Part 14

Only the book itself can persuade the reader of the extraordinary love and knowledge of birds which have thus been nourished. If I were to quote the passage where he speaks of his old desire to pursue wild birds over many lands, “to follow knowledge like a sinking star, to be and to know much until I became a name for always wandering with a hungry heart;” or where he declares that the golden oriole’s clear whistle was more to him “than the sight of towns, villages, castles, ruins, and cathedrals, and more than adventures among the people;” or where he calls being “present, in a sense invisible”--with the aid of silence and binoculars--“in the midst of the domestic circle of beings of a different order, another world than ours,” nearly every one would probably pronounce him an extravagant sentimentalist, a fanatic, or, worst of all, an exaggerator. He is none of these. When he writes of his first and only pet bird and its escapes, there is no pettiness or mere prettiness: it is not on the human scale, yet it is equal to a story of gods or men. He is an artist, with a singular power of sympathizing with wild life, especially that of birds. Their slender or full throated songs, the “great chorus of wild, ringing, jubilant cries,” when “the giant crane that hath a trumpet sound” assembles, the South American crested screamers counting the hours “when at intervals during the night they all burst out singing like one bird, and the powerful ringing voices of the incalculable multitude produce an effect as of tens of thousands of great chiming bells, and the listener is shaken by the tempest of sound, and the earth itself appears to tremble beneath him;” the colouring of birds, brilliant or delicate, their soaring or manœuvring or straight purposed flight, their games and battles, all their joyous, or fierce, passionate, and agitated cries and motions, delight him at least as much as music delights its most sensitive and experienced lovers. At sight of the pheasant he cannot help loving it, much as he hates the havoc of which it is the cause.

There is a very large variety in his enjoyment. It is exquisite and it is vigorous; it is tender and at times almost superhuman in grimness. It is a satisfaction of his senses, of his curious intelligence, and of his highest nature. The green eggs of the little bittern thrill him “like some shining supernatural thing or some heavenly melody.” He is cheerful when his binoculars are bringing him close to birds “at their little games”--a kestrel being turned off by starlings, a heron alighting on another heron’s back, a band of starlings detaching themselves from their flock to join some wild geese going at right angles to their course; for “the playful spirit is universal among them.” The songs of blackbird, nightingale, thrush, and marsh warbler delight him, and yet at other times the loss of the soaring species, eagles and kites, oppresses him, and he speaks contemptuously of “miles on miles of wood, millions of ancient noble trees, a haunt of little dicky birds and tame pheasants.” His vision of the Somerset of the lake-dwellers, of “the paradise of birds in its reedy inland sea, its lake of Athelney,” makes a feast for the eyes and ears. Moreover, he is never a mere bird man, and the result of this variety of interest and pleasure on the part of a man of Mr. Hudson’s imagination, culture, and experience, is that while his birds are intensely alive in many different ways, and always intensely birdlike, presenting a loveliness beyond that of idealized or supernaturalized women and children, yet at the same time their humanity was never before so apparent. The skylark is to him both bird and spirit, and one proof of the intense reality of his love is his ease in passing, as he does in several places, out of this world into a mythic, visionary, or very ancient world. This also is a proof of the powers of his style. At first sight, at least to the novice who is beginning to distinguish between styles without discriminating, Mr. Hudson’s is merely a rather exceptionally unstudied English, perhaps a little old-fashioned. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is, in fact, a combination, as curious as it is ripe and profound, of the eloquent and the colloquial, now the one, now the other, predominating in a variety of shades which make it wonderfully expressive for purposes of narrative and of every species of description--precise, humorous, rapturous, and sublime. And not the least reason of its power is that it never paints a bird without showing the hand and the heart that paints it. It reveals the author in the presence of birds just as much as birds in the presence, visible or invisible, of the author. The series of his books is now a long one, not enough, certainly, yet a feast, and the last is among the three or four which we shall remember and re-read most often.

