"A-birding on a Broncho" is the title of a charming little book
published some years ago, and probably better known to readers on the
other side of the Atlantic than in England. I remember reading it with
pleasure and pride on account of the author's name, Florence Merriam,
seeing that, on my mother's side, I am partly a Merriam myself (of the
branch on the other side of the Atlantic), and having been informed that
all of that rare name are of one family, I took it that we were related,
though perhaps very distantly. "A-birding on a Broncho" suggested an
equally alliterative title for this chapter--"Birding on a Bike"; but
I will leave it to others, for those who go a-birding are now very
many and are hard put to find fresh titles to their books. For several
reasons it will suit me better to borrow from Cobbett and name this
chapter "Rural Rides."
Sore of us do not go out on bicycles to observe the ways of birds.
Indeed, some of our common species have grown almost too familiar
with the wheel: it has become a positive danger to them. They not
infrequently mistake its rate of speed and injure themselves in
attempting to fly across it. Recently I had a thrush knock himself
senseless against the spokes of my forewheel, and cycling friends have
told me of similar experiences they have had, in some instances the
heedless birds getting killed. Chaffinches are like the children in
village streets--they will not get out of your way; by and by in rural
places the merciful man will have to ring his bell almost incessantly to
avoid running over them. As I do not travel at a furious speed I manage
to avoid most things, even the wandering loveless oil-beetle and the
small rose-beetle and that slow-moving insect tortoise the tumbledung.
Two or three seasons ago I was so unfortunate as to run over a large and
beautifully bright grass snake near Aldermaston, once a snake sanctuary.
He writhed and wriggled on the road as if I had broken his back, but on
picking him up I was pleased to find that my wind-inflated rubber tyre
had not, like the brazen chariot wheel, crushed his delicate vertebra;
he quickly recovered, and when released glided swiftly and easily away
into cover. Twice only have I deliberately tried to run down, to tread
on coat-tails so to speak, of any wild creature. One was a weasel,
the other a stoat, running along at a hedge-side before me. In both
instances, just as the front wheel was touching the tail, the little
flat-headed rascal swerved quickly aside and escaped.
Even some of the less common and less tame birds care as little for a
man on a bicycle as they do for a cow. Not long ago a peewit trotted
leisurely across the road not more than ten yards from my front wheel;
and on the same day I came upon a green woodpecker enjoying a dust-bath
in the public road. He declined to stir until I stopped to watch him,
then merely flew about a dozen yards away and attached himself to the
trunk of a fir tree at the roadside and waited there for me to go. Never
in all my wanderings afoot had I seen a yaffingale dusting himself like
a barn-door fowl!
It is not seriously contended that birds can be observed narrowly in
this easy way; but even for the most conscientious field naturalist the
wheel has its advantages. It carries him quickly over much barren ground
and gives him a better view of the country he traverses; finally, it
enables him to see more birds. He will sometimes see thousands in a day
where, walking, he would hardly have seen hundreds, and there is joy in
mere numbers. It was just to get this general rapid sight of the bird
life of the neighbouring hilly district of Hampshire that I was at
Newbury on the last day of October. The weather was bright though very
cold and windy, and towards evening I was surprised to see about twenty
swallows in Northbrook Street flying languidly to and fro in the shelter
of the houses, often fluttering under the eaves and at intervals sitting
on ledges and projections. These belated birds looked as if they wished
to hibernate, or find the most cosy holes to die in, rather than to
emigrate. On the following day at noon they came out again and flew up
and down in the same feeble aimless manner.
Undoubtedly a few swallows of all three species, but mostly
house-martins, do "lie up" in England every winter, but probably very
few survive to the following spring. We should have said that it was
impossible that any should survive but for one authentic instance in
recent years, in which a barn-swallow lived through the winter in a
semi-torpid state in an outhouse at a country vicarage. What came of
the Newbury birds I do not know, as I left on the 2nd of November--tore
myself away, I may say, for, besides meeting with people I didn't know
who treated a stranger with sweet friendliness, it is a town which
quickly wins one's affections. It is built of bricks of a good deep rich
red--not the painfully bright red so much in use now--and no person has
had the bad taste to spoil the harmony by introducing stone and stucco.
