Chapter VI: Part 6

I am not fond of crowds, but this holiday crowd caused no particular distaste. Away from their town and separated into small groups they had no cumulative effect. They were for the time being travellers as much as I was. In any case, a town like Trowbridge is used to strangers of all kinds passing through it: it would take a South Sea Islander in native costume to make it stare as a village does. The crowd that I dislike most is the crowd near Clapham Junction on a Saturday afternoon. Though born and bred a Clapham Junction man, I have become indifferently so. Perhaps I ought to call my feeling fear: alarm comes first, followed rapidly by dislike. It is a crowd of considerable size, consisting of women shopping, of young men and women promenading, mostly apart, though not blind to one another, and of men returning from offices. They take things fairly easily, even these last, and can look about. I shall not pretend to define the difference between them and a village or a provincial town crowd. It is less homely than a village, less compact and abounding in clear types than a town. It is a disintegrated crowd, rather suspicious and shy perhaps, where few know, or could guess much about, the others. When I find myself among them, I am more confused and uneasy than in any other crowd. I cannot settle down in it to notice the three or four or half a dozen types, as I should do at Swindon, or Swansea, or Coventry; nor yet to please myself as with the general look of a village mob of forty or fifty, and a few of the most remarkable individuals. Here, at Clapham Junction, each one asks a separate question. In a quarter of an hour I am bewildered and dejected.

How different it is from a London crowd. In London everybody is a Londoner. Once in the Strand or Oxford Street I am as much at home as any one. If I were to walk up and down continuously for a week I should not be noticed any more than I am now. For all they know I am an Old Inhabitant. So is every one else from Cartmel or Tregaron. There are no lookers on: all are lookers on. I look hard at every one as at the pictures in a gallery, and no offence is taken. I can lose myself comfortably amongst them, and wake up again only when I find myself alone. Each day, except in the shops, an entirely new set of faces is seen, so far as memory tells me. A burly flower-girl, a white-haired youth, and a broken-down, long-haired actor or poet, are the only strangers in London I have seen more than once. Yet the combination is familiar. I am a Londoner, and I am at home. But I am not a Clapham Junction man any more than I am a Trowbridge man. Perhaps the reason of my discontent is that there are no Clapham Junction men, that all are strangers and aware of it, that they never truly make a mob like the factory men at New Swindon, and yet are too numerous to be regarded as villagers like the people of Rudge.

I did not stop in Trowbridge. Its twenty chimneys were as tranquil as its tall spire, and its slaughter-house as silent as the adjacent church, where the poet Crabbe, once vicar, is commemorated by a tablet, informing the world that he rose by his abilities. In fact, the noisiest thing in Trowbridge was the rookery where I left it. Like nearly all towns--market towns, factory towns--Trowbridge is girdled by villas, chestnuts, and elms, and in the trees rooks build, thus making a ceremoniously rustic entrance or exit. While the rooks cawed overhead, the blackbirds sang below.

As far as Hilperton and the “Lion and Fiddle,” houses and fields alternated along the road, but after that I entered a broad elmy country of young corn and new-ploughed land sweeping gradually away on my right up to grass slopes, and to the foot of dark Roundway Down and pale Beacon Hill, above Devizes. Far to the left the meadow land swelled up into the wooded high land above Lacock, Corsham, and Bath. Under elms near Semington the threshing-machine boomed; its unchanging note mingled with a hiss at the addition of each sheaf. Otherwise the earth was the rooks’, heaven was the larks’, and I rode easily on along the good level road somewhere between the two.

Motion was extraordinarily easy that afternoon, and I had no doubts that I did well to bicycle instead of walking. It was as easy as riding in a cart, and more satisfying to a restless man. At the same time I was a great deal nearer to being a disembodied spirit than I can often be. I was not at all tired, so far as I knew. No people or thoughts embarrassed me. I fed through the senses directly, but very temperately, through the eyes chiefly, and was happier than is explicable or seems reasonable. This pleasure of my disembodied spirit (so to call it) was an inhuman and diffused one, such as may be attained by whatever dregs of this our life survive after death. In fact, had I to describe the adventure of this remnant of a man I should express it somewhat thus, with no need of help from Dante, Mr. A. C. Benson, or any other visitors to the afterworld. In a different mood I might have been encouraged to believe the experience a foretaste of a sort of imprisonment in the viewless winds, or of a spiritual share in the task of keeping the cloudy winds “fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.” Supposing I were persuaded to provide this afterworld with some of the usual furniture, I could borrow several visible things from that ride through Semington, Melksham, and Staverton. First and chief would be the Phœnix “Swiss” Milk Factory where I crossed the Avon at Staverton. It is an enormous stone cube, with multitudinous windows all alike, and at the back of it two tall chimneys. The Avon winding at its foot is a beautiful, willowy river. On the opposite side of the road and bridge the river bank rises up steeply, clothed evenly with elms, and crowned by Staverton’s little church which the trees half conceal.... This many-windowed naked mass, surmounted by a stone phœnix, immediately over the conspicuous information that it was burnt on November 5, 1834, and rebuilt on April 28 of the next year, is as big as a cathedral, and like a cathedral in possessing a rookery in the riverside elms behind it. With the small, shadowed church opposite, I feel sure that it would need little transmutation to fall into the geography of a land of shades. But the most beautiful thing of all was the broad meadow called Challimead on the west of Melksham, and the towered church lying along the summit of the gentle rise in which it ends. I bicycled along the north-west side of it immediately after leaving Melksham on the way to Holt. Elms of a hundred years’ growth lined the road, some upright, most lying amid the wreckage of their branchwork far out over the grass. Parallel with the road and much nearer to it than to the church the Avon serpentined along the meadow without disturbing the level three furlongs of its perfect green. The windows of the church flamed in the last sunbeams, the tombstones were clear white. For this meadow at least there should be a place in any Elysium. It would be a suitable model for the meadow of heavenly sheen where Æneas saw the blessed souls of Ilus and Assaracus and Dardanus and the bard Musæus, heroes and wise men, and the beautiful horses of the heroes, in that diviner air lighted by another sun and other stars than ours.

