FOURTH DAY--EDLESBOROUGH TO STREATLEY, ON THE UPPER ICKNIELD WAY, BY
WENDOVER, KIMBLE, WHITELEAF, GIPSIES’ CORNER, IPSDEN, AND CLEEVE
“Five o’clock, sir,” said the Cockney at my door next morning, and I
looked out to see a hot day slowly and certainly preparing in mist and
silence. There was nobody in the fields. The hay-waggon stood by the
rick where it had arrived too late to be unloaded last night. To one
bred in a town this kind of silence and solitariness perhaps always
remains impressive. We see no man, no smoke, and hear no voice of man
or beast or machinery, and straightway the mind recalls very early
mornings when London has lain silent but for the cooing of pigeons.
That silence of so many things that can and will make sounds gives some
of its prestige to the country silence of very quiet things. Therefore
when I have looked out of a strange window for the first time and seen
nothing move but leaves on the earth and clouds in the sky, I have
often for a moment felt as if it were dawn and have slipped into a mood
of dawn; it might be possible on a cloudy day and in a new country to
be deceived thus even at noon. Thus the innocence of silent London is
transferred to the downs, the woods, the vacant fields, and the road
without a wheel or a foot upon it for miles and miles.
I had about forty miles to cover before the end of the daylight, so
I had to help myself by driving with my host and his “old son” John.
I was now thoroughly foot-sore. One foot was particularly bad, and
in trying to save it I used different muscles in the leg, which were
quickly tired. Then, to help myself, I had leaned heavily on my stick
at every step and so brought arm and shoulder to a state of discomfort,
if not pain. Finally, the stick was unsuitable for its purpose and
sorely afflicted the palm of the hand that grasped it. I had carried
the stick for many single days of walking and liked it. For it was a
tapered oak sapling cut in the Weald and virtually straight because
its slightly spiral curves counteracted one another. But it had almost
no handle, and so drove itself into one small portion of the palm when
leaned on. It had also in the winter shown itself hard to retain in
the hand when a few inches of it were in mud. Nevertheless, it was so
nicely balanced and being oak so likely to last a lifetime that, for
six years, I put up with its faults, and now, having been in my company
for so many miles in a splendid June, it has a fresh hold upon me. Also
I am not certain that any other handle, a larger and rounder knob or a
stout natural crook, would have been much better in a hand not made of
iron. Perhaps a really long staff grasped some way from its upper end
would be right. But there is something too majestic, patriarchal even,
about such a staff. A man would have to build up his life round about
it if it had been deliberately adopted. And gradually he would become
a celebrity. Of course, if he had an inclination towards such a staff,
as the natural and accredited form among pedestrians, there would
be an end of the matter, but that is not very likely in a town-bred
Englishman. He must meditate upon what might have been, and be content
to make five shillings out of his meditation, if he is a journalist.
It was a pleasure to drive with Mr. Willcocks. He became quite silent
apart from civility. He evidently understood the horse, and the horse
him, in the mutual manner usually expected from a legal monogamous
union. If he had sat on the horse’s back the combination would have
been nothing like a centaur. But with one between the shafts and the
other holding the reins they were one spirit in two bodies.
