but one doll. It was an old stiff wooden doll, cut by the keeper for
his first-born, and never clothed. Martha kept it in the wood-lodge,
and would not have it in the house, but went to look at it just once
at morning and once at night, and never missed doing so. She did not
play with Mary’s, though as maid-of-all-work, bustling about seriously
and untidily, often breaking and upsetting things, she treated them
with immense reverence, putting them safely away in a sitting posture
when their mistress was tired of them and left them on chairs, in the
hearth, or on the table--anywhere. Nobody supposed that Martha cared
anything for her solitary wooden idol, and if you inquired after it
she only looked awkwardly into your face with those pale eyes and
said nothing, or perhaps asked you if you would like to see Mary’s
newest one. She was always busy, they could not keep her from work;
she was strong, and never ailed or complained. If a baby was brought
to the house, to see Mary’s delicate ways with it was worth a journey;
surrounding it with dolls, and giving herself up to it and taking good
care of it, while Martha slipped away and was not to be seen. Mary was
tenderest hearted, and could never pass carelessly by anything like a
calf’s head thrust out of a hole in a dark shed into the sun. As for
Martha she was too busy, though of course she would run to the town, if
need were, to fetch a vet.
“Mary was not nearly so strong, but she continued to grow in grace and
charm. At seventeen I think she was the loveliest human being of her
sex that I ever saw. I say of her sex, because she was so absolutely
and purely a woman that she seemed a species apart, even to me a
mystery; every position of her, every attitude, action, everything she
did and did not do, proclaimed her a woman newly created out of the
elements which but yesterday made her a child, an animal or bird in
human form. Many would have liked to marry her. Her round soft chin,
her rather long, and not too thin, smiling mouth, her living hair,
her wild eyes, won her lovers wherever she was seen. And yet I had a
feeling that she would not marry.... However, I came back from Italy
one year to find her married to a young farmer near Alton.
“Martha had already been with us for some years. When Mary began to
have babies Martha was over at the farm as often as possible. Mary
grew paler and thinner, but not less beautiful, and hardly less gay
and childlike. She did as she pleased--always perfectly dressed, while
others, and, above all, Martha, busied themselves in a hundred ways
for her and her baby. Now that she was obviously delicate as well as
beautiful, her hair looked more than ever like a wild life of some
kind affectionately attached to her. Martha worked harder for her, if
that were possible, than for us. I have heard her panting away as she
swept the stairs and sometimes sighing, too, but never stopping for
that luxury, and her sister would call out and laughingly chide her for
it, to which she replied with another laugh, not ceasing to pant or to
sweep. Mary was adored by her husband.
“Few men, I should say, took notice of Martha. She was very abrupt
with them, and had nothing to say if they spoke out of a wish to be
agreeable. Now and then she reported some advance--a soldier, for
example, offered to carry her parcels home for her at night; but as
soon as they turned from the high road into our dark lane she found
an excuse, swept up all the parcels into her arms and was off without
a word. Another time she allowed herself to be taken home on several
evenings by a young man whose real sweetheart was away for a time: he
had told her the fact, and politely asked if she would like him to take
her home in the interval. What Martha wanted was a baby. She was the
laughing-stock of the kitchen for confessing it. She did not mind: she
stitched away at baby’s underclothing which all went for her sister’s
infants, but was meant for her own. She once bought a cradle at an
auction sale--do you feel deferential now? Yet one man she put off by
telling him she already had a lover.
“Did you ever hear of her one dream? She came in and told us in great
excitement that she had had a dream. She said, ‘It was as plain as
plain, and all the family were eating boiled potatoes with their
fingers except me. Law, mum, that ever I should have dreamed such a
thing.’... She blushed that the family should have been put to shame in
a dream of hers.
“At last we heard that she had a lover. Her fellow servants accused
her of doing the courting, and he was younger than she. She was not
impatient, even now. When she heard that we were to move in a year’s
time, she made up her mind that she must go to the new house and see
what it was like living there. ‘He’s not so bad,’ she said quietly.
‘Father and mother think the world of him. It’s not love. Oh, no! I’m
too old for that, and I won’t have any nonsense. But he says he’ll
marry me. We shall love after that, maybe; but if not, there’ll be
the children. We shall have a nice little home. Charley has bought a
mirror, and he is saving up for a ring with a real stone in it.’ And so
she went on soberly, yet perhaps madly.
