more freely and disappearing for the last time. A white-fronted
farm-house, the heavily ivy-mantled ruin of a chantry adjacent, green
mounds of long submerged masonry, and a big knobby poplar with wine-red
catkins, are next neighbours to the church, a stone’s throw from the
churchyard. The chantry has come to this by several stages. Part of it,
for example, has been used as a dwelling, and adapted to the purpose
by makeshift methods, which now add a sordid, contumelious element to
the ruins. Fowls pecked about the chambers in the dust, in the bramble,
ivy, and nettles. The big poplar stands, or, rather, reclines just off
the ground, between the chantry and the brook. The running water led me
seaward, through a tangled thicket of scrub oak, gorse, and bramble,
filled in with teasel and burdock, and through a small marshy flag-bed.
A low cliff, pierced by the stream, separates the beach from the rough,
undulating, briery pasture. This cliff of sand and rock gave me shelter
from the wind; the flat gray pebbles gave me a seat; and I looked out
to sea.
A ragged sky hung threatening over a sea that was placid but corrugated
and of the colour of slate, having a margin of black at the horizon.
The water was hardly distinguishable, save by its motion, from the
broad beach of gray pools, blackened pebbles, and low rock edges. Only
the most fleeting and narrow lights fell upon the expanse, now on a
solitary sail, now on the pale lighthouse of Flat Holm far out. Between
this island, which just broke the surface of the sea on the left, and
Brean Down, the last outpost of the mainland on the right, the cloudy
pile of Steep Holm towered up.
[Illustration:
KILVE.
“A ragged sky hung threatening over a sea that was placid but
corrugated, and of the colour of slate, save a margin of black at the
horizon.”]
Not even the sea could altogether detain the eyes from the land scene
westward; for there massed and jostled themselves together the main
eminences of Exmoor, of a uniform gray, soft and unmoulded, that was
lost from time to time either in the wild, hurrying, and fitfully
gleaming sky, or in tawny smoke rolling low down from the Quantocks
seaward. Hardly less sublime was the long, clear-cut ridge between me
and Exmoor, low but precipitous, projecting into the sea a mile or two
distant, and bearing a dark church tower like a horn. The fire on the
Quantocks now burnt scarlet.
The Kilve brook on my left was noisily twisting over the pebbles and
the slanting, gray, mossy-weeded rock down to the sea, tossing up a
light but unceasing spray; and pied wagtails flitted from the fresh
water to the salt over the rocks. But what I was most glad to see was
the meadow pipit. Feebly, like a minor lark, and silently, he launched
himself twenty or thirty feet up from the wet, dark rock; then, with
wings uplifted and body curved to a keel like a crescent, he descended
slantwise, singing the most passionate and thrilling-sweet of all
songs that “o’er inform this tenement of clay” until he alighted.
Before one had finished another began, and not a moment was the song
silenced. Here, too, and among the briers of the rough pasture behind
the cliff, the wheatear, as clean as a star, flirted his tail and
showed his whiteness.
Over Exmoor storm and sun quarrelled in the cauldron, but here only one
drop fell on each dry, warm pebble and vanished. The wind slackened;
the heat grew; the warm, soft gray sky closed in and imprisoned the air
which the earth breathed. It was pleasant to get hot out of doors in
March. It was pleasant to bicycle up out of Kilve and away west on the
Minehead road, which carried me well up round the end of the Quantocks.
I took the second turning seaward for East Quantoxhead. The cottage
gardens in this lane were rich in wallflowers, daffodils, and jonquils;
and japonica was blood-red on the walls. Still better were the hedges
past the few cottages, because they were green entirely, and were the
first I had seen so in that spring. Nor were they mere thorn or elder
hedges, but interwoven elm, thorn, brier, and elder, all with their
young leaves expanded. But the heat was already great, and I was going
downhill too much not to reflect that I should have to come up again.
