Part 5

We left Winchester regretfully one fine morning, going through West Gate and the suburb of Fulflood to the Stockbridge Road. “From the western gate aforesaid,” to quote Thomas Hardy’s conclusion to “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” “as every Winton-cestrian knows, ascends a long and regular incline of the exact length of a measured mile, leaving the houses gradually behind.... The prospect from this summit was almost unlimited. In the valley beneath lay the city, its more prominent buildings showing as in an isometric drawing--among them the broad Cathedral tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of Saint Thomas’s, the pinnacled tower of the College, and, more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St. Catherine’s Hill; further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging above it. Against these far stretches of country rose, in front of the other city edifices, a large red brick building, with level grey roofs, and rows of short, barred windows bespeaking captivity, the whole contrasting greatly by its formalism with the quaint irregularities of the Gothic erections.... From the middle of the building an ugly flat-topped octagonal tower ascended against the east horizon, and viewed from this spot, on its shady side and against the light, it seemed the one blot on the city’s beauty.”

From here Angel Clare and ‘Liza-Lu beheld the black flag announce to the city that justice had been done upon Tess: “The two speechless gazers bent themselves to earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.”

And so, to my mind, the Stockbridge road shall be ever haunted with these two mourners who thus disappear into the void; and Roebuck Hill has acquired a literary interest that transfigures an eminence of no particular elevation, and of a certain air of suburban propriety, into a hill of sorrow. It commands Winchester Gaol, whose sordid dramas are, by the reading of that moving tale, touched with a saving tincture of romance.

Presently we came to the little village of Wyke, now more frequently called Weeke, a scattered collection of cottages, horse-pond, and tiny church at the foot of another gentle hill. Not a soul was there to be seen in Wyke. The churchyard gate was open, and also the door of the church, a building consisting of nave and chancel only, with shingled, extinguisher-like spirelet, and Norman south porch. But a mural brass, directly opposite the door, drew our attention. On examination it proved as interesting as that little effigy at Headbourne Worthy, although of entirely different character. It is monumental, in a sense, as its inscription commemorates a benefactor of the church and his wife, but the figure above is not, as usual, a portrait effigy, but, instead, a representation of Saint Christopher, shown in the act of carrying the infant Saviour across a river. The figure is only a few inches high, but carefully engraved, in 1498, a period shortly before the decadence of this ancient art began; it is, moreover, unique. Although the figure of Saint Christopher, that giant of the pretty mediæval legend, was generally to be found in fresco upon the walls of ancient churches, and was the subject of one of the earliest wood-blocks, no other brass than this is known where his striking figure is to be seen.

It is an open road, exposed and unshaded by trees, that leads from Wyke, up Harestock Hill, along the Stockbridge road, and the half-mile of avenue that shades the bye-road to Sparsholt was welcome indeed.

Sparsholt is a scattered village, on the road to nowhere in particular, and deep set in agricultural stodginess. It has a pleasing transitional-Norman church, with, attached to the living, the sinecure holding of Lainston, half-a-mile distant, whose church has been in ruins for generations. It was in those roofless walls that the notorious Duchess of Kingston was secretly wedded. There is nothing in the nature of a street to be found in Sparsholt village. Houses are few and far between in its winding lanes, and but two shops, the chiefest of them the post office, administer to the wants of this sleepy place. At the post office may be purchased anything from a postage-stamp to a Hampshire ham. The village water-supply is obtained from a well with a remarkable contrivance for raising the buckets. A large broad drum or wheel, some nine feet in diameter, is set above the well with the bucket-ropes wound round it. To raise the buckets, you step inside the drum and commence walking up its sides, resembling during the performance nothing so much as a caged squirrel.

XIII.

Shining with midsummer brilliancy, the sun heated the still air until all movement was irksome, and energy became entirely out of the question; so there was nothing for it but to recline in limp fashion on a hay-rick beside the white and dusty road, lazily noting the passers-by. Few indeed were they who passed down the village street--a shepherd, with barking dog and unruly flock, making in their passage a smother of dust that loaded the hedges with yet another white layer; and, as afternoon wore on, a girl went with pitcher to the well. The sound of buckets being lowered, and the splashing of water as they were wound up, made one feel positively cool. Then came a dull booming that now and again startled the stillness: gun practice off Spithead, without doubt.

