AN OLD MAN OF THE HILLS, AND THE SCHOOLMASTER'S STORY
While occupying myself with these no doubt wanton reflections on the
unfair division of opportunities in human life, I was leisurely
crossing the common, and presently I came up with a pedestrian who,
though I had little suspected it as I caught sight of him ahead, was
destined by a kind providence to make more entertaining talk for me in
half an hour than most people provide in a lifetime.
He was an oldish man, turned sixty, one would say, and belonging, to
judge from his dress and general appearance, to what one might call the
upper labouring class. He wore a decent square felt hat, a shabby
respectable overcoat, a workman's knitted waistcoat, and workman's
corduroys, and he carried an umbrella. His upper part might have
belonged to a small well-to-do tradesman, while his lower bore marks of
recent bricklaying. Without its being remarkable, he had what one calls
a good face, somewhat aquiline in character, with a refined forehead
and nose.
His cheeks were shaved, and his whitening beard and moustache were worn
somewhat after the fashion of Charles Dickens. This gave a slight
touch of severity to a face that was full of quiet strength.
Passing the time of day to each other, we were soon in conversation, I
asking him this and that question about the neighbouring country-side,
of which I gathered he was an old inhabitant.
"Yes," he said presently, "I was the first to put stick or stone on
Whortleberry Common yonder. Fifteen years ago I built my own wood
cottage there, and now I'm rebuilding it of good Surrey stone."
"Do you mean that you are building it yourself, with your own hands, no
one to help you?" I asked.
"Not so much as to carry a pail of water," he replied. "I'm my own
contractor, my own carpenter, and my own bricklayer, and I shall be
sixty-seven come Michaelmas," he added, by no means irrelevantly.
There was pride in his voice,--pardonable pride, I thought, for who of
us would not be proud to be able to build his own house from floor to
chimney?
"Sixty-seven,--a man can see and do a good deal in that time," I said,
not flattering myself on the originality of the remark, but desiring to
set him talking. In the country, as elsewhere, we must forego
profundity if we wish to be understood.
"Yes, sir," he said, "I have been about a good deal in my time. I have
seen pretty well all of the world there is to see, and sailed as far as
ship could take me."
"Indeed, you have been a sailor too?"
"Twenty-two thousand miles of sea," he continued, without directly
answering my remark. "Yes, Vancouver's about as far as any vessel need
want to go; and then I have caught seals off the coast of Labrador, and
walked my way through the raspberry plains at the back of the White
Mountains."
"Vancouver," "Labrador," "The White Mountains," the very names, thus
casually mentioned on a Surrey heath, seemed full of the sounding sea.
Like talismans they whisked one away to strange lands, across vast
distances of space imagination refused to span. Strange to think that
the shabby little man at my side had them all fast locked, pictures
upon pictures, in his brain, and as we were talking was back again in
goodness knows what remote latitude.
I kept looking at him and saying, "Twenty-two thousand miles of sea!
sixty-seven! and builds his own cottage!"
In addition to all this he had found time to be twenty-one years a
policeman, and to beget and rear successfully twelve children. He was
now, I gathered, living partly on his pension, and spoke of this
daughter married, this daughter in service here, and that daughter in
service there, one son settled in London and another in the States,
with something of a patriarchal pride, with the independent air too of
a man who could honestly say to himself that, with few advantages from
fortune, having had, so to say, to work his passage, every foot and
hour of it, across those twenty-two thousand miles and those
sixty-seven years, he had made a thoroughly creditable job of his life.
As we walked along I caught glimpses in his vivid and ever-varying talk
of the qualities that had made his success possible. They are always
the same qualities!
A little pile of half-hewn stones, the remains of a ruined wall,
scattered by the roadside caught his eye.
"I've seen the time when I wouldn't have left them stones lying out
there," he said, and presently, "Why, God bless you, I've made my own
boots before to-day. Give me the tops and I'll soon rig up a pair
still."
And with all his success, and his evident satisfaction with his lot,
the man was neither a prig nor a teetotaller. He had probably seen too
much of the world to be either. Yet he had, he said, been too busy all
his life to spend much time in public-houses, as we drank a pint of ale
together in the inn which stood at the end of the common.