The pale Court House and contiguous church of East Quantoxhead, homes
of the living and of the dead Luttrells for many centuries, as men
go, were still a quarter of a mile away across a wide meadow with oak
trees, and I never got nearer. I turned instead along a hedged, stony
lane upon the left. It soon created a suspicion that I ought not to
have taken it. I stuck to it, however, uphill and then precipitously
down under untrimmed hedges, where it was no better than a river bed
of mud and stones, until it ceased to exist, having emerged into the
fields which it served. As I refused to return, I had to ascend along
the edges of several ploughed fields and among sheepfolds and through
gateways before I recovered the main road at about the sixth milestone
from Nether Stowey. The heat, the climbing with a bicycle, and, above
all, the useless, indignant impatience of annoyance, tired me; yet I
rode on westward. The gorse was beautiful on the hills above, and in
the old sandstone quarries beside the road. The sides of these quarries
were bearded with it, their floors were carpeted with gilt moss, out of
which rose up straight young larch trees in freshest green. At the head
of a deep coomb of oak and foxglove the rock had been cut away for the
widening of the road, and from the newly exposed sandstone hundreds of
the rough rosettes of foxglove had broken forth; but a smooth slab had
been devoted to an advertisement of somebody’s flock of long-woolled
Devon sheep.
The approach to West Quantoxhead and the great house of St. Audries was
lined by fences, and I rode down past them with dread of the dismal
walk back again. But at the foot the fence came to an end. The pale
gorsy turf of the deer park fell away on the right to the great house
and its protecting woods. Daffodils and primroses were thick on the
left-hand slopes. And there was a fountain of ever-running water at
the roadside. I took the water inwardly and outwardly, and no longer
troubled about the difficulty of ascent and return, even when I found
myself slipping down hill for two miles into Williton. The high beacons
of Exmoor were hanging before me, scarfed and coifed by clouds of the
sunset, and grand were these half-earthly and half-aerial heights, but
lovelier was the gentle hill much nearer and a little to the left of
my course. For the sun, sinking on the right side of it, blessed and
honoured this hill above all other hills. Both its woods and pastures
were burning subduedly with a mild orange fire, without being consumed.
It was the marriage of heaven and earth. The grim beacons behind
guarded the couch. A white farm below was as white as moonlight.
Williton begins with a railway station and a workhouse, yet the first
half mile of it is a street without a shop, of white or pale-washed,
often thatched cottages and small houses, each separated from the road
by flowery gardens of various breadths, some mere flowery strips,
all good. To the fact that it was on the main road from Minehead to
Bridgwater it was as indifferent as to the marriage of heaven and
earth. The straight road was smooth, pale, and empty. Where it runs
into another road, as the down stroke runs into the cross stroke
of a T, and has a signpost to Watchet on the right, Bicknoller and
Minehead on the left, the shops begin. Here, though it was six, and
notwithstanding the marriage of heaven and earth, I had tea, and
furthermore ate cream with a spoon, until I had had almost as much as I
desired.
Now although I had seemed to be riding continually downhill into
Williton, I found it nearly all downhill back to Kilve. The road was
like a stream on which I floated in the shadows of trees and steep
hillsides. The light was slowly departing, and still on some of the
slopes the compact gorse bushes were like flocks of golden fleeces.
Robins and blackbirds sang while bats were flitting about me. Day was
not dead but sleeping, and the few stars overhead asked silence. By the
turning to East Quantoxhead some cottagers talked in low tones. Kilve,
dark and quiet, showed one or two faint lights. Only when I lay in
bed did I recognize the two sounds that made the murmurous silence of
Kilve--the whisper of its brook, and the bleat of sheep very far off.
X.
THE GRAVE OF WINTER.
When I awoke at six the light was good, but it was the light of rain.
One thrush alone was singing, a few starlings whistled. And the rain
lasted until half-past eight. Then the sunlight enshrined itself in the
room, the red road glistened, a Lombardy poplar at Kilve Court waved
against a white sky only a little blemished by gray, and I started
again westward. The black stain of yesterday’s fire on the hill was
very black, the new privet leaves very green, and the stitchwort very
white in the arches of the drenched grass. The end of the rain, as I
hoped, was sung away by missel-thrushes in the roadside oaks, by a
chain of larks’ songs which must have reached all over England.
