Chapter XII: The Hills

I

UNDER a sky of rain-washed blue they had left Bristol, and after an hour of hard riding came to an easy upland plateau where the road lay white and clear before them, so clean between its wide margins of rough turf, that it seemed to have some affinity with the sky. On their way they had met few people, but the carters with whom they had exchanged a morning greeting were all smiling and friendly, very different from the surly colliers that slouched about the cinder-paths at Halesby.

“Good-maarnin’,” they said, and the very dialect was friendly.

“We’re over the worst of the road,” said Mr. Ingleby. “In a minute or two we shall see the hills.”

And, from a final crest, the road suddenly fell steeply through the scattered buildings of a hamlet. An inn, with a wide space for carts to turn in, stood on a sort of platform at the right-hand side of the highway, and in front of the travellers lay the mass of Mendip: the black bow of Axdown with its shaggy flanks, the level cliffs of Callow, and a bold seaward spur, so lost in watery vapours that it might well have claimed its ancient continuity with the islands that swam beyond in the grey sea. In the light of his new enthusiasm Edwin found it more impressive than any scene that he remembered: more inspiring, though less vast in its perspective, than the dreamy plain of the Severn’s upper waters that he had seen so many times from Uffdown. For these hills were very mountains, and mightier in that they rose sheer from a plain that had been bathed in water within the memory of man. And, more than all this . . . far more . . . they were the home of his fathers.

“Now that we are in Somerset we should drink the wine of the country.”

They pushed their bicycles on to the platform before the inn door, and Mr. Ingleby called for cider, a pale, dry liquid with a faint acridity very different from the sugary stuff that comes to the cities in bottles from Devonshire.

“Yes, it’s good cider,” said Mr. Ingleby, tasting. “Where does it come from?” he asked the landlord, who brought it.

“It do be a tidy drop o’ zidur,” said the man. “It do come from Mr. Atwell’s varm into Burrowdown.”

“In” with the accusative, thought Edwin.

“Is old Aaron Atwell still living?” asked his father.

The landlord laughed. The gentleman must have been away a long time from these parts. Mr. Atwell had been dead these fifteen years.

“The cider’s the same,” said Mr. Ingleby.

“’Tis a marvellous archard, sure ’nuff,” said the landlord. “And last year was a wunnerful year for apples. ’Tis all accardin’ . . .”

They left him, and coasted gently down the hill. Descending, it seemed to Edwin that the dome of Axdown lost some of its mountainous quality; and by the time that they had reached the level of the plain in which Wringford lay, he was hardly conscious of its imminence more than as a reminder that this soft, green country was not wholly devoted to quietude and sleep, but that a cool and lively air must always be rolling from the hidden slopes. They came to a green, bordered by elms in heavy leaf, on which a solitary donkey and a flock of geese were grazing. Now the road was dead level and the hedges rich with fragile dog-rose petals and thickets of hemp-agrimony that were not yet in flower. Superficially, the road might have been part of Warwickshire; but there was nothing of the Midlands in the air that moved above it.

“Take the next turn to the right,” shouted Mr. Ingleby to Edwin, riding ahead.

In the middle of a village drenched with the perfume of roses, Edwin turned to the right down a narrow lane. By this time his father had reached his level. “Here we are,” he said. They dismounted.

It was a small cottage with a green-painted porch and carefully tended garden in front of it. The place was built of the stone of the country and washed with the pinkish lime of the hills. In the garden roses and bright annuals were blooming, and a huge acacia, hung with ivory blossom, shadowed the garden gate. On the gate itself Edwin read a crudely painted name: Geranium Cottage. Mr. Ingleby smiled. “Your Uncle Will is very fond of geraniums.” They opened the gate and pushed in their bicycles. Everything in the garden was so meticulously orderly that to wheel them over the mown grass seemed sacrilegious. The porch, at which they waited, was full of choice geraniums. Their hot scent filled the air. Mr. Ingleby knocked gently with a polished brass knocker. Slow steps were heard within moving over a flagged floor. The door was opened, disclosing a stone passage that smelt of coolness and cleanliness. It was like the smell of a sweet dairy. An elderly woman, with a plump and placid face and grey hair, received them. All her figure except her black sateen bodice was covered with a coarse but snowy apron.

“Why, John,” she said. “It do be a treat to see you.”

She took Mr. Ingleby in her arms and kissed him. “Poor fellow, too,” she said. The embrace implied more than any of the condolences that Edwin had heard in Halesby.

“And this is Edwin,” she said. “Well, what a great big man, to be sure!” She proceeded to embrace Edwin, and he became conscious of the extraordinary softness and coolness of her face.

“Come in and make yourselves comfortable,” said Aunt Sarah Jane. “We’re used to bicycles in this house. Our Joe has one. He goes to work on it every day, and sometimes on a Sunday rides over to Clevedern on it. Come in, John.” Edwin followed his father into the living-room. It was clean, strikingly clean, and curiously homely. On the walls hung a picture of Queen Victoria, looking like a pouter pigeon in her jubilee robes, and another of the sardonic Disraeli. There were several padded photograph albums with gilt clasps, and other photographs decorated the mantelpiece and a side table. These were all accommodated in fretwork frames.

