eighty-eight. A cottage or two stand not quite opposite, behind gardens
of wallflowers, mezereon, periwinkle, and tall copper-coloured peony
shoots, and a wall smothered in snow-on-the-mountains or alyssum.
On the same side, beyond, a dark farm-house and its outbuildings
project and cause the road and water to twist. The bank on that side,
the left, covered with celandines and topped with elms, now carries
a footpath of broad flagstones a yard or two above the road. Where
this footpath ends, the road, still ascending, forks, and at once
rejoins itself, thus making a small triangular island, occupied by a
ruinous, ivy-mantled cottage and a cultivated vegetable garden. At the
lower side a newish villa with a piano faces past the ruin uphill.
At the upper side, facing past the ruin and the villa downhill, is a
high-walled stone house of several gables, small enough, but possessing
dignity and even a certain faint grimness: it is backed on the roadside
by farm buildings. I saw and heard nobody from the “Half Moon” to this
house, except a chicken. Here I turned off from the road along a lane
which ended a mile away at a cottage and a farm-house, and in one of
the ploughed fields I came upon a plain stone tower, consisting of two
storeys, round-arched, roofless, in the company of a tall lime tree. It
looks over the low land towards the White Horse at Westbury. Once, they
told me, the upper storey held a water tank; but as the map shows an
ancient beacon at about this spot, I thought of it as a beacon rather
than as a water tower.
I returned and went some way along the road to Beckington. A few people
were walking in towards Rudge, children were picking primroses from
both sides of the hedges, watched silently and steadfastly by a baby in
a perambulator, not less happy in the sun than they. For the sun shone
radiant and warm out of a whitewashed sky on the red ploughlands and
wet daisy meadows by Seymour’s Court Farm, on the teams pulling chain
harrows and pewits plunging round them, and on the flag waving over
Road Church as if for some natural festival. I found my first thrush’s
egg of the year along this road, in which I was fortunate; for the bank
below the nest had been trodden into steps by boys who had examined it
before me.
I went downhill again through Rudge and took the road for North
Bradley, keeping above the left bank of the river Biss and commanding
the White Horse on the pale wall of the Plain beyond it. This took me
past Cutteridge, a modest farm, all that remains of a great house,
whose long avenues of limes, crooked and often as dense as a magpie’s
nest, still radiate from it on three sides. This is a country of noble
elms, spreading like oaks, above celandine banks.
Turning to the right down a steep-sided lane after passing Cutteridge I
reached the flat, rushy, and willowy green valley of the Biss. The road
forded the brook and brought me up into the sloping courtyard of Brook
House Farm. On the right was a high wall and a pile of rough cordwood
against it; on the left a buttressed, ecclesiastical-looking building
with tiers of windows and three doorways, some four or five centuries
old; and before me, at the top of the yard, between the upper end of
the high wall and the ecclesiastical-looking building, was the back of
the farm-house, its brass pans gleaming. This is the remnant of Brook
House. What is now a cowshed below, a cheese room above, has been the
chapel of Brook House, formerly the seat of Paveleys, Joneses, and
Cheneys. The brook below was once called Baron’s brook on account of
the barony conferred on the owner: the family of Willoughby de Broke
are said to have taken their name from it. The cows made an excellent
congregation, free from all the disadvantages of believing or wanting
to believe in the immortality of the soul, in the lower half of the
old chapel; the upper floor and its shelves of Cheddar cheeses of all
sizes could not offend the most jealous deity or his most jealous
worshippers. The high, intricate rafter-work of the tiled roof was
open, and the timber, as pale as if newly scrubbed, was free from
cobwebs--in fact, chestnut wood is said to forbid cobwebs. Against the
wall leaned long boards bearing the round stains of bygone cheeses.
Every one who could write had carved his name on the stone. Instead of
windows there were three doors in the side away from the quadrangle, as
if at one time they had been entered either from a contiguous building
or by a staircase from beneath. Evidently both the upper and the lower
chambers were formerly subdivided into cells of some kind.
The farmhouse is presumably the remnant of the old manor house,
cool and still, looking out away from the quadrangle over a garden
containing a broad, rough-hewn stone disinterred hereby, and a
green field corrugated in parallelograms betokening old walls or an
encampment. The field next to this is spoken of as a churchyard, but
there seems to be no record of skeletons found there. Half a mile off
in different directions are Cutteridge, Hawkeridge, and Storridge, but
nothing nearer in that narrow, gentle valley....
