Stoke, and Orcheston, I was free of houses; and of the few that lay
in the hollows of the Plain only one was visible--a small one on my
right a quarter of a mile away among ricks and elm trees--until I
came to Joan-a-Gore’s. It is a hedgeless road, with more or less wide
margins of rough grass, along which proceed two lines of poplars, some
dead, some newly planted, all unprosperous and resembling the sails of
windmills. A league of ploughland on either hand was broken only by
a clump or two on the high ridges and a rick on the lower. As it was
Sunday no white and black teams were crossing these spaces, sowing or
scarifying. The rooks of Joan-a-Gore’s flew back and forth, ignorant
of the falconer; the pewit brandished himself in the air; the lark
sang continually; on one of the dead poplars a corn bunting delivered
his unvaried song, as if a handful of small pebbles dropped in a chain
dispiritedly. Nobody was on the road, it being then two o’clock, except
a young soldier going to meet a girl. The rain came, but was gone
again before I reached Joan-a-Gore’s. The farm-house, the spacious
farm-yard and group of irregular, shadowy, thatched buildings, and the
surrounding rookery elms, all on a gently-sloping ground next to the
road--this is the finest modern thing on the Plain. The farm itself is
but a small, slated house, gray-white in colour, with a porch and five
front windows, half hid among elm trees; but the whole group probably
resembles a Saxon chief’s homestead. The trees make a nearly continuous
copse with the elms and ashes that stand around and above the thatched
cart lodges and combined sheds and cottages at Joan-a-Gore’s Cross. No
hedge, wall, or fence divides this group from my road or from the Ridge
Way crossing it, and I turned into one of the doorless cart lodges to
eat. I sat on a wagon shaft, looking out north over the Ridge Way and
the north edge of the Plain. Where it passed the cart lodge the Ridge
Way was a dusty farm track; but on the other side of the crossing
it was a fair road, leading past a new farm group towards Imber.
Chickens peeked round me in the road dust and within the shed. Sparrows
chattered in the thatch. The bells of sheep folded in neighbouring root
fields tinkled. In the rookery the rooks cawed, and nothing intimated
that the falcon had killed one. The young soldier had met his girl,
and was walking back with her hand in his. The heavy dark sagging
clouds let out some rain without silencing the larks. As the sun came
out again a trapful of friends of the cottagers drove up. The trap was
drawn up alongside of me with a few stares: the women went in; the men
put away the horse and strolled about. Well, I could not rest here when
I had finished eating. Perhaps Sunday had tainted the solitude and
quiet; I know not. So I mounted and rode on north-westward.
The road was beginning to descend off the Plain. The poplars having
come to an end, elms lined it on both sides. When the descent steepened
the roadside banks became high and covered in arum, parsley, nettle,
and ground ivy, and sometimes elder and ivy. No hedgerow on the left
hid the great waves of the Plain towards Imber, and the fascinating
hollow of the Warren close at hand. The slabby ploughland sinks away
to a sharp-cut, flat-bottomed hollow of an oblong tendency, enclosed
by half-wooded, green terraced banks all round except at the entrance,
which is towards the road. This is the Warren, a most pleasant thing
to see, a natural theatre unconsciously improved by human work, but
impossible to imitate entirely by art, and all the better for being
empty.
Nearing the foot of the descent the road on the left is blinded by a
fence, so that I could hardly see the deep wooded cleave parallel to
me, and could only hear the little river running down it to Lavington.
Very clear and thin and bright went this water over the white and dark
stones by the wayside, as I came down to the forge at West Lavington
and the “Bridge” inn. West Lavington is a street of about two miles of
cottages, a timber-yard, inns, a great house, a church, and gardens,
with interruptions from fields. All Saints’ Church stands upon a steep
bank on the left, a towered church with a staircase corner turret and
an Easter flag flying. Round about it throng the portly box tombs
and their attendant headstones, in memory of the Meads, Saunderses,
Bartlets, Naishes, Webbs, Browns, Allens, and the rest. Among the
Browns is James Brown, shepherd “for thirty-nine years,” who died in
1887, and was then but forty-six. The trees and thatched and tiled
roofs of the village hid the Plain from the churchyard. Inside, the
church wall was well lined with tablets to the Tinkers, the Smiths, and
the family of Amor; but the principal thing is the recumbent marble
figure of Henry Danvers, twenty-one years old when he died in 1654.
