Afoot in England Part 6

It was best to hear them during the afternoon service in the cathedral, when the singing of the choir and throbbing and pealing of the organ which filled the vast interior was heard outside, subdued by the walls through which it pa.s.sed, and was like a beautiful mist or atmosphere of sound pervading and enveloping the great building; and when the plaining of the doves, owing to the rhythmic flow of the notes and their human characters, seemed to harmonize with and be a part of that sacred music.

Chapter Twelve: Whitesheet Hill

On Easter Sat.u.r.day the roadsides and copses by the little river Nadder were full of children gathering primroses; they might have filled a thousand baskets without the flowers being missed, so abundant were they in that place. Cold though it was the whole air was laden with the delicious fragrance. It was pleasant to see and talk with the little people occupied with the task they loved so well, and I made up my mind to see the result of all this flower-gathering next day in some of the village churches in the neighbourhood--Fovant, Teffant Evias, Chilmark, Swallowcliffe, Tisbury, and Fonthill Bishop. I had counted on some improvement in the weather--some bright sunshine to light up the flower-decorated interiors; but Easter Sunday proved colder than ever, with the bitter north-east still blowing, the grey travelling cloud still covering the sky; and so to get the full benefit of the bitterness I went instead to spend my day on the top of the biggest down above the valley. That was Whitesheet Hill, and forms the highest part of the long ridge dividing the valleys of the Ebble and Nadder.

It was roughest and coldest up there, and suited my temper best, for when the weather seems spiteful one finds a grim sort of satisfaction in defying it. On a genial day it would have been very pleasant on that lofty plain, for the flat top of the vast down is like a plain in appearance, and the earthworks on it show that it was once a populous habitation of man. Now because of the wind and cloud its aspect was bare and bleak and desolate, and after roaming about for an hour, exploring the thickest furze patches, I began to think that my day would have to be spent in solitude, without a living creature to keep me company. The birds had apparently all been blown away and the rabbits were staying at home in their burrows. Not even an insect could I see, although the furze was in full blossom; the honey-suckers were out of sight and torpid, and the bloom itself could no longer look "unprofitably gay," as the poet says it does. "Not even a wheatear!" I said, for I had counted on that bird in the intervals between the storms, although I knew I should not hear his wild delightful warble in such weather.

Then, all at once, I beheld that very bird, a solitary female, flittering on over the flat ground before me, perching on the little green ant-mounds and flirting its tail and bobbing as if greatly excited at my presence in that lonely place. I wondered where its mate was, following it from place to place as it flew, determined now I had found a bird to keep it in sight. Presently a great blackness appeared low down in the cloudy sky, and rose and spread, travelling fast towards me, and the little wheatear fled in fear from it and vanished from sight over the rim of the down. But I was there to defy the weather, and so instead of following the bird in search of shelter I sat down among some low furze bushes and waited and watched. By and by I caught sight of three magpies, rising one by one at long intervals from the furze and flying laboriously towards a distant hill-top grove of pines. Then I heard the wailing cry of a peewit, and caught sight of the bird at a distance, and soon afterwards a sound of another character--the harsh angry cry of a carrion crow, almost as deep as the raven's angry voice.

Before long I discovered the bird at a great height coming towards me in hot pursuit of a kestrel. They pa.s.sed directly over me so that I had them a long time in sight, the kestrel travelling quietly on in the face of the wind, the crow toiling after, and at intervals spurting till he got near enough to hurl himself at his enemy, emitting his croaks of rage. For invariably the kestrel with one of his sudden swallow-like turns avoided the blow and went on as before. I watched them until they were lost to sight in the coming blackness and wondered that so intelligent a creature as a crow should waste his energies in that vain chase. Still one could understand it and even sympathize with him. For the kestrel is a most insulting creature towards the bigger birds. He knows that they are incapable of paying him out, and when he finds them off their guard he will drop down and inflict a blow just for the fun of the thing. This outraged crow appeared determined to have his revenge.

Then the storm broke on me, and so fiercely did the rain and sleet thrash me that, fearing a cold soaking, I fled before it to the rim of the plain, where the wheatear had vanished, and saw a couple of hundred yards down on the smooth steep slope a thicket of dwarf trees. It was, the only shelter in sight, and to it I went, to discover much to my disgust that the trees were nothing but elders. For there is no tree that affords so poor a shelter, especially on the high open downs, where the foliage is scantier than in other situations and lets in the wind and rain in full force upon you.

