indifferent. Only after a time was the goodness of the good ones
manifest, and by then I might be a hundred miles away from the shop,
if I had not forgotten where it came from. These I did everything to
preserve. Some of them went through the purification of fire a score
of times before they came to an end by falling or, which was rare, by
being worn too short. They had the great virtue of being hard, without
being stony. They resembled bone in their close grain, sometimes
being as smooth as if glazed. But I had little to do with the glazed
“colouring” clays. They stank, and I was not ambitious except of
achieving a cool, everlasting, and perfectly shaped pipe.
How to use the fire on a foul pipe was learnt by very slow degrees.
Many a good pipe cracked or flaked in the flames. They had, I was at
last to discover, been too suddenly submitted to great heat. If it
was done gradually, the fiercest heat could be and should be imposed
on them: they lay pinkish white in the heart of the fire until they
possessed more than their original purity. A few of the best would
emerge with almost an old ivory hue all over. Some I remember breaking
when they had come safely out and were nearly cool, by tapping them to
shake out the fur. Most of them were toughened as well as sweetened in
the process.
How very rare were those good pipes! Probably I did not find more than
one in twelve months, though I bought scores. I was continually trying
Irish clays in a stupid hope that they would not be bitten through. The
best pipe in the majority of shops was merely one that was not bad.
It did not burn _much_; it was not bitten through until it was just
reaching its ripeness.
Perhaps I should have remembered more varieties of goodness and badness
had I not twelve months ago met a perfect clay pipe. It is so hard that
I have only once bitten one through, yet it is soft to the teeth and
tongue. Nor is it very thick; the bowl in particular I should have been
inclined at first sight to condemn as too thin. It is smooth, in fact
polished. Its shape is graceful; the stem slightly curved, slightly
flattened, but thickening and developing roundness where it _becomes_
rather than joins the bowl, into which it flows so as to form something
like a calabash. There are other shapes of this excellent material.
This perfect clay pipe came from a shop at Oxford. A month later I
bought some of the same kind, but an inferior shape, at Melksham.
Everywhere else I have looked in vain for them. I have never seen any
one else smoking them who had not got them from me.
Tastes differ, but in this matter I cannot believe that any one
capable of distinguishing one clay from another would deny this one’s
excellence.
The Other Man cared nothing for the matter. He awoke from the stupor to
which he had been reduced by listening, and asked,--
“Did you see that weather-vane at Albury in the shape of a pheasant? or
the fox-shaped one by the ford at Butts Green? or the pub with the red
shield and the three tuns and three pairs of wheatsheaves for a sign?”
“No,” I answered, adding what I could remember about the horse’s
head over the corn chandler’s at Epsom. The Other Man had seen this,
and also a similar one of white wood over a saddler’s at Dorking. He
reminded me also of what I was engaged in forgetting--that Shalford
had an inn called the “Sea-Horse,” and a signboard of a sea-horse
with a white head and a fish-like body covered in azure scales. He
said it was a better sea-horse than those over the Admiralty gates in
Whitehall. Continuing, he asked me why it was that the chief inn of a
town was so frequently the “Swan.” It was at Leatherhead. It was at
Charing in Kent--I knew that. It was at a score of other places which
I have forgotten. Nor could I remember a sufficient number of “Lions,”
“Eagles,” and “Dolphins” to oppose him. Had I, was his next question,
seen the “Ship” at Bishop’s Sutton, which had a signboard with a
steamer on one side and a sailing ship on the other? And not long after
this I was asleep.
IV.
FROM DUNBRIDGE OVER SALISBURY PLAIN.
Before the first brightening of the light on Sunday morning the rain
ceased, and I returned to Dunbridge to pick up the road I had lost on
Saturday evening. Above all, I wanted to ride along under Dean Hill,
the level-ridged chalk hill dotted with yew that is seen running
parallel to the railway a quarter of a mile on your left as you near
Salisbury from Eastleigh. The sky was pale, scarcely more blue than the
clouds with which it was here and there lightly whitewashed. For five
miles I was riding against the stream of the river which rises near
Clarendon and meets the Test near Dunbridge. The water and its alders,
many of them prostrate, and its drab sedges mingled with intense green
and with marsh-marigolds’ yellow, were seldom more than a hundred
yards away on my right. Pewits wheeled over it with creaking wings and
protests against the existence of man.
