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IN PURSUIT OF SPRING
[Illustration:
PADDINGTON CANAL.
“So far the life of men moving to and fro across the bridges was
like the old life that I knew, though down below upon the sparkling
waters many birds were alighting, or were already seated like wondrous
blossoms upon the bulwarks of a barge painted in parrot colours red and
green.”]
IN PURSUIT OF
SPRING
BY
EDWARD THOMAS
THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN
AND NEW YORK.
TO
DOROTHY
AND
VIVIAN LOCKE ELLIS
_First Published April 1914_
CONTENTS.
I. IN SEARCH OF SPRING 9
II. THE START: LONDON TO GUILDFORD 34
III. GUILDFORD TO DUNBRIDGE 76
IV. FROM DUNBRIDGE OVER SALISBURY PLAIN 128
V. THREE WESSEX POETS 180
VI. THE AVON, THE BISS, THE FROME 199
VII. TROWBRIDGE TO SHEPTON MALLET 216
VIII. SHEPTON MALLET TO BRIDGWATER 235
IX. BRIDGWATER TO THE SEA 265
X. THE GRAVE OF WINTER 290
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
_From Drawings by Ernest Hazelhurst._
Paddington Canal _Frontispiece_
Cuckoo Flowers 32
A Passing Storm 80
Crosscombe 176
Glastonbury Tor 192
Kilve 208
IN PURSUIT OF SPRING.
I.
IN SEARCH OF SPRING.
This is the record of a journey from London to the Quantock Hills--to
Nether Stowey, Kilve, Crowcombe, and West Bagborough, to the high
point where the Taunton-Bridgwater road tops the hills and shows all
Exmoor behind, all the Mendips before, and upon the left the sea,
and Wales very far off. It was a journey on or with a bicycle. The
season was Easter, a March Easter. “A North-Easter, probably?” No. Nor
did much north-east go to the making of it. I will give its pedigree
briefly, going back only a month--that is, to the days when I began to
calculate, or guess methodically, what the weather would be like at
Easter.
Perhaps it was rather more than a month before Easter that a false
Spring visited London. But I will go back first a little earlier, to
one of those great and notable days after the turn of the year that win
the heart so, without deceiving it.
The wind blew from the north-west with such peace and energy together
as to call up the image of a good giant striding along with superb
gestures--like those of a sower sowing. The wind blew and the sun shone
over London. A myriad roofs laughed together in the light. The smoke
and the flags, yellow and blue and white, waved tumultuously, straining
for joy to leave the chimneys and the flagstaffs, like hounds sighting
their quarry. The ranges of cloud bathing their lower slopes in the
brown mist of the horizon had the majesty of great hills, the coolness
and sweetness and whiteness of the foam on the crests of the crystal
fountains, and they were burning with light. The clouds did honour to
the city, which they encircled as with heavenly ramparts. The stone
towers and spires were soft, and luminous as old porcelain. There was
no substance to be seen that was not made precious by the strong wind
and the light divine. All was newly built to a great idea. The flags
were waving to salute the festal opening of the gates in those white
walls to a people that should presently surge in and onward to take
possession. Princely was to be the life that had this amphitheatre of
clouds and palaces for its display.
Of human things, only music--if human it can be called--was fit to
match this joyousness and this stateliness. What, I thought, if the
pomp of river and roof and cloudy mountain walls of the world be made
ready, as so often they had been before, only for the joy of the
invisible gods? For who has not known a day when some notable festival
is manifestly celebrated by a most rare nobleness in the ways of the
clouds, the colours of the woods, the glitter of the waters, yet on
earth all has been as it was wont to be?
So far, the life of men moving to and fro across the bridges was like
the old life that I knew, though, down below, upon the sparkling
waters many birds were alighting, or were already seated like wondrous
blossoms upon the bulwarks of a barge painted in parrot colours--red
and green. When would the entry begin?
In the streets, for the present, the roar continued of the inhuman
masses of humanity, amidst which a child’s crying for a toy was an
impertinence, a terrible pretty interruption of the violent moving
swoon. Between the millions and the one no agreement was visible. The
wind summoned the colour in a girl’s cheeks. There, one smiled with
inward bliss. Another talked serenely with lovely soft mouth and wide
eyes that saw only one other pair as the man next her bent his head
nearer. The wind wagged the tails of blue or brown fur about the forms
of luxurious tall women, and poured wine into their bodies, so that
their complexions glowed under their violet hats. But in one moment
the passing loveliness of spirit, or form, or gesture, sank and was
drowned in the oceanic multitude. A boy had just met his father at a
railway station, and was glad; he held the man’s hand, and was trotting
gently, trying to get him to run--he failed: then in delight put his
arm to his father’s waist and was carried along thus, half lifted from
the ground, for several yards, smiling and chattering like a bird on a
waving branch. The two obstructed others, who took a step to left or
right in disdain or impatience. Only a child at an alley entrance saw
and laughed, wishing she were his sister, and had his father. A moment,
and these also were swallowed up.