But our sun was fading over Challimead. The air grew cold as I went on, and the pewits cried as if it were winter. The rooks were now silent dots all over the elms of the Trowbridge rookery. A light mist was brushing over the fields, softening the brightness of Venus in the pale rosy west, and the scarlet flames that leapt suddenly from a thorn pile in a field. Probably there would be another frost to-night.... People were returning to the town in small and more scattered groups. At corners and crossways figures were standing talking, or bidding farewell. I rode on easily through the chill, friendly land. Clear hoofs hammering and men or girls talking in traps were but an added music to the quiet throughout the evening. I began to feel some confidence in the Spring.

I went out into the village at about half-past nine in the dark, quiet evening. A few stars penetrated the soft sky; a few lights shone on earth, from a distant farm seen through a gap in the cottages. Single and in groups, separated by gardens or bits of orchard, the cottages were vaguely discernible: here and there a yellow window square gave out a feeling of home, tranquillity, security. Nearly all were silent. Ordinary speech was not to be heard, but from one house came the sounds of an harmonium being played and a voice singing a hymn, both faintly. A dog barked far off. After an interval a gate fell-to lightly. Nobody was on the road.

The road was visible most dimly, and was like a pale mist at an uncertain distance. When I reached the green all was still and silent. The cottages on the opposite side of the road all lay back, and they were merely blacker stains on the darkness. The pollard willows fringing the green, which in the sunlight resemble mops, were now very much like a procession of men, strange primæval beings, pausing to meditate in the darkness.

The intervals between the cottages were longer here, and still longer; I ceased to notice them until I came to the last house, a small farm, where the dog growled, but in a subdued tone, as if only to condemn my footsteps on the deserted road.

Rows of elm trees on both sides of the road succeeded. I walked more slowly, and at a gateway stopped. While I leaned looking over it at nothing, there was a long silence that could be felt, so that a train whistling two miles away seemed as remote as the stars. The noise could not overleap the boundaries of that silence. And yet I presently moved away, back towards the village, with slow steps.

I was tasting the quiet and the safety without a thought. Night had no evil in it. Though a stranger, I believed that no one wished harm to me. The first man I saw, fitfully revealed by a swinging lantern as he crossed his garden, seemed to me to have the same feeling, to be utterly free of trouble or any care. A man slightly drunk deviated towards me, halted muttering, and deviated away again. I heard his gate shut, and he was absorbed.

The inn door, which was now open, was as the entrance to a bright cave in the middle of the darkness: the illumination had a kind of blessedness such as it might have had to a cow, not without foreignness; and a half-seen man within it belonged to a world, blessed indeed, but far different from this one of mine, dark, soft, and tranquil. I felt that I could walk on thus, sipping the evening silence and solitude, endlessly. But at the house where I was staying I stopped as usual. I entered, blinked at the light, and by laughing at something, said with the intention of being laughed at, I swiftly again naturalized myself.

VII.

TROWBRIDGE TO SHEPTON MALLET.

I awoke to hear ducklings squeaking, and a starling in the pine tree imitating the curlew and the owl hunting. Then I heard another chiff-chaff. Everything more than a quarter of a mile away was hidden by the mist of a motionless white frost, but the blackbird disregarded it. At a quarter to eight he was singing perfectly in an oak at the cross roads. The sun had melted the frost wherever it was not protected by hedges or fallen trees. Soon a breeze broke up and scattered and destroyed the mist, and I set out on a warm, cloudy morning that could do no wrong. As I was riding down the half-way hill between Trowbridge and Bradford, where the hedge has a number of thorns trimmed to an umbrella shape at intervals, they were ploughing with two horses, and the sun gleamed on the muscles of the horses and the polished slabs of the furrows. Jackdaws were flying and crying over Bradford-on-Avon.