Then the sound of Winchester chimes echoed across the four miles of intervening country, and we climbed down from our resting-place and walked up through the village. We were dreadfully thirsty, and, discovering a little inn, passed through the doorway into its stone passage, cool and grateful after the glare outside. The beer was, not to mince words, beastly; but we had a conversation with the rustics, who were sitting or standing in the sanded parlour with striped and coloured beer-mugs in their hands.

“Quiet place, this, sirs,” said one, by way of opening a talk.

“Yes,” said my companion, “it seems so; is it always like this?”

“Well, yes, ’tis, in a manner o’ speakin’, an’ yet ’tisn’t, if so be ye can onderstand me. Leastways, ’tis always quiet like to toun-folk like yourselves; but we has our randys now an’ than, hain’t we, neighbours?”

“Ay, that we has.”

“D’ye mind Jubilee time?” A general laugh followed this inquiry, but to us strangers the allusion was cryptic, and provoked no smile.

But there was one dissentient; he was not a native of these parts. “Randys,” quoth he, “ne’er a one of ’ee has seen such rollickings as we uns used to have up to Amport.” Here one of the company stage-whispered to us, hand to mouth, that “Will’m Benjafield was a old, understanding man, as comed from Andover way.”

“Ay,” said our ancient, “I mind well enow the time when the gr’t house to Amport were open house, as ye may say. ’Twas in the old Markis o’ Winchester’s young days. They’m a old ancient fam’ly, the Paulets: ye can see their three golden daggerds on the carving o’ Winchester Guildhall clock to this day. But ’tis many a long day sence the feastin’s and drinkin’s to Amport House. ’Tis small beer now, ’stead o’ good yale, an’ that _do_ make a man’s stummick to wamble tarrible, sure-ly. I’d ’low the zilliest gawk-hammer in them there days drunk better liquor nor the best o’ you uns in these here, an’ the raggedest jack-o’-lent had a crust an’ cheese for the asking o’ it, an’ suthin better nor a tankard o’ swipes to swill his gullet wi’. ’Twas a bit an’ drap anywhen ye were plazed to ax fort. What dosta say, stunpoll?”

“Why, granfer,” said the young man thus unceremoniously addressed, “I was jest a-hoping you made as good usings o’ yer opportunities as we uns would an we had the chance.”

This was a good enough hint for us. We called for ale for the whole company.

“I’ll tell ’ee,” said “granfer,” laying one hand on my sleeve, while the other carefully described circles with his brimming beer-mug, “I’ll tell ’ee suthin o’ those times when the gran’ company was to the old Markis’s, an’ the huntin’ o’ the fox went arn, with the harses jumpin’ an the harns a-blown’; by gollikins, ’twas times, I tell ’ee. But they was over full rathe; they went the pace too quickly for their pockuts, d’ye see; the folks all went away, the harses sold, till there were scarcely a pair left to whinnick in the big stables. But the Markis, a proud one he wur, wi’ the devil’s own temper, an’ he went a-huntin’ as if he warn’t head an’ heels in debt; an’ they _did_ say the harse he rode warn’t rightly his’n, if all folk’s had their money paid ’em.

“Howsomdever, ’twas one marning he went to the meet at Quarley, an’ ’twas vine sport they had that day, as I see’d myself from the knap. An’ ’twas all the talk o’ the county how the Markis quarrelled wi’ the new Squire, as didn’t rightly know how to ride to hounds. Ye see, ’a was a man who’d been in business all ’a’s life, an’ had bought the Markis’s land, as ’a was obliged to sell it, piece by piece, an so the Markis hated him.

“‘What the hell are you up to, sir?’ hollared the Markis, as the new Squire put his harse to a gate right in front of him, just as ’a was a-goin’ to take it. ‘D’ye know who I am, damme?’

“‘Yes,’ ses the Squire, ‘I do; an’ I’d rather be a rich squire than a poor markis any day.’