I came to broader pavements. Here was less haste; and women went in
and out of the crowd, not only parallel to the street, but crosswise
here and there; and a man could go at any pace, not of necessity the
crowd’s. Some of the most beautiful civilized women of the world moved
slowly and musically in an intricate pattern, which any one could watch
freely; they had a background of lustrous jewellery, metal-work and
glass, gorgeous cloths and silks, and many had a foil in the stiff
black and white male figures beside them. They moved without fear.
Stately, costly, tender, beautiful, nevertheless, though so near, they
were seen as in a magic crystal that enshrines the remote and the long
dead. They walked as in dream, regardlessly smiling. They cast their
proud or kind eyes hither and thither. Once in the intense light of a
jeweller’s shop, spangled with pearls, diamonds, and gold, a large red
hand, cold and not quite clean, appeared from within, holding in three
fearful, careful fingers a brooch of gold and diamonds, which it placed
among the others, and then withdrew itself slowly, tremulously, lest
it should work harm to those dazzling cressets. The eyes of the women
watched the brooch: the red hand need not have been so fearful; it was
unseen--the soul was hid. Straight through the women, in the middle of
the broad pavement, and very slowly, went an old man. He was short,
and his patched overcoat fell in a parallelogram from his shoulders
almost to the pavement. From underneath his little cap massive gray
curls sprouted and spread over his upturned collar. Just below the
fringe of his coat his bare heels glowed red. His hands rested deep in
his pockets. His face was almost concealed by curls and collar: all
that showed itself was the glazed cold red of his cheeks and large,
straight nose, and the glitter of gray eyes that looked neither to left
nor to right, but ahead and somewhat down. Not a sound did he make,
save the flap of rotten leather against feet which he scarcely raised
lest the shoes should fall off. Doubtless the composer of the harmonies
of this day could have made use of the old man--doubtless he did; but
as it was a feast day of the gods, not of men, I did not understand.
Around this figure, clad in complete hue of poverty, the dance of women
in violet and black, cinnamon and green, tawny and gray, scarlet and
slate, and the browns and golden browns of animals’ fur, wove itself
fantastically. The dance heeded him not, nor he the dance. The sun
shone bright. The wind blew and waved the smoke and the flags wildly
against the sky. The horses curved their stout necks, showing their
teeth, trampling, massing head by head in rank and cluster, a frieze as
magnificent as the procession of white clouds gilded, rolling along the
horizon.
That evening, without thought of Spring, I began to look at my maps.
Spring would come, of course--nothing, I supposed, could prevent
it--and I should have to make up my mind how to go westward. Whatever I
did, Salisbury Plain was to be crossed, not of necessity but of choice;
it was, however, hard to decide whether to go reasonably diagonally
in accordance with my western purpose, or to meander up the Avon,
now on one side now on the other, by one of the parallel river-side
roads, as far as Amesbury. Having got to Amesbury, there would be much
provocation to continue up the river among those thatched villages to
Upavon and to Stephen Duck’s village, Charlton, and the Pewsey valley,
and so, turning again westward, in sight of that very tame White Horse
above Alton Priors, to include Urchfont and Devizes.
Or, again, I might follow up the Wylye westward from Salisbury, and
have always below me the river and its hamlets and churches, the wall
of the Plain always above me on the right. Thus I should come to
Warminster and to the grand west wall of the Plain which overhangs the
town.
The obvious way was to strike north-west over the Plain from Stapleford
up the Winterbourne, through cornland and sheepland, by Shrewton
and Tilshead, and down again to other waters at West Lavington. Or
at Shrewton I could turn sharp to the west, and so visit solitary
Chitterne and solitary Imber.
I could not decide. If I went on foot, I could do as I liked on the
Plain. There are green roads leading from everywhere to everywhere.
But, on the other hand, it might be necessary at that time of year to
keep walking all day, which would mean at least thirty miles a day,
which was more than I was inclined for. The false Spring, the weather
that really deluded me to think it shameful not to trust it, came a
month later, and one of its best days was in London.
Many days in London have no weather. We are aware only that it is
hot or cold, dry or wet; that we are in or out of doors; that we
are at ease or not. This was not one of them. Rain lashed and wind
roared in the night, enveloping my room in a turbulent embrace as if
it had been a tiny ship in a great sea, instead of one pigeon-hole
in a thousand-fold columbarium deep in London. Dawn awakened me with
its tranquillity. The air was sombrely sweet; there was a lucidity
under the gloom of the clouds; the air barely heaved with the ebb of
storm; and even when the sun was risen it seemed still twilight. The
jangle of the traffic made a wall round about the quiet in which
I lay embedded. I scarcely heard the sound of it; but I could not
forget the wall. Within the circle of quiet a parrot sang the street
songs of twenty years ago very clearly, over and over again, almost
as sweetly as a blackbird. I had heard him many times before, but
now he sang differently--I did not know or consider how or why. The
song was different as the air was. Yet I could not directly feel the
air, because the windows were tightly shut against the soot of four
neighbouring chimney-stacks.
