active unceasingly over a broad space of English country--Surrey,
Sussex, and Hampshire--always out of doors. His memory was good, his
eye for men and trades a vivid one, and his gift of speech unusual,
“with swift realistic touch, convincingly true;” so that a picture of
rural England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, by one
born in the earlier half and really belonging to it, is the result.
The portrait of an unlettered pagan English peasant is fascinating. He
lived in a parish where people of urban habits were continually taking
the place of the older sort who dropped out, but he had himself been
labourer, soldier, “all sorts of things; but ... first and last by
taste a peasant, with ideas and interests proper to another England
than that in which we are living now,” and perhaps unconscious of
the change since the days when he saw four men in a smithy making an
axe-head: “Three with sledge-’ammers, and one with a little ’ammer,
tinkin’ on the anvil.... There was one part of making a axe as they’d
never let anybody see ’em at.”
The talk, and George Bourne’s comments reveal this man’s way of
thinking and speaking, his lonely thoughts, and his attitude in
almost every kind of social intercourse. They show his physical
strength, his robust and gross enjoyment, his isolation, his breeding
and independence, his tenderness without pity, his courage, his
determination to endure. No permissible amount of quotation can explain
the subtle appeal of his talk, for example, whilst turf-laying,--
“Half unawares it came home to me, like the contact of the garden
mould, and the smell of the earth, and the silent saturation of the
cold air. You could hardly call it thought--the quality in this simple
prattling. Our hands touching the turfs had no thought either; but
they were alive for all that; and of such a nature was the life in
Bettesworth’s brain, in its simple touch upon the circumstances of his
existence. The fretful echoes men call opinions did not sound in it;
clamour of the daily press did not disturb its quiet; it was no bubble
puffed out by learning, nor indeed had it any of the gracefulness which
some mental life takes from poetry and art; but it was still a genuine
and strong elemental life of the human brain that during those days
was my companion. It seemed as if something very real, as if the true
sound of the life of the village had at last reached my dull senses.”
It will now reach duller senses than George Bourne’s. No one has told
better how a peasant who has not toned his other virtues with thrift is
deserted in the end by God and even the majority of men. The “Memoirs”
are shadowed from the first by the helplessness of Bettesworth’s
epileptic wife. The whole of his last year was a dimly lighted,
solitary, manly agony.... Now, a statue of Frederick Bettesworth might
well be placed at the foot of Castle Street, to astonish and annoy, if
a sculptor could be found.
As I was passing the “Jolly Sailor” and its jolly signboard, a gypsy,
a sturdy, black-haired, and brown-faced woman, was coming into Farnham
carrying a basket packed tight with daffodils. The sun shone and was
warm, but the low road was still wet. It was the Pilgrim’s Way now, not
merely a parallel road such as I had been on since Dorking. For some
miles it kept the Wey in sight, and over beyond the river, that low
wall and ledge of sand, used by the railway, crested with oak and pine
here and there, and often dappled on its slope with gorse. The land on
my right was different, being largely sodden, bare, arable, with elms.
But it was a pleasure to ride and walk and always to see the winding
river and its willows, and that even green terrace now near, now far.
Looking across at this scene were a number of detached houses, old and
new, at good intervals along the right hand side of the road: some of
them could see also the long Alice Holt woods of oaks and larches, the
tips of certain small groups of trees gilded fitfully by the sunshine.
At Willey Mill, soon after leaving Farnham, the road actually touched
the river, and horses can walk through it parallel to the road and
cool their feet; and just past this, I entered Hampshire. More often
the river was midway between my road and the terrace, touching an old
farm-house of brick and timber in the plashy meadows, or turning a
mill with a white plunge of water under sycamores. But the gayest and
most springlike sign was the fresh whitewash on every fruit tree in an
orchard by the wayside; it suggested a festival. The poles were being
set up in the hop gardens. The hedges enclosing them had been allowed
to grow up to a great height for a screen against wind, and to make a
diaphanous green wall. Many were the buildings related to hops, whose
mellow brickwork seemed to have been stained by a hundred harvests.