I dismounted by the empty “Lamb” inn, with a statue of a black-faced lamb over its porch, and sat on the bridge. The Avon ran swift, but calm and dull, down under the bridge and away westward. The town hill rises from off the water, covered as with scales with stone houses of countless varieties of blackened gray and many gables, and so steep that the roofs of one horizontal street are only just higher than the doorsteps of the one above. A brewery towers from the mass at the far side, and, near the top, a factory with the words “For Sale” printed on its roof in huge letters. And the smoke of factories blew across the town. The hilltop above the houses is crested with beeches and rooks’ nests against the blue. The narrow space between the foot of the hill and the river is occupied by private gardens, a church and its churchyard yews and chestnuts, and by a tall empty factory based on the river bank itself, with a notice “To Let.” Opposite this a small public garden of grass and planes and chestnuts comes to the water’s edge, and next to that, a workshop and a house or two, separated from the water by rough willowy plots, an angle of flat grass and an almond tree, and private gardens. Behind me the river disappeared among houses and willows.

As I sat there, who should come up and stare at the chapel on the bridge and its weather-vane of a gilded perch, but the Other Man. Surprise sufficiently fortified whatever pleasure we felt to compel us to join company; for he also was going to Wells.

We took the Frome road as far as Winkfield, where we turned off westward to Farleigh Hungerford. In half a mile we were in Somerset, descending by a steep bank of celandines under beeches that rose up on our right towards the Frome. The river lay clear ahead of us, and to our left. A bushy hill, terraced horizontally, rose beyond it, and Farleigh Hungerford Castle, an ivied front, a hollow-eyed round tower, and a gateway, faced us from the brow. From the bridge, and the ruined cottages and mills collected round it, we walked up to the castle, which is a show place. From here the Other Man would have me turn aside to see Tellisford. This is a hamlet scattered along half a mile of by-road, from a church at the corner down to the Frome. Once there was a ford, but now you cross by a stone footbridge with white wooden handrails. A ruined flock-mill and a ruined ancient house stand next to it on one side; on the other the only house is a farm with a round tower embodied in its front. Away from this farm a beautiful meadow slopes between the river and the woods above. This grass, which becomes level for a few yards nearest the bank, was the best possible place, said the Other Man, for running in the sun after bathing at the weir--we could see its white wall of foam half a mile higher up the river, which was concealed by alders beyond. He said it was a great haunt of nightingales. And there was also a service tree; and, said he, in that tree sang a thrush all through May--it was the best May that ever was--and so well it sang, unlike any other thrush, that it made him think he would gladly live no longer than a thrush if he could do some one thing as right, as crisp and rich, as the song was. “I suppose you write books,” said I. “I do,” said he. “What sort of books do you write?” “I wrote one all about this valley of the Frome.... But no one knows that it was the Frome I meant. You look surprised. Nevertheless, I got fifty pounds for it.” “That is a lot of money for such a book!” “So my publisher thought.” “And you are lucky to get money for doing what you like.” “What I like!” he muttered, pushing his bicycle back uphill, past the goats by the ruin, and up the steps between walls that were lovely with humid moneywort, and saxifrage like filigree, and ivy-leaved toadflax. Apparently the effort loosened his tongue. He rambled on and on about himself, his past, his writing, his digestion; his main point being that he did not like writing. He had been attempting the impossible task of reducing undigested notes about all sorts of details to a grammatical, continuous narrative. He abused notebooks violently. He said that they blinded him to nearly everything that would not go into the form of notes; or, at any rate, he could never afterwards reproduce the great effects of Nature and fill in the interstices merely--which was all they were good for--from the notes. The notes--often of things which he would otherwise have forgotten--had to fill the whole canvas. Whereas, if he had taken none, then only the important, what he truly cared for, would have survived in his memory, arranged not perhaps as they were in Nature, but at least according to the tendencies of his own spirit. “Good God!” said he. But luckily we were by this time on the level. I mounted. He followed.

Thanks, I suppose, to the Other Man’s conversation, we took the wrong road, retracing our steps to Farleigh instead of going straight on to Norton St. Philip. However, it was a fine day. The sun shone quietly; the new-cut hedges were green and trim; neither did any of the prunings puncture our tyres. Near the crossing from Wolverton to Freshford and Bath we sat down on a sheep trough and ate lunch in a sloping field sprinkled with oak trees. The Other Man ate monkey-nuts for the benefit of his health, but pointed out that the monkey-nuts, like beef-steak, turned into himself. He informed me that he had been all over Salisbury on Saturday night and Bradford on Monday morning in a vain search for brown bread. But as the monkey-nuts had the merit of absorbing most of his attention he talked comparatively little. I was free, therefore, to look down over our field and over drab grass and misted copses southward to Cley Hill, a dim, broad landscape that seemed to be expecting to bring something forth.

We had not gone a mile from this stopping-place when the Other Man got off to look over the “George” at Norton St. Philip, another show place, known to its proprietor as “the oldest licensed house in England,” and once for a night occupied by the Duke of Monmouth. It is a considerable, venerable house, timbered in front, with a room that was formerly a wool market extending over its whole length and breadth under the roof. In the rear of it crowded many pent-houses and outbuildings, equivalent to a hamlet, and once, no doubt, sufficient for all purposes connected with travel on foot or horseback. The Other Man was scared out of it in good time by a new arrival, a man of magnificent voice, who talked with authority, and without permission and without intermission, to any one whom neighbourhood made a listener. After a wish that the talker might become dumb, or he himself deaf, the Other Man escaped.