Out of doors the business and pleasure of the day kept me a close
though a moving prisoner. All the morning and afternoon I was glad to
see only one thing that was not a human face. It was a portico of high
fluted columns rising in a cliff above an expanse of gravel walks and
turf. The gray columns were blackened with soot splashes. The grass and
the stone were touched with the sweetness that was in the early air
and in the bird’s song before the rain had dried and the wind quite
departed. Both were blessed with the same pure and lovely union of
humid coldness, gloom, and lucidity, so that the portico appeared for a
moment to be the entrance to halls of unimagined beauty and holiness,
as if I should be admitted through them into the cloud-ramparted city
of that earlier day. Nevertheless, I found all inside exactly as it
had always been; not only the expectation but even the memory of what
had fostered it was wiped out without one pause of disappointment. The
sunlight, now and then flooding and astonishing the interior, fell
through windows that shut out both sky and earth, into an atmosphere
incapable of acknowledging the divinity of the rays; they were alien,
disturbing, hostile. There was something childish in these displays,
so wasteful and passionate, before the spectacled eyes of a number of
people reading books in the mummied air of a library.
Once more on this February day, at four in the afternoon, my eyes were
unsealed and awakened. The air in the streets of big dark houses was
still and hazy, but overhead hung the loftiest sky I had ever seen,
and the finest of fine-spun clouds stretched across the pale blue in
long white reefs. In a few moments I was again under a roof. This time
it was the house of a friend, removed from busy thoroughfares, very
silent within. As the old country servant, faintly dingy and sinister,
led me up to the usual room, the staircase, and both the shut and the
half-seen apartments on either hand, were mysterious and depressing,
with something massive and yet temporary, as if in a dream mansion of
shadows. Nothing definite was suggested by these doors; anything was
possible behind them. Right up to the familiar dark room I always felt
the same dull trouble. Then the dim room opened before me: I heard the
masterly, kind voice.
It was a high, large room with many corners that I had never explored.
The furniture gloomed vaguely above and around the little space that
was crossed by our two voices. The long windows were some yards away,
and between them and us stood a heavy table, a heavy cabinet, and
several chairs. Never had I been to the window and looked out, nor did
I today. No lamp was lit. We talked, we were silent, and I was content.
Now and then I looked towards the window, which framed only the corner
of a house near by, the chimneys of farther houses, and a pallor of sky
between and above them. I was aware of the slow stealing away of day.
I knew it was slow, and twice I looked at a clock to make sure that I
was not being deceived. I was aware also of the beauty of this slow
fading. No wind moved, nor was any movement anywhere heard or seen. The
stillness and silence were great; the tranquillity was even greater:
I dipped into it and shared it while I listened and talked. Several
times two or three children passed beneath the window and chattered
in loud, shrill voices, but they were unseen. Far from disturbing the
tranquillity, the sounds were steeped in it; the silence and stillness
of the twilight saturated and embalmed them. But pleasant as in
themselves they were entirely, they were far more so by reason of what
they suggested.
These voices and this tranquillity spoke of Spring. They told me what
an evening it was at home. I knew how the first blackbird was whistling
in the broad oak, and, farther away--some very far away--many thrushes
were singing in the chill, under the pale light fitly reflected by
the faces of earliest primroses. The sound of lambs and of a rookery
more distant blended in soft roaring. Underfoot everything was
soaked--soaked clay, soaked dead grass; and the land was agleam with
silver rain pools and channels. I foresaw tempest of rain and wind on
the next day. Perhaps imagination of dark, withered, and sodden land,
and the change threatening, helped to perfect that sweetness which was
not wholly of earth. The songs of the birds were to cease, and, in
their place, blackbirds would be clinking nervously in impenetrable
thickets long after sundown, when only a narrowing pane of almost
lightless light divided a black mass of cloud from a black horizon.
As in the morning streets the essence of the beauty was lucidity in
the arms of gloom, so it was now in the clear twilight fields gliding
towards black night, tempest, and perhaps a renewal of Winter.... Then
a lamp was carried in. The children’s voices had gone. In a little
while I rose, and, going out, saw precisely that long pane of light
that I should have seen low in the west, had I been standing fifty
miles off, looking towards Winchester.
Another evening like this one followed. To the south and west of me the
Downs were spread out beyond eyesight. Their flowing and quiet lines
were an invitation, a temptation. I should have liked to set forth
immediately, to travel day and night with that flow and quiet until
I reached the nightingale’s song, the apple blossom, the perfume of
sunny earth. But nothing was more impossible. The next day was sleet.
The most I could do was to plan so that perhaps I should find myself
travelling in one of those preludes to Summer which are less false than
this one. The beautiful Easters I had known came back to me: Easters
of five years, twenty years ago; early Easters when the chiffchaff was
singing on March 20 in a soft wind; later Easters, when Good Friday
brought the swallow, Saturday the cuckoo, Sunday the nightingale.
I did not forget Easters of snow and of north wind. In the end I
decided to trust to luck--to start on Good Friday on the chance that
I should meet fine weather at once or in a day or two. I would go out
in that safe, tame fashion, looking for Spring. The date of Easter
made nightingales and cuckoos improbable; but I might hope for the
chiffchaff, an early martin, some stitchwort blossoms, cuckoo flowers,
some larch green, some blackthorn white. I began to think of what the
days would be like. Would there be an invisible sky and a coldish wind,
yet some ground for hoping, because the blackbirds would be content in
their singing at evening, and the dead leaves that trundle in the road
would have decreased to a handful? Perhaps there would be another of
these dimly promising days. On the third, would the misty morning clear
slowly, the Downs barely visible under the low drift, behind which the
sky is caked in cloud, with a dirty silver light from the interstices?
