Part 3

I welcomed the fences for the sake of what lay behind them. Now it was a shrubbery, now a copse, and perhaps a rookery, or a field running up mysteriously to the curved edge of a wood, and at Morden Hall it was a herd of deer among the trees. The hedges were good in themselves, and for the lush grass, the cuckoo-pint, goose-grass, and celandine upon their banks. Walking up all the slightest hills because of the south-west wind, I could see everything, from the celandines one by one and the crowding new chestnut leaves, to the genial red brick tower of St. Laurence’s Church at Morden and the inns one after another--the “George,” the “Lord Nelson,” the “Organ,” the “Brick Kiln,” the “Victoria.” Nelson’s hatchment is still on the wall of Merton Church: his name is the principal one for inns in the neighbourhood. Ewell, for example, has a “Lord Nelson,” where the signboard shows Nelson and the telescope on one side, and the _Victory_ on the other.

The liberator of the chaffinch and I no longer had the road to ourselves as we struggled on in the mud between old houses, villas, dingy tea-shops, hoardings, and fields that seemed to produce crops of old iron and broken crockery. If the distant view at one moment was all elm trees, at the next it was a grand new instalment of London, ten fields away. But all of us must have looked mainly at the road ahead, making for some conjectural “world far from ours.” The important thing was to get out of this particular evil, not to inquire whether worse came after.

Only the most determined people were on the road. Motor cycles and side-cars bore middle-aged men with their wives or children, poorish-looking young men with their girls. Once or twice a man dashed by with a pretty girl smiling above his back wheel, perfectly balanced. But the greater number of my fellow-travellers were cyclists carrying luncheons and waterproofs. In one band seven or eight lean young chaps in dark clothes bent over their handle-bars, talking in jerks as they laboured, all stopping together at any call for a drink or to mend a puncture. They swore furiously, but (I believe) not in anger, at a nervous woman crossing in front of them. If conversation flagged, one or other of them was certain to break out into song with,--

“Who were you with last night Out in the pale moonlight? It wasn’t your missus, It wasn’t your ma. Ah, ah, ah, ah! ... ah! Will you tell your missus When you get home Who you were with last night?”

The clouds hung like pudding-bags all over the sky, but the sad, amorous, jaunty drivel seemed to console them.

Some way past Morden these braves were jeering at the liberator of the chaffinch, who stood in the middle of the road with a book and pencil. He was drawing a weather-vane above a house on the left hand. The long, gilt dragon, its open mouth, sharp ears, sharp upright wings, and thin curled tail, had attracted him, although the arrow-head at the tip of the tail was pointing south-westward, and rain was falling. “It’s rather curious,” he remarked, as I came up to him, “there is no ingenuity in weather-vanes. One has to put up with the Ship and the Cock erected over the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, and think oneself really lucky to come across the Centaur with his bow and arrow at the brass-foundry, you know, on the left just before you come to the top of Tottenham Court Road from Portland Road station.” But it was blowing hard, and there was little reason for me to suppose that he was addressing me, or for him to suppose that I heard him. However, it was a kind of introduction. On we rode.

I had been about two hours reaching the gate of Nonsuch Park, and the fountain and cross there commemorating a former mistress, Charlotte Farmer, who died in 1906. The other man was reading aloud the inscription,--

“As thirsty travellers in a desert land Welcome a spring amidst a waste of sand, So did her kindly actions cheer the sad, Refresh the worn, and make the weary glad.”

I tried to get water, but there was none. Nevertheless, the fountain was a pretty thing on that plot of grass where the road zigzags opposite the gate and avenue of Nonsuch. A dove and an olive branch, of ruddiest gilding, is perched on the cross tip.

“Wretched weather,” said the man, speaking through the pencil in his mouth, as he straddled on to his bicycle. At Ewell I lost him by going round behind the new church to look at the old tower. This completely ivy-covered square tower is all that remains of an old church. If the rest was as little decayed, there can hardly have been a good reason for demolishing it. The doors were locked. I could only walk about among the trees, glancing at the tombs of the Glyn family, and the headstone of Edward Wells (who died in 1742, at the age of sixteen) and the winged skull adorning it.

