Chapter XII

HOW THEY STARTED FOR THE MOTHER OF RIVERS.

Beatrice had promised to meet Burrough at the moor gate on Monday morning, that they might start for Cranmere. The weather was gloriously fine. There was scarcely any breeze. A better morning could not have fallen to their lot. Burrough felt curiously elate while he made his preparations for wandering into the wilderness. He talked all the time to the lineal descendant of the great Grimalkin, who occupies the same position among the feline race of the West Country as is held by King Arthur in the minds of men.

“This is a great day, King o’ the Cats. A day to be noted by red letters and marked with a white stone. I’m going a roaming across rivers and rocks, through bogs and quags; and she is coming too. The Queen of Trevalyor is coming, Peterkin. She likes me a little--she must, or she wouldn’t be alone with me all day. I’m not too old after all. What’s thirty-five when you feel strong and well, and look it too? I’m young, my brindled monarch. I’m still a boy. No wrinkles yet, no grey hairs. I am not yet old enough to make my own living. If that is not a sign of infancy, what is? Out of the way, or I shall tread upon your royal tail. It pleases us to be merry to-day, for we have issued our decree commanding our loving subjects to make holiday. Don’t you hear the pixies scampering up and down the gorge? They are crying as loud as they can, ‘Ho and away for Cranmere Pool.’”

Peter jerked his tail and stalked outside, perhaps considering that, if there were any basis of truth for this statement, a plump pixy would make a pleasant change of diet. Burrough stuffed his knapsack with provisions for the journey, and hurried outside to find his ashplant which was to serve him for alpenstock.

Burrough’s private idea was that the great plateau, which Beatrice and he proposed reaching that day, was not strictly speaking in England at all, because Dartmoor had neither been conquered nor legally annexed. The inhabitants had a perfect right to raise the flag of a republic and proclaim Dartmoor as a sort of English San Marino. Dartmoor was still Little Britain. Although it was attacked often by the Saxons it remained impregnable. The Celtic inhabitants of the moor retained their language until near the dawn of modern England, until long after the county which surrounded it had been incorporated within the western realm. As an independent and unconquered state it passed into the jurisdiction of the Duchy of Cornwall, although the Duchy obtained no legal title to it. Legally Dartmoor was not in Devonshire; politically it was not in England. If an adventurer were to seize the moor, and proclaim himself First Emperor, none except the commoners would have a legal right to evict him.

Once upon a time Dartmoor was an immense mountain of granite. The ladies and gentlemen of that period probably wore hair and tails, and had not progressed far enough to talk scandal or to be troubled by politics. That mountain is now ruined. Nothing but the stump remains. It has been worn away by the winds and rain of ages. It may have taken a hundred years to wear away a few grains of that tough granite which still cannot be cut by any tool. Frost, storm, and showers wore that huge mountain away. The softer portions went first, and the rivers following the line of least resistance cut and scraped and hollowed as they ran unceasingly, until the defiles, cleaves, and gorges were made, to be a delight to quite a new race of beings, who had abandoned the fashion of wearing tails, and instead of hair cumbered their bodies with a vast amount of superfluous clothing. The harder portions naturally resisted the action of the elements longer, and they appear now as the hills and ranges of the moor, capped each one by unusually tough masses of granite which are called tors. Some of these masses look as if they had been built by some Permian or Damnonian corvée; others take upon themselves the shapes of giants or monstrous beasts; others in pure playfulness will log or rock upon persuasion.

Where one would expect to find hills there is only a plateau. The big hills are upon the borders of the moor; the central part is a more or less flat-topped surface, broken by small hillocks having each its distinctive tor, named usually after the form it is supposed to represent. Between stretch the peat bogs, springy in summer, spongy in winter. The peat when cut in its dry state is as soft and lovely a brown as a woman’s hair. Here the shaggy cattle wander, the wild ponies frisk, and the horned sheep browse. The wildness is extreme, the solitude intense. There are no trees upon the moor, nothing but the stone clatters, the bogs and rivers, the heather, whortleberry, and gorse. The greater gorse blooms during winter and spring; the smaller species flowers in summer and autumn; thus all the year round the fairies’ gold is lying upon the moor.

