our ill fears is realised, the
girl will none the less tell stories to the child on her lap in the
cottage at Great Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their candle, and
mix their salad, and go orderly to bed.
The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a thrill in
the air like a reminiscence of frost. I went up into the sloping garden
behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to the tune of my
landlady’s lamentations over sundry cabbages and cauliflowers that had
been spoiled by caterpillars. She had been so much pleased in the
summer-time, she said, to see the garden all hovered over by white
butterflies. And now, look at the end of it! She could nowise reconcile
this with her moral sense. And, indeed, unless these butterflies are
created with a side-look to the composition of improving apologues, it is
not altogether easy, even for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M’Cosh,
to decide intelligibly upon the issue raised. Then I fell into a long
and abstruse calculation with my landlord; having for object to compare
the distance driven by him during eight years’ service on the box of the
Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself. We tackled the
question most conscientiously, made all necessary allowance for Sundays
and leap-years, and were just coming to a triumphant conclusion of our
labours when we were stayed by a small lacuna in my information. I did
not know the circumference of the earth. The landlord knew it, to be
sure—plainly he had made the same calculation twice and once before,—but
he wanted confidence in his own figures, and from the moment I showed
myself so poor a second seemed to lose all interest in the result.
Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the same valley with Great
Missenden, but at the foot of it, where the hills trend off on either
hand like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain lies, like a sea,
before one, I went up a chalky road, until I had a good outlook over the
place. The vale, as it opened out into the plain, was shallow, and a
little bare, perhaps, but full of graceful convolutions. From the level
to which I have now attained the fields were exposed before me like a
map, and I could see all that bustle of autumn field-work which had been
hid from me yesterday behind the hedgerows, or shown to me only for a
moment as I followed the footpath. Wendover lay well down in the midst,
with mountains of foliage about it. The great plain stretched away to
the northward, variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern of the
fields, but growing ever more and more indistinct, until it became a mere
hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents of river, and snatches of
slanting road, and finally melted into the ambiguous cloud-land over the
horizon. The sky was an opal-grey, touched here and there with blue, and
with certain faint russets that looked as if they were reflections of the
colour of the autumnal woods below. I could hear the ploughmen shouting
to their horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks innumerable overhead,
and, from a field where the shepherd was marshalling his flock, a sweet
tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells. All these noises came to me very thin
and distinct in the clear air. There was a wonderful sentiment of
distance and atmosphere about the day and the place.
I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky footholds
cut in the turf. The hills about Wendover and, as far as I could see,
all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood of beech
plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been suffered to
extend itself into something more like a cloak, and hung down about the
shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of lying flatly along the
summit. The trees grew so close, and their boughs were so matted
together, that the whole wood looked as dense as a bush of heather. The
prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering red, touched here and there
with vivid yellow. But the autumn had scarce advanced beyond the
outworks; it was still almost summer in the heart of the wood; and as
soon as I had scrambled through the hedge, I found myself in a dim green
forest atmosphere under eaves of virgin foliage. In places where the
wood had itself for a background and the trees were massed together
thickly, the colour became intensified and almost gem-like: a perfect
fire green, that seemed none the less green for a few specks of autumn
gold. None of the trees were of any considerable age or stature; but
they grew well together, I have said; and as the road turned and wound
among them, they fell into pleasant groupings and broke the light up
pleasantly. Sometimes there would be a colonnade of slim, straight
tree-stems with the light running down them as down the shafts of
pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to something, and led only to
a corner of sombre and intricate jungle. Sometimes a spray of delicate
foliage would be thrown out flat, the light lying flatly along the top of
it, so that against a dark background it seemed almost luminous. There
was a great bush over the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of a thicket
than a wood); and the vague rumours that went among the tree-tops, and
the occasional rustling of big birds or hares among the undergrowth, had
in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness, that put the
imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the russet carpeting
of last year’s leaves. The spirit of the place seemed to be all
attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its breath to number my
footfalls. One could not help feeling that there ought to be some reason
for this stillness; whether, as the bright old legend goes, Pan lay
somewhere near in siesta, or whether, perhaps, the heaven was meditating
rain, and the first drops would soon come pattering through the leaves.
