from the landing-place, as the moon rose in a cloudless sky.
V.
This morning there was an indignant man to breakfast at Cookham.
Nothing pleased the creature, and the crowded coffee-room was well
advised of his discontent, for he took care to proclaim it to all and
sundry. He had begun the morning badly, so it seemed, and was like
to continue thus throughout the day. The birds began it by arousing
him from sleep at dawn, and surely never had birds of any sort been
so anathematised since the time of that famous jackdaw of Rheims. The
rooks and crows, the sparrows and pigeons, that cawed and chattered and
murmured with the coming of day in neighbouring elms and hedgerows, on
roof-tops and in pigeon-cots, had awakened him and kept him counting
the dawning hours, and that was why the toast, the tea, the eggs and
the butter were all at fault to this man. He badgered the coffee-room
waiter, who--poor fool!--respected him the more for it at the expense
of the less contentious of the guests, and he plied all that waiter’s
attention with a grumbling commentary, that went far to show him in
the character of the fault-finder on principle. You see, that man who
has a great capacity for indignation, with a voice of roaring and words
of fury, is the man who gets on in this world. He who takes the world
by the throat, and grips it hard and shakes it violently, and kicks it
where honour is the more readily wounded, is the man who, at the end of
the struggle, comes out “upper dog.” But the cultivation of the furious
manner is a wearing cult, and besides, does not sit well on a man of
little chest, small voice, and gentle eye. Other things, too, are
wanting to a complete success. Let me put them all together, like Mrs.
Glass, the historic, the well-beloved:--
Take a goodly presence, one pair of sound lungs, some original sin, and
a small pinch of merit. Throw them all into your avocation, and, adding
some impudence to taste, let the whole boil vigorously until public
attention is attracted. Then serve up hot.[1]
Possibly that reader of a frankness so unmistakable, who annotates the
margins of books from his Mudie (or even, goodness knows! from his
Public Library), may disagree with these views, and fill these fair
margins with criticisms of this view of life; but (a word in your ear,
my friend) consider awhile, the view is sound.
This by the way. Excuse, if you please, the digression.
At Cookham we were bitten with a fancy for taking our meals _al
fresco_, so when the time came for departure, imagine us stowing
away into what I suppose are called the “stern sheets” of our boat
sufficient provender for the day. There was a loaf and a pot of
raspberry jam, some butter and a tin of some sort of meat. A couple
of plates furnished us luxuriantly in the crockery department, and as
for a table-knife, why, we forgot all about it, and when, in a quiet
backwater, the time came for luncheon, we did our little best, which
indeed was little enough, with a pocket-knife.
[Illustration: DOVE COTE, HURLEY.]
That meal was a gruesome orgie. Try to cut a new loaf with a
pocket-knife, and you will find it much better to tear your bread
straight away without further ado, a discovery we presently made; but
don’t try to open a tin with such a knife, as you value your cutlery.
This from experience, which we gained at the expense of a broken blade.
Eventually we burst the tin open by stamping on it, and then the Wreck
scooped out some of the contents with a piece of stick, as clean as
might be, but still scarcely the ideal substitute for a knife. With
this we spread the lumps of bread, and ate precariously. It should be
said that the plates had already come to grief, and their fragments
were now reposing in the river bed. For dessert we dipped the bread
into the jam-pot, and thus circumvented the necessity for spoons.
[Illustration: ABOVE HURLEY.]
This was at Hurley, after we had passed beautiful Marlow and Bisham,
where the ghost of Lady Hoby walks in the abbey, and before we had come
to Medmenham.
Here the notorious Medmenham Abbey stands by the waterside, where
the river winds and rushes grow thick, and a lovely view it makes,
close-hemmed with tall trees, the hills rising in the background and
the level meads spreading out, emerald green, in front.
[Illustration: MEDMENHAM ABBEY.]
They tell us--those unkind topographers--that the picturesque ruins of
the Abbey are a sham; that possibly one single pillar may be a genuine
relic of the old religious house that once stood here, but that the
arcading, the Tudor windows and the ivy-covered tower, are “_ruins_”
deliberately built. Perhaps they are, but, even so, they are excellent,
and those purists are not to be thanked for setting us right, where we
might gladly have erred.