Ewell was the first place on my road which bore a considerable resemblance to a country town. It stands at the forking of a Brighton and a Worthing road. Hereby rises the Hogsmill river; its water flows alongside the street, giving its name to the “Spring Inn.” The name Ewell, like that of Oxfordshire Ewelme, seems and is said to be connected with the presence of water. The place is not a mere roadside collection of houses with a variegated, old look, but a town at which roads meet, pause, take a turn or two, and exchange greetings, before separating from one another and from Ewell. The town probably struck those escaping Londoners on bicycles as one where the sign of the “Green Man” was in keeping. Comfortable houses on the outskirts, with high trees and shrubberies, and an avenue of limes crossing the road at right angles, confirm the fancy. It marked a definite stage on the road from London.

The end of Ewell touched the beginning of Epsom, which had to be entered between high walls of advertisements--yards of pictures and large letters--asserting the virtues of clothes, food, drugs, etc., one sheet, for example, showing that by eating or drinking something you gained health, appetite, vigour, and a fig-leaf. The exit was better.

Epsom had the same general effect as Ewell, but more definite and complete, thanks to a few hundred yards of street broad enough for a market which, for the most part, satisfied the town eye as countrified and old-fashioned. Over one of its corn-chandlers’ a carved horse’s head was stuck up. There was an empty inn called the “Tun,” a restaurant named after Nell Gwynn. True, there is a fortnight’s racing yearly, and a number of railway stations, in consequence; and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” is on sale there: but, as in Nell Gwynn’s time and Defoe’s time, it is a place for putting off London thoughts. There is no king there now, no king’s mistress presumably, no nightly ball even in July, no bowls, no strutting to the Wells to drink what the chemist sells at twopence a pound, no line of trees down the middle of the broad street. Nor, accordingly, is there the same wintry dereliction as in those days. When the leaves fall in Autumn the people do not all fly, the houses are not all shut up, the walks do not go out of repair, the roads do not become full of sloughs. But it always was a pleasure resort. For more than a hundred years before railways, London business men used to keep their families at Epsom and ride daily to and from the Exchange or their warehouses. The very market that it had on Fridays had been obtained for it by a plotting apothecary named Livingstone. This man tried to diddle the world by putting up a pump, not over the good old cathartic spring, but over a new one that was not cathartic; and the world gave up both old and new. To-day only the poor and simple go to Epsom for pleasure apart from racing. Anybody and everybody with feet or wheels can get there from London on a holiday or even a half-holiday.

The exit from Epsom was almost free from advertisements. And then the common: it had a sea-like breadth and clearness. The one man among the soaked, flowering gorse-bushes and new green hawthorn was extremely like the liberator of the chaffinch and collector of weather-vanes. He was sketching something in the rain. The only others of humankind visible were on the road, struggling south-west or rushing towards London, or on the side of the road, hoping to sell ginger-beer and lemonade to travellers. This hedgeless gorse-land, first on both sides, then on the right only, reached to the verge of Ashtead, but with some change of character. The larger part was gently billowing gorse flower and hawthorn leaf. The last part was flat, wet, and rushy. The gorse came to an end, and here was a copse of oak. At intervals of thirty yards or so were oaks as old as Epsom, of a broad kind, forking close to the ground, iron-coloured and stained with faint green. Oaks not more than forty or fifty years old, tall instead of spreading, their lower branches broken off, grew between. Among these, dead fern and bramble with its old leaves made distinct island thickets, out of which stood a few thorns. And the thin grasses around the thickets were strewn with dead twigs and leaves, and some paper and broken bottles left there in better weather. A robin sang in one of the broad oaks, whether any one listened or not.