But the elder affects me in two ways. I like it on account of early a.s.sociations, and because the birds delight in its fruit, though they wisely refuse to build in its branches; and I dislike it because its smell is offensive to me and its berries the least pleasant of all wild fruits to my taste. I can eat ivy-berries in March, and yew in its season, poison or not; and hips and haws and holly-berries and harsh acorn, and the rowan, which some think acrid; but the elderberry I can't stomach.

How comes it, I have asked more than once, that this poor tree is so often seen on the downs where it is so badly fitted to be and makes so sorry an appearance with its weak branches broken and its soft leaves torn by the winds? How badly it contrasts with the other trees and bushes that flourish on the downs--furze, juniper, holly, blackthorn, and hawthorn!

Two years ago, one day in the early spring, I was walking on an extensive down in another part of Wiltshire with the tenant of the land, who began there as a large sheep-farmer, but eventually finding that he could make more with rabbits than with sheep turned most of his land into a warren. The higher part of this down was overgrown with furze, mixed with holly and other bushes, but the slopes were mostly very bare.

At one spot on a wide bare slope where the rabbits had formed a big group of burrows there was a close little thicket of young elder trees, looking exceedingly conspicuous in the bright green of early April.

Calling my companion's attention to this little thicket I said something about the elder growing on the open downs where it always appeared to be out of harmony with its surroundings. "I don't suppose you planted elders here," I said.

"No, but I know who did," he returned, and he then gave me this curious history of the trees. Five years before, the rabbits, finding it a suitable spot to dig in, probably because of a softer chalk there, made a number of deep burrows at that spot. When the wheatears, or "horse-maggers" as he called them, returned in spring two or three pairs attached themselves to this group of burrows and bred in them. There was that season a solitary elder-bush higher up on the down among the furze which bore a heavy crop of berries; and when the fruit was ripe he watched the birds feeding on it, the wheatears among them. The following spring seedlings came up out of the loose earth heaped about the rabbit burrows, and as they were not cut down by the rabbits, for they dislike the elder, they grew up, and now formed a clump of fifty or sixty little trees of six feet to eight feet in height.

Who would have thought to find a tree-planter in the wheatear, the bird of the stony waste and open naked down, who does not even ask for a bush to perch on?

It then occurred to me that in every case where I had observed a clump of elder bushes on the bare downside, it grew upon a village or collection of rabbit burrows, and it is probable that in every case the clump owed its existence to the wheatears who had dropped the seed about their nesting-place. The clump where I had sought a shelter from the storm was composed of large old dilapidated-looking half-dead elders; perhaps their age was not above thirty or forty years, but they looked older than hawthorns of one or two centuries; and under them the rabbits had their diggings--huge old mounds and burrows that looked like a badger's earth. Here, too, the burrows had probably existed first and had attracted the wheatears, and the birds had brought the seed from some distant bush.

Crouching down in one of the big burrows at the roots of an old elder I remained for half an hour, listening to the thump-thump of the alarmed rabbits about me, and the accompanying hiss and swish of the wind and sleet and rain in the ragged branches.

The storm over I continued my rambles on Whitesheet Hill, and coming back an hour or two later to the very spot where I had seen and followed the wheatear, I all at once caught sight of a second bird, lying dead on the turf close to my feet! The sudden sight gave me a shock of astonishment, mingled with admiration and grief. For how pretty it looked, though dead, lying on its back, the little black legs stuck stiffly up, the long wings pressed against the sides, their black tips touching together like the clasped hands of a corpse; and the fan-like black and white tail, half open as in life, moved perpetually up and down by the wind, as if that tail-flirting action of the bird had continued after death. It was very beautiful in its delicate shape and pale harmonious colouring, resting on the golden-green mossy turf. And it was a male, undoubtedly the mate of the wheatear I had seen at the spot, and its little mate, not knowing what death is, had probably been keeping watch near it, wondering at its strange stillness and greatly fearing for its safety when I came that way, and pa.s.sed by without seeing it.

Poor little migrant, did you come back across half the world for this--back to your home on Whitesheet Hill to grow cold and fail in the cold April wind, and finally to look very pretty, lying stiff and cold, to the one pair of human eyes that were destined to see you! The little birds that come and go and return to us over such vast distances, they perish like this in myriads annually; flying to and from us they are blown away by death like sere autumn leaves, "the pestilence-stricken mult.i.tudes" whirled away by the wind! They die in myriads: that is not strange; the strange, the astonishing thing is the fact of death; what can they tell us of it--the wise men who live or have ever lived on the earth--what can they say now of the bright intelligent spirit, the dear little emotional soul, that had so fit a tenement and so fitly expressed itself in motions of such exquisite grace, in melody so sweet! Did it go out like the glow-worm's lamp, the life and sweetness of the flower?