“’Twas a hard thing to say to sech a gr’t nobleman, an’ a’ turned away an rode home.

“The nex’ day was Sunday, an’ the Markis comes to church late, lookin’ like thunder. We could hear ’im pokin’ the fire in ’a’s pew right through the zinging an’ the gruntin’ o’ the bass-viol an’ the squeakin’ o’ the viddles, an I ses to John Butcher as played the flute, ‘’Tis a tarrible rage ’a’s in this marnin’, sure enow.’ An’ what text should the pa’son gi’ out then, but ‘Let not the sun go down upon thy wrath.’ ‘Sure-ly,’ I whispers, ‘pa’son don’t knaw nothin’ o’ yesterday’s doin’s; a’ wouldn’t be sech a ninny as to offend the Markis in that way.’ ‘Hush,’ ses John, ‘there’s the Markis a-lookin’.’ ’Twas a way ’a had; ’a liked to zee ivery one at church. ’A was leanin’ on the door o’ the pew an’ lookin’ round, when, sudden-like, the hinges o’ it guv way, an’ that noble Marquis fell down wi’ it, just the same as any common feller, like you an’ me.

“‘Blast the door,’ ’a says, wi’ a face as red as a turkey-cock, an’ the pa’son, he says, breakin’ off in his sermond, ‘we will sing to the praise an’ glory of God, the one ’undred an’ twenty-first ’ym.’ We o’ the choir niver knew how we got through that music, some for laffing an’ some for fright at what had happened to such a gr’t lord. The serpent couldn’ blaw, nor the flutes neither, an’ the virst viddle put so much elbow-grease into ’as playin’ that ’a bruk all the strings at onct.” “Ah!” said granfr’, shaking his head and drinking his mug dry, “they _wuz_ times.”

“Well, good day to you, friends,” we said, leaving the inn, and our beer (for, as I have said, the local brew was not of the best); “we must be going.”

XIV.

The rustics watched our departure with interest, until a turning of the lane hid us from their view, and brought us again into the open country, a country-side scattered with small and inhospitable hamlets and villages, where Roman roads ran straight up and down hill, deserted and grass-grown, where apparently the tourist was an unknown quantity, where certainly his wants remain unsatisfied.

This night we “camped-out” as a matter of necessity. It was a fine night, and warm, and so there was not so much hardship in it, after all. Our resting-place was a haystack that loomed up black in front of us as we turned a bend of these lonely roads. We climbed over a field gate and selected a corner of the partly used stack, and fell to talking.

Presently, however, there came the near baying of a big dog, whereupon we rubbed our shins meditatively and climbed to a safer altitude. This was philosophic: we had hardly settled in this coign of vantage when we heard the dog snuffling below, and so to cool his questing we reached down some stones from the thatch and sent them into the darkness. We could hear him growling over them in a particularly horrid manner, and congratulated ourselves on our happy perch. But a lucky shot hit him, so he went yelping away, and afterwards all was peace.

It was at a very early hour the next morning we awoke, damp with early dews, uncomfortable, and dishevelled; covered in wildest confusion with fragments of hay, and altogether two most miserable-looking objects. The tramp who sleeps in summertime in haystacks and under hedges with never a change of clothes may possibly not feel any inconvenience for lack of the commonest toilet observances, but the first experience is to the tramp _en amateur_ decidedly unpleasant, so far have we distanced our woad-stained ancestors of a remote Britain when Pears’ soap was undreamed of.

When by good fortune we came to one of the many streams that water this lonesome land we made our toilet, and presently, girded anew with self-respect, set forward in the direction of Romsey and breakfast.

It was still early when we regained the highway, and indeed throughout that day we never once arrived at familiar terms with time. Eight o’clock came, and wore the look of high noon; noonday seemed to herald the hour for tea; by five o’clock we awaited sundown; and at length, when night arrived, the backward vista to this early rising was achieved only by a mental effort, so lengthy was our day.

XV.

We breakfasted at a roadside inn, full early, not without inquiring glances from the landlady, for surely never before had she entertained such guests, so near the echo of cock-crow, and yet already dusty with travel.

