Chapter II: Part 2

I tried to get water, but there was none. Nevertheless, the fountain was a pretty thing on that plot of grass where the road zigzags opposite the gate and avenue of Nonsuch. A dove and an olive branch, of ruddiest gilding, is perched on the cross tip.

“Wretched weather,” said the man, speaking through the pencil in his mouth, as he straddled on to his bicycle. At Ewell I lost him by going round behind the new church to look at the old tower. This completely ivy-covered square tower is all that remains of an old church. If the rest was as little decayed, there can hardly have been a good reason for demolishing it. The doors were locked. I could only walk about among the trees, glancing at the tombs of the Glyn family, and the headstone of Edward Wells (who died in 1742, at the age of sixteen) and the winged skull adorning it.

Ewell was the first place on my road which bore a considerable resemblance to a country town. It stands at the forking of a Brighton and a Worthing road. Hereby rises the Hogsmill river; its water flows alongside the street, giving its name to the “Spring Inn.” The name Ewell, like that of Oxfordshire Ewelme, seems and is said to be connected with the presence of water. The place is not a mere roadside collection of houses with a variegated, old look, but a town at which roads meet, pause, take a turn or two, and exchange greetings, before separating from one another and from Ewell. The town probably struck those escaping Londoners on bicycles as one where the sign of the “Green Man” was in keeping. Comfortable houses on the outskirts, with high trees and shrubberies, and an avenue of limes crossing the road at right angles, confirm the fancy. It marked a definite stage on the road from London.

The end of Ewell touched the beginning of Epsom, which had to be entered between high walls of advertisements--yards of pictures and large letters--asserting the virtues of clothes, food, drugs, etc., one sheet, for example, showing that by eating or drinking something you gained health, appetite, vigour, and a fig-leaf. The exit was better.

Epsom had the same general effect as Ewell, but more definite and complete, thanks to a few hundred yards of street broad enough for a market which, for the most part, satisfied the town eye as countrified and old-fashioned. Over one of its corn-chandlers’ a carved horse’s head was stuck up. There was an empty inn called the “Tun,” a restaurant named after Nell Gwynn. True, there is a fortnight’s racing yearly, and a number of railway stations, in consequence; and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” is on sale there: but, as in Nell Gwynn’s time and Defoe’s time, it is a place for putting off London thoughts. There is no king there now, no king’s mistress presumably, no nightly ball even in July, no bowls, no strutting to the Wells to drink what the chemist sells at twopence a pound, no line of trees down the middle of the broad street. Nor, accordingly, is there the same wintry dereliction as in those days. When the leaves fall in Autumn the people do not all fly, the houses are not all shut up, the walks do not go out of repair, the roads do not become full of sloughs. But it always was a pleasure resort. For more than a hundred years before railways, London business men used to keep their families at Epsom and ride daily to and from the Exchange or their warehouses. The very market that it had on Fridays had been obtained for it by a plotting apothecary named Livingstone. This man tried to diddle the world by putting up a pump, not over the good old cathartic spring, but over a new one that was not cathartic; and the world gave up both old and new. To-day only the poor and simple go to Epsom for pleasure apart from racing. Anybody and everybody with feet or wheels can get there from London on a holiday or even a half-holiday.

The exit from Epsom was almost free from advertisements. And then the common: it had a sea-like breadth and clearness. The one man among the soaked, flowering gorse-bushes and new green hawthorn was extremely like the liberator of the chaffinch and collector of weather-vanes. He was sketching something in the rain. The only others of humankind visible were on the road, struggling south-west or rushing towards London, or on the side of the road, hoping to sell ginger-beer and lemonade to travellers. This hedgeless gorse-land, first on both sides, then on the right only, reached to the verge of Ashtead, but with some change of character. The larger part was gently billowing gorse flower and hawthorn leaf. The last part was flat, wet, and rushy. The gorse came to an end, and here was a copse of oak. At intervals of thirty yards or so were oaks as old as Epsom, of a broad kind, forking close to the ground, iron-coloured and stained with faint green. Oaks not more than forty or fifty years old, tall instead of spreading, their lower branches broken off, grew between. Among these, dead fern and bramble with its old leaves made distinct island thickets, out of which stood a few thorns. And the thin grasses around the thickets were strewn with dead twigs and leaves, and some paper and broken bottles left there in better weather. A robin sang in one of the broad oaks, whether any one listened or not.

On the opposite side of the road--that is to say, on the left--the common had given way to Ashtead Park. There the big iron-coloured oaks stood aristocratically about on gentle green slopes. To Ashtead Park belonged the Hon. Mary Greville Howard, who died in 1877, at the age of ninety-two, and is commemorated by a fountain on the right hand which gave me this information. The fountain is placed on a square of much-trodden bare earth close to the road, surmounted by a cross. Whatever were the good deeds which persuaded her friends to erect the fountain, that was a good deed. It was not dry, and, I have been told, never is.

Ashtead itself is more suburban than either Ewell or Epsom. It appeared to be a collection of residences about as incapable of self-support as could anywhere be found--a private-looking, respectable, inhospitable place that made the rain colder, and doubtless, in turn, coloured the spectacles it was seen through. The name of its inn, the “Leg of Mutton and Cauliflower,” may be venerable, but it smacked of suburban fancy, as if it had been bestowed to catch the pennies of easy-going lovers of quaintness.