I did not stop for the villages. Butts Green, for example, where the
Other Man had seen the fox weather-vane, began with an old thatched
cottage and a big hollow yew, but the green itself was dull, flat,
and bare, and the cottages round it newish. Lockerley Green, a mile
farther on, was much like it, except that the road traversed instead
of skirting the green. Between these two, and beyond Lockerley Church,
where the road touched the river and had a fork leading across to East
Tytherley, there was a small, but not old, mill, and a miller too, and
flour. As I looked back the small sharp spire of the church stuck up
over the level ridgy ploughland in a manner which, I supposed, would
have made for a religious person a very religious picture. No other
building was visible. The railway on my left was more silent than the
river on my right, among its willow and alder and tall, tufted grass,
at the foot of gorse slopes.
After crossing the railway half a mile past Lockerley Green the road
went close to the base of Dean Hill, separated from it by ploughland
without a hedge. On the left, that is on the Dean Hill side, stood
East Dean Church, a little rustic building of patched brick and
plaster walls, mossy roof, and small lead-paned windows displaying the
Easter decorations of moss and daffodils. It had a tiny bell turret
at the west end, and a round window cut up into radiating panes like
a geometrical spider’s web. Under the yew tree, amidst long grass,
dandelion, and celandine, lay the bones of people bearing the names
Edney and Langridge. The door was locked. Its neighbours on the other
side of the road were an old cottage with tiled roof and walls of
herring-boned brick, smothered from chimney to earth with ivy, in a
garden of plum blossom; and next to it, a decent, small home, a smooth
clipped block of yew, and a whitewashed mud wall with a thatched
coping. The other houses of East Dean, either thatched or roofed with
orange tiles, were scattered chiefly on the right.
Presently I had the willows of the river as near me on the right as the
green slope, the chalk pit, the sheep-folds, and yew trees of Dean Hill
on the left; and the sun shone upon the water and began to slant down
the hillside. The river was very clear and swift, the chalk of its bed
very white, the hair of its waving weeds very dark green.
West Dean, where I entered Wiltshire, a mile from East Dean, is a
village with a “Red Lion” inn, a railway station, a sawmill and
timber-yard, and several groups of houses clustering close to both
banks of the river, which is crossed by a road-bridge and by a white
footbridge below. I went over river and railway uphill past the new
but ivied church to look at the old farm-house, the old church, and
the camp, which lie back from the road on the left among oaks and
thickets. On that Sunday morning cows pasturing on the rushy fields
below the camp, and thrushes singing in the oaks, were the principal
inhabitants of West Dean. I did not go farther in this direction,
for the road went north to West Tytherley and the broad woods that
lie east of it, the remnant of Buckholt Forest, but turned back and
west, and then south-west again on my original road, in order to be
on the road nearest to Dean Hill. This took me over broad and almost
hedgeless fields, and through a short disconnected fragment of an
avenue of mossy-rooted beeches, to West Dean Farm. Nothing lay between
the houseless road and the hillside, which is thick here with yew,
except the broad arable fields, with a square or two given up to
mustard flowers and sheep, and West Dean Farm itself. It is a house of
a dirty white colour amidst numerous and roomy outbuildings, thatched
or mellow-tiled, set in a circle of tall beeches. The road bends round
the farm group and goes straight to the foot of the hill, and then
along it. I went slowly, looking up at the yews and thorns on the green
wall of the hill, and its slanting green trackway, and the fir trees
upon the ridge. Linnets twittered in companies or sang solitarily on
thorn tips. Thrushes sang in the wayside yews. Larks rose and fell
unceasingly. The sheep-bells tinkled in the mustard. Away from the
hill the land sloped gradually in immense arable fields, and immense
grass fields newly rolled into pale green stripes, down to the river,
and there rose again up to Hound Wood and Bentley Wood, where a white
house shone pale in the north-east, four or five miles off.