I had some thoughts of branching off on one of the green lanes to the
left, that would have led me past a thatched cottage or two up to the
ridge of the Quantocks, to Stowborrow Hill, Beacon Hill, Thorncombe
Hill, Great Hill, Will’s Neck, Lydeard Hill, Cothelstone Hill, and
down to Taunton; but I kept to my road of last night as far as West
Quantoxhead. There, beyond the fountain, I entered the road between
ranks of lime trees towards Stogumber. Before I had gone a mile the
rain returned, and made the roads so bad that I had to take to the
highway from Williton to Taunton, and so saw no more of Bicknoller than
its brown tower. But I had hopes of the weather, and the rain did no
harm to the flowers of periwinkle and laurustinus in the hedges I was
passing, and only added a sort of mystery of inaccessibleness to the
west wall of the Quantocks, with which I was now going parallel. It
was a wall coloured in the main by ruddy dead bracken and dark gorse,
but patched sometimes with cultivated strips and squares of green, and
trenched by deep coombs of oak, and by the shallow, winding channels of
streams--streams not of water but of the most emerald grass. Seagulls
mingled with the rooks in the nearer fields. The only people on the
road were road-menders working with a steam-roller; the corduroys of
one were stained so thoroughly by the red mud of the Quantocks, and
shaped so excellently by wear to his tall, spare figure, that they
seemed to be one with the man. It reminded me of “Lee Boo,” and how the
Pelew Islanders doubted whether the clothes and bodies of the white
men did not “form one substance,” and when one took off his hat they
were struck with astonishment, “as if they thought it had formed part
of his head.”
The rain ceased just soon enough not to prove again the vanity of
waterproofs. I have, it is true, discovered several which have brought
me through a storm dry in parts, but I have also discovered that
sellers of waterproofs are among the worst of liars, and that they
communicate their vice with their goods. The one certain fact is
that nobody makes a garment or suit which will keep a man both dry
and comfortable if he is walking in heavy and beating rain. Suits of
armour have, of course, been devised to resist rain, but at best they
admit it at the neck. The ordinary (and extraordinary) waterproof may
keep a man dry from neck to groin, though it is improbable exceedingly
that both neck and wrists will escape. As for the legs, the rain gets
at the whole of them with the aid of wind and capillary attraction.
Whoever wore a coat that kept his knees dry in a beating rain? I am not
speaking of waterproof tubes reaching to the feet. They may be sold,
they may even be bought. They may be useful, but not for walking in.
For moderate showers one waterproof is about as good as another. The
most advertised have the advantage of being expensive, and conferring
distinction: otherwise they are no better, and wear worse, than a thing
at two-thirds of the price which is never advertised at all. In such
a one I was riding now, and I got wet only at the ankles. It actually
kept my knees dry in the heavy rain near Timsbury. But if I had been
walking I should have been intolerably hot and embarrassed in this, and
very little less so in the lighter, more distinguished, more expensive
garment. Supposing that a thorough waterproof exists, so light as
to be comfortable in mild weather, it is certain to have the grave
disadvantage of being easily tearable, and therefore of barring the
wearer from woods.
Getting the body wet even in cold weather is delicious, but getting
clothes and parts of the body wet, especially about and below the knee,
is detestable. Trousers, and still more breeches, when wet through,
prove unfriendly to man, and in some degree to boy. If the knees were
free and the feet bare, I should think there would be no impediment
left to bliss for an active man in shower or storm, except that he
would provoke, evoke, and convoke laughter, and ninety-nine out of a
hundred would prefer to this all the evils of rain and of waterproofs.
It is to save our clothes and to lessen the discomfort of them that a
waterproof is added.
At first thought, it is humiliating to realize that we have spent many
centuries in this climate and never produced anything to keep us dry
and comfortable in rain. But who are we that complain? Not farmers,
labourers, and fishermen, but people who spend much time out of doors
by choice. We can go indoors when it rains; only, we do not wish to,
because so many of the works of rain are good--in the skies, on the
earth, in the souls of men and also of birds. When youth is over we are
not carried away by our happiness so far as to ignore soaked boots and
trousers. We like hassocks to kneel on, and on those hassocks we pray
for a waterproof. As the prayer is only about a hundred years old--a
hundred years ago there were no such beings--it is not surprising that
the answer has not arrived from that distant quarter. Real outdoor
people have either to do without waterproofs, or what they use would
disable us from our pleasures. Naturally, they have done nothing to
solve our difficulties. They have not written poetry for us, they have
not made waterproofs for us. They do not read our poetry, they do not
wear our waterproofs. We must solve the question by complaint and
experiment, or by learning to go wet--an increasingly hard lesson for
a generation that multiplies conveniences and inconveniences rather
faster than it does an honest love of sun, wind, and rain, separately
and all together.
