Squire put his harse to a gate right in front of him, just as ’a was
a-goin’ to take it. ‘D’ye know who I am, damme?’
“‘Yes,’ ses the Squire, ‘I do; an’ I’d rather be a rich squire than a
poor markis any day.’
“’Twas a hard thing to say to sech a gr’t nobleman, an’ a’ turned away
an rode home.
“The nex’ day was Sunday, an’ the Markis comes to church late, lookin’
like thunder. We could hear ’im pokin’ the fire in ’a’s pew right
through the zinging an’ the gruntin’ o’ the bass-viol an’ the squeakin’
o’ the viddles, an I ses to John Butcher as played the flute, ‘’Tis a
tarrible rage ’a’s in this marnin’, sure enow.’ An’ what text should
the pa’son gi’ out then, but ‘Let not the sun go down upon thy wrath.’
‘Sure-ly,’ I whispers, ‘pa’son don’t knaw nothin’ o’ yesterday’s
doin’s; a’ wouldn’t be sech a ninny as to offend the Markis in that
way.’ ‘Hush,’ ses John, ‘there’s the Markis a-lookin’.’ ’Twas a way ’a
had; ’a liked to zee ivery one at church. ’A was leanin’ on the door o’
the pew an’ lookin’ round, when, sudden-like, the hinges o’ it guv way,
an’ that noble Marquis fell down wi’ it, just the same as any common
feller, like you an’ me.
“‘Blast the door,’ ’a says, wi’ a face as red as a turkey-cock, an’
the pa’son, he says, breakin’ off in his sermond, ‘we will sing to the
praise an’ glory of God, the one ’undred an’ twenty-first ’ym.’ We o’
the choir niver knew how we got through that music, some for laffing
an’ some for fright at what had happened to such a gr’t lord. The
serpent couldn’ blaw, nor the flutes neither, an’ the virst viddle put
so much elbow-grease into ’as playin’ that ’a bruk all the strings at
onct.” “Ah!” said granfr’, shaking his head and drinking his mug dry,
“they _wuz_ times.”
“Well, good day to you, friends,” we said, leaving the inn, and our
beer (for, as I have said, the local brew was not of the best); “we
must be going.”
XIV.
The rustics watched our departure with interest, until a turning of
the lane hid us from their view, and brought us again into the open
country, a country-side scattered with small and inhospitable hamlets
and villages, where Roman roads ran straight up and down hill, deserted
and grass-grown, where apparently the tourist was an unknown quantity,
where certainly his wants remain unsatisfied.
This night we “camped-out” as a matter of necessity. It was a fine
night, and warm, and so there was not so much hardship in it, after
all. Our resting-place was a haystack that loomed up black in front
of us as we turned a bend of these lonely roads. We climbed over a
field gate and selected a corner of the partly used stack, and fell to
talking.
Presently, however, there came the near baying of a big dog, whereupon
we rubbed our shins meditatively and climbed to a safer altitude. This
was philosophic: we had hardly settled in this coign of vantage when we
heard the dog snuffling below, and so to cool his questing we reached
down some stones from the thatch and sent them into the darkness. We
could hear him growling over them in a particularly horrid manner, and
congratulated ourselves on our happy perch. But a lucky shot hit him,
so he went yelping away, and afterwards all was peace.
It was at a very early hour the next morning we awoke, damp with early
dews, uncomfortable, and dishevelled; covered in wildest confusion with
fragments of hay, and altogether two most miserable-looking objects.
The tramp who sleeps in summertime in haystacks and under hedges with
never a change of clothes may possibly not feel any inconvenience for
lack of the commonest toilet observances, but the first experience
is to the tramp _en amateur_ decidedly unpleasant, so far have we
distanced our woad-stained ancestors of a remote Britain when Pears’
soap was undreamed of.
When by good fortune we came to one of the many streams that water
this lonesome land we made our toilet, and presently, girded anew with
self-respect, set forward in the direction of Romsey and breakfast.
It was still early when we regained the highway, and indeed throughout
that day we never once arrived at familiar terms with time. Eight
o’clock came, and wore the look of high noon; noonday seemed to herald
the hour for tea; by five o’clock we awaited sundown; and at length,
when night arrived, the backward vista to this early rising was
achieved only by a mental effort, so lengthy was our day.
XV.
We breakfasted at a roadside inn, full early, not without inquiring
glances from the landlady, for surely never before had she entertained
such guests, so near the echo of cock-crow, and yet already dusty with
travel.