They were beginning to create a new Ashtead a little farther on. A placard by a larch copse at the edge of a high-walled marl-pit, announced that convenient and commanding houses were to be built shortly to supply the new golf links with golfers. A road had been driven through the estate. The young, green larches stood at the entrance like well-drilled liveried pages, ready to give way or die according to the requirements of golfers, but for the present enjoying the rain and looking as larch-like as possible above the curved gray wall of the pit.

Not much after this, Leatherhead began, two broken lines of villas, trees, and shrubberies, leading to a steep country street and, at its foot, the Mole,

“Four streams: whose whole delight in island lawns,
Dark-hanging alder dusks and willows pale
O’er shining gray-green shadowed waterways,
Makes murmuring haste of exit from the vale--
Through fourteen arches voluble
Where river tide-weed sways.” ...

CUCKOO FLOWERS

Leatherhead Mill.]

As I looked this time from Leatherhead Bridge, I recalled “Aphrodite at Leatherhead,” and these, its opening lines, by John Helston, the town’s second poet. It is no new thing to stop on the bridge and look up the river to the railway bridge, and down over the divided water to the level grass, the tossing willows, the tall poplars scattered upon it, the dark elms beside, and Leatherhead rising up from it to the flint tower of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, and its umbrageous churchyard and turf as of grass-green silk. The bridge is good in itself, and the better for this view and for the poem. The adjacent inn, the “Running Horse,” and Elinour Rumming who brewed ale there and sold it to travellers--

“Tinkers and sweaters and swinkers
And all good ale-drinkers”--

four hundred years ago, these were the theme of a poet, Henry the Eighth’s laureate, John Skelton.

Having ridden down to the bridge, I walked up again, for I had no intention of going on over the Mole by the shortest road to Guildford. It is a good road, but a high and rather straight one through parks and cornland, and scarcely a village. The wide spaces on both hands, and the troops and clusters of elm trees, are best in fine weather, particularly in Autumn. I took the road through Mickleham and Dorking. Thus I wound along, having wooded hills, Leatherhead Downs, Mickleham Downs, Juniper Hill, and Box Hill, always steep above on the left, and on the right the Mole almost continually in sight below.

They were still worshipping in the Church of St. Mary and St. Nicholas. Outside it what most pleased me were the cross near a young cedar which was erected in 1902 “to the praise and glory of God, and the memory of the nameless dead,” and the epitaph: “Here sleepeth, awaiting the resurrection of the just, William Lewis, Esq., of the East India Company.” The memory of a human being that can exist without a name is but the shadow of the shadow that a name casts, and it is hard not to wonder what effect the cross can have on those who await the resurrection of the just, or indeed, on any one but Geraldine Rickards, at whose expense it was placed here.

The road, bending round under the churchyard and its trees, followed the steeper side of the Mole valley, and displayed to me the meadow, young corn, and ploughland, running up from the farther bank to beech woods. The clouds were higher and harder. The imprisoned pale sun, though it could not be seen, could be felt at the moments when a bend offered shelter from the wind. The change was too late for most of my fellow-travellers: they had stopped or turned back at Leatherhead. I was almost alone as I came into Mickleham, except for a horseman and his dog. This man was a thick, stiff man in clay-coloured rough clothes and a hard hat; his bandy, begaitered legs curled round the flanks of a piebald pony as thick and stiff as himself. He carried an ash-plant instead of a riding-whip, and in his mouth a pipe of strong, good tobacco. I had not seen such a country figure that day, though I dare say there were many among the nameless dead in Leatherhead churchyard, awaiting the resurrection of the just with characteristic patience. His dog also was clay-coloured, as shaggy and as large as a sheep, and exceedingly like a sheep. Probably he was a man who could have helped me to understand, for example, the epitaph of Benjamin Rogers in Mickleham churchyard,--

“Here peaceful sleep the aged and the young,
The rich and poor, an undistinguished throng.
Time was these ashes lived; a time must be
When others thus shall stand and look at thee.”

I had at first written,--

“Time was these ashes lov’d.”

His wife, Mary, who died at fifty-five in 1755, is hard by under an arch of ancient ivy against the wall. She speaks from the tomb,--

“How lov’d, how valu’d once avails thee not:
To whom related, or by whom begot.
A heap of dust alone remains of thee.
’Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.”

That this desperate Christian, Mary Rogers, had any special knowledge of these matters, I have no reason for believing. I even doubt if she really thought that love was of as little importance as having a lord in the family. The lines were composed in a drab ecstasy of conventional humility, lacking genuine satisfaction in the thought that she and the more beautiful and the better-dressed were become equals. But I did not ask the clay-coloured man’s opinion. I rode behind him into Mickleham, and there lost him between the “Running Horse” (or, at least, an inn with two racing horses for a sign) and the “William the Fourth.” The loyalty of Mickleham, in thus preserving the memory of a sort of a king for three-quarters of a century, is sublime. Mickleham is, apart from its gentlemen’s residences, an old-fashioned place, accommodating itself in a picturesque manner to the hillside against which it has to cling, in order to avoid rolling into the Mole. The root-suckers and the trunk shoots of the elm trees were in tiny leaf beside the road, the horse-chestnuts were in large but still rumpled leaf. The celandines on the steep banks found something like sunbeams to shine in. On the smooth slopes the grass was perfect, alternating with pale young corn, and with arable squares where the dung was waiting for a fine day before being spread. The small flints of the ploughland were as fresh and as bright as flowers.