We glided down the street to a little tributary of a tributary too pleasantly to stop at the church below, though it had a grand tower with tiers of windows. The rise following brought us up to where a road crosses from Wellow, and at the crossing stands a small isolated inn called “Tuckers-grave.” Who Tucker was, and whether it was a man or a woman buried at the crossing, I did not discover. The next village was Falkland, a mile farther on. It is built around a green, on one side of which a big elm overshadows a pair of stocks and a low, long stone for the patient to sit upon, and at the side a tall one like a rude sculptured constable. A number of other great stones were distributed about the village, including two smooth and rounded ones, like flat loaves, on a cottage wall. The children and youths of the village were in the road, the children whipping tops of a carrot shape, the youths of seventeen or so playing at marbles.

From this high land--for since rising up away from Norton St. Philip we had always been over four hundred feet up, midway between the valleys of the Frome on the left and the Midford brook on the right--we looked far on either side over valleys of mist. The hollow land on the right, which contained Radstock coalfield, many elm trees, and old overgrown mounds of coal refuse, was vague, and drowsed in the summer-like mist: the white smoke of the collieries drifted slowly in horizontal bands athwart the mist. The voices of lambs rose up, the songs of larks descended, out of the mist. Rooks cawed from field to field. Carts met us or passed us coming from Road, Freshford, Frome, and other places, to load up with coal from the store by the side of the road, which is joined to the distant colliery by a miniature railway, steep and straight. But what dominated the scene was a tall square tower on the road. Turner’s Tower the map named it. Otherwise at a distance it might have been taken for an uncommon church tower or a huge chimney. The Other Man asked twenty questions about it of a carter whom we met as we came up to it; and the carter, a round-eyed, round-nosed, round-voiced, genial man, answered them all. He said it had been built half a century ago by a gentleman farmer named Turner, as a rival to Lord Hylton’s tower which we could see on our left at a wooded hilltop near Ammerdown House. Originally it measured two hundred and thirty feet in height. Mr. Turner used to go up and down it, but it served no other purpose, and in course of time more than half fell down. The long hall at the bottom became a club-room, where miners used to drink more than other people thought good for them. Finally Lord Hylton bought it: the club ceased. About a hundred feet of the tower survives, pierced by a few pointed windows above and doors below, cheap and ecclesiastical in appearance. Attached to it is a block of cottages, and several others lie behind.

We crossed the Frome and Radstock road, and raced down a straight mile that is lined on the left by the high park walls of Ammerdown House, and overhung by beeches. At the bottom only an inferior road continued our line, and that dwindled to a footpath. For the descent to Kilmersdon by this direct route is too precipitous for a modern road. We had to turn, therefore, sharp to the left along the road from Writhlington to Mells and Frome, and then curved round out of it to the right, and so under the railway down to Kilmersdon. Before entering the village the road bent alongside a steep wooded slope littered with ash poles. The bottom of the deep hollow is occupied by a church, an inn distinguished by a coat-of-arms, and the motto, “_Tant que je puis_,” and many stone cottages strung about a stream and a parallelogram of roads. The church tower has three tiers of windows in it, and a blue-faced clock, whose gilt hands pointed to half-past three. There is a venerable and amusing menagerie of round-headed and long-headed gargoyles, with which a man could spend a lifetime unbored. Inside as well as outside the church the Jolliffe family, now represented by Lord Hylton, predominates, amid the Easter scent of jonquil and daffodil. For example, much space is given to the following verses, in memory of Thomas Samuel Jolliffe, lord of the Hundreds of Kilmersdon and Wellow, a “high-minded and scrupulously honourable gentleman,” “of Norman original,” who died in 1824 at the age of seventy-eight,--

“A graceful mien, an elegant address,
Looks which at once each winning charm express,
A life where worth by wisdom polished shines,
Where wisdom’s self again by love refines:--
A wit that no licentious coarseness knows,
The sense that unassuming candour shows,
Reason by narrow principles unchecked,
Slave to no party, bigot to no sect.
Knowledge of various life, of learning too,
Thence taste, thence truth, which will from taste ensue;
An humble though an elevated mind,
A pride, its pleasure but to serve mankind:
If these esteem and admiration raise,
Give true delight and gain unflattering praise,
In one bright view the accomplished man we see,
These graces all were thine and thou wert he.”

If human virtue, as it appears from these lines, lies buried at Kilmersdon, it has a pleasant resting-place--pleasant partly on account of the neighbourhood of one Robert Twyford, a former Treasurer of St. Davids, and lord of this manor, who died in 1776, aged sixty-one,--

“The sweetness of his temper made him happy in himself, and he employed his abilities, his fortune, and authority in rendering others so; and those many virtues which constituted his felicity in this life will, we trust, through the merits of Christ, make him completely happy to all eternity.”