And would there be one place in this sky which it would be impossible
to gaze at, and would this at last become dazzling, would the drift
vanish, and the Downs and half the valley be hid in the foundations
of a stationary mass of sunlit white cloud? Would the earth begin to
crumble in the warm breeze? Would the bees be heard instead of the
wind? Would the jackdaws play and cry far up in the pale vault? Would
the low east become a region of cumulus clouds, old-ivory-coloured,
receding with sunny edges one behind the other infinitely? Would the
evening sky be downy-white and clouded softly over the dark copses and
the many songs interwoven at seven? Would a clear still night follow,
with Lyra and a multitude of stars? So I questioned. But I will relate
something of what happened in the month of waiting and preparation.
Next day the north-east wind began to prevail, making a noise as if
the earth were hollow and rumbling all through the bright night, and
all day a rhythmless and steady roar. The earth was being scoured like
a pot. If snow fell, there was no more of it in the valleys than if a
white bird had been plucked by a sparrow-hawk: on the hills it lasted
longer, but as thin as rice the day after a wedding. The wind was
eager enough to scour me. Doubtless, an old man or two, and an infant
or two, it both scoured and killed. The yellow celandine flowers were
bright but shrivelled; the ivy gleamed blackly on the banks beside the
white roads. These were days of great rather than of little things;
the north-east wind that was cleaning, and the world that was being
cleaned. The old man, the child, and the celandine, mattered little.
Such days are good to live in, better to remember.
Very meekly, and in the night, the north-east wind gave up its power to
the south. Mild, sweet, and soft days followed, when the earth was an
invalid certain of recovery, with many delicate smiles and languors and
fatigues, and little vain fears or recollections. By St. David’s Day
violets began to disclose themselves to children and some lovers....
Copses, hedges, roadsides, and brooksides were taken possession of by
millions of primroses in thick, long-stemmed clusters; their green,
only just flowerlike, scent was suited perfectly to the invalid but
strengthening earth.
Then for most of a day it rained, and what was done under cover of
that deliberate, irresistible rain, only a poet can tell. There are
more trees than men on the earth, more flowers than children, and on
that day the earth was such as I can imagine it before man or god
had been invented. It was an earlier than prehistoric day. The sun
rose glimmeringly in mist, as yet not strongly, but sure of victory
over chaos. What will happen? What shall come of it? What will be
the new thing? On such a day the song of birds was first heard upon
the earth.... As I went along I found myself repeating with an
inexplicable and novel fervour the words, “Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.” No possible
supplication to “Earth, Ocean, Air--Eternal Brotherhood,” could have
been more satisfying. From time to time other incantations also seemed
appropriate, as, for example,--
“Oh, Santiana’s won the day--
Away, Santiana!--
Santiana’s won the day
Along the plains of Mexico.”
There followed an ordinary fine day, warm but fresh, with more than one
light shower out of the south-west during the afternoon; after that
a cloudy, rainless day, which people did not call fine, though the
chaffinches and thrushes enjoyed it wholly; and after that, rain again,
and the elms standing about like conspirators in the mist of the rain,
preparing something; then a day, warm and bright, of a heavenly and yet
also a spirited loveliness--the best day of the year, when the larks’
notes were far beyond counting; and after that wind and rain again; a
day of great wind and no rain; then two days of mild, quick air, both
glooming into black nights of tumult, with frosty, penitent-looking
dawns. Snow succeeded, darkening the air, whitening the sky, on the
wings of a strong wind from the north of north-west, for a minute only,
but again and again, until by five o’clock the sky was all blue except
at the horizon, where stood a cluster of white mountains, massive and
almost motionless, in the south above the Downs, and round about them
some dusky fragments not fit to be used in the composition of such
mountains. They looked as if they were going to last for ever. Yet by
six o’clock the horizon was dim, and the clouds all but passed away,
the Downs clear and extended; the blackbird singing as if the world
were his nest, the wind cold and light, but dying utterly to make way
for a beautiful evening of one star and many owls hooting.
The next day was the missel-thrush’s and the north-west wind’s. The
missel-thrush sat well up in a beech at the wood edge and hailed the
rain with his rolling, brief song: so rapidly and oft was it repeated
that it was almost one long, continuous song. But as the wind snatched
away the notes again and again, or the bird changed his perch, or
another answered him or took his place, the music was roving like a
hunter’s.... I looked at my maps. Should I go through Swindon, or
Andover, or Winchester, or Southampton? I had a mind to compass all
four; but the objection was that the kinks thus to be made would
destroy any feeling of advance in the journey....
The night was wild, and on the morrow the earth lay sleeping a sweet,
quiet sleep of recovery from the wind’s rage. The robin could be heard
as often as the missel-thrush. The sleep lasted through a morning
of frost and haze into a clear day, gentle but bright, and another
and another of cloudy brightness, brightened cloudiness, rounded off
between half-past five and half-past six by blackbirds singing. The
nights were strange children for such days, nights of frantic wind
and rain, threatening to undo all the sweet work in a swift, howling
revolution. Trees were thrown down, branches broken, but the buds
remained.