“Joe do keep us supplied with up-to-date photograph frames,” said Aunt Sarah Jane, following Edwin’s glances with a touch of motherly pride. “He’s like his father. Clever with his fingers.”

Edwin found that the photographs were familiar. His father was there: an ardent, younger father, with black whiskers and a determined mouth. A father confident in the virtue of self-help. His mother, too, in a tight-fitting costume of the eighties, with a row of buttons down the front from the throat to the hem. And, wonder of wonders, there was Edwin himself in a sailor suit. The discovery of his own portrait did something to destroy the illusion of unreality that occupied the place. Obviously he really belonged to it. For years, without his knowing it, his image had been part of this unfamiliar room. Even though he had not known of their existence he had evidently been a familiar accepted person to these people. Even their friends must have known him by sight. It was strange. It was pathetic. “I can see a touch of our Joe in him, John,” said his aunt, who had been examining him closely. “An’ there do be a look of your father as well.”

“Do you think so?” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Joe’s a great boy, too,” said Aunt Sarah Jane lovingly.

It was clear enough who was the idol of this household.

“There now, your dinner will be spoiling. Take the boy upstairs, John.”

She left them, and Edwin followed his father up a crooked stair to a low room above the garden. A cool wind was blowing down from Axdown, and the filigree shadow of the lace window-curtains danced on the white coverlet of the bed. The room smelt faintly of lavender. It seemed to Edwin a wonderful room, “full of sweet”—he couldn’t remember the line—“peace and health and quiet breathing.” There was nothing quite so placid as this in the life that he had known.

They washed their dusty faces and came downstairs again, and Edwin, seated by the sunny window of the front room, relapsed into a state of perfect drowsiness, content merely to exist and drink in the sweet and simple atmosphere of humble content. This, he supposed, was what his father by his struggles and sacrifices had lost. Was it worth while? The complications of this question were far too great for Edwin to decide.

The men folk of Geranium Cottage did not return to dinner, and after that meal, in which suet dumplings played an important part, Edwin retired to a trellised structure at the back of the garden, bowery with honeysuckle, that Aunt Sarah Jane described as the harbour. Here, drugged with more cider and fresh air, he dozed away the early afternoon. He was asleep when his father came to call him for tea. After all, it was not surprising that he was sleepy, for they had talked into the small hours the night before. Certainly Aunt Sarah Jane’s tea was worth waking up for. Quince marmalade and clotted cream, and wheaten scones that she had baked that morning. Edwin, ready now for any further revelations, would not now have been shocked to hear that in her young days she had been a cook. In this beatific state of refreshment he was anxious to explore.

“When are we going to Highberrow, father?”

“And this was to be a restful holiday,” Mr. Ingleby laughed. “Why, now, if you like.”

Edwin would have run to the linhay behind the house for the bicycles, but his father called him back. The hill was so steep, he told him, that it would be easier for them to walk.

“Well, John, Will’ll be tarrable disappointed if you aren’t here when he comes home from work,” said Aunt Sarah Jane. “This young man of yours do go too fast for me.”

“Oh, we won’t be long,” said Mr. Ingleby.

And so they set off together for Highberrow, making, first of all, a straight line for the base of the hills and then following a green lane that skirted the foot of them but was so overshadowed with hazel that the slopes could not be seen. In a mile or so they cut into the main road again, by an iron milestone that said “Bridgwater 18: Bristol 14.” The road climbed along a quarried terrace in the hill-side, and to the left of it lay a deep valley, on the farther slope of which lay half a dozen pink-washed cottages with gardens falling to the bed of an attenuated stream; and behind the cottages a steep hill-side rose abruptly to a bare height crowned with ancient earthworks.

“That,” said Mr. Ingleby, “is Silbury camp. There’s an old rhyme about it. It is supposed to be full of buried gold. When I was a boy I often used to lie up there in the sun, gazing out over the channel. In spring all the meadows between the camp and Highberrow Batch are full of daffodils. I often used to wish there were daffodils in Halesby. . . .”

In a little while they came to the church of Highberrow, placed like a watch-tower on the edge of the Batch, surveying the immense relics of paganism on the opposite side of the valley. It was a humble and not very beautiful building; but Edwin entered the churchyard with awe, for it seemed to him that so much of the past that had made him lay buried there. And the inscriptions on the tombstones reinforced this idea; for the churchyard was veritably crowded with the remains of dead Inglebys. It made the past, a piece of knowledge so recent to him that it still held an atmosphere of unreality and phantasy, so ponderable, that in comparison with it his present condition seemed almost unreal. His father led him through the long grass, starry with yellow ragwort, to the corner in which his grandmother was buried.

“This is the place that I told you about,” he said.

“The place where my grandfather went out at night and blasted the rock?”

“Yes.”

It was incredible. Until that moment the story had been only a legend. Edwin wondered how ever his father could have broken away from the tradition of centuries and left the hills. The roots of their family had pierced so deeply into the soil, yes, even beneath the soil and into the veins of the solid rock. The conditions of his own life seemed to him the tokens of an unnatural and artificial thing.

They left the churchyard by a narrow lane that always climbed. They passed the village inn: a long, windswept building, so bare and so exposed to weather that even the tenure of the lichen on the tiles seemed precarious. Over the lintel a weathered board showed them the name of Ingleby in faded letters. Edwin pointed to it.