Was its destiny not like that of the soul, specialized in a different direction, of the saint or poet or philosopher! Alas, they can tell us nothing!

I could not go away leaving it in that exposed place on the turf, to be found a little later by a magpie or carrion crow or fox, and devoured.

Close by there was a small round hillock, an old forsaken nest of the little brown ants, green and soft with moss and small creeping herbs--a suitable grave for a wheatear. Cutting out a round piece of turf from the side, I made a hole with my stick and put the dead bird in and replacing the turf left it neatly buried.

It was not that I had or have any quarrel with the creatures I have named, or would have them other than they are--carrion-eaters and scavengers, Nature's balance-keepers and purifiers. The only creatures on earth I loathe and hate are the gourmets, the carrion-crows and foxes of the human kind who devour wheatears and skylarks at their tables.

Chapter Thirteen: Bath and Wells Revisited

'Tis so easy to get from London to Bath, by merely stepping into a railway carriage which takes you smoothly without a stop in two short hours from Paddington, that I was amazed at myself in having allowed five full years to pa.s.s since my previous visit. The question was much in my mind as I strolled about noting the old-remembered names of streets and squares and crescents. Quiet Street was the name inscribed on one; it was, to me, the secret name of them all. The old impressions were renewed, an old feeling partially recovered. The wide, clean ways; the solid, stone-built houses with their dignified aspect; the large distances, terrace beyond terrace; mansions and vast green lawns and parks and gardens; avenues and groups of stately trees, especially that unmatched clump of old planes in the Circus; the whole town, the design in the cla.s.sic style of one master mind, set by the Avon, amid green hills, produced a sense of harmony and repose which cannot be equalled by any other town in the kingdom.

This idle time was delightful so long as I gave my attention exclusively to houses from the outside, and to hills, rocks, trees, waters, and all visible nature, which here harmonizes with man's works. To sit on some high hill and look down on Bath, sun-flushed or half veiled in mist; to lounge on Camden Crescent, or climb Sion Hill, or take my ease with the water-drinkers in the s.p.a.cious, comfortable Pump Room; or, better still, to rest at noon in the ancient abbey--all this was pleasure pure and simple, a quiet drifting back until I found myself younger by five years than I had taken myself to be.

I haunted the abbey, and the more I saw of it the more I loved it. The impression it had made on me during my former visits had faded, or else I had never properly seen it, or had not seen it in the right emotional mood. Now I began to think it the best of all the great abbey churches of England and the equal of the cathedrals in its effect on the mind.

How rich the interior is in its atmosphere of tempered light or tender gloom! How tall and graceful the columns holding up the high roof of white stone with its marvellous palm-leaf sculpture! What a vast expanse of beautifully stained gla.s.s! I certainly gave myself plenty of time to appreciate it on this occasion, as I visited it every day, sometimes two or three times, and not infrequently I sat there for an hour at a stretch.

Sitting there one day, thinking of nothing, I was gradually awakened to a feeling almost of astonishment at the sight of the extraordinary number of memorial tablets of every imaginable shape and size which crowd the walls. So numerous are they and so closely placed that you could not find s.p.a.ce anywhere to put your hand against the wall. We are accustomed to think that in cathedrals and other great ecclesiastical buildings the ill.u.s.trious dead receive burial, and their names and claims on our grat.i.tude and reverence are recorded, but in no fane in the land is there so numerous a gathering of the dead as in this place.

The inscription-covered walls were like the pages of an old black-letter volume without margins. Yet when I came to think of it I could not recall any Bath celebrity or great person a.s.sociated with Bath except Beau Nash, who was not perhaps a very great person. Probably Carlyle would have described him as a "meeserable creature."

Leaving my seat I began to examine the inscriptions, and found that they had not been placed there in memory of men belonging to Bath or even Somerset. These monuments were erected to persons from all counties in the three kingdoms, and from all the big towns, those to Londoners being most numerous. Nor were they of persons distinguished in any way. Here you find John or Henry or Thomas Smith, or Brown, or Jones, or Robinson, provision dealer, or merchant, of Clerkenwell, or Bermondsey, or Bishopsgate Street Within or Without; also many retired captains, majors, and colonels. There were hundreds more whose professions or occupations in life were not stated. There were also hundreds of memorials to ladies--widows and spinsters. They were all, in fact, to persons who had come to die in Bath after "taking the waters," and dying, they or their friends had purchased immortality on the walls of the abbey with a handful or two of gold. Here is one of several inscriptions of the kind I took the trouble to copy: "His early virtues, his cultivated talents, his serious piety, inexpressibly endeared him to his friends and opened to them many bright prospects of excellence and happiness. These prospects have all faded," and so on for several long lines in very big letters, occupying a good deal of s.p.a.ce on the wall.