He is musing over a book which appears to be slipping from his grasp.
The figure of his mother, Elizabeth, near him is also holding but
not reading a book. Between the two an earlier female effigy, head on
cushion, slumbers in a recess. Under one of the largest tablets a tiny
stone with quaint lettering was inset to keep in mind Henevera Yerbury,
who died at Coulston on March 4, 1672.
Instead of going straight on through Potterne and Devizes, I turned
to the left by the Dauntsey Agricultural College, and entered a road
which follows the foot of the Plain westward to Westbury and Frome.
Thus I had the north wall of the Plain always visible on my left as I
rode through Little Cheverell, Erlestoke, Tinhead, and Edington. The
road twisted steeply downhill between high banks of loose earth and elm
roots, half draped by arum, dandelion, ground ivy, and parsley, and the
flowers of speedwell and deadnettle; then up again to Little Cheverell.
Here I mounted a bank of nettles and celandines under elm trees into
the churchyard, and between two pairs of pollard limes to the door of
the church, and walked round it and saw the two box tombs smothered
in ivy, and the spotted old carved stones only two feet out of the
ground. Behind the church rises Strawberry Hill. A cow was lowing in
the farmyard over the road. Fowls were scratching deeper and deeper the
holes among the elm roots on the church bank.
Then for a distance the road traversed hedgeless arable levels that
rose gently in their young green garments up to the Plain. I looked
back, and saw the vast wall of the Plain making an elbow at West
Lavington, and crooking round to a clump on a straw-coloured hill above
Urchfont, the farthest point visible. Before me stretched the woods of
Erlestoke Park, crossing the road and slanting narrow and irregular
up and along the hillside, lining it with beech and fir for over a
mile, under the name of Hill Wood. The road dipped steeply through the
grounds of the park, and its high banks of gray sand, dressed in dog’s
mercury and ivy, and overhung by pine trees, shut out everything on
either hand. Several private bridges crossed the deep road, and a woman
had stopped that her child might shout, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” under the
arch of one of them. Emerging from these walls, the road cut through a
chain of ponds. Erlestoke Park lay on both sides. On the right its deer
fed by the new church under a steep rise of elms and sycamores; on the
left rooks cawed among the elms and chestnuts scattered on lawn that
sloped up to Hill Wood.
A timber-yard, a “George and Dragon,” and many neat thatched cottages
compose the wayside village of Erlestoke. Water was flashing down the
gutters. Quite a number of people were on the road, but no one could
tell me the meaning of the statuary niched on the cottage walls. It
must have come from “some old ancient place,” they said. An old man
who had dwelt for eighteen years in one of the cottages thus adorned,
and had worked as a boy with old men that knew the place, could tell
me no more. Some of the figures were nudes--one a female, with the coy
hands of Venus, rising from her bath--others classical, and symbolic or
grotesque: all astonishing in that position, ten feet up on a cottage
wall, and unlikely to have come from the old church in Erlestoke Park.
Not a mile of this road was without cottagers strolling with their
children or walking out to see friends in the beautiful weather. But
just outside Erlestoke I met two slightly dilapidated women, not
cottage women, with a perambulator, and twenty yards behind them two
weatherbeaten, able-bodied men in caps, better dressed than the women.