On the opposite side of the road--that is to say, on the left--the common had given way to Ashtead Park. There the big iron-coloured oaks stood aristocratically about on gentle green slopes. To Ashtead Park belonged the Hon. Mary Greville Howard, who died in 1877, at the age of ninety-two, and is commemorated by a fountain on the right hand which gave me this information. The fountain is placed on a square of much-trodden bare earth close to the road, surmounted by a cross. Whatever were the good deeds which persuaded her friends to erect the fountain, that was a good deed. It was not dry, and, I have been told, never is.

Ashtead itself is more suburban than either Ewell or Epsom. It appeared to be a collection of residences about as incapable of self-support as could anywhere be found--a private-looking, respectable, inhospitable place that made the rain colder, and doubtless, in turn, coloured the spectacles it was seen through. The name of its inn, the “Leg of Mutton and Cauliflower,” may be venerable, but it smacked of suburban fancy, as if it had been bestowed to catch the pennies of easy-going lovers of quaintness.

They were beginning to create a new Ashtead a little farther on. A placard by a larch copse at the edge of a high-walled marl-pit, announced that convenient and commanding houses were to be built shortly to supply the new golf links with golfers. A road had been driven through the estate. The young, green larches stood at the entrance like well-drilled liveried pages, ready to give way or die according to the requirements of golfers, but for the present enjoying the rain and looking as larch-like as possible above the curved gray wall of the pit.

Not much after this, Leatherhead began, two broken lines of villas, trees, and shrubberies, leading to a steep country street and, at its foot, the Mole,

“Four streams: whose whole delight in island lawns, Dark-hanging alder dusks and willows pale O’er shining gray-green shadowed waterways, Makes murmuring haste of exit from the vale-- Through fourteen arches voluble Where river tide-weed sways.” ...

As I looked this time from Leatherhead Bridge, I recalled “Aphrodite at Leatherhead,” and these, its opening lines, by John Helston, the town’s second poet. It is no new thing to stop on the bridge and look up the river to the railway bridge, and down over the divided water to the level grass, the tossing willows, the tall poplars scattered upon it, the dark elms beside, and Leatherhead rising up from it to the flint tower of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, and its umbrageous churchyard and turf as of grass-green silk. The bridge is good in itself, and the better for this view and for the poem. The adjacent inn, the “Running Horse,” and Elinour Rumming who brewed ale there and sold it to travellers--

“Tinkers and sweaters and swinkers And all good ale-drinkers”--

four hundred years ago, these were the theme of a poet, Henry the Eighth’s laureate, John Skelton.

Having ridden down to the bridge, I walked up again, for I had no intention of going on over the Mole by the shortest road to Guildford. It is a good road, but a high and rather straight one through parks and cornland, and scarcely a village. The wide spaces on both hands, and the troops and clusters of elm trees, are best in fine weather, particularly in Autumn. I took the road through Mickleham and Dorking. Thus I wound along, having wooded hills, Leatherhead Downs, Mickleham Downs, Juniper Hill, and Box Hill, always steep above on the left, and on the right the Mole almost continually in sight below.

They were still worshipping in the Church of St. Mary and St. Nicholas. Outside it what most pleased me were the cross near a young cedar which was erected in 1902 “to the praise and glory of God, and the memory of the nameless dead,” and the epitaph: “Here sleepeth, awaiting the resurrection of the just, William Lewis, Esq., of the East India Company.” The memory of a human being that can exist without a name is but the shadow of the shadow that a name casts, and it is hard not to wonder what effect the cross can have on those who await the resurrection of the just, or indeed, on any one but Geraldine Rickards, at whose expense it was placed here.