And so into Romsey, in company with a profane tinker, who ambled, clattering, beside us, scattering anathemas broadcast. Trade was bad, said he, and he hadn’t the price of a pint in his pockets. Perhaps we had? Assuredly; but there it remained. Whereupon ensued references to “torffs,” coloured with the British adjective.

I have never happened upon Romsey in winter time, nor indeed on any other occasion save this, in a season of heat and drought, so say nothing as to its local name of Romsey-in-the-Mud. Its summer aspect is dry and somnolent; its streets apparently all too roomy for its present estate: but then we have not seen Romsey on market-day, which probably gives a different complexion to these streets, so ample and so unconventionally named. One enters Romsey from Winchester along The Hundred, and traverses the town through the Market Square and Horsefair, and leaves it for the New Forest by Mainstone.

But to the tourist the most interesting thing in Romsey is the Abbey church, wonderfully dilapidated and picturesque, picturesque with what we generally (and rightly) think the exaggerated picturesqueness of Prout’s architectural pictures. Prout himself could scarce have rendered Romsey Abbey more flamboyantly time-worn than it is. Wild flowers, and even large bushes, grow on its walls, and have forced apart their Norman masonry. Surely nowhere else is so lovely an example of ecclesiastical decay as here, where the shrubs and flowers, the ivy and gorgeous lichens, have draped and mantled these grey walls with a living glory. But perhaps ere these lines shall appear in print, those beauties will have been torn away. The restorer was at Romsey when we visited the Abbey; his scaffoldings were rising against the walls, and workmen were moving about the chevroned windows and portentous corbels that have grinned unchanging upon a changing world for nigh upon eight hundred years. Cats’-heads and double-headed chimeras peculiar to the Norman mind gape and leer from under cornices, and make the restorer’s masons, by comparison with their dim antiquity, seem as evanescent as the gadflies of a summer’s day. The hoariest tombstones in the churchyard below them are things of yesterday beside these contorted monsters. And now they will be scraped and trimmed and renewed, and the masonry reset, and all the weatherings of time improved away. Architects and contractors must live, even though to earn a livelihood they disastrously renew delightful work that has been mellowing for centuries. Everywhere the old work has been scraped, and glass-papered, and tinkered, and endued with a modern smugness, until, as you stand before it, you sigh for the richness of colour that was a delight and a warranty of antiquity.

Romsey Abbey is almost entirely Norman--thick-limbed and sturdy, with a virile simplicity in its ornaments of pier and arch. Cruciform, its lantern at the crossing shows even the uninstructed traveller from a distance that here is something more than a parish church of usual type. From the bridge that crosses the Test by the flour mills, one sees the great bulk of the Abbey rising above the greenery of Romsey outskirts, and above all, the lantern, like a fairy crown, completes the picture.

There is a bronze statue of Palmerston standing in the Market Square of Romsey, unrecognisable to all who have been brought up on the conventional likenesses of “old Pam” that used to figure in _Punch_. We don’t expect the sculptor to give us the Palmerston of the rakishly cocked hat, with a straw in his mouth, but I fear it was with something very like disappointment that we regarded this very unsportsman-like effigy that stands, hatless, strawless, in a mild unjaunty attitude, with outstretched hand, in pose of eternal declamation.

XVI.

We left Romsey by the grateful shade of Broadlands, and entered the New Forest at the hamlet of Ower. Here close battalions of firs lined the way on either side, and continued with us past Coppithorne church, until we reached Cadnam--Cadnam, a ravelled-out settlement emerging insensibly from the Forest and merging again into its groves by equally easy and insensible stages. We plunged into thick glades where a deep hush prevailed in a secondary lighting, varied occasionally by a first-hand patch of sunlight, yellow upon the delicate grass as gold of Australian mintage. This was one of the oldest glades in the Forest, where giant boles proclaimed an age of centuries. Comparatively few of these oldsters remain, so constant and extensively has the woodman’s axe been swung. Perhaps these, too, are doomed. Let us hope they will last our time, but assuredly they will be accorded no more extended grace. When the land-agitators have had their way, when the Socialist shall have come in power, there will be a short way with forests, I promise you, as of everything else that cannot make out a _prima facie_ case of immediate usefulness. The economic times that are coming when these little islands shall be so crowded that the lordly parks and gardens, the mazy forests, and heathy lands, will be cut up into allotments, or used for sites of Socialist barracks, will be more destructive than the days that witnessed Rome’s long agony, the irruption of the Goths, or the fanatic fury of our Puritan days. Art and letters, and all the graces of life will be swallowed up between the struggle for existence and the gloomy social tenets of the new Roundheads in our children’s children’s days. Who that early Victorian poet was I cannot now recall, that rejoiced in being born in our era, nor can I swear to the accuracy of the quotation, but his pæan ran thus, did it not?