As we began to curve round the foot of the Ivinghoe Hills, which were
on our left, we passed another but larger deep cleft, like those at
Well Head and Cross Waters, below the road, upon our right, called
Coombe Hole. There was another Coombe a mile to the south; but before
this I had not met the name (hardly the thing, except on the west of
Royston) since I left Thetford. We went close under the steep slope of
Beacon Hill which was tipped with a tumulus and scored upon its flanks
by many old descending trackways. Away to the right there was no land
so high as our road--about five hundred feet; the hill-tops were half
as high again--for farther than eye could see; and to all this low
land of dairy and garden the road was a boundary. We were approaching
the place where the Icknield Way is said to divide into two parallel
courses. A road from Leighton Buzzard strikes athwart the course and
following along this to the left for half a mile you turn to the right
into the “Upper Icknield Way”; following it to the right you reach
Ivinghoe and there turn to the left into the “Lower Icknield Way.” We
were going to take the Upper, so called as being higher up the slope
of the land. Just before the Leighton Buzzard road we passed on our
left a long cleft, smooth and flat-bottomed, with horses feeding in
it, and hereabouts the old course or part of its original width was
clear over the left-hand hedge. On our right was a high bank round
which went the road to Ivinghoe, and this bank would explain the sharp
turn. Originally it may well have been that the road forked, the Lower
going past the old windmill straight ahead and so to Pitstone Green
and missing Ivinghoe; the Upper going with it to the old windmill and
there diverging to the left past Pitstone Church and out into the road
now marked “Upper Icknield Way” at Folly Farm. Along this road there
was a border of close grass; chestnuts or sycamores of about thirty
years stood up here and there in the hedge, and over it I saw Ivinghoe
Church tower and the silly spire, short and sharp, on top of it, the
misty woods behind, and the protuberance of Southend Hill, having
its sides carved into thorny terraces, “linces” or “linchetts”; the
Pitstone Church tower and an elm, throned on a rise together, and the
broad wooded valley beyond. The air was sweet now with roses, now
with yellow bedstraw. Larks sang, and a yellowhammer that forgot the
end of its song, and once a blackbird. I had left behind the Ivinghoe
Hills, but Pitstone Hill, their successor, was of the same brood. It
was chiefly bare, and its flanks much-modelled as well as scarred by
a slanting trackway. The land between the foot of it and the road was
carved with the utmost ingenuity of which chalk is capable. Once there
was a succession of long parallel deep rolls at right angles to the
road; wheat and barley grew on them except in one or two places where
the fall was too steep and there were thorns amidst the corn. I saw
also several of those natural walls formed by a sudden change of level.
These are generally used as divisions between fields. Here there was
wheat above and wheat below, and along the bottom of the wall a cart
track went between lines of poppies up to the hill. Another such wall,
but higher, had beeches on its slope, and it made a fine curve up to
its end at the foot of the hill.
Half a mile past the turn to Pitstone Church the way becomes a boundary
between Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire as far as the bridge over
the Grand Junction Canal, where I entered Hertfordshire again, leaving
it nearly two miles beyond and not far from the junction with Akeman
Street. At a dip from Tring wharf the road narrowed and lost its green
edges, but regained them on the more level ground. For a little while
after the crossing to Tring Church a narrow green track was raised on
the right above the road and between it and the hedge. Here there was
an elm, and there several, and here an ash; and there was never no
charlock. The hills on the left were more and more wooded with beeches;
and they curved round so as to lie slightly across our course. On the
right lay the broad reservoirs of the canal at the edge of the Vale of
Aylesbury.
[Illustration: Wendover.]
Now once more the Icknield Way is thrown out of its course for a little
way, this time by Akeman Street, a modern road to Aylesbury, the
ancient road from this region to Cirencester, which was the junction
for Wales, Devon, and Cornwall. It enters Akeman Street a third of
a mile east of the thirty-third milestone from London. The Icknield
Way was presumably older; it was at least old when Akeman Street was
Romanized and came cutting in a straight line across its meanders;
and therefore it lost confidence for half a mile and forsook them and
took to the Roman straight line until suddenly stumbling upon itself
again at one of its meanders further on it returned to its old way.