And so into Romsey, in company with a profane tinker, who ambled,
clattering, beside us, scattering anathemas broadcast. Trade was bad,
said he, and he hadn’t the price of a pint in his pockets. Perhaps we
had? Assuredly; but there it remained. Whereupon ensued references to
“torffs,” coloured with the British adjective.
I have never happened upon Romsey in winter time, nor indeed on any
other occasion save this, in a season of heat and drought, so say
nothing as to its local name of Romsey-in-the-Mud. Its summer aspect
is dry and somnolent; its streets apparently all too roomy for its
present estate: but then we have not seen Romsey on market-day, which
probably gives a different complexion to these streets, so ample and
so unconventionally named. One enters Romsey from Winchester along
The Hundred, and traverses the town through the Market Square and
Horsefair, and leaves it for the New Forest by Mainstone.
[Illustration: ROMSEY ABBEY.]
But to the tourist the most interesting thing in Romsey is the Abbey
church, wonderfully dilapidated and picturesque, picturesque with what
we generally (and rightly) think the exaggerated picturesqueness of
Prout’s architectural pictures. Prout himself could scarce have
rendered Romsey Abbey more flamboyantly time-worn than it is. Wild
flowers, and even large bushes, grow on its walls, and have forced
apart their Norman masonry. Surely nowhere else is so lovely an example
of ecclesiastical decay as here, where the shrubs and flowers, the ivy
and gorgeous lichens, have draped and mantled these grey walls with a
living glory. But perhaps ere these lines shall appear in print, those
beauties will have been torn away. The restorer was at Romsey when we
visited the Abbey; his scaffoldings were rising against the walls, and
workmen were moving about the chevroned windows and portentous corbels
that have grinned unchanging upon a changing world for nigh upon eight
hundred years. Cats’-heads and double-headed chimeras peculiar to the
Norman mind gape and leer from under cornices, and make the restorer’s
masons, by comparison with their dim antiquity, seem as evanescent
as the gadflies of a summer’s day. The hoariest tombstones in the
churchyard below them are things of yesterday beside these contorted
monsters. And now they will be scraped and trimmed and renewed, and
the masonry reset, and all the weatherings of time improved away.
Architects and contractors must live, even though to earn a livelihood
they disastrously renew delightful work that has been mellowing for
centuries. Everywhere the old work has been scraped, and glass-papered,
and tinkered, and endued with a modern smugness, until, as you stand
before it, you sigh for the richness of colour that was a delight and a
warranty of antiquity.
Romsey Abbey is almost entirely Norman--thick-limbed and sturdy, with
a virile simplicity in its ornaments of pier and arch. Cruciform, its
lantern at the crossing shows even the uninstructed traveller from a
distance that here is something more than a parish church of usual
type. From the bridge that crosses the Test by the flour mills, one
sees the great bulk of the Abbey rising above the greenery of Romsey
outskirts, and above all, the lantern, like a fairy crown, completes
the picture.
There is a bronze statue of Palmerston standing in the Market Square
of Romsey, unrecognisable to all who have been brought up on the
conventional likenesses of “old Pam” that used to figure in _Punch_.
We don’t expect the sculptor to give us the Palmerston of the rakishly
cocked hat, with a straw in his mouth, but I fear it was with something
very like disappointment that we regarded this very unsportsman-like
effigy that stands, hatless, strawless, in a mild unjaunty attitude,
with outstretched hand, in pose of eternal declamation.
XVI.
We left Romsey by the grateful shade of Broadlands, and entered the
New Forest at the hamlet of Ower. Here close battalions of firs lined
the way on either side, and continued with us past Coppithorne church,
until we reached Cadnam--Cadnam, a ravelled-out settlement emerging
insensibly from the Forest and merging again into its groves by
equally easy and insensible stages. We plunged into thick glades where
a deep hush prevailed in a secondary lighting, varied occasionally
by a first-hand patch of sunlight, yellow upon the delicate grass as
gold of Australian mintage. This was one of the oldest glades in the
Forest, where giant boles proclaimed an age of centuries. Comparatively
few of these oldsters remain, so constant and extensively has the
woodman’s axe been swung. Perhaps these, too, are doomed. Let us hope
they will last our time, but assuredly they will be accorded no more
extended grace. When the land-agitators have had their way, when the
Socialist shall have come in power, there will be a short way with
forests, I promise you, as of everything else that cannot make out a
_prima facie_ case of immediate usefulness. The economic times that are
coming when these little islands shall be so crowded that the lordly
parks and gardens, the mazy forests, and heathy lands, will be cut
up into allotments, or used for sites of Socialist barracks, will be
more destructive than the days that witnessed Rome’s long agony, the
irruption of the Goths, or the fanatic fury of our Puritan days. Art
and letters, and all the graces of life will be swallowed up between
the struggle for existence and the gloomy social tenets of the new
Roundheads in our children’s children’s days. Who that early Victorian
poet was I cannot now recall, that rejoiced in being born in our era,
nor can I swear to the accuracy of the quotation, but his pæan ran
thus, did it not?
