amid the gorse. The road was now cutting through sand, and the sand
walls were half overgrown with moss and gorse, ivy and celandine, and
overhung by wild cherry and beech. Behind me, as I climbed, a moment’s
sunlight brought out the white scar of Box Hill.
Between the rising road and the Downs lay a hollow land, for nearly two
miles occupied in its lowest part by the oaks of a narrow wood, called
Deerleap Wood, running parallel to the road: sometimes the gray trunks
were washed faintly with light, the accumulated branch-work proved
itself purplish, and here and there the snick of a lost bough was
bright. Over the summit of the wood I could see the chalky ploughland
or pasture of the Downs, and their beechen ridge. The hollow land has a
kind of island, steep and naturally moated, within it, and close to the
road. Here stands Wotton Church, the home of dead Evelyns of Wotton,
alone among tall beeches and chestnuts.
I had left behind me most cyclists from London, but I was now
continually amongst walkers. There were a few genial muscular
Christians with their daughters, and equally genial muscular agnostics
with no children; bands of scientifically-minded ramblers with
knickerbockers, spectacles, and cameras; a trio of young chaps singing
their way to a pub.; one or two solitaries going at five miles an hour
with or without hats; several of a more sentimental school in pairs,
generally chosen from both sexes, disputing as to the comparative
merits of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Arthur Sidgwick; and a few country people
walking, not for pleasure, but to see friends seven or eight miles
away, whom perhaps they had not visited for years, and, after such a
Good Friday as this, never will again.
These travellers gave me a feeling that I had been forestalled (to
put it mildly), and as the light began to dwindle, and to lose all
intention of being brilliant, I allowed Guildford to hover before my
mind’s eye, particularly when I saw St. Martha’s Church, a small, clear
hilltop block six miles away, and I knew that Guildford was not two
miles from it, by the Pilgrim’s Way or not. It was a satisfaction,
though a trifling one, to be going with the water which was making
for the Wey at Shalford. The streamlet, the Tillingbourne, began
to assert itself at Abinger Hammer. Just before that village it
runs alongside the road instead of a hedge, nourishing willows and
supplying the bronzed watercress beds. The beginning of the village is
a wheelwright’s shed under an elm by the road. Many hoops of wheels
lean against the shed, many planks against the elm. The green follows,
and Abinger Hammer is built round it. I preferred Gomshall--which
only showed to the main road its inns and brewery--and the wet, bushy
Gomshall Common. It is a resort of gypsies. A van full of newly-made
baskets stood among the bushes, and the men sat on the shafts instead
of joining the ramblers at the “Black Horse” or the “Compasses.” The
downs opposite them were speckled black with yew.
I did not stop at Shere, “the prettiest village in Surrey,” and I saw
no reason why it should not bear the title, or why it should be any
the better liked for it. But I went to see the Silent Pool. Until it
has been seen, everything is in the name. I had supposed it circular,
tenebrous, and deep enough to be the receptacle of innumerable romantic
skeletons. It is, in fact, an oblong pond of the size of a swimming
bath, overhung on its two long sides and its far, short side, by ash
trees. Its unrippled lymph, on an irregular chalk bottom of a singular
pallid green, was so clear and thin that it seemed not to be water. It
concealed nothing. A few trout glided here and there over the chalk or
the dark green weed tufts. It had no need of romantic truth or fiction.
Its innocent lucidity fascinated me.
Now another short cut to Guildford offered itself, by the road--an open
and yellow road--up over Merrow Down. But the Downs were beginning to
give me some shelter, and I went on under them, glad of the easier
riding. The Tillingbourne here was running closer under the Downs,
and the river level met the hillside more sharply than before. The
road bent above the meadows and showed them flat to the very foot of a
steep, brown slope covered with beeches. The sky lightened--lightened
too much: St. Martha’s tower, almost reaching up into the hurrying
white rack, was dark on its dark hill. So I came to Albury, which
has the streamlet between it and the Downs, unlike Abinger Hammer,
Gomshall, and Shere. The ground, used for vegetables and plum trees,
fell steeply down to the water, beyond which it rose again as steeply
in a narrow field bounded horizontally by a yet steeper strip of hazel
coppice; beyond this again the rise was continued in a broader field
extending to the edge of the main hillside beechwood. Albury is one of
those villages possessing a neglected old church and a brand-new one.
