and side-cars bore middle-aged men with their wives or children,
poorish-looking young men with their girls. Once or twice a man dashed
by with a pretty girl smiling above his back wheel, perfectly balanced.
But the greater number of my fellow-travellers were cyclists carrying
luncheons and waterproofs. In one band seven or eight lean young chaps
in dark clothes bent over their handle-bars, talking in jerks as they
laboured, all stopping together at any call for a drink or to mend a
puncture. They swore furiously, but (I believe) not in anger, at a
nervous woman crossing in front of them. If conversation flagged, one
or other of them was certain to break out into song with,--
“Who were you with last night
Out in the pale moonlight?
It wasn’t your missus,
It wasn’t your ma.
Ah, ah, ah, ah! ... ah!
Will you tell your missus
When you get home
Who you were with last night?”
The clouds hung like pudding-bags all over the sky, but the sad,
amorous, jaunty drivel seemed to console them.
Some way past Morden these braves were jeering at the liberator of the
chaffinch, who stood in the middle of the road with a book and pencil.
He was drawing a weather-vane above a house on the left hand. The
long, gilt dragon, its open mouth, sharp ears, sharp upright wings,
and thin curled tail, had attracted him, although the arrow-head at
the tip of the tail was pointing south-westward, and rain was falling.
“It’s rather curious,” he remarked, as I came up to him, “there is
no ingenuity in weather-vanes. One has to put up with the Ship and
the Cock erected over the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, and think
oneself really lucky to come across the Centaur with his bow and arrow
at the brass-foundry, you know, on the left just before you come to the
top of Tottenham Court Road from Portland Road station.” But it was
blowing hard, and there was little reason for me to suppose that he was
addressing me, or for him to suppose that I heard him. However, it was
a kind of introduction. On we rode.
I had been about two hours reaching the gate of Nonsuch Park, and the
fountain and cross there commemorating a former mistress, Charlotte
Farmer, who died in 1906. The other man was reading aloud the
inscription,--
“As thirsty travellers in a desert land
Welcome a spring amidst a waste of sand,
So did her kindly actions cheer the sad,
Refresh the worn, and make the weary glad.”
I tried to get water, but there was none. Nevertheless, the fountain
was a pretty thing on that plot of grass where the road zigzags
opposite the gate and avenue of Nonsuch. A dove and an olive branch, of
ruddiest gilding, is perched on the cross tip.
“Wretched weather,” said the man, speaking through the pencil in his
mouth, as he straddled on to his bicycle. At Ewell I lost him by going
round behind the new church to look at the old tower. This completely
ivy-covered square tower is all that remains of an old church. If the
rest was as little decayed, there can hardly have been a good reason
for demolishing it. The doors were locked. I could only walk about
among the trees, glancing at the tombs of the Glyn family, and the
headstone of Edward Wells (who died in 1742, at the age of sixteen) and
the winged skull adorning it.
Ewell was the first place on my road which bore a considerable
resemblance to a country town. It stands at the forking of a Brighton
and a Worthing road. Hereby rises the Hogsmill river; its water
flows alongside the street, giving its name to the “Spring Inn.” The
name Ewell, like that of Oxfordshire Ewelme, seems and is said to be
connected with the presence of water. The place is not a mere roadside
collection of houses with a variegated, old look, but a town at which
roads meet, pause, take a turn or two, and exchange greetings, before
separating from one another and from Ewell. The town probably struck
those escaping Londoners on bicycles as one where the sign of the
“Green Man” was in keeping. Comfortable houses on the outskirts, with
high trees and shrubberies, and an avenue of limes crossing the road at
right angles, confirm the fancy. It marked a definite stage on the road
from London.
The end of Ewell touched the beginning of Epsom, which had to be
entered between high walls of advertisements--yards of pictures and
large letters--asserting the virtues of clothes, food, drugs, etc., one
sheet, for example, showing that by eating or drinking something you
gained health, appetite, vigour, and a fig-leaf. The exit was better.
Epsom had the same general effect as Ewell, but more definite and
complete, thanks to a few hundred yards of street broad enough for a
market which, for the most part, satisfied the town eye as countrified
and old-fashioned. Over one of its corn-chandlers’ a carved horse’s
head was stuck up. There was an empty inn called the “Tun,” a
restaurant named after Nell Gwynn. True, there is a fortnight’s racing
yearly, and a number of railway stations, in consequence; and “Lord
Arthur Savile’s Crime” is on sale there: but, as in Nell Gwynn’s time
and Defoe’s time, it is a place for putting off London thoughts.