The afternoon was as fine as Easter Monday could be, all that could
be desired by chapel-goers for their Anniversary Tea. It was the very
weather that Trowbridge people needed on Good Friday for a walk to
Farleigh Castle, for beer or tea and watercress at the “Hungerford
Arms.” As I bicycled into Trowbridge at four o’clock the inhabitants
were streaming out along the dry road westward.
I am not fond of crowds, but this holiday crowd caused no particular
distaste. Away from their town and separated into small groups they had
no cumulative effect. They were for the time being travellers as much
as I was. In any case, a town like Trowbridge is used to strangers
of all kinds passing through it: it would take a South Sea Islander
in native costume to make it stare as a village does. The crowd that
I dislike most is the crowd near Clapham Junction on a Saturday
afternoon. Though born and bred a Clapham Junction man, I have become
indifferently so. Perhaps I ought to call my feeling fear: alarm comes
first, followed rapidly by dislike. It is a crowd of considerable size,
consisting of women shopping, of young men and women promenading,
mostly apart, though not blind to one another, and of men returning
from offices. They take things fairly easily, even these last, and can
look about. I shall not pretend to define the difference between them
and a village or a provincial town crowd. It is less homely than a
village, less compact and abounding in clear types than a town. It is a
disintegrated crowd, rather suspicious and shy perhaps, where few know,
or could guess much about, the others. When I find myself among them,
I am more confused and uneasy than in any other crowd. I cannot settle
down in it to notice the three or four or half a dozen types, as I
should do at Swindon, or Swansea, or Coventry; nor yet to please myself
as with the general look of a village mob of forty or fifty, and a few
of the most remarkable individuals. Here, at Clapham Junction, each
one asks a separate question. In a quarter of an hour I am bewildered
and dejected.
How different it is from a London crowd. In London everybody is a
Londoner. Once in the Strand or Oxford Street I am as much at home
as any one. If I were to walk up and down continuously for a week I
should not be noticed any more than I am now. For all they know I am an
Old Inhabitant. So is every one else from Cartmel or Tregaron. There
are no lookers on: all are lookers on. I look hard at every one as at
the pictures in a gallery, and no offence is taken. I can lose myself
comfortably amongst them, and wake up again only when I find myself
alone. Each day, except in the shops, an entirely new set of faces is
seen, so far as memory tells me. A burly flower-girl, a white-haired
youth, and a broken-down, long-haired actor or poet, are the only
strangers in London I have seen more than once. Yet the combination is
familiar. I am a Londoner, and I am at home. But I am not a Clapham
Junction man any more than I am a Trowbridge man. Perhaps the reason
of my discontent is that there are no Clapham Junction men, that all
are strangers and aware of it, that they never truly make a mob like
the factory men at New Swindon, and yet are too numerous to be
regarded as villagers like the people of Rudge.
I did not stop in Trowbridge. Its twenty chimneys were as tranquil
as its tall spire, and its slaughter-house as silent as the adjacent
church, where the poet Crabbe, once vicar, is commemorated by a
tablet, informing the world that he rose by his abilities. In fact,
the noisiest thing in Trowbridge was the rookery where I left it. Like
nearly all towns--market towns, factory towns--Trowbridge is girdled
by villas, chestnuts, and elms, and in the trees rooks build, thus
making a ceremoniously rustic entrance or exit. While the rooks cawed
overhead, the blackbirds sang below.
As far as Hilperton and the “Lion and Fiddle,” houses and fields
alternated along the road, but after that I entered a broad elmy
country of young corn and new-ploughed land sweeping gradually away
on my right up to grass slopes, and to the foot of dark Roundway Down
and pale Beacon Hill, above Devizes. Far to the left the meadow land
swelled up into the wooded high land above Lacock, Corsham, and Bath.
Under elms near Semington the threshing-machine boomed; its unchanging
note mingled with a hiss at the addition of each sheaf. Otherwise the
earth was the rooks’, heaven was the larks’, and I rode easily on
along the good level road somewhere between the two.