Moreover, Newbury has, in Shaw House, an Elizabethan mansion of the
rarest beauty. Let him that is weary of the ugliness and discords in our
town buildings go and stand by the ancient cedar at the gate and look
across the wide green lawn at this restful house, subdued by time to
a tender rosy-red colour on its walls and a deep dark red on its roof,
clouded with grey of lichen.
From Newbury and the green meadows of the Kennet the Hampshire hills may
be seen, looking like the South Down range at its highest point viewed
from the Sussex Weald. I made for Coombe Hill, the highest hill in
Hampshire, and found it a considerable labour to push my machine up from
the pretty tree-hidden village of East Woodhay at its foot. The top is a
league-long tableland, with stretches of green elastic turf, thickets
of furze and bramble, and clumps of ancient noble beeches--a beautiful
lonely wilderness with rabbits and birds for only inhabitants. From
the highest point where a famous gibbet stands for ever a thousand feet
above the sea and where there is a dew-pond, the highest in England,
which has never dried up although a large flock of sheep drink in it
every summer day, one looks down into an immense hollow, a Devil's Punch
Bowl very many times magnified,--and spies, far away and far below,
a few lonely houses half hidden by trees at the bottom. This is the
romantic village of Coombe, and hither I went and found the vicar busy
in the garden of the small old picturesque parsonage. Here a very pretty
little bird comedy was in progress: a pair of stock-doves which had been
taken from a rabbit-hole in the hill and reared by hand had just escaped
from the large cage where they had always lived, and all the family were
excitedly engaged in trying to recapture them. They were delightful to
see--those two pretty blue birds with red legs running busily about
on the green lawn, eagerly searching for something to eat and finding
nothing. They were quite tame and willing to be fed, so that anyone
could approach them and put as much salt on their tails as he liked, but
they refused to be touched or taken; they were too happy in their new
freedom, running and flying about in that brilliant sunshine, and when I
left towards the evening they were still at large.
But before quitting that small isolated village in its green basin--a
human heart in a chalk hill, almost the highest in England--I wished the
hours I spent in it had been days, so much was there to see and hear.
There was the gibbet on the hill, for example, far up on the rim of the
green basin, four hundred feet above the village; why had that memorial,
that symbol of a dreadful past, been preserved for so many years and
generations? and why had it been raised so high--was it because the
crime of the person put to death there was of so monstrous a nature that
it was determined to suspend him, if not on a gibbet fifty cubits high,
at all events higher above the earth than Haman the son of Hammedatha
the Agagite? The gruesome story is as follows.
Once upon a time there lived a poor widow woman in Coombe, with two
sons, aged fourteen and sixteen, who worked at a farm in the village.
She had a lover, a middle-aged man, living at Woodhay, a carrier who
used to go on two or three days each week with his cart to deliver
parcels at Coombe. But he was a married man, and as he could not marry
the widow while his wife remained alive, it came into his dull Berkshire
brain that the only way out of the difficulty was to murder her, and
to this course the widow probably consented. Accordingly, one day, he
invited or persuaded her to accompany him on his journey to the remote
village, and on the way he got her out of the cart and led her into a
close thicket to show her something he had discovered there. What
he wished to show her (according to one version of the story) was a
populous hornets' nest, and having got her there he suddenly flung her
against it and made off, leaving the cloud of infuriated hornets to
sting her to death. That night he slept at Coombe, or stayed till a
very late hour at the widow's cottage and told her what he had done.
In telling her he had spoken in his ordinary voice, but by and by it
occurred to him that the two boys, who were sleeping close by in the
living-room, might have been awake and listening. She assured him that
they were both fast asleep, but he was not satisfied, and said that if
they had heard him he would kill them both, as he had no wish to swing,
and he could not trust them to hold their tongues. Thereupon they got up
and examined the faces of the two boys, holding a candle over them,
and saw that they were in a deep sleep, as was natural after their long
day's hard work on the farm, and the murderer's fears were set at rest.
Yet one of the boys, the younger, had been wide awake all the time,
listening, trembling with terror, with wide eyes to the dreadful tale,
and only when they first became suspicious instinct came to his aid and
closed his eyes and stilled his tremors and gave him the appearance of
being asleep. Early next morning, with his terror still on him, he told
what he had heard to his brother, and by and by, unable to keep the
dreadful secret, they related it to someone--a carter or ploughman on
the farm. He in turn told the farmer, who at once gave information, and
in a short time the man and woman were arrested. In due time they were
tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged in the parish where the
crime had been committed.
