Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 35

Even so is Man whose thread is spun, Drawn out and cut, and so is done!

The rose withers, the blossom blasteth, The flower fades, the morning hasteth, The sun sets, the shadow flies, The gourd consumes, the man he dies.

Beaumont wrote the lines, legend says; perhaps wrongly, but they have the Elizabethan life and ring.

If one had to choose a dozen square yards of London to sum up the Surrey side, where should they be? For me, there could be no choice. One spot would demand the first, the only place. It would be where Waterloo Bridge touches the Surrey sh.o.r.e; where you may look south to a Surrey hill by Sydenham, and north to half the panorama of London, from St.

Paul's to Westminster Abbey. There, on the first few yards of the bridge, above the little hill which shrinks the wide roadway into a neck and stops overladen drays like a wall, blows the aura of all London that crowds south of the river, all Surrey that belongs to the London Thames.

The business of the town and the country mingles with the business of the river and the sea. An afternoon in December, the month of months to know London in, is the time to be there. Up stream from the Nore on an east wind rides the damp of salt and of estuary fogs; about you are the steam of sweating horses and the pungent clinging scents of malt and hops and brewing; up on a yellow tide under the arches of the bridge swings a string of barges, piled with bales of hay. A flock of pigeons sways and wheels in the sky, drops to the roofs, settles with a clatter, sails up into the sky again. Black-headed gulls, in their winter suits of dove-colour and white, walk about the muddy edge of the rising tide, drift on the stream like torn paper, soar and hang in the wind above the bridge, peering this way and that for the fish and bread the Londoners give them; or late in the afternoon wing quiet journeys into unknown s.p.a.ces of western light. Beyond the bridge the lights dot orange sparks in the films and shades of great buildings and the Embankment roadway.

That is pure London, and London, too, is most of the Waterloo Road, with its new hospital, and the roar of the trains from the junction, and the old curiosity shops with the foreign names, and the wig-makers, and the cheap furniture spoiling in the rain. But Surrey is there, too; a shop that shows cricket bats, and another that has fruit-ladders, and, above all, the little shops that offer boxes of pansies and delphinium roots and hyacinth bulbs all the seasons round to Surrey men leaving London behind them in the evening. Surrey recollects that she is not quite London in the Waterloo Road; she plays cricket and plants pansies.

That would be the Surrey side I should choose, with the magic of the tide water about it and somewhere, however faint, the scent of the Surrey gardens. But the old, the oldest Surrey side? That belongs to the river-sh.o.r.e south of London Bridge, where once, too, Londoners could cross from crowded wood and brick to walk among Surrey hawthorn and Surrey daisies. The roar and the soot of the Borough have set that strip of country deep in London, hardly divided by the water. But it was there, when Chaucer's nine-and-twenty pilgrims lay at the Tabard inn, that Surrey began for Londoners and for all who had come to the 'dere and sweete citye' of which Chaucer sings to journey south from the Thames on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. The Tabard inn is no more; the fire that swept over Southwark ten years after the fire of London destroyed the building Chaucer knew. The piety of a later day raised another Tabard, perhaps like the old Tabard with the same galleries and bal.u.s.trades to look down from upon pilgrims and minstrels and monks and fools. But that Tabard inn became the Talbot in a careless age, and as the Talbot it was razed to the ground forty years ago, when n.o.body minded what became of the old inns and churches and the things best worth keeping in old Surrey. The Tabard has gone, but the ancient road remains. Smoke and stone are about it, where once it stretched out bare among green fields; but the fields are there, for those who can see them, behind the veil of smoke, and through them a wayfarer may still travel with the Knight who loved freedom and courtesy, the Monk shaking his belled bridle, the Ploughman on his mare, and the dainty fingered Prioress with her eyes as grey as gla.s.s, riding to join other pilgrims travelling east to Canterbury by the old road.

THE END