There is no king there now, no king’s mistress presumably, no nightly
ball even in July, no bowls, no strutting to the Wells to drink what
the chemist sells at twopence a pound, no line of trees down the
middle of the broad street. Nor, accordingly, is there the same wintry
dereliction as in those days. When the leaves fall in Autumn the people
do not all fly, the houses are not all shut up, the walks do not go
out of repair, the roads do not become full of sloughs. But it always
was a pleasure resort. For more than a hundred years before railways,
London business men used to keep their families at Epsom and ride daily
to and from the Exchange or their warehouses. The very market that it
had on Fridays had been obtained for it by a plotting apothecary named
Livingstone. This man tried to diddle the world by putting up a pump,
not over the good old cathartic spring, but over a new one that was
not cathartic; and the world gave up both old and new. To-day only the
poor and simple go to Epsom for pleasure apart from racing. Anybody and
everybody with feet or wheels can get there from London on a holiday or
even a half-holiday.
The exit from Epsom was almost free from advertisements. And then the
common: it had a sea-like breadth and clearness. The one man among the
soaked, flowering gorse-bushes and new green hawthorn was extremely
like the liberator of the chaffinch and collector of weather-vanes.
He was sketching something in the rain. The only others of humankind
visible were on the road, struggling south-west or rushing towards
London, or on the side of the road, hoping to sell ginger-beer and
lemonade to travellers. This hedgeless gorse-land, first on both sides,
then on the right only, reached to the verge of Ashtead, but with some
change of character. The larger part was gently billowing gorse flower
and hawthorn leaf. The last part was flat, wet, and rushy. The gorse
came to an end, and here was a copse of oak. At intervals of thirty
yards or so were oaks as old as Epsom, of a broad kind, forking close
to the ground, iron-coloured and stained with faint green. Oaks not
more than forty or fifty years old, tall instead of spreading, their
lower branches broken off, grew between. Among these, dead fern and
bramble with its old leaves made distinct island thickets, out of which
stood a few thorns. And the thin grasses around the thickets were
strewn with dead twigs and leaves, and some paper and broken bottles
left there in better weather. A robin sang in one of the broad oaks,
whether any one listened or not.
On the opposite side of the road--that is to say, on the left--the
common had given way to Ashtead Park. There the big iron-coloured oaks
stood aristocratically about on gentle green slopes. To Ashtead Park
belonged the Hon. Mary Greville Howard, who died in 1877, at the age
of ninety-two, and is commemorated by a fountain on the right hand
which gave me this information. The fountain is placed on a square
of much-trodden bare earth close to the road, surmounted by a cross.
Whatever were the good deeds which persuaded her friends to erect the
fountain, that was a good deed. It was not dry, and, I have been told,
never is.
Ashtead itself is more suburban than either Ewell or Epsom. It appeared
to be a collection of residences about as incapable of self-support as
could anywhere be found--a private-looking, respectable, inhospitable
place that made the rain colder, and doubtless, in turn, coloured the
spectacles it was seen through. The name of its inn, the “Leg of Mutton
and Cauliflower,” may be venerable, but it smacked of suburban fancy,
as if it had been bestowed to catch the pennies of easy-going lovers of
quaintness.
They were beginning to create a new Ashtead a little farther on.
A placard by a larch copse at the edge of a high-walled marl-pit,
announced that convenient and commanding houses were to be built
shortly to supply the new golf links with golfers. A road had been
driven through the estate. The young, green larches stood at the
entrance like well-drilled liveried pages, ready to give way or die
according to the requirements of golfers, but for the present enjoying
the rain and looking as larch-like as possible above the curved gray
wall of the pit.
Not much after this, Leatherhead began, two broken lines of villas,
trees, and shrubberies, leading to a steep country street and, at its
foot, the Mole,
“Four streams: whose whole delight in island lawns,
Dark-hanging alder dusks and willows pale
O’er shining gray-green shadowed waterways,
Makes murmuring haste of exit from the vale--
Through fourteen arches voluble
Where river tide-weed sways.” ...
[Illustration:
CUCKOO FLOWERS
Leatherhead Mill.]