The north wind made an invasion with horizontal arrows of pricking
hail in the day, and twice in the night a blue lightning, that long
stood brandished within the room until thunder fell, disembowelling
the universe, with no rolling sound, but a single plunge and rebound
as of an enormous weight. With the day came snow, hail, and rain, each
impotent to silence the larks for one minute after it had ceased. The
half-moon at the zenith of a serene, frosty night led in a morning of
mist that filled up all the hollows of the valley as with snow: each
current of smoke from locomotive or cottage lay in solid and enduring
vertebræ above the mist: the sun shone upon black rooks cawing moodily,
upon snow and freshest green intermingled: the larks soared into the
light white cloud; the bullfinch whispered a sweet, cracked melody,
almost hid now in hawthorn leaves.
These things in their turn availed nothing against a wind swooping
violently all night, sometimes with rain, sometimes without. Neither
west wind nor rain respected daybreak: only at half-past one could
the sun put his head out to see if the two had done quarrelling with
the earth or with one another. The rain gave up, and the loose clouds
strewn over the sky had no more order than the linen which was now
hurriedly spread on the blossoming gorse-bushes to flatter the sun.
In response, the sun poured out light on flooded waters, on purple
brook-side thickets of alder, and celandines under them, and on
solitary greening chestnuts, as if all was now to be well. The clouds
massed themselves together in larger and whiter continents, the blue
spaces widened. Yet though the sun went down in peace, what of the
morrow?
Whatever happened, I was to start on Good Friday. I was now deciding
that I would go through Salisbury, and over the Plain to West
Lavington, and thence either through Devizes or through Trowbridge
and Bradford. Salisbury was to be reached by Guildford, Farnham,
Alton, Alresford, but perhaps not Winchester--for I could follow down
the Itchen to King’s Worthy, and then cross those twenty miles of
railwayless country by way of Stockbridge, visiting thus Hazlitt’s
Winterslow. To Guildford there were several possible ways. The ordinary
Portsmouth road, smooth enough for roller-skating, and passing
through unenclosed piny and ferny commons one after another, did not
overmuch attract me. Also, I wanted to see Ewell again, and Epsom, and
Leatherhead, and to turn round between hill and water under Leatherhead
Church and Mickleham Church to Dorking. Thus my ways out of London
were reduced. I could, of course, reach Ewell by way of Kingston,
Surbiton, and Tolworth, traversing some of Jefferies’ second country,
and crossing the home of his “London trout.” But this was too much of a
digression for the first day.
At any rate the Quantocks were to be my goal. I had a wish of a mildly
imperative nature that Spring would be arriving among the Quantocks at
the same time as myself--that “the one red leaf the last of its clan,”
that danced on March 7, 1798, would have danced itself into the grave:
that since my journey was to be in “a month before the month of May,”
Spring would come fast, not slowly, up that way. Yes, I would see
Nether Stowey, the native soil of “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel,” and “The
Ancient Mariner,” where Coleridge fed on honey-dew and drank the milk
of Paradise.
If I was to get beyond the Quantocks, it would only be for the sake
of looking at Taunton or Minehead or Exmoor. Those hills were a
distinct and sufficient goal, because they form the boundary between
the south-west and the west. Beyond them lie Exmoor, Dartmoor, the
Bodmin Moor, and Land’s End, a rocky and wilder land, though with many
a delicate or bounteous interspace. On this side is the main tract of
the south and the south-west, and the Quantocks themselves are the
last great strongholds of that sweetness. Thither I planned to go,
under the North Downs to Guildford, along the Hog’s Back to Farnham,
down the Itchen towards Winchester, over the high lands of the Test to
Salisbury; across the Plain to Bradford, over the Mendips to Shepton
Mallet, and then under the Mendips to Wells and Glastonbury, along the
ridge of the Polden Hills to Bridgwater, and so up to the Quantocks and
down to the sea.
I was to start on roads leading into the Epsom road. Some regret I
felt that I could not contrive to leave by the Brighton road. For I
should thus again have enjoyed passing the green dome of Streatham
Common, the rookery at Norbury, the goose-pond by the “Wheatsheaf”
and “Horse-shoe,” and threading the unbroken lines of Croydon shops
until Haling Park begins on the right hand, opposite the “Red Deer.”
The long, low, green slope of the Park, the rookery elms on it, the
chestnuts above the roadside fence, are among the pleasantest things
which the besieging streets have made pleasanter. Haling Down, a
straight-ridged and treeless long hill parallel to the road, is a
continuation of that slope. In the midst it is broken by a huge
chalk-pit, bushy and weathered, and its whole length is carved by an
old road, always clearly marked either by the bare chalk of its banks
or the stout thorn-bushes attending its course. Blocks of shops between
the grass and the road, a street or two running up into it, as at the
chalk-pit, and the announcement of building sites, have not spoiled
this little Down, which London has virtually imprisoned. Anywhere in
the chalk country its distinct individuality, the long, straight ridge
and even flank, would gain it honour, but here it is a pure pastoral.
It is good enough to create a poem at least equal (in everything but
length) to “Windsor Forest” or “Cooper’s Hill,” if we had a local poet
to-day. Beyond it, enclosed by the Eastbourne and Brighton roads, is a
perfect small region of low downs, some bare, some wooded, some bushy,
having Coulsdon in the centre.... But that was not to be my way.