The road, bending round under the churchyard and its trees, followed the steeper side of the Mole valley, and displayed to me the meadow, young corn, and ploughland, running up from the farther bank to beech woods. The clouds were higher and harder. The imprisoned pale sun, though it could not be seen, could be felt at the moments when a bend offered shelter from the wind. The change was too late for most of my fellow-travellers: they had stopped or turned back at Leatherhead. I was almost alone as I came into Mickleham, except for a horseman and his dog. This man was a thick, stiff man in clay-coloured rough clothes and a hard hat; his bandy, begaitered legs curled round the flanks of a piebald pony as thick and stiff as himself. He carried an ash-plant instead of a riding-whip, and in his mouth a pipe of strong, good tobacco. I had not seen such a country figure that day, though I dare say there were many among the nameless dead in Leatherhead churchyard, awaiting the resurrection of the just with characteristic patience. His dog also was clay-coloured, as shaggy and as large as a sheep, and exceedingly like a sheep. Probably he was a man who could have helped me to understand, for example, the epitaph of Benjamin Rogers in Mickleham churchyard,--

“Here peaceful sleep the aged and the young, The rich and poor, an undistinguished throng. Time was these ashes lived; a time must be When others thus shall stand and look at thee.”

I had at first written,--

“Time was these ashes lov’d.”

His wife, Mary, who died at fifty-five in 1755, is hard by under an arch of ancient ivy against the wall. She speaks from the tomb,--

“How lov’d, how valu’d once avails thee not: To whom related, or by whom begot. A heap of dust alone remains of thee. ’Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.”

That this desperate Christian, Mary Rogers, had any special knowledge of these matters, I have no reason for believing. I even doubt if she really thought that love was of as little importance as having a lord in the family. The lines were composed in a drab ecstasy of conventional humility, lacking genuine satisfaction in the thought that she and the more beautiful and the better-dressed were become equals. But I did not ask the clay-coloured man’s opinion. I rode behind him into Mickleham, and there lost him between the “Running Horse” (or, at least, an inn with two racing horses for a sign) and the “William the Fourth.” The loyalty of Mickleham, in thus preserving the memory of a sort of a king for three-quarters of a century, is sublime. Mickleham is, apart from its gentlemen’s residences, an old-fashioned place, accommodating itself in a picturesque manner to the hillside against which it has to cling, in order to avoid rolling into the Mole. The root-suckers and the trunk shoots of the elm trees were in tiny leaf beside the road, the horse-chestnuts were in large but still rumpled leaf. The celandines on the steep banks found something like sunbeams to shine in. On the smooth slopes the grass was perfect, alternating with pale young corn, and with arable squares where the dung was waiting for a fine day before being spread. The small flints of the ploughland were as fresh and as bright as flowers.

When I got to Burford Bridge, the only man at the entrance of the Box Hill footpath was a man selling fruit and drink and storing bicycles, or hoping to begin doing these things. One motor car stood at the hotel door. The hill was bare, except of trees. But it would take centuries to wipe away the scars of the footpaths up it. For it has a history of two hundred years as a pleasure resort. Ladies and gentlemen used to go on a Sunday from Epsom to take the air and walk in the woods. The landlord of the “King’s Arms” at Dorking furnished a vault under a great beech on top, with chairs, tables, food, and drink. It was like a fair, what with the gentry and the country people crowding to see and to imitate. But the young men of Dorking were very virtuous in those days, or were anxious that others should be so. They paid the vault a visit on a Saturday and blew it up with gunpowder to put a stop to the Sabbath merriment. They, at least, did not believe that in the dust they would be merely the equals of the frivolous and fresh-air-loving rich.

Dorking nowadays has no objection to the popularity of Box Hill and similar resorts. It is a country town not wholly dependent on London, but its shops and inns are largely for the benefit of travellers of all degrees, and a large proportion of its inhabitants were not born in Dorking and will not die there. A number of visitors were already streaming back under umbrellas to the railway stations, for again it rained. The skylarks sang in the rain, but as man was predominant hereabouts, the general impression was cheerless. To many it must have seemed absurd that the Government--say, Mr. Lloyd George--or the County Council, or the Lord Mayor of Dorking, could not arrange for Good Friday to be a fine day. The handfuls of worshippers may have been more content, but they did not look so. Three-quarters of the windows in the long, decent high street were shuttered or blinded. Unless it was some one entering the “Surrey Yeoman” or “White Horse,” nobody did anything but walk as rapidly and as straight as possible along the broad flagged pavement.

