Part 16

The Kilve brook on my left was noisily twisting over the pebbles and the slanting, gray, mossy-weeded rock down to the sea, tossing up a light but unceasing spray; and pied wagtails flitted from the fresh water to the salt over the rocks. But what I was most glad to see was the meadow pipit. Feebly, like a minor lark, and silently, he launched himself twenty or thirty feet up from the wet, dark rock; then, with wings uplifted and body curved to a keel like a crescent, he descended slantwise, singing the most passionate and thrilling-sweet of all songs that “o’er inform this tenement of clay” until he alighted. Before one had finished another began, and not a moment was the song silenced. Here, too, and among the briers of the rough pasture behind the cliff, the wheatear, as clean as a star, flirted his tail and showed his whiteness.

Over Exmoor storm and sun quarrelled in the cauldron, but here only one drop fell on each dry, warm pebble and vanished. The wind slackened; the heat grew; the warm, soft gray sky closed in and imprisoned the air which the earth breathed. It was pleasant to get hot out of doors in March. It was pleasant to bicycle up out of Kilve and away west on the Minehead road, which carried me well up round the end of the Quantocks. I took the second turning seaward for East Quantoxhead. The cottage gardens in this lane were rich in wallflowers, daffodils, and jonquils; and japonica was blood-red on the walls. Still better were the hedges past the few cottages, because they were green entirely, and were the first I had seen so in that spring. Nor were they mere thorn or elder hedges, but interwoven elm, thorn, brier, and elder, all with their young leaves expanded. But the heat was already great, and I was going downhill too much not to reflect that I should have to come up again. The pale Court House and contiguous church of East Quantoxhead, homes of the living and of the dead Luttrells for many centuries, as men go, were still a quarter of a mile away across a wide meadow with oak trees, and I never got nearer. I turned instead along a hedged, stony lane upon the left. It soon created a suspicion that I ought not to have taken it. I stuck to it, however, uphill and then precipitously down under untrimmed hedges, where it was no better than a river bed of mud and stones, until it ceased to exist, having emerged into the fields which it served. As I refused to return, I had to ascend along the edges of several ploughed fields and among sheepfolds and through gateways before I recovered the main road at about the sixth milestone from Nether Stowey. The heat, the climbing with a bicycle, and, above all, the useless, indignant impatience of annoyance, tired me; yet I rode on westward. The gorse was beautiful on the hills above, and in the old sandstone quarries beside the road. The sides of these quarries were bearded with it, their floors were carpeted with gilt moss, out of which rose up straight young larch trees in freshest green. At the head of a deep coomb of oak and foxglove the rock had been cut away for the widening of the road, and from the newly exposed sandstone hundreds of the rough rosettes of foxglove had broken forth; but a smooth slab had been devoted to an advertisement of somebody’s flock of long-woolled Devon sheep.

The approach to West Quantoxhead and the great house of St. Audries was lined by fences, and I rode down past them with dread of the dismal walk back again. But at the foot the fence came to an end. The pale gorsy turf of the deer park fell away on the right to the great house and its protecting woods. Daffodils and primroses were thick on the left-hand slopes. And there was a fountain of ever-running water at the roadside. I took the water inwardly and outwardly, and no longer troubled about the difficulty of ascent and return, even when I found myself slipping down hill for two miles into Williton. The high beacons of Exmoor were hanging before me, scarfed and coifed by clouds of the sunset, and grand were these half-earthly and half-aerial heights, but lovelier was the gentle hill much nearer and a little to the left of my course. For the sun, sinking on the right side of it, blessed and honoured this hill above all other hills. Both its woods and pastures were burning subduedly with a mild orange fire, without being consumed. It was the marriage of heaven and earth. The grim beacons behind guarded the couch. A white farm below was as white as moonlight.

Williton begins with a railway station and a workhouse, yet the first half mile of it is a street without a shop, of white or pale-washed, often thatched cottages and small houses, each separated from the road by flowery gardens of various breadths, some mere flowery strips, all good. To the fact that it was on the main road from Minehead to Bridgwater it was as indifferent as to the marriage of heaven and earth. The straight road was smooth, pale, and empty. Where it runs into another road, as the down stroke runs into the cross stroke of a T, and has a signpost to Watchet on the right, Bicknoller and Minehead on the left, the shops begin. Here, though it was six, and notwithstanding the marriage of heaven and earth, I had tea, and furthermore ate cream with a spoon, until I had had almost as much as I desired.