In this case the new is a decent enough one of alternating flint and
stone, built among trees on a gradual rise. But the old one is too much
like a shameless unburied corpse.
Twice I crossed the Tillingbourne, and came to where it broadened
into a pond. This water on either side of the road was bordered by
plumed sedges and clubbed bulrushes. At the far side, under the wooded
Downside crowned by St. Martha’s, was a pale, shelterless mill of a
ghostly bareness. The aspens were breaking into yellow-green leaves
round about, especially one prone aspen on the left where a drain was
belching furious, tawny water into the stream, and shaking the spears
of the bulrushes.
As I went on towards Chilworth, gorse was blossoming on the banks of
the road. Behind the blossom rose up the masses of hillside wood, now
scarcely interrupted save by a few interspaces of lawn-like grass; and
seated at the foot of all this oak and pine were the Chilworth powder
mills. Two centuries have earned them nobody’s love or reverence; for
there is something inhuman, diabolical, in permitting the union which
makes these unrelated elements more powerful than any beast, crueller
than any man.
Crossing the little railway from the mills, I came in sight of the
Hog’s Back, by which I must go to Farnham. That even, straight ridge
pointing westward, and commanding the country far away on either
side, must have had a road along it since man went upright, and must
continue to have one so long as it is a pleasure to move and to use
the eyes together. It is a road fit for the herald Mercury and the
other gods, because it is as much in heaven as on earth. The road I
was on, creeping humbly and crookedly to avoid both the steepness of
the hills and the wetness of the valley, was by comparison a mole run.
Between me and the Hog’s Back flowed the Wey, and as the Tillingbourne
approached it the valley spread out and flattened into Shalford’s long,
wet common. My road crossed the common, a rest for gypsies and their
ponies. Shalford village also is on the flat, chiefly on the right hand
side of the road, nearer the hill, and away from the river, so that its
outlook over the levels gives it a resemblance to a seaside village.
Instead of the sea it had formerly a fair ground of a hundred and forty
acres. Its inn is the “Queen Victoria”--charmless name.
To avoid the Wey and reach Guildford, which is mainly on this side
of the water, I had to turn sharp to the right at Shalford, and to
penetrate, along with the river, the hills which I had been following.
Within half a mile of Guildford I was at the point where the Pilgrim’s
Way, travelling the flank of these hills, descends towards the Wey and
the Hog’s Back opposite. A small but distinct hill, with a precipitous,
sandy face, rises sheer out of the far side of the river where the road
once crossed. The silver-gray square of the ruins of St. Catherine’s
Chapel tops the cliff. The river presently came close to my bank; the
road climbed to avoid it, and brought me into Guildford by Quarry Road,
well above the steep-built, old portion of the town and its church and
rookery sycamores, though below the castle.
The closed shops, plate glass, and granite roadway of the High Street
put the worst possible appearance on the rain that suddenly poured down
at six. A motor car dashed under the “Lion” arch for shelter. The shop
doorways were filled by foot-passengers. The plate glass, the granite,
and the rain rebounding from it and rushing in two torrents down the
steep gutters, made a scene of physical and spiritual chill under a sky
that had now lost even the pretence to possess a sun. I had thought
not to decide for or against going on to Farnham that night until
I had drunk tea. But having once sat in a room--not of the “Jolly
Butcher,” but a commercial temperance hotel--where I could only hear
the rain falling from the sky and dripping from roofs, I glided into
the resolution to spend the night there. A fire was lit; the servant
stood a poker vertically against the grate to make it burn; and, after
some misgivings, it did burn. The moon was mounting the clear east, and
Venus stood with Orion in the west above a low, horizontal ledge of
darkest after-sunset cloud. There could not have been a better time for
those ten miles to Farnham; but I did not go. Not until after supper
did I go out to look at the night I had lost, the cold sea of sky, the
large bright moon, the white stars over the shimmering roofs, and the
yellow street lamps and window panes of Guildford. I walked haphazard,
now to the right, now to the left, often by narrow passages and dark
entries. I skirted the railings of the gardens which have been made out
of the castle site, the square ivy-patched keep, the dry moat full of
sycamores; and hereby was a kissing corner. I crossed Quarry Road and
went down Mill Lane to the “Miller’s Arms,” the water-works, and the
doubled Wey roaring in turbid streams. A footbridge took me to Mill
Mead, the “Britannia,” and the faintly nautical cottages that look,
over a gas-lit paved space, at the river and the timber sheds of the
other bank. The dark water, the dark houses, the silvered, wet, moonlit
streets, called for some warm, musical life in contrast. But except
that a sacred concert was proceeding near the market place, there was
nothing like it accessible. Many couples hurried along: at corners here
and there a young man, or two young men, talked to a girl. The inns
were not full, too many travellers having been discouraged. I had the
temperance commercial hotel to myself, but for two men who had walked
from London and had no conversation left in them, as was my case also.