For nearly two miles the road had not had a house upon it, and nothing
separated me from the hill, the yew trees, and the brier and hawthorn
thickets. In fact, West Dean Farm was the only house served by the
three miles of road between West Dean and West Grimstead. Yet this did
not save a chalk pit close to the road from being used as a receptacle
for rubbish. Having reached the farm and the foot of the hill the road
began to turn away again towards the river and to West Grimstead. It
was a loose, flinty road, so that I had another reason for walking
instead of riding. The larks that sang over me could not have wished
for better dust baths than this road would make them, for the sun
was gaining. It was almost a treeless road until I was close to West
Grimstead, where there was an oak wood on the right, streaked with the
silver of birch stems and tipped with the yellow flames of larches.
The village consisted of a church, an inn called the “Spring Cottage,”
and many thatched cottages scattered along several by-roads on either
side. It ended in an old thatched cottage with outbuildings, at the
verge of a deep sand pit full of sand-martins’ holes. When I had passed
it I stopped at a gate and looked at the orange pit wall on the far
side, the cottage above the wall, and the elm between the road and the
pit. A thrush and several larks were singing, and through their songs I
heard a thin voice that I had not heard for six months, very faint yet
unmistakable, though I could not at once see the bird--a sand-martin.
I recognized the sound, as I always recognize at their first autumnal
ascent above the horizon the dim small cluster of the Pleiades on a
September evening. On such a morning one sand-martin seems enough to
make a summer, and here were six, flitting in narrow circles like
butterflies with birds’ voices.
I went on and found myself in a flat land of oak woods and of fields
that were half molehills and half rushes, and the hedge banks had gorse
in blossom. It was here that I joined the Southampton and Salisbury
road, a yellow road between the gorsy, rolling fragments of Whaddon
Common, which came to an end at a plantation of pines on and about some
mounds like tumuli on the right hand.
Uphill to Alderbury I walked, looking back south-eastward along
the four-mile wall of Dean Hill which I had quitted a mile behind.
Alderbury, its “Green Dragon,” its public seat and foursquare fountain
of good water for man and beast (erected by Jacob, sixth Earl of
Radnor), is on a hilltop overlooking the Avon, and immediately on
leaving it I began to descend and to slant nearer and nearer the river.
The hedges of the road guided my eyes straight to the cathedral spire
of Salisbury, two or three miles off beneath me. On the right the sward
and oaks of Ivychurch came down to the road: below on the left the
sward was wider, the oaks were fewer, and many cows were feeding. A
long cleft of rushy turf and oaks, then a broad ploughland succeeded
the Ivychurch oaks, and the ploughland rose up into a round summit
crested by a clump of pines and beeches. I remember seeing this field
when it was being ploughed by two horses, and the ploughman’s white dog
was exploring on one side or another across the slopes.
Over beyond the river the land swelled up into chalk hills, here smooth
and green, with a clump on the ridge, and there wooded. The railway was
now approaching the road from the right, and the narrow strip between
road and railway was occupied by an old orchard and a large green
chestnut tree. In the branches of the chestnut sang a chaffinch, while
a boy was trimming swedes underneath. I was now at the suburban edge
of Salisbury, the villas looking out of their trees and lemon-coloured
barberry at the double stream of Avon, at the willowy marshland, the
cathedral, and the Harnham Down racecourse above.
I crossed over Harnham bridge where the tiled roofs are so mossy, and
went up under that bank of sombre-shimmering ivy just to look from
where the roads branch to Downton, Blandford, and Odstock. Southward
nothing is to be seen except the workhouse and the many miles of bare
down and sheepfolds. Northward the cathedral spire soars out of a city
without a hill, dominated on the right or east by Burroughs Hill, a
low but decided bluff, behind which are the broad woods of Clarendon.
