SIXTH DAY--WATLINGTON TO UPTON, BY EWELME, WALLINGFORD, LITTLE STOKE,
THE PAPIST WAY, LOLLINGDON, ASTON, AND BLEWBURY
For supper, bed, and picture gallery my host at Watlington charged me
two shillings, and called me at five into the bargain, as I wished
to breakfast at Wallingford. I took the turning to Ewelme out of the
Oxford road, and was soon high up among large, low-hedged fields of
undulating arable, with here and there a mass or a troop of elms at a
corner, above a farm, or down a hedge. Farther away on the left I had
the Chilterns, wooded on their crests and in their hollows, not very
high, but shapely. The sky was misted at the horizon, but overhead
milky blue, with thin-spun, dim white cloud; the sun a burning disc;
half-way up the sky hung heavier white clouds, which might develop
later. The road was clover-edged, winding, and undulating, and by no
means an improbable connection of the Icknield Way. Britwell Salome
Church lay on my right, across a willowy field, and having no tower
or spire, it was like one of the farm buildings surrounding it. Then
my road mounted between nettly and elmy banks, and had a bit of waste
on the right where chalk had been dug--a pretty tumbled piece, all
nettles and gix and white bryony under ash trees. There was not much
hedge between the road and the corn before I got to the “Plough” at
Britwell Salome, and next the “Sun.” The village was scattered among
trees, not interrupting the smell of hay. The road skirted it, and was
soon out again amongst the wheat, and passing Britwell park, where
the cattle were crossing in a straight line between groups of elms. In
the hedge there was bracken along with the yellow bedstraw and white
bryony. For a time there were gorse and bracken together on the green
strip above the road. Then, instead of going straight on to Benson, I
turned to the left for Firebrass Hill, Ewelme, and Wallingford. Beyond
this turn all the country round was high, bare cornland undulating to
the darker hills. The road had nettles for a hedge, or sometimes brier,
scabious, knap-weed, and rest-harrow, and once some more purple meadow
crane’s-bill; it had steep banks, but no green border. But this was not
the Icknield Way, which would never have dipped down to the lower part
of Ewelme and up again at once. The first houses of the village were
decent, small ones, standing high and looking down at the farm-house
thatch, the cottages, gardens of fruit trees, and elms of the main
village. The churchyard covered the slope down from the upper to the
lower village, and in the midst stood the church, a venerable one with
a particularly neat growth of ivy across the tower. I could not get
into the church, but could hear the clock ticking in the emptiness.
In the churchyard I noticed this devout fancy over the body of Alice
Heath, who died in 1776:--
Kind angels, watch this sleeping dust
Till Jesus comes to raise the just;
Then may they wake with sweet surprise
And in their Saviour’s image rise.
[Illustration: Watlington Town Hall.]
I should like to know what was in the verse-writer’s mind when he
penned the first line. The word “surprise” pleased me most, though
due to a rhyme. It occurred to me that the writer’s mind, through
grief, might have been in the same condition as the bedroom artist at
Watlington who drew the lady and the cradle and the beautiful winged
diver. I believe that this artist would have translated literally into
pictorial form the words:--
Kind angels, watch this sleeping dust.
He would have shown a neat, grassy churchyard with an immemorial
church tower in the background. Scattered over the turf close to the
church would be an indistinct crowd of tombstones. Nearer and clearer
he would present a new and costly stone, probably in the form of a
cross, standing at the top of three or four steps. Many wreaths of
rare and costly flowers would lie unfaded at the foot of the steps. On
the lowest step two figures of exceptional beauty and dignity would be
kneeling without sign of impatience or any other emotion. They would
be in the customary costume of these pictures, and the onlooker would
marvel what they were doing; and if he knew that they were watching
the dust below, he would still conjecture as to what they were to
watch against, and how they proposed to resist the attempts of any
robbing man, beast, dragon, or other monster. But it is unlikely that
any such picture was in the mind of the Ewelme epitaph-writer. He or
she had perhaps no distinct image; choosing words that would fit the
metre and not be in any way surprising to the religious, he thought of
“angels” and of “dust,” and the need of epithets pretty soon suggested
“kind” and “sleeping.” Nevertheless, when I read it I came so near to
forming an image, rather in the style of the bedroom artist, that it is
possible the writer had an image or vision of some sort, and handed it
on to me in that early July morning before anyone was on the roads or
in the churchyard.