Everybody was delighted, and Coombe most delighted of all, for it
happened that some of their wise people had been diligently examining
into the matter and had made the discovery that the woman had been
murdered just outside their borders in the adjoining parish of Inkpen,
so that they were going to enjoy seeing the wicked punished at somebody
else's expense. Inkpen was furious and swore that it would not be
saddled with the cost of a great public double execution. The line
dividing the two parishes had always been a doubtful one; now they
were going to take the benefit of the doubt and let Coombe hang its own
miscreants!
As neither side would yield, the higher authorities were compelled to
settle the matter for them, and ordered the cost to be divided between
the two parishes, the gibbet to be erected on the boundary line, as far
as it could be ascertained. This was accordingly done, the gibbet
being erected at the highest point crossed by the line, on a stretch
of beautiful smooth elastic turf, among prehistoric earthworks--a
spot commanding one of the finest and most extensive views in Southern
England. The day appointed for the execution brought the greatest
concourse of people ever witnessed at that lofty spot, at all events
since prehistoric times. If some of the ancient Britons had come out
of their graves to look on, seated on their earthworks, they would have
probably rubbed their ghostly hands together and remarked to each other
that it reminded them of old times. All classes were there, from the
nobility and gentry, on horseback and in great coaches in which they
carried their own provisions, to the meaner sort who had trudged from
all the country round on foot, and those who had not brought their own
food and beer were catered for by traders in carts. The crowd was a
hilarious one, and no doubt that grand picnic on the beacon was the talk
of they country for a generation or longer. The two wretches having been
hanged in chains on one gibbet were left to be eaten by ravens, crows,
and magpipes, and dried by sun and winds, until, after long years, the
swinging, creaking skeletons with their chains on fell to pieces and
were covered with the turf, but the gibbet itself was never removed.
Then a strange thing happened. The sheep on a neighbouring farm became
thin and sickly and yielded little wool and died before their time. No
remedies availed and the secret of their malady could not be discovered;
but it went on so long that the farmer was threatened with utter
ruin. Then, by chance, it was discovered that the chains in which the
murderers had been hanged had been thrown by some evil-minded person
into a dew-pond on the farm. This was taken to be the cause of the
malady in the sheep; at all events, the chains having been taken out
of the pond and buried deep in the earth, the flock recovered: it was
supposed that the person who had thrown the chains in the water to
poison it had done so to ruin the farmer in revenge for some injustice
or grudge. But even now we are not quite done with the gibbet! Many,
many years had gone by when Inkpen discovered from old documents that
their little dishonest neighbour, Coombe, had taken more land than
she was entitled to, that not only a part but the whole of that noble
hill-top belonged to her! It was Inkpen's turn to chuckle now; but she
chuckled too soon, and Coombe, running out to look, found the old rotten
stump of the gibbet still in the ground. Hands off! she cried. Here
stands a post, which you set up yourself, or which we put up together
and agreed that this should be the boundary line for ever. Inkpen
sneaked off to hide herself in her village, and Coombe, determined to
keep the subject in mind, set up a brand-new stout gibbet in the place
of the old rotting one. That too decayed and fell to pieces in time,
and the present gibbet is therefore the third, and nobody has ever
been hanged on it. Coombe is rather proud of it, but I am not sure that
Inkpen is.
That was one of three strange events in the life of the village which I
heard: the other two must be passed by; they would take long to tell and
require a good pen to do them justice. To me the best thing in or of the
village was the vicar himself, my put-upon host, a man of so blithe
a nature, so human and companionable, that when I, a perfect stranger
without an introduction or any excuse for such intrusion came down like
a wolf on his luncheon-table, he received me as if I had been an old
friend or one of his own kindred, and freely gave up his time to me for
the rest of that day. To count his years he was old: he had been vicar
of Coombe for half a century, but he was a young man still and had never
had a day's illness in his life--he did not know what a headache was. He
smoked with me, and to prove that he was not a total abstainer he drank
my health in a glass of port wine--very good wine. It was Coombe that
did it--its peaceful life, isolated from a distracting world in that
hollow hill, and the marvellous purity of its air. "Sitting there on my
lawn," he said, "you are six hundred feet above the sea, although in a
hollow four hundred feet deep." It was an ideal open-air room, round and
green, with the sky for a roof. In winter it was sometimes very cold,
and after a heavy fall of snow the scene was strange and impressive from
the tiny village set in its stupendous dazzling white bowl. Not only on
those rare arctic days, but at all times it was wonderfully quiet. The
shout of a child or the peaceful crow of a cock was the loudest sound
you heard. Once a gentleman from London town came down to spend a week
at the parsonage. Towards evening on the very first day he grew restless
and complained of the abnormal stillness. "I like a quiet place well
enough," he exclaimed, "but this tingling silence I can't stand!" And
stand it he wouldn't and didn't, for on the very next morning he took
himself off. Many years had gone by, but the vicar could not forget the
Londoner who had come down to invent a new way of describing the Coombe
silence. His tingling phrase was a joy for ever.