It is the rivers which are the pride and glory of the little republic of Dartmoor. Broadly it may be said that all have their origin upon the most inaccessible, the loneliest, most solemn and dreary, and the highest of all Dartmoor plateaus--the Mother of Rivers, Cranmere. Dart and Teign are the fairest rivers in the world. To walk by the Teign in the bluebell season is to be in fairyland. To trace the windings of the Dart is to become the central figure of a dream. There is also the Okement, river of ferns--it was this which flowed through Beatrice’s Blissland--and the noisy river Taw; and many another, with rattling brooks innumerable, all streaming from the breasts of Mother Cranmere to irrigate the green valleys of Devon, which was once a part of heaven, but broke off one day and fell to earth.

These rivers of Dartmoor have a beauty and romance all their own, as they dash their cold, sweet water to the western towns, where England’s commercial prosperity was built up, and whence her sailors pushed away to conquer Spain. There is one beauty of the Alps, and another of English hills; one beauty of the Rhine, and another of the Dart. Nothing is big, and nothing little, when referred to its proper scale. Cramping smallness is usually more lovely, if less sublime, than oppressive largeness. The crystal rivers of the moor run down between brown banks of peat decked with ferns and asphodel. Here they flow into wizard pools; there they thrill from one rocky ledge to another in a succession of sparkling stickles or little falls. They are always bright, always laughing, and possess a wondrous freshness. Sometimes these rivers forget they have risen upon Cranmere, and are destined to flow through merely terrestrial scenes. They revert sometimes to their former state, when Devon was a part of the heavenly country; or they lose their way, as it were, to find themselves, somewhere about the month of May, passing through some land that never was. Thus one reach of the Tavy passes through Arcady; one reach of the Teign through fairyland; one reach of the Dart through dreamland. And the dreams of that land are good!

Not many legends of the wild Cymric imagination remain. Arthurian legend has become forgotten. Board-schools have killed the pixies. Only the more vulgar fancies remain. One of them is connected with the Dart, which was originally not so much a river bringing water to the people as a god who demanded tribute from them. That tribute was a human heart each year--one year the heart of a maid, the next that of a man, and so on for ever.

In the vast and wild solitude of the moor it is curious to consider that here was once the Birmingham of England. Beside the rivers appear grass-grown mounds which betray the former working places of the tin-streamers. Here and there may be seen the ruins of their huts and homes. Their bridges across the rivers--huge slabs of granite known as clappers--are in use to-day probably in very much the same condition as they were a thousand years ago. During the Bronze Age the demand for tin was about equal to the present demand for steel, and the tin of “Dertymore” was famous before the Roman empire had declined. Upon Crockern Tor, an equal distance from the Stannary Towns, the Tinners’ Parliament was held in the open air. Offenders against its laws were sentenced to death and torture in its horrible dungeon of Lydford, more foul a prison than any devised by the intelligence and cruelty of the Spanish Inquisitors.

Cranmere is the practical summing-up of all that is wild and weird upon Dartmoor, and of all that is lonely and drear. It is a great watershed up among the clouds, the roof, as it were, of the moor. The so-called Pool in its centre may be reached by any active pedestrian during the summer months on those days when the gunners of the British artillery are not sending their shells across its boggy surface. In winter it is practically inaccessible alike to man and beast. There is danger then. Wool-like mists may encircle the wanderer suddenly, or the driving snowstorm spring up.

In every part the peaty soil has been rent into fissures. These crevasses present the most striking feature of the region. They are innumerable, and some are deep, while all are treacherous. The traveller jumps one to find himself balancing insecurely upon the brink of another in every respect identical with that he has just crossed. Their angular crookedness is amazing. They curve and zigzag into all manner of snaky shapes. Their crumbling edges are often hidden by tufts of bleached grass or knotted heather, and a false step may mean a sudden descent into slime and mud. One would imagine that the entire region had been tortured by earthquake, or that some Titan had fallen in frenzy upon the plateau and rent it with his hands and teeth.

Each of these crevasses is, in its humble way, a water-course. Each is a vein which does its part in the great act of river-making. During the summer months the mud with which they are choked is of a glue-like consistency. As autumn approaches the mass loosens and becomes oil-like, until in winter the mud vanishes and water begins to flow. Rivers have humble origins; they are not born great, but they have greatness thrust upon them. The source of any particular river can hardly be discovered. It is merely a muddy crevasse amid a hundred others. But the hundred are destined finally to feed the one, until the river casts its slough and appears fresh.