Next day new dust was blowing over still wet mud, but the stainless
blue of eight o’clock was veiled at nine. A thin gleam now and then
illuminated the oaks, the fagots piled among primroses, and the copser
himself. Half leaning against an oak, half reclining on his bed between
two hurdles, he smoked and saw steadily and whole the train that rushed
past the wood’s edge, the immense white cloud that pushed up slowly
above the horizon, and the man following the roller down stripe after
stripe of the next meadow, his head bent, his hand in his pocket. What
sun there was, and perhaps more, had entered the rook’s cawing and
the passages from “Madame Angot” tripping out of the barrel-organ.
One isolated bent larch in a dark wood was green all over, a spirit
of acrid green challenging the darkness. An angry little shower made
my hope sputter, but the gleam--while the rain, white with light, was
still falling--the soft bright gleam with which the worn flagstones
answered the returning sun seemed to me pure Spring. If the rain
fell again soon afterwards it only enriched the deep, after-rainy blue
of evening, and made whiter the one planet that shone at half-past
six upon the mud, the straight lines of traffic, and the parallels of
white and yellow lamps. As deeply as one pearl dropped in mid-Atlantic
was that planet lost in the storms of the night, when the rain and the
south-west wind raved together. Yet I had planned to start on the next
day.
II.
THE START: LONDON TO GUILDFORD.
I had planned to start on March 21, and rather late than early, to give
the road time for drying. The light arrived bravely and innocently
enough at sunrise; too bravely, for by eight o’clock it was already
abashed by a shower. There could be no doubt that either I must wait
for a better day, or at the next convenient fine interval I must
pretend to be deceived and set out prepared for all things. So at ten I
started, with maps and sufficient clothes to replace what my waterproof
could not protect from rain.
The suburban by-streets already looked rideable; but they were false
prophets: the main roads were very different. For example, the surface
between the west end of Nightingale Lane and the top of Burntwood Lane
was fit only for fancy cycling--in and out among a thousand lakes a
yard wide and three inches deep. These should either have been stocked
with gold-fish and aquatic plants or drained, but some time had been
allowed to pass without either course being adopted. It may be that
all the draining forces of the neighbourhood had been directed to
emptying the ornamental pond on Wandsworth Common. Empty it was, and
the sodden bed did not improve the look of the common--flat by nature,
flatter by recent art. The gorse was in bloom amidst a patchwork of
turf, gravel, and puddle. Terriers raced about or trifled. A flock
of starlings bathed together in a puddle until scared by the dogs. A
tall, stern, bald man without a hat strode earnestly in a straight
line across the grass and water, as if pleasure had become a duty.
He was alone on the common. In all the other residences, that form
walls round the common almost on every side, hot-cross buns had proved
more alluring than the rain and the south-west wind. The scene was,
in fact, one more likely to be pleasing in a picture than in itself.
It was tame: it was at once artificial and artless, and touched
with beauty only by the strong wind and by the subdued brightness
due to the rain. Its breadth and variety were sufficient for it to
respond--something as Exmoor or Mousehold Heath or Cefn Bryn in Gower
would have responded--to the cloudily shattered light, the threats and
the deceptions, and the great sweep of the wind. But there was no one
painting those cold expanses of not quite lusty grass, the hard, dull
gravel, the shining puddles, the dark gold-flecked gorse, the stiff,
scanty trees with black bark and sharp green buds, the comparatively
venerable elms of Bolingbroke Grove, the backs and fronts of houses of
no value save to their owners, and the tall chimney-stacks northwards.
Perhaps only a solitary artist, or some coldish sort of gnome or angel,
could have thoroughly enjoyed this moment. That it was waiting for such
a one I am certain; I am almost equally certain that he could create a
vogue in scenes like this one, which are only about a thousandth part
as unpleasant as a cold bath, and possess, furthermore, elements of
divinity lacking both to the cold bath and to the ensuing bun.
It is easier to like the blackbird’s shrubbery, the lawn, the big elm,
or oak, and the few dozen fruit trees, of the one or two larger and
older houses surviving--for example, at the top of Burntwood Lane. The
almond, the mulberry, the apple trees in these gardens have a menaced
or actually caged loveliness, as of a creature detained from some world
far from ours, if they are not, as in some cases they are, the lost
angels of ruined paradises.
Burntwood Lane, leading down from a residential district to an
industrial district, is no longer as pretty as its name. Also, when
it seems to be aiming at the country, it turns into a street of
maisonettes, with a vista of houses terminated by the two tall red
chimneys of the Wimbledon Electricity Works. But it has its character.