“The joys of ancient times let others state:
I think it lucky I was born so late.”
Lucky enough, he is dead now. But were he alive, ’tis conceivable that,
having an eye to signs and portents, he would say with me, “_I_ think
it lucky I was born so soon.”
Meanwhile, the objects most commonly met with in the New Forest are
timber-wagons and New Forest ponies. The Forest, has a character of its
own, with subsidiary traits and divagations that defy monotony. Ancient
woods give place to modern plantations; beech succeeds to oak, and
gloomy firs to either. Clearings and plantations, heaths and hamlets,
and murmuring alleys of foliage, alternate for mile after mile, and
moss-carpeted drives everywhere radiate from the orthodox highways.
This journey was not an exploration of the New Forest; these woodlands
were but incidents in our itinerary; thus it was that we did not
penetrate to Stony Cross and Rufus Stone, but kept straight ahead for
Lyndhurst.
And Lyndhurst is as pretty a village as one could wish to see. It
is the metropolis of the New Forest, if that portentous word is not
too big to apply to this little gem of a place. Here come all them
that would make a thorough exploration of the leafy alleys and dim
recesses of these woodlands, and as it chances that the democratic
taste inclines rather to the fearful joys of Ramsgate or Margate than
to forest scenery, Lyndhurst wears an air aristocratic and exclusive,
and its visitors are eminently “nice.” True, we saw a brakeful of
bean-feasters pledging one another (the ladies as deep-drinking as the
men) in pewter tankards outside the Crown Hotel, but if one swallow
doesn’t make a summer, surely it must be allowed that one bean-feast
does not convert Lyndhurst into a semblance of Rye House and Broxbourne.
[Illustration: LYNDHURST.]
Lyndhurst, then, exists for the moneyed visitor, and is a model
of neatness and propriety. Round about it, seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century mansions nestle amid thick bowers. In the centre
of the village rises the tall, obtuse-pointed spire of the modern
red-brick church, set conspicuously on its high mound, and below, to
emphasise the eternal propinquity of Beer and Bible, stands the Crown
Hotel and Tap. But the most picturesque grouping of these different
estates is where the church spire rises high above the roof of the “Fox
and Hounds,” as I have here endeavoured to show.
Three and a half miles down the road is Brockenhurst, a pretty
place--I know it well--but this afternoon broken out into a rash of
flags and flaunting bannerets in primary colours, and swarming with
excursionists, who celebrated some occasion connected with a Widow and
Orphan Society. These we soon left behind, crossing the railway, and so
into the country again.
The London and South-Western Railway spells the place Brokenhurst,
reckless of the philology of the name. “Brock” is Anglo-Saxon for
badger, and in the same way “hurst” stands for “wood”; thus with the
plural “brocken,” Badgers’ Wood stands revealed. But philology and the
bygone natural history of places are nothing to railway companies.
[Illustration: A FORD IN THE NEW FOREST.]
In the hot glare of noonday we came through a heathy land to a sandy
ford where a stream, the Avon Water, rippled across the road, and a
crazy footbridge spanned the current. Brilliant lepidoptera floated
lazily in the air, blundering humble bees boomed in many cadences, and
the Avon sang a happy song among the grasses and the slight timbers of
the bridge; I wish I knew the secret of its joy.
XVII.
Here we rested awhile, where all was still. Only the booming of the
bees disturbed the ear, and one solitary wayfarer passed in the space
of two hours. This was one who toured, even as ourselves, afoot, but
one who dressed up to the part, with gaiters and Norfolk jacket and
great Balbriggan stockings. He was walking as if for a wager; and while
we sniffed at this toil of pleasure, he eyed us as he flashed past with
some amusement, as who should smile at exhausted rivals.
[Illustration: “FLASHED PAST.”]