The road was deserted. It was on a Tuesday evening, after market,
that I had last been there, when clergy with wives and daughters were
cycling out past a wagon for Downton drawn by horses with red and blue
plumelets; motor cyclists were tearing in; a tramp or two trudged down
towards the bridge. In the city itself the cattle were being driven
to the slaughter-house or out to the country, a spotted calf was
prancing on the pavement, one was departing for Wilton in a crowded
motor bus, a wet, new-born one stood in a cart with its mother, a cow
with udders wagging was being hustled up the Exeter road by motor cars
and pursued at a distance by a man who called to it affectionately as
a last resource; another calf was being held outside a pub while the
farmer drank; black and white pigs were steered cautiously past plate
glass; and in the market-place Sidney Herbert and Henry Fawcett on
their pedestals were looking out over the dark, wet square at the last
drovers and men in gaiters leaving it, and ordinary passengers crossing
it, and a few sheep still bleating in a pen. And the green river
meadows and their elms and willows chilled and darkened as the gold
sun sank without staining the high, pale-washed sky, and the cathedral
clock nervously and quietly said, “One-two, one-two, one-two” for the
third quarter before dark.
But this was Sunday morning, and still early. I ate breakfast to the
tune of the “Marseillaise,” sung slowly and softly to a child as a
lullaby, and was soon out again, this time amidst jackdaws, rooks,
clergy, and the black-dressed Sunday procession, diversified by women
in violet, green, and curry colour. The streets, being shuttered and
curtained, robbed of the crowd shopping, were cold and naked; even the
inns of Salisbury, whose names are so genial and succulent--“Haunch
of Venison,” “Round of Beef,” “Ox,” “Royal George,” “Roebuck,” “Wool
Pack”--were as near as possible dismal. Their names were as meaningless
as those of the dead Browns, Dowdings, Burtons, Burdens, and Fullfords
in St. Edmund’s Churchyard. If it had not been for the women it would
have been a city of the dead or a city of birds. The people kept to the
paths of the close. The lawns and trees were given over exclusively
to the birds, especially those that are black, such as the rook and
blackbird. Those that were not matrimonially engaged on the grass
were cawing in the elms, beeches, and chestnuts of the cathedral.
Missel-thrushes were singing across the close as if it had been empty.
A lark from the fields without drifted singing over the city. The
stockdoves cooed among the carved saints. There were more birds than
men in Salisbury. Never had I seen the cathedral more beautiful. The
simple form of the whole must have been struck out of glaucous rock at
one divine stroke. It seemed to belong to the birds that flew about it
and lodged so naturally in the high places. The men who crawled in at
the doors, as into mines, could not be the masters of such a vision.
Nevertheless, I took the liberty of entering myself, chiefly to look
again for those figures of Death and a Traveller, where the Traveller
says,--
“Alas, Death, alas, a blissful thing that were
If thou wouldst spare us in our lustiness
And come to wretches that be so of heavy cheer.” ...
and Death retorts,--
“Graceless gallant, in all thy lust and pride,
Remember that thou shalt give due.
Death shall from thy body thy soul divide.
Thou must not him escape certainly.
To the dead bodies cast down thine eye,
Behold them well, consider and see,
For such as they are such shalt thou be.”
There is little more to be said about death than is said here. But
I could not find the words, though I went up and down those streets
of knights’, ladies’, and doctors’ tombs, and saw again old Eleonor
Sadler, grim, black, and religious, kneeling at her book in a niche
since 1622, and looking as if she could have been the devil to those
who did not do likewise. I saw, too, the tablet of Henry Hele, who
practised medicine felicitously and honourably, for fifty years, in the
close and in the city; and the green lady with the draped harp mourning
over Thomas, Baron Wyndham, Lord High Steward of Ireland (1681-1745),
and the bust of Richard Jefferies,--
“Who, observing the works of Almighty God
With a poet’s eye, | Has |
enriched the literature of his country, | and |
won for himself a place amongst | those |
who have made men happier, | and wiser.”
If Jefferies had to be commemorated in a cathedral, it was unnecessary
to drag in Almighty God. Perhaps the commemorator hoped thus to cast a
halo over the man and his books; but I think “The Story of my Heart”
and “Hours of Spring” will be proof against the holy water of these
feeble and ill divided words.
