Crowsnest lies upon a hill. It consists of a post-office, a tiny
butcher's shop, a greengrocer's, an Italian warehouse, and a church. The
London road climbs the hill, passes through the village, descends the
hill, and vanishes from sight. Trees swallow it up. Century-old elms
cavern it over. When the great-grandfathers of these elms were young the
Roman road leading over the hill to the sea was old. As it was then, so
is it now, and so will it be when these elms are coffin-boards,
enclosing the bones of vanished and long-forgotten people.
At the foot of the hill passes a nameless river, which the Roman road
crosses by a bridge whose stones are as old as the road itself. On a
summer's afternoon, leaning one's elbow comfortably on the moss-grown
balustrade of this bridge, the river and the road hold one's mind
between them; the river leaping amid the weed-green stones, here in the
cave-like twilight of the foliage, here diamond bright where the sun
dazzle strikes through the leaves; the road steadfast and silent, with a
silence which the motor-horn cannot break--a silence that has been
growing and feeding upon life since the time of Tiberius.
The place is tremulous and vibrating with life; the wagtail by the
water, the water itself, the leaves dancing to the breeze, and the
birds amid the leaves: the lost butterfly, the gauze-blue dragonfly, the
midges in their interminable dance, all keep up an accompaniment to the
flute-like tune of the river. Then, as one muses, the thousand snippets
of beauty and life, gay and free and ephemeral, that make up the beauty
of a summer's afternoon, suddenly, as if touched by a magic wand, lose
their ephemeral nature and become their immortal selves.
"They were old when I was young. The wind blew their songs in the faces
of the legionaries; before the phalanx flew the butterfly, and the water
wagtails before the glittering eagles."
Thus speaks the road in answer to the river, making the charm of this
place--a charm felt even by the teamsters of a summer's afternoon as
they halt their horses for a rest.
On either side of the road, down here, stretch woods; mellow-hearted
English woods, nut copses, beech glades, willow brakes; the home of the
squirrel and the pheasant and the wood-dove. The cork-screw note of the
cock pheasant answers the poetical lamentation of the dove; that
caressing sound, soothing, sleep-drugged, and fatuous.
In spring the children of Crowsnest come here for the wood violets
burning blue amid the brown last autumn leaves; the glades are purple
with the wild hyacinths, and the voice of the cuckoo here is a thing
never to be forgotten. In autumn the children come for nuts. No poem of
tone or word conceived by man can approach the poetry of these glades;
no picture their simple beauty; they are the home of Oberon and
Titania, and they are rented by Colonel Bingham.
The Colonel lives, or lived at the time of this story, at the Hall,
which is the chief house of the neighbourhood--a neighbourhood parcelled
up into small country seats. Three acres and a house would about
constitute one of these seats, and they stretch right round the hill of
Crowsnest, invading even the rise of the Downs.
The bungalow is situated on the Downs; a good road of fairly easy ascent
leads up to it, and looking from the verandah of the bungalow you can
see, below, the roofs of all the country seats, the walls forming their
frontiers, and, with a good glass, the seat-holders promenading in their
gardens.
From here the Roman road looks like a white cotton ribbon; the woods and
gardens, the tennis lawns no bigger than billiard-tables, the red-tiled
houses no larger than rabbit hutches, form a pretty enough picture to
smoke a cigarette and ponder over on a warm afternoon. The people down
there seem playing at life, and finding the game pleasant enough, to
judge from their surroundings. They look very small even when viewed
with the aid of a lens.
Raising your eyes suddenly from those toy houses, those trim and tiny
lawns, those gardens threaded with the scarlet of geraniums, you see
Sussex in one great sweep of country, just as by the river you saw the
past in the monolithic Roman road. Woods upon woods, domes and vales of
foliage, and, to the south, the continuation of the Downs on which you
are standing.
Emmanuel Ibbetson had built the bungalow and stables in a moment of
enthusiasm about racing. It was certainly an ideal spot for training.
Just here the Downs are level as heart of man could wish. A great sweep
of turf, a tableland where nothing moves but the grazing sheep and the
shadow of the bird and cloud, extends from the stables due south, ending
in an outcrop of chalk and a rise leading to the higher Downs and the
sea. The higher Downs shelter it in winter from the wind.
There was stabling for half a dozen horses; everything about the place
was of the best, from the tiles to the roof, from the patent manger to
the patent latch of the doors. There was a patent arrangement with a
prong for conducting the hay from the loft above to the manger below.
This nearly stabbed Garryowen in his suddenly upflung nose, and
Moriarty, who had a contempt for everything patent, including medicine,
broke it--but this in parenthesis.
The bungalow, where the human beings were stabled, was a much less
elaborate affair in its way. Built for a bachelor and his friends, it
just held the Frenches, leaving a spare room over for Mr. Dashwood.
This is a vague sketch of the buildings and premises called The
Martens--Heaven knows why--and situated like a marten-box on the
eminence above Crowsnest, that highly respectable residential
neighbourhood where residents knew nothing yet of the fact that the
place had been let--or, rather, borrowed--and nothing yet of the nature
of the borrower.