We know that there cannot be progression without retrogression, or gain
with no corresponding loss; and often on my wheel, when flying along
the roads at a reckless rate of very nearly nine miles an hour, I have
regretted that time of limitations, galling to me then, when I was
compelled to go on foot. I am a walker still, but with other means of
getting about I do not feel so native to the earth as formerly. That is
a loss. Yet a poorer walker it would have been hard to find, and on even
my most prolonged wanderings the end of each day usually brought extreme
fatigue. This, too, although my only companion was slow--slower than the
poor proverbial snail or tortoise--and I would leave her half a mile
or so behind to force my way through unkept hedges, climb hills, and
explore woods and thickets to converse with every bird and shy little
beast and scaly creature I could discover. But mark what follows. In the
late afternoon I would be back in the road or footpath, satisfied to
go slow, then slower still, until--the snail in woman shape would be
obliged to slacken her pace to keep me company, and even to stand still
at intervals to give me needful rest.
But there were compensations, and one, perhaps the best of all, was that
this method of seeing the country made us more intimate with the people
we met and stayed with. They were mostly poor people, cottagers in small
remote villages; and we, too, were poor, often footsore, in need of
their ministrations, and nearer to them on that account than if we
had travelled in a more comfortable way. I can recall a hundred little
adventures we met with during those wanderings, when we walked day after
day, without map or guide-book as our custom was, not knowing where the
evening would find us, but always confident that the people to whom it
would fall in the end to shelter us would prove interesting to know and
would show us a kindness that money could not pay for. Of these hundred
little incidents let me relate one.
It was near the end of a long summer day when we arrived at a small
hamlet of about a dozen cottages on the edge of an extensive wood--a
forest it is called; and, coming to it, we said that here we must stay,
even if we had to spend the night sitting in a porch. The men and women
we talked to all assured us that they did not know of anyone who could
take us in, but there was Mr. Brownjohn, who kept the shop, and was the
right person to apply to. Accordingly we went to the little general shop
and heard that Mr. Brownjohn was not at home. His housekeeper, a fat,
dark, voluble woman with prominent black eyes, who minded the shop
in the master's absence, told us that Mr. Brownjohn had gone to a
neighbouring farm-house on important business, but was expected back
shortly. We waited, and by and by he returned, a shabbily dressed,
weak-looking little old man, with pale blue eyes and thin yellowish
white hair. He could not put us up, he said, he had no room in his
cottage; there was nothing for us but to go on to the next place, a
village three miles distant, on the chance of finding a bed there. We
assured him that we could go no further, and after revolving the matter
a while longer he again said that we could not stay, as there was not a
room to be had in the place since poor Mrs. Flowerdew had her trouble.
She had a spare room and used to take in a lodger occasionally, and a
good handy woman she was too; but now--no, Mrs. Flowerdew could not take
us in. We questioned him, and he said that no one had died there and
there had been no illness. They were all quite well at Mrs. Flowerdew's;
the trouble was of another kind. There was no more to be said about it.
As nothing further could be got out of him we went in search of Mrs.
Flowerdew herself, and found her in a pretty vine-clad cottage. She was
a young woman, very poorly dressed, with a pleasing but careworn face,
and she had four small, bright, healthy, happy-faced children. They were
all grouped round her as she stood in the doorway to speak to us, and
they too were poorly dressed and poorly shod. When we told our tale she
appeared ready to burst into tears. Oh, how unfortunate it was that
she could not take us in! It would have made her so happy, and the
few shillings would have been such a blessing! But what could she do
now--the landlord's agent had put in a distress and carried off and sold
all her best things. Every stick out of her nice spare room had been
taken from them! Oh, it was cruel!
As we wished to hear more she told us the whole story. They had got
behindhand with the rent, but that had often been the case, only this
time it happened that the agent wanted a cottage for a person he wished
to befriend, and so gave them notice to quit. But her husband was a
high-spirited man and determined to stick to his rights, so he informed
the agent that he refused to move until he received compensation for his
improvements.
Questioned about these improvements, she led us through to the back to
show us the ground, about half an acre in extent, part of which was used
as a paddock for the donkey, and on the other part there were about a
dozen rather sickly-looking young fruit trees. Her husband, she said,
had planted the orchard and kept the fence of the paddock in order, and
they refused to compensate him! Then she took us up to the spare room,
empty of furniture, the floor thick with dust. The bed, table,
chairs, washhandstand, toilet service--the things she had been so long
struggling to get together, saving her money for months and months, and
making so many journeys to the town to buy--all, all he had taken away
and sold for almost nothing!
Then, actually with tears in her eyes, she said that now we knew why she
couldn't take us in--why she had to seem so unkind.
But we are going to stay, we told her. It was a very good room; she
could surely get a few things to put in it, and in the meantime we would
go and forage for provisions to last us till Monday.
