cut in the turf. The hills about Wendover, and, as far as I could see,
all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood of beech
plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been suffered to
extend itself into something more like a cloak, and hung down about the
shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of lying flatly along the
summit. The trees grew so close, and their boughs were so matted
together, that the whole wood looked as dense as a bush of heather. The
prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering red, touched here and there
with vivid yellow. But the autumn had scarce advanced beyond the
outworks; it was still almost summer in the heart of the wood; and as
soon as I had scrambled through the hedge, I found myself in a dim green
forest atmosphere under eaves of virgin foliage. In places where the
wood had itself for a background and the trees were massed together
thickly, the colour became intensified and almost gem-like: a perfect
fire of green, that seemed none the less green for a few specks of
autumn gold. None of the trees were of any considerable age or stature;
but they grew well together, I have said; and as the road turned and
wound among them, they fell into pleasant groupings and broke the light
up pleasantly. Sometimes there would be a colonnade of slim, straight
tree-stems with the light running down them as down the shafts of
pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to something, and led only
to a corner of sombre and intricate jungle. Sometimes a spray of
delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, the light lying flatly along
the top of it, so that against a dark background it seemed almost
luminous. There was a great hush over the thicket (for, indeed, it was
more of a thicket than a wood); and the vague rumours that went among
the tree-tops, and the occasional rustling of big birds or hares among
the undergrowth, had in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness,
that put the imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the
russet carpeting of last year's leaves. The spirit of the place seemed
to be all attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its breath to
number my footfalls. One could not help feeling that there ought to be
some reason for this stillness: whether, as the bright old legend goes,
Pan lay somewhere near in a siesta, or whether, perhaps, the heaven was
meditating rain, and the first drops would soon come pattering through
the leaves. It was not unpleasant, in such an humour, to catch sight,
ever and anon, of large spaces of the open plain. This happened only
where the path lay much upon the slope, and there was a flaw in the
solid leafy thatch of the wood at some distance below the level at which
I chanced myself to be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of
foreshortened distance, miniature fields, and Liliputian houses and
hedgerow trees would appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow
larger and smaller, and change and melt one into another, as I continued
to go forward, and so shift my point of view.
For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in the
wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and gobbling,
now and again interrupted by a harsh scream. As I advanced towards this
noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and I caught sight, through
the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure walls, and something like the
tops of a rickyard. And sure enough, a rickyard it proved to be, and a
neat little farm-steading, with the beech-woods growing almost to the
door of it. Just before me, however, as I came up the path, the trees
drew back and let in a wide flood of daylight on to a circular lawn. It
was here that the noises had their origin. More than a score of peacocks
(there are altogether thirty at the farm), a proper contingent of
peahens, and a great multitude that I could not number of more ordinary
barn-door fowls, were all feeding together on this little open lawn
among the beeches. They fed in a dense crowd, which swayed to and fro,
and came hither and thither as by a sort of tide, and of which the
surface was agitated like the surface of a sea as each bird guzzled his
head along the ground after the scattered corn. The clucking, cooing
noise that had led me thither was formed by the blending together of
countless expressions of individual contentment into one collective
expression of contentment, or general grace during meat. Every now and
again a big peacock would separate himself from the mob and take a
stately turn or two about the lawn, or perhaps mount for a moment upon
the rail, and there shrilly publish to the world his satisfaction with
himself and what he had to eat. It happened, for my sins, that none of
these admirable birds had anything beyond the merest rudiment of a tail.
Tails, it seemed, were out of season just then. But they had their necks
for all that; and by their necks alone they do as much surpass all the
other birds of our grey climate as they fall in quality of song below
the blackbird or the lark. Surely the peacock, with its incomparable
parade of glorious colour and the scrannel voice of it issuing forth, as
in mockery, from its painted throat, must, like my landlady's
butterflies at Great Missenden, have been invented by some skilful
fabulist for the consolation and support of homely virtue: or rather,
perhaps, by a fabulist not quite so skilful, who made points for the
moment without having a studious enough eye to the complete effect; for
I thought these melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon,
that I would have given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe
in all the spring woods. For indeed there is no piece of colour of the
same extent in nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of a
man's eyes; and to come upon so many of them, after these acres of
stone-coloured heavens and russet woods, and grey-brown ploughlands and
white roads, was like going three whole days' journey to the southward,
or a month back into the summer.