“Yes,” said his father. “I suppose he is some remote cousin of yours. Everybody that is left in this village must be related to us in some degree; though I don’t suppose any of them would remember me. You see, I went to Axcombe when I was a good deal younger than you.” He smiled. “I am like a ghost returning to its old home. Like a ghost. . . .”

And yet, to Edwin, the whole place seemed familiar. He was not in the least surprised when, opposite a windy farm-house, in front of which the dry blades of a dishevelled dracæna shivered as though protesting against its wintry exile, his father turned off to the left along a road that had once been gay with cottage gardens and trim buildings of stone, but was now suggestive of nothing but ruin and desolation. By one of these pathetic ruins his father paused.

“This was your grandfather’s house, Eddie. It was here that I was born.”

Now there remained only the ground-plan of a house, and the only sign of habitation in all the ruin was to be seen in the smoke-blackened stones of the chimney. The garden, indeed, lay beautiful in decay, for there, as everywhere in this deserted countryside, the golden ragwort had taken possession; but within the walls of the house only nettles shivered.

“You’ll always find nettles in deserted human habitations. I don’t know why,” said Mr. Ingleby. “There is a rather unusual botanical curiosity to be found among the workings at Cold Harbour,” he went on, “the Roman Nettle. Urtica . . . Urtica. . . . My memory isn’t what it used to be. It has a bigger leaf than the ordinary nettle and a much more poisonous sting. It’s only found in places where the Romans have been.”

Why, in the face of this harrowing desolation, should he be thinking of things like that? A ghost . . . with as little passion or feeling as a ghost: emotions so different from the passionate resentment that now filled Edwin’s heart.

“Ah . . . here is the school. I suppose they couldn’t pull that down. I remember when it was newly built. It was there that I learnt my alphabet. . . .”

In the whole of the lane the school was the only whole building.

“If you come to the edge of the Batch you will see the valley bottom where I spent my childhood with your great-grandmother.”

They passed on, and saw, a hundred feet beneath them, the valley of the little stream. More ruins, many of them; but one or two cottages still inhabited. The lower cottages lay close to the water, and in four or five places the stream was spanned by a clapper bridge. In one of the gardens ghostly children were playing, and in another ghostly washing flapped in a breeze that had risen with the coolness of evening. Mr. Ingleby pointed out to Edwin his great-grandmother’s home. It was the cottage in the garden of which the children were playing.

From the chimney a trail of smoke dwindled up against the grey hill-side.

“I should like to see inside it,” said Edwin.

“Would you? No . . . I don’t think it would be worth going down into the hollow to see it. You’d only be disappointed. I don’t expect there’d be anything much to see. Besides, we haven’t time. I want to take you to a little farm—it isn’t really big enough to be called a farm—at the top of the lane under Axdown. They call it the Holloway. Why I can’t imagine, for it is the highest point of the whole village. Your aunt tells me that your grandfather’s sister, your own great-aunt Lydia, is still living there, and I think I had better go and see her.”

He turned again, and Edwin followed him. It seemed strange to him that his father should not be anxious to look inside the house where his childhood had been spent. A ghost . . . a ghost. . . .

They passed the windy farm once more. A man, in muddy gaiters, was driving cows into the yard. He was the first creature—apart from the ghostly children in the valley—that they had seen. A tall man, with a gaunt, grey face, who did not even turn to look at them or give them good-evening, although they must surely have been the only living people that he had seen that day. It was impossible to believe from the sight of its exterior that the farm was now inhabited.

“Who do you think he is?” Edwin asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t the least idea. The people at that farm used to be named Ingleby; and he certainly has the figure of your grandfather. . . .”

“Won’t you stop and speak to him?”

“Why should we?”

“But he would be awfully pleased to see you and know who you are. . . .”

“I don’t expect he would.”

A moment later Mr. Ingleby said,

“Now, the ruins of this cottage ought to interest you, Edwin.”

“Why? Is it one of ours?”

“No, but the old woman who lived in it in my day was always supposed to be a witch. Mendip people were always great believers in witchcraft. I shouldn’t wonder if your aunt believes in ‘ill-wishing’ to this day. I suppose she was really a harmless old body. The story was that a daughter of hers, with whom she had quarrelled, married a small dairy farmer down by Axcombe, and no sooner had she gone to live with him than the poor man’s cows went dry. His business failed. He had to sell his stock. He was ruined, and took to drink; and in all the public-houses for miles round he used to rail against his mother-in-law, and say that she was responsible for the whole business. She was a lonely old creature, very poor and dirty, and when we were children and going up to the Holloway we used to cover our eyes and run for fear we should catch sight of her. No one even knew when she died. They found her, I heard, when she had been dead for a week or ten days.”

Edwin shivered. These hill-people, it seemed, were hard and cruel. No doubt he must have some of their stony cruelty in his own being somewhere.

At last they reached the farm at the top of the Holloway. It was a poor building, only a little more hospitable than the ruins in the valley. Mr. Ingleby knocked at the door, and a sturdy, middle-aged man with an iron hook in place of his right hand lifted the latch and stared at them.

“You don’t know me, Isaac?” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Noa. . . . I can’t say I do know ’ee.”