It would be easier to invent Thomas Samuel Jolliffe than Robert Twyford. I should like to meet them both; but in Jolliffe’s case my chief motive would be curiosity to see how far his virtues were due to time, place, and the exigencies of rhyme. A dialogue between Jolliffe and the writer of his epitaph would be worth writing; equally so between the Treasurer of St. Davids and his--I can imagine the old man (I cannot imagine him a young man even in another world) beginning,--

“Sir, have you the felicity to know of a case where authority rendered any one happy save the exerciser of it? I desire also, at your leisure, to know what you understand by the words, ‘Completely happy to all eternity.’ With as much impatience as is compatible with the sweetness of temper immortalized (to use a mortal phrase) by you at Kilmersdon, I await your answer. Will you drink tea? But, alas! I had forgotten that complete happiness in our present state has to be sustained without tea as well as without some of the other blessings of Pembrokeshire and Somerset....”

“This is very sudden, Mr. Twyford....”

What the Other Man most liked in the whole church was the small, round-headed window stained in memory of Sybil Veitch.

Out of Kilmersdon we walked uphill, looking back at the cottage groups in the hollow, the much-carved green slopes, and the high land we had traversed, all craggy-ridged in the mist. As steeply we descended to another streamlet, another hollow called Snail’s Bottom, and the hamlet of Charlton and a rookery. Another climb of a mile, always in sight of a stout hilltop tower very dark against the sky, took us up to where the Wells road crosses a Roman road, the Fosse Way, now the road from Bath to Shepton Mallet. We chose the Fosse Way in order to see both Shepton and Wells. Thus we went through Stratton-on-the-Fosse, a high roadside village that provides teas, and includes a Roman Catholic college and a new church attached to it--that church whose tower we had been admiring so as it stood up against the sky. The flowering currant here was dressed in blossom.

A mile farther on we were seven hundred and twenty feet up, almost on a level with the ridge of the Mendips, now close before us. Running from that point down to Nettlebridge and its rivulet, and walking up away from them, was the best thing in the day. The gradient of the hillside was too much for a modern road. The Fosse Way, therefore, had been deserted and a new descent made, curving like an S; yet, even so, bold enough for a high speed to be attained before we got down to the “George” and the loose-clustered houses of Nettlebridge. The opposite ascent was also in an S. At the top of it we sat on a wall by the larches of Horridge Wood, and looked back and down. The valley was broad and destitute of trees. Gorse scrambled over its sides. Ducks fed across the turf at the bottom. Straight down the other side came the Fosse Way, denoted by its hedges, and round its crossing of the brook was gathered half of Nettlebridge. The rough, open valley, the running water, the brookside cluster of stone cottages, reminded me of Pembrokeshire. There is no church.

From that bleak and yet pleasant scene I turned with admiration to a farm-house on the other side of the road. It stood well above the road, and the stone wall enclosing its farm-yard followed the irregular crown of the steep slope. This plain stone house, darkened, I think, by a sycamore, and standing high, solitary, and gloomy, above Nettlebridge, seemed to me a house of houses. If I could draw, I would draw this and call it “A House.” For it had all the spirit of a house, farm, and fortress in one, grim without bellicosity, tranquil, but not pampered.

Presently, at Oak Hill, we were well up on the main northern slope of the Mendips. The “Oak Hill” inn, a good inn, hangs out its name on a horizontal bar, ending in a gilded oak leaf and acorn. I had lunch there once of the best possible fat bacon and bread fried in the fat, for a shilling; and for nothing, the company of a citizen of Wells, a hearty, strong-voiced man, who read the _Standard_ over a beef-steak, a pint of cider, and a good deal of cheese, and at intervals instructed me on the roads of the Mendips, the scenery, the celebrated places, and also praised his city and praised the stout of Oak Hill. Then he smacked his lips, pressed his bowler tight down on his head, and drove off towards Leigh upon Mendip. I was sorry not to have arrived at a better hour this time. The village is no more than the inn, the brewery, and a few cottages, and a shop or two, in one of which there was a pretty show of horse ornaments of brass among the saddlery. I almost counted these ornaments, crescents, stars, and bosses, as flowers of Spring, so clearly did I recall their May-day flashing in former years. It was darkening, or at least saddening, as we rode out of Oak Hill along the edge of a park which was notable for much-twisted, dark sycamores on roots accumulated above-ground like pedestals. At the far side gleamed the water, I imagine, of the brewery reservoir. We reached the main ridge road of the Mendips soon after this, and crossed it at a point about nine hundred feet high. Shepton is five hundred feet lower, and but two miles distant; so that we glided down somewhat like gods, having for domain an expanse that ended in the mass of Selwood Forest twelve miles to our left, level-topped, huge, and dim, under a cloudy sky. Unprepared as I was, I expected to meet my end in the steep conclusion of this descent, which was through narrow streets; and my brakes were bad. On the other hand, nothing troubled the godlikeness of my companion. In the rush at twenty-five miles an hour he sang, as if it had been a hymn of the new Paganism, a ribald song beginning,--

“As I was going to Salisbury upon a Summer’s day.”

When he had done he shouted across at me, “I would rather have written that song than take Quebec.”