But what and who was he, and what connection had he with Bath? He was a young man born in the West Indies who died in Scotland, and later his mother, coming to Bath for her health, "caused this inscription to be placed on the abbey walls"! If this policy or tradition is still followed by the abbey authorities, it will be necessary for them to build an annexe; if it be no longer followed, would it be going too far to suggest that these mural tablets to a thousand obscurities, which ought never to have been placed there, should now be removed and placed in some vault where the relations or descendants of the persons described could find, and if they wished it, have them removed?

But it must be said that the abbey is not without a fair number of memorials with which no one can quarrel; the one I admire most, to Quin, the actor, has, I think, the best or the most appropriate epitaph ever written. No, one, however familiar with the words, will find fault with me for quoting them here:

That tongue which set the table on a roar And charmed the public ear is heard no more.

Closed are those eyes, the harbingers of wit, Which spake before the tongue what Shakespeare writ.

Cold is that hand which living was stretched forth At friendship's call to succor modest worth.

Here lies James Quin, deign readers to be taught Whate'er thy strength of body, force of thought, In Nature's happiest mood however cast, To this complexion thou must come at last.

Quin's monument strikes one as the greatest there because of Garrick's living words, but there is another very much more beautiful.

I first noticed this memorial on the wall at a distance of about three yards, too far to read anything in the inscription except the name of Sibthorpe, which was strange to me, but instead of going nearer to read it I remained standing to admire it at that distance. The tablet was of white marble, and on it was sculptured the figure of a young man with curly head and cla.s.sic profile. He was wearing sandals and a loose mantle held to his breast with one hand, while in the other hand he carried a bunch of leaves and flowers. He appeared in the act of stepping ash.o.r.e from a boat of antique shape, and the artist had been singularly successful in producing the idea of free and vigorous motion in the figure as well as of some absorbing object in his mind. The figure was undoubtedly symbolical, and I began to amuse myself by trying to guess its meaning. Then a curious thing happened. A person who had been moving slowly along near me, apparently looking with no great interest at the memorials, came past me and glanced first at the tablet I was looking at, then at me. As our eyes met I remarked that I was admiring the best memorial I had found in the abbey, and then added, "I've been trying to make out its meaning. You see the man is a traveller and is stepping ash.o.r.e with a flowering spray in his hand. It strikes me that it may have been erected to the memory of a person who introduced some valuable plant into England."

"Yes, perhaps," he said. "But who was he?"

"I don't know yet," I returned. "I can only see that his name was Sibthorpe."

"Sibthorpe!" he exclaimed excitedly. "Why, this is the very memorial I've been looking for all over the abbey and had pretty well given up all hopes of finding it." With that he went to it and began studying the inscription, which was in Latin. John Sibthorpe, I found, was a distinguished botanist, author of the Flora Graeca, who died over a century ago.

I asked him why he was interested in Sibthorpe's memorial.

"Well, you see, I'm a great botanist myself," he explained, "and have been familiar with his name and work all my life. Of course," he added, "I don't mean I'm great in the sense that Sibthorpe was. I'm only a little local botanist, quite unknown outside my own circle; I only mean that I'm a great lover of botany."

I left him there, and had the curiosity to look up the great man's life, and found some very curious things in it. He was a son of Humphrey Sibthorpe, also a great botanist, who succeeded the still greater Dillenius as Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford, a post which he held for thirty-six years, and during that time he delivered one lecture, which was a failure. John, if he did not suck in botany with his mother's milk, took it quite early from his father, and on leaving the University went abroad to continue his studies. Eventually he went to Greece, inflamed with the ambition to identify all the plants mentioned by Dioscorides. Then he set about writing his Flora Graeca; but he had a rough time of it travelling about in that rude land, and falling ill he had to leave his work undone. When nearing his end he came to Bath, like so many other afflicted ones, only to die, and he was very properly buried in the abbey. In his will he left an estate the proceeds of which were to be devoted to the completion of his work, which was to be in ten folio volumes, with one hundred plates in each.

This was done and the work finished forty-four years after his death, when thirty copies were issued to the patient subscribers at two hundred and forty guineas a copy. But the whole cost of the work was set down at 30,000 pounds! A costlier work it would be hard to find; I wonder how many of us have seen it?