When I got to Burford Bridge, the only man at the entrance of the Box Hill footpath was a man selling fruit and drink and storing bicycles, or hoping to begin doing these things. One motor car stood at the hotel door. The hill was bare, except of trees. But it would take centuries to wipe away the scars of the footpaths up it. For it has a history of two hundred years as a pleasure resort. Ladies and gentlemen used to go on a Sunday from Epsom to take the air and walk in the woods. The landlord of the “King’s Arms” at Dorking furnished a vault under a great beech on top, with chairs, tables, food, and drink. It was like a fair, what with the gentry and the country people crowding to see and to imitate. But the young men of Dorking were very virtuous in those days, or were anxious that others should be so. They paid the vault a visit on a Saturday and blew it up with gunpowder to put a stop to the Sabbath merriment. They, at least, did not believe that in the dust they would be merely the equals of the frivolous and fresh-air-loving rich.

Dorking nowadays has no objection to the popularity of Box Hill and similar resorts. It is a country town not wholly dependent on London, but its shops and inns are largely for the benefit of travellers of all degrees, and a large proportion of its inhabitants were not born in Dorking and will not die there. A number of visitors were already streaming back under umbrellas to the railway stations, for again it rained. The skylarks sang in the rain, but as man was predominant hereabouts, the general impression was cheerless. To many it must have seemed absurd that the Government--say, Mr. Lloyd George--or the County Council, or the Lord Mayor of Dorking, could not arrange for Good Friday to be a fine day. The handfuls of worshippers may have been more content, but they did not look so. Three-quarters of the windows in the long, decent high street were shuttered or blinded. Unless it was some one entering the “Surrey Yeoman” or “White Horse,” nobody did anything but walk as rapidly and as straight as possible along the broad flagged pavement.

Only a robust and happy man, or one in love, can be indifferent to this kind of March weather. Only a lover or a poet can enjoy it. The poet naturally thought of here and on such a day was Meredith of Box Hill. This man,

“Quivering in harmony with the tempest, fierce
And eager with tempestuous delight,”

was one of the manliest and deepest of earth’s lovers who have written books. From first to last he wrote as an inhabitant of this earth, where, as Wordsworth says, “we have our happiness or not at all,” just or unjust. Meredith’s love of earth was in its kind equal to Wordsworth’s. It was a more earthly kind, at the same time that it had a quality almost as swiftly winged as Shelley’s. His earliest poems were all saturated with English sun and wind. He prayed that “this joy of woods and fields” would never cease; and towards the end of his life he wrote one of the happiest of all the poems of age, the one which is quoted on the fly-leaf of Mr. Hudson’s “Adventures among Birds:”

“Once I was part of the music I heard
On the boughs, or sweet between earth and sky,
For joy of the beating of wings on high
My heart shot into the breast of a bird.

“I hear it now and I see it fly,
And a life in wrinkles again is stirred,
My heart shoots into the breast of a bird,
As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh.”

What his “Juggling Jerry” said briefly--

“Yonder came smells of the gorse, so nutty,
Gold-like, and warm: it’s the prime of May.
Better than mortar, brick, and putty
Is God’s house on a blowing day”--

he himself said at greater length, with variations and footnotes.

Love of earth meant to him more than is commonly meant by love of Nature. Men gained substance and stability by it; they became strong--

“Because their love of earth is deep,
And they are warriors in accord
With life to serve.” ...

In his two sonnets called “The Spirit of Shakespeare” he said,--

“Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoured
He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell
Of human passions, but of love deflowered
His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well.
Thence came the honeyed corner at his lips.” ...

Love of earth meant breadth, perspective, and proportion, and therefore humour,--

“Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart.”

His Melampus, servant of Apollo, had a medicine, a “juice of the woods,” which reclaimed men,--

“That frenzied in some delirious rage
Outran the measure.” ...

So, in “The Appeasement of Demeter,” it was on being made to laugh that the goddess relented from her devastating sorrow, and the earth could revive and flourish again. The poet’s kinship with earth taught him to look at lesser passing things with a smile, yet without disdain; and he saw the stars as no “distant aliens” or “senseless powers,” but as having in them the same fire as we ourselves, and could, nevertheless, turn from them to sing “A Stave of Roving Tim:--”

“The wind is east, the wind is west,
Blows in and out of haven;
The wind that blows is the wind that’s best,
And croak, my jolly raven.
If here awhile we jigged and laughed,
The like we will do yonder;
For he’s the man who masters a craft,
And light as a lord can wander.

“So foot the measure, Roving Tim,
And croak, my jolly raven.
The wind, according to his whim,
Is in and out of haven.”

The “bile and buskin” attitude of Byron upon the Alps caused him to condemn “Manfred,” pronouncing, as one having authority,--

“The cities, not the mountains, blow
Such bladders; in their shape’s confessed
An after-dinner’s indigest.”

For his earth was definitely opposed to the “city.” He cried to the singing thrush in February,--

“I hear, I would the City heard.