Now although I had seemed to be riding continually downhill into Williton, I found it nearly all downhill back to Kilve. The road was like a stream on which I floated in the shadows of trees and steep hillsides. The light was slowly departing, and still on some of the slopes the compact gorse bushes were like flocks of golden fleeces. Robins and blackbirds sang while bats were flitting about me. Day was not dead but sleeping, and the few stars overhead asked silence. By the turning to East Quantoxhead some cottagers talked in low tones. Kilve, dark and quiet, showed one or two faint lights. Only when I lay in bed did I recognize the two sounds that made the murmurous silence of Kilve--the whisper of its brook, and the bleat of sheep very far off.

X.

THE GRAVE OF WINTER.

When I awoke at six the light was good, but it was the light of rain. One thrush alone was singing, a few starlings whistled. And the rain lasted until half-past eight. Then the sunlight enshrined itself in the room, the red road glistened, a Lombardy poplar at Kilve Court waved against a white sky only a little blemished by gray, and I started again westward. The black stain of yesterday’s fire on the hill was very black, the new privet leaves very green, and the stitchwort very white in the arches of the drenched grass. The end of the rain, as I hoped, was sung away by missel-thrushes in the roadside oaks, by a chain of larks’ songs which must have reached all over England.

I had some thoughts of branching off on one of the green lanes to the left, that would have led me past a thatched cottage or two up to the ridge of the Quantocks, to Stowborrow Hill, Beacon Hill, Thorncombe Hill, Great Hill, Will’s Neck, Lydeard Hill, Cothelstone Hill, and down to Taunton; but I kept to my road of last night as far as West Quantoxhead. There, beyond the fountain, I entered the road between ranks of lime trees towards Stogumber. Before I had gone a mile the rain returned, and made the roads so bad that I had to take to the highway from Williton to Taunton, and so saw no more of Bicknoller than its brown tower. But I had hopes of the weather, and the rain did no harm to the flowers of periwinkle and laurustinus in the hedges I was passing, and only added a sort of mystery of inaccessibleness to the west wall of the Quantocks, with which I was now going parallel. It was a wall coloured in the main by ruddy dead bracken and dark gorse, but patched sometimes with cultivated strips and squares of green, and trenched by deep coombs of oak, and by the shallow, winding channels of streams--streams not of water but of the most emerald grass. Seagulls mingled with the rooks in the nearer fields. The only people on the road were road-menders working with a steam-roller; the corduroys of one were stained so thoroughly by the red mud of the Quantocks, and shaped so excellently by wear to his tall, spare figure, that they seemed to be one with the man. It reminded me of “Lee Boo,” and how the Pelew Islanders doubted whether the clothes and bodies of the white men did not “form one substance,” and when one took off his hat they were struck with astonishment, “as if they thought it had formed part of his head.”

The rain ceased just soon enough not to prove again the vanity of waterproofs. I have, it is true, discovered several which have brought me through a storm dry in parts, but I have also discovered that sellers of waterproofs are among the worst of liars, and that they communicate their vice with their goods. The one certain fact is that nobody makes a garment or suit which will keep a man both dry and comfortable if he is walking in heavy and beating rain. Suits of armour have, of course, been devised to resist rain, but at best they admit it at the neck. The ordinary (and extraordinary) waterproof may keep a man dry from neck to groin, though it is improbable exceedingly that both neck and wrists will escape. As for the legs, the rain gets at the whole of them with the aid of wind and capillary attraction. Whoever wore a coat that kept his knees dry in a beating rain? I am not speaking of waterproof tubes reaching to the feet. They may be sold, they may even be bought. They may be useful, but not for walking in.

For moderate showers one waterproof is about as good as another. The most advertised have the advantage of being expensive, and conferring distinction: otherwise they are no better, and wear worse, than a thing at two-thirds of the price which is never advertised at all. In such a one I was riding now, and I got wet only at the ankles. It actually kept my knees dry in the heavy rain near Timsbury. But if I had been walking I should have been intolerably hot and embarrassed in this, and very little less so in the lighter, more distinguished, more expensive garment. Supposing that a thorough waterproof exists, so light as to be comfortable in mild weather, it is certain to have the grave disadvantage of being easily tearable, and therefore of barring the wearer from woods.

Getting the body wet even in cold weather is delicious, but getting clothes and parts of the body wet, especially about and below the knee, is detestable. Trousers, and still more breeches, when wet through, prove unfriendly to man, and in some degree to boy. If the knees were free and the feet bare, I should think there would be no impediment left to bliss for an active man in shower or storm, except that he would provoke, evoke, and convoke laughter, and ninety-nine out of a hundred would prefer to this all the evils of rain and of waterproofs. It is to save our clothes and to lessen the discomfort of them that a waterproof is added.