There was a much better stone and delicately writ inscription near the
east window. The stone, a very thin, shouldered one, had slipped down
into the earth, and was less than two feet in height and in breadth.
The words were:--
Here lyeth the Body
of Margaret Machen
who departed this
life the 5^{th} of April
being aged 20 years
Anno Dom. 1675.
Here the smallness and prettiness of the thin stone, its being half
swallowed up in earth and grass, the fineness of the written, not
printed, lettering, the name a poem in itself and half Welsh, the youth
of the girl, her death in April more than two hundred years ago, all
together produced an effect like that of beauty, nay! which was beauty.
Not far off was a ponderous square chest with as much reading on it as
a page of newspaper, dated 1869. The sparrows were chittering in the
elms.
[Illustration: Ewelme Cow Common.]
My road dipped down through the village, and to the left by the
“Greyhound” and up between steep banks under larch trees. On the right
a few yards up that road a footpath used to go for two miles towards
Wallingford, but it was covered by corn for the first part, and I kept
to the road. I was soon going past the Ewelme cow common again, but
along the opposite side; and there were cows among its thorns. For a
few yards, after crossing the Benson and Dorchester road at Gypsies’
Corner, I was in the Upper Icknield Way again, but turned to the right,
due west, leaving Clack’s Farm on the south instead of the west. I
was then going down towards the green-striped cornland, the clustered
trees of the Thames Valley, and the pale spire and tower of Wallingford
rising out of it. The low, long curves of land meeting or intersecting
a little above the river were like those of a brier with nothing to
climb. In the hedges there were wild roses and masses of traveller’s
joy, with all its grey-green buds very large. Instead of following the
road round its bend to the south-west, I turned just past the bend
into a green lane to the right, which made straight for Wallingford
spire; and into this lane presently came the footpath from Ewelme and
a parallel old lane. However, I had to turn sharp to the left to reach
Crowmarsh Gifford and Wallingford. Crowmarsh is a wide street of old
cottages leading to Wallingford bridge. Wallingford climbs the right
bank up from the bridge, and out of its crowded brick rise the tower
and the spire of two churches, and the ivied tower of a castle, of the
kind that looks as if it had been ready-made ruinous and ivied, with
a flagstaff on top. I crossed the bridge to the town, and went up the
narrow, old street, past an inn called “The Shakespeare,” to the small
square of small shops, where red and blue implements of farming stood
by the pillared town hall and the sun poured on them. I went into the
“private bar” of an inn, but hearing only a blue-bottle and seeing
little but a polished table, and smelling nothing else, I went out and
round the corner to the taproom of the same inn. Here there were men,
politics, crops, beer, and shag tobacco.
[Illustration: Wallingford Bridge.]
This contrast between the “private bar” and the taproom round the
corner reminded me of another town which illustrates it perfectly. At
the edge of the town, its large front windows looking up the principal
street, its small back windows over a windy common to noble hills, is a
public house called “The Jolly Drover.” The tap of “The Jolly Drover”
is the one blot upon the face of Coldiston. The town is clean and
demure from the decent old houses of the market-place to the brand-new
cottages, more like conservatories than dwellings, on the outskirts.
The magistrates are busy week after week in sentencing men and women of
all ages for begging, asking for hot water to make tea, sleeping under
hedges or in barns, for being unseemly in act or speech; if possible,
nothing offensive must happen in the streets. A market is held once a
week and is a byword in the county. Any animal can be offered for sale
there; the drover creeps along behind a beast that attracts as much
attention as a menagerie in the wayside villages; they know where it is
going; they have seen a pig resembling a greyhound, except that it had
not the strength to stand up, sold there for a shilling. Three or four
times a year a builder and contractor of Coldiston is sold up, because
he has been trying to get work by doing it for nothing, and these sales
are the chief diversion of the neighbourhood. The town is a model of
neatness and respectability, as if created by a shop-window decorator;
and of all the public-houses--all named hotels--“The Jolly Drover”
is the neatest and most respectable outside, and the most expensive
inside. It is painted white at short intervals. The chief barmaid is
a Londoner, white-faced and coral-lipped, with a love-lock over her
marble brow; and her way is brisk and knowing, and her speech more than
equal to the demands made upon it of an evening by the tradesmen who
will come until they are rich enough to quit the town for ever. Every
form of invitation adorns the exterior.