I dallied alternately with my maps and with the pictures on the wall.
One of these I liked, a big square gloomy canvas, where a dark huntsman
of Byron’s time, red-coated and clean-shaven, turned round on his horse
to cheer the hounds, one of them almost level with him, glinting pallid
through the mist of time, two others just pushing their noses into the
picture; it had a background of a dim range of hills and a spire. The
whole picture was as dim as memory, but more powerful to recall the
nameless artist and nameless huntsman than that cross at Leatherhead.
III.
GUILDFORD TO DUNBRIDGE.
Cocks crowing and wheels thundering on granite waked me at Guildford
soon after six. I was out at seven, after paying 3s. 6d. for supper
and bed: breakfast I was to have at Farnham. I have often fared as
well as I did that night at a smaller cost, and worse at a larger.
At Guildford itself, for example, I went recently into a place of no
historic interest or natural beauty, and greenly consented to pay 3s.
for a bed, although the woman, in answer to my question, said that the
charge for supper and breakfast would be according to what I had. What
I had for supper was two herrings and bread and butter, and a cup of
coffee afterwards; for breakfast I had bacon and bread and tea. The
supper cost 1s. 6d., exclusive of the coffee; the breakfast cost 1s.
6d. exclusive of the tea. Nor did these charges prevent the boots, who
had not cleaned my boots, from hanging round me at parting, as if I
had been his long-lost son.
The beautiful, still, pale morning was as yet clouded by the lightest
of white silk streamers. The slates glimmered with yesterday’s rain in
the rising sun. It was too fine, too still, too sunny, but the castle
jackdaws rejoiced in it, crying loudly in the sycamores, on the old
walls, or high in air. By the time I was beginning to mount the Hog’s
Back, clouds not of silk were assembling. They passed away; others
appeared, but the rain was not permitted to fall. Many miles of country
lay cold and soft, but undimmed, on both hands. On the north it was a
mostly level land where hedgerow trees and copses, beyond the first
field or two, made one dark wood to the eye, but rising to the still
darker heights of Bisley and Chobham on the horizon, and gradually
disclosing the red settlements of Aldershot and Farnborough, and the
dark high land of Bagshot. On the south at first I could see the broken
ridge of Hindhead, Blackdown, and Olderhill, and through the gap a
glimpse of the Downs; then later the piny country which culminates in
the dome of Crooksbury Hill; and nearer at hand a lower but steeply
rising and falling region of gorse, bracken, and heather intermingled
with ploughland of almost bracken colour, and with the first hop
gardens. Both the level-seeming sweep on the north and the hills of
the south, clear as they were in that anxious light, were subject to
the majestic road on the Hog’s Back. A mile out of Guildford the road
is well upon the back, and for five or six miles it runs straight, yet
not too straight, with slight change of altitude, yet never flat, and
for the most part upon the very ridge--the topmost bristles--of the
Hog’s Back. The ridge, in fact, has in some parts only just breadth
enough to carry the road, and the land sinks away rapidly on both
hands, giving the traveller the sensation of going on the crest of a
stout wall, surveying his immense possessions northward and southward.
The road has a further advantage that would be great whatever its
position, but on this ridge is incalculable. It is bordered, not by a
hedge, but by uneven and in places bushy wastes, often as wide as a
field. The wastes, of course, are divided from the cultivated slopes
below by hedges, but either these are low, as on the right, or they are
irregularly expanded into thickets of yew and blackthorn, and even into
beech plantations, as on the left. Whoever cares to rides or walks here
instead of on the dust. A goat or two were feeding here. There was,
and there nearly always is, an encampment of gypsies. The telegraph
posts and the stout, three-sided, old, white milestones stand here.