As I went by, one of them gave a shout, which I did not take as meant
for me. He continued to shout what I discovered to be “Sir” in a loud
voice until I turned round and had to get down. They advanced to meet
me. The shorter man, a stocky fellow of not much past thirty, with
very little nose, thin lips, and a strong, shaven chin, hastened up
to me and inquired, in an unnecessarily decided manner, the road to
Devizes, and if there were many houses on the way. The taller man,
slender and very upright, with bright blue eyes, had by this time come
up, and the two began to beg, telling rapidly, loudly, emphatically,
and complainingly, a combined story into which the _Titanic_ was
introduced. One of them pointed out that he was wearing the button of
the Seamen’s Guild. They wanted me to look at papers. The two women,
who were still walking on, they claimed as their wives. The more they
talked the less inclined did I feel to give them money. Though they
began to call down a blessing on me, I still refused. They persisted.
The shorter one was not silent while I mounted my bicycle. So I rode
away out of reach of their blessings without giving them anything. I
tried to explain to myself why. For sixpence I might have purchased two
loaves or three pints for them, and for myself blessings and possibly
some sort of glow. I did not know nearly enough of mankind to condemn
them as mere beggars; besides, mere beggars must live, if any one must.
But they were very glib and continuous. Also they were hearty men in
good health--which should have been a reason for giving them what I
could afford. The strongest reason against it was probably alarm at
being given some responsibility at one blow for five bodies in some
ways worse off than myself, and shame, too, at the act of handing
money and receiving thanks for it. My conscience was uneasy. I could
not appease it with sixpence, nor with half a sovereign, which might
have been thought generous if I had told the story. If I was to do
anything I ought to have seen the thing through, to have accompanied
these people and seen that they slept dry and ate enough, and got work
or a pension. To give them money was to take mean advantage of the fact
that in half a mile or so I could stow them away among the mysteries
and miseries of the world. Too late I concluded that I ought to have
listened to their story to the end, to have read their papers and
formed an opinion, and to have given what I could, because in any case
I should be none the worse, and they might be the better, if only to
the extent of three pints between them. I made a resolution--a sort of
a resolution--to give sixpence in future to every beggar, and leave the
question of right or wrong till--
“When the Archangel’s trump shall sound
And slumbering mortals bid to rise,”
and the schoolmaster’s expectation is answered. Nevertheless, I was
uneasy--so uneasy that the next beggar got nothing from me. It was
simpler to pass by with a helpless “_Que sais-je?_” shrug, than to
stop and have a look at him and say something, while I felt in my
pockets and made the choice between my coppers and my smallest silver.
Thus I rode up hill through more steep banks of gray sand draped in
ivy, overhung with pine trees. Dipping again, I came to a park-like
meadow, a pond, and a small house above rather stiff, ineffectual
green terraces, on my right; while on the left the wall of the Plain
was carved from top to bottom by three parallel even rolls like suet
puddings, and these again carved across horizontally. A little farther
on Coulston Hill was hollowed out into a great round steep bay which
had once been a beech wood. Now all the beeches were lying anyhow, but
mostly pointing downward, on the steep where they had fallen or slid,
some singly, some in raft-like masses. Not a tree remained upright. The
bared, blackish earth and the gray stems--of the colour of charred wood
and ashes--suggested fire. The disorder of the strewn debris suggested
earthquake. All was silent. A stiff man of fifty was endeavouring
to loiter without stopping still in the road while his daughter of
eighteen tried to keep her distance behind him by picking anemones
without actually stopping.
Before Tinhead there were more vertical rolls and corresponding troughs
on the hillside, and at the foot again three or four wide terraces,
and below them a cornfield reaching to the road. To the low, dark-blue
elm country away from the Plain--that is, northward--and to the far
wooded ridge on its horizon, the westering light was beginning to
add a sleeplike softness of pale haze. Over the low hedges I saw
league after league of this lower land, and the drab buttresses of
Beacon Hill near Devizes on its eastern edge. It had the appearance
of a level, uninhabitable land of many trees. Several times a hollow
cleft in the slope below the road--a cleft walled by trees, but
grass-bottomed--guides the eye out towards it. All along good roads
led down to the vale, and an equal number of rough roads climbed the
hillside up to the Plain. I was to go down, not up, and I looked with
regret at the clear ridge and the rampart of Bratton Castle carved
on it against the sky, the high bare slopes, the green magnificent
gulleys and horizontal terraces, the white roads, and especially a
rough cartway mounting steeply from Edington between prodigious naked
banks. For I had formerly gone up this cartway on a day so fine that
for many nights afterwards I could send myself to sleep by thinking of
how I climbed, seeing only these precipitous banks and the band of sky
above them, until I emerged into the glory and the peace of the Plain,
of the unbounded Plain and the unbounded sky, and the marriage of sun
and wind that was being celebrated upon them. But it was no use going
the same way, for I was tired and alone, and it was near the end of the
afternoon, though still cloudily bright and warm. I had to go down, not
up, to find a bed that I knew of seven or eight miles from Tinhead and
Edington.