At first thought, it is humiliating to realize that we have spent many centuries in this climate and never produced anything to keep us dry and comfortable in rain. But who are we that complain? Not farmers, labourers, and fishermen, but people who spend much time out of doors by choice. We can go indoors when it rains; only, we do not wish to, because so many of the works of rain are good--in the skies, on the earth, in the souls of men and also of birds. When youth is over we are not carried away by our happiness so far as to ignore soaked boots and trousers. We like hassocks to kneel on, and on those hassocks we pray for a waterproof. As the prayer is only about a hundred years old--a hundred years ago there were no such beings--it is not surprising that the answer has not arrived from that distant quarter. Real outdoor people have either to do without waterproofs, or what they use would disable us from our pleasures. Naturally, they have done nothing to solve our difficulties. They have not written poetry for us, they have not made waterproofs for us. They do not read our poetry, they do not wear our waterproofs. We must solve the question by complaint and experiment, or by learning to go wet--an increasingly hard lesson for a generation that multiplies conveniences and inconveniences rather faster than it does an honest love of sun, wind, and rain, separately and all together.

By the time I reached Crowcombe, the sun was bright. This village, standing at the entrance to a great cloudy coomb of oaks and pine trees, is a thatched street containing the “Carew Arms,” a long, white inn having a small porch, and over it a signboard bearing a coat of arms and the words “_J’espère bien_.” The street ends in a cross, a tall, slender, tapering cross of stone, iron-brown and silver-spotted. Here also sang a chiffchaff, like a clock rapidly ticking. The church is a little beyond, near the rookery of Crowcombe Court. Its red tower on the verge of the high roadside bank is set at the north-west corner in such a way--perhaps it is not quite at right angles--that I looked again and again up to it, as at a man in a million.

After passing Flaxpool, a tiny cluster of dwellings and ricks, with a rough, rising orchard, then a new-made road with a new signpost to Bridgwater, and then a thatched white inn called the “Stag’s Head,” I turned off for West Bagborough, setting my face toward the wooded flank of Bagborough Hill. Bagborough Church and Bagborough House stand at the edge of the wood. The village houses either touch the edge of the road, or, where it is very steep, lie back behind walls which were hanging their white and purple clouds of alyssum and aubretia down to the wayside water. Rain threatened again, and I went into the inn to eat and see what would happen. Two old men sat in the small settle at the fireside talking of the cold weather, for so they deemed it. Bent, grinning, old men they were, using rustic, deliberate, grave speech, as they drank their beer and ate a few fancy biscuits. One of them was so old that never in his life had he done a stroke of gardening on a Good Friday; he knew a woman that did so once when he was a lad, and she perished shortly after in great pain. His own wife, even now, was on her death-bed; she had eaten nothing for weeks, and was bad-tempered, though still sensible. But when the rain at last struck the window like a swarm of bees, and the wind drove the smoke out into the room, the old man was glad to be where he was, not out of doors or up in the death room. His talk was mostly of the weather, and his beans, and his peas, which he was so pleased with that he was going to send over half a pint of them to the other old man. The biscuits they were eating set him thinking of better biscuits. For example, now, a certain kind made formerly at Watchet was very good. But the best of all were Half Moon biscuits. They had a few caraways in them, which they did not fear, because, old as they were, they were not likely to have leisure for appendicitis. Half a one in your cup of tea in the morning would _plim out_ and fill the cup. They told me the street, the side of the street, the shop, its neighbours on either side, in Taunton, where I might hope to buy Half Moon biscuits even in the twentieth century. The whitening sky and the drops making the window pane dazzle manifested the storm’s end, and the old men thought of the stag hounds, which were to meet that day.... Just above Bagborough there, seven red stags had been seen, not so long ago.