The scene is like the picture of a wandering life interrupted by a
year of discipline. The stark telegraph-posts in line seem part of the
discipline. Possibly for years, for centuries, the meanders survived,
more and more faintly, with the straight line, enclosing a rough
and crooked space. This space beside Tring Hill should have been a
common for ever; but either it never was or a common award handed it
over to the largest mouth. Opposite the milestone it turns out from
the main road in its old south-westerly direction, and escapes the
telegraph-posts. For some time it was unlike its old self because it
had hardly any grassy margin. It went up and down again and again, and
often steeply, and the more hilly a modern road the less likely it is
to have wide margins. Near Halton there was a wayside border but little
if at all trodden, and not fed down by sheep. A traveller joining the
road for a mile or so would have failed to see in it any distant or
ancient purpose; it was a winding country lane metalled for modern
uses, and by Halton House made polite with firs and laurels. In one
place, as we neared Wendover, I saw the old course and its bank and
also a hedge beyond the present one. Past Halton Woods the hills recede
southward and there is a gap of a mile between steep Boddington Hill
and steep Bacombe Hill. Through this gap comes the road from London,
Uxbridge, and Amersham to Aylesbury, and the railway with it: at the
entrance stands Wendover. Through this long little town of cottages the
Icknield Way goes as High Street and Pound Street. We were now close
under Bacombe Hill, with its camp and barrow. In front, jutting out and
making the road curve west before it could resume its south-west course
by a sharp turn south, lay the Coombe Hill and its obelisk, Beacon Hill
sprinkled with thorns, and Pulpit Hill. As we climbed the lower slopes
of Bacombe Hill I noticed that the roadside green had been dug up and
enclosed by a second hedge. Beyond there was a good green margin now
on the left and now on the right, and beeches rustled from the hedges;
and on both sides grew corn. The road went up and down, coming thus
suddenly in sight of Ellesborough Church tower rising pale ahead out
of its trees against the clear line of the hills. Past Butler’s Cross,
where the road from Aylesbury to Hughenden and High Wycombe crosses,
the sycamores on the left were beautiful, and so were the beeches,
wych-elms and ashes following, and then more sycamores, and still more
in a cluster above the high bank by Ellesborough Church. The Chekers
Park limes and ashes on the left cooled the road until we came to a
pool and Little Kimble Church. Then there were more park trees, lime
and elm and chestnut, as we went up to the church tower of St. Nicholas
at Great Kimble.
[Illustration: Ellesborough Church.]
At Great Kimble--at the “Bear and Cross”--I got tired of riding at
a walk up steep hills and down steep hills, and I took to my feet
again. Just before the second milestone from Princes Risborough, in
obedience to my map, I turned to the left and took the right-hand road
at a fork. For a quarter mile this was a narrow chalky lane, having
at its entrance a sycamore and a thatched cottage, and traveller’s joy
all over its low hedge; but crossing a road from Great Missenden it
became more important, hard and white, with a green border. I climbed
up past the “Red Lion” at Whiteleaf, under Whiteleaf Hill, crossed the
Wycombe road, and went down a hedged and rutty lane, leaving the spire
of Princes Risborough half a mile below on the right. The way was some
distance up on a steep slope, and itself in places so steep from side
to side that there were two tracks, one two yards above the other. Then
it was a broad track of level turf, next a narrow and rough one, the
ruts, as near the Horsenden road, mended with lemonade bottles and meat
tins. That road also thwarts the Icknield Way, and diverts it half a
mile to the left; an old course seemed perhaps to be indicated by a
hedge continuing the line of the lane behind. Turning to the right out
of this road the Icknield Way was white with green edges, of which one
presently became a terrace above the road. Over one railway and under
another its level green edges were trimmed with silver-weed; in the
hedges there were elms. Past the Bledlow road it was a broad, rough
lane, soon green, between hedges; the Chilterns and Wain Hill woods
on the left, charlock on the right. It climbed until at the “Leather
Bottle” it reached its highest point since Telegraph Hill, and it had
woods both above and below--which rarely happens to it--as it passed
above the head of a beech-sided coombe having an entrance apparently
higher than its back. There were roses in the hedges through these
beech woods. The “Leather Bottle” marked the far edge of the wood and
the passing of the border into Oxfordshire. Here a steep track slanted
down from the hill-top. The road was now narrower, confined by a hedge
and bank on the right and the steep wall of the thorn and juniper hill
on the left. Presently another deep track came slantwise down from
Chinnor Hill towards Bledlow and crossed my way. Beyond this the vale
was lovely. At the foot of the hill beyond the railway which followed
it was an irregular space of two or three square miles, nearly level
but not quite. This was divided into large fields of grass or corn by
scarce perceptible hedges or ditches, and crossed by one winding road
visible and white at only one of its bends. Along this road and the
hedges a very few elms were distributed with indescribable felicity.