As I looked this time from Leatherhead Bridge, I recalled “Aphrodite at
Leatherhead,” and these, its opening lines, by John Helston, the town’s
second poet. It is no new thing to stop on the bridge and look up the
river to the railway bridge, and down over the divided water to the
level grass, the tossing willows, the tall poplars scattered upon it,
the dark elms beside, and Leatherhead rising up from it to the flint
tower of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, and its umbrageous churchyard and
turf as of grass-green silk. The bridge is good in itself, and the
better for this view and for the poem. The adjacent inn, the “Running
Horse,” and Elinour Rumming who brewed ale there and sold it to
travellers--
“Tinkers and sweaters and swinkers
And all good ale-drinkers”--
four hundred years ago, these were the theme of a poet, Henry the
Eighth’s laureate, John Skelton.
Having ridden down to the bridge, I walked up again, for I had no
intention of going on over the Mole by the shortest road to Guildford.
It is a good road, but a high and rather straight one through parks
and cornland, and scarcely a village. The wide spaces on both hands,
and the troops and clusters of elm trees, are best in fine weather,
particularly in Autumn. I took the road through Mickleham and Dorking.
Thus I wound along, having wooded hills, Leatherhead Downs, Mickleham
Downs, Juniper Hill, and Box Hill, always steep above on the left, and
on the right the Mole almost continually in sight below.
They were still worshipping in the Church of St. Mary and St. Nicholas.
Outside it what most pleased me were the cross near a young cedar which
was erected in 1902 “to the praise and glory of God, and the memory
of the nameless dead,” and the epitaph: “Here sleepeth, awaiting
the resurrection of the just, William Lewis, Esq., of the East India
Company.” The memory of a human being that can exist without a name
is but the shadow of the shadow that a name casts, and it is hard
not to wonder what effect the cross can have on those who await the
resurrection of the just, or indeed, on any one but Geraldine Rickards,
at whose expense it was placed here.
The road, bending round under the churchyard and its trees, followed
the steeper side of the Mole valley, and displayed to me the meadow,
young corn, and ploughland, running up from the farther bank to beech
woods. The clouds were higher and harder. The imprisoned pale sun,
though it could not be seen, could be felt at the moments when a bend
offered shelter from the wind. The change was too late for most of my
fellow-travellers: they had stopped or turned back at Leatherhead. I
was almost alone as I came into Mickleham, except for a horseman and
his dog. This man was a thick, stiff man in clay-coloured rough clothes
and a hard hat; his bandy, begaitered legs curled round the flanks of
a piebald pony as thick and stiff as himself. He carried an ash-plant
instead of a riding-whip, and in his mouth a pipe of strong, good
tobacco. I had not seen such a country figure that day, though I dare
say there were many among the nameless dead in Leatherhead churchyard,
awaiting the resurrection of the just with characteristic patience.
His dog also was clay-coloured, as shaggy and as large as a sheep,
and exceedingly like a sheep. Probably he was a man who could have
helped me to understand, for example, the epitaph of Benjamin Rogers in
Mickleham churchyard,--
“Here peaceful sleep the aged and the young,
The rich and poor, an undistinguished throng.
Time was these ashes lived; a time must be
When others thus shall stand and look at thee.”
I had at first written,--
“Time was these ashes lov’d.”
His wife, Mary, who died at fifty-five in 1755, is hard by under an
arch of ancient ivy against the wall. She speaks from the tomb,--
“How lov’d, how valu’d once avails thee not:
To whom related, or by whom begot.
A heap of dust alone remains of thee.
’Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.”
That this desperate Christian, Mary Rogers, had any special knowledge
of these matters, I have no reason for believing. I even doubt if
she really thought that love was of as little importance as having
a lord in the family. The lines were composed in a drab ecstasy of
conventional humility, lacking genuine satisfaction in the thought
that she and the more beautiful and the better-dressed were become
equals. But I did not ask the clay-coloured man’s opinion. I rode
behind him into Mickleham, and there lost him between the “Running
Horse” (or, at least, an inn with two racing horses for a sign) and the
“William the Fourth.” The loyalty of Mickleham, in thus preserving the
memory of a sort of a king for three-quarters of a century, is sublime.
Mickleham is, apart from its gentlemen’s residences, an old-fashioned
place, accommodating itself in a picturesque manner to the hillside
against which it has to cling, in order to avoid rolling into the
Mole. The root-suckers and the trunk shoots of the elm trees were in
tiny leaf beside the road, the horse-chestnuts were in large but still
rumpled leaf. The celandines on the steep banks found something like
sunbeams to shine in. On the smooth slopes the grass was perfect,
alternating with pale young corn, and with arable squares where the
dung was waiting for a fine day before being spread. The small flints
of the ploughland were as fresh and as bright as flowers.