These two are typical downside villages of brick and thatch, built on
the banks of the main road, a parallel lane or two, and some steep
connecting lanes at right angles. When I first entered them from below
I was surprised again and again how many steps yet higher up the
downside they extended. From top to bottom the ledges and inclines on
which they stand, and the intervening spaces of grass and orchard,
cover about half a mile. Tinhead has an “Old George” inn of an L
shape, with a yard in the angle. Edington, almost linked to Tinhead
by cottages scattered along the road, has a “Plough” and “Old White
Horse.” They were beginning to advertise the Tinhead and Bratton inns
as suitable for teas and week-end parties. Hence, perhaps, the prefix
“Old.” For hereby is the first station since Lavington on the line
that goes parallel to the wall of the Plain and a mile or two below the
road, all along the Pewsey vale to Westbury.
I turned away from the hills through Edington, which has a big towered
church among its farmyards, cottage gardens, and elm slopes--big
enough to seat all Edington, men and cattle. Like Salisbury Cathedral,
this church looks as if it had been made in one piece. All over, it
is a uniform rough gray without ivy or moss or any stain. On first
entering the churchyard, what most struck my eye was the name of the
Rev. Hussy Cave-Browne-Cave, for his name is on the fifth step of the
cross erected during his vicarship; and next to that a prostrate cross
within a stone kerb, six yards long by three yards wide, in memory of
a member of the Long family. The church is the centre of a village of
big box tombs, some ornamented by carving, one covered by a stone a
foot thick, mossed, lichened, stained orange and black, pitted deep
by rain, and retaining not a letter of its inscription. I saw the
names Pike, Popler, Oram, and Fatt. Inside, out of the rain, lie the
Longs, Carters, and Taylers, the days of their lives conspicuously
recorded, and more than this in the case of George Tayler, since he
died in 1852, and left money for a sixpenny cake to be given to each
Sunday-school teacher, and a threepenny one to each scholar, once a
year, “immediately after the sermon” (I think, at Easter). Mr. Tayler
was either an enemy to sermons, or did not know as much as Sir Philip
Sidney about schoolboys. One transept is the exclusive domain of an
Augustinian canon, his head on a cushion, his feet against a barrel,
while the coping-stone of his monument is capped by a barrel and a
tree sprouting from it. The locked chancel is peopled by effigies of
great or of rich men lying on their backs or kneeling and clasping
their hands in prayer, as they have done for centuries; one of them a
Welshman from Glamorgan, Sir Edward Lewys. Round about I read the names
Lewis, Price, Roberts, Phillips, and Ellis. And speaking of names, I
noticed that the landlord of the “Plough” was Pavy, a name which I had
seen at Stapleford, and long before that in the epitaph Ben Jonson
wrote on “a child of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel,” a boy actor, Salathiel
Pavy--
“Weep with me all you that read
This little story;
And know, for whom a tear you shed,
Death’s self is sorry.
’Twas a child, that so did thrive
In grace and feature,
As Heaven and nature seemed to strive
Which owned the creature.
Years he numbered scarce thirteen
When fates turned cruel;
Yet three filled zodiacs had he been
The stage’s jewel;
And did act, what now we moan,
Old men so duly,
As, sooth, the Parcæ thought him one,
He played so truly.