They would, too, assuage by exact inquiry the romantic legends of the
Hell Fire Club, those “Monks of St. Francis,” as Wilkes and his jolly
companions who rioted here were pleased to call themselves. Their
horrid rites, their orgies and debauchery, the license of the place,
typified by their motto, still extant, “_Fay ce que voudras_,” are,
perhaps, better “taken as read.”
We crept up stream against a swift current, and between heavy rain
showers that soaked us and diluted the remains of our picnic to a
revolting mess: bread and water, tinned meat and raspberry jam, both
sufficiently saturated, are not appetising items. It would perhaps be
an exaggeration to say there was more jam on the seats and our clothes
than in its native pot, but this was at least an open question.
At Hambledon, the lock-keeper let us through in a pelting shower, which
ceased directly we were freed from the unsheltered imprisonment of the
lock. Have you ever noticed how _wet_ the river looks after rain? how
much more _watery_ the water appears? Thus looked Henley Reach as we
rowed up it this evening, past that singular eyot called Regatta Island.
VI.
Regatta Island is scarcely a place of beauty. There is a brick and
plaster pseudo-temple affair on it that records the most strenuous days
of the classic fallacy, when eighteenth-century poets peopled the
country side and the river banks with preposterous naiads and other
galvanised reproductions of the beautiful and mystic mythology of the
ancients. Alas! this is not Arcadia: Great Pan is dead long since,
and his nymphs have danced away to an enduring _Götterdämmerung_. It
is well it should be so, for had Pan survived he would have hidden
his hairy legs with check trousers, and changed his “woodnotes wild”
for the democratic strains of the concertina. In these days of prim
and proper County Councils, whose internal rottenness is varnished
over with a shiny varnish of prudery, such improper creatures are
impossible. This is an age when everything must be properly breeched or
sufficiently skirted, and, though the constitution of our Councils be
revolutionary, a revolution _sans culottes_ could not hope to win their
approval.
A poignant individual, whose melancholy look touched time and place to
a deeper pathos, stood by the water’s side, and vulgarised that shoddy
temple with an air of one who had drunk too much beer, and was in the
lachrymose stage.
[Illustration: _Poignant Individual_]
We passed him by with flashing sculls that sent the watery shadows
dancing madly in our wake, and crept up the quiet reach, past the
poetically-named Phillis Court; the Wren-built bulk of Fawley;
modern-built, yet historical Greenlands, residence of the late Mr.
W. H. Smith, that unromantic but sufficiently strenuous upholder of
“duty to Queen and country,” and presently came off the slip where many
boats lay moored. Henley was quiet enough, not to say dull. Except
when the midsummer madness of the Regatta sets all the riverside agog,
and sends even garret lodgings up to fabulous prices, the broad stony
streets of the town loom blankly to the stranger. The great church
of Henley, whose tower, picturesquely turreted, shows to greater
advantage at a distance, is of equally generous proportions. It is
scarcely interesting, but there is in the graveyard a tomb of a sombre
and darkling interest. Here lies, beside her father and mother, Mary
Blandy, who, at the time of her trial and execution, was probably
the most notorious person within the compass of these islands. The
daughter of Mr. Francis Blandy, an attorney-at-law, who in 1750 lived
in Henley town, close by the Angel Inn, she became acquainted with a
Captain Cranston, who, being in charge of a recruiting party stationed
here, was received into the society of the place. Now, Mr. Blandy was
a widower, and dotingly fond of his daughter, his only child. Being a
rich man as times went, he was anxious to secure for her a footing in
county society, then more difficult of access than now. To this end he
caused it to be understood that his Molly would have £10,000 by way of
dowry, and the prospect of securing this large sum led the captain, who
was a married man, to pretend love for her. Although he sprang from an
old Scots family, Cranston was a man of extremely dissolute and evil
character, and the lawyer, although he knew little or nothing of this,
and nothing of the wife in Scotland, disliked and distrusted him, and
forbade the engagement into which he and his daughter had entered.