He took me to the church--one of the tiniest churches in the country,
just the right size for a church in a tiny village and assured me that
he had never once locked the door in his fifty years--day and night it
was open to any one to enter. It was a refuge and shelter from the storm
and the Tempest, and many a poor homeless wretch had found a dry place
to sleep in that church during the last half a century. This man's
feeling of pity and tenderness for the very poor, even the outcast and
tramp, was a passion. But how strange all this would sound in the ears
of many country clergymen! How many have told me when I have gone to the
parsonage to "borrow the key" that it had been found necessary to keep
the church door locked, to prevent damage, thefts, etc. "Have you never
had anything stolen?" I asked him. Yes, once, a great many years ago,
the church plate had been taken away in the night. But it was recovered:
the thief had taken it to the top of the hill and thrown it into the
dewpond there, no doubt intending to take it out and dispose of it at
some more convenient time. But it was found, and had ever since then
been kept safe at the vicarage. Nothing of value to tempt a man to steal
was kept in the church. He had never locked it, but once in his fifty
years it had been locked against him by the churchwardens. This
happened in the days of the Joseph Arch agitation, when the agricultural
labourer's condition was being hotly discussed throughout the country.
The vicar's heart was stirred, for he knew better than most how hard
these conditions were at Coombe and in the surrounding parishes. He
took up the subject and preached on it in his own pulpit in a way that
offended the landowners and alarmed the farmers in the district. The
church wardens, who were farmers, then locked him out of his church,
and for two or three weeks there was no public worship in the parish of
Coombe. Doubtless their action was applauded by all the substantial
men in the neighbourhood; the others who lived in the cottages and were
unsubstantial didn't matter. That storm blew over, but its consequences
endured, one being that the inflammatory parson continued to be regarded
with cold disapproval by the squires and their larger tenants. But the
vicar himself was unrepentant and unashamed; on the contrary, he gloried
in what he had said and done, and was proud to be able to relate that a
quarter of a century later one of the two men who had taken that extreme
course said to him, "We locked you out of your own church, but years
have brought me to another mind about that question. I see it in a
different light now and know that you were right and we were wrong."
Towards evening I said good-bye to my kind friend and entertainer and
continued my rural ride. From Coombe it is five miles to Hurstbourne
Tarrant, another charming "highland" village, and the road, sloping
down the entire distance, struck me as one of the best to be on I had
travelled in Hampshire, running along a narrow green valley, with oak
and birch and bramble and thorn in their late autumn colours growing
on the slopes on either hand. Probably the beauty of the scene, or the
swift succession of beautiful scenes, with the low sun flaming on the
"coloured shades," served to keep out of my mind something that should
have been in it. At all events, it was odd that I had more than once
promised myself a visit to the very village I was approaching solely
because William Cobbett had described and often stayed in it, and now no
thought of him and his ever-delightful Rural Rides was in my mind.
Arrived at the village I went straight to the "George and Dragon," where
a friend had assured me I could always find good accommodations. But
he was wrong: there was no room for me, I was told by a weird-looking,
lean, white-haired old woman with whity-blue unfriendly eyes. She
appeared to resent it that any one should ask for accommodation at
such a time, when the "shooting gents" from town required all the rooms
available. Well, I had to sleep somewhere, I told her: couldn't she
direct me to a cottage where I could get a bed? No, she couldn't--it is
always so; but after the third time of asking she unfroze so far as to
say that perhaps they would take me in at a cottage close by. So I went,
and a poor kind widow who lived there with a son consented to put me
up. She made a nice fire in the sitting-room, and after warming myself
before it, while watching the firelight and shadows playing on the dim
walls and ceiling, it came to me that I was not in a cottage, but in
a large room with an oak floor and wainscoting. "Do you call this a
cottage?" I said to the woman when she came in with tea. "No, I have
it as a cottage, but it is an old farm-house called the Rookery," she
returned. Then, for the first time, I remembered Rural Rides. "This then
is the very house where William Cobbett used to stay seventy or eighty
years ago," I said. She had never heard of William Cobbett; she only
knew that at that date it had been tenanted by a farmer named Blount, a
Roman Catholic, who had some curious ideas about the land.
