Part 13
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.
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.”