“We moved, and Martha with us. She had to wait still longer, because
Mary was expecting another child. Mary was not so well as usual. She
was very thin, and yet looked in a way younger than ever. Martha left
us to devote herself to her sister. I went over once or twice: I wish
now it had been oftener. Martha looked the same as ever. Mary grew
still more frail, until, in a ghastly way, you could not see her body
for her soul, as the poet says. Her husband being called away left her
confidently in Martha’s hands.
“The nearest doctor was five miles off. She had to go for him suddenly
in a night of winter thunder. The whole night was up in arms, the black
clouds and the woods, the noises of a great wind and thunder trying
to get the better of one another, and the rain drowning the lightning
as if it had been no more than an eel in a dirty pond, and drowning
thunder and the wind at last. When Martha reached the doctor’s house
he was out. She found another, and having meekly delivered her message
was gone before the man could offer to drive her back with him; but the
horse was so helpless in the stormy, steep, crooked roads among the
woods that he expected to find her there before him. When he arrived
Mary was delirious, speaking of her sister, whom she seemed to see
approaching and at last coming into the room; she cried out, ‘Martha!’
and never spoke again. Martha had not returned. The cowman found her
lying on her face in the mire by a gateway, stopped in her swift,
clumsy running by heart-failure, dead. Poor old Martha! but I have
no doubt she was quite happy making for that green blind upstairs in
her sister’s house, hastening half asleep, and only waking up as she
stumbled over the stile. The world misses her--and her children.”
I had never met the surname before, and here upon a stranger’s
tombstone it called up Martha like a mysterious incantation.
The tune of the telegraph wires became sadder, and I pushed on with the
purpose of getting as far as possible before the rain fell. The road
out of Alresford is dignified by a long avenue of elms, with a walk
between, lining it on the right as far as the gate of Arlebury House.
Opposite the last of the trees it was a pleasure to see on a wayside
plot, where elms mingled with telegraph posts, a board advertising
building sites, but leaning awry, mouldy, and almost illegible. Then
the road went under the railway and bent south-westwards, while I
turned to the right to follow a byway along the right bank of the
Itchen, where there was a village every two or three miles, and I
could be sure of shelter. The valley, a flat-bottomed marshy one, was
full of drab-tufted grasses and new-leafed willows, and pierced by
straight, shining drains. The opposite bank rose up rather steeply,
and was sometimes covered with copse, sometimes carved by a chalk
pit; tall trees with many mistletoe boughs grew on top. I got to
Itchen Abbas, its bridge, mill, church, and “Plough,” all in a group,
when the rain was beginning. I had not gone much further when it
became clear that the rain was to be heavy and lasting, and I took
shelter in a cart-lodge. There I was joined by a thatcher and a deaf
and dumb labourer. The thatcher would talk of nothing but the other
man, having begun by explaining that he could not be expected to say
“Good-afternoon.” The deaf man sat on the straw and watched us. He was
the son of a well-to-do farmer, but had left home because he did not
get enough money and was in other ways imposed on. He had now been
at the same farm thirty years. He was a good workman, understanding
by signs what he had to do. Moreover, he could read the lips, though
how he learnt--for he could neither read nor write--I do not know!
Probably, said the thatcher, he knows what we are saying now. At
half-past three the horses came in for the day. They had begun at
half-past six; so, said the thatcher, “they don’t do a man’s work.”
So we talked while the horses were stabled, and rain fell and it
thundered, if not to the tune of “Greensleeves,” at least to that of
blackbirds’ songs.
The sky was full and sagging, but actually rained little, when I
started soon after four, and went on through the four Worthys,--on
my left the low sweep of Easton Down, and the almost windowless high
church wall among elms between it and the river; and on my right,
arable country and pewits tumbling over it. Worthy Park, a place of
lawns and of elms and chestnuts, adorned the road with an avenue of
very branchy elms. At King’s Worthy, just beyond, I might have crossed
over and taken the shortest way to Salisbury, that is to say, by
Stockbridge. But, except at Stockbridge itself, there is hardly a house
on the twenty miles of road, and either one inn or two. Evidently the
sky could not long contain itself, and as I knew enough of English
inns to prefer not arriving at one wet through, I determined to take
the Roman road through Headbourne Worthy to Winchester. This brought
me through a region of biggish houses, shrubberies, rookeries, motor
cars, and carriages, but also down to a brook and a withy bed, and
Headbourne Worthy’s little church and blunt shingled spire beside
it. The blackbirds were singing their best in the hawthorns as I
was passing, and in the puddles they were bathing before singing.