Presently we set out again and came through Wootton to Christchurch,
that fine old town lying between the rivers Stour and Avon, with
a great priory church, that gives the place its accepted name,
superseding the old-time designation of Twyneham. Here is a Norman
house, and close by is the site of the castle, now converted into a
public pleasure-ground, where a notice-board warns visitors that the
penalty for using bad language is not less than forty shillings.
There is an old altar-tomb in the churchyard that has long been a
mystery, and in all probability will ever remain one. No one knows
what its strange inscription means, although its strangeness invites
research, nor who the “ten” were who are buried here, nor who were the
“men of strife” that twice buried them: a most enthralling mystery; who
will rede the riddle of this cryptic inscription:--
WE WERE NOT SLAYNE BVT RAYSD,
RAYSD NOT TO LIFE
BUT TO BE BVRIED TWICE
BY MEN OF STRIFE
WHAT REST COVLD ^{TH} LIVING HAVE
WHEN DEAD HAD NONE
AGREE AMONGST YOV
HEERE WE TEN ARE ONE
HEN: ROGERS DIED APRILL 17, 1641
I · R ·
Here is another tombstone: one, this time, that arouses, not curiosity,
but an unseemly mirth, by reason of its curious illiteracy. It dates
from 1720.
“Here Lieth in hope
of A Joyful Resurrecti
on the Body of LUCY y^e
Daughter of Richard and
Lucy baset Who departed
this Life February y^e 16^{th} day
Heark, heark I hears A voi^{ce}
The Lord made sweet bab
es for his one choyce and
when his will and pleasur^E
is there Bodys he turns to
Dust there Souls to Rain
with Christ one High.”
By way of Southborough-on-Sea, that struggling maze of stuccoed,
melancholy houses, we left Christchurch, and came upon the parched
and desolate undulations of that sandy waste, Pokesdown, like nothing
so much as a bankrupt outpost of civilisation in the back blocks of
Australia.
We had asked a fat and florid countryman, who surely was out of place
here, how far it was to Bournemouth.
“We calls it a matter of fower mile,” he said. Those reputed four miles
proved to be nearer six than four; better measure than the “reputed”
pints or quarts of commerce.
XVIII.
It was late in the hot afternoon, when we came into Bournemouth,
through what seemed to us miles of suburban roads and endless rows
of stucco villas. This is what Mr. Stevenson calls “the uncharted
wilderness of Bournemouth,” and, indeed, we found the phrase happy
and the place not at all to our liking. From what we saw of the famed
pine-woods we were not impressed with them; gaunt battalions of tall
trees, bare as scaffold-poles and as straight, with never a branch nor
sign of foliage within a matter of forty feet from the ground, and that
ground covered with a frowzy matting of husky, colourless fir-spines--a
Bournemouth pine-wood is a depressing place.
If Bournemouth had been invented when the era of the Interesting
Invalid was yet with us, I can conceive how grand a site it would have
been for the novelist’s plots (plots, that is to say, in a technical
sense, for under no circumstances could one imagine robustious
plottings and deeds of derring-do at Bournemouth). Building-plots are
Bournemouth’s nearest approach to the romantic. Languorous romances of
the fading-away-in-the-twilight order would have been written with an
anæmic heroine effectively displayed against a striking background of
whispering fir-trees, and--but you all know that sort of thing!
But this was not to be. Long before Bournemouth had sprung into
importance, the Interesting Invalid had grown unfashionable, and there
reigned in her stead the robust young woman of fine Du Maurieresque
physique, and energetic, not to say athletic and slangy habits.
Bournemouth, truly, is thronged with invalids, but not chiefly with the
interesting variety: that sort went out with the crinoline. Here the
Bath Chair is the most familiar object of the sea-shore, and the mild
and offensively inoffensive chair-man has attained in his numbers the
dignity of a class.