So, by error, to his fate
They all consented;
But viewing him since, alas, too late
They have repented;
And have sought, to give new birth,
In baths to steep him;
But, being so much too good for earth,
Heaven vows to keep him.”
The conceit and the babbling metre play most daintily with sadness;
yet I think now it would touch us little had we not a name to attach
to it, the name of a boy who acted in Jonson’s “Cynthia’s Revels” and
“Poetaster” in 1600 and 1601.
A motor car overtook me in the village, scattering a group of boys.
“Look out!” cried one, and as the thing passed by, turned to the next
boy with, “There’s a fine motor; worth more than you are; cost a lot of
money.” Is this not the awakening of England? At least, it is truth.
One pink foxy boy laughed in my face as if there had been iron bars or
a wall of plate glass dividing us; another waited till I had started,
to hail me, “Long-legs.”
Rapidly I slid down, crossed the railway, and found myself in a land
where oaks stood in the hedges and out in mid-meadow, and the banks
were all primroses, and a brook gurgled slow among rush, marigold, and
willow. High above me, on my left hand, eastward, was the grandest,
cliffiest part of the Plain wall, the bastioned angle where it
bends round southward by Westbury and Warminster, bare for the most
part, carved with the White Horse and with double tiers of chalk
pits, crowned with the gigantic camps of Bratton, Battlesbury, and
Scratchbury, ploughed only on some of the lower slopes, and pierced by
the road to Imber. The chimneys of Trowbridge made a clump on ahead to
my right. In the west the dark ridge of the Mendips made the horizon.
I turned out of my way to see Steeple Ashton. It has no steeple,
being in fact Staple Ashton, but a tower and a dial on a church, a
very big church, bristling with coarse crockets all over, and knobby
with coarse gargoyles, half lion and half dog, some spewing down,
some out, some up. It is not a show village, like Lacock, where the
houses are packed as in a town, and most of the gardens invisible;
but a happy alternation of cottages of stone or brick (sometimes
placed herring-bone fashion) or timber work, vegetable gardens, orchard
plots, and the wagon-maker’s. On many a wagon for miles round the
name of Steeple Ashton is painted. It is on level ground, but well up
towards the Plain, over the wall of which rounded clouds, pure white
and sunlit, were heaving up. Rain threatened again, but did no more.
The late afternoon grew more and more quiet and still, and in the
warmth I mistook a distant dog’s bark, and again a cock’s crowing, for
the call of a cuckoo, mixed with the blackbird’s singing. I strained
my ears, willing to be persuaded, but was not. I was sliding easily
west, accompanied by rooks going homeward, and hailed by thrushes in
elm trees beside the road--through West Ashton and downhill on the
straight green-bordered road between Carter’s Wood and Flowery Wood.
I crossed the little river Biss and went under the railway to North
Bradley. This is a village built partly along the road from Westbury
to Trowbridge, partly along two parallel turnings out of it. The most
conspicuous houses on the main road are the red brick and stone villas
with railings and small gardens, bearing the following names: The
Laurels, East Lynn, Cremont, Lyndhurst, Hume Villa, Alcester Cottage,
Rose Villa, and Frith House, all in one row. On a dusty, cold day,
when sparrows are chattering irresolutely, this is not a cheerful spot;
nor yet when an organ-grinder is singing and grinding at the same time,
while his more beauteous and artistic-looking mate stands deceitfully
by and makes all the motions but none of the music of a baritone in
pain. To the outward eye, at least, the better part of North Bradley
is the by-road which the old flat-fronted asylum of stone faces across
a small green, the church tower standing behind, half hid by trees.