However, Mary Blandy was so infatuated with the man, and so influenced
by him, that, to get rid of her father, and to obtain at once both
husband and her dowry, she set in train a scheme of slow poisoning
that for heartlessness rivals Brinvilliers herself. In November 1750,
she began to poison her father, under the instructions of Cranston,
who, returning to Scotland, had sent her some pebbles, and powders
ostensibly to clean them withal. The powders were composed of arsenic,
and were administered in her father’s tea. By March of the following
year the poison had its effect in causing her father’s teeth to drop
out, whereupon this exceptional daughter “damned him for a toothless
old rogue and wished him at hell.”
Several times the servants were nearly killed by having accidentally
drunk of the tea prepared for the master of the house, and on each
occasion this extraordinary woman nursed them back to health with the
tenderest solicitude. At length their suspicions were sufficiently
aroused to inform Mr. Blandy secretly. He told his daughter that
he suspected he was being poisoned. She confessed to him, and he,
incredible as it may appear, forgave her, with admonitions to amend her
life, and, above all, to conceal everything, saying, “Poor girl, what
will not a love-sick woman do for the man she loves!”
He died the next day, and Mary Blandy escaped the same night from the
house, after having vainly attempted to bribe the servants to smuggle
her off to London in a post-chaise. Half-way across Henley Bridge she
was discovered, and would have been lynched by the inhabitants had
she not taken shelter within the Angel Inn, where she was promptly
arrested. Taken thence to Oxford, she was tried, found guilty, and
condemned to death on the 29th February 1752. She was executed on the
6th April, begging not to be hanged high, “for the sake of decency.”
She asserted her innocence to the last, saying Cranston had told her
the powders would do her father no harm. The same mob that had hunted
her to the doors of the “Angel,” attended her body from the scene of
execution at Oxford Castle, regarding her as a saint. She was buried
here in a coffin lined with white satin. Cranston, it is scarcely
necessary to add, fled the country.
This slow poisoner, if painter and mezzotinter lie not who have handed
down her portraiture to our times, was peculiarly beautiful, with an
eighteenth-century grace, a swan neck, and a sweetness of expression
that, if any truth there be in views that take the face as index to the
mind, would seem to shadow forth nothing but virtues minor and major.
At the “Red Lion” by the bridge we supped and slept, possibly attracted
to this particular hostelry by Shenstone’s famous lines--
“Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
His warmest welcome at an inn.”
[Illustration: EVENING AT HENLEY.]
Boating men comprised almost the whole of the company at the Red Lion,
and the talk was solely aquatic, dealing with races--past, present, and
to come--with sculls and sliding-seats, and all the minutiæ of water
pastimes.
VII.
This morning we rowed through Marsh Lock, struggled through the mazes,
snags, and shallows of Hennerton Backwater, and lazed in the sunshine
at Wargrave, that picturesque beach and village set over against the
flat green meadows of the Oxfordshire bank. Then (for the spirit of
exploration grew strong again) we laboriously shoved, rather than
rowed, our craft through the esoteric windings of the Loddon River
and Patricksbourne, arriving some hours later on the hither side of
Shiplake Lock, with the unexpected satisfaction of having thus saved
some pence from the clutch of the Thames Conservancy.
[Illustration: Sonning Bridge.]
At the Bull at Sonning we dined in a parlour gay with geraniums, with
windows shaded by vines and creepers, with old-fashioned fire-place
surmounted by a huge stuffed fish--a typical river-side inn--and
thereafter rowed up from Sonning to Reading, where, by the filthy
Kennet side, we left our boat for return to its owner, in the usual
Thames-side practice.
We came to Reading prepared for anything but charm in that town of
biscuits, and we were not inclined to alter our ready-made opinion upon
sight of it. We passed through “double-quick,” leaving the last of
the town as late as 8.30. He who runs may read, perhaps, if the type
be sufficiently large; but I don’t think he would find it possible to
write: we did not, and so this book must go forth lacking a description
of Reading.
The train that carried us from this town of almost metropolitan savour
jogged along in most leisurely fashion past Mortimer Stratfield, and
finally brought up at Basingstoke, where we went to bed with what haste
we might.
VIII.