That settled it. Blount was the name of Cobbett's friend, and I had come
to the very house where Cobbett was accustomed to stay. But how odd that
my first thought of the man should have come to me when sitting by the
fire where Cobbett himself had sat on many a cold evening! And this was
November the second, the very day eighty-odd years ago when he paid his
first visit to the Rookery; at all events, it is the first date he gives
in Rural Rides. And he too had been delighted with the place and the
beauty of the surrounding country with the trees in their late autumn
colours. Writing on November 2nd, 1821, he says: "The place is commonly
called Uphusband, which is, I think, as decent a corruption of names as
one could wish to meet with. However, Uphusband the people will have it,
and Uphusband it shall be for me." That is indeed how he names it all
through his book, after explaining that "husband" is a corruption of
Hurstbourne, and that there are two Hurstbournes, this being the upper
one.
I congratulated myself on having been refused accommodation at the
"George and Dragon," and was more than satisfied to pass an evening
without a book, sitting there alone listening to an imaginary
conversation between those two curious friends. "Lord Carnarvon," says
Cobbett, "told a man, in 1820, that he did not like my politics. But
what did he mean by my politics? I have no politics but such as he ought
to like. To be sure I labour most assiduously to destroy a system of
distress and misery; but is that any reason why a Lord should dislike
my politics? However, dislike them or like them, to them, to those very
politics, the Lords themselves must come at last."
Undoubtedly he talked like that, just as he wrote and as he spoke in
public, his style, if style it can be called, being the most simple,
direct, and colloquial ever written. And for this reason, when we are
aweary of the style of the stylist, where the living breathing body
becomes of less consequence than its beautiful clothing, it is a relief,
and refreshment, to turn from the precious and delicate expression, the
implicit word, sought for high and low and at last found, the balance of
every sentence and perfect harmony of the whole work--to go from it to
the simple vigorous unadorned talk of Rural Rides. A classic, and as
incongruous among classics as a farmer in his smock-frock, leggings, and
stout boots would appear in a company of fine gentlemen in fashionable
dress. The powerful face is the main thing, and we think little of the
frock and leggings and how the hair is parted or if parted at all.
Harsh and crabbed as his nature no doubt was, and bitter and spiteful at
times, his conversation must yet have seemed like a perpetual feast
of honeyed sweets to his farmer friend. Doubtless there was plenty of
variety in it: now he would expatiate on the beauty of the green downs
over which he had just ridden, the wooded slopes in their glorious
autumn colours, and the rich villages between; this would remind him of
Malthus, that blasphemous monster who had dared to say that the increase
in food production did not keep pace with increase of population; then
a quieting down, a breathing-space, all about the turnip crop, the
price of eggs at Weyhill Fair, and the delights of hare coursing, until
politics would come round again and a fresh outburst from the glorious
demagogue in his tantrums.
At eight o'clock Cobbett would say good night and go to bed, and early
next morning write down what he had said to his friend, or some of it,
and send it off to be printed in his paper. That, I take it, is how
Rural Rides was written, and that is why it seems so fresh to us to this
day, and that to take it up after other books is like going out from a
luxurious room full of fine company into the open air to feel the wind
and rain on one's face and see the green grass. But I very much regret
that Cobbett tells us nothing of his farmer friend. Blount, I imagine,
must have been a man of a very fine character to have won the heart
and influenced such a person. Cobbett never loses an opportunity of
vilifying the parsons and expressing his hatred of the Established
Church; and yet, albeit a Protestant, he invariably softens down when he
refers to the Roman Catholic faith and appears quite capable of seeing
the good that is in it.