“I’m John Ingleby.”

“John Ingleby! . . . Well, and I’m proud to see ’ee, John. Do ’ee step inside and see mother. I can’t shake hands with ’ee the way I was used to. I lost en in a mowin’-machine five years back. Come in then.”

He led the way into a dark cabin. Everything in it was dark, partly, perhaps, because the windows were full of flower-pots; partly because all the furniture was darkened with age or smoke or grime. The only bright colours in its brownness were a number of shining copper utensils and a fine show of geraniums in the window. Isaac followed Mr. Ingleby’s eyes towards these flowers.

“Purty, ban’t they?” he said with pride. “Your brother Will sent mother they.”

In the gloom of the fireplace, where a pile of turves smouldered, mother began to dissociate herself from the surrounding brownness. She was a very old woman. Edwin had never seen any one so old—sitting bolt upright in a straight-backed oaken chair. Her face seemed to Edwin very beautiful, for extreme age had taken from it all the extraneous charm that smoothness and colour give, leaving only the sheer chiselled beauty of feature. It was a noble face, finely modelled, with a straight nose, a tender mouth, and level brows beneath which burned the darkest and clearest eyes that Edwin had ever seen. Her hair was white and scanty, but little of it was seen beneath the white bonnet that she wore. Edwin felt her eyes go through him in the gloom.

“Here’s cousin John come to see ’ee, mother,” said Isaac, bending over her.

“John? What John?” said the old lady.

It struck Edwin at once that her speech was purer and more delicate than that of her son.

“John Ingleby, Aunt Lydia,” said Edwin’s father.

“You need not raise your voice, my dear,” she said. “My sight and my hearing are wonderful, thank God.”

“Then you remember me, Aunt Lydia?”

“Of course I remember you, John. Though it’s many and many years since my eyes saw you. And how are you, my dear? They tell me that you have done great things in the world. You’re a doctor, like poor Dr. Marshall.”

“No . . . I’m not a doctor. I’m in business. I’m a chemist.”

“I knew it was something of the kind. You needn’t speak so loud. And they told me you had married. I suppose this is your boy. A fine boy, surely. He has a look of your grandfather.” . . .

“Yes, this is Edwin.”

“I don’t remember that name in our family. It sounds like a fanciful name. Come here, my dear, and let me look at you.”

Edwin went to her, and she kissed him. Her face was so cold and smooth that she might almost have been dead.

“And how is your dear wife, John?”

“I’ve had a terrible blow, Aunt Lydia. I’ve lost her.”

“Ah . . . that was bad for you, and bad for the boy, too.”

“I shall never get over it.” Mr. Ingleby’s voice trembled.

“Yes, of course, you say that. It’s natural that you should. You’re young. But when you live to be as old as I am you’ll know better. You will get over it. When a few years have gone by you’ll marry again.”

“Never, Aunt Lydia . . . never. . .”

“Yes. . . . That’s what you feel now. But I know the family. The Inglebys are always very tender in marriage. I’ve seen many of them that have lost their wives, and they always marry again. I don’t suppose that I shall live to hear of it; but when the time comes you’ll remember what I said.”

“No, Aunt Lydia . . . never.”

“Time is a wonderful thing, John. I’m glad to have seen you and your boy. I hope he’ll take after you—you were always the best of them.”

She gave a little sigh. Evidently she was tired. The flame that burned behind her black eyes was so very feeble for all its brightness. Isaac, who had been watching her with the devotion of a practised nurse, saw that she could not stand any more talking.

“Now, mother, that’s enough, my dear,” he said.

“Kiss me, John,” she said. And Mr. Ingleby kissed her.

“Well, now that you be here after all these years,” said Isaac cheerily, as he rearranged the red shawl round his mother’s shoulders, “you won’t leave us without taking something. There do be a lovely bit of bacon I have cut. Do ’ee try a bit now, and a mug of cider.”

Edwin, who was already hungry with his walk, and was rapidly acquiring a taste for the wine of the country, now became aware of the fact that the dark ceiling was decked with sides of bacon and hams that hung there slowly pickling in the turf smoke that saturated the atmosphere of the room. He was disappointed when his father declined to take any of this delicacy.

“Well, a mug of cider, then,” Isaac persisted. He went into an inner chamber down three stone steps, with three china mugs hanging on his hook. “You see, I do be pretty handy with en,” he laughed.

They drank their cider solemnly. It was even drier than that which they had drunk for lunch at Wringford, and so free from acidity that all that Edwin could taste was that faint astringent bitterness. It had also a bouquet that was less like the odour of apples than that of a flour-mill. A wonderful drink. . . . They said good-bye, and Isaac, who seemed to Edwin the most kindly and patient creature he had ever met, showed them to the door.

By this time the sun was setting, and the cool wind from the west had freshened. Edwin saw, for the first time, the huge panorama on which they had turned their backs as they climbed the hill to the Holloway. Perhaps it was the strangeness of all his recent experience; perhaps, partly, the exhilaration that proceeded from Isaac’s cider, but the sight struck Edwin as one of greater magnificence than any he had ever seen before. From their feet the whole country sloped in a series of hilly waves to the shores of the channel, and that muddy sea now shone from coast to coast in a blaze of tawny light: now truly, for the first time, one of the gateways of the world. And beyond the channel stood the heaped mountains of Wales, very wild and black in their vastness. The sight was so impressive that on their way down the lane they did not speak.