I left Wells by a road passing the South-Western Railway station, and admired the grass island parting the roads to the passengers’ and the goods’ entrances. The curved edge of the turf was as clean as that of the most select lawn; the grass looked as if it had never been trodden. I now rode close to Hay Hill on my right--a dull, isolated heave of earth, striped downwards by hedges so as to resemble a country umbrella and its ribs. Motor cars overtook me. At Coxley Pound I overtook a peat-seller’s cart. The air was perfumed with something like willow-plait which I did not identify. The wind was light, but blew from behind me, and was strong enough to strip the dead ivy leaves from an ash tree, but not to stop the tortoiseshell butterfly sauntering against it.

For three miles I was in the flat green land of Queen’s Sedgemoor, drained by straight sedgy watercourses, along which grow lines of elm, willow, or pine. Glastonbury Tor mounted up out of the flat before me, like a huge tumulus, almost bare, but tipped by St. Michael’s tower. Soon the ground began to rise on my left, and the crooked apple orchards of Avalon came down to the roadside, their turf starred by innumerable daisies and gilt celandines. Winding round the base of the Tor, I rode into Glastonbury, and down its broad, straight hill past St. John the Baptist Church and the notoriously mediæval “Pilgrim’s Inn,” and many pastry cooks. Another peat cart was going down the street. The church stopped me because of its tower and the grass and daisies and half-dozen comfortable box tombs of its churchyard, irregularly placed and not quite upright. One of the tombs advertised in plain lettering the fact that John Down, the occupant, who died in 1829 at the age of eighty-three, had “for more than sixty years owned the abbey.” He _owned_ the abbey, nothing more; at least his friends and relatives were content to introduce him to posterity as the man who “for more than sixty years owned the abbey.” If the dead were permitted to own anything here below, doubtless he would own it still. Outside the railings two boys were doing the cleverest thing I saw on this journey. They were keeping a whip-top, and that a carrot-shaped one, spinning by kicking it in turns. Which was an accomplishment more worthy of being commemorated on a tombstone than the fact that you owned Glastonbury Abbey. The interior of the church is made equally broad at both ends by the lack of screen or of any division of the chancel. It is notable also for a marble monument in the south-west corner, retaining the last of its pale blue and rose colouring. A high chest, carved with camels, forms the resting-place for a marble man with a head like Dante’s, wearing a rosary over his long robes.

At first I thought I should not see more of the abbey than can be seen from the road--the circular abbot’s kitchen with pointed cap, and the broken ranges of majestic tall arches that guide the eye to the shops and dwellings of Glastonbury. While I was buying a postcard the woman of the shop reminded me of Joseph of Arimathea’s thorn, and how it blossomed at Christmas. “Did you ever see it blossoming at Christmas?” I asked. “Once,” she said, and she told me how the first winter she spent in Glastonbury was a very mild one, and she went out with her brothers for a walk on Christmas day in the afternoon. She remembered that they wore no coats. And they saw blossom on the holy thorn. After all, I did go through the turnstile to see the abbey. The high pointed arches were magnificent, the turf under them perfect. The elms stood among the ruins like noble savages among Greeks. The orchards hard by made me wish that they were blossoming. But excavations had been going on; clay was piled up and cracking in the sun, and there were tin sheds and scaffolding. I am not an archæologist, and I left it. As I was approaching the turnstile an old hawthorn within a few yards of it, against a south wall, drew my attention. For it was covered with young green leaves and with bright crimson berries almost as numerous. Going up to look more closely, I saw what was more wonderful--Blossom. Not one flower, nor one spray only, but several sprays. I had not up till now seen even blackthorn flowers, though towards the end of February I had heard of hawthorn flowering near Bradford. As this had not been picked, I conceitedly drew the conclusion that it had not been observed. Perhaps its conspicuousness had saved it. It was Lady Day. I had found the Spring in that bush of green, white, and crimson. So warm and bright was the sun, and so blue the sky, and so white the clouds, that not for a moment did the possibility of Winter returning cross my mind.