The Lunatic Asylum helps it with broad, cultivated squares, elms, and
rooks’ nests, and the voices of cows and pigs behind the railings that
line it on the left hand from top to bottom. On the right, playfields
waiting to be built all over give it a lesser advantage. How sorry are
the unprotected elms on that side! They will never be old. Man, child,
and dog, walking in and out of them, climbing them, kicking and cutting
them, have made them as little like trees as it is possible for them
to be while they yet live. They have one hour of prettiness, when the
leaf-buds are as big as peas on the little side sprays low down. Then
on a Saturday--or on a Sunday, when the path is darkened by adults in
their best clothes--the children come and pick the sprays in bunches
instead of primroses. For there are no primroses, no celandines, no
dandelions outside the fences in Burntwood Lane. And Garratt Green at
the bottom is now but a railed-in, perfectly level square for games,
with rules on a notice-board. It is greener than when it was crossed
diagonally by paths, and honoured on a Saturday by gypsies and
coconut-shies. Probably it now gives some satisfaction to the greatest
number possible, but nobody will ever again, until After London, think
of Garratt Green as a sort of country place. I went round it and its
footballers in haste. Nor is that thickening portion of London beyond
it easily made to appear beautiful or interesting. It is flat and low,
suitable rather for vegetables than men, and built on chiefly because
people can always be enticed into new houses. The flatter and lower
and more suitable for vegetables, the more easily satisfied are the
people with their houses, partly because they are poor, partly because
they are half country folk and like this kind of land, it may be, and
the river Wandel, the watercress beds, the swampy places, the market
gardens, the cabbages and lavender, and Mitcham Fair, more than they
would like the church-parade along Bolingbroke Grove, the bands, the
teetotallers, the atheists, and the tennis-players, on the commons
which have a gravel soil.
As I left the Green I noticed Huntspill Road. Why is it Huntspill
Road? I thought at once of Huntspill in Somerset, of Highbridge on the
Brue, of Brent Knoll, of Burnham and Hunt’s Pond, and the sandhills
and the clouded-yellow butterflies that shared the hollows of the
sandhills with me in the Summer once. Such is the way of street names,
particularly in London suburbs, where free play is given to memory and
fancy. I suppose, if I were to look, I should find names as homely
as the Florrie Place and Lily Place at lower Farringdon near Alton,
or the Susannah’s Cottage and Katie’s Cottage near Canute’s Palace
at Southampton. But Beatrice, Ayacanora, or Megalostrate would be as
likely. To the casual, curious man, these street names compose an
outdoor museum as rich as any in the world. They are the elements of a
puzzle map of England which gradually we fill in, now recognizing from
a bus-top the name of a Wiltshire village, and again among the Downs
coming upon a place which had formerly been but a name near Clapham
Junction.
Not far beyond Huntspill Road, at what is called (I think) New
Wimbledon, I noticed a De Burgh Street. Do you remember how Borrow,
speaking of the tricks of fortune, says that he has seen a descendant
of the De Burghs who wore the falcon mending kettles in a dingle? He
counted himself one of the De Burghs. De Burgh Street is a double row
of more than dingy--better than dingy--swarthy, mulatto cottages,
ending in a barrier of elm trees. The monotony of the tiny front
gardens is broken by a dark pine tree in one, and by an inn called the
“Sultan”--not “Sweet Sultan,” which is a flower, but “Sultan,” a dusky
king. And out of the “Sultan,” towards me, strode a gaunt, dusky man,
with long black ringlets dangling from under his hard hat down over his
green and scarlet neckerchief. His tight trousers, his brisk gait, and
his hairless jib, were those of a man used to horses and to buyers and
sellers of horses. He came rapidly and to beg. Rapid was his begging,
exquisitely finished in its mechanical servility. His people were
somewhere not far off, said he. That night he had travelled from St.
Albans to rejoin them. They were not here: they must be at Wandsworth,
with the vans and horses. All questions were answered instantly,
briefly, and impersonally. The incident was but a pause in his rapid
career from the “Sultan” to Wandsworth. He took the price of a pint
with a slight appearance of gratitude, and departed with long, very
quick steps, head down, face almost hidden by his bowler.
But there was much to be seen between Huntspill Road and De Burgh
Road. The scene, for instance, from the corner by the “Plough,” the
“Prince Albert,” and the “White Lion,” at Summerstown, was curious
and typical. These three great houses stand at the edge of the still
cultivated and unpopulated portion of the flat land of the Wandel--the
allotment gardens, the watercress beds, the meadows plentifully
adorned with advertisements and thinly sprinkled with horse and cow,
but not lacking a rustic house and a shed or two, and to-day a show
of plum-blossom. This suburban landscape had not the grace of Haling
Park and Down, but at that moment its best hour was beginning. The
main part visible was twenty acres of damp meadow. On the left it was
bounded by the irregular low buildings of a laundry, a file and tool
factory, and a chamois-leather mill; on the right by the dirty backs of
Summerstown. On the far side a neat, white, oldish house was retiring
amid blossoming fruit trees under the guardianship of several elms, and
the shadow of those two tall red chimneys of the Electricity Works. On
my side the meadow had a low black fence between it and the road, with
the addition, in one place, of high advertisement boards, behind which
lurked three gypsy vans. A mixture of the sordid and the delicate in
the whole was unmistakable.
Skirting the meadow, my road led up to the Wandel and a mean bridge.
The river here is broadened for a hundred yards between the bridge and
the chamois-leather mill or Copper Mill. The buildings extend across
and along one side of the water; a meadow comes to the sedgy side
opposite. The mill looks old, has tarred boards where it might have
had corrugated iron, and its neighbours are elms and the two chimneys.
It is approached at one side by a lane called Copper Mill Lane, where
the mud is of a sort clearly denoting a town edge or a coal district.