But round the corner, towards the common, “The Jolly Drover” is
white no longer. It has no pavement outside, but a space of bare
earth overshadowed by an enormous elm’s last two living branches and
roughened by its wide-spreading roots. There is no invitation to enter
here, but simply the words upon a low lamp, “The Jolly Drover Tap.”
No invitation is needed, for the windows are not curtained and the
passer-by cannot fail to see the contented backs of drinkers and the
long tiers of bottles. At night almost as much can be seen through the
yellow blinds. The door stands open opposite the old tree, and through
it the eye finds the bar, the plain country barmaid, the lamp, and the
bright bottles. A mongrel dog or two and a gypsy’s broken-down cart and
wild-eyed horse are usually outside, or a tramp’s woman waiting, or a
group of men talking quietly before going in or after coming out. Here
“The Jolly Drover” answers to its name. It is a hedge public house of
old red brick and tiles, joined, nevertheless, to the white-fronted
hotel and connected with it in the proprietor’s accounts. It is noisy.
They sing there. No plain man is afraid to go in who has the price of
half a pint in his pocket. In the summer benches are set outside, and
men can sit and see the discreet going to and fro of the town life a
few yards away.
Old Jack Runaway (who will borrow sixpence and then lose half a year’s
custom in watercress for fear of showing his face again) has lost six
heifers that he was taking to the fair over the hill, but he has a pint
inside and a pint before him--the clock stands still--and as the people
go by he comments to himself:--
“My young Lord Drapery, may he go to gaol for being a poor beggar
before he’s forty. A brood mare; what with living between a policeman
and a postman, with a registrar in front and a minister behind, _her_
children ought to be tin soldiers. Now I wonder what’s _he_ worth?
But if I was coined into golden sovereigns I wouldn’t have married
his missus when I was twenty, no, I wouldn’t. Pretty Miss Ladybird,
Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away from home; you’re a tantalizer for a fine
day, to be out with a young chap drinking a glass of six and nobody
looking. What we do lose by being old, to be sure, more than by being
poor! What a clean, white beard, now, that Mr. Welcome has got, like an
angel. Eh, old Colonel High and Mighty, there’s doctors for sciatica
and gout, but there’s something we have both got by being sixty that
they won’t cure, not if your purse is as long as your two legs. How
much do _you_ weigh, bombarrel? They don’t allow a carriage and pair in
Kingdom Come. Now, _that_ young fellow could break a good few stones
on a summer’s day; kind, too, and don’t his heels kick the pavement
proud; but mind the women don’t bend your back for you, or you might
as well be dust to dust any day. That’s what I call a good piece, neat
and not too stuck up, not so young as she was, keeps the house tidy,
and knows where they sell the best things cheap; now, I’d like to walk
into your parlour and have a cup of tea, missus, after wiping my feet
on the mat and hanging up my hat; and then that little ladybird of a
nursemaid brings in the baby, and we feed it on cake and weak tea; it
must be weak, or it’s bad for the health ...; and wouldn’t I be proud
to have you brushing my coat as I goes out of a morning, a black coat,
and putting a rose in my button-hole, and kissing me before all the
street--ha, ha! dirty Jack Runaway. How they do dress up the youngsters
these days, like little angels; hark at them talking, and when the
mother whispers to them and they run over as if you dropped it and
give you a penny, you might think it would turn into a flower in their
hands, and they give you a kind of look as much as to say, ‘God is
feeding His sparrows,’ and then they run away without a word, and you
look at the price of half a pint, and either you bless them or else
you curse them. _You_, Reverend Sir, would give me a cold in the head
if you were to talk; then you’d give me sixpence; if you go to heaven,
there’s a bit of luck left for those who don’t, you freezing point, you
Monday’s loaf, you black-and-white undertaker’s friend. Oh, this town!
it’s rotten without stinking, gilt without gingerbread. Look at them
staring at us as if we were wild beasts taking an airing _outside_ the
cage....”