“The City of the smoky fray;
A prodded ox, it drags and moans;
Its morrow no man’s child; its day
A vulture’s morsel beaked to bones.” ...

He tried to persuade the city that earth was not “a mother whom no cry can melt.” But his song was not clear enough, and when it was understood it said chiefly that man should love battle and seek it, and so make himself, even if a clerk or a philosopher, an animal worthy of the great globe, careless of death:--

“For love we Earth, then serve we all:
Her mystic secret then is ours:
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded, as beholds her flowers

“Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
Enrobed in morning’s mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire.”

He advanced farther, fanatically far, when he said of the lark’s song,--

“Was never voice of ours could say
Our inmost in the sweetest way,
Like yonder voice aloft, and link
All hearers in the song they drink.
Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,
Our passion is too full in flood,
We want the key of his wild note
Of truthful in a tuneful throat,
The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality.” ...

An impossibly noble savage might seem to have been his desire, a combination of Shakespeare and a Huron, of a “Wild god-ridden courser” and a study chair, though in practice perhaps a George Borrow delighted him less than a Leslie Stephen. But what he thought matters little compared with what he succeeded in saying, and with that sensuousness and vigour, both bodily and intellectual, which at his best he mingled as few poets have done. His “Love in the Valley” is the most English of love poems: the girl and the valley are purely and beautifully English. His early poem, “Daphne,” though treating a Greek myth, is equally English--altogether an open-air piece. No pale remembered orb, but the sun itself, and the wind, sweeten and brace the voluptuousness of both poems. And therefore it is that in passing Box Hill, whether the leaves of “the sudden-lighted whitebeam” are flashing, or lying, as now they were, but dimly hoary in the paths, I think of Meredith as I should not think of other poets in their territories. He was not so much an admirer and lover of Nature, like other poets, as a part of her, one of her most splendid creatures, fit to be ranked with the whitebeam, the lark, and the south-west wind that--

“Comes upon the neck of night,
Like one that leapt a fiery steed
Whose keen, black haunches quivering shine
With eagerness and haste.” ...

Riding against the south-west wind is quite another thing. That fiery steed which I had been dragging with me, as it were, instead of riding it, was not in the least exhausted, and I knew that I was unlikely to reach Farnham that evening. The telegraph wires wailed their inhuman lamentation. Thunder issued a threat of some sort far off.

At three, after eating, I was on the road again, making for Guildford by way of Wotton, Shere, and Shalford. If Dorking people will not have wine and women on top of Box Hill on a Sunday, they were, at any rate, strolling on the paths of their roadside common. The road was level, impossible to cycle on against the wind. But the eye was not starved; there was no haste. I now had the clear line of the Downs on my right hand, and was to have them so to Shalford. At first, in the region of Denbies, they were thoroughly tamed, their smoothness made park-like, their trees mostly fir. Beyond, their sides, of an almost uniform gentle steepness, but advancing and receding, hollowed and cleft, were adorned by unceasingly various combinations of beech wood, of scattered yew and thorn, of bare ploughland or young corn, and of naked chalk. The rolling commons at their feet, Milton Heath and Westcott Heath, were traversed by my road. Milton Heath, except for some rugged, heathery, pine-crested mounds on the right, was rather unnoticeable in comparison with Buryhill, a roof-like hill at right angles to the road on my left. This hill has a not very high but distinct, even ridge, and steep slopes of grass. Its trees are chiefly upon the top, embowering a classic, open summer-house.

After Milton Street came Westcott Heath and a low shingled spire up amid the gorse. The road was now cutting through sand, and the sand walls were half overgrown with moss and gorse, ivy and celandine, and overhung by wild cherry and beech. Behind me, as I climbed, a moment’s sunlight brought out the white scar of Box Hill.

Between the rising road and the Downs lay a hollow land, for nearly two miles occupied in its lowest part by the oaks of a narrow wood, called Deerleap Wood, running parallel to the road: sometimes the gray trunks were washed faintly with light, the accumulated branch-work proved itself purplish, and here and there the snick of a lost bough was bright. Over the summit of the wood I could see the chalky ploughland or pasture of the Downs, and their beechen ridge. The hollow land has a kind of island, steep and naturally moated, within it, and close to the road. Here stands Wotton Church, the home of dead Evelyns of Wotton, alone among tall beeches and chestnuts.

I had left behind me most cyclists from London, but I was now continually amongst walkers. There were a few genial muscular Christians with their daughters, and equally genial muscular agnostics with no children; bands of scientifically-minded ramblers with knickerbockers, spectacles, and cameras; a trio of young chaps singing their way to a pub.; one or two solitaries going at five miles an hour with or without hats; several of a more sentimental school in pairs, generally chosen from both sexes, disputing as to the comparative merits of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Arthur Sidgwick; and a few country people walking, not for pleasure, but to see friends seven or eight miles away, whom perhaps they had not visited for years, and, after such a Good Friday as this, never will again.