It was Blount, I think, who had soothed the savage breast of the man
in this matter. The only thing I could hear about Blount and his "queer
notions" regarding the land was his idea that the soil could be improved
by taking the flints out. "The soil to look upon," Cobbett truly says,
"appears to be more than half flint, but is a very good quality." Blount
thought to make it better, and for many years employed all the aged poor
villagers and the children in picking the flints from the ploughed land
and gathering them in vast heaps. It does not appear that he made his
land more productive, but his hobby was a good one for the poor of the
village; the stones, too, proved useful afterwards to the road-makers,
who have been using them these many years. A few heaps almost clothed
over with a turf which had formed on them in the course of eighty years
were still to be seen on the land when I was there.
The following day I took no ride. The weather was so beautiful it seemed
better to spend the time sitting or basking in the warmth and brightness
or strolling about. At all events, it was a perfect day at Hurstbourne
Tarrant, though not everywhere, for on that third of November the
greatest portion of Southern England was drowned in a cold dense white
fog. In London it was dark, I heard. Early in the morning I listened
to a cirl-bunting singing merrily from a bush close to the George and
Dragon Inn. This charming bird is quite common in the neighbourhood,
although, as elsewhere in England, the natives know it not by its book
name, nor by any other, and do not distinguish it from its less engaging
cousin, the yellowhammer.
After breakfast I strolled about the common and in Doles Wood, on the
down above the village, listening to the birds, and on my way back
encountered a tramp whose singular appearance produced a deep impression
on my mind. We have heard of a work by some modest pressman entitled
"Monarchs I have met", and I sometimes think that one equally
interesting might be written on "Tramps I have met". As I have neither
time nor stomach for the task, I will make a present of the title to
any one of my fellow-travellers, curious in tramps, who cares to use
it. This makes two good titles I have given away in this chapter with a
borrowed one.
But if it had been possible for me to write such a book, a prominent
place would be given in it to the one tramp I have met who could be
accurately described as gorgeous. I did not cultivate his acquaintance;
chance threw us together and we separated after exchanging a few polite
commonplaces, but his big flamboyant image remains vividly impressed on
my mind.
At noon, in the brilliant sunshine, as I came loiteringly down the long
slope from Doles Wood to the village, he overtook me. He was a huge man,
over six feet high, nobly built, suggesting a Scandinavian origin, with
a broad blond face, good features, and prominent blue eyes, and his
hair was curly and shone like gold in the sunlight. Had he been a mere
labourer in a workman's rough clay-stained clothes, one would have stood
still to look at and admire him, and say perhaps what a magnificent
warrior he would have looked with sword and spear and plumed helmet,
mounted on a big horse! But alas! he had the stamp of the irreclaimable
blackguard on his face; and that same handsome face was just then
disfigured with several bruises in three colours--blue, black, and red.
Doubtless he had been in a drunken brawl on the previous evening and had
perhaps been thrown out of some low public-house and properly punished.
In his dress he was as remarkable as in his figure. Bright blue trousers
much too small for his stout legs, once the property, no doubt, of
some sporting young gent of loud tastes in colours; a spotted fancy
waistcoat, not long enough to meet the trousers, a dirty scarlet tie,
long black frock-coat, shiny in places, and a small dirty grey cap which
only covered the topmost part of his head of golden hair.
Walking by the hedge-side he picked and devoured the late blackberries,
which were still abundant. It was a beautiful unkept hedge with scarlet
and purple fruit among the many-coloured fading leaves and silver-grey
down of old-man's-beard.
I too picked and ate a few berries and made the remark that it was late
to eat such fruit in November. The Devil in these parts, I told him,
flies abroad in October to spit on the bramble bushes and spoil the
fruit. It was even worse further north, in Norfolk and Suffolk, where
they say the Devil goes out at Michaelmas and shakes his verminous
trousers over the bushes.
He didn't smile; he went on sternly eating blackberries, and then
remarked in a bitter tone, "That Devil they talk about must have a busy
time, to go messing about blackberry bushes in addition to all his other
important work."
I was silent, and presently, after swallowing a few more berries, he
resumed in the same tone: "Very fine, very beautiful all this"--waving
his hand to indicate the hedge, its rich tangle of purple-red stems
and coloured leaves, and scarlet fruit and silvery oldman's-beard. "An
artist enjoys seeing this sort of thing, and it's nice for all those who
go about just for the pleasure of seeing things. But when it comes to a
man tramping twenty or thirty miles a day on an empty belly, looking for
work which he can't find, he doesn't see it quite in the same way."