There would be five at a bend; a row, then a break, and only one or two
more; and they made only one long line. One of the fields so divided
was lemon-coloured with charlock; on one which was slightly tilted up
a few sheep were scattered. Beyond and on either side of this space
the trees were thicker, and closed in so that two or three miles
away all seemed woodland with an interspace or two, then a grey, dim
ridge beyond, all under a grey-folded sky. Above the juniper hill the
jackdaws were jacking merrily.
[Illustration: Near the “Leather Bottle.”]
Afterwards the road descended and was a green-hedged line with a
narrow ploughed field between it and the edge of the juniper. Above
Chinnor it was for a long way almost straight, broad and green, with
elms in the left hedge. Here the Chilterns had beeches on the upper
slope and dots of juniper below. Suddenly after this straightness the
way had to descend a little over undulating ground, and it wriggled
ahead confusedly, narrow and without trees in its hedge, widening
where a hump was useless, to the ploughland below. In front now stood
the clumped Beacon Hill above Lewknor, which was the end of a long
curve of hills carrying the woods of Crowell, Kingston, and Aston,
woods reaching from the ridge down to the arable in most parts, but
with lawny or chalky intervals. At the crossing to Kingston Blount
the railway came up to my road and from there went close and parallel
for a mile to the station of Aston Rowant. It was here a broad green
track at the foot of the slope, though still above everything lying
on its right, and leaving the villages at least half a mile on that
side. It rounded Beacon Hill, which was capped with a tree-clump and
sprinkled with junipers, and went along under Bald Hill and Shirburn
Hill, which was wooded. Before crossing the road from Great Marlow and
Fingest to Watlington, it wound round a chalk pit and rubbish heap.
Then the telegraph-posts joined it, though it was only a green lane in
two terraces going under thorny Watlington Hill, and past cornfields
sprinkled with charlock and white campion. At one point ten elm trees,
one a triple tree, stood out in the middle of the wide green trackway.
Beyond the road from Nettlebed the way was white between high, level
green banks, and then long grass, thistles, and thorns in a thicket,
before coming to the elm-shaded pond where a lane goes up on the left
under more elms to Dame Alice Farm. Then it narrowed and widened again
among nettles and elder, and a little farther it became a company
of four parallel grooves paved with the pure down turf, a little
silver-weed, and thyme. The undulations of the cornland were bolder now
towards Britwell Salome, and in a hollow a roof nestled among elms;
beyond these were dim, low hills. A line of elm trees, now many deep,
now in narrow file, half hid the village of Britwell. Above my road a
steam-plough stood idle; the men lay on their faces under the elms;
and beyond was their caravan. Crossing the Britwell Salome road I came
in sight of the clear heavings of the Sinodun Hills and their clumps
of trees, and the dim length of the main downs far past them. Britwell
House, looking at its monument and Swyncombe Downs, lay a little to the
right. Down the slope of the hill at the north edge of the beeches and
firs of Icknield Bank Plantation came a Danish entrenchment.
[Illustration: Icknield Way, near Watlington.]
[Illustration: Sinodun Hill.]
Emerging from the trees the road was narrow and hard, but sent a
green branch southward over Littleworth Hill, and the adjacent land
was equally high on both sides, on the left Ewelme Downs, on the
right Huntingland. I went along the south side of Ewelme Cow Common,
a shallow, irregular hollow of grass, with many thorns and much
bird’s-foot trefoil in it, bounded on all hands by roads without
hedges. I entered the Henley road a little west of the fourteenth
milestone from Oxford, and turned along it to the right, and then
almost at once to the left at Gipsies’ Corner, and so went south,
avoiding the road on the right to Crowmarsh Gifford and Wallingford.