Pleasure at finding the May sent me up Wearyall Hill, instead of along the customary road straight out of Glastonbury. The hill projects from the earth like a ship a mile long, whose stern is buried in the town, its prow uplifted westward towards Bridgwater; and the road took me up as on a slanting deck, until I saw Glastonbury entire below me, all red-tiled except the ruins and the towers of St. John and St. Benedict. At the western edge the town’s two red gasometers stood among blossoming plum trees, and beyond that spread the flat land. The Quantocks, fifteen miles distant, formed but a plain wall, wooded and flat-topped, on the horizon northward.

Instead of continuing up the broad green deck of Wearyall Hill, I went along the west flank of it by road, descending through meadows and apple trees to the flat land. I crossed the river Brue immediately by Pomparles bridge, and in half a mile was in the town of Street. It is a mostly new conglomeration of houses dominated by the chimney and the squat tower of Clark’s Boot Factory; and since it is both flat and riverless, it sprawls about with a dullness approaching the sordid. A rough-barked elm tree, a hundred and fifty years old, slung on a timber carriage outside the “Street Inn,” was the chief sign of Spring here after the dust.

I was very glad to see the flat slowly swelling up at last to the long ridge of the Polden Hills, which was soon to carry my road. Walton, the next village, is a winding hamlet of thatched cottages, pink, yellow, and stone-coloured, alternating with gardens, plums in blossom, the vicarage trees and shrubbery, and the green yard of a quaint apsidal farmhouse, once the parsonage. It has a flagged pavement on the right, trodden solely by a policeman. The road was in the power of a steam-roller and its merry men, but the fowls of the old parsonage presented the only immediate signs of life. The plum blossom and new green leaves in hedge and border were spotless at Walton, its wallflowers very sweet on the untroubled air.

Thus I came clear of Street and the flat land. Outside of Walton I was in a country consisting of ups and downs rather than undulations, a grass country mainly, with orchards and hedges, elms in the hedges, pigs and sheep in the orchards. After the flat it was blessed. Perhaps it was not beautiful. It had character, but without easily definable features, and it fell an easy victim to such an accident as the absurdly dull stucco “Albion” inn, which appeared to have been designed for Pevensey or Croydon. Nevertheless, a sloping orchard of bowed apple trees sweeping the grass with their long, arched branches, and the smell of peat smoke, counterbalanced the “Albion.” At Ashcott, where a man is free to choose between very good water from a fountain on the right and the coloured drinks of the “Bell” opposite, I was two hundred feet up. I went into the church--a delightful place for a retired deity--and enjoyed this inscription on an oval tablet of marble, behind the pulpit, relating to the “remains” of Joseph Toms, who died in 1807, at the age of sixteen,--

“This youth was an apprentice to a grocer in Bristol, and as long as health permitted proved that inclination no less than duty prompted the union of strict integrity with industry. During his illness unto death he was calm, resigned, and full of hope. His late master has erected this small tribute to perpetuate the worth of so promising a character.”

My road ran along the ridge of the Poldens, and, after Ashcott, touched but a solitary house or two. One set of villages lay to the south or left, just above the levels of Sedgemoor, but below the hills. Another set lay below to the north, each with its attendant level--Shapwick Heath, Catcott Heath, Edington Heath, Chilton Moor, Woolavington Level--beyond. Shapwick I turned aside to visit. The village is scattered along a parallelogram of roads and cross lanes. An old manor house, low and screened by cedars, stands apart. The church, of clean, rough stone, with a central tower, is in a cedared green space at a corner, having roads on two sides, a farm and an apple orchard on the others; and trees have supplanted cottages on one roadside. A flagged path leads among the tombstones to the church door. One of the inscriptions that caught my eye was that in memory of Joe Whitcombe, fifty years a groom and factotum in the Strangways family at the manor house, who died at the age of sixty-four in 1892. Along with these facts are the lines,--

“An orchard in bloom in the sunny spring To me is a wondrous lovely thing.”