"No, it's all well enough in its way, but it swallows time," he
remarked. "You see, my wife and I have our own pin at home, and when
I'm a bit tired, I just draw a glass for myself, and smoke a pipe, and
there's no time wasted coming and going, and drinking first with this
and then with the other."
A little way past the inn we came upon a notice-board whereon the lord
of the manor warned all wayfarers against trespassing on the common by
making encampments, lighting fires or cutting firewood thereon, and to
this fortunate circumstance I owe the most interesting story my
companion had to tell.
We had mentioned the lord of the manor as we crossed the common, and
the notice-board brought him once more to the old man's mind.
"Poor gentleman!" he said, pointing to the board as though it was the
lord of the manor himself standing there, "I shouldn't like to have had
the trouble he's had on my shoulders."
"Indeed?" I said interrogatively.
"Well, you see, sir," he continued, instinctively lowering his voice to
a confidential impressiveness, "he married an actress; a noble lady too
she was, a fine dashing merry lady as ever you saw. All went well for
a time, and then it suddenly got whispered about that she and the
village schoolmaster were meeting each other at nights, in the
meadow-bottom at the end of her own park. It lies over that way,--I
could take you to the very place. The schoolmaster was a noble-looking
young man too, a devil-me-care blade of a fellow, with a turn for
poetry, they said, and a merry man too, and much in request for a song
at The Moonrakers of an evening. Many 's the night I've heard the
windows rattling with the good company gathered round him. Yes, he was
a noble-looking man, a noble-looking man," he repeated wistfully, and
with an evident sympathy for the lovers which, I need hardly say, won
my heart.
"But how, I wonder, did they come to know each other?" I interrupted,
anxious to learn all I could, even if I had to ask stupid questions to
learn it.
"Well, of course, no one can say how these things come about. She was
the lady of the manor and the patroness of his school; and then, as I
say, he was a very noble-looking man, and probably took her fancy; and,
sir, whenever some women set their hearts on a man there's no stopping
them. Have him they will, whatever happens. They can't help it, poor
things! It's just a freak of nature."
"Well, and how was it found out?" I again jogged him.
"One of Sir William's keepers played the spy on them. He spread it all
over the place how he had seen them on moonlight nights sitting
together in the dingle, drinking champagne, and laughing and talking as
merry as you please; and, of course, it came in time to Sir William--"
"You see that green lane there," he broke off, pointing to a romantic
path winding along the heath side; "it was along there he used to go of
a night to meet her after every one was in bed; and when it all came
out there was a regular cartload of bottles found there. The squire
had them all broken up, but the pieces are there to this day.
"Yes," he again proceeded, "it hit Sir William very hard. He's never
been the same man since."
I am afraid that my sympathies were less with Sir William than better
regulated sympathies would have been. I confess that my imagination
was more occupied with that picture of the two lovers making merry
together in the moonlit dingle.
Is it not, indeed, a fascinating little story, with its piquant
contrasts and its wild love-at-all-costs? And how many such stories
are hidden about the country, lying carelessly in rustic memories, if
one only knew where to find them!
At this point my companion left me, and I--well, I confess that I
retraced my steps to the common and rambled up that green lane, along
which the romantic schoolmaster used to steal in the moonlight to the
warm arms of his love. How eagerly he had trodden the very turf I was
treading,--we never know at what moment we are treading sacred earth!
But for that old man, I had passed along this path without a thrill.
Had I not but an hour ago stood upon this very common, vainly, so it
seemed, invoking the spirits of passion and romance, and the grim old
common had never made a sign. And now I stood in the very dingle where
they had so often and so wildly met; and it was all gone, quite gone
away for ever. The hours that had seemed so real, the kisses that had
seemed like to last for ever, the vows, the tears, all now as if they
had never been, gone on the four winds, lost in the abysses of time and
space.
And to think of all the thousands and thousands of lovers who had loved
no less wildly and tenderly, made sweet these lanes with their vows,
made green these meadows with their feet; and they, too, all gone,
their bright eyes fallen to dust, their sweet voices for ever put to
silence.
To which I would add, for the benefit of the profane, that I sought in
vain for those broken bottles.