It was not unpleasant, in such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon,
of large spaces of the open plain. This happened only where the path lay
much upon the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of
the wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to be
walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance, miniature
fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would appear for a
moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller, and change and melt
one into another, as I continued to go forward, and so shift my point of
view.
For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in the
wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and gobbling,
now and again interrupted by a harsh scream. As I advanced towards this
noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and I caught sight, through the
trees, of sundry gables and enclosure walls, and something like the tops
of a rickyard. And sure enough, a rickyard it proved to be, and a neat
little farm-steading, with the beech-woods growing almost to the door of
it. Just before me, however, as I came upon the path, the trees drew
back and let in a wide flood of daylight on to a circular lawn. It was
here that the noises had their origin. More than a score of peacocks
(there are altogether thirty at the farm), a proper contingent of
peahens, and a great multitude that I could not number of more ordinary
barn-door fowls, were all feeding together on this little open lawn among
the beeches. They fed in a dense crowd, which swayed to and fro, and
came hither and thither as by a sort of tide, and of which the surface
was agitated like the surface of a sea as each bird guzzled his head
along the ground after the scattered corn. The clucking, cooing noise
that had led me thither was formed by the blending together of countless
expressions of individual contentment into one collective expression of
contentment, or general grace during meat. Every now and again a big
peacock would separate himself from the mob and take a stately turn or
two about the lawn, or perhaps mount for a moment upon the rail, and
there shrilly publish to the world his satisfaction with himself and what
he had to eat. It happened, for my sins, that none of these admirable
birds had anything beyond the merest rudiment of a tail. Tails, it
seemed, were out of season just then. But they had their necks for all
that; and by their necks alone they do as much surpass all the other
birds of our grey climate as they fall in quality of song below the
blackbird or the lark. Surely the peacock, with its incomparable parade
of glorious colour and the scannel voice of it issuing forth, as in
mockery, from its painted throat, must, like my landlady’s butterflies at
Great Missenden, have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the
consolation and support of homely virtue: or rather, perhaps, by a
fabulist not quite so skilful, who made points for the moment without
having a studious enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought these
melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I would have
given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe in all the spring
woods. For indeed there is no piece of colour of the same extent in
nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of a man’s eyes; and to
come upon so many of them, after these acres of stone-coloured heavens
and russet woods, and grey-brown ploughlands and white roads, was like
going three whole days’ journey to the southward, or a month back into
the summer.
I was sorry to leave _Peacock Farm_—for so the place is called, after the
name of its splendid pensioners—and go forwards again in the quiet woods.
It began to grow both damp and dusk under the beeches; and as the day
declined the colour faded out of the foliage; and shadow, without form
and void, took the place of all the fine tracery of leaves and delicate
gradations of living green that had before accompanied my walk. I had
been sorry to leave _Peacock Farm_, but I was not sorry to find myself
once more in the open road, under a pale and somewhat troubled-looking
evening sky, and put my best foot foremost for the inn at Wendover.
Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.
Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street should
go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen with a new
idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of neighbours to join in
his heresy. It would have somewhat the look of an abortive
watering-place, such as we may now see them here and there along the
coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely quiet design of some of
them, and the look of long habitation, of a life that is settled and
rooted, and makes it worth while to train flowers about the windows, and
otherwise shape the dwelling to the humour of the inhabitant. The
church, which might perhaps have served as rallying-point for these loose
houses, and pulled the township into something like intelligible unity,
stands some distance off among great trees; but the inn (to take the
public buildings in order of importance) is in what I understand to be
the principal street: a pleasant old house, with bay-windows, and three
peaked gables, and many swallows’ nests plastered about the eaves.