Very different from Old Joe’s are the epitaphs inside the church, the work largely, I believe, of a former vicar, G. H. Templer, who built the big blank vicarage with its square, high-walled fruit garden and double range of stables, and planted cedars and cork trees. The epitaph of Lieut.-Col. Isaac Easton of the East India Company is a fair sample of this practically imperishable prose,--

“Through all the gradations of military duty, his love of Enterprise, his Valour, his Prudence, and Humanity, obtained the admiration and affection of his fellow-soldiers with the confidence and commendation of that government which knew as well to distinguish as to reward real merit. In the more familiar walks of private life, all who knew him were eager to approve and to applaud the brilliant energy of his mind and the polished affability of his manners. His heart glowed with all the sensibility which forms the genuine source of real goodness and greatness, with gratitude to his benefactor, with generosity to his friend, and liberality to mankind. The sudden loss of so many virtues and so many amiable qualities, who that enjoyed his confidence or shared his conviviality can recall without a sigh or a tear? With a constitution impaired by the severities of unremitted service and the rigours of an oppressive climate, he returned, to the fond hope of enjoying on his native soil the well-earned recompense of his honourable labours, when a premature death hurried him to his grave in 1780, at the age of 45.”

Templer’s position in prose is the same as that of Jolliffe’s encomiast in verse at Kilmersdon. The relation of his work to life at Shapwick in the eighteenth century is about as close as that of the “Arcadia” to Sidney’s age. More telling are the inscriptions of two men named Cator and Graham, who were killed during a fight with a French privateer in the Bay of Bengal in October 1800. The Bulls and Strangways have big slabs; the Bulls adding the blue and crimson of their arms to the chancel. Not less silent than the church was the street leading down towards the manor house and railway station, silent except for a transitory twitter of goldfinches. The one shop had its blinds drawn in honour of early closing day. It is a peaceful neighbourhood, where every one brews his own cider and burns the black or the inflammable ruddy peat from the moor. A corner where there are a beautiful chestnut and some waste grass provides a camping ground for gypsies from Salisbury and elsewhere; and it seemed fitting that men and boys should spend their idle hours in the lane at marbles. It is famous, if at all, since the battle of Sedgemoor, for giving a home to F. R. Havergal and an occasional resting-place to Churton Collins.

Very still, silvery, and silent was the by-road by which I rode up through ploughland back again to the ridge. Lest I had missed anything, I turned away from my destination for a mile towards Ashcott. I was for most of the distance in Loxley Wood. Primroses, as far as I could see, clustered thick round the felled oaks, the fagot heaps, and the tufts of last year’s growth on the stoles. A few stones on the right inside the wood are called Swayne’s Jumps, and it is related that a prisoner of the name, whether in Monmouth’s or Cromwell’s time I forget, escaped by means of some tremendous jumps there, taken when he was pretending to show his captors how they ought to jump.

Even without the wood this road was beautiful. For it was bordered for some way on the left by a broad grass strip planted with oaks, and not common oaks, but trees all based on small moss-gilded pedestals of their own roots above the earth, their bark and branches silver, their main limbs velveted with moss and plumed with polypody ferns. Moreover, they have filled the few gaps with young trees. On the right, after coming to the end of Loxley Wood and before the signpost of Greinton, I saw a rough waste strip of uneven breadth, partly overgrown by bushes from the hedge and by pine trees. Here ran the rank of telegraph posts, and in the grass were remains of fires. A hundred yards later, and as far as the turning of Shapwick, the waste was quite a little rushy common fed by horses.

Turning once more westward and again piercing Loxley Wood, the wayside strip there consecrated to the oak avenue ceased, but that it had once been prolonged far along the road was plain, whether it had been swallowed up by wood or meadow, or hedged off and planted with larches or apple trees, or ploughed up, or usurped by cottage and garden. Shorn thus, the road travels four miles of a ridge as straight and sharp as the Hog’s Back. It was delicious easy riding, with no company but that of a linnet muttering sweetly in the new-green larches, and a blackbird or two hurrying and spluttering under the hedge.