By the time I reached Crowcombe, the sun was bright. This village,
standing at the entrance to a great cloudy coomb of oaks and pine
trees, is a thatched street containing the “Carew Arms,” a long, white
inn having a small porch, and over it a signboard bearing a coat of
arms and the words “_J’espère bien_.” The street ends in a cross, a
tall, slender, tapering cross of stone, iron-brown and silver-spotted.
Here also sang a chiffchaff, like a clock rapidly ticking. The church
is a little beyond, near the rookery of Crowcombe Court. Its red tower
on the verge of the high roadside bank is set at the north-west corner
in such a way--perhaps it is not quite at right angles--that I looked
again and again up to it, as at a man in a million.
After passing Flaxpool, a tiny cluster of dwellings and ricks, with
a rough, rising orchard, then a new-made road with a new signpost to
Bridgwater, and then a thatched white inn called the “Stag’s Head,”
I turned off for West Bagborough, setting my face toward the wooded
flank of Bagborough Hill. Bagborough Church and Bagborough House stand
at the edge of the wood. The village houses either touch the edge of
the road, or, where it is very steep, lie back behind walls which were
hanging their white and purple clouds of alyssum and aubretia down to
the wayside water. Rain threatened again, and I went into the inn to
eat and see what would happen. Two old men sat in the small settle at
the fireside talking of the cold weather, for so they deemed it. Bent,
grinning, old men they were, using rustic, deliberate, grave speech, as
they drank their beer and ate a few fancy biscuits. One of them was so
old that never in his life had he done a stroke of gardening on a Good
Friday; he knew a woman that did so once when he was a lad, and she
perished shortly after in great pain. His own wife, even now, was on
her death-bed; she had eaten nothing for weeks, and was bad-tempered,
though still sensible. But when the rain at last struck the window
like a swarm of bees, and the wind drove the smoke out into the room,
the old man was glad to be where he was, not out of doors or up in the
death room. His talk was mostly of the weather, and his beans, and his
peas, which he was so pleased with that he was going to send over half
a pint of them to the other old man. The biscuits they were eating set
him thinking of better biscuits. For example, now, a certain kind made
formerly at Watchet was very good. But the best of all were Half Moon
biscuits. They had a few caraways in them, which they did not fear,
because, old as they were, they were not likely to have leisure for
appendicitis. Half a one in your cup of tea in the morning would _plim
out_ and fill the cup. They told me the street, the side of the street,
the shop, its neighbours on either side, in Taunton, where I might hope
to buy Half Moon biscuits even in the twentieth century. The whitening
sky and the drops making the window pane dazzle manifested the storm’s
end, and the old men thought of the stag hounds, which were to meet
that day.... Just above Bagborough there, seven red stags had been
seen, not so long ago.
It was hot again at last as I climbed away from the valley and its
gently sloping green and rosy squares and elmy hedges, up between
high, loose banks of elder and brier, and much tall arum, nettle, and
celandine, and one plant of honesty from the last cottage garden.
High as it was, the larch coppice on the left far up had a chiffchaff
singing in it, and honeysuckle still interwove itself in the gorse and
holly of the roadside. A parallel, deep-worn, green track mounted the
hill, close on my right, and there was a small square ruin covered with
ivy above it among pine trees. It was not the last building. A hundred
feet up, in a slight dip, I came to a farm-house, Tilbury Farm. Both
sides of the road there are lined by mossy banks and ash and beech
trees, and deep below, southward, on the right hand, I saw through the
trees the gray mass of Cothelstone Manor-house beside its lake, and
twelve miles off in the same direction the Wellington obelisk on the
Black Down Hills. A stone seat on the other side of the trees commands
both the manor house beneath and the distant obelisk. The seat is in an
arched-over recess in the thickness of a square wall of masonry, six
or seven feet in height and breadth. A coeval old hawthorn, spare and
solitary, sticks out from the base of the wall. The whole is surmounted
by a classic stone statue of an emasculated man larger than human, nude
except for some drapery falling behind, long-haired, with left arm
uplifted, and under its feet a dog; and it looks straight over at the
obelisk. I do not know if the statue and the obelisk are connected,
nor, if so, whether the statue represents the Iron Duke, his king,
or a classic deity; the mutilation is against the last possibility.