I went down this road, past farms called Ireland and Scotland on the
left, and on the right a green lane, where, among pots and pans, a
gypsy caravan had anchored, belonging to a Loveridge of Bristol. Venus,
spiky with beams, hung in the pale sky, and Orion stood up before me,
above the blue woods of the horizon. All the thrushes of England sang
at that hour, and against that background of myriads I heard two or
three singing their frank, clear notes in a mad eagerness to have all
done before dark; for already the blackbirds were chinking and shifting
places along the hedgerows. And presently it was dark, but for a lamp
at an open door, and silent, but for a chained dog barking, and a pine
tree moaning over the house. When the dog ceased, an owl hooted, and
when the owl ceased I could just hear the river Frome roaring steadily
over a weir far off. Before I settled into a chair I asked them what
the weather was going to be like to-morrow. “Who knows?” they said;
“but we do want sun. The grass isn’t looking so well as it was a month
ago: it’s looking browny.” Had any eggs been found? “Not one; but we’ve
heard of them being found, and we’ve been looking out for plovers’
eggs.” I asked what they did with the song birds’ eggs, and if they
were ever eaten. The idea of eating such little eggs disgusted every
one over fifteen; but they were fond of moorhens’, and had once taken
twenty-two from a single nest before the bird moved to a safe place.
Yes, they had plenty of chicks, and some young ducks half grown. The
turkeys were laying, but it was too early to let them sit.... Again I
heard the weir, and I began to think of sleep.
V.
THREE WESSEX POETS.
Before I decided that sleep was better than any book, some bad poetry
I was reading put me in mind of Stephen Duck. I had been thinking of
him earlier in the day at Erlestoke, because it occurred to me that
the sculpture was as inappropriate on the cottages there as were the
frigid graces on the thresher’s mortal pages. This man, a labourer from
Charlton, some way east of Erlestoke, was made a Yeoman of the Guard
in 1733 for his services to literature, and rector of Byfleet in 1752.
He drowned himself in 1755, when he was fifty. His great achievements
were, first, to show that an agricultural labourer could write as well
as ninety-nine out of a hundred clergymen, gentlemen, and noblemen, and
extremely like them, for his verses rarely had more to do with rural
life than the sculpture at Erlestoke; second, to show, conversely,
that a poet could use a scythe, which he tells us he did--and made
“the vanquished mowers soon confess his skill”--when revisiting his
birthplace.
Instead of Stephen, George, and John, he sang of Colin, Cuddy, and
Menalcas; of Chloe and Celia, instead of Ann and Maria. When he set
himself to write of shepherds, whom he must often have met, it fell out
thus,--
“From Bath, I travel thro’ the sultry vale,
Till Sal’sb’ry Plains afford a cooling Gale:
Arcadian Plains where Pan delights to dwell,
In verdant Beauties cannot these excel:
These too, like them, might gain immortal Fame,
Resound with Corydon and Thyrsis’ Flame;
If, to his Mouth, the Shepherd would apply
His mellow Pipe, or vocal Music try.”
But, alas, the poor shepherd has not heard of pastoral poetry, and
does not know--oh, happy if his happiness he knew--that his country is
Arcadia; for, as Duck laments,--
“Propt on his Staff, he indolently stands;
His Hands support his Head, his Staff his Hands;
Or, idly basking in the sunny Ray,
Supinely lazy, loiters Life away.”
This is a good deal more like a poet than a shepherd. The fellow might
have retorted that even if he converted his sheep hook into a pen he
might not be the one of whom the poet wrote,--
“Great Caroline her Royal Bounty show’d
To one, and raised him from the grov’ling Crowd”--
that Queen Caroline could not be expected to replenish the Yeomen with
Arcadians only.
Duck was at least as much awed by the Queen as by Nature. Richmond Park
and the Royal Gardens so disturbed his judgment that he believed it
possible, if Pope’s Muse would visit him,--
“Then Richmond Hill renown’d in Verse should grow,
And Thames re-echo to the Song below;
A second Eden in my Page should shine,
And Milton’s Paradise submit to mine.”
The Queen’s Grotto in Richmond Gardens inspired him with the line,--
“The sweetest Grotto and the wisest Queen.”
And yet the poor man said, and in a preface published in his lifetime,
“I have not myself been so fond of writing, as might be imagined from
seeing so many things of mine as are got together in this Book. Several
of them are on Subjects that were given me by Persons, to whom I have
such great Obligations, that I always thought their desires commands.”