At last Edwin said,—

“I think Aunt Lydia has a very beautiful face. She looks like some old grand lady.”

“She is very like your grandfather,” said his father. “She must be over ninety. It is a great age.”

And on the way home Edwin began to imagine what his strange grandfather the dowser must have been, with the figure of the lonely farmer, his black beard and hair, and his great-aunt Lydia’s noble features and piercing eyes.

II

They stayed for a week at Geranium Cottage, sinking without any effort into its placid life. Edwin was content merely to live there, soaking up the atmosphere of Wringford village, and only thinking of Highberrow as a strange and ghostly adventure, possible, but too disturbing to be indulged in. The tiredness of Mr. Ingleby, who never showed the least inclination to revisit the place, made this abstention easier. In the whole of his week at Wringford Edwin only made one attempt to see Highberrow again. The impulse came to him very early one morning, just at the hour of dawn when the birds had fallen to silence, and Joe, who happened to be working for his master at a village some miles away, was splashing about under the pump in the yard at the back of the linhay. Mr. Ingleby was still asleep, and Edwin, dressing quietly, stole downstairs and set off towards the hills, this time on his bicycle.

He followed the high road, and left the machine in a quarry opposite the point where the first pink-washed cottages appeared. By this time he was almost sorry that he had come there: for he was quite certain that the village he was now going to visit would be a very different place from the dead or hallucinated Highberrow that he and his father had penetrated some days before. He felt this so strongly that he wouldn’t take the risk of spoiling that marvellous impression, and instead of following the road that they had taken before, he changed his mind, crossed the valley of the pink cottages, and climbed the shaley slope of Silbury. In the fosse that surrounded the encampment a hundred white tails bobbed at once, and, laughing, he scrambled up the sides of what had once been Silbury Camp, and now was Silbury Warren.

Here, lying full length upon the top of the vallum, as perhaps a Belgic ancestor, or an ancestor who held the crest before the Belgæ came, had lain before him, he could look over the combe towards the church of Highberrow on the Batch. And the church tower was all he saw of Highberrow again: a feature most unrepresentative of the spirit of that pagan place. Even the church tower at this hour of the morning could scarcely be seen for mist, and all the time cold mist was pouring down in a dense, impalpable stream from the milky coverlet that spread upon Axdown and Callow and all the hills beyond. In the plain nothing could be seen at first; and from the sleeping villages no mist-muffled sound was heard; but by degrees the pattern of the plain’s surface, with its dappled orchards, its green pasturage and paler turf-moors, cut by the straight bands of the rhines, the sluggish channels through which the surface water drained into the sea, became more clear, and with this the sounds of the country grew more distinct: indefinite noises, such as the creaking of cart-wheels in a hidden lane, the squeak of a pump-handle at the back of the pink cottages, the clink of a pick in the quarry. The whole world awoke, and Edwin, too, found that he was awake and awfully hungry. He scrambled down the slope. Smoke was now rising from the chimneys of the cottages in the combe. He was back at Wringford in time for breakfast.

By this time he had begun to feel quite at home in Geranium Cottage. He had made the discovery of his cousin and his Uncle Will. The latter he found wholly lovable: a creature of slow, quiet speech, as leisurely and peaceful as his vocation, and full of small kindnesses that surprised by reason of their unexpectedness.

The thing that most impressed Edwin in his uncle’s nature was the extraordinary tenderness he showed towards the green things that were his care. Perhaps the west-country custom of dispensing with the neuter pronoun and speaking of all inanimate creatures as if they were persons, made his solicitude for their welfare more noticeable. But he was not only kind to them in his speech: his short and clumsy-looking fingers, that seemed to be built for nothing but the roughest of labour, became amazingly sensitive and delicate as soon as he began to handle the plants in his garden, so that every touch had in it the nature of a caress.

In this life, of the devoted husbandman, he was evidently wholly contented; and he made it seem to Edwin the most natural and human on earth. The fascination of watching his uncle’s hands grew upon him, and in the end he would watch the man, who had been busy at the same work in his master’s garden all day, tending his own favourites at home until the light began to fail, and Aunt Sarah Jane would call the two of them in to supper. The spectacle had a sort of hypnotic effect upon the boy, it was so slow and measured, as slow almost, Edwin thought, as the processes of germination and growth which it was his uncle’s vocation to assist. His fingers even handled the purple soil as if he loved it.

His cousin was a different matter altogether: a tall, dark-haired boy, a couple of years older than Edwin. He had, much more distinctly than Uncle Will, the Ingleby face, the features that were to be seen at their best in the old lady at the Holloway farm. And he possessed in a high degree the quality that had carried Edwin’s father out into the world: a seriousness that made him anxious to “get on,” promptings of which were now being satisfied in an accumulation of the periodical publications that have taken the place of Mr. Samuel Smiles in these days: weeklies devoted to all kinds of useful hobbies—electricity, wood-carving, plumbing—the series that eventually culminated in the gigantic illusion of the Self-Educator.