It is odd to find how easy it is to get what one wants by simply taking
it! At first she was amazed at our decision, then she was delighted and
said she would go out to her neighbours and try to borrow all that was
wanted in the way of furniture and bedding. Then we returned to Mr.
Brownjohn's to buy bread, bacon, and groceries, and he in turn sent us
to Mr. Marling for vegetables. Mr. Marling heard us, and soberly taking
up a spade and other implements led us out to his garden and dug us a
mess of potatoes while we waited. In the meantime good Mrs. Flowerdew
had not been idle, and we formed the idea that her neighbours must have
been her debtors for unnumbered little kindnesses, so eager did they now
appear to do her a good turn. Out of one cottage a woman was seen coming
burdened with a big roll of bedding; from others children issued bearing
cane chairs, basin and ewer, and so on, and when we next looked into
our room we found it swept and scrubbed, mats on the floor, and quite
comfortably furnished.
After our meal in the small parlour, which had been given up to us, the
family having migrated into the kitchen, we sat for an hour by the open
window looking out on the dim forest and saw the moon rise--a great
golden globe above the trees--and listened to the reeling of the
nightjars. So many were the birds, reeling on all sides, at various
distances, that the evening air seemed full of their sounds, far and
near, like many low, tremulous, sustained notes blown on reeds, rising
and falling, overlapping and mingling. And presently from the bushes
close by, just beyond the weedy, forlorn little "orchard," sounded
the rich, full, throbbing prelude to the nightingale's song, and that
powerful melody that in its purity and brilliance invariably strikes us
with surprise seemed to shine out, as it were, against the background of
that diffused, mysterious purring of the nightjars, even as the golden
disc of the moon shone against and above the darkening skies and dusky
woods.
And as we sat there, gazing and listening, a human voice came out of the
night--a call prolonged and modulated like the coo-ee of the Australian
bush, far off and faint; but the children in the kitchen heard it at the
same time, for they too had been listening, and instantly went mad with
excitement.
"Father!" they all screamed together. "Father's coming!" and out they
rushed and away they fled down the darkening road, exerting their full
voices in shrill answering cries.
We were anxious to see this unfortunate man, who was yet happy in a
loving family. He had gone early in the morning in his donkey-cart to
the little market town, fourteen miles away, to get the few necessaries
they could afford to buy. Doubtless they would be very few. We had
not long to wait, as the white donkey that drew the cart had put on a
tremendous spurt at the end, notwithstanding that the four youngsters
had climbed in to add to his burden. But what was our surprise to behold
in the charioteer a tall, gaunt, grey-faced old man with long white hair
and beard! He must have been seventy, that old man with a young wife and
four happy bright-eyed little children!
We could understand it better when he finally settled down in his corner
in the kitchen and began to relate the events of the day, addressing his
poor little wife, now busy darning or patching an old garment, while the
children, clustered at his knee, listened as to a fairy tale. Certainly
this white-haired man had not grown old in mind; he was keenly
interested in all he saw and heard, and he had seen and heard much in
the little market town that day. Cattle and pigs and sheep and shepherds
and sheepdogs; farmers, shopkeepers, dealers, publicans, tramps, and
gentlefolks in carriages and on horseback; shops, too, with beautiful
new things in the windows; millinery, agricultural implements, flowers
and fruit and vegetables; toys and books and sweeties of all colours.
And the people he had met on the road and at market, and what they had
said to him about the weather and their business and the prospects of
the year, how their wives and children were, and the clever jokes they
had made, and his own jokes, which were the cleverest of all. If he had
just returned from Central Africa or from Thibet he could not have had
more to tell them nor told it with greater zest.
We went to our room, but until the small hours the wind of the old
traveller's talk could still be heard at intervals from the kitchen,
mingled with occasional shrill explosions of laughter from the listening
children.
It happened that on the following day, spent in idling in the forest and
about the hamlet, conversing with the cottagers, we were told that
our old man was a bit of a humbug; that he was a great talker, with a
hundred schemes for the improvement of his fortunes, and, incidently,
for the benefit of his neighbours and the world at large; but nothing
came of it all and he was now fast sinking into the lowest depths of
poverty. Yet who would blame him? 'Tis the nature of the gorse to be
"unprofitably gay." All that, however, is a question for the moralist;
the point now is that in walking, even in that poor way, when, on
account of physical weakness, it was often a pain and weariness, there
are alleviations which may be more to us than positive pleasures, and
scenes to delight the eye that are missed by the wheelman in his haste,
or but dimly seen or vaguely surmised in passing--green refreshing nooks
and crystal streamlets, and shadowy woodland depths with glimpses of a
blue sky beyond--all in the wilderness of the human heart.