These travellers gave me a feeling that I had been forestalled (to put it mildly), and as the light began to dwindle, and to lose all intention of being brilliant, I allowed Guildford to hover before my mind’s eye, particularly when I saw St. Martha’s Church, a small, clear hilltop block six miles away, and I knew that Guildford was not two miles from it, by the Pilgrim’s Way or not. It was a satisfaction, though a trifling one, to be going with the water which was making for the Wey at Shalford. The streamlet, the Tillingbourne, began to assert itself at Abinger Hammer. Just before that village it runs alongside the road instead of a hedge, nourishing willows and supplying the bronzed watercress beds. The beginning of the village is a wheelwright’s shed under an elm by the road. Many hoops of wheels lean against the shed, many planks against the elm. The green follows, and Abinger Hammer is built round it. I preferred Gomshall--which only showed to the main road its inns and brewery--and the wet, bushy Gomshall Common. It is a resort of gypsies. A van full of newly-made baskets stood among the bushes, and the men sat on the shafts instead of joining the ramblers at the “Black Horse” or the “Compasses.” The downs opposite them were speckled black with yew.

I did not stop at Shere, “the prettiest village in Surrey,” and I saw no reason why it should not bear the title, or why it should be any the better liked for it. But I went to see the Silent Pool. Until it has been seen, everything is in the name. I had supposed it circular, tenebrous, and deep enough to be the receptacle of innumerable romantic skeletons. It is, in fact, an oblong pond of the size of a swimming bath, overhung on its two long sides and its far, short side, by ash trees. Its unrippled lymph, on an irregular chalk bottom of a singular pallid green, was so clear and thin that it seemed not to be water. It concealed nothing. A few trout glided here and there over the chalk or the dark green weed tufts. It had no need of romantic truth or fiction. Its innocent lucidity fascinated me.

Now another short cut to Guildford offered itself, by the road--an open and yellow road--up over Merrow Down. But the Downs were beginning to give me some shelter, and I went on under them, glad of the easier riding. The Tillingbourne here was running closer under the Downs, and the river level met the hillside more sharply than before. The road bent above the meadows and showed them flat to the very foot of a steep, brown slope covered with beeches. The sky lightened--lightened too much: St. Martha’s tower, almost reaching up into the hurrying white rack, was dark on its dark hill. So I came to Albury, which has the streamlet between it and the Downs, unlike Abinger Hammer, Gomshall, and Shere. The ground, used for vegetables and plum trees, fell steeply down to the water, beyond which it rose again as steeply in a narrow field bounded horizontally by a yet steeper strip of hazel coppice; beyond this again the rise was continued in a broader field extending to the edge of the main hillside beechwood. Albury is one of those villages possessing a neglected old church and a brand-new one. In this case the new is a decent enough one of alternating flint and stone, built among trees on a gradual rise. But the old one is too much like a shameless unburied corpse.

Twice I crossed the Tillingbourne, and came to where it broadened into a pond. This water on either side of the road was bordered by plumed sedges and clubbed bulrushes. At the far side, under the wooded Downside crowned by St. Martha’s, was a pale, shelterless mill of a ghostly bareness. The aspens were breaking into yellow-green leaves round about, especially one prone aspen on the left where a drain was belching furious, tawny water into the stream, and shaking the spears of the bulrushes.

As I went on towards Chilworth, gorse was blossoming on the banks of the road. Behind the blossom rose up the masses of hillside wood, now scarcely interrupted save by a few interspaces of lawn-like grass; and seated at the foot of all this oak and pine were the Chilworth powder mills. Two centuries have earned them nobody’s love or reverence; for there is something inhuman, diabolical, in permitting the union which makes these unrelated elements more powerful than any beast, crueller than any man.

Crossing the little railway from the mills, I came in sight of the Hog’s Back, by which I must go to Farnham. That even, straight ridge pointing westward, and commanding the country far away on either side, must have had a road along it since man went upright, and must continue to have one so long as it is a pleasure to move and to use the eyes together. It is a road fit for the herald Mercury and the other gods, because it is as much in heaven as on earth. The road I was on, creeping humbly and crookedly to avoid both the steepness of the hills and the wetness of the valley, was by comparison a mole run. Between me and the Hog’s Back flowed the Wey, and as the Tillingbourne approached it the valley spread out and flattened into Shalford’s long, wet common. My road crossed the common, a rest for gypsies and their ponies. Shalford village also is on the flat, chiefly on the right hand side of the road, nearer the hill, and away from the river, so that its outlook over the levels gives it a resemblance to a seaside village. Instead of the sea it had formerly a fair ground of a hundred and forty acres. Its inn is the “Queen Victoria”--charmless name.

To avoid the Wey and reach Guildford, which is mainly on this side of the water, I had to turn sharp to the right at Shalford, and to penetrate, along with the river, the hills which I had been following. Within half a mile of Guildford I was at the point where the Pilgrim’s Way, travelling the flank of these hills, descends towards the Wey and the Hog’s Back opposite. A small but distinct hill, with a precipitous, sandy face, rises sheer out of the far side of the river where the road once crossed. The silver-gray square of the ruins of St. Catherine’s Chapel tops the cliff. The river presently came close to my bank; the road climbed to avoid it, and brought me into Guildford by Quarry Road, well above the steep-built, old portion of the town and its church and rookery sycamores, though below the castle.