But not only invalids hie them to the neighbourhood of these frowzy
firs, these yellow sands. Bournemouth, one is tempted to say, is the
watering-place _par excellence_ of the curate. There is a certain
respectable air of five-o’clock tea and a savour of muffins about
the place, that traditionally accompany the unbeneficed. Bournemouth
abominates the tripper whose pockets ring with plebeian silver, whose
trips are calculated in hours, and so with the recurrence of statutory
holidays, Bournemouth shivers at the sounds of vulgar revelry heard by
the sounding sea. Truth to tell, however, the jolly Bank-holiday crew
are never too prominent here: lordly expresses are the salient feature
of the railway service and hotels of an appalling magnificence affright
the shallow pursed. Otherwhere, sandy foreshores are filled, thronged,
with trippers, cheap and checked with checks of Tweed gone mad; with
photographic ninepenny-touchers, gay again in that the automatic
cloud has passed away from their horizon; with longshoremen, gruff of
voice and broad in the beam, redolent of spirits, who confide to your
unwilling ear the secret of the day being “fine for a sail, sir;” with
hateful brats intent on constructing masked pitfalls for the stout
and elderly of either gender; with children’s missionising preachers
with their excruciating harmoniums; raucous-voiced burnt-corkists,
tract-distributors and hurdy-gurds. Here, to the contrary, are few of
these pests. Certainly there be occasionally, as at prim and proper
Hastings, the children’s services, that give an air of cheap and
superficial piety to the scene; and liliputian pails and spades are
continually at work on the sands; but moneyed holiday-makers, either
leisured or (in two senses) pursy business men of the Saturday to
Monday variety are among the chief of Bournemouth’s clientèle. I met
Wellesley Welles the other day in, let me see where was it? Oh, yes,
Capel Court. He was going to flee for a space the gilded baseness of
the Stock Exchange for a three weeks’ trip to Homburg, and to that
end had accumulated a prodigious heap of red-covered encyclopædias of
travel, and spouted guide-bookese until the brain whirled again with
the sound and volume of it. Yet Bournemouth claimed him as its own for
many week-ends. Indeed, Saturday to Monday Bournemouth is peculiarly
knowing in contangos and options, and has a keen eye on the money
article in its morning paper.
XIX.
We stayed a day at Bournemouth, to catch anew the flavour of the place.
On the morning after our arrival we came down early to breakfast.
There was an American in the coffee-room. He was staying at the hotel,
it seemed, with his wife and daughter. He did not, strange to say,
wear striped trousers strapped over his boots, nor a star-spangled
waistcoat, as in the comic papers, nor the supposedly-characteristic
Yankee goatee. No, he had none of these things; he resembled that
American of the caricatures no more than the Englishman resembles
the John Bull of the leathern breeches and the top-boots, and the
low-crowned beaver hat. He didn’t even chew nor spit on the walls (we
must revise those caricatures). The only American traits about him were
his sallow complexion, his restlessness, and his high cheek-bones. That
is to say, when he was silent. When he spoke there was no excuse for
mistaking his nationality.
He eyed us for some time with an ill-suppressed curiosity, which at
length grew too acute for silence.
“Gentlemen,” said he, “I see your names in the visitors’ book of this
hotel. You come from London?”
I said we did.
“Say, you’re not travelling on business, I guess?”
The Wreck replied that we were touring for pleasure, and that we
walked. This was an indiscreet admission, I could see at once, for this
free-born citizen of those States evidently, by his manner, did not
quite appreciate walking for walking’s sake. It was evidently, to his
view, the mark of the “mean white.” But his only comment was, “Wall,
I’ll swear.”
For all this fall in his esteem, though, his curiosity was still
rampant, and he was as eager to obtain personal details as though he
had been an interviewer (which indeed he was not, for he informed us
that he had made “his dollars” in some grain-elevating business or
another in “Chicawgo,” and had come over to see this country).
“Well,” I said, in answer to his inquiries, “my friend here is nothing
in particular, and I’m a journalist.”
“You don’t say!” he exclaimed. “What paper?”
“The ---- and ----,” I replied; “but, indeed, any print that will use
my stuff and pay at decent rates.”
“Wall, now! You’re like the flies, bumming around the sweetest lump of
molasses, eh?”
I admitted that the case was somewhat similar, although I didn’t like
the analogy.
“Ah!” exclaimed our American (whose name, by the way, was Hiram D.
Cheasey, or something else equally humorous), “you ain’t got no
paper over here to compare with the best New York papers: one of ’em
’specially.”
“Which one may that be?” I inquired of the stranger, who by now was
beginning to exhibit symptoms of spread-eagleism.
“Sir,” he replied, “it is the organ through which America speaks to the
hull civilized world.”
I suspect I must have been tempted of the devil, for I inquired, with
apparent innocency--
“You mean the nasal organ, I presume?”
It was an unfortunate inquiry, for on account of it I never learned the
name of the New York print which had so world-wide a voice: I wonder
what is the title of that sheet, and what is its scale of remuneration?
XX.
It was evening ere we had taken our fill of Bournemouth’s joys and
departed from those crowded sands to walk by the sea-shore to North
Haven, where the entrance to Poole Harbour bars further progress.
Bournemouth’s lights began to glitter in the gloaming, and made this
lonely edge of land more cheerless by comparison.