The town in its turn does watch “The Jolly Drover Tap” and its life.
Why should there be all that space wasted where the elm stands?
people wonder; it is quite old-fashioned, and they smile pityingly,
yet tenderly, when the old tree is crowding into leaf. But when there
are half a dozen rough men and women talking aloud and gesticulating
like foreigners over the price of a long, brown dog that shivers
under a cart, they do not see why it should be so; only, it is “The
Jolly Drover,” and rather difficult to attack. It is extraordinary,
they think as they pass by the turning down to the Tap, how a lot of
lazy fellows, with nothing to do and with only rags on them, can
get enough to spend half a day there. That ought certainly not to be
allowed. These are not the honest poor. Either a man must work, or be
looking out for work in a serious manner, or be so well dressed that he
obviously need not work; or something is wrong. Nor do they invariably
look starved and miserable. They eat and drink and talk to one another.
Where do they come from? Of course they do not live in Coldiston: then
why come here to drink? They cannot, of course, be stuffed into prison
or workhouse or asylum; but is there no other cesspool possible in an
age with a genius for sanitation?
When the blinds are down and the lamp lit, what a jolly place it is!
The light pours out through the door on to the old tree, and makes it
look friendly as you go in, and romantic as you come out. It is best
at haymaking or harvest time in fine weather. The irregular labourers
come into the town, especially on a Saturday, and break their journey
at “The Jolly Drover Tap.” The townsman glances in as he passes, and
sees a tall, straight man in a restful attitude standing up at the
bar, and he has just raised his pot to drink. It is only a glimpse of
a second, but it remains in the mind. The passer-by could not say how
the drinker was clad, except that he wore a loose, broad-brimmed hat on
his head, pushed back so as to leave quite clear against the lamp the
whole of a big-featured, long face, the brow, and the curled hair up
to the crown. Was it coat and trousers, or just shirt and trousers? At
any rate the whole man could be seen underneath. Not that the observer
did not as a rule admire a man fully and fashionably dressed. Only, in
this light, just this harvest evening of purple and of great silence,
the tall man drinking with head thrown back at the end of the passage
looked more like the statues of a bygone age, or the representations
of magnificent men seen in pictures, or the soldiers he has read of
in books about the wars of Roundhead and Cavalier or the invasions of
Wales and Scotland--yes! the height and carriage of this man call up
the words “rough borderer.” A lance or a long sword would look well
in his hands. His hat is not unlike a foot-soldier’s helmet. And then
the face--coarse, fearless, and careless--is an enigma. He is some
fellow without a house, or wife, or any goods or gods, yet this is how
the admirer used to picture lords and generals when a little boy at
school. He is not thinking about rent, accounts, education, clothes,
the poor, church, chapel, appendicitis, or this time next year. He is
not apparently in a hurry. He has no vote, and one party in power is
as good as the other to him. No doubt a wasteful fellow--has fallen,
perhaps, through drink--is good-natured possibly, but would not stop
short at violence on occasion--idle with all his strength--and yet....
And yet? The figure and face against the light stick in the mind of
the man out in the street. He is discontented. He grumbles at his wife
when he goes in because she has not done something, and he does more,
he grows enraged, when he finds that she really has done it, but has
not had time to tell him. He lies still in bed on his back, thinking
for a long time. His wife lies still, and he knows that she also is
awake thinking. He says “Good night,” hoping she will say something to
comfort him for his fruitless wakefulness. But she says “Good night,”
and no more. They remain silent. He has the image of the drinker clear
in the darkness before he falls asleep. Left entirely alone his wife
sighs, and presently she also is asleep.
But I do not wish to say that Wallingford is as respectable as
Coldiston. All I can say is that the ford below is very old, and it
is highly probable that some travellers on the Icknield Way followed
the road I had been on from Gypsies’ Corner to Wallingford and then
into the Berkshire Ickleton Street at Blewbury, if not before. Others,
avoiding Wallingford, might have crossed at Little Stoke, from which a
westward road goes up, called the “Papist Way.”