The Other Man would not stay in Shepton Mallet. He was very angry with Shepton. He called it a godless place, and I laughed, supposing he lamented the lack of Apollo or Dionysus or Aphrodite; but he justified the word by relating his first visit to the church. The bell was ringing. It was five minutes to eleven on a Wednesday, a day of north-east wind, in February. With him entered a clergyman, and except for the old bell-ringer, the church was empty. When the bells ceased at eleven it was still empty. The clergyman and the bell-ringer mumbled together, the old man saying, “You see, nobody has come.” No service was held; the Other Man and the bell-ringer were unworthy. The clergyman struggled up the road against the north-east wind. “And look there,” exclaimed the Other Man, as we turned out of the long, narrow street of shops into Church Lane, mediæval-looking and narrower, “look there,” he exclaimed, pointing to the remains of a blue election poster on a wall, where these words survived,--

“Foreigners tax us; let us tax them.”

“Why,” said he, “it is not even in the Bible,” and with this he mounted and rode on toward Wells. The church tower was framed by the end walls of Church Lane, a handsome, tall tower with a pointed cap to it, and a worn statue of the Virgin and two other figures over the door. Immediately inside the door are tablets to seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Barnards and Strodes of Down Hill, one bearing the inscription,--

“Urna tenet cineres
Animam deus.”

The truth of it sounded like a copper gong in that twilight silence. I went on among the ashes. Two window ledges, one looking east, one west, form couches for stone effigies. That in the eastward ledge, with his hand across the shield on his breast, looked as if happily sleeping; the other had lost an arm, and was not happy. I re-entered the main street by a side street broad enough for a market-place. Here are some of the inns, and at the edge of the pavement a row of fixed wooden shambles. The market cross stands at the turn. It is a stone canopy, supported by six pillars in a circle, and one central pillar surrounded by two stone steps or seats, and the south side wears a dial, dated 1841. To know the yards of the “Red Lion,” “George,” and “Bunch of Grapes,” and all the lanes and high-walled passages between Shepton and the prison, would be a task (for the first ten years of life) very cheerful to look back upon, and it would be difficult to invent anything more amusing and ingenious, as it would be impossible to invent anything prettier than the ivy, the ivy-leaved toadflax, and that kidney-leafed cressy white flower, growing on the walls of the passages. There are no public lights in Shepton, so that away from the shop lamps all now was dark in the side streets and edges of the town. The stone prison and all its apertures, like a great wasps’ nest, was a punishment to look at in the darkness. But night added grandeur to the many round arches of the viaduct on which the railway strides across the valley. At this, a sort of boundary to Shepton upon the east, I turned back, and ended the day at a temperance hotel. Its plain and not old-looking exterior, ordinary bar and public room, suggested nothing of the ancientness within. I found a good fire and peace in the company of a man who studied Bradshaw. With the aid of maps I travelled my road again, dwelling chiefly on Tellisford, its white bridge over the Frome, the ruined mill and cottage, the round tower of Vaggs Hill Farm, and the distinct green valley which enclosed them, and after this, the Nettlebridge valley and the dark house above it.

VIII.

SHEPTON MALLET TO BRIDGWATER.

Day opened cold, dull, and windy in Shepton Mallet. After paying the usual bill of about four shillings for supper, bed, and breakfast, I tried to get into the churchyard again; but it was locked, and I set out for Wells. The road led me past the principal edifice in Shepton on the west side, as the prison is on the east--the Anglo-Bavarian Brewery, which is also the highest in position. It is a plain stone heap and a tubular chimney-stack of brick. A lover of size or of beer at any price might love it, but no one else. I rode from it in whirls of dust down to Bowlish and into the valley of the Sheppey. To within a mile of Wells I was to have this little river always with me and several times under me. Telegraph posts also accompanied the road. It was a delightful exit; the brewery was behind me, a rookery before me in the beech trees of the outskirts. On both hands grassy banks rose up steeply. The left one, when the rookery was passed, was topped with single thorn trees, and pigs and chickens did their duty and their pleasure among the pollard ashes below. Most of the cottages of Bowlish are on the other side, their gardens reaching down in front of them to the stream, their straggling orchards of crooked apple trees behind within walls of ivy-covered stone. Where Bowlish becomes Darshill, the cottages are concentrated round a big square silk-mill and its mill pond beside the road. Up in the high windows could be seen the backs or faces of girls at work. All this is on the right, at the foot of the slope. The left bank being steeper, is either clothed in a wood of ivied oaks, or its ridgy turf and scattering of elms and ash trees are seldom interrupted by houses. A sewage farm and a farmhouse ruined by it take up part of the lower slope for some way past the silk-mill: a wood of oak and pine invades them irregularly from above. Then on both hands the valley does without houses. The left side is a low, steep thicket rising from the stream, which spreads out here into a sedgy pool before a weir, and was at this moment bordered by sheaves of silver-catkined sallow, fresh-cut. But the right side became high and precipitous, mostly bare at first, then hanging before me a rocky barrier thinly populated by oaks. This compelled the road to twist round it in a shadowy trough. In fact, so much has the road to twist that a traveller coming from the other direction would prepare himself for scaling the barrier, not dreaming that he could slink in comfort round that wild obstacle.