Here was a new land before me, of sweeping corn, big thatched barns on
a low ridge above it, and the main Downs beyond. It was a narrow and
low-hedged road that kept away from the low, elmy Thames land on the
west. Over the hazels and elders of its hedgerows climbed roses and
bryony. Between Oakley Wood and Coldharbour Farm it made southward,
crossing the Nettlebed and Crowmarsh and Nuffield and Crowmarsh roads
within a few yards; the three ways framing a pretty triangular waste
of impenetrable thorns, elders, and nettles. Sinodun Hills were always
distinct on the right. Then I traversed Grim’s Ditch, where it borders
the south edge of Foxberry Wood and of a broad, herbless ploughland;
the ditch being on the south side of the bank. In half a mile I crossed
another road from Crowmarsh, going south-east. There my way ceased
to be a road, but its line was clear along the natural wall of earth
between upper and lower fields; and when there was no more wall, along
the strip of rough grass between two stretches of ploughland; and when
that ended, the course of the way was clearly on a terrace with a
central path through the long grass and some thorns on the bank to the
right of it, between two fields of sainfoin. Ahead, on the left, stood
the little solitary church of Ipsden on an east-and-west road from
North Stoke which I crossed. Onwards there was a rough, hedgeless road
still going south. After the next cross-road to Ipsden the probable
line was marked only by a hedge between grass and arable, and even that
gave out for the last fifty yards before entering the Mongewell road.
Over this road a gap in the hedge might have been used when the road
had dwindled to a footpath going to Glebe Farm, which is on a road now
largely used to connect Brazier’s Park with Goring. I thought I saw
the ghost of it coming down to Glebe Farm, though amidst corn. This
road to Goring is henceforward along the course of the Icknield Way.
It is a hard and hedgeless road, winding and undulating through corn
that rises on either hand to crested ridges. It passed Icknield Farm,
crossed the South Stoke and Woodcote road, and went up as Catsbrain
Hill to where I saw below me the red roofs and walls of suburban
Cleeve and the Berkshire downs, their woods and pastures, beyond.
The road dipped, and at the cross-road below was lost in streets and
building land. Therefore I turned west along the cross-road, and then
south again to Goring, the ford, and Streatley. Goring and Streatley
railway station, and the cutting and the new houses have probably
covered up where they have not destroyed all traces of the Icknield
Way. But there is a Ferry Lane leading down to the towing-path and
river, to where there was a ferry before the bridge, and a “Roman” ford
over the gravelly bottom before that. On the opposite side Streatley
Vicarage and its lawn lie across the probable way, but beyond them a
path continuing the line of Ferry Lane goes straight up to the Reading
road a quarter mile south of the “Bull.” I went into Goring Church
and churchyard, and was pleased with the names of “John Lammas” and
of “James, Ann, and Ruth Thresher” on tombstones. What clear visages
of men and women these call up, each perfect in its way, shorn of the
uncertain, vague, or incongruous elements of the living! By a kind of
art the mere names in the churchyard sketch the characters. I have seen
mere names that suggested as much as those two beautiful verses express
which Mr. Walter de la Mare, the author, calls “An Epitaph”:--
Here lies the most beautiful lady,
Light of step and heart was she;
I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever dwelt in the West Countrie.
But beauty vanishes; beauty passes;
However rare--rare it be;
And when I crumble who will remember
This lady of the West Countrie?
[Illustration: Near Cleeve.]
I have seen some that had in them no touch of death except the word,
and that did no more than make a rustle and a shadow in the beauty as
death does in the same poet’s “Three Cherry Trees”:--
There were three cherry trees once
Grew in a garden all shady;
And there for delight of so gladsome a sight
Walked a most beautiful lady,
Dreamed a most beautiful lady.
Birds in those branches did sing,
Blackbird and throstle and linnet,
But she walking there was by far the most fair--
Lovelier than all else within it,
Blackbird and throstle and linnet.
But blossoms to berries do come,
All hanging on stalks light and slender,
And one long summer’s day charmed that lady away
With vows sweet and merry and tender,
A lover with voice low and tender.
Moss and lichen the green branches deck,
Weeds nod in its paths green and shady;
Yet a light footstep seems there to wander in dreams,
The ghost of that beautiful lady--
That happy and beautiful lady.
