At the end of the orchard, where the road that climbs up the hillside
from the valley crosses the old British track that had ambled along
the slopes of the hills for thousands of years, stands a finger-post.
One of its hands has fallen with age, and the other two are hardly
legible, though with difficulty you may see that one of them directs
the wayfarer to Dunstable. I have never seen anyone consult it, and
on a moonlight night it looks the most gaunt and solitary thing on
earth, for ever pointing a minatory finger over the glimmering
landscape, like a prophet vainly directing a naughty and unheeding
world to the land of Beulah. Nobody takes any notice of it.
But it has its moments of consequence. On high-days and holidays in
the summer, days such as these, happy picnickers from afar, mostly
school-children out for their annual treat, come to a halt at the old
finger-post on their way to the summit of the hill. The horses are
unhitched from the waggonette and are left to graze while the
children spread their lunch or their tea on the Icknield Way, which
here resumes the character of a green-ride over which the centuries
have passed without record of change. But no one ever seems to want
to go to Dunstable. I do not want to go to Dunstable myself. In
time I suppose the poor old finger-post will tire of telling the
world to go to Dunstable and will drop its second arm in weariness
and despair.
I have no desire to go to Dunstable, because I like the name so much
that I do not want to spoil the emotion of pleasure it gives me by
any earthly contacts. I should as soon think of going to Dunstable
as of going to Ashby-de-la-Zouch. I would not destroy the poetry
that hangs about that name for anything the place could give me.
Ashby-de-la-Zouch belongs to the realm of dreams, where high romance
is always afoot and you may see any day some splendid knight in the
tournament charging down upon his foe, while the beautiful heroine
drops her handkerchief to show that she can bear no more. Why should
I desecrate this agreeable fancy by discovering that
Ashby-de-la-Zouch is (perhaps) a grubby little place with one frowsy
tea-shop and a tin tabernacle? I do not say that that is what
Ashby-de-la-Zouch is like. It may be a very nice place with a
boulevard and a bandstand. I shall never know. But it could not
possibly be like my Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Nothing could be like my
Ashby-de-la-Zouch.
It is so with Bideford in Devon. It may be that if one went to
Bideford in Devon one would find it very much like Southend-on-Sea,
or Skegness or Blackpool or any other popular resort. It may have a
pier and half-a-dozen cinemas and a "Ham and Eggs" Parade like New
Brighton. It may be a wilderness of stuffy lodging-houses, with
"APARTMENTS"
in every window, and touts who salute you at every step. But to the
imagination Bideford in Devon is something quite different from that.
It is the gateway of adventure, the arch wherethrough gleams the
untravelled world. On the shore you may meet Grenville or Drake in
buff jerkin and silken hose, and Salvation Yeo telling tales to a
crowd of open-mouthed youths and blowing clouds of tobacco before
their astonished eyes. And in the harbour you may see the little
_Revenge_ herself, waiting for her crew of "men from Bideford in
Devon" who are to share in the immortal exploit that hangs like an
imperishable halo over this Devon shore.
I once knew a man who came from Bideford. I don't suppose he was
really better than if he had come from Chowbent, or Wigan, or
Coggeshall. I fancy he was quite an ordinary man; but to me he came
trailing clouds of glory from afar. He seemed to waft breezes from
the Spanish Main before him, and in his pockets I fancied I heard the
chink of doubloons that had come from a treasure-ship in Nombre Dios
Bay. I could not regard him as a man. I regarded him as a romance.
What else could one do with a man who came from Bideford in Devon? I
was very young then, but I doubt whether years have wrought any
difference. I doubt whether I could do business with any success
with a man who had come from Bideford. I should be as wax in his
hands or as clay to the potter. But much as I love the sound of its
name, no finger-post will ever tempt me to Bideford in Devon. I will
preserve the vision. I will not break the spell.
Now, it is different with places like those Essex villages, Messing
and Mucking. Anyone might go to Messing or to Mucking and have quite
a pleasant surprise. I have not been to them myself, but I should
not be afraid to go to them. If Messing (or Mucking) should turn out
to be no better than its name I should rejoice in its blunt honesty,
and if on the contrary it should prove a country idyll, all ivy and
parish pumps and village greens and thatched cottages, with perhaps
the ancient pound in one field and the old village stocks in another,
a ghost haunting the Tudor manor-house and an owl keeping its nightly
vigil in the church tower--if, I say, Messing (or Mucking) should be
like this one, one would have the sensation which Mr. Birrell had
when he picked up a first edition of Gray's _Elegy_ on a threepenny
barrow. Yes, decidedly, if that finger-post pointed to Messing or
Mucking I would go there. But not to Dunstable.
Places with beautiful or suggestive names are like the heroes of our
fancy: they ought not to be seen. Who ever saw a man who had become
a myth to him without disappointment? I remember when I was a boy
and saw W. G. Grace for the first time what a sense of disillusion I
suffered. He had become a fable to me. I used to see him in
imagination descending from Olympus, with all nature celebrating his
advent. The clouds would clap their hands at his approach and the
earth would assuredly tremble with joy. And instead he just walked
about and talked like any other man, and got out on the same plane of
frail mortality. It was my first lesson in the brutal realism of
things.
It was such a shock that Stevenson records in _Across the Plains_.
Who is there who has not felt the beauty of that word "Wyoming"? It
is a name that would almost make one forget the toothache. It is the
very stuff of poetry, a balm for the troubled spirit, an anodyne for
the jangled nerves. I could imagine a doctor prescribing that a
patient should repeat "Wyoming" half a dozen times every hour as a
cure for neurasthenia or something like that. That was how Stevenson
felt about it until he had the misfortune to see it.
To cross such a plain (Nebraska) is to grow homesick for the
mountains. I longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we
were soon to enter, like an ice-bound whaler for the spring. Alas!
and it was a worse country than the other. All Sunday and Monday we
travelled through these sad mountains or over the main ridge of the
Rockies, which is a fair match to them in misery of aspect. Hour
after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our
onward path....
But get down the book and read the whole passage. It is as beautiful
a piece of descriptive prose as you will find anywhere. But when you
have read it you will be glad that you have not been to Wyoming and
that you can still soothe the toothache with the sound of its magic
name.
I shared the disenchantment which Stevenson felt in Wyoming when not
long ago I travelled by the Ohio. I had been a captive since
childhood to those bewitching vowels. However dull the world seemed,
it could be brightened by the thought of the Ohio. I saw that
shining river flowing through the landscape of fancy to the Southern
seas, to the accompaniment of negro melodies and the song of the
mocking-bird. Its waters were crystal like the river of Bunyan's
vision, and as they went they sang of the old legends of the Kentucky
Shore and Tennessee. Now the vision is shattered. I know that the
Ohio (in winter at all events) is as yellow as pea-soup and as thick,
flowing by rank, dishevelled shores, slopping over its banks and
leaving great messy pools along its borders. I travelled by it and
across it for the best part of a day, and I left it behind as
gratefully as Stevenson left behind the Black Hills of Wyoming. It
was a warning to me to leave the cloud palaces of the mind unvisited.
If I ever see a finger-post pointing to Wyoming, I shall ignore it as
I ignore the hand that, from the corner of the orchard, points me to
Dunstable.