The closed shops, plate glass, and granite roadway of the High Street put the worst possible appearance on the rain that suddenly poured down at six. A motor car dashed under the “Lion” arch for shelter. The shop doorways were filled by foot-passengers. The plate glass, the granite, and the rain rebounding from it and rushing in two torrents down the steep gutters, made a scene of physical and spiritual chill under a sky that had now lost even the pretence to possess a sun. I had thought not to decide for or against going on to Farnham that night until I had drunk tea. But having once sat in a room--not of the “Jolly Butcher,” but a commercial temperance hotel--where I could only hear the rain falling from the sky and dripping from roofs, I glided into the resolution to spend the night there. A fire was lit; the servant stood a poker vertically against the grate to make it burn; and, after some misgivings, it did burn. The moon was mounting the clear east, and Venus stood with Orion in the west above a low, horizontal ledge of darkest after-sunset cloud. There could not have been a better time for those ten miles to Farnham; but I did not go. Not until after supper did I go out to look at the night I had lost, the cold sea of sky, the large bright moon, the white stars over the shimmering roofs, and the yellow street lamps and window panes of Guildford. I walked haphazard, now to the right, now to the left, often by narrow passages and dark entries. I skirted the railings of the gardens which have been made out of the castle site, the square ivy-patched keep, the dry moat full of sycamores; and hereby was a kissing corner. I crossed Quarry Road and went down Mill Lane to the “Miller’s Arms,” the water-works, and the doubled Wey roaring in turbid streams. A footbridge took me to Mill Mead, the “Britannia,” and the faintly nautical cottages that look, over a gas-lit paved space, at the river and the timber sheds of the other bank. The dark water, the dark houses, the silvered, wet, moonlit streets, called for some warm, musical life in contrast. But except that a sacred concert was proceeding near the market place, there was nothing like it accessible. Many couples hurried along: at corners here and there a young man, or two young men, talked to a girl. The inns were not full, too many travellers having been discouraged. I had the temperance commercial hotel to myself, but for two men who had walked from London and had no conversation left in them, as was my case also. I dallied alternately with my maps and with the pictures on the wall. One of these I liked, a big square gloomy canvas, where a dark huntsman of Byron’s time, red-coated and clean-shaven, turned round on his horse to cheer the hounds, one of them almost level with him, glinting pallid through the mist of time, two others just pushing their noses into the picture; it had a background of a dim range of hills and a spire. The whole picture was as dim as memory, but more powerful to recall the nameless artist and nameless huntsman than that cross at Leatherhead.

III.

GUILDFORD TO DUNBRIDGE.

Cocks crowing and wheels thundering on granite waked me at Guildford soon after six. I was out at seven, after paying 3s. 6d. for supper and bed: breakfast I was to have at Farnham. I have often fared as well as I did that night at a smaller cost, and worse at a larger. At Guildford itself, for example, I went recently into a place of no historic interest or natural beauty, and greenly consented to pay 3s. for a bed, although the woman, in answer to my question, said that the charge for supper and breakfast would be according to what I had. What I had for supper was two herrings and bread and butter, and a cup of coffee afterwards; for breakfast I had bacon and bread and tea. The supper cost 1s. 6d., exclusive of the coffee; the breakfast cost 1s. 6d. exclusive of the tea. Nor did these charges prevent the boots, who had not cleaned my boots, from hanging round me at parting, as if I had been his long-lost son.

The beautiful, still, pale morning was as yet clouded by the lightest of white silk streamers. The slates glimmered with yesterday’s rain in the rising sun. It was too fine, too still, too sunny, but the castle jackdaws rejoiced in it, crying loudly in the sycamores, on the old walls, or high in air. By the time I was beginning to mount the Hog’s Back, clouds not of silk were assembling. They passed away; others appeared, but the rain was not permitted to fall. Many miles of country lay cold and soft, but undimmed, on both hands. On the north it was a mostly level land where hedgerow trees and copses, beyond the first field or two, made one dark wood to the eye, but rising to the still darker heights of Bisley and Chobham on the horizon, and gradually disclosing the red settlements of Aldershot and Farnborough, and the dark high land of Bagshot. On the south at first I could see the broken ridge of Hindhead, Blackdown, and Olderhill, and through the gap a glimpse of the Downs; then later the piny country which culminates in the dome of Crooksbury Hill; and nearer at hand a lower but steeply rising and falling region of gorse, bracken, and heather intermingled with ploughland of almost bracken colour, and with the first hop gardens. Both the level-seeming sweep on the north and the hills of the south, clear as they were in that anxious light, were subject to the majestic road on the Hog’s Back. A mile out of Guildford the road is well upon the back, and for five or six miles it runs straight, yet not too straight, with slight change of altitude, yet never flat, and for the most part upon the very ridge--the topmost bristles--of the Hog’s Back. The ridge, in fact, has in some parts only just breadth enough to carry the road, and the land sinks away rapidly on both hands, giving the traveller the sensation of going on the crest of a stout wall, surveying his immense possessions northward and southward. The road has a further advantage that would be great whatever its position, but on this ridge is incalculable. It is bordered, not by a hedge, but by uneven and in places bushy wastes, often as wide as a field. The wastes, of course, are divided from the cultivated slopes below by hedges, but either these are low, as on the right, or they are irregularly expanded into thickets of yew and blackthorn, and even into beech plantations, as on the left. Whoever cares to rides or walks here instead of on the dust. A goat or two were feeding here. There was, and there nearly always is, an encampment of gypsies. The telegraph posts and the stout, three-sided, old, white milestones stand here. The telegraph posts, in one place, for some distance alternate with low, thick yew trees. I liked those telegraph posts, businesslike and mysterious, and their wires that are sufficient of themselves to create the pathetic fallacy. None the less, I liked the look of the gypsies camping under them. If they were not there, in fact, they would have to be invented. They are at home there. See them at nightfall, with their caravans drawn up facing the wind, and the men by the half-door at the back smoking, while the hobbled horses are grazing and the children playing near. The children play across the road, motor cars or no motor cars, laughing at whoever amuses them. There were two caravans at the highest point near Puttenham, where the ridge is so narrow that the roadside thicket is well below the road, and I saw clear to Hindhead: in another place there were two antique, patched tents on hoops.