Out of this crooked coomb I emerged into dust whirls and sunshine. The village of Crosscombe was but a little way ahead, a long village of old stone cottages and slightly larger houses, and two mills pounding away. The river running among stones sounds all through it. At the bridge, where it foams over the five steps of a weir, a drinking fountain is somewhat complicated by the inscription: “If thou knewest the gift of God, thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water.” At the “Rose and Crown,” outside which is a cross, or rather a knobbed pillar surmounting some worn steps, I branched up a steep lane to St. Mary’s Church. It has a spire instead of a tower, and an image of the Virgin at the base of it. Its broad-tailed weather-cock flashed so in the sun as to be all but invisible. The grass was at its greenest, the daisies at their whitest, in the churchyard, under the black cypress wedges, where lies something or other of many a Chedzoy, Perry, Hare, Hodges, and Pike. The upper side is bounded by a good ancient wall, cloaked in ivy and tufted with yellow wallflower. Another chiffchaff was singing here. While I was inside the building, a girl hung about, rattling the keys expectantly (but no more persuasively than the Titanic roadsters told their tale at Erlestoke), while I walked among the dark pews and choir stalls of carven oak, and looked at the tablets of the Hares and Pippets, great Clothiers of this country, and the brass of Mr. William Bisse, and his nine daughters and nine sons, and Mrs. Bisse, in the costume of 1625. The church has a substantial business flavour belonging to the days when it was so little known as to be beyond dispute that blessed are the rich, for they do inherit this world and probably the next. A few yards higher up the slope from the church is a Baptist chapel and a cottage in one, evidently adapted with small skill or expense from a church building older than the sect. Nothing divided the vegetable garden of the cottage from the graveyard of the chapel, and it looked as if the people of Crosscombe were ill content to raise merely violets from the ashes of their friends.

CROSSCOMBE.]

The road climbed away from Crosscombe up the left wall of the valley, which is given a mountainous expression by the naked rock protruding both at the ridge and on the slope of Dulcote Hill. The river runs parallel on the right beneath, and along its farther bank the church and cottages of Dinder in a string; and the sole noise arising from Dinder was that of rooks. At a turning overshadowed by trees, at Dulcote, a path travels straight through green meadows to Wells, and to the three towers of the cathedral at the foot of a horizontal terrace-like spur of oak, pine, and beech, that juts out from the main line of Mendip leftwards or southwards. The river, which follows that main line up to this spot, now quits it, and follows the receding left wall of its valley, and consequently my road had its company no longer. My way lay upward and over the spur. The white footpath was to be seen going comfortably below on the left through parklike meadows, and beyond it, the pudding-shaped Hay Hill and Ben Knowle Hill, and the misty dome of Glastonbury Tor farther off.

By ten o’clock I was in the cathedral, and saw the painted dwarf up on the wall kick the bell ten times with his heel, and the knights race round and round opposite ways, clashing together ten times, while their attendant squires rode in silence; and I heard the remote, monotonous priest’s voice in the _Benedicite_, and the deep and the high responses of men and boys. Up there in the transepts and choir chapels are many rich tombs, and recumbent figures overarched by stone fretwork; but the first and lasting impression is of the clean spaciousness of the aisles and nave, clear of all tombs and tablets.

But clear and clean as was the cathedral, the outer air was clearer and cleaner. The oblong green, walled in on three sides by homely houses, and by the rich towered west front on the fourth, echoed gently with the typical cathedral music, that of the mowing-machine, destroying grass and daisies innumerable, with a tone which the sun made like a grasshopper’s, not out of harmony with the song of a chaffinch asseverating whatever it is he asseverates from one of the bordering lime trees. The market-place, too, was warm; the yellowish and grayish and bluish walls, the windows of all shapes and all sizes, and the water of the central fountain, answered the sun.

Two gateways lead out of one side of the market-place to the cathedral and the palace grounds. Taking the right-hand one, I came to the palace, and the moat that flows along one side, between a high wall climbed by fruit trees and ivy, and a walk lined with old pollard elms. Rooks inhabited the elm tops, and swans the water. Rooks are essential to a cathedral anywhere, but Wells is perfected by swans. On the warm palace roof behind the wall--a roof smouldering mellow in the sun--pigeons lay still ecclesiastically. Sometimes one cooed sleepily, as if to seal it canonical that silence is better; the rooks cawed; the water foamed down into the moat at one end between bowery walls. Away from the cathedral on that side to the foot of the Mendips expanded low, green country. I walked along the moat into the Shepton road, and turning to the left, and passing many discreet, decent, quiet houses such as are produced by cathedrals, and to the left again, so made a circuit of the cathedral and its high tufted walls and holly trees, back to the market-place.

