Afoot in England Part 7

Alas! it cannot be spoken, and we cannot comfort a sister if she cannot divine the thought; but to brood over these inevitable changes is as idle as it is to lament that we were born into this mutable world. After all, it is because of the losses, the sadnesses, that the world is so infinitely sweet to us. The thought is in Cory's Mimnernus in Church:

All beauteous things for which we live By laws of time and s.p.a.ce decay.

But oh, the very reason why I clasp them is because they die.

From this sadness in Bath I went to a greater in Wells, where I had not been for ten years, and timing my visit so as to have a Sunday service at the cathedral of beautiful memories, I went on a Sat.u.r.day to Shepton Mallet. A small, squalid town, a "manufacturing town" the guide-book calls it. Well, yes; it manufactures Anglo-Bavarian beer in a gigantic brewery which looks bigger than all the other buildings together, the church and a dozen or twenty public-houses included. To get some food I went to the only eating-house in the place, and saw a pleasant-looking woman, plump and high-coloured, with black hair, with an expression of good humour and goodness of every description in her comely countenance.

She promised to have a chop ready by the time I had finished looking at the church, and I said I would have it with a small Guinness. She could not provide that, the house, she said, was strictly temperance. "My doctor has ordered me to take it," said I, "and if you are religious, remember that St. Paul tells us to take a little stout when we find it beneficial."

"Yes, I know that's what St. Paul says," she returned, with a heightened colour and a vicious emphasis on the saint's name, "but we go on a different principle."

So I had to go for my lunch to one of the big public-houses, called hotels; but whether it called itself a cow, or horse, or stag, or angel, or a blue or green something, I cannot remember. They gave me what they called a beefsteak pie--a tough crust and under it some blackish cubes carved out of the muscle of an antediluvian ox-and for this delicious fare and a gla.s.s of stout I paid three shillings and odd pence.

As I came away Shepton Mallet was shaken to its foundations by a tremendous and most diabolical sound, a prolonged lupine yell or yowl, as if a stupendous wolf, as big, say, as the Anglo-Bavarian brewery, had howled his loudest and longest. This infernal row, which makes Shepton seem like a town or village gone raving mad, was merely to inform the men, and, incidentally, the universe, that it was time for them to knock off work.

Turning my back on the place, I said to myself, "What a fool I am to be sure! Why could I not have been satisfied for once with a cup of coffee with my lunch? I should have saved a shilling, perhaps eighteen-pence, to rejoice the soul of some poor tramp; and, better still, I could have discussed some interesting questions with that charming rosy-faced woman. What, for instance, was the reason of her quarrel with the apostle; by the by, she never rebuked me for misquoting his words; and what is the moral effect (as seen through her clear brown eyes) of the Anglo-Bavarian brewery on the population of the small town and the neighbouring villages?"

The road I followed from Shepton to Wells winds by the water-side, a tributary of the Brue, in a narrow valley with hills on either side.

It is a five-mile road through a beautiful country, where there is practically no cultivation, and the green hills, with brown woods in their hollows, and here and there huge ma.s.ses of grey and reddish Bath stone cropping out on their sides, resembling gigantic castles and ramparts, long ruined and overgrown with ivy and bramble, produce the effect of a land dispeopled and gone back to a state of wildness.

A thaw had come that morning, ending the severest frost experienced this winter anywhere in England, and the valley was alive with birds, happy and tuneful at the end of January as in April. Looking down on the stream the sudden glory of a kingfisher pa.s.sed before me; but the sooty-brown water-ouzel with his white bib, a haunter, too, of this water, I did not see. Within a mile or so of Wells I overtook a small boy who belonged there, and had been to Shepton like me, noticing the birds. "I saw a kingfisher," I said. "So did I," he returned quickly, with pride. He described it as a biggish bird with a long neck, but its colour was not blue--oh, no! I suggested that it was a heron, a long-necked creature under six feet high, of no particular colour. No, it was not a heron; and after taking thought, he said, "I think it was a wild duck."

Bestowing a penny to encourage him in his promising researches into the feathered world, I went on by a footpath over a hill, and as I mounted to the higher ground there before me rose the n.o.ble tower of St.

Cuthbert's Church, and a little to the right of it, girt with high trees, the magnificent pile of the cathedral, with green hills and the pale sky beyond. O joy to look again on it, to add yet one more enduring image of it to the number I had long treasured! For the others were not exactly like this one; the building was not looked at from the same point of view at the same season and late hour, with the green hills lit by the departing sun and the clear pale winter sky beyond.