Bentley, the first village in Hampshire, seemed hardly more than a
denser gathering, and all on the right hand, of the houses that had
been scattered along since Farnham, with the addition of two inns
and of a green which a brooklet crosses and turns into a pond at the
road’s edge. After Bentley the road ascended, the place of houses
was taken by trees, chiefly lines of beeches connected with several
embowered mansions at some distance, one of pale stone, one of dark
brick. Several rookeries inhabited these beeches. Froyle House,
perhaps the chief in this neighbourhood, stood near where the road is
highest, and yet closest to the river--a many-gabled pale house next
to a red church tower among elms and black-flamed cypresses. Up to
the church and house a quarter of a mile of grass mounted, with some
isolated ancient thorns and many oaks, which in one spot near the road
gathered together into a loose copse. The park itself ran with not too
conspicuous or regular a boundary into hop gardens and ploughland. A
low wall on a bank separated it from the road, and where a footpath had
to pass the wall the stile was a slab of stone pierced by two pairs of
foot-holes, approached up the bank by three stone steps. It was here,
and at eleven, that I first heard the chiffchaff saying, “Chiff-chaff,
chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff!” A streamlet darted out of the park
towards the Wey, and on the other side of the road, and below it, had
to itself a little steep coomb of ash trees. An oak had been felled on
the coomb side, and a man was clearing the brushwood round it, but the
small bird’s double note, almost as regular as the ticking of a clock,
though often coming to an end on the first half, sounded very clear in
the coomb. He sang as he flitted among the swaying ash tops in that
warm, cloudy sun. I thought he sang more shrilly than usual, something
distractedly. But I was satisfied. Nothing so convinces me, year after
year, that Spring has come and cannot be repulsed, though checked it
may be, as this least of songs. In the blasting or dripping weather
which may ensue, the chiffchaff is probably unheard; but he is not
silenced. I heard him on March 19 when I was fifteen, and I believe not
a year has passed without my hearing him within a day or two of that
date. I always expect him and always hear him. Not all the blackbirds,
thrushes, larks, chaffinches, and robins can hide the note. The silence
of July and August does not daunt him. I hear him yearly in September,
and well into October--the sole Summer voice remaining save in memory.
But for the wind I should have heard him yesterday. I went on more
cheerfully, as if each note had been the hammering of a tiny nail into
Winter’s coffin.
My road now had the close company of the railway, which had crossed
the river. The three ran side by side on a strip not more than a
quarter of a mile in breadth; but the river, small, and not far from
its source, was for the most part invisible behind the railway. Close
to the railway bank some gypsies had pitched a tent, betrayed by the
scarlet frock of one of the children. But in a moment scarlet abounded.
The hounds crossing road and railway in front of me were lost to sight
for several minutes before they reappeared on the rising fields towards
Binsted Wyck. The riders, nearly all in scarlet, kept coming in for
ten minutes or so from all hands, down lanes, over sodden arable land,
between hop gardens, past folded sheep. Backwards and forwards galloped
the scarlet before the right crossing of the railway was taken. The fox
died in obscurity two miles away.
How warm and sweet the sun was can be imagined when I say that it made
one music of the horn-blowing, the lambs’ bleating, the larks’ singing,
as I sat looking at Bonham’s Farm. This plain old brick house, with
fourteen windows--two dormers--symmetrically placed, fronted the road
down two or three hundred yards of straight, hedged cart track. It had
spruce firs on the left, on the right some beeches and a long barn
roof stained ochre by lichens.
Then I came to Holybourne. It is a village built in a parallelogram
formed by a short section of the main road, two greater lengths of
parallel by-roads, and a cross road connecting these two. Froyle was
of an equally distinct type, lying entirely on a by-road parallel to
the main road, near the church and great house, as Bentley lay entirely
on one side of the main road, half a mile from its church. Holybourne
Church--Holy Rood--stands at the corner where the short cross road
joins one of the side roads; where it joins the other is the Manor
Farm. I turned up by the “White Hart” and the smithy and chestnut with
which the village begins, and found the church. It is a flint and
stone one, with a moderately sharp shingled spire that spreads out
at the base. On the side away from the main road, that is northward,
lies ploughland mixed with copse rising to the horizon, but, near
by, a hop garden, an oast-house, a respectable, square, ivy-mantled
farm-house possessing a fruit wall, a farmyard occupied by black pigs,
and a long expanse of corrugated iron, roofing old whitestone sheds
and outbuildings. Southward is a chalk-bottomed pond of clear water,
containing two sallow islets, and bordered, where it touches the road,
by chestnuts, a lime, and an ivy-strangled spruce fir. This pond is
not cut off in any way from the churchyard and all its tombstones of
Lillywhites, Warners, Mays, Fidlers, Knights, Inwoods, and Burninghams.