The telegraph posts, in one place, for some distance alternate with
low, thick yew trees. I liked those telegraph posts, businesslike and
mysterious, and their wires that are sufficient of themselves to create
the pathetic fallacy. None the less, I liked the look of the gypsies
camping under them. If they were not there, in fact, they would have to
be invented. They are at home there. See them at nightfall, with their
caravans drawn up facing the wind, and the men by the half-door at the
back smoking, while the hobbled horses are grazing and the children
playing near. The children play across the road, motor cars or no motor
cars, laughing at whoever amuses them. There were two caravans at the
highest point near Puttenham, where the ridge is so narrow that the
roadside thicket is well below the road, and I saw clear to Hindhead:
in another place there were two antique, patched tents on hoops.
The wind was now strong in my face again. But it did not rain, and at
moments the sun had the power to warm. There was not a moment when I
had not a lark singing overhead. On the right hand slope, which is more
gradual than that to the left, men were rolling some grass fields,
harrowing others; lower down they were ploughing. Men were beginning
to work among the hop poles on the left. The oaks in the woods there
were each individualized, and had a smoky look which they would not
have had in Summer, Autumn, or Winter.
Houses very seldom intrude on the waste, and there are few near it. On
the south side two or three big houses had been built so as to command
Hindhead, etc., and a board directed me to the “Jolly Farmer” at
Puttenham, but no inn was visible till I came to the “Victory,” which
was well past the half-way mark to Farnham. The north side showed not
more than a cottage or two, until I began to descend towards Farnham
and came to a villa which had trimmed the waste outside its gates and
decorated it with the inscription, “Keep off the grass.” Going downhill
was too much of a pleasure for me to look carefully at Runfold, though
I noticed another “Jolly Farmer” there, and a “Princess Royal,” with
the date 1819. This not very common sign put into my head the merry
song about the “brave _Princess Royal_” that set sail from Gravesend--
“On the tenth of December and towards the year’s end,”
and met a pirate, who asked them to “drop your main topsail and heave
your ship to,” but got the answer,--
“We’ll drop our main topsail and heave our ship to,
But that in some harbour, not alongside of you.
So we hoisted the royals and set the topsail,
And the brave _Princess Royal_ soon showed them her tail:
And we went a-cruising, and we went a-cruising,
And we went a-cruising, all on the salt seas.”
[Illustration:
A PASSING STORM
near St. Cross, Winchester.]
The good tune and merry words lasted me down among the market gardens
and florists’ plantations, past the “Shepherd and Flock” at the turning
to Moor Park, to the Wey again, and the first oast-house beside it, and
so into Farnham at a quarter to nine, which I felt to be breakfast time.
While I drank my coffee the rising wind slammed a door and the first
shower passed over. The sun shone for me to go to the “Jolly Farmer”
across the Wey, in a waterside street of cottages and many inns, such
as the “Hop Bag,” the “Bird in Hand,” and the “Lamb.” The “Jolly
Farmer,” Cobbett’s birthplace, a small inn standing back a little, with
a flat black and white front, was labelled “Cobbett’s Birthplace,” in
letters as big as are usually given to the name of a brewer. It is
built close up against a low sandy bank, which continues above the
right shore of the Wey, somewhat conspicuously, for miles. Behind the
“Jolly Farmer” this bank is a cliff, hollowed out into caves (no one
knows how old, or whether made by Druids or smugglers), and overgrown
by bushes and crowned by elms full of rooks’ nests. The whole of this
waterside is attractive, rustic, but busy. The Wey is already a strong
stream there, and timber yards and warehouses abut on it. A small
public garden occupies the angle made by one of its willowy bends.