Coming in by the moated palace I stood once more on the Green before that west front, beautiful beyond all others, in spite of the strange defeatures Time has written on it. I watched the daws, numerous as ever, still at their old mad games, now springing into the air to scatter abroad with ringing cries, only to return the next minute and fling themselves back on their old perches on a hundred weather-stained broken statues in the niches. And while I stood watching them from the palace trees close by came the loud laugh of the green woodp.e.c.k.e.r. The same wild, beautiful sound, uttered perhaps by the same bird, which I had often heard at that spot ten years ago! "You will not hear that woodland sound in any other city in the kingdom," I wrote in a book of sketches ent.i.tled "Birds and Man", published in 1901.

But of my soul's adventures in Wells on the two or three following days I will say very little. That laugh of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r was an a.s.surance that Nature had suffered no change, and the town too, like the hills and rocks and running waters, seemed unchanged; but how different and how sad when I looked for those I once knew, whose hands I had hoped to grasp again! Yes, some were living still; and a dog too, one I used to take out for long walks and many a mad rabbit-hunt--a very handsome white-and-liver coloured spaniel. I found him lying on a sofa, and down he got and wagged his tail vigorously, pretending, with a pretty human hypocrisy in his gentle yellow eyes, that he knew me perfectly well, that I was not a bit changed, and that he was delighted to see me.

On my way back to Bath I had a day at Bristol. It was cattle-market day, and what with the bellowings, barkings, and shoutings, added to the buzz and clang of innumerable electric tramcars and the usual din of street traffic, one got the idea that the Bristolians had adopted a sort of Salvation Army theory, and were endeavouring to conquer earth (it is not heaven in this case) by making a tremendous noise. I amused myself strolling about and watching the people, and as train after train came in late in the day discharging loads of humanity, mostly young men and women from the surrounding country coming in for an evening's amus.e.m.e.nt, I noticed again the peculiarly Welsh character of the Somerset peasant--the shape of the face, the colour of the skin, and, above all, the expression.

Freeman, when here below, proclaimed it his mission to prove that "Englishmen were Englishmen, and not somebody else." It appeared to me that any person, unbia.s.sed by theories on such a subject, looking at that crowd, would have come to the conclusion, sadly or gladly, according to his nature, that we are, in fact, "somebody else."

Chapter Fourteen: The Return of the Native

That "going back" about which I wrote in the second chapter to a place where an unexpected beauty or charm has revealed itself, and has made its image a lasting and prized possession of the mind, is not the same thing as the revisiting a famous town or city, rich in many beauties and old memories, such as Bath or Wells, for instance. Such centres have a permanent attraction, and one who is a rover in the land must return to them again and again, nor does he fail on each successive visit to find some fresh charm or interest. The sadness of such returns, after a long interval, is only, as I have said, when we start "looking up" those with whom we had formed pleasant friendly relations. And all because of the illusion that we shall see them as they were--that Time has stood still waiting for our return, and by and by, to our surprise and grief, we discover that it is not so; that the dear friends of other days, long unvisited but unforgotten, have become strangers. This human loss is felt even more in the case of a return to some small centre, a village or hamlet where we knew every one, and our intimacy with the people has produced the sense of being one in blood with them. It is greatest of all when we return to a childhood's or boyhood's home. Many writers have occupied themselves with this mournful theme, and I imagine that a person of the proper Amiel-like tender and melancholy moralizing type of mind, by using his own and his friends' experiences, could write a charmingly sad and pretty book on the subject.

The really happy returns of this kind must be exceedingly rare. I am almost surprised to think that I am able to recall as many as two, but they hardly count, as in both instances the departure or exile from home happens at so early a time of life that no recollections of the people survived--nothing, in fact, but a vague mental picture of the place.

One was of a business man I knew in London, who lost his early home in a village in the Midlands, as a boy of eight or nine years of age, through the sale of the place by his father, who had become impoverished. The boy was trained to business in London, and when a middle-aged man, wishing to retire and spend the rest of his life in the country, he revisited his native village for the first time, and discovered to his joy that he could buy back the old home. He was, when I last saw him, very happy in its possession.

The other case I will relate more fully, as it is a very curious one, and came to my knowledge in a singular way.