In the church I saw chiefly two things: the wall tablet to “George
Penton, Brassfounder, Member of the Worshipful Company of Drapers, who
resided in New Street Square, and whose remains were deposited in St.
Bride’s parish church, London,” and a slender window decorated with
tiny flowered discs of alternating blue and orange.
Holybourne’s shrubberies, and the beeches and elms of an overhanging
rookery, shadowed and quieted the main road as if it had been private.
Moreover, there was still some sun to help dapple the dust with light
as well as leaf shadow. Nor was the wind strong, and what there was
helped me.
Before the village had certainly ended, Alton had begun. Its grandest
building was its first--the workhouse. It is an oblong brick building
lying back behind its gardens, with a flat ivied front which is pierced
by thirty-three windows, including dormers, placed symmetrically about
a central door, and an oval stone tablet bearing the figures “1795.”
It smacked of 1795 pure and simple; of the England which all the
great men of the nineteenth century were born in and nearly all hated.
Its ivy, its plain, honest face, and substantial body of mellow red
brick, and that date, 1795, gave the workhouse a genial tranquillity
which no doubt was illusory. From there to the end of Alton is one
not quite straight or quite level street--Normandy Street and High
Street--altogether a mile of houses and of shops (including the “Hop
Poles,” the “Barley Mow,” and the “French Horn”) that supply everything
a man needs, with the further advantage that if a man wants his hair
cut he can have it done by Julius Cæsar: the town brews beer, and even
makes paper. It is a long and a low town, and the main street has no
church in it until it begins to emerge on to the concluding green,
called Robin Hood Butts.
I could have gone as well through Medstead as through Ropley to
Alresford, but I went by the Ropley way, and first of all through
Chawton. Here the road forks at a smithy, among uncrowded thatched
cottages and chestnuts and beeches. The village is well aware of the
fact that Jane Austen once dwelt in a house at the fork there, opposite
the “Grey Friar.” I took the right hand road and had a climb of two
miles, from 368 feet above sea level to 642 feet. This road ascended,
parallel to the railway, in a straight, narrow groove, and was fringed
on both sides for some distance, up to and past the highest point,
by hedgeless copses of oak and beech, hazel, thorn, and ivy. An old
chalk pit among the trees had been used for depositing pots and pans,
but otherwise the copses might never have been entered except by the
chiffchaff that sang there, and seemed to own them. Once out in the
open at Four Marks, I had spread out around me a high but not hilly
desolation of gray grass, corrugated iron bungalows, and chicken-runs.
I glided as fast as possible away from this towards the Winchester
Downs beyond, not pausing even at the tenth milestone from Winchester
to enjoy again that brief broadening on either hand of the rough
wayside turf, sufficient to make a fair ground. Past the “Chequers” at
Ropley Dean, and again past the “Anchor” towards Bishop’s Sutton, there
are similar and longer broadenings; and on one of these two tramps were
lying asleep, the one hid by hat and clothes, the other with clear
outstanding pale profile, hands clasped over the fifth rib, and feet
stuck up, like a carved effigy. I was as glad to see them sleeping in
the sun as to hear the larks singing. I would have done the same if I
had been somebody else.
Bishop’s Sutton, the next village, resembles Holybourne in the
shrubberies with which it hushes the road. Passing the “Plough” and the
“Ship” (kept by a man with the great Hampshire name of Port), I went
into the church, which was decorated by the memorial tablets of people
named Wright and an eighteenth century physician named William Cowper,
and by daffodils and primroses arranged in moss and jam jars. Many dead
flowers were littered about the floor. The churchyard was better, for
it had a tree taller than the tower, and another lying prone alongside
the road for children to play on, and very few tombstones. Of these
few, one recorded the deaths of three children in 1827-1831, and
furthermore thus boldly baffled the infidel,--
“Bold infidelity, turn pale and die.