To these short cuts to power the young man devoted all his evenings, and though he was quite natural in his anxiousness to be friendly with Edwin, with whose subtler and more contemplative nature he had at present so little in common, the attempts were not very successful. Between these two there lay a far more obvious gulf than that which separated Edwin from the older people. In a way, he could not help admiring his cousin’s earnestness, probably because he knew that he could never imitate it, and yet he sometimes found himself examining it in a mood of absolute detachment that made his sympathy feel artificial.

Just before he left St. Luke’s he had been reading Darwin’s _Origin of Species_, and in the light of this work the efforts of his father, followed by those of his cousin Joe, seemed to him an excellent instance of the tendency of ancient stocks to vary or sport in definite directions. In the earnest Joe Edwin found the phenomenon a little troublesome, for the sight of the immense energies that the youth was putting into channels that were futile distressed him, and the more so because to correct the waste it would have been necessary to begin again from a point so distant that Joe would be faced with the spectacle of more than half of his present energies wasted. So Edwin thought as little as the consciousness of his own selfishness would allow him, of all the labours that were typified by the fretwork mahogany frames that surrounded the photographs of the Halesby Inglebys, listening instead to the endless tales of his Aunt Sarah Jane, in the hour when she became talkative, after supper.

By this time Edwin was so interested in his own romantic origins that any story of the old Highberrow would do for him; and his aunt, with her soft Somerset voice, her picturesque phrasing, and her unfailing memory for social details, rebuilt, night after night, the life of the decayed village as it had been in the old dowser’s time, evolving by degrees a human comedy which resembled that of its great exemplar by the way in which the protagonists of one episode became mere incidentals to another. Edwin knew them all by name, and recognised them as if he had met them in the flesh whenever he heard of them.

In this way, sitting in the smell of the window geraniums over a leisurely supper of bread and cheese, in his uncle’s case literally washed down with cider, he heard a story that he always remembered with pride and pity and a degree of passionate resentment: the story of how the village of his fathers had sunk into decay.

Highberrow, it appeared, had been built on what was then a common moorland, by the men who lived in it, laboriously, stone by stone. Their right to these fruits of their labour had never been called into question, and the whole spirit of the village had been happy and prosperous, as well it might, seeing that it owed nothing to the care of any outsider and could pay its way. And during those prosperous times its liberties seemed secure from danger. But when the decay of the grouvier’s industry led to unemployment and poverty, and the younger men of the Highberrow families began to look for their living overseas, the little community became so weak that the owner of the manor-house saw his opportunity. As Lord of the Manor he disputed the “squatters’ right” of the Highberrow villagers, and through his agents demanded a rent that would have made living impossible for most of them, for the cottages that they or their forefathers had built. If they refused to pay the rent, he said, they would be evicted, not in order that other people might be introduced who would pay, but merely to satisfy the landlord’s convictions of the rightness of his principle. That was the way in which he put it. Merely out of spite would be a more accurate description of his motives.

Highberrow was in a bad way. The villagers were either very old or very young, and in either case their feebleness made the whole organism unfit to resist the inroads of the parasite. What is more, they were very poor, and the very nature of the Mendip mining industry had made them so far individualist that the idea of combined resistance did not occur to them. The landlord wisely started his operations with an old woman whose cottage lay nearest to the woods in which his pheasants were bred. Almost incredibly poor, she had lived on the products of her garden and her poultry. To pay rent was out of the question. Sheer age and inertia made it impossible for her to move, and in the course of time she was evicted with her miserable belongings, and went to die at the home of a married daughter.

Emerging from this easy contest, the landlord, or perhaps his agent, moved on to the next. It was unfortunate for him, and fortunate for the villagers, that he now pitched on the cottage of Thomas Ingleby, the dowser, Edwin’s grandfather. The old man had this in his favour: that he was a man of two trades, that even when the mining had failed him he could make a living with the divining rod, and the consciousness of this power no doubt stiffened his resistance. Another eviction was decreed, but this time things did not go so easily. When the landlord’s men arrived from the manor to empty the house, another party appeared from the Cold Harbour mines, and as soon as the furniture was dragged out at the front door it was seized and taken in again at the back.

“It were a proper field-day,” said Uncle Will quietly, “I do remember it well. I can see your father now, John, standing over beyond the road with his back to the wall, not speakin’ a word, just smokin’ of his pipe.”

The landlord’s men saw that this sort of thing might go on for ever and none the better for it, so they just gave it up, but old Ingleby (Edwin had already canonised him as a “village Hampden”) had shown the rest of the Highberrow people what could be done, and gradually stirred them into combined action.

It was a little, pitiful attempt. He himself put into it all his savings, a matter of a few pounds, and to this were added as many shillings as could be scraped together in the village. He took the money to a lawyer in Axcombe—Bayliss was his name—an honest man with a sense of justice and, one suspects, some admiration for the sturdiness of his client. Bayliss worked the matter up and made a case of it, and no further attempts at eviction were made in Highberrow in the meantime. The village even regained a little of its former confidence, and for some time the landlord did not show his face in it. But once more luck was against Highberrow. Bayliss, the good lawyer, died. He had been careful to keep the matter in his own hands, and when it came to be considered by his successor, a partner with social ambitions, the new man would not touch it: partly because there appeared to be no more money in it (as was probably the case), and partly because he was in the habit of meeting the Lord of the Manor in the hunting-field, and was on card-playing terms with the agent.