At a small station near Eastleigh a man wearing a highly pleased expression on his face entered the smoking-carriage in which I was travelling to London. Putting his bag on the rack, he pulled out his pipe and threw himself back in his seat with a satisfied air; then, looking at me and catching my eye, he at once started talking. I had my newspaper, but seeing him in that overflowing mood I responded readily enough, for I was curious to know why he appeared so happy and who and what he was. Not a tradesman nor a bagman, and not a farmer, though he looked like an open-air man; nor could I form a guess from his speech and manner as to his native place. A robust man of thirty-eight or forty, with blue eyes and a Saxon face, he looked a thorough Englishman, and yet he struck me as most un-English in his lively, almost eager manner, his freedom with a stranger, and something, too, in his speech.

From time to time his face lighted up, when, looking to the window, his eyes rested on some pretty scene--a glimpse of stately old elm trees in a field where cattle were grazing, of the vivid green valley of a chalk stream, the paler hills beyond, the grey church tower or spire of some tree-hidden village. When he discovered that these hills and streams and rustic villages had as great a charm for me as for himself, that I knew and loved the two or three places he named in a questioning way, he opened his heart and the secret of his present happiness.

He was a native of the district, born at a farmhouse of which his father in succession to his grandfather had been the tenant. It was a small farm of only eighty-five acres, and as his father could make no more than a bare livelihood out of it, he eventually gave it up when my informant was but three years old, and selling all he had, emigrated to Australia. Nine years later he died, leaving a numerous family poorly provided for; the home was broken up and boys and girls had to go out and face the world. They had somehow all got on very well, and his brothers and sisters were happy enough out there, Australians in mind, thoroughly persuaded that theirs was the better land, the best country in the world, and with no desire to visit England. He had never felt like that; somehow his father's feeling about the old country had taken such a hold of him that he never outlived it--never felt at home in Australia, however successful he was in his affairs. The home feeling had been very strong in his father; his greatest delight was to sit of an evening with his children round him and tell them of the farm and the old farm-house where he was born and had lived so many years, and where some of them too had been born. He was never tired of talking of it, of taking them by the hand, as it were, and leading them from place to place, to the stream, the village, the old stone church, the meadows and fields and hedges, the deep shady lanes, and, above all, to the dear old ivied house with its gables and tall chimneys. So many times had his father described it that the old place was printed like a map on his mind, and was like a picture which kept its brightness even after the image of his boyhood's home in Australia had become faded and pale. With that mental picture to guide him he believed that he could go to that angle by the porch where the flycatchers bred every year and find their nest; where in the hedge the blackberries were most abundant; where the elders grew by the stream from which he could watch the moorhens and watervoles; that he knew every fence, gate, and outhouse, every room and pa.s.sage in the old house. Through all his busy years that picture never grew less beautiful, never ceased its call, and at last, possessed of sufficient capital to yield him a modest income for the rest of his life, he came home. What he was going to do in England he did not consider. He only knew that until he had satisfied the chief desire of his heart and had looked upon the original of the picture he had borne so long in his mind he could not rest nor make any plans for the future.

He came first to London and found, on examining the map of Hampshire, that the village of Thorpe (I will call it), where he was born, is three miles from the nearest station, in the southern part of the county.

Undoubtedly it was Thorpe; that was one of the few names of places his father had mentioned which remained in his memory always a.s.sociated with that vivid image of the farm in his mind. To Thorpe he accordingly went--as pretty a rustic village as he had hoped to find it. He took a room at the inn and went out for a long walk--"just to see the place,"

he said to the landlord. He would make no inquiries; he would find his home for himself; how could he fail to recognize it? But he walked for hours in a widening circle and saw no farm or other house, and no ground that corresponded to the picture in his brain.

Troubled at his failure, he went back and questioned his landlord, and, naturally, was asked for the name of the farm he was seeking. He had forgotten the name--he even doubted that he had ever heard it. But there was his family name to go by--Dyson; did any one remember a farmer Dyson in the village? He was told that it was not an uncommon name in that part of the country. There were no Dysons now in Thorpe, but some fifteen or twenty years ago one of that name had been the tenant of Long Meadow Farm in the parish. The name of the farm was unfamiliar, and when he visited the place he found it was not the one he sought.

It was a grievous disappointment. A new sense of loneliness oppressed him; for that bright image in his mind, with the feeling about his home, had been a secret source of comfort and happiness, and was like a companion, a dear human friend, and now he appeared to be on the point of losing it. Could it be that all that mental picture, with the details that seemed so true to life, was purely imaginary? He could not believe it; the old house had probably been pulled down, the big trees felled, orchard and hedges grabbed up--all the old features obliterated--and the land thrown into some larger neighbouring farm. It was dreadful to think that such devastating changes had been made, but it had certainly existed as he saw it in his mind, and he would inquire of some of the old men in the place, who would perhaps be able to tell him where his home had stood thirty years ago.