All the country on either hand was subject to my eyes. Before me the red disc of the sun was low, its nether half obliterated by a long, misty cloud. The levels on my right, and their dark, moss-like corrugations, were misted over, not so densely that a white river of train smoke could not be seen flowing through it; and Brent Knoll far off towered over it like an islet of crag, dark and distinct; nor was the prostrate mass of Brean Down invisible on the seaward side of Brent Knoll. Not a sound emerged from that side beyond the bleat of a few lambs. On the left was the misty country of Athelney, and a solitary dark tower raised well above the midst of the level. The most delicate scene of all my journey was nearer. The Poldens have on this side several foothills, and at the turning to Righton’s Grave one of these confronted me; I had it in full view for a mile and could hardly look at anything else. This was Ball Hill. It is a smooth island lifted up out of an ever so faintly undulating land of hedged meadows and sparse elm trees. It rose very gradually, parallel to my road and about half a mile from it, so as to make a long, nascent curve, up to a comb of trees; and its flank was divided downwards and lengthwise amongst rosy ploughland and pale green corn in large hedgeless squares and oblongs, beautifully contrasted in size and colour. Next to Ball Hill is another one, as distinct, but steeper and wooded, called Pendon Hill. In the dip between the two lay the church tower and cottages of Stawell, and a dim orchard rose behind them with trees that were like smoke. Though the lines of these hills and their decorated slopes are definitely beautiful, during the dusk on that silver road in the first Spring innocence they were a miraculous birth, to match the Spring innocence and the tranquillity of the dusk as I slid quietly on that road of silver.

Then came two shams. The first was a towered residence close to the road, with Gothic features. The second, black against the sky, three miles ahead, was a tower and many ruinous arches on top of the wooded hill at Knowle. It is hard to show how not very experienced eyes begin to suspect a sham of this sort. But they did, and yet were able to dally a little with the kind of feeling which the real thing would have produced. For, when I saw the ruins most clearly, at the turn to Woolavington, Highbridge, and Burnham, twilight was half spent.

The road was descending. Bridgwater’s tower, spire, and chimneys, and smoke mingling with trees, were visible down on the left, and past them the dim Quantocks fading down to the sea. I was soon at the level of the railway, and Bawdrip behind the embankment showed me a pretty jumble of roofs, chimneys, a church tower, and a green thorn tree over the rim. The high slope of Knowle and its rookery beeches--where the ruin is--hung upon the right very darkly over the small pale “Knowle Inn” and the white scattered blackthorn blossom and myself slipping by. The road went on to Puriton and Pawlett, and down it under the trees two lovers were walking slowly, but opposite Knowle I had to turn sharp to the left. Those green trees in the last of the twilight seemed exceptionally benign. After the turning I immediately crossed the deep-cut King’s Sedgemoor drain--with a flowering orchard betwixt it and the road I had left--and in a few yards the single line of the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway. Two miles of flat field and white-painted orchard, and I was in a street of flat, dull, brick cottages and foul smoke, but possessing an extraordinarily haughty white hart chained over an inn porch of that name. Then the river Parrett; and a dark ship drawn up under the line of tall inns and stores with glimmering windows. I crossed the bridge and walked up Corn Hill between the shops to where the roads fork, one for Taunton, one for Minehead, to left and right of Robert Blake’s statue and the pillared dome of the market. I took the Minehead road, the right-hand one, past the banks, the post office, the “Royal Clarence” hotel, and by half-past seven I was eating supper, listening to children outside in the still, dark street, laughing, chattering, teasing, disputing. I read a page or two of the “History of Prince Lee Boo,” and fell asleep.

IX.

BRIDGWATER TO THE SEA.