I was sorry to leave "Peacock Farm"--for so the place is called, after
the name of its splendid pensioners--and go forward again in the quiet
woods. It began to grow both damp and dusk under the beeches: and as the
day declined the colour faded out of the foliage: and shadow, without
form and void, took the place of all the fine tracery of leaves and
delicate gradations of living green that had before accompanied my walk.
I had been sorry to leave "Peacock Farm," but I was not sorry to find
myself once more in the open road, under a pale and somewhat
troubled-looking evening sky, and put my best foot foremost for the inn
at Wendover.
Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.
Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street should
go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen with a new
idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of neighbours to join in
his heresy. It would have somewhat the look of an abortive
watering-place, such as we may now see them here and there along the
coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely quiet design of some of
them, and the look of long habitation, of a life that is settled and
rooted, and makes it worth while to train flowers about the windows, and
otherwise shape the dwelling to the humour of the inhabitant. The
church, which might perhaps have served as rallying-point for these
loose houses, and pulled the township into something like intelligible
unity, stands some distance off among great trees; but the inn (to take
the public buildings in order of importance) is in what I understand to
be the principal street: a pleasant old house, with bay windows, and
three peaked gables, and many swallows' nests plastered about the eaves.
The interior of the inn was answerable to the outside: indeed, I never
saw any room much more to be admired than the low wainscoted parlour in
which I spent the remainder of the evening. It was a short oblong in
shape, save that the fireplace was built across one of the angles so as
to cut it partially off, and the opposite angle was similarly truncated
by a corner cupboard. The wainscot was white, and there was a Turkey
carpet on the floor, so old that it might have been imported by Walter
Shandy before he retired, worn almost through in some places, but in
others making a good show of blues and oranges, none the less harmonious
for being somewhat faded. The corner cupboard was agreeable in design;
and there were just the right things upon the shelves--decanters and
tumblers, and blue plates, and one red rose in a glass of water. The
furniture was old-fashioned and stiff. Everything was in keeping, down
to the ponderous leaden inkstand on the round table. And you may fancy
how pleasant it looked all flushed and flickered over by the light of a
brisk companionable fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted sort of
perspective, in the three compartments of the old mirror above the
chimney. As I sat reading in the great arm-chair, I kept looking round
with the tail of my eye at the quaint, bright picture that was about me,
and could not help some pleasure and a certain childish pride in forming
part of it. The book I read was about Italy in the early Renaissance,
the pageantries and the light loves of princes, the passion of men for
learning, and poetry, and art; but it was written, by good luck, after a
solid, prosaic fashion, that suited the room infinitely more nearly than
the matter; and the result was that I thought less, perhaps, of Lippo
Lippi, or Lorenzo, or Politian, than of the good Englishman who had
written in that volume what he knew of them, and taken so much pleasure
in his solemn polysyllables.