While the maze is penetrated, by means of jumps and scrambles, there are pools--small ragged patches of black and sullen water fringed by cotton-grass and bleached sedges. The water is so thick that the wind hardly ruffles it. Probably these pools are crowded with invisible insect life, but to the eye they might be poison-pits, so dead are they and so black. One cannot wonder if the Celtic moormen should have peopled this desolate region of crevasse and tarn with the souls of sinners. Here was once the site of purgatory. There was a time when the West-Welsh inhabitants of Dartmoor feared to climb upon the great plateau because of the piteous cries issuing from the crevasses. Nothing could be more suggestive of souls in agony than the groaning of the wind across Cranmere. With the sun “sinking in its roaring home,” with the wind sounding like grated doors heavily creaking, and the dripping clouds of mist around; with the fissures and the tarns below, the desolate peat-wastes, the deep black sheets of mud; with the solitude and lifelessness on every side, the imaginative Celt might well have hastened to find an easier way by which to escape from that haunted region to his home.

In the centre of this saturated waste was once a pool of some size. There are moormen who remember the sedge-choked sheet of black water. It was surrounded by beds of rushes. The rushes have gone, and the pool which nurtured them has gone too, drained by the turve-cutters. The finest peat in the world is cut upon the edge of Cranmere. What was the Pool is now an almost oval depression in the surface. The spongy bank of peat slopes gradually, and a cairn appears made of turves and marble-like stones, and topped by a sad post, to which from time to time a flag has been fastened, only to be torn to fragments and utterly demolished by the furious winter gales. Two tin boxes are pushed into a hole at the side of the cairn. The one contains a book to receive names and addresses of visitors who succeed in conquering Cranmere: the other is a post-box. They who reach the Pool leave letters and postcards to various friends and relations. The next arrival takes these missives, and upon returning to civilisation posts them without delay. Letters posted at Cranmere do not often miscarry, even though they may not reach their destination until many months later.

There is little to be seen upon Cranmere. Nature is naked and unrelieved. She is cold, hard and fierce. She is there not the Nature which smiles and is kind. She is the Nature which is exceedingly cruel. All the epithets usually applied to tragedy may be applied to Cranmere. Yet peace, and not sorrow, is the dominant note. On a calm day--and there are few perfectly calm at so great an altitude--the stillness is weird. It is unnatural. Perhaps there is not a region in all the world more silent than Cranmere. There is no life; all around there is death. But by one of Nature’s little ironies, Cranmere is the centre of life and the source of it. For she is the mother of nearly all the rivers in Devon.

Burrough had not long to wait beside the moor gate, for Beatrice was punctual. He went forward to meet her as she tripped along, fresh and sparkling like a part of the morning. She was attired like the practical Cornish girl she could be when she liked. She wore a short grey skirt which did not reach her ankles, and a tight-fitting jersey of white wool, over which was slung a little satchel, which she declared contained everything that could possibly be required for the expedition from a packet of pins to a white elephant. Her little feet were shod with two absurd miniatures of men’s Dartmoor boots--thick-soled and hob-nailed. Her head was uncovered, and so were her hands.

“Since it’s necessary to commence with the weather,” she cried, “what a day!”

“Ready to start?” asked Burrough.

“Ay, ready,” cried Beatrice.

The moor gate banged behind, and they were off.

“It’s up, everlasting up,” she said. “It’s drag, climb, and jump, henceforth and for ever, and we mustn’t talk too much. I’ll tell you why,” she rattled on, anxious to ignore her own advice. “Once I made this trip alone. I hope you’re impressed. I went to Cranmere alone, and I wondered why I was so little tired when I got back. It was because I had no talking or laughing to do. Talking and laughing are very exhausting.”

“We cannot walk like mutes,” he objected.

“The thing is difficult, but not impossible. We might make signs. Point, gesticulate, raise our eyebrows, shrug our shoulders. Do you know the deaf and dumb alphabet? But that wouldn’t do. It’s eyes on your feet hereabouts, or great is the fall. Now this is a breathless bit. We won’t talk for ten minutes.”