The interior of the inn was answerable to the outside: indeed, I never
saw any room much more to be admired than the low wainscoted parlour in
which I spent the remainder of the evening. It was a short oblong in
shape, save that the fireplace was built across one of the angles so as
to cut it partially off, and the opposite angle was similarly truncated
by a corner cupboard. The wainscot was white, and there was a Turkey
carpet on the floor, so old that it might have been imported by Walter
Shandy before he retired, worn almost through in some places, but in
others making a good show of blues and oranges, none the less harmonious
for being somewhat faded. The corner cupboard was agreeable in design;
and there were just the right things upon the shelves—decanters and
tumblers, and blue plates, and one red rose in a glass of water. The
furniture was old-fashioned and stiff. Everything was in keeping, down
to the ponderous leaden inkstand on the round table. And you may fancy
how pleasant it looked, all flushed and flickered over by the light of a
brisk companionable fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted sort of
perspective, in the three compartments of the old mirror above the
chimney. As I sat reading in the great armchair, I kept looking round
with the tail of my eye at the quaint, bright picture that was about me,
and could not help some pleasure and a certain childish pride in forming
part of it. The book I read was about Italy in the early Renaissance,
the pageantries and the light loves of princes, the passion of men for
learning, and poetry, and art; but it was written, by good luck, after a
solid, prosaic fashion, that suited the room infinitely more nearly than
the matter; and the result was that I thought less, perhaps, of Lippo
Lippi, or Lorenzo, or Politian, than of the good Englishman who had
written in that volume what he knew of them, and taken so much pleasure
in his solemn polysyllables.
I was not left without society. My landlord had a very pretty little
daughter, whom we shall call Lizzie. If I had made any notes at the
time, I might be able to tell you something definite of her appearance.
But faces have a trick of growing more and more spiritualised and
abstract in the memory, until nothing remains of them but a look, a
haunting expression; just that secret quality in a face that is apt to
slip out somehow under the cunningest painter’s touch, and leave the
portrait dead for the lack of it. And if it is hard to catch with the
finest of camel’s-hair pencils, you may think how hopeless it must be to
pursue after it with clumsy words. If I say, for instance, that this
look, which I remember as Lizzie, was something wistful that seemed
partly to come of slyness and in part of simplicity, and that I am
inclined to imagine it had something to do with the daintiest suspicion
of a cast in one of her large eyes, I shall have said all that I can, and
the reader will not be much advanced towards comprehension. I had struck
up an acquaintance with this little damsel in the morning, and professed
much interest in her dolls, and an impatient desire to see the large one
which was kept locked away for great occasions. And so I had not been
very long in the parlour before the door opened, and in came Miss Lizzie
with two dolls tucked clumsily under her arm. She was followed by her
brother John, a year or so younger than herself, not simply to play
propriety at our interview, but to show his own two whips in emulation of
his sister’s dolls. I did my best to make myself agreeable to my
visitors, showing much admiration for the dolls and dolls’ dresses, and,
with a very serious demeanour, asking many questions about their age and
character. I do not think that Lizzie distrusted my sincerity, but it
was evident that she was both bewildered and a little contemptuous.
Although she was ready herself to treat her dolls as if they were alive,
she seemed to think rather poorly of any grown person who could fall
heartily into the spirit of the fiction. Sometimes she would look at me
with gravity and a sort of disquietude, as though she really feared I
must be out of my wits. Sometimes, as when I inquired too particularly
into the question of their names, she laughed at me so long and heartily
that I began to feel almost embarrassed. But when, in an evil moment, I
asked to be allowed to kiss one of them, she could keep herself no longer
to herself. Clambering down from the chair on which she sat perched to
show me, Cornelia-like, her jewels, she ran straight out of the room and
into the bar—it was just across the passage,—and I could hear her telling
her mother in loud tones, but apparently more in sorrow than in
merriment, that _the gentleman in the parlour wanted to kiss Dolly_. I
fancy she was determined to save me from this humiliating action, even in
spite of myself, for she never gave me the desired permission. She
reminded me of an old dog I once knew, who would never suffer the master
of the house to dance, out of an exaggerated sense of the dignity of that
master’s place and carriage.