From Wallingford I made for the “Papist Way,” following a series of
paths and roads about a quarter of a mile east of the river. I went
past the little towerless and spireless church of Newnham Murren,
which had a number of crooked, ivy-coloured tombstones, and was itself
covered with ivy, which traveller’s joy was beginning to climb. Then
over Grim’s Ditch, a mile and a half west of the Icknield Way crossing,
I came to Mongewell park, and my path was along a line of huge elms
and sweet limes. On my left, the main road and its telegraph wires
ran bordered with charlock along the top of a low ridge above these
meadows. From North Stoke there was a good road. I turned aside to the
church, but found what was better, a big range of tiled, thatched sheds
and barns extending on either side of my path, with a cattle-yard in
the midst full of dazzling straw and richly-stinking cow dung, and a
big black sow lying on it like a recumbent statue on a huge pedestal.
Swifts were shrieking above and chickens clucking in the corners.
From the road the tiled church and the thatched barn fell into line,
and seemed one, especially as the farm pigeons were perched on the
ridges of both. On a corn-rick behind I saw the figure of a sheep on a
weather-vane. This road went alongside hedgeless barley on the left,
over which I could see the bare, low hills between me and the Icknield
Way, and far beyond them the wooded hills about Nuffield and Nettlebed;
on the right there was hay to the river; there was succory on the
roadside, scabious, knapweed, rest-harrow, and long grass.
To reach the ferry at Little Stoke I turned off to the right under
elm trees and was rowed across. The boy told me that the road up from
the ferry was called Asylum Road, there being a big, red lunatic
asylum on the right-hand side of it, just as it crossed the Reading
and Wallingford road. Only beyond this crossing is it marked “Papist
Way” on the map. I have not discovered why it was named so, for the
name suggests too late a date to be connected with the monastery which
lay near where the road reaches the Great Western railway station at
Cholsey. It points to the Astons, Blewbury, and Upton, and may at one
time have formed part of a road running through them to Wantage;
unless this road is rather a protraction of the road from South Stoke
and Moulsford, which may, however, have joined the “Papist Way” at
Lollingdon.
They were talking about roads at the “Morning Star” on the left side of
the “Papist Way.” The fat drayman and the smart butcher’s boy agreed
that motor-cars were ruining the good roads. The rubber wheels can
travel on the smoothest possible surface, which is the modern ideal.
Hoofs, on the other hand, need something to bite into. The drayman,
with his heavy waggon, would do away with steam-rollers. Here the needy
cyclist interrupted, and said that he had never known better times; the
smooth roads were as good for him as for motor-cars. All cursed their
dust, their stink, their insolence, and all looked with some admiration
at the foreign-looking chauffeur who came in for a glass and out again
in a minute. Outside, the flies were “terrifying” the horses for the
first time in the summer, and the drivers inside yelled at them, but
seldom moved from their beer. One driver was a man with big, red ears,
and a serious, quizzical face, with a beard. He came in wearing a fine
musk thistle, which he seemed to think was Scotch, but immediately on
being given a bunch of sweet peas he threw it away. If this had been
his preference it would have been absurd enough--as if a musk thistle
were not better than all the sweet peas ever contrived by man and
God!--but he took the garden flowers because they were things having a
price, and because they were a gift.
[Illustration: By Lollingdon Farm.]
The “Papist Way” was a hard road winding between wheat and beans for
half a mile. Then it crossed the Wallingford and Cholsey road, and was
interrupted by the railway embankment. Its course on the farther side
of this seemed to be marked by a division between barley and potatoes
to the left of the present road. This line was continued through
Pancroft farm-yard, from which a path went south-westward along the
hedges to Lollingdon. This was over black, rushy lands haunted by
pewits. The road a little on the left, leading also to Lollingdon Farm,
was on better ground, winding westward under the wooded swell of the
round hill called Lollingdon Hill. The farm had a big home meadow with
ash and poplar enclosing it, almost as if it had been a quadrangle
with cloisters round. There were many thatched farm buildings in the
corner, and a fine walnut tree and a beautiful abundance of poppies
and dusty nettle and dusty mallow against the walls. The road had an
elmy hedge on its right, but nothing on the left between it and the
oats that reached up to the beeches of Lollingdon Hill-top. The long
grass and knapweed and succory by the roadside were blossoming with
white and meadow-brown butterflies, which flew away from their stalks
as ducklings swim away from their unamphibious foster-mothers. The
butterflies flew after one another, sometimes a white after a brown.