Winchester Cathedral appeared and disappeared several times, and above
it, slightly to the left, St. Catherine’s smooth hill and beechen
crown. In one of these views I saw what I had never before noticed,
that the top of the cathedral tower is apparently higher than the top
of St. Catherine’s Hill.
Through the crowd of Winchester High Street I walked, and straight out
by the West Gate and the barracks uphill. I meant to use the Romsey
road as far as Ampfield, and thence try to reach Dunbridge. The sky was
full of rain, though none was falling. It was a mile before I could
mount, and then, for some way, the road was accompanied on the right by
yew trees. Between these trees I could see the low, half-wooded Downs
crossed by the Roman road to Sarum and by hardly any other road. The
most insistent thing there was the Farley Tower, perched on a barrow
at one of the highest points, to commemorate not the unknown dead but
a horse called Beware Chalkpit, who won a race in 1734 after having
leaped into a chalkpit in 1733. The eastern scene was lovelier: the
clear green Downs above Twyford, Morestead, and Owslebury, four or five
miles away; and then the half wooded green wall of Nan Trodd’s Hill
which the road curves under to Hursley. But, first, I had to dip down
to Pitt Village, which is a small cluster of thatched cottages, mud
walls, and beech trees, with a pond and a bright white chalk pit, all
at the bottom of a deep hollow. I climbed out of it and glided down
under Nan Trodd’s Hill and its black yews, divided from the road only
by a gentle rise of arable; and so, betwixt a similar but slighter
yew-crowned rise and the oaks of Hursley Park, I approached Hursley.
The first thing was a disused pump on the right, with an ivy-covered
shelter and a fixed lamp; but before the first house there was a beech
copse, and after that a farm and its attendant ricks and cottages, and
at length the village. A single row of houses faced the park and its
rookery beeches through a parallel row of pollard limes; but the centre
was a double row of neat brick and timber houses, both old and new, a
smithy, a doctor’s, and a “King’s Head” and “Dolphin.” Here also stood
the spired church, opposite a branching of roads. At the beginning,
middle, and end of the village, gates led into Hursley Park. And I
think it was here that I saw the last oast-house in Hampshire.
Immediately after passing the fifth milestone from Winchester I turned
with the Romsey road south-west instead of keeping on southward to
Otterbourne. It was now darkening and still. I was on a low moist
road overhung by oak trees, through which I saw, on the right, a
mile away, the big many-windowed Hursley House among its trees. The
road had obviously once had wide grassy margins. The line of the old
hedge was marked, several yards within a field on the right, by the
oaks, the primroses, and the moss, growing there and not beyond: in
a wood that succeeded, it was equally clear. The primroses glimmered
in the dank shadow of the trees, where the old hedge had been, and
round the water standing in old wayside pits. In one place on the
left, by Ratlake, the fern and gorse looked like common. Nobody was
using the road except the blackbirds and robins. Hardly a house was
to be seen. It might have been the edge of the New Forest. If the
road could have gone on so, with no more rise and fall, for ever, I
think I should have been content. The new church and its pine, and
cypress, and laurel, intruded but did not break the charm. More to my
taste was the pond on the other side; gorse came to its edge, oaks
stood about it, and dabchicks were diving in its unrippled surface.