After the young people were gone there was but one more incident ere I
went to bed. I heard a party of children go up and down the dark street
for a while, singing together sweetly. And the mystery of this little
incident was so pleasant to me that I purposely refrained from asking who
they were, and wherefore they went singing at so late an hour. One can
rarely be in a pleasant place without meeting with some pleasant
accident. I have a conviction that these children would not have gone
singing before the inn unless the inn-parlour had been the delightful
place it was. At least, if I had been in the customary public room of
the modern hotel, with all its disproportions and discomforts, my ears
would have been dull, and there would have been some ugly temper or other
uppermost in my spirit, and so they would have wasted their songs upon an
unworthy hearer.
Next morning I went along to visit the church. It is a long-backed
red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a pleasant
graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken already. The
sky was drowned in a mist. Now and again pulses of cold wind went about
the enclosure, and set the branches busy overhead, and the dead leaves
scurrying into the angles of the church buttresses. Now and again, also,
I could hear the dull sudden fall of a chestnut among the grass—the dog
would bark before the rectory door—or there would come a clinking of
pails from the stable-yard behind. But in spite of these occasional
interruptions—in spite, also, of the continuous autumn twittering that
filled the trees—the chief impression somehow was one as of utter
silence, insomuch that the little greenish bell that peeped out of a
window in the tower disquieted me with a sense of some possible and more
inharmonious disturbance. The grass was wet, as if with a hoar frost
that had just been melted. I do not know that ever I saw a morning more
autumnal. As I went to and fro among the graves, I saw some flowers set
reverently before a recently erected tomb, and drawing near, was almost
startled to find they lay on the grave a man seventy-two years old when
he died. We are accustomed to strew flowers only over the young, where
love has been cut short untimely, and great possibilities have been
restrained by death. We strew them there in token, that these
possibilities, in some deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the touch
of our dead loves remain with us and guide us to the end. And yet there
was more significance, perhaps, and perhaps a greater consolation, in
this little nosegay on the grave of one who had died old. We are apt to
make so much of the tragedy of death, and think so little of the enduring
tragedy of some men’s lives, that we see more to lament for in a life cut
off in the midst of usefulness and love, than in one that miserably
survives all love and usefulness, and goes about the world the phantom of
itself, without hope, or joy, or any consolation. These flowers seemed
not so much the token of love that survived death, as of something yet
more beautiful—of love that had lived a man’s life out to an end with
him, and been faithful and companionable, and not weary of loving,
throughout all these years.
The morning cleared a little, and the sky was once more the old
stone-coloured vault over the sallow meadows and the russet woods, as I
set forth on a dog-cart from Wendover to Tring. The road lay for a good
distance along the side of the hills, with the great plain below on one
hand, and the beech-woods above on the other. The fields were busy with
people ploughing and sowing; every here and there a jug of ale stood in
the angle of the hedge, and I could see many a team wait smoking in the
furrow as ploughman or sower stepped aside for a moment to take a
draught. Over all the brown ploughlands, and under all the leafless
hedgerows, there was a stout piece of labour abroad, and, as it were, a
spirit of picnic. The horses smoked and the men laboured and shouted and
drank in the sharp autumn morning; so that one had a strong effect of
large, open-air existence. The fellow who drove me was something of a
humourist; and his conversation was all in praise of an agricultural
labourer’s way of life. It was he who called my attention to these jugs
of ale by the hedgerow; he could not sufficiently express the liberality
of these men’s wages; he told me how sharp an appetite was given by
breaking up the earth in the morning air, whether with plough or spade,
and cordially admired this provision of nature. He sang _O fortunatos
agricolas_! indeed, in every possible key, and with many cunning
inflections, till I began to wonder what was the use of such people as
Mr. Arch, and to sing the same air myself in a more diffident manner.
Tring was reached, and then Tring railway-station; for the two are not
very near, the good people of Tring having held the railway, of old days,
in extreme apprehension, lest some day it should break loose in the town
and work mischief. I had a last walk, among russet beeches as usual, and
the air filled, as usual, with the carolling of larks; I heard shots
fired in the distance, and saw, as a new sign of the fulfilled autumn,
two horsemen exercising a pack of fox-hounds. And then the train came
and carried me back to London.