Outside the city I had the road to Wilton, a road lined on both sides
by elms, almost to myself. The rooks cawed in their nests in the elms,
and the eight bells of Bemerton called to worshippers from among the
trees, a field’s-breadth distant on the left. I was not tempted by the
bells, yet this was one of those Sundays that help us to see beauty and
a sort of sense in the lines of George Herbert, vicar of Bemerton,--
“Sundays the pillars are
On which heav’ns palace arched lies:
The other days fill up the spare
And hollow room with vanities.
They are the fruitful beds and borders
In God’s rich garden: that is bare
Which parts their ranks and orders.
The Sundays of man’s life,
Threaded together on time’s string,
Make bracelets to adorn the wife
Of the eternal, glorious King.
On Sundays heaven’s gate stands ope;
Blessings are plentiful and rife,
More plentiful than hope.”
Izaak Walton says that on the Sunday before his death Herbert rose up
suddenly from his bed, called for one of his instruments, tuned it, and
sang this verse: “Thus he sung on earth such hymns and anthems as the
angels and he ... now sing in Heaven.” The bells, the sunshine after
storm, the elm trees, and the memory of that pious poet, put me into
what was perhaps an unconscious imitation of a religious humour. And
in that humour, repeating the verses with a not wholly sham unction, I
rode away from Bemerton. The Other Man, however, overtook me, and upset
the humour. For he repeated in his turn, with unction exaggerated to
an incredibly ridiculous degree, the sonnet on Sin which comes next to
that on Nature in Herbert’s “Temple,”--
“Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round.
Parents first season us: then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers,
Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,
Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
The sound of glory ringing in our ears:
Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.”
At the conclusion of this, without pause or change of tone, he
continued: “From Parents, Schoolmasters, and Parsons, from Sundays and
Bibles, from the Sound of Glory ringing in our ears, from Shame and
Conscience, from Angels, Grace, and Eternal Hopes and Fears, Good Lord,
or whatever Gods there be, deliver us.” This so elated him that he rode
on at a great pace, and I lost him. For I dismounted at Fugglestone
St. Peter, a very small, short-spired church with its churchyard,
huddled into a narrow wayside patch. Church and churchyard are usually
locked, so that you must get over the wall, if you wish to walk about
on the shaven turf amongst ivy and periwinkle and the headstones of the
Wiltshires, Bennetts, Lakes, Tabors, and Hollys, and to see middle-aged
George Williams’s uncomfortable words (in 1842),--
“Dangers stand thick through all the ground
To push us to the tomb,
And fierce diseases wait around
To hurry mortals home.”
and J. Harris’s double-edged epitaph (1793),--
“How strangely fond of life poor mortals be,
How few that see our beds would change with we.
But, serious reader, tell me which is best,
The painful journey or the traveller’s rest?”
Harris was trying to imagine what it would be like, lying there in
Fugglestone Churchyard, and having the laugh of people who were still
perpendicular; but, of course, it is most likely that Harris never
wrote it.
I did not go into Wilton, but kept on steadily alongside the Wylye. For
three miles I had on my left hand the river and its meadows, poplars,
willows, and elms--the railway raised slightly above the farther
bank--and the waved green wall of down beyond, to the edge of which
came the dark trees of Grovely. It was such another scene as the Wey
and the natural terrace west of Farnham. The road was heavy and wet,
being hardly above the river level, but that was all the better for
seeing the maidenhair lacework of the greening willows, the cattle
among the marsh-marigolds of the flat green meadows, the moorhen
hurried down the swift water, the bulging wagons of straw going up a
deep lane to the sheepfolds, and the gradual slope of the Plain where
those sheepfolds were, on my right. This edge of the Plain above the
Wylye is a beautiful low downland, cloven by coombs and topped by beech
clumps; and where it was arable the flints washed by last night’s rain
were shining in the sun. A few motor cyclists, determined men, passed
me at twenty miles an hour through South Newton. Larks sang high, and
hedge-sparrows sang low.