As if I had not had enough of it in passing through, I walked out again
to Cleeve, and looked at the blocks of red brick houses. Only people
with immortal souls could be content with houses like those. For a man
without an immortal soul, but a few senses for a substitute, a house
like one of these is, to use one poor word instead of a dozen better
ones, unsuitable. I have lived in three, and one of them would compete
with any house at Cleeve for the title of The Red Brick House.
The Red Brick House was a raw naked building in the county of Kent with
a triple bay window to left and right of the front door, and, above
these, two large windows and a small one in the middle; on one side
there were no windows, on the other only one very small one low down;
the back was flat and had a door between a large window and a small,
and three windows above. The roof was of slate and low-pitched, and
there was a stack with three chimney pots at either side of the house,
and a single chimney at the back.
The house stood in a level, oblong piece of land cut out of a large
field by posts and wire, and separated from the road by a cheap but
rustic fence. There were two other buildings of the same species within
two hundred yards, all looking across the same road between elm trees
to a ploughed field, many hedges, a rise of orchard land, and some
heavy wooded hills at the horizon. For the sake of the houses the elms
on their side had been felled and taken away. Breaking-down, temporary
fowl-houses were littered about two of the gardens, which someone had
begun to dig once upon a time, and even to plant and sow; but there was
not a living tree in either of them.
The soil was light. There was no higher ground in the near
neighbourhood, and it had therefore been chosen as the site of a square
water-tank, imperfectly sequestered among elms close to the house. To
the south the view was gentle and perfect, especially when the blossom
snow hung in the orchards and the sky was milky soft above the dark
woods of the horizon. At the lower edge of these woods stood a white
house that was always mysterious, even though it was often seen from
a gateway not a hundred yards distant. The Downs flowed to the north.
Eastward and westward the last undulations of the Downs could be seen
beyond orchards and elms.
The village clustered round a triangular green half a mile away, and
in the woods on the slope from the Red Brick House down to the Green,
several bigger houses half hid themselves, looking toward the far
Downs and the orchard rise. Many other folds of the land held cottages
in groups, farm-houses and their spreading dependencies, conical
oast-houses, single or sociable, and not a few churches; yet from the
Red Brick House only the White House at the wood’s edge was visible
when the leaves were on the elms of the hedges, on the orchards, and on
the oak and beech of the copses and greater woods.
All other houses that I have known, beautiful, plain, dear, hateful, or
dull, have been somehow subdued and made spiritual houses in course of
time and of memory. The Red Brick House is the only unconquerable one.
To this day it remains a body, and dead. Its fires are black grates
that burnt coal. Its walls are wall-paper in strips at a certain price.
Its garden is still mere hard ground to be dug (and to grow chiefly
the inexorable couch-grass). I saw a beautiful spring come into the
world from that house: spring passed down the elms on the opposite
side of the road, led one morning by a wry-neck screaming loud in the
tops of the trees. Pewits came to the ploughed field beyond, and tossed
in the sunny wind, as I would have done in such days of March, had I
been a bird. Beautiful autumn, beautiful spring, beautiful summer,
triumphed round about that building. Many days can I remember from
those seasons, a February day, for example--a pale morning after a
night of lashing rain, a pale, still morning. The puddles, the ruts of
the cartways, the smooth surface of the winding roads, glistened in the
brown, ploughed world. The Downs were clear and dark and hard under a
silver-clouded blue sky, and far beyond them were the upper ridges of
small mountainous clouds of a yellowish and sunlit white. Very sombre
were the woods. Each thing was dark or bright; all was fresh and cold.
Suddenly a bee twanged through the air to a snowdrop on the south side
of the Red Brick House. Inside the house a subtle devil was refusing to
let a soul enter into its walls--a subtle but a bodiless and soulless
devil, negative and denying. During the nine years since it was built
eight families had sojourned in the house, and had not given it a soul;
nor had the several intervals of vacancy given it a ghost.