The sun was perfect for them, there being fewer clouds than there were
eight hours back--for as I walked I heard a pleasant, gong-like bell
strike two at Aston.
Aston Tirrold and Aston Upthorpe make a square of roads with many
lanes and paths crossing from one side to another. In the square are
big houses and small, and their gardens and old, nettly orchards,
and many sycamores, elms, chestnuts, and acacias in the gardens and
along the paths; there are even some small fields within it. Running
water goes through it. Here you pass a mud wall, there a hedge, here
a boarded, there a thatched, and again a tiled, cottage. At some of
the corners and in the churchyard stand lime trees. If a happy child
had all the ingredients of old villages to play with, it would, if it
were ingenious, probably combine them thus. The farms are all outside
the square but close to it. The churches are near the edge but within
it. I hardly believed that anybody remained alive in the village until
I failed to open the door of Aston Tirrold Church. Aston Upthorpe
church was a small tiled building with a stupid little spire stuck on
yesterday, to show that it was not part of the neighbouring tiled farm
and outhouses. The village hid itself well on both sides under its
elms. From the east it seemed all trees and orchards, from the west
only the new thatch of a rick betrayed it.
My road led along the south side of the village and commanded a simple,
perfect piece of downland--a bare, even wall of down with an almost
straight ridge, which was also bare but for one clump; along the foot
of the wall ran the main road to Wantage; up from it, an old trackway,
very deeply worn, rose slanting and showing one old steep green bank,
up to the ridge and over; and at the point where the trackway crossed
the main road the turf was carved by a chalk-pit.
[Illustration: Blewbury.]
A broad track and several parallel paths went fairly straight without
hedges, westward through the corn to Blewbury, passing close under the
south side of a bare, sudden hill--Blewburton Hill--and the ramparts
of a supposed Danish camp. Blewbury was like Aston, with a streamlet,
many trees and orchards, and a towered church standing in the midst
of several paths and roads. The clock was beating slowly with such
gigantic and ancient peace inside the church that I did not enter. It
was as if some hoary giant were sleeping inside away from the sun, if
indeed he had not been there for some centuries. Outside the church lay
a dilapidated and weed-grown pair of prostrate effigies. If it were not
disturbing the sleeper in Blewbury Church I should suggest that these
effigies might be taken in. They are much to be preferred to the clean
effigies which have never borne the weather of God or the pocket-knives
of men; but if they are left outside much longer they will hardly pass
as representations of two human beings lying on their backs.
The south side of Blewbury touched the main Reading and Wantage road,
and had several inns: a “Barley Mow,” a “Catherine Wheel,” a “George
and Dragon,” a “Sawyer’s Arms,” a “Load of Mischief,” and at its west
end a “New Inn.” I was glad to see that the “Load of Mischief” still
upheld its sign and name. I feared that it might have been renamed
“The Red Lion” or the “Crown,” and have been robbed of its sign. But
there was the sign, and almost opposite a window, where I was equally
glad and surprised to see an advertisement of “Votes for Women.” The
“Load of Mischief” was a woman, of a type belonging to a day hardly
later than Hogarth’s, mounted on the shoulders of a man. The man was
a mere small beast of burden. The woman was magnificent--a huge,
lusty, brown virago--and she was holding in her hand a glass clearly
labelled “GIN.” This woman and her ill-chosen spouse were painted on
both sides of the sign-board, so that all coming from north and from
south should see it. I forgot to inquire whether “The Load of Mischief”
was a fully licensed house and sold gin. Probably it was. The sign
was not a beerhouse’s defamation of gin. It did not deny that gin was
a very good thing. It did not assert anything more than that a big,
gin-drinking woman on a small man’s shoulders was a “load of mischief.”
How impossible it is--even in this sporting country--to think of a
sign depicting a big, gin-drinking man on a little woman’s shoulders.