Farnham West Street was for the moment warm in the sun as I walked
slowly between its shops to where the perched brick fronts of decent
old houses were scarcely interrupted by a quiet shop or two and the
last inns, the “Rose and Thistle” and the “Holly Bush.” It is one
of those streets in which a hundred houses have been welded into
practically one block. There are some very old houses, some that are
old, and some not very old, but all together compose one long, uneven
wall of rustic urbanity. Castle Street is entirely different. It takes
its name from the Bishop of Winchester’s castle, a palace of old red
brick and several cedars standing at its upper end. Being about three
times as broad as West Street, it is fit to be compared for breadth
with the streets of Marlborough, Wootton Bassett, or Epsom. Most of
the houses are private and not big, of red or of plastered or whitened
brick; but there is a baker’s shop, a “Nelson’s Arms,” and a row of
green-porched alms-houses. At the far end the street rises and curves
a little to the left, and is narrowed by the encroachment of front
gardens only possessed by the houses at that point. A long flight
of steps above this curve ascends a green slope of arum and ivy and
chestnut trees, past an old episcopal fruit wall, to a rough-cast
gateway, with clock and belfry, and beyond that, the palace and two
black, many-storied cedars towering at its front door.
I looked in vain for a statue of Cobbett in Farnham. Long may it
be before there is one, for it will probably be bad and certainly
unnecessary. So long as “Rural Rides” is read he needs not to share
that kind of resurrection of the just with Queen Anne and the late
Dukes of Devonshire and of Cambridge. The district has bred yet another
man who combines the true countryman and the writer. I mean, of course,
George Bourne, author of “The Bettesworth Book,” a volume which ought
to go on to the most select shelf of country books, even beside those
of White, Cobbett, Jefferies, Hudson, and Burroughs. Bettesworth was
a Surrey labourer, a neighbour and workman of the author’s. He was an
observant and communicative man: his employer took notes from time to
time, and the book is mainly a record of conversations. George Bourne
gives a brief setting to the old man’s words, yet a sufficient one.
Pain and sorrow are not absent, and afar off we see a gray glimpse of
the workhouse; but the whole is joyful. Even when Bettesworth “felt a
bit Christmassy” there is no melancholy; his head merely seems “all
mops and brooms.” His wife tells him that he has been laughing in his
sleep. “I was always laughing, then,” he says, “until I was sore all
round wi’ it.” We have Bettesworth’s own words in most cases, and
George Bourne never interferes except to help. There is no insipid
contrast with the outer world, though here and there we have an echo
from it; we hear of railways as not particularly convenient, and
a dull way of travelling; and of cut-purses, “got up they was, ye
know, reg’lar fly-looking blokes, like gentlemen.” Nothing is omitted
but what had to be. Bettesworth cleaned cesspools at times, and the
best things in the book centre round his “excellent versatility in
usefulness.” Well-sinking, reaping, lawn-mowing, pole-pulling in
the hop garden, mending of roofs and steeples, and all the glorious
activities connected with horses, had come into his work: as for
adventure, he drove his first pair of cart horses from Staines to
Smithfield Market. He had been a wanderer, too. During a long absence
from friends he wrote to a brother, enclosing a gift; but on the way to
the post he met an acquaintance, “and I ast’n if he’d ’ave a drink. So
when he says yes, I took the letter an’ tore out the dollar an’ chucked
the letter over the hedge. An’ we went off an’ ’ad a bottle o’ rum wi’
this dollar. An’ that’s all as they ever heerd o’ me for seven year.”
But the conversations themselves were held while Bettesworth was laying
turf, or during the quite genial fatigue following a fifteen-hour day.
“Laying Turf” is one of the most charming pieces in the world. The old
steeple-mender, reaper, and carter was laying turf under continuous
rain and in an uncomfortable attitude, and made the unexpected comment:
“Pleasant work this. I could very well spend my time at it, with good
turfs.”
“The Bettesworth Book” appeared in 1901. “Memoirs of a Surrey
Labourer,” the record of Bettesworth’s last years--1892-1905--appeared
in 1907. At first the book may seem tame, a piece of reporting which
leaves the reader not unaware of the notebooks consulted by the author.
But in the end comes a picture out of the whole, painfully, dubiously
emerging, truthful undoubtedly, subtle, not easy to understand, which
raises George Bourne to a high place among observers. Apart from his
observation, too, he shows himself a man with a ripe and generous,
if staid, view of life, and a writer capable of more than accurate
writing: witness his picture of frozen rime on telegraph wires, of
Bettesworth’s “polling beck” or potato fork, and phrases like this:
“Near the beans there were brussels sprouts, their large leaves soaked
with colour out of the clouded day.”