Sometimes death will give a soul to a house. I once saw the soul of a
dead man given to a new little house with a verandah. The swifts were
racing to and fro between the rows of new houses. They flew just above
the level of men’s hats, except when they turned with a rapier-like
twist up into the air. While they raced they screamed continually
shrill screams of a fierce hilarity. There were half a hundred of them
all flying as upon the surface of an invisible stream surmounted by a
few black, bobbing hats, or, very rarely, an upturned white face; and
no part of the streets was for more than a second without a crescent
black wing and a shriek. They had taken possession of the town. Under
their rush and cry the people in the streets were silent, walking
blankly and straight ahead, and all looking old in contrast with the
tumultuous and violent youth of the birds. The thought came into my
head as I was passing the last of the houses that even so must the
birds have been racing and screaming when the Danes harried this way a
thousand years ago, and thus went they over the head of Dante in the
streets of Florence. In the warriors and in the poet there was a life
clearly and mightily akin to that in the bird’s throat and wing, but
here all was grey, all was dead.
When I came to the bridge leading over the railway to the meadows I
stood and watched the birds flying beneath me, above the slowly curving
metals; for I could not tire of the wings and voices that ripped the
dead air, and I crossed to the other parapet to see how far they went
in the opposite direction. Then for the first time I noticed a house
built almost at the edge of the bank which fell steeply down to the
railway. Only the cutting separated it from the town, and beyond it
could be seen nothing but trees lining the road, and fields on either
side as far as the woods of the horizon. It was the last house of the
town, and one of the newest. Not being in a street it needed not to
be exactly like the rest, square, pierced with oblong windows on two
sides, and blank on the other two; but so it was, except that its
lower windows looked across the railway between the thin, white posts
of a verandah. A strip of garden, not more than equal to it in area,
surrounded the house, and this was enclosed by rusty iron railings
upon all sides. Every window was shut, and the light and air blocked
out by venetian blinds painted grey. The white paint of the window
frames and the verandah was dirty, but the red bricks of the walls
were still harshly new and untouched by vegetation or any stain. The
garden had never been cultivated: it was given over to long grasses of
the unhealthy rankness peculiar to soil which is composed of builders’
refuse, and the stalks were matted and beaten down so as to suggest
the soaked hair of something dead. The door and gate were shut. The
verandah and the white paint gave the building a pretentious air of
being a pleasure house; yet it looked over the railway at the back
parts of the town, at the railway station on one hand, at the cemetery
and a tall chimney on the other. It had apparently not been occupied
or for a little time only, and was now empty; or it had been used for
a month at a time by perhaps half a dozen families; certainly it had
never become a house; it was the corpse, the stillborn corpse of a
house.
Beyond it, between the two lines of elms and on either side of them,
was the open country. The road was old, too, worn down like a river-bed
into the sandy soil, and the elms above either side made it dark as
it rose towards the north. I had not gone many yards along it when
I came to a place where the bank had been excavated long ago. There
was a smooth sandy floor, and behind that a firm wall of orange sand
interlaced by the stony and snake-like roots of a great oak which
towered up from the top of the wall; and behind the trunk the sun was
a scarlet round in a dull sky at the moment of going down. It was dark
and still in this hollowed place, and I had looked at it for some time
before I heard the crying of a child and saw three children playing
in the sand. Under the oak they had dug a cave in the sand, and a
black-haired boy and a fair-haired girl were carrying away little
spadefuls, while the third sat still among the roots. The two workers
went silently backwards and forwards. They moved gravely and without
a word, and I might have thought they were unaware of one another
had they not made way for one another in their comings and goings.
They worked as if in a dream and being moved by some unseen power.
Their faces also were fixed and expressionless; their wide-open eyes
seemed to be upon something which travelled always before them and was
invisible to me. They were perhaps seven years old. The other was not
more than three, and he took no notice of them as he sat, his face
smeared with tears and sand, and a paper bag upon his lap. Now and
then he burst out into a fresh sobbing cry just as suddenly, and not
more loudly than the robin singing above his head. When he did this
the little girl went up to him and shook him gently, and took a cherry
from the paper bag and put it into his mouth. At this he became silent
again for a little, holding the cherry-stone in one hand, and with the
other rubbing his eyes. When this cure had been tried several times,
and the scarlet sun had gone down out of the dull heavens, the child
began to cry more steadily, and it was in vain that a cherry was put
into his mouth; for he held it a little while between his lips, and did
not notice when it fell out, but sobbed on and on as if he saw nothing,
heard nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing, but only sobbed.