At once he set about interviewing all the old men he came upon in his rounds, describing to them the farm tenanted by a man named Dyson about forty years ago, and by and by he got hold of one who knew. He listened for a few minutes to the oft-repeated story, then exclaimed, "Why, sir, 'tis surely Woodyates you be talking about!"

"That's the name! That's the name," he cried. "Woodyyates-how did I ever forget it! You knew it then--where was it?"

"I'll just show you," said the old man, proud at having guessed rightly, and turning started slowly hobbling along till he got to the end of the lane.

There was an opening there and a view of the valley with trees, blue in the distance, at the furthest visible point. "Do you see them trees?"

he said. "That's where Harping is; 'tis two miles or, perhaps, a little more from Thorpe. There's a church tower among them trees, but you can't see it because 'tis hid. You go by the road till you comes to the church, then you go on by the water, maybe a quarter of a mile, and you comes to Woodyates. You won't see no difference in it; I've knowed it since I were a boy, but 'tis in Harping parish, not in Thorpe."

Now he remembered the name--Harping, near Thorpe--only Thorpe was the more important village where the inn was and the shops.

In less than an hour after leaving his informant he was at Woodyates, feasting his eyes on the old house of his dreams and of his exiled father's before him, inexpressibly glad to recognize it as the very house he had loved so long--that he had been deceived by no false image.

For some days he haunted the spot, then became a lodger at the farm-house, and now after making some inquiries he had found that the owner was willing to sell the place for something more than its market value, and he was going up to London about it.

At Waterloo I wished him happiness in his old home found again after so many years, then watched him as he walked briskly away--as commonplace-looking a man as could be seen on that busy crowded platform, in his suit of rough grey tweeds, thick boots, and bowler hat. Yet one whose fortune might be envied by many even among the successful--one who had cherished a secret thought and feeling, which had been to him like the shadow of a rock and like a cool spring in a dry and thirsty land.

And in that host of undistinguished Colonials and others of British race from all regions of the earth, who annually visit these sh.o.r.es on business or for pleasure or some other object, how many there must be who come with some such memory or dream or aspiration in their hearts!

A greater number probably than we imagine. For most of them there is doubtless disappointment and disillusion: it is a matter of the heart, a sentiment about which some are not given to speak. He too, my fellow-pa.s.senger, would no doubt have held his peace had his dream not met with so perfect a fulfilment. As it was he had to tell his joy to some one, though it were to a stranger.

Chapter Fifteen: Summer Days on the Otter

The most characteristic district of South Devon, the greenest, most luxuriant in its vegetation, and perhaps the hottest in England, is that bit of country between the Exe and the Axe which is watered by the Clyst, the Otter, and the Sid. In any one of a dozen villages found beside these pretty little rivers a man might spend a month, a year, a lifetime, very agreeably, ceasing not to congratulate himself on the good fortune which first led him into such a garden. Yet after a week or two in this luxurious land I began to be dissatisfied with my surroundings. It was June; the weather was exceptionally dry and sultry.

Vague thoughts, or "visitings" of mountains and moors and coasts would intrude to make the confinement of deep lanes seem increasingly irksome.

Each day I wandered miles in some new direction, never knowing whither the devious path would lead me, never inquiring of any person, nor consulting map or guide, since to do that is to deprive oneself of the pleasure of discovery; always with a secret wish to find some exit as it were--some place beyond the everlasting wall of high hedges and green trees, where there would be a wide horizon and wind blowing un.o.bstructed over leagues of open country to bring me back the sense of lost liberty.

I found only fresh woods and pastures new that were like the old; other lanes leading to other farm-houses, each in its familiar pretty setting of orchard and garden; and, finally, other ancient villages, each with its ivy-grown grey church tower looking down on a green graveyard and scattered cottages, mostly mud-built and thatched with straw. Finding no outlook on any side I went back to the streams, oftenest to the Otter, where, lying by the hour on the bank, I watched the speckled trout below me and the dark-plumaged dipper with shining white breast standing solitary and curtseying on a stone in the middle of the current.