No woman ever painted a sign-board, I suppose, and no woman keeping
an inn would put up such a one as “The Load of Mischief.” A woman who
drank gin was a load of mischief. On the other hand, a man who made
the gin for her, provided that he grew rich on it, became a justice
of the peace or a member of Parliament; if his father made it he
became a bishop. It is the difference between mind and matter, between
brain-work and manual labour. The member of Parliament or the bishop’s
father had only to think about gin; he might never have tasted it. The
woman had to swallow it and pay for it. Therefore she grew poor while
he grew rich. A history of England was once written entirely to show
this difference, to insist upon it, and to teach the consumer that he
must never forget his duties and responsibilities to the manufacturer,
and to remind the manufacturer of his privileges. It was called “A
History of England for Shoe-Blacks and Sons of Gentlemen: or, A Guide
to Tuft-hunting, Sycophancy, Boot-licking, and other Services to the
Aristocracy and Plutocracy, and to Keeping in Your Place.” It was
published in 1911, and is used in schools.
When I went into one of the inns there was a woman seated in the
taproom drinking beer, a shrill and lean, large-eyed woman of middle
age, somewhat in liquor, and with ill-fitting boots, in which she had
walked fifteen miles and had nine still to do. Whether or not because
he had drunk more, her husband had gone on by train; she said she had
“sent him.” She foresaw that it was not going to rain that day. She
claimed no credit for the foresight. Her corns alone had the power. In
about a quarter of an hour she left. She was a woman that walked fast
but stopped often. She carried her hands in the pockets of her black
skirt. Not long after she had started the rain fell down upon her, as
it did upon the roofs, mackintoshes, and umbrellas of the brewers,
publicans, and brewery shareholders.
From the west of Blewbury to Upton there was another mile of broad,
green tracks through corn, without a tree between them and the round,
smooth downs, with their tumuli clear against the sky on the left hand.
At Upton this series of roads from Little Stoke entered the main road,
or crossed it, and continued without touching any villages on the way
to Lockinge and Wantage. But this further road was a continuation of
the line of the main road before it turned north to Upton and west to
Hagbourne, and might have been an alternative course to Wantage, or
part of an earlier way, perhaps the Icknield Way itself, which some
have supposed to go nearer the Downs than the main road now does. As
I meant at another time to travel this road and its parallels from
Streatley to the Wiltshire border, I returned to Blewbury, and at one
of the six inns read James Montgomery’s _Pelican Island_, a poem of
A.D. 1827, in nine cantos. The poem seemed to have been started and
carried on under the influence of an ecstasy given to the author by
an explorer’s book. In his _Voyage to Terra Australis_, then not long
published, Captain Matthew Flinders had described two little islands,
the breeding-place and antique cemetery of pelicans, “islets of a
hidden lagoon of an uninhabited island, situate upon an unknown coast,
near the antipodes of Europe.” This evidently impressed Montgomery with
a strong feeling of solitariness. He imagined himself alone when “sky,
sun, and sea were all the universe,” himself a spirit, “all eye, ear,
thought”--“what the soul can make itself at pleasure, that I was.” For
“thrice a thousand years” he saw none but the people of the sea:--
Beings for whom the universe was made,
Yet none of kindred with myself. In vain
I strove to waken sympathy in breasts
Cold as the element in which they moved,
And inaccessible to fellowship
With me, as sun and stars, as winds and vapours.
Under the sea also he saw:--
Relics huge and strange
Of the old world that perish’d by the flood,
Kept under chains of darkness till the judgment.
He watched the making of a coral islet, compared with which men’s work
seemed nothing. A comparison which set him thinking of the grandeurs of
earth, among them of Babylon, built for eternity, though where it stood,
Ruin itself stands still for lack of work,
And Desolation keeps unbroken Sabbath....
He saw the islet grow and become hospitable. The sea-wrack and many
sea-changed things were swept up on to it,
While heaven’s dew
Fell on the sterile wilderness as sweetly
As though it were the garden of the Lord.
Grass grew. Insects swarmed. He witnessed “the age of gold in that
green isle.” Trees and flowers rose up. Reptiles and amphibious
monsters appeared. Then came “more admirable” beings:--
Flocking from every point of heaven, and filling
Eye, ear, and mind with objects, sounds, emotions
Akin to livelier sympathy and love
Than reptiles, fishes, insects could inspire;
--Birds, the free tenants of land, air, and ocean,
Their forms all symmetry, their motions grace;
In plumage, delicate and beautiful,
Thick without burthen, close as fishes’ scales,
Or loose as full-blown poppies to the breeze;
With wings that might have had a soul within them,
They bore their owners by such sweet enchantment;
Birds, small and great, of endless shapes and colours,
Here flew and perched, there swam and dived at pleasure;
Watchful and agile, uttering voices wild
And harsh, yet in accordance with the waves
Upon the beach, the winds in caverns moaning,
Or winds and waves abroad upon the water.