When I got to Burford Bridge, the only man at the entrance of the
Box Hill footpath was a man selling fruit and drink and storing
bicycles, or hoping to begin doing these things. One motor car stood
at the hotel door. The hill was bare, except of trees. But it would
take centuries to wipe away the scars of the footpaths up it. For it
has a history of two hundred years as a pleasure resort. Ladies and
gentlemen used to go on a Sunday from Epsom to take the air and walk
in the woods. The landlord of the “King’s Arms” at Dorking furnished
a vault under a great beech on top, with chairs, tables, food, and
drink. It was like a fair, what with the gentry and the country people
crowding to see and to imitate. But the young men of Dorking were very
virtuous in those days, or were anxious that others should be so. They
paid the vault a visit on a Saturday and blew it up with gunpowder to
put a stop to the Sabbath merriment. They, at least, did not believe
that in the dust they would be merely the equals of the frivolous and
fresh-air-loving rich.
Dorking nowadays has no objection to the popularity of Box Hill and
similar resorts. It is a country town not wholly dependent on London,
but its shops and inns are largely for the benefit of travellers of
all degrees, and a large proportion of its inhabitants were not born
in Dorking and will not die there. A number of visitors were already
streaming back under umbrellas to the railway stations, for again
it rained. The skylarks sang in the rain, but as man was predominant
hereabouts, the general impression was cheerless. To many it must have
seemed absurd that the Government--say, Mr. Lloyd George--or the County
Council, or the Lord Mayor of Dorking, could not arrange for Good
Friday to be a fine day. The handfuls of worshippers may have been more
content, but they did not look so. Three-quarters of the windows in the
long, decent high street were shuttered or blinded. Unless it was some
one entering the “Surrey Yeoman” or “White Horse,” nobody did anything
but walk as rapidly and as straight as possible along the broad flagged
pavement.
Only a robust and happy man, or one in love, can be indifferent to this
kind of March weather. Only a lover or a poet can enjoy it. The poet
naturally thought of here and on such a day was Meredith of Box Hill.
This man,
“Quivering in harmony with the tempest, fierce
And eager with tempestuous delight,”
was one of the manliest and deepest of earth’s lovers who have written
books. From first to last he wrote as an inhabitant of this earth,
where, as Wordsworth says, “we have our happiness or not at all,”
just or unjust. Meredith’s love of earth was in its kind equal to
Wordsworth’s. It was a more earthly kind, at the same time that it had
a quality almost as swiftly winged as Shelley’s. His earliest poems
were all saturated with English sun and wind. He prayed that “this joy
of woods and fields” would never cease; and towards the end of his life
he wrote one of the happiest of all the poems of age, the one which is
quoted on the fly-leaf of Mr. Hudson’s “Adventures among Birds:”
“Once I was part of the music I heard
On the boughs, or sweet between earth and sky,
For joy of the beating of wings on high
My heart shot into the breast of a bird.
“I hear it now and I see it fly,
And a life in wrinkles again is stirred,
My heart shoots into the breast of a bird,
As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh.”
What his “Juggling Jerry” said briefly--
“Yonder came smells of the gorse, so nutty,
Gold-like, and warm: it’s the prime of May.
Better than mortar, brick, and putty
Is God’s house on a blowing day”--
he himself said at greater length, with variations and footnotes.
Love of earth meant to him more than is commonly meant by love of
Nature. Men gained substance and stability by it; they became strong--
“Because their love of earth is deep,
And they are warriors in accord
With life to serve.” ...
In his two sonnets called “The Spirit of Shakespeare” he said,--
“Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoured
He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell
Of human passions, but of love deflowered
His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well.
Thence came the honeyed corner at his lips.” ...
Love of earth meant breadth, perspective, and proportion, and therefore
humour,--
“Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart.”
His Melampus, servant of Apollo, had a medicine, a “juice of the
woods,” which reclaimed men,--
“That frenzied in some delirious rage
Outran the measure.” ...
So, in “The Appeasement of Demeter,” it was on being made to laugh that
the goddess relented from her devastating sorrow, and the earth could
revive and flourish again. The poet’s kinship with earth taught him to
look at lesser passing things with a smile, yet without disdain; and
he saw the stars as no “distant aliens” or “senseless powers,” but as
having in them the same fire as we ourselves, and could, nevertheless,
turn from them to sing “A Stave of Roving Tim:--”
“The wind is east, the wind is west,
Blows in and out of haven;
The wind that blows is the wind that’s best,
And croak, my jolly raven.