Sometimes a kingfisher would flash by, and occasionally I came upon a lonely grey heron; but no mammal bigger than a watervole appeared, although I waited and watched for the much bigger beast that gives the river its name. Still it was good to know that he was there, and had his den somewhere in the steep rocky bank under the rough tangle of ivy and bramble and roots of overhanging trees. One was shot by a farmer during my stay, but my desire was for the living, not a dead otter.

Consequently, when the otter-hunt came with blaze of scarlet coats and blowing of bra.s.s horns and noise of barking hounds and shouts of excited people, it had no sooner got half a mile above Ottery St. Mary, where I had joined the straggling procession, than, falling behind, the hunting fury died out of me and I was relieved to hear that no quarry had been found. The frightened moorhen stole back to her spotty eggs, the dipper returned to his dipping and curtseying to his own image in the stream, and I to my idle dreaming and watching.

The watching was not wholly in vain, since there were here revealed to me things, or aspects of things, that were new. A great deal depends on atmosphere and the angle of vision. For instance, I have often looked at swans at the hour of sunset, on the water and off it, or flying, and have frequently had them between me and the level sun, yet never have I been favoured with the sight of the rose-coloured, the red, and the golden-yellow varieties of that majestic waterfowl, whose natural colour is white. On the other hand, who ever saw a carrion-crow with crimson eyes? Yet that was one of the strange things I witnessed on the Otter.

Game is not everywhere strictly preserved in that part of Devon, and the result is that the crow is not so abhorred and persecuted a fowl as in many places, especially in the home counties, where the cult of the sacred bird is almost universal. At one spot on the stream where my rambles took me on most days a pair of crows invariably greeted my approach with a loud harsh remonstrance, and would keep near me, flying from tree to tree repeating their angry girdings until I left the place.

Their nest was in a large elm, and after some days I was pleased to see that the young had been safely brought off. The old birds screamed at me no more; then I came on one of their young in the meadow near the river.

His curious behaviour interested me so much that I stood and watched him for half an hour or longer. It was a hot, windless day, and the bird was by himself among the tall flowering gra.s.ses and b.u.t.tercups of the meadow--a queer gaunt unfinished hobbledehoy-looking fowl with a head much too big for his body, a beak that resembled a huge nose, and a very monstrous mouth. When I first noticed him he was amusing himself by picking off the small insects from the flowers with his big beak, a most unsuitable instrument, one would imagine, for so delicate a task. At the same time he was hungering for more substantial fare, and every time a rook flew by over him on its way to or from a neighbouring too populous rookery, the young crow would open wide his immense red mouth and emit his harsh, throaty hunger-call. The rook gone, he would drop once more into his study of the b.u.t.tercups, to pick from them whatever unconsidered trifle in the way of provender he could find. Once a small bird, a pied wagtail, flew near him, and he begged from it just as he had done from the rooks: the little creature would have run the risk of being itself swallowed had it attempted to deliver a packet of flies into that cavernous mouth. I went nearer, moving cautiously, until I was within about four yards of him, when, half turning, he opened his mouth and squawked, actually asking me to feed him; then, growing suspicious, he hopped awkwardly away in the gra.s.s. Eventually he permitted a nearer approach, and slowly stooping I was just on the point of stroking his back when, suddenly becoming alarmed, he swung himself into the air and flapped laboriously off to a low hawthorn, twenty or thirty yards away, into which he tumbled pell-mell like a bundle of old black rags.

Then I left him and thought no more about the crows except that their young have a good deal to learn upon first coming forth into an unfriendly world. But there was a second nest and family close by all the time. A day or two later I discovered it accidentally in a very curious way.

There was one spot where I was accustomed to linger for a few minutes, sometimes for half an hour or so, during my daily walks. Here at the foot of the low bank on the treeless side of the stream there was a scanty patch of sedges, a most exposed and unsuitable place for any bird to breed in, yet a venturesome moorhen had her nest there and was now sitting on seven eggs. First I would take a peep at the eggs, for the bird always quitted the nest on my approach; then I would gaze into the dense tangle of tree, bramble, and ivy springing out of the ma.s.s 'of black rock and red clay of the opposite bank. In the centre of this rough tangle which overhung the stream there grew an old stunted and crooked fir tree with its tufted top so shut out from the light by the branches and foliage round it that it looked almost black. One evening I sat down on the green bank opposite this tangle when the low sun behind me shone level into the ma.s.s of rock and rough boles and branches, and fixing my eyes on the black centre of the ma.s.s I encountered a pair of crimson eyes staring back into mine. A level ray of light had lit up that spot which I had always seen in deep shadow, revealing its secret.