There followed an exodus of despair. The people of Highberrow, who had no more money to fight with, packed up their pitiable belongings and left their houses rather than face the trouble of eviction. Not so Thomas Ingleby. The agent returned to the attack. There were threats: a stormy interview, in which the dowser faced the landlord himself. A final week’s notice was given, and Ingleby made sure once more of the support of his friends from the neighbouring villages. But no further attempt at eviction was made. At the last moment the landlord climbed down. He arranged another interview, and at this the terms for the whole village were settled. For the lives of the present occupants, or for a period of sixty years, the cottages should remain rent-free. It was not everything, but ’twas a famous victory. “That is why Aunt Lydia do be still living up to the Holloway to this day,” said Aunt Sarah Jane.

“And I suppose grandfather lived there till he died,” said Edwin.

“No, the poor dear. When he did grow very aged your uncle and I went up to Highberrow and persuaded en that he weren’t fit to look after himself. You should ’a seed the dirt in that house! And he comed down to live along of we. But he were never happy, were he, Will?”

“Noa . . . he were never happy.”

“He were a quare old man. Us seed very little of en. Arften people would come for en from a distance that wanted water found, and he did spend the day roving the country cutting blackthorns for his dowsing. Right up to the day when he took to his bed, poor soul.”

“I should like to have seen him dowsing,” said Edwin. “I haven’t even seen the twigs that they use.”

“Why, that would have been easy enough. Only the other day I throwed out a lot that belonged to your grandfather.”

Edwin blushed at this sacrilege. “And could Uncle Will find water with a twig?” he asked.

“Not I,” laughed his uncle. “But they do say it runs in families. Have you ever tried, John?”

“I tried when I was a boy,” said Mr. Ingleby, “but nothing happened.”

“I expect our Joe could,” said Aunt Sarah Jane, with infinite faith in her offspring.

“No, mother, I’ve tried it,” said Joe, from the lamplit corner where he was wrestling with the science of sanitary inspection.

“I wonder if I could . . .” said Edwin.

“Well, you shall have a try,” laughed his uncle.

“At this time o’ night?” said Aunt Sarah Jane, scandalised.

“Let the boy have a try,” said Uncle Will, rising. “’Tis a beautivul moonlight night, and I’ll take him over the field where the new water-pipe runs.”

“You’m mad, the two of you,” said his aunt with a sigh.

Edwin and his uncle went out into the garden, and there the boy watched the gardener’s clumsy, skilful hands cut a forked twig from a blackthorn bush.

“Hazel do work as well,” he said, “but father always used the thorn.”

Then they went out together over a dewy meadow, and his uncle showed him how to hold the rod: with his two hands turned palm upwards, the arms of the twig between the third and fourth fingers, the thumb, and the palm of each hand, and the fork downwards between them. Over the meadow grass they walked slowly, then suddenly the tip of the rod began to turn upwards by no agency of which Edwin was aware. It was very thrilling, for his hands were quite still.

“There you are,” said his uncle, “you’ve a found our water-pipe.”

“Hold the rod down, uncle,” Edwin said.

He did so, and now the mysterious force was so strong that the arms of the twig snapped.

“Now, you’ve gone and broke it,” said Uncle Will. “Come in or you’ll catch cold.”

They went in together.

“Well . . .?” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Oh, he’s a proper dowser, sure enough,” said Uncle Will.

Edwin was still curiously thrilled with the whole business. He felt that a little more excitement in his attainment was due to him; but no one, not even his father, seemed in the least impressed. It comforted him to think that his cousin Joe, his eyes fixed on his book in the corner, had really less in common than himself with the strange dark people from whom they were both descended. It was better, he thought, to be a born dowser than a Fellow of Balliol. More wonderful still to be both.

All the rest of that evening he felt a queer elation in his mysterious birthright, and when his father yawned and they both went up to bed he lay awake for a long time listening to the drowsy music of the corncrake and the wail of hunting owls, trying to put himself more closely in touch with the romantic past that had bred him: with that magnificent figure his grandfather, and the innumerable strange and passionate ancestry that slept under the shadow of Highberrow church on the Batch. “Yea, I have a goodly heritage,” he thought. And so he came to think of his father, through whom these things came to him: of his hard achievements, of his loneliness, of his difficulty of expressing—if it were not a disinclination to express—all the powerful and stormy things that must lie hidden in his heart. And a feeling of passionate kinship carried Edwin away: an anxiety to show his love for his father in unmistakable ways; to make clear to him once and for all the depth of his son’s devotion. He began to think of his father as a mother might think of her child. It must have been in that way, he imagined, that his own mother had thought of her husband. The night was so still that he imagined he could hear the rusty ivory of the acacia-blossom falling at the gate.

III

They were in the train on their way home from Bristol, passing smoothly under the escarpment of the lower Cotswolds. The fortnight had passed with an astounding swiftness. After leaving Wringford they had cycled over the back of Mendip, past the mines at Cold Harbour, where they had paused for half an hour to look at the workings, now deserted and overgrown with ragwort and scabious, and the Roman amphitheatre, to the great limestone gorge above Axcombe; and from there they had ridden to Wells, where, beyond streets that flowed eternally with limpid water, they had gazed on the wonder of the cathedral and seen the white swans floating in the palace moat under a sky that was full of peace. Only for a moment had they seen the masts of Bristol and Redcliffe’s dreamy spire; and now in a few hours they would be back in Halesby: in another world.