Only a robust and happy man, or one in love, can be indifferent to this kind of March weather. Only a lover or a poet can enjoy it. The poet naturally thought of here and on such a day was Meredith of Box Hill. This man,

“Quivering in harmony with the tempest, fierce And eager with tempestuous delight,”

was one of the manliest and deepest of earth’s lovers who have written books. From first to last he wrote as an inhabitant of this earth, where, as Wordsworth says, “we have our happiness or not at all,” just or unjust. Meredith’s love of earth was in its kind equal to Wordsworth’s. It was a more earthly kind, at the same time that it had a quality almost as swiftly winged as Shelley’s. His earliest poems were all saturated with English sun and wind. He prayed that “this joy of woods and fields” would never cease; and towards the end of his life he wrote one of the happiest of all the poems of age, the one which is quoted on the fly-leaf of Mr. Hudson’s “Adventures among Birds:”

“Once I was part of the music I heard On the boughs, or sweet between earth and sky, For joy of the beating of wings on high My heart shot into the breast of a bird.

“I hear it now and I see it fly, And a life in wrinkles again is stirred, My heart shoots into the breast of a bird, As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh.”

What his “Juggling Jerry” said briefly--

“Yonder came smells of the gorse, so nutty, Gold-like, and warm: it’s the prime of May. Better than mortar, brick, and putty Is God’s house on a blowing day”--

he himself said at greater length, with variations and footnotes.

Love of earth meant to him more than is commonly meant by love of Nature. Men gained substance and stability by it; they became strong--

“Because their love of earth is deep, And they are warriors in accord With life to serve.” ...

In his two sonnets called “The Spirit of Shakespeare” he said,--

“Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoured He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell Of human passions, but of love deflowered His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well. Thence came the honeyed corner at his lips.” ...

Love of earth meant breadth, perspective, and proportion, and therefore humour,--

“Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart.”

His Melampus, servant of Apollo, had a medicine, a “juice of the woods,” which reclaimed men,--

“That frenzied in some delirious rage Outran the measure.” ...

So, in “The Appeasement of Demeter,” it was on being made to laugh that the goddess relented from her devastating sorrow, and the earth could revive and flourish again. The poet’s kinship with earth taught him to look at lesser passing things with a smile, yet without disdain; and he saw the stars as no “distant aliens” or “senseless powers,” but as having in them the same fire as we ourselves, and could, nevertheless, turn from them to sing “A Stave of Roving Tim:--”

“The wind is east, the wind is west, Blows in and out of haven; The wind that blows is the wind that’s best, And croak, my jolly raven. If here awhile we jigged and laughed, The like we will do yonder; For he’s the man who masters a craft, And light as a lord can wander.

“So foot the measure, Roving Tim, And croak, my jolly raven. The wind, according to his whim, Is in and out of haven.”

The “bile and buskin” attitude of Byron upon the Alps caused him to condemn “Manfred,” pronouncing, as one having authority,--

“The cities, not the mountains, blow Such bladders; in their shape’s confessed An after-dinner’s indigest.”

For his earth was definitely opposed to the “city.” He cried to the singing thrush in February,--

“I hear, I would the City heard.

“The City of the smoky fray; A prodded ox, it drags and moans; Its morrow no man’s child; its day A vulture’s morsel beaked to bones.” ...

He tried to persuade the city that earth was not “a mother whom no cry can melt.” But his song was not clear enough, and when it was understood it said chiefly that man should love battle and seek it, and so make himself, even if a clerk or a philosopher, an animal worthy of the great globe, careless of death:--

“For love we Earth, then serve we all: Her mystic secret then is ours: We fall, or view our treasures fall, Unclouded, as beholds her flowers

“Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning’s mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.”

He advanced farther, fanatically far, when he said of the lark’s song,--

“Was never voice of ours could say Our inmost in the sweetest way, Like yonder voice aloft, and link All hearers in the song they drink. Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, Our passion is too full in flood, We want the key of his wild note Of truthful in a tuneful throat, The song seraphically free Of taint of personality.” ...