“The joys of ancient times let others state: I think it lucky I was born so late.”

Lucky enough, he is dead now. But were he alive, ’tis conceivable that, having an eye to signs and portents, he would say with me, “_I_ think it lucky I was born so soon.”

Meanwhile, the objects most commonly met with in the New Forest are timber-wagons and New Forest ponies. The Forest, has a character of its own, with subsidiary traits and divagations that defy monotony. Ancient woods give place to modern plantations; beech succeeds to oak, and gloomy firs to either. Clearings and plantations, heaths and hamlets, and murmuring alleys of foliage, alternate for mile after mile, and moss-carpeted drives everywhere radiate from the orthodox highways.

This journey was not an exploration of the New Forest; these woodlands were but incidents in our itinerary; thus it was that we did not penetrate to Stony Cross and Rufus Stone, but kept straight ahead for Lyndhurst.

And Lyndhurst is as pretty a village as one could wish to see. It is the metropolis of the New Forest, if that portentous word is not too big to apply to this little gem of a place. Here come all them that would make a thorough exploration of the leafy alleys and dim recesses of these woodlands, and as it chances that the democratic taste inclines rather to the fearful joys of Ramsgate or Margate than to forest scenery, Lyndhurst wears an air aristocratic and exclusive, and its visitors are eminently “nice.” True, we saw a brakeful of bean-feasters pledging one another (the ladies as deep-drinking as the men) in pewter tankards outside the Crown Hotel, but if one swallow doesn’t make a summer, surely it must be allowed that one bean-feast does not convert Lyndhurst into a semblance of Rye House and Broxbourne.

Lyndhurst, then, exists for the moneyed visitor, and is a model of neatness and propriety. Round about it, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions nestle amid thick bowers. In the centre of the village rises the tall, obtuse-pointed spire of the modern red-brick church, set conspicuously on its high mound, and below, to emphasise the eternal propinquity of Beer and Bible, stands the Crown Hotel and Tap. But the most picturesque grouping of these different estates is where the church spire rises high above the roof of the “Fox and Hounds,” as I have here endeavoured to show.

Three and a half miles down the road is Brockenhurst, a pretty place--I know it well--but this afternoon broken out into a rash of flags and flaunting bannerets in primary colours, and swarming with excursionists, who celebrated some occasion connected with a Widow and Orphan Society. These we soon left behind, crossing the railway, and so into the country again.

The London and South-Western Railway spells the place Brokenhurst, reckless of the philology of the name. “Brock” is Anglo-Saxon for badger, and in the same way “hurst” stands for “wood”; thus with the plural “brocken,” Badgers’ Wood stands revealed. But philology and the bygone natural history of places are nothing to railway companies.

In the hot glare of noonday we came through a heathy land to a sandy ford where a stream, the Avon Water, rippled across the road, and a crazy footbridge spanned the current. Brilliant lepidoptera floated lazily in the air, blundering humble bees boomed in many cadences, and the Avon sang a happy song among the grasses and the slight timbers of the bridge; I wish I knew the secret of its joy.

XVII.

Here we rested awhile, where all was still. Only the booming of the bees disturbed the ear, and one solitary wayfarer passed in the space of two hours. This was one who toured, even as ourselves, afoot, but one who dressed up to the part, with gaiters and Norfolk jacket and great Balbriggan stockings. He was walking as if for a wager; and while we sniffed at this toil of pleasure, he eyed us as he flashed past with some amusement, as who should smile at exhausted rivals.