Beneath this sod three infants’ ashes lie.
Say, are they lost or sav’d?
If Death’s by sin, they sinn’d, for they lie here:
If Heaven’s by works, in Heaven they can’t appear.
Ah, reason, how depraved!
Revere the Bible’s sacred page, for there the knot’s untied.”
The children were Oakshotts, a Hampshire name borne by a brook and a
hanger near Hawkley.
The telegraph wires were whining as if for rain as I neared Alresford,
having on my right hand the willowy course of the young Alre, and
before me its sedgy, wide waters, Old Alresford pond. The road became
Alresford by being lined for a third of a mile downhill by cottages,
inns, and shops. This is the whole town, except for one short, very
broad turning half way along at the highest point, and opposite where
the church stands bathed in cottages.
Alresford is an excellent little town, sad-coloured but not cold,
and very airy. For not only does the main street descend from this
point steeply west towards Winchester, but the broad street also
descends northward, so that over the tops of the houses crossing the
bottom of it and over the hidden Alre, are seen the airy highlands of
Abbotsstone, Swarraton, and Godsfield. The towered flint church and
the churchyard make almost as much of a town as Alresford itself, so
numerous are the tombs of all the Wools, Keanes, Corderoys, Privetts,
Cameses, Whitears, Norgetts, Dykeses, scattered among many small
yew trees. At one side stand many headstones of French officers
who had served Napoleon, but died in England about the time of
Waterloo--Lhuille, Lavan, Garnier, Riouffe, and Fournier. Inside the
church one of the most noticeable things is a tablet to one John Lake,
who was born in 1691, died in 1759, and lies near that spot, waiting
for the day of judgment. “_Qualis erat_,” says the inscription, “_dies
iste indicabit_:” (“What manner of man he was that day will make
known.”) The writer of these words saved himself from lies and from
trouble.
I looked in vain for any one bearing the name of the poet who praised
Alresford pond--George Wither. Or, rather, he praised it as it was
in the days when Thetis resorted thither and played there with her
attendant fishes, and received crowns of flowers and beech leaves from
the land nymphs at eve:--
“For pleasant was that pool, and near it then
Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen.
It was not overgrown with boist’rous sedge,
Nor grew there rudely then along the edge
A bending willow nor a prickly bush,
Nor broad-leaf’d flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush;
But here, well order’d, was a grove with bowers:
There grassy plots set round about with flowers.
Here you might through the water see the land
Appear, strow’d o’er with white or yellow sand.
Yon, deeper was it; and the wind by whiffs
Would make it rise and wash the little cliffs,
On which oft pluming sat, unfrightened than,
The gaggling wildgoose and the snow-white swan:
With all those flocks of fowls that to this day
Upon those quiet waters breed and play.
For though those excellences wanting be
Which once it had, it is the same that we
By transposition name the Ford of Arle;
And out of which along a chalky marl
That river trills, whose waters wash the fort
In which brave Arthur kept his royal court.”
--Which, being interpreted, means Camelot, or Winchester.
Yet Wither is one of the poets whom we can connect with a district
of England and often cannot sunder from it without harm. Many other
poets are known to have resided for a long or a short time in certain
places; but of these a great many did not obviously owe much to their
surroundings, and some of those that did, like Wordsworth, possessed
a creative power which made it unnecessary that the reader should see
the places, whatever the railway companies may say. Wordsworth at his
best is rarely a local poet, and his earth is an “insubstantial fairy
place.” But if you know the pond at Alresford before this poem, you add
a secondary but very real charm to Wither; while, if you read the poem
first, you are charmed, if at all, partly because you see that the pond
exists, and you taste something of the human experience and affection
which must precede the mention. To have met the poet’s name here would
have been to furbish the charm a little.