The wind was now strong in my face again. But it did not rain, and at moments the sun had the power to warm. There was not a moment when I had not a lark singing overhead. On the right hand slope, which is more gradual than that to the left, men were rolling some grass fields, harrowing others; lower down they were ploughing. Men were beginning to work among the hop poles on the left. The oaks in the woods there were each individualized, and had a smoky look which they would not have had in Summer, Autumn, or Winter.

Houses very seldom intrude on the waste, and there are few near it. On the south side two or three big houses had been built so as to command Hindhead, etc., and a board directed me to the “Jolly Farmer” at Puttenham, but no inn was visible till I came to the “Victory,” which was well past the half-way mark to Farnham. The north side showed not more than a cottage or two, until I began to descend towards Farnham and came to a villa which had trimmed the waste outside its gates and decorated it with the inscription, “Keep off the grass.” Going downhill was too much of a pleasure for me to look carefully at Runfold, though I noticed another “Jolly Farmer” there, and a “Princess Royal,” with the date 1819. This not very common sign put into my head the merry song about the “brave _Princess Royal_” that set sail from Gravesend--

“On the tenth of December and towards the year’s end,”

and met a pirate, who asked them to “drop your main topsail and heave your ship to,” but got the answer,--

“We’ll drop our main topsail and heave our ship to,
But that in some harbour, not alongside of you.
So we hoisted the royals and set the topsail,
And the brave _Princess Royal_ soon showed them her tail:
And we went a-cruising, and we went a-cruising,
And we went a-cruising, all on the salt seas.”

A PASSING STORM

near St. Cross, Winchester.]

The good tune and merry words lasted me down among the market gardens and florists’ plantations, past the “Shepherd and Flock” at the turning to Moor Park, to the Wey again, and the first oast-house beside it, and so into Farnham at a quarter to nine, which I felt to be breakfast time.

While I drank my coffee the rising wind slammed a door and the first shower passed over. The sun shone for me to go to the “Jolly Farmer” across the Wey, in a waterside street of cottages and many inns, such as the “Hop Bag,” the “Bird in Hand,” and the “Lamb.” The “Jolly Farmer,” Cobbett’s birthplace, a small inn standing back a little, with a flat black and white front, was labelled “Cobbett’s Birthplace,” in letters as big as are usually given to the name of a brewer. It is built close up against a low sandy bank, which continues above the right shore of the Wey, somewhat conspicuously, for miles. Behind the “Jolly Farmer” this bank is a cliff, hollowed out into caves (no one knows how old, or whether made by Druids or smugglers), and overgrown by bushes and crowned by elms full of rooks’ nests. The whole of this waterside is attractive, rustic, but busy. The Wey is already a strong stream there, and timber yards and warehouses abut on it. A small public garden occupies the angle made by one of its willowy bends.

Farnham West Street was for the moment warm in the sun as I walked slowly between its shops to where the perched brick fronts of decent old houses were scarcely interrupted by a quiet shop or two and the last inns, the “Rose and Thistle” and the “Holly Bush.” It is one of those streets in which a hundred houses have been welded into practically one block. There are some very old houses, some that are old, and some not very old, but all together compose one long, uneven wall of rustic urbanity. Castle Street is entirely different. It takes its name from the Bishop of Winchester’s castle, a palace of old red brick and several cedars standing at its upper end. Being about three times as broad as West Street, it is fit to be compared for breadth with the streets of Marlborough, Wootton Bassett, or Epsom. Most of the houses are private and not big, of red or of plastered or whitened brick; but there is a baker’s shop, a “Nelson’s Arms,” and a row of green-porched alms-houses. At the far end the street rises and curves a little to the left, and is narrowed by the encroachment of front gardens only possessed by the houses at that point. A long flight of steps above this curve ascends a green slope of arum and ivy and chestnut trees, past an old episcopal fruit wall, to a rough-cast gateway, with clock and belfry, and beyond that, the palace and two black, many-storied cedars towering at its front door.