IV.
A WINTER’S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY
A FRAGMENT
1876
At the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central district of the shire of
Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly. On the Carrick side of
the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, cleft with
shallow dells, and sown here and there with farms and tufts of wood.
Inland, it loses itself, joining, I suppose, the great herd of similar
hills that occupies the centre of the Lowlands. Towards the sea it
swells out the coast-line into a protuberance, like a bay-window in a
plan, and is fortified against the surf behind bold crags. This hill is
known as the Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more shortly, Brown Carrick.
It had snowed overnight. The fields were all sheeted up; they were
tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modelled through the pliant
counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother. The wind had made
ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the sea, in quiet weather,
leaves upon the sand. There was a frosty stifle in the air. An effusion
of coppery light on the summit of Brown Carrick showed where the sun was
trying to look through; but along the horizon clouds of cold fog had
settled down, so that there was no distinction of sky and sea. Over the
white shoulders of the headlands, or in the opening of bays, there was
nothing but a great vacancy and blackness; and the road as it drew near
the edge of the cliff seemed to skirt the shores of creation and void
space.
The snow crunched under foot, and at farms all the dogs broke out barking
as they smelt a passer-by upon the road. I met a fine old fellow, who
might have sat as the father in ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night,’ and who
swore most heathenishly at a cow he was driving. And a little after I
scraped acquaintance with a poor body tramping out to gather cockles.
His face was wrinkled by exposure; it was broken up into flakes and
channels, like mud beginning to dry, and weathered in two colours, an
incongruous pink and grey. He had a faint air of being surprised—which,
God knows, he might well be—that life had gone so ill with him. The
shape of his trousers was in itself a jest, so strangely were they bagged
and ravelled about his knees; and his coat was all bedaubed with clay as
tough he had lain in a rain-dub during the New Year’s festivity. I will
own I was not sorry to think he had had a merry New Year, and been young
again for an evening; but I was sorry to see the mark still there. One
could not expect such an old gentleman to be much of a dandy or a great
student of respectability in dress; but there might have been a wife at
home, who had brushed out similar stains after fifty New Years, now
become old, or a round-armed daughter, who would wish to have him neat,
were it only out of self-respect and for the ploughman sweetheart when he
looks round at night. Plainly, there was nothing of this in his life,
and years and loneliness hung heavily on his old arms. He was
seventy-six, he told me; and nobody would give a day’s work to a man that
age: they would think he couldn’t do it. ‘And, ’deed,’ he went on, with
a sad little chuckle, ‘’deed, I doubt if I could.’ He said goodbye to me
at a footpath, and crippled wearily off to his work. It will make your
heart ache if you think of his old fingers groping in the snow.
He told me I was to turn down beside the school-house for Dunure. And
so, when I found a lone house among the snow, and heard a babble of
childish voices from within, I struck off into a steep road leading
downwards to the sea. Dunure lies close under the steep hill: a haven
among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate disrepair, much apparatus for
drying nets, and a score or so of fishers’ houses. Hard by, a few shards
of ruined castle overhang the sea, a few vaults, and one tall gable
honeycombed with windows. The snow lay on the beach to the tidemark. It
was daubed on to the sills of the ruin: it roosted in the crannies of the
rock like white sea-birds; even on outlying reefs there would be a little
cock of snow, like a toy lighthouse. Everything was grey and white in a
cold and dolorous sort of shepherd’s plaid. In the profound silence,
broken only by the noise of oars at sea, a horn was sounded twice; and I
saw the postman, girt with two bags, pause a moment at the end of the
clachan for letters.
It is, perhaps, characteristic of Dunure that none were brought him.
The people at the public-house did not seem well pleased to see me, and
though I would fain have stayed by the kitchen fire, sent me ‘ben the
hoose’ into the guest-room. This guest-room at Dunure was painted in
quite æsthetic fashion. There are rooms in the same taste not a hundred
miles from London, where persons of an extreme sensibility meet together
without embarrassment. It was all in a fine dull bottle-green and black;
a grave harmonious piece of colouring, with nothing, so far as coarser
folk can judge, to hurt the better feelings of the most exquisite purist.