Motion was extraordinarily easy that afternoon, and I had no doubts
that I did well to bicycle instead of walking. It was as easy as
riding in a cart, and more satisfying to a restless man. At the same
time I was a great deal nearer to being a disembodied spirit than I
can often be. I was not at all tired, so far as I knew. No people
or thoughts embarrassed me. I fed through the senses directly, but
very temperately, through the eyes chiefly, and was happier than
is explicable or seems reasonable. This pleasure of my disembodied
spirit (so to call it) was an inhuman and diffused one, such as may
be attained by whatever dregs of this our life survive after death.
In fact, had I to describe the adventure of this remnant of a man I
should express it somewhat thus, with no need of help from Dante, Mr.
A. C. Benson, or any other visitors to the afterworld. In a different
mood I might have been encouraged to believe the experience a foretaste
of a sort of imprisonment in the viewless winds, or of a spiritual
share in the task of keeping the cloudy winds “fresh for the opening
of the morning’s eye.” Supposing I were persuaded to provide this
afterworld with some of the usual furniture, I could borrow several
visible things from that ride through Semington, Melksham, and
Staverton. First and chief would be the Phœnix “Swiss” Milk Factory
where I crossed the Avon at Staverton. It is an enormous stone cube,
with multitudinous windows all alike, and at the back of it two tall
chimneys. The Avon winding at its foot is a beautiful, willowy river.
On the opposite side of the road and bridge the river bank rises up
steeply, clothed evenly with elms, and crowned by Staverton’s little
church which the trees half conceal.... This many-windowed naked
mass, surmounted by a stone phœnix, immediately over the conspicuous
information that it was burnt on November 5, 1834, and rebuilt on April
28 of the next year, is as big as a cathedral, and like a cathedral
in possessing a rookery in the riverside elms behind it. With the
small, shadowed church opposite, I feel sure that it would need little
transmutation to fall into the geography of a land of shades. But the
most beautiful thing of all was the broad meadow called Challimead on
the west of Melksham, and the towered church lying along the summit of
the gentle rise in which it ends. I bicycled along the north-west side
of it immediately after leaving Melksham on the way to Holt. Elms of
a hundred years’ growth lined the road, some upright, most lying amid
the wreckage of their branchwork far out over the grass. Parallel with
the road and much nearer to it than to the church the Avon serpentined
along the meadow without disturbing the level three furlongs of its
perfect green. The windows of the church flamed in the last sunbeams,
the tombstones were clear white. For this meadow at least there should
be a place in any Elysium. It would be a suitable model for the meadow
of heavenly sheen where Æneas saw the blessed souls of Ilus and
Assaracus and Dardanus and the bard Musæus, heroes and wise men, and
the beautiful horses of the heroes, in that diviner air lighted by
another sun and other stars than ours.
But our sun was fading over Challimead. The air grew cold as I went
on, and the pewits cried as if it were winter. The rooks were now
silent dots all over the elms of the Trowbridge rookery. A light mist
was brushing over the fields, softening the brightness of Venus in the
pale rosy west, and the scarlet flames that leapt suddenly from a thorn
pile in a field. Probably there would be another frost to-night....
People were returning to the town in small and more scattered groups.
At corners and crossways figures were standing talking, or bidding
farewell. I rode on easily through the chill, friendly land. Clear
hoofs hammering and men or girls talking in traps were but an added
music to the quiet throughout the evening. I began to feel some
confidence in the Spring.
I went out into the village at about half-past nine in the dark, quiet
evening. A few stars penetrated the soft sky; a few lights shone on
earth, from a distant farm seen through a gap in the cottages. Single
and in groups, separated by gardens or bits of orchard, the cottages
were vaguely discernible: here and there a yellow window square gave
out a feeling of home, tranquillity, security. Nearly all were silent.
Ordinary speech was not to be heard, but from one house came the sounds
of an harmonium being played and a voice singing a hymn, both faintly.
A dog barked far off. After an interval a gate fell-to lightly. Nobody
was on the road.
The road was visible most dimly, and was like a pale mist at an
uncertain distance. When I reached the green all was still and silent.
The cottages on the opposite side of the road all lay back, and they
were merely blacker stains on the darkness. The pollard willows
fringing the green, which in the sunlight resemble mops, were now very
much like a procession of men, strange primæval beings, pausing to
meditate in the darkness.
The intervals between the cottages were longer here, and still longer;
I ceased to notice them until I came to the last house, a small farm,
where the dog growled, but in a subdued tone, as if only to condemn my
footsteps on the deserted road.