Had the obelisk not been so plainly opposite, I should have taken the
figure for some sort of a god, the ponderous, rustic-classic fancy of a
former early nineteenth-century owner of Cothelstone Manor. The statue
and masonry, darkened and bitten by weather, in that high, remote,
commanding place, has in any case long outgrown the original conception
and intention, and become a classi-rustical, romantic what-you-please,
waiting for its poet or prose poet. I should have liked very well, on
such a day, in such a position, to think it a Somerset Pan or Apollo,
but could not. It was mainly pathetic and partly ridiculous. In the
mossy bank behind it the first woodsorrel flower drooped its white
face among primroses and green moschatel knobs; they made the statue,
lacking ivy and moss, seem harsh and crude. Some way farther on, where
the beeches on that hand come to an end, two high stout pillars,
composed of alternate larger and smaller layers of masonry, stand
gateless and as purposeless as the king, duke, or god.
For a while I rested in a thatched shed at the summit, 997 feet up,
where the road turns at right angles and makes use of the ridge track
of the Quantocks. A roller made of a fir trunk gave me a seat, and I
looked down this piece of road, which is lined by uncommonly bushy
beeches, and over at Cothelstone Hill, a dome of green and ruddy
grasses in the south-east, sprinkled with thorn trees and capped by
the blunt tower of a beacon. The primrose roots hard by me had each
sufficient flowers to make a child’s handful.
Turning to the left again, when the signpost declared it seven and
three-quarter miles to Bridgwater, I found myself on a glorious sunlit
road without hedge, bank, or fence on either side, proceeding through
fern, gorse, and ash trees scattered over mossy slopes. Down the slopes
I looked across the flat valley to the Mendips and Brent Knoll, and to
the Steep and Flat Holms, resting like clouds on a pale, cloudy sea;
what is more, through a low-arched rainbow I saw the blueness of the
hills of South Wales. The sun had both dried the turf and warmed it.
The million gorse petals seemed to be flames sown by the sun. By the
side of the road were the first bluebells and cowslips. They were not
growing there, but some child had gathered them below at Stowey or
Durleigh, and then, getting tired of them, had dropped them. They were
beginning to wilt, but they lay upon the grave of Winter. I was quite
sure of that. Winter may rise up through mould alive with violets and
primroses and daffodils, but when cowslips and bluebells have grown
over his grave he cannot rise again: he is dead and rotten, and from
his ashes the blossoms are springing. Therefore, I was very glad to see
them. Even to have seen them on a railway station seat in the rain,
brought from far off on an Easter Monday, would have been something;
here, in the sun, they were as if they had been fragments fallen out
of that rainbow over against Wales. I had found Winter’s grave; I had
found Spring, and I was confident that I could ride home again and find
Spring all along the road. Perhaps I should hear the cuckoo by the time
I was again at the Avon, and see cowslips tall on ditchsides and short
on chalk slopes, bluebells in all hazel copses, orchises everywhere in
the lengthening grass, and flowers of rosemary and crown-imperial in
cottage gardens, and in the streets of London cowslips, bluebells, and
the unflower-like yellow-green spurge.... Thus I leapt over April and
into May, as I sat in the sun on the north side of Cothelstone Hill on
that 28th day of March, the last day of my journey westward to find the
Spring.
THE END.
Transcriber's Note
Illustrations have been moved to avoid paragraph breaks, and may no
longer match the locations in the List of Illustrations.
The following apparent errors have been corrected:
p. 7 "Kilre" changed to "Kilve"
p. 113 "and above, it slightly to" changed to "and above it, slightly
to"
p. 135 "branch to Downston" changed to "branch to Downton"
p. 182 "I aways thought" changed to "I always thought"
(Illustration) "Green’s Sedge" changed to "Queen’s Sedge"
(Illustration) "KILRE" changed to "KILVE"
p. 293 "distinction otherwise: they" changed to "distinction:
otherwise they"
Archaic or inconsistent language has otherwise been kept as printed.