I looked in vain for a statue of Cobbett in Farnham. Long may it be before there is one, for it will probably be bad and certainly unnecessary. So long as “Rural Rides” is read he needs not to share that kind of resurrection of the just with Queen Anne and the late Dukes of Devonshire and of Cambridge. The district has bred yet another man who combines the true countryman and the writer. I mean, of course, George Bourne, author of “The Bettesworth Book,” a volume which ought to go on to the most select shelf of country books, even beside those of White, Cobbett, Jefferies, Hudson, and Burroughs. Bettesworth was a Surrey labourer, a neighbour and workman of the author’s. He was an observant and communicative man: his employer took notes from time to time, and the book is mainly a record of conversations. George Bourne gives a brief setting to the old man’s words, yet a sufficient one. Pain and sorrow are not absent, and afar off we see a gray glimpse of the workhouse; but the whole is joyful. Even when Bettesworth “felt a bit Christmassy” there is no melancholy; his head merely seems “all mops and brooms.” His wife tells him that he has been laughing in his sleep. “I was always laughing, then,” he says, “until I was sore all round wi’ it.” We have Bettesworth’s own words in most cases, and George Bourne never interferes except to help. There is no insipid contrast with the outer world, though here and there we have an echo from it; we hear of railways as not particularly convenient, and a dull way of travelling; and of cut-purses, “got up they was, ye know, reg’lar fly-looking blokes, like gentlemen.” Nothing is omitted but what had to be. Bettesworth cleaned cesspools at times, and the best things in the book centre round his “excellent versatility in usefulness.” Well-sinking, reaping, lawn-mowing, pole-pulling in the hop garden, mending of roofs and steeples, and all the glorious activities connected with horses, had come into his work: as for adventure, he drove his first pair of cart horses from Staines to Smithfield Market. He had been a wanderer, too. During a long absence from friends he wrote to a brother, enclosing a gift; but on the way to the post he met an acquaintance, “and I ast’n if he’d ’ave a drink. So when he says yes, I took the letter an’ tore out the dollar an’ chucked the letter over the hedge. An’ we went off an’ ’ad a bottle o’ rum wi’ this dollar. An’ that’s all as they ever heerd o’ me for seven year.”

But the conversations themselves were held while Bettesworth was laying turf, or during the quite genial fatigue following a fifteen-hour day. “Laying Turf” is one of the most charming pieces in the world. The old steeple-mender, reaper, and carter was laying turf under continuous rain and in an uncomfortable attitude, and made the unexpected comment: “Pleasant work this. I could very well spend my time at it, with good turfs.”

“The Bettesworth Book” appeared in 1901. “Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer,” the record of Bettesworth’s last years--1892-1905--appeared in 1907. At first the book may seem tame, a piece of reporting which leaves the reader not unaware of the notebooks consulted by the author. But in the end comes a picture out of the whole, painfully, dubiously emerging, truthful undoubtedly, subtle, not easy to understand, which raises George Bourne to a high place among observers. Apart from his observation, too, he shows himself a man with a ripe and generous, if staid, view of life, and a writer capable of more than accurate writing: witness his picture of frozen rime on telegraph wires, of Bettesworth’s “polling beck” or potato fork, and phrases like this: “Near the beans there were brussels sprouts, their large leaves soaked with colour out of the clouded day.”

Bettesworth had fought in the Crimea, and during sixty years had been active unceasingly over a broad space of English country--Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire--always out of doors. His memory was good, his eye for men and trades a vivid one, and his gift of speech unusual, “with swift realistic touch, convincingly true;” so that a picture of rural England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, by one born in the earlier half and really belonging to it, is the result. The portrait of an unlettered pagan English peasant is fascinating. He lived in a parish where people of urban habits were continually taking the place of the older sort who dropped out, but he had himself been labourer, soldier, “all sorts of things; but ... first and last by taste a peasant, with ideas and interests proper to another England than that in which we are living now,” and perhaps unconscious of the change since the days when he saw four men in a smithy making an axe-head: “Three with sledge-’ammers, and one with a little ’ammer, tinkin’ on the anvil.... There was one part of making a axe as they’d never let anybody see ’em at.”

The talk, and George Bourne’s comments reveal this man’s way of thinking and speaking, his lonely thoughts, and his attitude in almost every kind of social intercourse. They show his physical strength, his robust and gross enjoyment, his isolation, his breeding and independence, his tenderness without pity, his courage, his determination to endure. No permissible amount of quotation can explain the subtle appeal of his talk, for example, whilst turf-laying,--

“Half unawares it came home to me, like the contact of the garden mould, and the smell of the earth, and the silent saturation of the cold air. You could hardly call it thought--the quality in this simple prattling. Our hands touching the turfs had no thought either; but they were alive for all that; and of such a nature was the life in Bettesworth’s brain, in its simple touch upon the circumstances of his existence. The fretful echoes men call opinions did not sound in it; clamour of the daily press did not disturb its quiet; it was no bubble puffed out by learning, nor indeed had it any of the gracefulness which some mental life takes from poetry and art; but it was still a genuine and strong elemental life of the human brain that during those days was my companion. It seemed as if something very real, as if the true sound of the life of the village had at last reached my dull senses.”

It will now reach duller senses than George Bourne’s. No one has told better how a peasant who has not toned his other virtues with thrift is deserted in the end by God and even the majority of men. The “Memoirs” are shadowed from the first by the helplessness of Bettesworth’s epileptic wife. The whole of his last year was a dimly lighted, solitary, manly agony.... Now, a statue of Frederick Bettesworth might well be placed at the foot of Castle Street, to astonish and annoy, if a sculptor could be found.