A cherry-red half window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth in the cold
room, and threw quite a glow on the floor. Twelve cockle-shells and a
half-penny china figure were ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf.
Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead of sawdust contained
sea-shells. And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an article to
itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text. It was patchwork, but
the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old brocade and Chinese
silk, shaken together in the kaleidoscope of some tasteful housewife’s
fancy; but a work of art in its own way, and plainly a labour of love.
The patches came exclusively from people’s raiment. There was no colour
more brilliant than a heather mixture; ‘My Johnny’s grey breeks,’ well
polished over the oar on the boat’s thwart, entered largely into its
composition. And the spoils of an old black cloth coat, that had been
many a Sunday to church, added something (save the mark!) of preciousness
to the material.
While I was at luncheon four carters came in—long-limbed, muscular
Ayrshire Scots, with lean, intelligent faces. Four quarts of stout were
ordered; they kept filling the tumbler with the other hand as they drank;
and in less time than it takes me to write these words the four quarts
were finished—another round was proposed, discussed, and negatived—and
they were creaking out of the village with their carts.
The ruins drew you towards them. You never saw any place more desolate
from a distance, nor one that less belied its promise near at hand. Some
crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled in. The snow had
drifted into the vaults. The clachan dabbled with snow, the white hills,
the black sky, the sea marked in the coves with faint circular wrinkles,
the whole world, as it looked from a loop-hole in Dunure, was cold,
wretched, and out-at-elbows. If you had been a wicked baron and
compelled to stay there all the afternoon, you would have had a rare fit
of remorse. How you would have heaped up the fire and gnawed your
fingers! I think it would have come to homicide before the evening—if it
were only for the pleasure of seeing something red! And the masters of
Dunure, it is to be noticed, were remarkable of old for inhumanity. One
of these vaults where the snow had drifted was that ‘black route’ where
‘Mr. Alane Stewart, Commendatour of Crossraguel,’ endured his fiery
trials. On the 1st and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr. Alan!),
Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his cook, his
pantryman, and another servant, bound the Poor Commendator ‘betwix an
iron chimlay and a fire,’ and there cruelly roasted him until he signed
away his abbacy. It is one of the ugliest stories of an ugly period, but
not, somehow, without such a flavour of the ridiculous as makes it hard
to sympathise quite seriously with the victim. And it is consoling to
remember that he got away at last, and kept his abbacy, and, over and
above, had a pension from the Earl until he died.
Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of somewhat less unkindly aspect,
opened out. Colzean plantations lay all along the steep shore, and there
was a wooded hill towards the centre, where the trees made a sort of
shadowy etching over the snow. The road went down and up, and past a
blacksmith’s cottage that made fine music in the valley. Three
compatriots of Burns drove up to me in a cart. They were all drunk, and
asked me jeeringly if this was the way to Dunure. I told them it was;
and my answer was received with unfeigned merriment. One gentleman was
so much tickled he nearly fell out of the cart; indeed, he was only saved
by a companion, who either had not so fine a sense of humour or had
drunken less.
‘The toune of Mayboll,’ says the inimitable Abercrummie, {136} ‘stands
upon an ascending ground from east to west, and lyes open to the south.
It hath one principals street, with houses upon both sides, built of
freestone; and it is beautifyed with the situation of two castles, one at
each end of this street. That on the east belongs to the Erle of
Cassilis. On the west end is a castle, which belonged sometime to the
laird of Blairquan, which is now the tolbuith, and is adorned with a
pyremide [conical roof], and a row of ballesters round it raised from the
top of the staircase, into which they have mounted a fyne clock. There
be four lanes which pass from the principall street; one is called the
Black Vennel, which is steep, declining to the south-west, and leads to a
lower street, which is far larger than the high chiefe street, and it
runs from the Kirkland to the Well Trees, in which there have been many
pretty buildings, belonging to the severall gentry of the countrey, who
were wont to resort thither in winter, and divert themselves in converse
together at their owne houses. It was once the principall street of the
town; but many of these houses of the gentry having been decayed and
ruined, it has lost much of its ancient beautie. Just opposite to this
vennel, there is another that leads north-west, from the chiefe street to
the green, which is a pleasant plott of ground, enclosed round with an
earthen wall, wherein they were wont to play football, but now at the
Gowff and byasse-bowls. The houses of this towne, on both sides of the
street, have their several gardens belonging to them; and in the lower
street there be some pretty orchards, that yield store of good fruit.’