The name of Norgett on a stone called up Oldhurst into my mind, a
thatched house built of flints in the middle of oak woods not far
off--ancient woods where the leaves of many Autumns whirled and rustled
even in June. It was three miles from the hard road, and it used to
seem that I had travelled three centuries when at last I emerged from
the oaks and came in sight of that little humped gray house and within
sound of the pines that shadowed it. It had a face like an owl; it was
looking at me. Norgett must have heard me coming from somewhere among
the trees, for, as I stepped into the clearing at one side, he was at
the other. I thought of Herne the Hunter on catching sight of him. He
was a long, lean, gray man with a beard like dead gorse, buried gray
eyes, and a step that listened. He hardly talked at all, and only after
questions that he could answer quite simply. Speech was an interruption
of his thoughts, and never sprang from them; as soon as he ceased
talking they were resumed with much low murmuring and whistling--like
that of the pine trees--to himself, which seemed the sound of their
probings in the vast of himself and Nature. His was a positive, an
active silence. It did me good to be with him, especially after I had
learned to share it with him, instead of trying to get him to join in
gossip. I say I shared it, but what I did and enjoyed was, apparently,
to sleep as we walked. It was unpleasant to wake up, to go away from
that cold, calm presence. Then, perhaps, I sneaked back for a talk with
Mrs. Norgett, who was a little, busy woman with black needle eyes and a
needle voice like a wren’s, as thin and lively as a cricket; she knew
everything that happened, and much that did not. But with him she also
was silent.
These two had two daughters--and, in fact, I got to know them by
staying with a friend three miles away, where one of the girls was a
servant: she said that there were always woodcocks round Oldhurst, and
her father would introduce me. It was several years since I had seen
Norgett and Oldhurst, but a letter concerning these daughters brought
them again before me,--
“Martha Norgett is dead. I suppose you remember her just as a stout,
nervous girl, with uncomfortable manners, tow hair, face always as red
as if she had been making toast, gray eyes rather scared but alarmingly
frank, always rushing about the house noisily and apologetically at
the same time; willing to do anything at any time for almost anybody,
but especially for you, perhaps, when you stayed with us in Summer
holidays. I am sure you could not tell me offhand how old she was. I
can hear you saying, ‘Well, the country girls always look much older
than you said they were. I suppose it is the responsibility, and
they belong to an older, more primitive type. So I always have an
instinct to treat them deferentially.... She might be twenty-three or
-four--say, eighteen. But then she was just the same fifteen years
ago.... Thirty--thirty-five. That is absurd. I give it up.’...
“I will not tell you her age, but I want to give you something of
Martha’s history, though it is now too late for the development of that
instinct for treating her deferentially.
“The family has been in the parish since the beginning of the parish
register, in 1597. I should say that 597 would be much nearer the date
when they settled in that clearing among the oaks. Fifteen centuries is
not much to a temperament like theirs, perhaps. But they will hardly
see another fifteen: they have not adapted themselves. Martha and her
sister Mary were old Norgett’s only children. I don’t think you ever
saw Mary. You would have treated her deferentially. As bright and sweet
as a chaffinch was Mary. She had small, warm brown eyes that seemed to
be dissolving in a glow of amused pleasure at everything. Everybody
and everything as a rule conspired to preserve the glow; but now and
then--cruelly and very easily--drawing tears from them because then
they were softer than ever, and one could not help smiling as one wiped
the tears away, as if she had only cried for craft and prettiness.
That was when she was seven or eight. For a year or so she was always
either laughing or crying. Visitors used to take delight in converting
one into the other. They treated her like a bird. She had very thick
and long, fine and dark brown hair--such beautiful and lustrous hair! I
remember treating it as if it were alive, apart from her life, as if it
were a wild creature living on her shoulders.
“She was considered rather a stupid child. Some people seem to regard
animals as rather stupid human beings never blessed with spectacles and
baldness--it was they who called her stupid. She never said anything
wise. Usually she laughed when she spoke, and you could hardly make
out the words: to try to read a meaning of an accustomed sort into her
speech was little better than making a translation from a brook’s song
or a bird’s song; for in her case also it really meant translating from
an unknown tongue. Everybody gave her presents. She had as many dolls
as the cat had kittens. She was fond of people, but she seemed fonder
of these, and, seeing her, I used to smile and think of the words: ‘Ye
shall serve gods the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither
see, nor hear, not eat, nor smell.’