"True," I returned, with indifference.
But he was not to be put off by my sudden coldness, and he proceeded to
inform me that he had just returned from Salisbury Plain, that it had
been noised abroad that ten thousand men were wanted by the War Office
to work in forming new camps. On arrival he found it was not so--it was
all a lie--men were not wanted--and he was now on his way to Andover,
penniless and hungry and--
By the time he had got to that part of his story we were some distance
apart, as I had remained standing still while he, thinking me still
close behind, had gone on picking blackberries and talking. He was soon
out of sight.
At noon the following day, the weather still being bright and genial,
I went to Crux Easton, a hilltop village consisting of some low farm
buildings, cottages, and a church not much bigger than a cottage. A
great house probably once existed here, as the hill has a noble avenue
of limes, which it wears like a comb or crest. On the lower slope of the
hill, the old unkept hedges were richer in colour than in most places,
owing to the abundance of the spindle-wood tree, laden with its loose
clusters of flame-bright, purple-pink and orange berries.
Here I saw a pretty thing: a cock cirl-bunting, his yellow breast
towards me, sitting quietly on a large bush of these same brilliant
berries, set amidst a mass of splendidly coloured hazel leaves, mixed
with bramble and tangled with ivy and silver-grey traveller's-joy. An
artist's heart would have leaped with joy at the sight, but all his
skill and oriental colours would have made nothing of it, for all
visible nature was part of the picture, the wide wooded earth and the
blue sky beyond and above the bird, and the sunshine that glorified all.
On the other side of the hedge there were groups of fine old beech trees
and, strange to see, just beyond the green slope and coloured trees,
was the great whiteness of the fog which had advanced thus far and now
appeared motionless. I went down and walked by the side of the bank
of mist, feeling its clammy coldness on one cheek while the other was
fanned by the warm bright air. Seen at a distance of a couple of hundred
yards, the appearance was that of a beautiful pearly-white cloud resting
upon the earth. Many fogs had I seen, but never one like this, so
substantial-looking, so sharply defined, standing like a vast white wall
or flat-topped hill at the foot of the green sunlit slope! I had the
fancy that if I had been an artist in sculpture, and rapid modeller, by
using the edge of my hand as a knife I could have roughly carved out a
human figure, then drawing it gently out of the mass proceeded to press
and work it to a better shape, the shape, let us say, of a beautiful
woman. Then, if it were done excellently, and some man-mocking deity, or
power of the air, happened to be looking on, he would breathe life and
intelligence into it, and send it, or her, abroad to mix with human kind
and complicate their affairs. For she would seem a woman and would be
like some women we have known, beautiful with blue flower-like eyes,
pale gold or honey-coloured hair; very white of skin, Leightonian,
almost diaphanous, so delicate as to make all other skins appear coarse
and made of clay. And with her beauty and a mysterious sweetness not
of the heart, since no heart there would be in that mist-cold body, she
would draw all hearts, ever inspiring, but never satisfying passion, her
beauty and alluring smiles being but the brightness of a cloud on which
the sun is shining.
Birds, driven by the fog to that sunlit spot, were all about me in
incredible numbers. Rooks and daws were congregating on the bushes,
where their black figures served to intensify the red-gold tints of the
foliage. At intervals the entire vast cawing multitude simultaneously
rose up with a sound as of many waters, and appeared now at last about
to mount up into the blue heavens, to float circling there far above the
world as they are accustomed to do on warm windless days in autumn. But
in a little while their brave note would change to one of trouble; the
sight of that immeasurable whiteness covering so much of the earth would
scare them, and led by hundreds of clamouring daws they would come down
again to settle once more in black masses on the shining yellow trees.
Close by a ploughed field of about forty acres was the camping-ground
of an army of peewits; they were travellers from the north perhaps, and
were quietly resting, sprinkled over the whole area. More abundant were
the small birds in mixed flocks or hordes--finches, buntings, and larks
in thousands on thousands, with a sprinkling of pipits and pied and grey
wagtails, all busily feeding on the stubble and fresh ploughed land.
Thickly and evenly distributed, they appeared to the vision ranging
over the brown level expanse as minute animated and variously coloured
clods--black and brown and grey and yellow and olive-green.