His was an eager, rapturous temperament. Next to birds he seems to have
loved the insect legions--“children of light and air and fire” he
calls them,
Their lives all ecstasy and quick cross motion.
But birds and insects did not confine his sympathy. They did not, e.g.,
turn it aside from the elephant, leading his quiet life “among his old
contemporary trees.”
Whether it was through the impulse of the discoverer’s words, or, as is
more likely, through his own nature, he was able to suggest with some
power the world that does without men, the “sterile wilderness” not
neglected by the dew, the Paradise without man and without death, where
Bliss had newly
Alighted, and shut close his rainbow wings,
To rest at ease, nor dread intruding ill.
I think he was enchanted by those tropical
Airy aisles and living colonnades,
Where nations might have worshipp’d God in peace.
For, with an energy which a tree would call religious, he describes
their flourishing, and how the Indian fig was multiplied:--
From year to year their fruits ungather’d fall;
Not lost, but quickening where they lay, they struck
Root downward, and brake forth on every hand,
Till the strong saplings, rank and file, stood up,
A mighty army, which o’erran the isle,
And changed the wilderness into a forest.
His love of things that are not men, that are happy and without
conscience, is more instinctive than his desire for men in his
solitude. They, though “kindred spirits,” never moved him to a picture
like the flamingoes flying,
Till, on some lonely coast alighting,
Again their gorgeous cohort took the field.
I was not surprised, then, at the seventh canto, to find him saying, in
Wordsworthian strain, that we only begin to live
From that fine point,
Which memory dwells on, with the morning star,
The earliest note we heard the cuckoo sing,
Or the first daisy that we ever pluck’d,
When thoughts themselves were stars, and birds, and flowers,
Pure brilliance, simplest music, wild perfume.
My copy of the book was printed in 1827. It had the date 1856 under
the old owner’s name; and I suppose that not many editions have been
published since 1827, or any since 1856. Yet this individual character
of the writer, original as much in degree as in kind, had kept the book
alive. The energy of his ecstasy gave his blank verse a gushing flow
that may cause sleep, but seldom impatience, and never contempt. The
overflowing of so many lines into an extra unaccented syllable seemed a
natural effect of his possession by his subject, and not a device or a
mere habit. At its best it had the eloquence of an improvisation.
As I shut this book it reminded me of a poem called _To Deck a Woman_,
by Mr. Ralph Hodgson, where a similar rapt picture of a manless Eden is
painted, but with a passion that is controlled to a quivering repose
by an art finer than Montgomery’s. There the passion is double, for
the poet’s love of the life and beauty of birds is turned to an anger
too deep for hate against the woman Bloodwant, “shrill for Beauty’s
veins,” and the men who satisfy--and provoke--her desire for feathers.
The same poet’s _Stupidity Street_ is a curious instance of passion
submitting itself to the quietest of smiling rhymes:--
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops for
The people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.
I saw in vision
The worm in the wheat
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat,
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.
I was glad that I had taken _Pelican Island_ with me as my only book;
for if I had not I might very likely never have read it. Yet it might
have escaped me even though it was in my pocket. Unless a man always
carries a book with him, when he does take one it is often a little
too well chosen, or rather chosen too deliberately, because it is a
very good one, or is just the right one, or is one that ought to be
read. But walking is apt to relieve him of the kind of conscience that
obeys such choices. At best he opens the book and yawns and shuts
it. He may look about him for any distraction rather than this book.
He reads through a country newspaper, beginning and ending with the
advertisements. He looks at every picture in an illustrated magazine.
He looks out of the window for some temptation. He takes down _The
Lamplighter_ or Mrs. Humphry Ward’s _East Lynne_ from the landlord’s
shelves. He looks through the magazine again. If he opens the choice
book he finds in it an irresistible command to go to bed at nine
o’clock. The same book may be taken out thus a score of times, and
acquire a friendly and well-read appearance.