As they travelled northwards Edwin was thinking all the time of the work that he would do in his little room above the bed of stocks. It should be a fragrant room, he thought, and a good one for reading, for when his attention wandered he would be able to lift his eyes to a line of gentler hills crowned by the dark folds of Shenstone’s hanging woods. And there he would be able to dream of the coloured past and of his own exciting future, and the enchanted life that he would soon be leading among the noblest works of men in letters and in stone. Oxford, his Mecca . . . the eternal city of his dreams. He allowed his fancy to travel westward over the rolling Cotswold and droop by the slow descent of river valleys to that sacred place. His father’s voice dispelled his dream. They were alone in the carriage and their privacy made speaking easy.

“Edwin . . . I’ve been thinking a good deal about your future.”

“Yes, father?”

“I’ve been thinking it over in my own mind. I talked it over a week or two ago with your Uncle Albert. He’s a sound man of business, you know. Then I felt that I couldn’t trust my judgment; the whole world was upside down; but now I feel that I can think clearly, and of course I am anxious to do my best for you. I’ve been thinking about this Oxford plan. . . .”

“Yes.”

“You know quite well, Edwin, that I’m not a rich man. I’m a very poor man. You can understand that, better than you could before, after this holiday. And when people have very limited means and are getting on in life—this business has made me an old man, you know—they have to be very careful in their decisions. Looking at it from every point of view, I don’t think it would be fair of me to let you go to Oxford.”

“Father . . . what do you mean?”

“To begin with, there’s the expense.”

“But I shall get a scholarship. I’ll work like anything. I’ll make sure of it.”

“I’m sure you would. You’re a good boy. But that isn’t everything by a long way. When you’ve got your scholarship, supposing you do get it, the expense would begin. I shouldn’t like you to feel at a hopeless disadvantage with men of your own year. You would have to live quite a different life from them. You wouldn’t be able to afford any of their pleasures.”

“I shouldn’t want their pleasures.”

“That is a rash thing to say. But I’m looking even farther ahead. What can you expect to do when you’ve taken a degree in Arts?”

“A fellowship. . . .”

“Ah, but that is a matter of considerable uncertainty. I’ve seen so many men who have managed to scrape through a university degree and then been thrown on the world in a state of miserable poverty. Look at Mr. Kelly at the grammar-school. You wouldn’t like to live his life; but I believe he has quite a brilliant university career behind him. No . . . I don’t think it would be fair to you.”

“But mother and I always said . . .”

“Yes, I know . . . you were a pair of dreamers, both of you. If you felt any very strong desire to become a parson there might be something in it, though that, too, is a miserable life often enough. But you don’t, do you?”

“No . . . of course not.”

“So I think that while I am living you should have the chance of learning a useful profession. What about doctoring?”

“But that would be expensive too.”

“I know that . . . but I think we could do it. We should have a little in common. I might even be able to help you. And in a way . . . in a way I should feel that in you I was realising some of my own old ambitions. It is a noble profession, Eddie: the most humane in the world. No one need ever be ashamed of being a doctor. I think that a parson who professes religion for the sake of a living is rather to be despised.”

“Father, I’m sure it would cost too much. Six years, you know. . . .”

“Five . . . only five, if you pass all your examinations. And it need not be so expensive as you think. During the last year they have turned the old College in North Bromwich into a University. They give a degree in medicine. And while you were studying there you could still live with me at Halesby. I should be glad of your company.”

This appeal to Edwin’s pity was difficult to resist. It recalled to him all the resolutions that he had made in the night at Wringford: the devotion with which he had determined to devote himself to his father’s welfare: the determination that he should never do anything that could cause the man a moment’s pain. It was difficult . . . difficult.

“You could still get your scholarship,” his father went on. “There are several endowments of that kind at the North Bromwich medical school. I have a pamphlet at home that gives all the particulars. I had even shown it to your mother.”

“And what did she say, father?”

“She didn’t say much. She knew it would be a great disappointment to you. But I think she realised that it would be a good thing for you; and I know she looked forward to having you at home.”

“Yes . . . she must have known what a disappointment it would be. Father, I wish you would think it over again.”

“I want you to think it over, too. At present it naturally comes as a shock to you; but I think you’ll see in time. . . .”

He couldn’t see. He knew that he could never see it in that light. It was going to take all the beauty that he had conceived out of his life. It was going to ruin all his happiness. In place of light and cleanliness and learning it was going to give him . . . what? The darkness of a smoky city; its grime; the mean ideals of the people who lived beneath its ugliness. Even the memory of the enthusiasm with which he had thought of the life of old Dr. Marshall, his father’s patron, couldn’t mitigate the dreariness of the prospect. The idea of living for ever in company with dirt and misery and harrowing disease repelled him. It was no good telling him that contact with these misfortunes developed the nobler faculties of man. It was not the life that he had wanted. His soul sent forth a cry of exceeding bitterness. And while he sat there, full of misery and resentment, the train was carrying them onward into the gloom that always overshadowed the City of Iron.