It was a rare pleasure to be in this company, to revel in their
astonishing numbers, to feast my soul on them as it were--little birds
in such multitudes that ten thousand Frenchmen and Italians might have
gorged to repletion on their small succulent bodies--and to reflect
that they were safe from persecution so long as they remained here in
England. This is something for an Englishman to be proud of.
After spending two hours at Crux Easton, with that dense immovable
fog close by, I at length took the plunge to get to Highclere. What
a change! I was at once where all form and colour and melody had been
blotted out. My clothes were hoary with clinging mist, my fingers numb
with cold, and Highclere, its scattered cottages appearing like dim
smudges through the whiteness, was the dreariest village on earth. I
fled on to Newbury in quest of warmth and light, and found it indoors,
but the town was deep in the fog.
The next day I ventured out again to look for the sun, and found it not,
but my ramble was not without its reward. In a pine wood three miles
from the town I stood awhile to listen to the sound as of copious rain
of the moisture dropping from the trees, when a sudden tempest of loud,
sharp metallic notes--a sound dear to the ornithologist's ears--made me
jump; and down into the very tree before which I was standing dropped a
flock of about twenty crossbills. So excited and noisy when coming
down, the instant they touched the tree they became perfectly silent and
motionless. Seven of their number had settled on the outside shoots, and
sat there within forty feet of me, looking like painted wooden images of
small green and greenish-yellow parrots; for a space of fifteen minutes
not the slightest movement did they make, and at length, before going, I
waved my arms about and shouted to frighten them, and still they refused
to stir.
Next morning that memorable fog lifted, to England's joy, and quitting
my refuge I went out once more into the region of high sheep-walks,
adorned with beechen woods and traveller's-joy in the hedges, rambling
by Highclere, Burghclere, and Kingsclere. The last--Hampshire's little
Cuzco--is a small and village-like old red brick town, unapproached by
a railroad and unimproved, therefore still beautiful, as were all places
in other, better, less civilized days. Here in the late afternoon
a chilly grey haze crept over the country and set me wishing for a
fireside and the sound of friendly voices, and I turned my face towards
beloved Silchester. Leaving the hills behind me I got away from the haze
and went my devious way by serpentine roads through a beautiful, wooded,
undulating country. And I wish that for a hundred, nay, for a thousand
years to come, I could on each recurring November have such an afternoon
ride, with that autumnal glory in the trees. Sometimes, seeing the road
before me carpeted with pure yellow, I said to myself, now I am coming
to elms; but when the road shone red and russet-gold before me I knew it
was overhung by beeches. But the oak is the common tree in this place,
and from every high point on the road I saw far before me and on either
hand the woods and copses all a tawny yellow gold--the hue of the dying
oak leaf. The tall larches were lemon-yellow, and when growing among
tall pines produced a singular effect. Best of all was it where beeches
grew among the firs, and the low sun on my left hand shining through
the wood gave the coloured translucent leaves an unimaginable splendour.
This was the very effect which men, inspired by a sacred passion, had
sought to reproduce in their noblest work--the Gothic cathedral and
church, its dim interior lit by many-coloured stained glass. The only
choristers in these natural fanes were the robins and the small lyrical
wren; but on passing through the rustic village of Wolverton I
stopped for a couple of minutes to listen to the lively strains of a
cirl-bunting among some farm buildings.
Then on to Silchester, its furzy common and scattered village and the
vast ruinous walls, overgrown with ivy, bramble, and thorn, of ancient
Roman Calleva. Inside the walls, at one spot, a dozen men were still at
work in the fading light; they were just finishing--shovelling earth
in to obliterate all that had been opened out during the year. The old
flint foundations that had been revealed; the houses with porches and
corridors and courtyards and pillared hypocausts; the winter room with
its wide beautiful floor--red and black and white and grey and yellow,
with geometric pattern and twist and scroll and flower and leaf and
quaint figures of man and beast and bird--all to be covered up with
earth so that the plough may be driven over it again, and the wheat grow
and ripen again as it has grown and ripened there above the dead city
for so many centuries. The very earth within those walls had a reddish
cast owing to the innumerable fragments of red tile and tessera mixed
with it. Larks and finches were busily searching for seeds in the
reddish-brown soil. They would soon be gone to their roosting-places
and the tired men to their cottages, and the white owl coming from his
hiding-place in the walls would have old Silchester to himself, as he
has had it since the cries and moans of the conquered died into silence
so long ago.