As Patterson says, this description is near enough even to-day, and is
mighty nicely written to boot. I am bound to add, of my own experience,
that Maybole is tumbledown and dreary. Prosperous enough in reality, it
has an air of decay; and though the population has increased, a roofless
house every here and there seems to protest the contrary. The women are
more than well-favoured, and the men fine tall fellows; but they look
slipshod and dissipated. As they slouched at street corners, or stood
about gossiping in the snow, it seemed they would have been more at home
in the slums of a large city than here in a country place betwixt a
village and a town. I heard a great deal about drinking, and a great
deal about religious revivals: two things in which the Scottish character
is emphatic and most unlovely. In particular, I heard of clergymen who
were employing their time in explaining to a delighted audience the
physics of the Second Coming. It is not very likely any of us will be
asked to help. If we were, it is likely we should receive instructions
for the occasion, and that on more reliable authority. And so I can only
figure to myself a congregation truly curious in such flights of
theological fancy, as one of veteran and accomplished saints, who have
fought the good fight to an end and outlived all worldly passion, and are
to be regarded rather as a part of the Church Triumphant than the poor,
imperfect company on earth. And yet I saw some young fellows about the
smoking-room who seemed, in the eyes of one who cannot count himself
strait-laced, in need of some more practical sort of teaching. They
seemed only eager to get drunk, and to do so speedily. It was not much
more than a week after the New Year; and to hear them return on their
past bouts with a gusto unspeakable was not altogether pleasing. Here is
one snatch of talk, for the accuracy of which I can vouch—
‘Ye had a spree here last Tuesday?’
‘We had that!’
‘I wasna able to be oot o’ my bed. Man, I was awful bad on Wednesday.’
‘Ay, ye were gey bad.’
And you should have seen the bright eyes, and heard the sensual accents!
They recalled their doings with devout gusto and a sort of rational
pride. Schoolboys, after their first drunkenness, are not more boastful;
a cock does not plume himself with a more unmingled satisfaction as he
paces forth among his harem; and yet these were grown men, and by no
means short of wit. It was hard to suppose they were very eager about
the Second Coming: it seemed as if some elementary notions of temperance
for the men and seemliness for the women would have gone nearer the mark.
And yet, as it seemed to me typical of much that is evil in Scotland,
Maybole is also typical of much that is best. Some of the factories,
which have taken the place of weaving in the town’s economy, were
originally founded and are still possessed by self-made men of the
sterling, stout old breed—fellows who made some little bit of an
invention, borrowed some little pocketful of capital, and then, step by
step, in courage, thrift and industry, fought their way upwards to an
assured position.