And so we came into Hampshire. A weary county this, for those who know
not where to seek its beauties--a county of flint-bestrewn roads, a
county, too, of unconscionable distances and sad, lonely, rolling
downs. Hampshire, indeed, seems ever attuned to memories in a minor
key. It is, possibly, but a matter of individual temperament, but so it
seems that this county of pine woods and bleak hills--bare, save for
some crowning clump of eerie trees, whose branches continually whisper
in sobbing breezes--shall always restrain your boisterous spirits,
however bright the day, with a sense of foreboding. How much more,
then, shall you be impressed of eventide, should you be still abroad,
to see how weirdly the sun goes down behind those hill-tops, which
then grow black beside his dying glory, while the water-meadows below
grow blurred and indistinct, as the night mists rise in ghostly swirls.
These thoughts can never find adequate expression, charged as they
are with a latent superstition which, despite the lapse of centuries,
lingers yet, perhaps unreasonably.
Such are the emotions conjured up by Nature in Hampshire. You may test
their force readily at sundown, outside Winchester, when the huge mass
of St. Catherine’s Hill looms awfully above the water-meadows of the
Itchen, etched in deepest black upon the radiant evening sky. Gazing
thus, and presently possessed of a fine thrill of superstitious dread,
or artistic admiration--what you will--you may turn and encounter, full
to the gaze, the twinkling lamps of the City--prosaic indeed.
[Illustration: INSCRIPTION: SHERBORNE SAINT JOHN.]
But we anticipate, as the artless novelist of another generation
was used to remark, with a painful frequency. Before Winchester,
Basingstoke. This morning, we took an early walk to Sherborne St. John,
an outlying village, now suburban to Basingstoke, a village, as it
proved, uninteresting. The church, as was to be expected at 8 a.m., was
locked: our only reminiscence of the place, then, is this problematic
inscription from the doorway. Returning, we made a nearer acquaintance
with that ruined chapel--the chapel of the Holy Ghost--familiar to all
travellers by the South-Western Railway, standing as it does beside the
Station. Here was established the lay Fraternity of the Holy Ghost,
founded at that late period when Gothic architecture began to feel the
influence of the Renaissance. The mixed details are very interesting,
though, unfortunately, much mutilated. Gilbert White, the historian
of Selborne, says he was, when a schoolboy, “eye-witness, perhaps
a party concerned”--observe the grace of later years that made him
ashamed of the occasion, and willing to doubt his participance--“in the
undermining a vast portion of that fine old ruin at the north end of
Basingstoke town.” The motive for this destruction (he says) does not
appear, save that boys love to destroy what men venerate and admire;
the more danger the more honour, and the notion of doing some mischief
gave a zest to the enterprise.
“It looked so like a sin it pleased the more.”
The Chapel stands within the cemetery known locally as the Liten.
Within its walls are two mutilated effigies on altar-tombs, the sole
remains of a building long preceding the present ruin, hacked and
carven with many penknives.
[Illustration: Holy Ghost Chapel, Basingstoke]
Modern Basingstoke--“name of hidden and subtle meaning,” as Mr. Gilbert
says in “Ruddigore”--is prosperous, cheerful with the ruddy mellowness
of red-brick, and loyal with a lofty Jubilee belfry-tower to its Town
Hall; and that is all the spirit moves me to set down here of the town.
IX.
No more dreary road than that sixteen miles between Basingstoke and
Winchester; a road that goes in a remorseless straight line through
insignificant scenery, passing never a village for twelve or more
weary miles, a road upon which every turning leads to Micheldever.
Sign-posts one and all conspire to lead you thither, with an unanimity
perfectly surprising. We made certain that something entirely out of
the common run was to be found at that place of the peculiar name, and
so we were ill enough advised to visit it by turning aside for the
matter of a mile.
And yet, when we were arrived at the place, there was nothing to be
seen; nay, worse than that indeed: there is a church at Micheldever
whose architectural enormities would make any sane ecclesiologist flee
the neighbourhood on the instant. Of the scenery, I will remark only
that the village is overhung with funereal pines and firs, a setting
that depresses beyond the power of words to express.
We retraced our steps toward the high road to Winchester, with
anathemas upon those sign-posts, varied by a consideration of Hampshire
as a county prolific in what Mr. Gilbert calls, “that curious
anomaly”--the lady novelist. For, look you, at Micheldever resides Mrs.