I was not left without society. My landlord had a very pretty little
daughter whom we shall call Lizzie. If I had made any notes at the time,
I might be able to tell you something definite of her appearance. But
faces have a trick of growing more and more spiritualised and abstract
in the memory, until nothing remains of them but a look, a haunting
expression; just that secret quality in a face that is apt to slip out
somehow under the cunningest painter's touch, and leave the portrait
dead for the lack of it. And if it is hard to catch with the finest of
camel's hair pencils, you may think how hopeless it must be to pursue
after it with clumsy words. If I say, for instance, that this look,
which I remember as Lizzie, was something wistful that seemed partly to
come of slyness and in part of simplicity, and that I am inclined to
imagine it had something to do with the daintiest suspicion of a cast in
one of her large eyes, I shall have said all that I can, and the reader
will not be much advanced towards comprehension. I had struck up an
acquaintance with this little damsel in the morning, and professed much
interest in her dolls, and an impatient desire to see the large one
which was kept locked away for great occasions. And so I had not been
very long in the parlour before the door opened, and in came Miss Lizzie
with two dolls tucked clumsily under her arm. She was followed by her
brother John, a year or so younger than herself, not simply to play
propriety at our interview, but to show his own two whips in emulation
of his sister's dolls. I did my best to make myself agreeable to my
visitors, showing much admiration for the dolls and dolls' dresses, and,
with a very serious demeanour, asking many questions about their age and
character. I did not think that Lizzie distrusted my sincerity, but it
was evident she was both bewildered and a little contemptuous. Although
she was ready herself to treat her dolls as if they were alive, she
seemed to think rather poorly of any grown person who could fall
heartily into the spirit of the fiction. Sometimes she would look at me
with gravity and a sort of disquietude, as though she really feared I
must be out of my wits. Sometimes, as when I inquired too particularly
into the question of their names, she laughed at me so long and heartily
that I began to feel almost embarrassed. But when, in an evil moment, I
asked to be allowed to kiss one of them, she could keep herself no
longer to herself. Clambering down from the chair on which she sat
perched to show me, Cornelia-like, her jewels, she ran straight out of
the room and into the bar--it was just across the passage,--and I could
hear her telling her mother in loud tones, but apparently more in sorrow
than in merriment, that _the gentleman in the parlour wanted to kiss
Dolly_. I fancy she was determined to save me from this humiliating
action, even in spite of myself, for she never gave me the desired
permission. She reminded me of an old dog I once knew, who would never
suffer the master of the house to dance, out of an exaggerated sense of
the dignity of that master's place and carriage.
After the young people were gone there was but one more incident ere I
went to bed. I heard a party of children go up and down the dark street
for a while, singing together sweetly. And the mystery of this little
incident was so pleasant to me that I purposely refrained from asking
who they were, and wherefore they went singing at so late an hour. One
can rarely be in a pleasant place without meeting with some pleasant
accident. I have a conviction that these children would not have gone
singing before the inn unless the inn-parlour had been the delightful
place it was. At least, if I had been in the customary public room of
the modern hotel, with all its disproportions and discomforts, my ears
would have been dull, and there would have been some ugly temper or
other uppermost in my spirit, and so they would have wasted their songs
upon an unworthy hearer.
Next morning I went along to visit the church. It is a long-backed
red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a pleasant
graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken already. The
sky was drowned in a mist. Now and again pulses of cold wind went about
the enclosure, and set the branches busy overhead, and the dead leaves
scurrying in to the angles of the church buttresses. Now and again,
also, I could hear the dull sudden fall of a chestnut among the
grass--the dog would bark before the rectory door--or there would come a
clinking of pails from the stable-yard behind. But in spite of these
occasional interruptions--in spite, also, of the continuous autumn
twittering that filled the trees--the chief impression somehow was one
as of utter silence, inasmuch that the little greenish bell that peeped
out of a window in the tower disquieted me with a sense of some possible
and more inharmonious disturbance. The grass was wet, as if with a
hoar-frost that had just been melted. I do not know that ever I saw a
morning more autumnal. As I went to and fro among the graves, I saw some
flowers set reverently before a recently erected tomb, and drawing near
was almost startled to find they lay on the grave of a man seventy-two
years old when he died. We are accustomed to strew flowers only over the
young, where love has been cut short untimely, and great possibilities
have been restrained by death. We strew them there in token that these
possibilities, in some deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the
touch of our dead loves remain with us and guide us to the end. And yet
there was more significance, perhaps, and perhaps a greater consolation,
in this little nosegay on the grave of one who had died old. We are apt
to make so much of the tragedy of death, and think so little of the
enduring tragedy of some men's lives, that we see more to lament for in
a life cut off in the midst of usefulness and love, than in one that
miserably survives all love and usefulness, and goes about the world the
phantom of itself, without hope, or joy, or any consolation. These
flowers seemed not so much the token of love that survived death, as of
something yet more beautiful--of love that had lived a man's life out to
an end with him, and been faithful and companionable, and not weary of
loving, throughout all these years.