Abercrummie has told you enough of the Tolbooth; but, as a bit of
spelling, this inscription on the Tolbooth bell seems too delicious to
withhold: ‘This bell is founded at Maiboll Bi Danel Geli, a Frenchman,
the 6th November, 1696, Bi appointment of the heritors of the parish of
Maiyboll.’ The Castle deserves more notice. It is a large and shapely
tower, plain from the ground upwards, but with a zone of ornamentation
running about the top. In a general way this adornment is perched on the
very summit of the chimney-stacks; but there is one corner more elaborate
than the rest. A very heavy string-course runs round the upper story,
and just above this, facing up the street, the tower carries a small
oriel window, fluted and corbelled and carved about with stone heads. It
is so ornate it has somewhat the air of a shrine. And it was, indeed,
the casket of a very precious jewel, for in the room to which it gives
light lay, for long years, the heroine of the sweet old ballad of
‘Johnnie Faa’—she who, at the call of the gipsies’ songs, ‘came tripping
down the stair, and all her maids before her.’ Some people say the
ballad has no basis in fact, and have written, I believe, unanswerable
papers to the proof. But in the face of all that, the very look of that
high oriel window convinces the imagination, and we enter into all the
sorrows of the imprisoned dame. We conceive the burthen of the long,
lack-lustre days, when she leaned her sick head against the mullions, and
saw the burghers loafing in Maybole High Street, and the children at
play, and ruffling gallants riding by from hunt or foray. We conceive
the passion of odd moments, when the wind threw up to her some snatch of
song, and her heart grew hot within her, and her eyes overflowed at the
memory of the past. And even if the tale be not true of this or that
lady, or this or that old tower, it is true in the essence of all men and
women: for all of us, some time or other, hear the gipsies singing; over
all of us is the glamour cast. Some resist and sit resolutely by the
fire. Most go and are brought back again, like Lady Cassilis. A few, of
the tribe of Waring, go and are seen no more; only now and again, at
springtime, when the gipsies’ song is afloat in the amethyst evening, we
can catch their voices in the glee.
By night it was clearer, and Maybole more visible than during the day.
Clouds coursed over the sky in great masses; the full moon battled the
other way, and lit up the snow with gleams of flying silver; the town
came down the hill in a cascade of brown gables, bestridden by smooth
white roofs, and sprangled here and there with lighted windows. At
either end the snow stood high up in the darkness, on the peak of the
Tolbooth and among the chimneys of the Castle. As the moon flashed a
bull’s-eye glitter across the town between the racing clouds, the white
roofs leaped into relief over the gables and the chimney-stacks, and
their shadows over the white roofs. In the town itself the lit face of
the clock peered down the street; an hour was hammered out on Mr. Geli’s
bell, and from behind the red curtains of a public-house some one trolled
out—a compatriot of Burns, again!—‘The saut tear blin’s my e’e.’
Next morning there was sun and a flapping wind. From the street corners
of Maybole I could catch breezy glimpses of green fields. The road
underfoot was wet and heavy—part ice, part snow, part water, and any one
I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with ‘A fine thowe’ (thaw). My
way lay among rather bleak bills, and past bleak ponds and dilapidated
castles and monasteries, to the Highland-looking village of Kirkoswald.
It has little claim to notice, save that Burns came there to study
surveying in the summer of 1777, and there also, in the kirkyard, the
original of Tam o’ Shanter sleeps his last sleep. It is worth noticing,
however, that this was the first place I thought ‘Highland-looking.’
Over the bill from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to the coast. As I came
down above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed strangely different from
the day before. The cold fogs were all blown away; and there was Ailsa
Craig, like a refraction, magnified and deformed, of the Bass Rock; and
there were the chiselled mountain-tops of Arran, veined and tipped with
snow; and behind, and fainter, the low, blue land of Cantyre. Cottony
clouds stood in a great castle over the top of Arran, and blew out in
long streamers to the south. The sea was bitten all over with white;
little ships, tacking up and down the Firth, lay over at different angles
in the wind. On Shanter they were ploughing lea; a cart foal, all in a
field by himself, capered and whinnied as if the spring were in him.
The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along the shore, among sand-hills
and by wildernesses of tumbled bent. Every here and there a few cottages
stood together beside a bridge. They had one odd feature, not easy to
describe in words: a triangular porch projected from above the door,
supported at the apex by a single upright post; a secondary door was
hinged to the post, and could be hasped on either cheek of the real
entrance; so, whether the wind was north or south, the cotter could make
himself a triangular bight of shelter where to set his chair and finish a
pipe with comfort. There is one objection to this device; for, as the
post stands in the middle of the fairway, any one precipitately issuing
from the cottage must run his chance of a broken head. So far as I am
aware, it is peculiar to the little corner of country about Girvan. And
that corner is noticeable for more reasons: it is certainly one of the
most characteristic districts in Scotland, It has this movable porch by
way of architecture; it has, as we shall see, a sort of remnant of
provincial costume, and it has the handsomest population in the Lowlands.
. . .
V.
FOREST NOTES 1875–6