I asked the little girl: “What is the matter with him?”
“He wants his mother,” she said.
“Where does he live?” I asked, as I stepped towards the child, meaning
to lift him up.
“Over there,” she replied, pointing with her eyes to the house of the
verandah.
“Then why doesn’t he go home?” I said, stopping still and thinking
again chiefly of the house.
“His father is dead,” said the little girl and the little boy
simultaneously. Then they went on with their digging, while I turned
and saw the house looking as if it had grown suddenly old in those few
moments--old and haggard, and so cold that I shivered to think how cold
it must be in the death-room behind the venetian blinds. The silence
of the house and road was like a sea suddenly expanding infinitely
about me. As I turned away, the child’s sob, the song of the robin, the
scream of the swifts, fell into that dark silence without breaking it,
like tears into a deep sea. And I looked at the house and saw that the
soul of the dead man had entered it.
[Illustration: The Bridge at Goring.]
Remembering this, I gave up my spiritual frivolity at Cleeve, and
escaped to an inn. I suppose I had been too much taken with churchyard
names in the grey evening to be quite fair to the living landlord
at the inn. He was a short, heavy, fair-haired man, who had a too
distinguished moustache, and talked through his nose, and had a straw
hat tilted back on his neck. He and a wealthy Scotchman were talking
together, and invariably--by a slight effort--agreeing with one
another. His little niece came in with a flag, but he successfully put
her off by saying that he had a lot of things to show her by and by,
and she ran away shouting: “Uncle has a lot of things to show me.”
He explained to the Scotchman that he really had--“flags and things
for the coronation”--“must do something”--“everybody will”--“have
spent half a sovereign”--“it isn’t much--but still....” The child,
he said, was very excitable, not that there was anything wrong; oh,
no; but she would make a wonderful actress. He asked the Scotchman
what he would take, and then ordered two whiskies, which I understood
the other to pay for. They talked of drinks and of champagne, of
course. The landlord began laughing at “some _ladies_” who like it
sweet. He implied huge contempt for a man who could like such stuff.
Nevertheless, he hastened to say: “You don’t like sweet champagne?...
No.... No, of course you don’t.... Oh, yes, well, tastes differ.” This
naturally led to Freemasonry, and it turned out that the Scotchman
had done everything as a Mason (except work in stone); had served
as chairman, etc. etc., and the landlord showed great eagerness of
admiration by saying: “Have you really?” several times. They returned
to the subject of drink. The Scotchman announced that he took nothing
but whisky, except when he had to. The landlord hastened to remark:
“You are quite right. You’ll live the longer for it.” Then the landlord
related how when he was three-quarters drunk he always found it so hard
to drink champagne, which was only good, really, if you were run down,
or for medicinal purposes. A very great deal of natural philosophy was
uttered over those three or four glasses of whisky. After the Scotchman
had gone the landlord was claimed by two young gentlemen who were
staying under his roof for the fishing, boating, and alcoholic drinks.
They called him “Arthur,” and lured him into frivolities which he was
not born to, such as arranging a band with tennis rackets, etc., for
instruments, and serenading the other visitors and the inhabitants of
the surrounding houses. In the intervals they fortified themselves with
his whisky to such an extent that his leniency towards its effect was
not to be surprised at. They also took care to keep up their reputation
of commonplace luridity with the barmaid, a plain, hard-worked girl,
whose smile--and, they evidently believed, everything else--was at
their command. When he could slip away from these sportsmen the
landlord straightened his hat and talked business to the barmaid with
some anxiety and no false generosity. But they were always shouting
for “Arthur” in shriller and more discordant voices until at last the
second fiddle of the two burst through the door of his bedroom and
rushed across and fell heavily on the other side. Then his leader went
quietly to bed. The landlord turned to his accounts, and the barmaid
went on washing up glasses.