It was hot again at last as I climbed away from the valley and its gently sloping green and rosy squares and elmy hedges, up between high, loose banks of elder and brier, and much tall arum, nettle, and celandine, and one plant of honesty from the last cottage garden. High as it was, the larch coppice on the left far up had a chiffchaff singing in it, and honeysuckle still interwove itself in the gorse and holly of the roadside. A parallel, deep-worn, green track mounted the hill, close on my right, and there was a small square ruin covered with ivy above it among pine trees. It was not the last building. A hundred feet up, in a slight dip, I came to a farm-house, Tilbury Farm. Both sides of the road there are lined by mossy banks and ash and beech trees, and deep below, southward, on the right hand, I saw through the trees the gray mass of Cothelstone Manor-house beside its lake, and twelve miles off in the same direction the Wellington obelisk on the Black Down Hills. A stone seat on the other side of the trees commands both the manor house beneath and the distant obelisk. The seat is in an arched-over recess in the thickness of a square wall of masonry, six or seven feet in height and breadth. A coeval old hawthorn, spare and solitary, sticks out from the base of the wall. The whole is surmounted by a classic stone statue of an emasculated man larger than human, nude except for some drapery falling behind, long-haired, with left arm uplifted, and under its feet a dog; and it looks straight over at the obelisk. I do not know if the statue and the obelisk are connected, nor, if so, whether the statue represents the Iron Duke, his king, or a classic deity; the mutilation is against the last possibility. Had the obelisk not been so plainly opposite, I should have taken the figure for some sort of a god, the ponderous, rustic-classic fancy of a former early nineteenth-century owner of Cothelstone Manor. The statue and masonry, darkened and bitten by weather, in that high, remote, commanding place, has in any case long outgrown the original conception and intention, and become a classi-rustical, romantic what-you-please, waiting for its poet or prose poet. I should have liked very well, on such a day, in such a position, to think it a Somerset Pan or Apollo, but could not. It was mainly pathetic and partly ridiculous. In the mossy bank behind it the first woodsorrel flower drooped its white face among primroses and green moschatel knobs; they made the statue, lacking ivy and moss, seem harsh and crude. Some way farther on, where the beeches on that hand come to an end, two high stout pillars, composed of alternate larger and smaller layers of masonry, stand gateless and as purposeless as the king, duke, or god.

For a while I rested in a thatched shed at the summit, 997 feet up, where the road turns at right angles and makes use of the ridge track of the Quantocks. A roller made of a fir trunk gave me a seat, and I looked down this piece of road, which is lined by uncommonly bushy beeches, and over at Cothelstone Hill, a dome of green and ruddy grasses in the south-east, sprinkled with thorn trees and capped by the blunt tower of a beacon. The primrose roots hard by me had each sufficient flowers to make a child’s handful.

Turning to the left again, when the signpost declared it seven and three-quarter miles to Bridgwater, I found myself on a glorious sunlit road without hedge, bank, or fence on either side, proceeding through fern, gorse, and ash trees scattered over mossy slopes. Down the slopes I looked across the flat valley to the Mendips and Brent Knoll, and to the Steep and Flat Holms, resting like clouds on a pale, cloudy sea; what is more, through a low-arched rainbow I saw the blueness of the hills of South Wales. The sun had both dried the turf and warmed it. The million gorse petals seemed to be flames sown by the sun. By the side of the road were the first bluebells and cowslips. They were not growing there, but some child had gathered them below at Stowey or Durleigh, and then, getting tired of them, had dropped them. They were beginning to wilt, but they lay upon the grave of Winter. I was quite sure of that. Winter may rise up through mould alive with violets and primroses and daffodils, but when cowslips and bluebells have grown over his grave he cannot rise again: he is dead and rotten, and from his ashes the blossoms are springing. Therefore, I was very glad to see them. Even to have seen them on a railway station seat in the rain, brought from far off on an Easter Monday, would have been something; here, in the sun, they were as if they had been fragments fallen out of that rainbow over against Wales. I had found Winter’s grave; I had found Spring, and I was confident that I could ride home again and find Spring all along the road. Perhaps I should hear the cuckoo by the time I was again at the Avon, and see cowslips tall on ditchsides and short on chalk slopes, bluebells in all hazel copses, orchises everywhere in the lengthening grass, and flowers of rosemary and crown-imperial in cottage gardens, and in the streets of London cowslips, bluebells, and the unflower-like yellow-green spurge.... Thus I leapt over April and into May, as I sat in the sun on the north side of Cothelstone Hill on that 28th day of March, the last day of my journey westward to find the Spring.

THE END.

Transcriber's Note

Illustrations have been moved to avoid paragraph breaks, and may no longer match the locations in the List of Illustrations.

The following apparent errors have been corrected:

p. 7 "Kilre" changed to "Kilve"

p. 113 "and above, it slightly to" changed to "and above it, slightly to"

p. 135 "branch to Downston" changed to "branch to Downton"

p. 182 "I aways thought" changed to "I always thought"

(Illustration) "Green’s Sedge" changed to "Queen’s Sedge"

(Illustration) "KILRE" changed to "KILVE"

p. 293 "distinction otherwise: they" changed to "distinction: otherwise they"

Archaic or inconsistent language has otherwise been kept as printed.