The morning cleared a little, and the sky was once more the old
stone-coloured vault over the sallow meadows and the russet woods, as I
set forth on a dog-cart from Wendover to Tring. The road lay for a good
distance along the side of the hills, with the great plain below on one
hand, and the beech-woods above on the other. The fields were busy with
people ploughing and sowing; every here and there a jug of ale stood in
the angle of the hedge, and I could see many a team wait smoking in the
furrow as ploughman or sower stepped aside for a moment to take a
draught. Over all the brown ploughlands, and under all the leafless
hedgerows, there was a stout piece of labour abroad, and, as it were, a
spirit of picnic. The horses smoked and the men laboured and shouted and
drank in the sharp autumn morning; so that one had a strong effect of
large, open-air existence. The fellow who drove me was something of a
humorist; and his conversation was all in praise of an agricultural
labourer's way of life. It was he who called my attention to these jugs
of ale by the hedgerow; he could not sufficiently express the liberality
of these men's wages; he told me how sharp an appetite was given by
breaking up the earth in the morning air, whether with plough or spade,
and cordially admired this provision of nature. He sang _O fortunatos
agricolas_! indeed, in every possible key, and with many cunning
inflections, till I began to wonder what was the use of such people as
Mr. Arch, and to sing the same air myself in a more diffident manner.
Tring was reached, and then Tring railway station; for the two are not
very near, the good people of Tring having held the railway, of old
days, in extreme apprehension, lest some day it should break loose in
the town and work mischief. I had a last walk, among russet beeches as
usual, and the air filled, as usual, with the carolling of larks; I
heard shots fired in the distance, and saw, as a new sign of the
fulfilled autumn, two horsemen exercising a pack of fox-hounds. And then
the train came and carried me back to London.
FOOTNOTE:
[40] I had nearly finished the transcription of the following pages,
when I saw on a friend's table the number containing the piece from
which this sentence is extracted, and, struck with a similarity of
title, took it home with me and read it with indescribable
satisfaction. I do not know whether I more envy M. Theuriet the
pleasure of having written this delightful article, or the reader
the pleasure, which I hope he has still before him, of reading it
once and again, and lingering over the passages that please him
most.
VII
A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY
(_A Fragment_: 1876)
At the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central district of the shire of
Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly. On the Carrick side of
the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, cleft with
shallow dells, and sown here and there with farms and tufts of wood.
Inland, it loses itself, joining, I suppose, the great herd of similar
hills that occupies the centre of the Lowlands. Towards the sea, it
swells out the coast-line into a protuberance, like a bay window in a
plan, and is fortified against the surf behind bold crags. This hill is
known as the Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more shortly, Brown Carrick.
It had snowed overnight. The fields were all sheeted up; they were
tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modelled through the
pliant counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother. The wind
had made ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the sea, in quiet
weather, leaves upon the sand. There was a frosty stifle in the air. An
effusion of coppery light on the summit of Brown Carrick showed where
the sun was trying to look through; but along the horizon clouds of cold
fog had settled down, so that there was no distinction of sky and sea.
Over the white shoulders of the headlands, or in the opening of bays,
there was nothing but a great vacancy and blackness; and the road as it
drew near the edge of the cliff seemed to skirt the shores of creation
and void space.
The snow crunched underfoot, and at farms all the dogs broke out barking
as they smelt a passer-by upon the road. I met a fine old fellow, who
might have sat as the father in "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and who
swore most heathenishly at a cow he was driving. And a little after I
scraped acquaintance with a poor body tramping out to gather cockles.
His face was wrinkled by exposure; it was broken up into flakes and
channels, like mud beginning to dry, and weathered in two colours, an
incongruous pink and grey. He had a faint air of being surprised--which,
God knows, he might well be--that life had gone so ill with him. The
shape of his trousers was in itself a jest, so strangely were they
bagged and ravelled about his knees; and his coat was all bedaubed with
clay as though he had lain in a rain-dub during the New Year's
festivity. I will own I was not sorry to think he had had a merry New
Year, and been young again for an evening; but I was sorry to see the
mark still there. One could not expect such an old gentleman to be much
of a dandy, or a great student of respectability in dress; but there
might have been a wife at home, who had brushed out similar stains after
fifty New Years, now become old, or a round-armed daughter, who would
wish to have him neat, were it only out of self-respect and for the
ploughman sweetheart when he looks round at night. Plainly, there was
nothing of this in his life, and years and loneliness hung heavily on
his old arms. He was seventy-six, he told me; and nobody would give a
day's work to a man that age: they would think he couldn't do it. "And,
'deed," he went on, with a sad little chuckle, "'deed, I doubt if I
could." He said good-bye to me at a foot-path, and crippled wearily off
to his work. It will make your heart ache if you think of his old
fingers groping in the snow.