Rows of elm trees on both sides of the road succeeded. I walked more
slowly, and at a gateway stopped. While I leaned looking over it at
nothing, there was a long silence that could be felt, so that a train
whistling two miles away seemed as remote as the stars. The noise could
not overleap the boundaries of that silence. And yet I presently moved
away, back towards the village, with slow steps.
I was tasting the quiet and the safety without a thought. Night had
no evil in it. Though a stranger, I believed that no one wished harm
to me. The first man I saw, fitfully revealed by a swinging lantern
as he crossed his garden, seemed to me to have the same feeling, to
be utterly free of trouble or any care. A man slightly drunk deviated
towards me, halted muttering, and deviated away again. I heard his gate
shut, and he was absorbed.
The inn door, which was now open, was as the entrance to a bright
cave in the middle of the darkness: the illumination had a kind
of blessedness such as it might have had to a cow, not without
foreignness; and a half-seen man within it belonged to a world,
blessed indeed, but far different from this one of mine, dark, soft,
and tranquil. I felt that I could walk on thus, sipping the evening
silence and solitude, endlessly. But at the house where I was staying I
stopped as usual. I entered, blinked at the light, and by laughing at
something, said with the intention of being laughed at, I swiftly again
naturalized myself.
VII.
TROWBRIDGE TO SHEPTON MALLET.
I awoke to hear ducklings squeaking, and a starling in the pine
tree imitating the curlew and the owl hunting. Then I heard another
chiff-chaff. Everything more than a quarter of a mile away was hidden
by the mist of a motionless white frost, but the blackbird disregarded
it. At a quarter to eight he was singing perfectly in an oak at the
cross roads. The sun had melted the frost wherever it was not protected
by hedges or fallen trees. Soon a breeze broke up and scattered and
destroyed the mist, and I set out on a warm, cloudy morning that could
do no wrong. As I was riding down the half-way hill between Trowbridge
and Bradford, where the hedge has a number of thorns trimmed to an
umbrella shape at intervals, they were ploughing with two horses, and
the sun gleamed on the muscles of the horses and the polished slabs of
the furrows. Jackdaws were flying and crying over Bradford-on-Avon.
I dismounted by the empty “Lamb” inn, with a statue of a black-faced
lamb over its porch, and sat on the bridge. The Avon ran swift, but
calm and dull, down under the bridge and away westward. The town hill
rises from off the water, covered as with scales with stone houses of
countless varieties of blackened gray and many gables, and so steep
that the roofs of one horizontal street are only just higher than the
doorsteps of the one above. A brewery towers from the mass at the far
side, and, near the top, a factory with the words “For Sale” printed
on its roof in huge letters. And the smoke of factories blew across
the town. The hilltop above the houses is crested with beeches and
rooks’ nests against the blue. The narrow space between the foot of the
hill and the river is occupied by private gardens, a church and its
churchyard yews and chestnuts, and by a tall empty factory based on the
river bank itself, with a notice “To Let.” Opposite this a small public
garden of grass and planes and chestnuts comes to the water’s edge, and
next to that, a workshop and a house or two, separated from the water
by rough willowy plots, an angle of flat grass and an almond tree,
and private gardens. Behind me the river disappeared among houses and
willows.
As I sat there, who should come up and stare at the chapel on the
bridge and its weather-vane of a gilded perch, but the Other Man.
Surprise sufficiently fortified whatever pleasure we felt to compel us
to join company; for he also was going to Wells.
We took the Frome road as far as Winkfield, where we turned off
westward to Farleigh Hungerford. In half a mile we were in Somerset,
descending by a steep bank of celandines under beeches that rose up
on our right towards the Frome. The river lay clear ahead of us, and
to our left. A bushy hill, terraced horizontally, rose beyond it,
and Farleigh Hungerford Castle, an ivied front, a hollow-eyed round
tower, and a gateway, faced us from the brow. From the bridge, and
the ruined cottages and mills collected round it, we walked up to the
castle, which is a show place. From here the Other Man would have me
turn aside to see Tellisford. This is a hamlet scattered along half a
mile of by-road, from a church at the corner down to the Frome. Once
there was a ford, but now you cross by a stone footbridge with white
wooden handrails. A ruined flock-mill and a ruined ancient house stand
next to it on one side; on the other the only house is a farm with a
round tower embodied in its front. Away from this farm a beautiful
meadow slopes between the river and the woods above. This grass, which
becomes level for a few yards nearest the bank, was the best possible
place, said the Other Man, for running in the sun after bathing at the
weir--we could see its white wall of foam half a mile higher up the
river, which was concealed by alders beyond. He said it was a great
haunt of nightingales. And there was also a service tree; and, said
he, in that tree sang a thrush all through May--it was the best May
that ever was--and so well it sang, unlike any other thrush, that it
made him think he would gladly live no longer than a thrush if he could
do some one thing as right, as crisp and rich, as the song was. “I
suppose you write books,” said I. “I do,” said he. “What sort of books
do you write?” “I wrote one all about this valley of the Frome....