It was difficult to know what to do in all this somewhat foreign tranquillity. I actually entered an old furniture shop, and looked over a number of second-hand books, _Spectators_, sermons that were dead, theology that had never been alive, recent novels preparing for their last sleep, books about Wells, “Clarissa Harlowe,” Mr. Le Gallienne’s “English Poems,” “The Marvels of the Polar World,” and hundreds of others. A cat slept in the sun amongst them, curled superbly, as if she had to see justice done to the soporific powers of the cathedral city and the books that nobody wanted. For the sake of appearances, I bought “The History of Prince Lee Boo” for twopence. I thought to read this book over my lunch, but there was better provender. The restaurant was full of farmers, district councillors and their relatives, and several school children. The loudest voice, the longest tongue, and the face best worth looking at, belonged to a girl. She was a tomboy of fifteen, black-haired, pale, strong-featured, with bold though not very bright eyes. Her companion was a boy perhaps a little younger than herself, and she was talking in a quick, decided manner.

“I like a girl that sticks to a chap,” she began suddenly.

The boy mumbled something. She looked sharply at him, as if to make sure that he did exist, though he had not the gift of speech; then directed her eyes out into the street. Having been silent for half a minute, she stood up, pressing her face to the window to see better, and exclaimed,--

“Look, look! There’s lovely hair.”

The boy got up obediently.

“There’s lovely hair,” she repeated, indicating some one passing; “she isn’t good-looking to it, but it is lovely now. Look! isn’t it?”

The boy, I think, agreed before sitting down. What impressed him most was the girl’s frank enthusiasm. She remained standing and looking out. But in a moment something else had pleased her. She beckoned to the boy, still with her eyes on the street, and said,--

“There’s a nice little boy.” As she said this she tapped the glass and smiled animatedly. So in half a minute up came another boy of about the same age as the first, and took a seat at the next table, smiling but not speaking. Only when he had half eaten a cake did he begin to talk casually about what had been passing at school--how an unpopular master had been ragged, but dared not complain, though nobody did any work. The girl listened intently, but when he had done, merely asked,--

“Have you ever been caned?”

“Lots of times,” he answered.

“Have _you_?” she asked the boy at her own table.

“Once,” he laughed.

“Have you?” she mused. “I haven’t. My mother told them they were to cane me at one school, and they did try once, but I never went back again after.” ... On finishing her lunch, she got up and strode out of the room silently, without a farewell. She was shorter than I had guessed, but more unforgettable than Prince Lee Boo. I put the book away unopened. Even what passes for a good book is troublesome to read after a few days out of doors, and the highest power of most of them is to convey an invitation to sleep. And yet I thought of one writer at Wells, and that was Mr. W. H. Hudson, who has written of it more than once. He says that it is the only city where the green woodpecker is to be heard. It comes into his new book, “Adventures among Birds,” because it was here that he first satisfied his wish to be in a belfry during the bell-ringing and hear “a symphony from the days of the giants, composed (when insane) by a giant Tschaikovsky to be performed on ‘instruments of unknown form’ and gigantic size.” But the book is really all about birds and his journeys in search of them, chiefly in the southern half of England. It is one of his best country books. It is, in fact, the best book entirely about birds that is known to me. The naturalist may hesitate to admit it, though he knows that no such descriptions of birds’ songs and calls are to be found elsewhere, and he cannot deny that no other pages reveal English birds in a wild state so vividly, so happily, so beautifully. Mr. Hudson is in no need of recommendation among naturalists. This particular claim of his is mentioned only in order to impress a class of readers who might confuse him with the fancy dramatic naturalists, and the other class who will appreciate the substantial miracle of a naturalist and an imaginative artist in one and in harmony.

Were men to disappear they might be reconstructed from the Bible and the Russian novelists; and, to put it briefly, Mr. Hudson so writes of birds that if ever, in spite of his practical work, his warnings and indignant scorn, they should cease to exist, and should leave us to ourselves on a benighted planet, we should have to learn from him what birds were.

Many people, even “lovers of Nature,” would be inclined to look for small beer in a book with the title of “Adventures among Birds.” If they are ignorant of Mr. Hudson’s writings, they are not to blame, since bird books are, as a rule, small beer. Most writers condescend to birds or have not the genius to keep them alive in print, whether or not they have the eternal desire “to convey to others,” as Mr. Hudson says, “some faint sense or suggestion of the wonder and delight which may be found in Nature.” He does not condescend to birds, “these loveliest of our fellow-beings,” as he calls them, “these which give greatest beauty and lustre to the world.” He travels “from county to county viewing many towns and villages, conversing with persons of all ages and conditions,” and when these persons are his theme he writes like a master, like an old master perhaps, as everybody knows, who has read his “Green Mansions,” “The Purple Land,” and “South American Sketches.” It might, therefore, be taken for granted that such an artist would not be likely to handle birds unless he could do so with the same reality and vitality as men. And this is what he does.

His chief pleasure from his childhood on the Pampas has been in wild birds; he has delighted in their voices above all sounds. “Relations,” he calls the birds, “with knowing, emotional, and thinking brains like ours in their heads, and with senses like ours, only brighter. Their beauty and grace so much beyond ours, and their faculty of flight which enables them to return to us each year from such remote, outlandish places, their winged, swift souls in winged bodies, do not make them uncanny, but only fairy-like.”