She compressed her lips firmly and looked down. They began to ascend, winding among the big blocks of granite. Beatrice kept glancing up with a smile, and a saucy gesture _apropos_ of nothing. Presently she pointed at the sun, then patted her hair. Burrough nodded, and wiped his forehead, tacitly acknowledging the heat. Beatrice with difficulty restrained a titter. Then Burrough held up one finger and shook his head sadly. Beatrice nodded with equal gravity, and Burrough held up two fingers, looking pleased and happy. The girl nodded again, although she was entirely bewildered, and immediately held up three pink fingers, which looked almost transparent in that clear light. Burrough shook his head quite savagely.

“I must speak, or I shall burst,” cried Beatrice. “What ever do you mean?”

“When I held up one finger, I meant to signify that during my previous walks here I have been alone,” he answered. “Then I held up two, to show how glad I was to have you for a companion; and when you held up three, I took it that you meant there should be someone else with us.”

“That was much too deep for me,” said Beatrice. “I put up three fingers just to beat your two. I couldn’t imagine what you were driving at. So you thought I meant you ought to have a chaperon?”

He laughed at her wilful perversion, while she with a quick glance went on, “We open-air Cornish girls can look after ourselves. We are not hot-house plants by any manner of means. You’re an open-air person, aren’t you?”

“Altogether,” Burrough answered, “through necessity, not from choice.”

“But you are all right now?” Beatrice suggested quickly.

“Quite well, so long as I am here,” he said.

“I’ve been always awfully strong,” Beatrice went on. “At home my bedroom looks out upon the sea. I have the window open winter and summer, in storm and fine weather, and my bed is close beside it. I won’t have blind or curtains. I like to feel the salt breeze on my face. I can lie and watch the moon rising out of the sea, or the lightning flashing upon it, and I can watch the fishing boats sailing by. Sometimes I get my pillows soaked with rain, or the spray which dashes over the cliff. And after a stormy night my bed is in such a mess. Dry leaves and dust, and bits of stick, and my hair is simply filled with wreckage. Beetles and moths and bats come to visit me, and more than once a bird has been flung in by the wind. I get up in the morning feeling that I must dance and sing.”

“It’s the way to keep young and live long,” said Burrough, in his pedantic manner.

“Of course it is. These commoners of Dartmoor could live as long as they liked if they were not such fools. They sleep four or five in one small room with every chink sealed up even in summer. They pass the night undoing the good that the day has done. Nearly everyone on the moor goes off between seventy and eighty. They break up suddenly and go off, worn out by want of night air. Our fisher-folk in Cornwall are just the same. It’s no good talking to them. I’ve tried lots of times. ‘Sleep with my window open! Why, ’twould kill me,’ is what they say. One old woman sang quite a different song when I tackled her on the subject. ‘Us don’t want to bide over a hundred years,’ she said. ‘Us can’t afford it. Us bides too long as ’tis.’ You can’t argue against that,” finished Beatrice with a laugh.

“We’re on our way back to wigwams and hut circles,” suggested Burrough.

“Yes,” she laughed. “The house agent’s advertisement in the future will be something like this: ‘A charming modern residence for sale. Contains four large stones, carefully propped up and leaning securely against one another; an admirable hearthstone, and roofed most artistically with rushes. A perpetual current of cold east wind guaranteed. Pretty but inexpensive.’ And here’s another from the same list: ‘A few hurdles and a piece of sailcloth to be had cheap. Could be converted into a nice suburban villa.’”

“How were you brought up?” Burrough asked.

“Why, in the most sensible manner possible. Just as if I’d been a chicken. My father put up a ring-fence on the lawn, and I was dropped inside to crawl about and roll as I pleased. There was a sort of kennel for me to go to when it rained, but I think on the whole I preferred the wet grass. And this is the result,” concluded Beatrice, with a kind of shyness that was new to her.

Before Burrough could make the complimentary reply which he intended, she anticipated him by an exclamation of pleasure and the cry--

“Away to the right, or we’ll be in the marsh!”

Burrough looked up and saw Steeperton standing beyond like Chrephren’s pyramid, its grey peak pricking the soft blue sky, and the silvery ribbon of Taw River winding round its base. He realised suddenly how entirely alone they were.

“There’s a sort of pony-track this way--beneath the Tor,” said Beatrice the guide.