If here awhile we jigged and laughed,
The like we will do yonder;
For he’s the man who masters a craft,
And light as a lord can wander.
“So foot the measure, Roving Tim,
And croak, my jolly raven.
The wind, according to his whim,
Is in and out of haven.”
The “bile and buskin” attitude of Byron upon the Alps caused him to
condemn “Manfred,” pronouncing, as one having authority,--
“The cities, not the mountains, blow
Such bladders; in their shape’s confessed
An after-dinner’s indigest.”
For his earth was definitely opposed to the “city.” He cried to the
singing thrush in February,--
“I hear, I would the City heard.
“The City of the smoky fray;
A prodded ox, it drags and moans;
Its morrow no man’s child; its day
A vulture’s morsel beaked to bones.” ...
He tried to persuade the city that earth was not “a mother whom no
cry can melt.” But his song was not clear enough, and when it was
understood it said chiefly that man should love battle and seek it,
and so make himself, even if a clerk or a philosopher, an animal worthy
of the great globe, careless of death:--
“For love we Earth, then serve we all:
Her mystic secret then is ours:
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded, as beholds her flowers
“Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
Enrobed in morning’s mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire.”
He advanced farther, fanatically far, when he said of the lark’s song,--
“Was never voice of ours could say
Our inmost in the sweetest way,
Like yonder voice aloft, and link
All hearers in the song they drink.
Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,
Our passion is too full in flood,
We want the key of his wild note
Of truthful in a tuneful throat,
The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality.” ...
An impossibly noble savage might seem to have been his desire, a
combination of Shakespeare and a Huron, of a “Wild god-ridden courser”
and a study chair, though in practice perhaps a George Borrow delighted
him less than a Leslie Stephen. But what he thought matters little
compared with what he succeeded in saying, and with that sensuousness
and vigour, both bodily and intellectual, which at his best he mingled
as few poets have done. His “Love in the Valley” is the most English of
love poems: the girl and the valley are purely and beautifully English.
His early poem, “Daphne,” though treating a Greek myth, is equally
English--altogether an open-air piece. No pale remembered orb, but the
sun itself, and the wind, sweeten and brace the voluptuousness of both
poems. And therefore it is that in passing Box Hill, whether the leaves
of “the sudden-lighted whitebeam” are flashing, or lying, as now they
were, but dimly hoary in the paths, I think of Meredith as I should
not think of other poets in their territories. He was not so much an
admirer and lover of Nature, like other poets, as a part of her, one of
her most splendid creatures, fit to be ranked with the whitebeam, the
lark, and the south-west wind that--
“Comes upon the neck of night,
Like one that leapt a fiery steed
Whose keen, black haunches quivering shine
With eagerness and haste.” ...
Riding against the south-west wind is quite another thing. That fiery
steed which I had been dragging with me, as it were, instead of riding
it, was not in the least exhausted, and I knew that I was unlikely to
reach Farnham that evening. The telegraph wires wailed their inhuman
lamentation. Thunder issued a threat of some sort far off.
At three, after eating, I was on the road again, making for Guildford
by way of Wotton, Shere, and Shalford. If Dorking people will not have
wine and women on top of Box Hill on a Sunday, they were, at any rate,
strolling on the paths of their roadside common. The road was level,
impossible to cycle on against the wind. But the eye was not starved;
there was no haste. I now had the clear line of the Downs on my right
hand, and was to have them so to Shalford. At first, in the region of
Denbies, they were thoroughly tamed, their smoothness made park-like,
their trees mostly fir. Beyond, their sides, of an almost uniform
gentle steepness, but advancing and receding, hollowed and cleft, were
adorned by unceasingly various combinations of beech wood, of scattered
yew and thorn, of bare ploughland or young corn, and of naked chalk.
The rolling commons at their feet, Milton Heath and Westcott Heath,
were traversed by my road. Milton Heath, except for some rugged,
heathery, pine-crested mounds on the right, was rather unnoticeable in
comparison with Buryhill, a roof-like hill at right angles to the road
on my left. This hill has a not very high but distinct, even ridge, and
steep slopes of grass. Its trees are chiefly upon the top, embowering a
classic, open summer-house.