But no one knows that it was the Frome I meant. You look surprised.
Nevertheless, I got fifty pounds for it.” “That is a lot of money for
such a book!” “So my publisher thought.” “And you are lucky to get
money for doing what you like.” “What I like!” he muttered, pushing
his bicycle back uphill, past the goats by the ruin, and up the steps
between walls that were lovely with humid moneywort, and saxifrage like
filigree, and ivy-leaved toadflax. Apparently the effort loosened his
tongue. He rambled on and on about himself, his past, his writing, his
digestion; his main point being that he did not like writing. He had
been attempting the impossible task of reducing undigested notes about
all sorts of details to a grammatical, continuous narrative. He abused
notebooks violently. He said that they blinded him to nearly everything
that would not go into the form of notes; or, at any rate, he could
never afterwards reproduce the great effects of Nature and fill in the
interstices merely--which was all they were good for--from the notes.
The notes--often of things which he would otherwise have forgotten--had
to fill the whole canvas. Whereas, if he had taken none, then only the
important, what he truly cared for, would have survived in his memory,
arranged not perhaps as they were in Nature, but at least according to
the tendencies of his own spirit. “Good God!” said he. But luckily we
were by this time on the level. I mounted. He followed.
Thanks, I suppose, to the Other Man’s conversation, we took the wrong
road, retracing our steps to Farleigh instead of going straight on to
Norton St. Philip. However, it was a fine day. The sun shone quietly;
the new-cut hedges were green and trim; neither did any of the prunings
puncture our tyres. Near the crossing from Wolverton to Freshford and
Bath we sat down on a sheep trough and ate lunch in a sloping field
sprinkled with oak trees. The Other Man ate monkey-nuts for the benefit
of his health, but pointed out that the monkey-nuts, like beef-steak,
turned into himself. He informed me that he had been all over Salisbury
on Saturday night and Bradford on Monday morning in a vain search for
brown bread. But as the monkey-nuts had the merit of absorbing most of
his attention he talked comparatively little. I was free, therefore,
to look down over our field and over drab grass and misted copses
southward to Cley Hill, a dim, broad landscape that seemed to be
expecting to bring something forth.
We had not gone a mile from this stopping-place when the Other Man
got off to look over the “George” at Norton St. Philip, another show
place, known to its proprietor as “the oldest licensed house in
England,” and once for a night occupied by the Duke of Monmouth. It
is a considerable, venerable house, timbered in front, with a room
that was formerly a wool market extending over its whole length and
breadth under the roof. In the rear of it crowded many pent-houses and
outbuildings, equivalent to a hamlet, and once, no doubt, sufficient
for all purposes connected with travel on foot or horseback. The Other
Man was scared out of it in good time by a new arrival, a man of
magnificent voice, who talked with authority, and without permission
and without intermission, to any one whom neighbourhood made a
listener. After a wish that the talker might become dumb, or he himself
deaf, the Other Man escaped.
We glided down the street to a little tributary of a tributary too
pleasantly to stop at the church below, though it had a grand tower
with tiers of windows. The rise following brought us up to where a road
crosses from Wellow, and at the crossing stands a small isolated inn
called “Tuckers-grave.” Who Tucker was, and whether it was a man or a
woman buried at the crossing, I did not discover. The next village was
Falkland, a mile farther on. It is built around a green, on one side
of which a big elm overshadows a pair of stocks and a low, long stone
for the patient to sit upon, and at the side a tall one like a rude
sculptured constable. A number of other great stones were distributed
about the village, including two smooth and rounded ones, like flat
loaves, on a cottage wall. The children and youths of the village were
in the road, the children whipping tops of a carrot shape, the youths
of seventeen or so playing at marbles.