Mona Caird, the heroine of the “Marriage a Failure” correspondence, and
the authoress of the “Wing of Azrael”; and Sparkford, Haslemere, and
the New Forest shelter respectively, Miss Yonge, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and
Miss Braddon; others, doubtless, there be within these gates who help
to swell the output of the familiar three volumes, for almost every
woman of leisure and scribbling propensities writes romances nowadays.
Hampshire, indeed, seems decidedly a literary county, for Tennyson
and Tyndall and Kingsley (Keble, too) have lived and worked within its
borders.
For the next five miles we passed, I think, but one house, Lunways Inn,
and then came upon modified civilisation in the shape of the village
of King’s Worthy. There is quite a cluster of villages here with
the generic name of Worthy, with prefixes by which we can generally
identify the old-time lords of the respective manors. There are beside
King’s Worthy, Abbot’s Worthy, Martyr Worthy, and Headbourne Worthy,
“Headbourne,” conjecturally from the brook that rises by the village
churchyard. This village lies on the road to Winchester, directly after
King’s Worthy is passed, and is about a mile and a half from the city.
The church is interesting for itself, but it contains a charming little
monumental brass to a Winchester scholar that alone is worth journeying
to see, both from its unique character and by reason of its technical
excellence. It was formerly let into the flooring of the chancel, and
was in danger of being trampled out of recognition, until the vicar
caused it to be fixed on the north wall of the church, where it now
remains.
The brass consists of the kneeling figure of a boy in the act of
prayer, habited in the time-honoured Winchester College gown, of
the same pattern, with slight modifications, as that worn to-day.
He wears, suspended from his collar, a badge, probably that of a
patron saint; his hair is short, and exhibits the small first tonsure
customarily performed on scholars upon completing their first year. A
scroll issuing from his mouth is inscribed “_Misericordias dni inetnū
cantabo_”--The mercies of the Lord I will sing for ever. The curiously
contracted Latin of the inscription beneath is, Englished, “Here lies
John Kent, sometime scholar of the New College of Winchester, son of
Simon Kent of Reading, whose soul God pardon.”
It is supposed that he was removed to Headbourne from the College by
his parents, to escape an epidemic prevalent there in the year of his
death, 1434, when several other scholars died. The “College Register”
records the death of John Kent: “_Johēs Kent de Redyng de eadem com.
adm. XXIII. die August obiit ulto die Augusti anno Regni Reg. H. VI.
XIII._”
Within the space of another half-hour we had reached the city and
discovered an hostelry after our own heart. We remained three whole
days at Winchester.
X.
The ancient capital of all England lies in the quiet valley of the
River Itchen, a small stream which, some twelve miles lower down,
empties into Southampton Water. The naïve remark of the schoolboy upon
the “coincidence” of great cities always being situated upon the banks
of large rivers did not, when Winchester was the metropolis, have any
application here, but in the light of subsequent history it may show
the reason of the city’s decadence.
From the earliest times Winchester was a city of importance; Briton and
Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman alike made it a place of strength. Under
Cerdic, first king of the West Saxons, the city became the capital
of that kingdom, and at the dissolution of the Heptarchy, capital of
united England.
But it was under the rule of the early Plantagenet kings that
Winchester attained the zenith of its prosperity as the seat of
government and as a centre of the woollen trade. Now the court has
departed, and the manufacture utterly died out; but Winchester is a
prosperous city still--gay with the rubrical gaiety of a cathedral
city--the centre of an agricultural district, and the capital of a
diocese.
Of feudal Winchester much has been destroyed; but from the remains of
its two great castles, and of the city gates and walls, one may conjure
up the city of the two first Norman kings, held under stern repressive
rule, when despotic power lay in the hands of alien king and noble.
Then the New Forest lying near was a newly created desolation; and
the country-side, now dotted with villages, a sparsely settled tract.
And even in the city itself there were long hours when all was silent
and lonely; for when the curfew rang out, who dared to disobey its
warning note? Then the city was given up to darkness, the watchmen at
the closed and guarded gates, and the sentinels pacing the walls; for
though, mayhap, there were no danger threatening from without, it must
perchance be watched for and combated from within.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE CLOSE, WINCHESTER.]