Above the bridge the back-yards of new houses have only a narrow
waste between them and the Wandel, and on this was being set up the
coconut-shy that would have been on Garratt Green twenty years ago.
The rain returned as I was crossing the railway bridge by Hayden’s Road
station. It was raining hard when the gypsy left the “Sultan,” and
still harder when I turned to the right along Merton Road. Rather than
be soaked thus early, I took the shelter offered by a bird-shop on the
left hand. This was not a cheerful or a pretty place. Overhead hung a
row of cages containing chaffinches--battered ones at a shilling, a
neater one at eighteen-pence--that sang every now and then,--
“My life and soul, as if he were a Greek.”
Inside the shop, linnets at half a crown were rushing ceaselessly
against the bars of six-inch cages, their bosoms ruffled and bloody as
if from the strife, themselves like wild hearts beating in breasts
too narrow. “House-moulted” goldfinches (price 5s. 6d.) were making
sounds which I should have recognized as the twittering of goldfinches
had I heard them among thistles on the Down tops. Little, bright
foreign birds, that would have been hardly more at home there than
here, looked more contented. A gold-fish, six inches long, squirmed
about a globe with a diameter of six inches, in the most complete exile
imaginable. The birds at least breathed air not parted entirely from
the south-west wind which was now soaking the street; but the fish was
in a living grave. The place was perhaps more cheerless to look at than
to live in, but in a short time three more persons took shelter by it,
and after glancing at the birds, stood looking out at the rain, at
the dull street, the tobacconist’s, news-agent’s, and confectioner’s
shops alone being unshuttered. Presently one of the three shelterers
entered the bird-shop, which I had supposed shut; the proprietor came
out for a chaffinch; and in a minute or two the customer left with an
uncomfortable air and something fluttering in a paper bag such as would
hold a penn’orth of sweets. He mounted a bicycle, and I after him, for
the rain had forgotten to fall. He turned up to the left towards Morden
station, which was my way also. Not far up the road he was apparently
unable to bear the fluttering in the paper bag any longer; he got down,
and with an awkward air, as if he knew how many great men had done it
before, released the flutterer. A dingy cock chaffinch flew off among
the lilacs of a garden, saying “Chink.” The deliverer was up and away
again.
For some distance yet the land was level. The only hill was made by
the necessity of crossing a railway at Morden station. At that point
rows of houses were discontinued; shops and public-houses with a lot
of plate-glass had already ceased. The open stretches were wider
and wider, of dark earth, of vegetables in squares, or florists’
plantations, divided by hedges low and few, or by lines of tall elm
trees or Lombardy poplars. Not quite rustic men and women stooped or
moved to and fro among the vegetables: carts were waiting under the
elms. A new house, a gasometer, an old house and its trees, lay on the
farther side of the big field: behind them the Crystal Palace. On my
right, in the opposite direction, the trees massed themselves together
into one wood.
It is so easy to make this flat land sordid. The roads, hedges, and
fences on it have hardly a reason for being anything but straight.
More and more the kind of estate disappears that might preserve trees
and various wasteful and pretty things: it is replaced by small villas
and market gardens. If any waste be left under the new order, it will
be used for conspicuously depositing rubbish. Little or no wildness
of form or arrangement can survive, and with no wildness a landscape
cannot be beautiful. Barbed wire and ugly and cruel fences, used
against the large and irresponsible population of townsmen, add to the
charmless artificiality. It was a relief to see a boy stealing up one
of the hedges, looking for birds’ nests. And then close up against this
eager agriculture and its barbed wires are the hotels, inns, tea-shops,
and cottages with ginger-beer for the townsman who is looking for
country of a more easy-going nature. This was inhospitable. On many
a fence and gate had been newly written up in chalk by some prophet:
“Eternity,” “Believe,” “Come unto Me.”
I welcomed the fences for the sake of what lay behind them. Now it was
a shrubbery, now a copse, and perhaps a rookery, or a field running up
mysteriously to the curved edge of a wood, and at Morden Hall it was
a herd of deer among the trees. The hedges were good in themselves,
and for the lush grass, the cuckoo-pint, goose-grass, and celandine
upon their banks. Walking up all the slightest hills because of the
south-west wind, I could see everything, from the celandines one by one
and the crowding new chestnut leaves, to the genial red brick tower of
St. Laurence’s Church at Morden and the inns one after another--the
“George,” the “Lord Nelson,” the “Organ,” the “Brick Kiln,” the
“Victoria.” Nelson’s hatchment is still on the wall of Merton Church:
his name is the principal one for inns in the neighbourhood. Ewell, for
example, has a “Lord Nelson,” where the signboard shows Nelson and the
telescope on one side, and the _Victory_ on the other.
The liberator of the chaffinch and I no longer had the road to
ourselves as we struggled on in the mud between old houses, villas,
dingy tea-shops, hoardings, and fields that seemed to produce crops of
old iron and broken crockery. If the distant view at one moment was all
elm trees, at the next it was a grand new instalment of London, ten
fields away. But all of us must have looked mainly at the road ahead,
making for some conjectural “world far from ours.” The important thing
was to get out of this particular evil, not to inquire whether worse
came after.