I
Toward the last of April, in Monmouthshire, the primroses were as big
as your fist. I say in Monmouthshire, because I believe that a certain
grassy mountain which I gave myself the pleasure of climbing and to
which I took my way across the charming country, through lanes where
the hedges were perched upon blooming banks, lay within the borders
of this ancient province. It was the festive Eastertide, and a pretext
for leaving London had not been wanting. Of course it rained—it rained
a good deal—for man and the weather are usually at cross-purposes.
But there were intervals of light and warmth, and in England a couple
of hours of brightness islanded in moisture assert their independence
and leave an uncompromised memory. These reprieves were even of longer
duration; that whole morning for instance on which, with a companion,
I scrambled up the little Skirrid. One had a feeling that one was very
far from London; as in fact one was, after six or seven hours in a
swift, straight train. In England this is a long span; it seemed to
justify the half-reluctant confession, which I heard constantly made,
that the country was extremely “wild.” There is wildness and wildness,
I thought; and though I had not been a great explorer I compared this
rough district with several neighbourhoods in another part of the world
that passed for tame. I went even so far as to wish that some of its
ruder features might be transplanted to that relatively unregulated
landscape and commingled with its suburban savagery. We were close
to the Welsh border, and a dozen little mountains in the distance
were peeping over each other’s shoulders, but nature was open to the
charge of no worse disorder than this. The Skirrid (I like to repeat
the name) wore, it is true, at a distance, the aspect of a magnified
extinguisher; but when, after a bright, breezy walk through lane
and meadow, we had scrambled over the last of the thickly-flowering
hedges which lay around its shoulders like loosened strings of coral
and begun to ascend the grassy cone (very much in the attitude of
Nebuchadnezzar), it proved as smooth-faced as a garden-mound. Hard by,
on the flanks of other hills, were troops of browsing sheep, and the
only thing that confessed in the least to a point or an edge was the
strong, damp wind. But even the high breeze was good-humoured and only
wanted something to play with, blowing about the pearly morning mists
that were airing themselves upon neighbouring ridges and shaking the
vaporous veil that fluttered down in the valley over the picturesque
little town of Abergavenny. A breezy, grassy English hill-top, looking
down on a country full of suggestive names and ancient memories and
implied stories (especially if you are exhilarated by a beautiful walk
and have a flask in your pocket), shows you the world as a very smooth
place, fairly rubbed so by human use.
I was warned away from church, on Sunday, by my mistrust of its
mediæval chill—lumbago there was so clearly catching. In the still
hours, when the roads and lanes were empty, I simply walked to the
churchyard and sat upon one of the sun-warmed gravestones. I say the
roads were empty, but they were peopled with the big primroses I just
now spoke of—primroses of the size of ripe apples and yet, in spite of
their rank growth, of as pale and tender a yellow as if their gold had
been diluted with silver. It was indeed a mixture of gold and silver,
for there was a wealth of the white wood-anemone as well, and these
delicate flowers, each of so perfect a coinage, were tumbled along the
green wayside as if a prince had been scattering largess. The outside
of an old English country church in service-time is a very pleasant
place; and this is as near as I often dare approach the celebration
of the Anglican mysteries. A just sufficient sense of their august
character may be gathered from that vague sound of village music
which makes its way out into the stillness and from the perusal of
those portions of the Prayer-Book which are inscribed upon mouldering
slabs and dislocated headstones. The church I speak of was a beautiful
specimen of its kind—intensely aged, variously patched, but still
solid and useful and with no touch of restoration. It was very big and
massive and, hidden away in the fields, had a kind of lonely grandeur;
there was nothing in particular near it but its out-of-the-world little
parsonage. It was only one of ten thousand; I had seen a hundred such
before. But I watched the watery sunshine upon the rugosities of its
ancient masonry; I stood a while in the shade of two or three spreading
yews which stretched their black arms over graves decorated for Easter,
according to the custom of that country, with garlands of primrose and
dog-violet; and I reflected that in a “wild” region it was a blessing
to have so quiet a place of refuge as that.
Later I chanced upon a couple of other asylums which were more spacious
and no less tranquil. Both of them were old country-houses, and each
in its way was charming. One was a half-modernised feudal dwelling,
lying in a wooded hollow—a large concavity filled with a delightful old
park. The house had a long grey façade and half a dozen towers, and
the usual supply of ivy and of clustered chimneys relieved against a
background of rook-haunted elms. But the windows were all closed and
the avenue was untrodden; the house was the property of a lady who
could not afford to live in it in becoming state and who had let it,
furnished, to a rich young man, “for the shooting.” The rich young
man occupied it but for three weeks in the year and for the rest of
the time left it a prey to the hungry gaze of the passing stranger,
the would-be redresser of æsthetic wrongs. It seemed a great æsthetic
wrong that so charming a place should not be a conscious, sentient
home. In England all this is very common. It takes a great many plain
people to keep a “perfect” gentleman going; it takes a great deal of
wasted sweetness to make up a saved property. It is true that, in the
other case I speak of, the sweetness, which here was even greater,
was less sensibly squandered. If there was no one else in the house
at least there were ghosts. It had a dark red front and grim-looking
gables; it was perched upon a vague terrace, quite high in the air,
which was reached by steep, crooked, mossy steps. Beneath these steps
was an ancient bit of garden, and from the hither side of the garden
stretched a great expanse of turf. Out of the midst of the turf sprang
a magnificent avenue of Scotch firs—a perfect imitation of the Italian
stone-pine. It looked like the Villa Borghese transplanted to the Welsh
hills. The huge, smooth stems, in their double row, were crowned with
dark parasols. In the Scotch fir or the Italian pine there is always
an element of oddity; the open umbrella in a rainy country is not a
poetical analogy, and the case is not better if you compare the tree
to a colossal mushroom. But, without analogies, there was something
very striking in the effect of this enormous, rigid vista, and in the
grassy carpet of the avenue, with the dusky, lonely, high-featured
house looking down upon it. There was something solemn and tragical;
the place was made to the hand of a story-seeker, who might have found
his characters within, as, the leaden lattices being open, the actors
seemed ready for the stage.