The “White Hart” farther on tempted me. It lay rather below the road
on the left, behind the yellow courtyard and the signboard, forming a
quadrangle with the stables and sheds on either side. The pale walls
and the broad bay window on the ground floor offered “Accommodation for
Cyclists.” But I did not stop, perhaps because Ampfield House on the
other side took away my thoughts from inns. This was an ivy-mantled
brick house, like two houses side by side, not very far back from the
road; its high blossoming fruit wall bounded the road. Travelling so
easily, I was loth to dismount, and on the signpost on the right,
near the third milestone from Romsey, I read MSBURY without thinking
of Timsbury, which lay on my way to Dunbridge. I glided on for half
a mile before thinking better of it, and turning back, discovered my
mistake. Here I entered a gravelly, soft road among trees. I should
have done well to put up in one of the woodmen’s shelters here under
the oaks. These huts were frames of stout green branches thatched
with hazel peelings and walled with fagots. One was built so that an
oak divided its entrance in two, and against the tree was fastened a
plain wooden contrivance for gripping and bending wood. Inside, it had
other hurdlemaker’s implements--a high wooden horse for gripping and
bending, and a low wooden table. White peelings were thickly strewn
around the huts. The floor showed likewise such signs of life as
cigarette ends, match-boxes, and a lobster’s claw. On Saturday evening
a marsh-tit and a robin alone seemed to have anything to do with them.
Nevertheless I went contentedly on between mossy banks, hedges of
beech, rhododendrons, and woodlands of oak, beech, and larch, which
opened out in one place to show me the fern and pine of Ganger Common.
The earth was quiet, dark, and beautiful. The owl was beginning to hunt
over the fields, while the blackbird finished his song. Pleasant were
the yellow road, the roadside bramble and brier hoops, the gravel pits
and gorse at corners. But the sky was wild, threatening the earth both
with dark clouds impending and with momentary wan gleams between them,
angrier than the clouds. Some rain sprinkled as I dipped down between
roadside oaks and a narrow orchard to Brook Farm. Here the road forded
a brook, and a lane turned off, with a gravelly bluff on one side,
farmyard and ricks on the other. Up in the pale spaces overhead Venus
glared like a madman’s eye. Yet the rain came to nothing, and for a
little longer the few scattered house lights appearing and disappearing
in the surrounding country were mysteriously attractive. And then
arrived complete darkness and rain together, as I reached the turning
where I could see the chimney stack of Michelmersh. I tried the “Malt
House” on the left. They could not give me a bed because “the missus
was expecting some friends.” I pushed on against wind and rain to the
“Bear and Ragged Staff,” a bigger inn behind a triangle of rushy turf
and a walnut tree. “Accommodation for Cyclists” was announced, which I
always used to assume meant that there was a bed; but it does not. It
was raining, hailing, and blowing furiously, but they could not give me
a bed because they were six in family: no, not any sort of a bed. They
directed me to the “Mill Arms” at Dunbridge. Crossing the Test by Kim
Bridge Mill, the half-drowned fields smelt like the sea. The mill-house
windows shone above the double water plunging away into blackness.
Then, for a space, when I had turned sharply north-westward the wind
helped me. Actually I was now at the third inn. They were polite and
even smiling, but they informed me that I could by no means have a
bed, seeing that the lady and gentleman from somewhere had all the
beds. Nor could they tell me of a bed anywhere, because it was Easter
and people with a spare room mostly had friends. Luckily a train was
just starting which would bear me away from Dunbridge to Salisbury. I
boarded it, and by eight o’clock I was among the people who were buying
and selling fish and oranges to the accompaniment of much chaffing,
but no bad temper, in Fish Row. And, soon, though not at once, I
found a bed and a place to sit and eat in, and to listen to the rain
breaking over gutters and splashing on to stones, and pipes swallowing
rain to the best of their ability, and signboards creaking in the
wind; and to reflect on the imperfection of inns and life, and on the
spirit’s readiness to grasp at all kinds of unearthly perfection such,
for instance, as that which had encompassed me this evening before
the rain. At that point a man entered whom I slowly recognized as the
liberator of the chaffinch on Good Friday. At first I did not grasp the
connection between this dripping, indubitably real man and the wraith
of the day before. But he was absurdly pleased to recognize me, bowing
with a sort of uncomfortable graciousness and a trace of a cockney
accent. His expression changed in those few moments from a melancholy
and too yielding smile to a pale, thin-lipped rigidity. I did not know
whether to be pleased or not with the reincarnation, when he departed
to change his clothes.