But I must go back to my subject. I was not in Bath just to die and lie there, like poor Sibthorpe, with all those strange bedfellows of his, nor was I in search of a vacant s.p.a.ce the size of my hand on the walls to bespeak it for my own memorial. On the contrary, I was there, as we have seen, to knock five years off my age. And it was very pleasant, as I have said, so long as I confined my attention to Bath, the stone-built town of old memories and a.s.sociations--so long as I was satisfied to loiter in the streets and wide green places and in the Pump Room and the abbey. The bitter came in only when, going from places to faces, I began to seek out the friends and acquaintances of former days. The familiar faces seemed not wholly familiar now. A change had been wrought; in some cases a great change, as in that of some weedy girl who had blossomed into fair womanhood. One could not grieve at that; but in the middle-aged and those who were verging on or past that period, it was impossible not to feel saddened at the difference. "I see no change in you," is a lie ready to the lips which would speak some pleasing thing, but it does not quite convince. Men are naturally brutal, and use no compliments to one another; on the contrary, they do not hesitate to make a joke of wrinkles and grey hairs--their own and yours. "But, oh, the difference" when the familiar face, no longer familiar as of old, is a woman's! This is no light thing to her, and her eyes, being preternaturally keen in such matters, see not only the change in you, but what is infinitely sadder, the changed reflection of herself. Your eyes have revealed the shock you have experienced. You cannot hide it; her heart is stabbed with a sudden pain, and she is filled with shame and confusion; and the pain is but greater if her life has glided smoothly--if she cannot appeal to your compa.s.sion, finding a melancholy relief in that saddest cry:--

O Grief has changed me since you saw me last!

For not grief, nor sickness, nor want, nor care, nor any misery or calamity which men fear, is her chief enemy. Time alone she hates and fears--insidious Time who has lulled her mind with pleasant flatteries all these years while subtly taking away her most valued possessions, the bloom and colour, the grace, the sparkle, the charm of other years.

Here is a true and pretty little story, which may or may not exactly fit the theme, but is very well worth telling. A lady of fashion, middle-aged or thereabouts, good-looking but pale and with the marks of care and disillusionment on her expressive face, accompanied by her pretty sixteen-years-old daughter, one day called on an artist and asked him to show her his studio. He was a very great artist, the greatest portrait-painter we have ever had and he did not know who she was, but with the sweet courtesy which distinguished him through all his long life--he died recently at a very advanced age--he at once put his work away and took her round his studio to show her everything he thought would interest her. But she was restless and inattentive, and by and by leaving the artist talking to her young daughter she began going round by herself, moving constantly from picture to picture. Presently she made an exclamation, and turning they saw her standing before a picture, a portrait of a girl, staring fixedly at it. "Oh," she cried, and it was a cry of pain, "was I once as beautiful as that?" and burst into tears.

She had found the picture she had been looking for, which she had come to see; it had been there twenty to twenty-five years, and the story of it was as follows.

When she was a young girl her mother took her to the great artist to have her portrait painted, and when the work was at length finished she and her mother went to see it. The artist put it before them and the mother looked at it, her face expressing displeasure, and said not one word. Nor did the artist open his lips. And at last the girl, to break the uncomfortable silence, said, "Where shall we hang it, mother?" and the lady replied, "Just where you like, my dear, so long as you hang it with the face to the wall." It was an insolent, a cruel thing to say, but the artist did not answer her bitterly; he said gently that she need not take the portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case he would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for the work. She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he never saw her again. And now Time, the humbler of proud beautiful women, had given him his revenge: the portrait, scorned and rejected when the colour and sparkle of life was in the face, had been looked on once more by its subject and had caused her to weep at the change in herself.

To return. One wishes in these moments of meeting, of surprise and sudden revealings, that it were permissible to speak from the heart, since then the very truth might have more balm than bitterness in it. "Grieve not, dear friend of old days, that I have not escaped the illusion common to all--the idea that those we have not looked on this long time--full five years, let us say--have remained as they were while we ourselves have been moving onwards and downwards in that path in which our feet are set. No one, however hardened he may be, can escape a shock of surprise and pain; but now the illusion I cherished has gone--now I have seen with my physical eyes, and a new image, with Time's writing on it, has taken the place of the old and brighter one, I would not have it otherwise. No, not if I could would I call back the vanished l.u.s.tre, since all these changes, above all that wistful look in the eyes, do but serve to make you dearer, my sister and friend and fellow-traveller in a land where we cannot find a permanent resting-place."