He told me I was to turn down beside the school-house for Dunure. And
so, when I found a lone house among the snow, and heard a babble of
childish voices from within, I struck off into a steep road leading
downwards to the sea. Dunure lies close under the steep hill: a haven
among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate disrepair, much apparatus
for drying nets, and a score or so of fishers' houses. Hard by, a few
shards of ruined castle overhang the sea, a few vaults, and one tall
gable honeycombed with windows. The snow lay on the beach to the
tide-mark. It was daubed on to the sills of the ruin; it roosted in the
crannies of the rock like white sea-birds; even on outlying reefs there
would be a little cock of snow, like a toy lighthouse. Everything was
grey and white in a cold and dolorous sort of shepherd's plaid. In the
profound silence, broken only by the noise of oars at sea, a horn was
sounded twice; and I saw the postman, girt with two bags, pause a moment
at the end of the clachan for letters. It is, perhaps, characteristic of
Dunure that none were brought him.
The people at the public-house did not seem well pleased to see me, and
though I would fain have stayed by the kitchen fire, sent me "ben the
hoose" into the guest-room. This guest-room at Dunure was painted in
quite aesthetic fashion. There are rooms in the same taste not a hundred
miles from London, where persons of an extreme sensibility meet together
without embarrassment. It was all in a fine dull bottle-green and black;
a grave harmonious piece of colouring, with nothing, so far as coarser
folk can judge, to hurt the better feelings of the most exquisite
purist. A cherry-red half window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth in
the cold room, and threw quite a glow on the floor. Twelve cockle-shells
and a halfpenny china figure were ranged solemnly along the
mantel-shelf. Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead of
sawdust contained sea-shells. And as for the hearthrug, it would merit
an article to itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text. It was
patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old
brocade and Chinese silk, shaken together in the kaleidoscope of some
tasteful housewife's fancy; but a work of art in its own way, and
plainly a labour of love. The patches came exclusively from people's
raiment. There was no colour more brilliant than a heather mixture; "My
Johnnie's grey breeks," well polished over the oar on the boat's
thwart, entered largely into its composition. And the spoils of an old
black cloth coat, that had been many a Sunday to church, added something
(save the mark!) of preciousness to the material.
While I was at luncheon four carters came in--long-limbed, muscular
Ayrshire Scots, with lean, intelligent faces. Four quarts of stout were
ordered; they kept filling the tumbler with the other hand as they
drank; and in less time than it takes me to write these words the four
quarts were finished--another round was proposed, discussed, and
negatived--and they were creaking out of the village with their carts.
The ruins drew you towards them. You never saw any place more desolate
from a distance, nor one that less belied its promise near at hand. Some
crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled in. The snow had
drifted into the vaults. The clachan dabbled with snow, the white hills,
the black sky, the sea marked in the coves with faint circular wrinkles,
the whole world, as it looked from a loop-hole in Dunure, was cold,
wretched, and out-at-elbows. If you had been a wicked baron and
compelled to stay there all the afternoon, you would have had a rare fit
of remorse. How you would have heaped up the fire and gnawed your
fingers! I think it would have come to homicide before the evening--if
it were only for the pleasure of seeing something red! And the masters
of Dunure, it is to be noticed, were remarkable of old for inhumanity.
One of these vaults where the snow had drifted was that "black voute"
where "Mr. Alane Stewart, Commendatour of Crossraguel," endured his
fiery trials. On the 1st and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr.
Alan!), Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his cook,
his pantryman, and another servant, bound the poor Commendator "betwix
an iron chimlay and a fire," and there cruelly roasted him until he
signed away his abbacy. It is one of the ugliest stories of an ugly
period, but not, somehow, without such a flavour of the ridiculous as
makes it hard to sympathise quite seriously with the victim. And it is
consoling to remember that he got away at last, and kept his abbacy,
and, over and above, had a pension from the Earl until he died.