This Other Man, as I shall call him, ate his supper in silence, and
then adjusted himself in the armchair, stretching himself out so that
all of him was horizontal except his head. He was smoking a cigarette
dejectedly, for he had left his pipe behind at Romsey. I offered him
a clay pipe. No; he would not have it. They stuck to his lips, he
said. But he volunteered to talk about clay pipes, and the declining
industry of manufacturing them. He seemed to know all about ten-inch
and fifteen-inch pipes, from the arrival of the clay out of Cornwall
in French gray blocks to the wetting of the clay and the beating of
it up with iron rods; the rough first moulding of the pipes by hand,
and the piercing of the stems; the baking in moulds, the scraping of
rough edges by girls, down to the sale of the pipes in the two months
round about Christmas to Aldershot, Portsmouth, and such places.
These longer pipes, at any rate, have become chiefly ceremonious and
convivial, though personally I have hardly ever seen them smoked except
by literary people under thirty. No wonder that in one of the principal
factories only one artist is left, as the Other Man declared, to pierce
the stems with unerring thrust. It seemed to him wonderful that even
one man could be found to push a wire up the core of a long thin stick
of clay. He had never himself been able to avoid running the wire out
at the side before reaching the end. The great man who always succeeded
had once made him a pipe with five bowls.
He could not tell me why the industry is decaying. But two causes seem
at least to have contributed. First, a great many of the men who used
to smoke clays smoke cheap cigarettes. Second, those who have not
taken to cigarettes smoke briar pipes. Cigarettes appear to give less
trouble than pipes. Any one, drunk or sober, can light them and keep
them alight. They can be put out at any moment and returned to the
cigarette case or tucked behind the ear. Also, it is held by snobs as
well as by haters of foul pipes that cigarettes are more genteel, or
whatever the name is of our equivalent vice. But if a pipe is to be
smoked, the briar is believed to cast some sort of faint credit on the
smoker which the clay does not. That Tennyson used clays probably now
only influences a small number of young men--and that but for a year or
two--of a class that would not take to clays as a matter of course. A
few others of the same class begin in imitation of labourer, sailor, or
gamekeeper, with whom they have come in exhilarating contact; and, in
turn, others imitate them. The habit so gained, however, is not likely
to endure. Nearly every one sheds it, either because he really does not
enjoy it, or he has for some reason to keep it in abeyance too long for
it to be resumed, or he supposes himself to be conspicuous and prefers
not to be.
In the first place he may have been moved partly by a desire to be
conspicuous, to signalize his individuality by a visible symbol, but
such can seldom be a conscious motive with the most self-conscious
of men. For some years I met plenty of youths of my own age who were
experimenting with clay pipes, nervously colouring small thorny ones,
or lying back and making of themselves cushions for long churchwardens,
or carrying the bowl of a two-inch pipe upside down like a navvy. But I
was never much tempted myself until I went to live permanently in the
country. As I was pretty frequently walking at lunch time I took that
meal at an inn, and one day remembering that as a child I had got clays
from a publican for nothing I asked for one with my beer, and got it. I
shall not pretend that this pipe was in any way remarkable, for I have
no recollection of it. All I know is that it was not the last. Most, if
not all, of my briar pipes at the time were foul. I took more and more
to smoking clay pipes when I was alone or where it would not attract
attention.
It was not long before I made the discovery that there are clays and
clays. Those given away or sold for a halfpenny by innkeepers between
the North and South Downs were usually thin and straight, sometimes
embellished with a design in relief, particularly with a horned head
and the initial letters of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes.
Many and many a one of these mere smoking utensils was broken very soon
in my teeth or in my pocket, or discarded because I did not like the
feel or look of it, or simply because it was an unnecessary addition to
my supply. For a time I could and did smoke almost anything, fortified
possibly by a feeling (though I cannot recall it) that the custom was
worth persisting in. At any rate it was persisted in.
If I pursued singularity I was not blindfold. Not many weeks were
occupied in learning that thin clays were useless, or were not for
me. They began by burning my tongue, and they were very soon bitten
through. On the other hand, thickness alone was not sufficient. For
example, Irish pipes up to a third of an inch thick were as rapidly
bitten through as the harder thin clays. It was necessary to fit them
with mouth-pieces connected by a tin band, and since these would
corrode, I refused them. Even a clay that was hard as well as thick was
not therefore faultless. I kept one for several years, at intervals
trying to make terms with it on account of its good shape--the bowl set
at more than a right angle to the stem, and adorned with a conventional
ribbed leaf underneath--but always in vain; the clay, being hard after
the manner of flint, gritted on the teeth and was no sweeter at the
tenth than at the first pipe.