Part 6

The name of Norgett on a stone called up Oldhurst into my mind, a thatched house built of flints in the middle of oak woods not far off--ancient woods where the leaves of many Autumns whirled and rustled even in June. It was three miles from the hard road, and it used to seem that I had travelled three centuries when at last I emerged from the oaks and came in sight of that little humped gray house and within sound of the pines that shadowed it. It had a face like an owl; it was looking at me. Norgett must have heard me coming from somewhere among the trees, for, as I stepped into the clearing at one side, he was at the other. I thought of Herne the Hunter on catching sight of him. He was a long, lean, gray man with a beard like dead gorse, buried gray eyes, and a step that listened. He hardly talked at all, and only after questions that he could answer quite simply. Speech was an interruption of his thoughts, and never sprang from them; as soon as he ceased talking they were resumed with much low murmuring and whistling--like that of the pine trees--to himself, which seemed the sound of their probings in the vast of himself and Nature. His was a positive, an active silence. It did me good to be with him, especially after I had learned to share it with him, instead of trying to get him to join in gossip. I say I shared it, but what I did and enjoyed was, apparently, to sleep as we walked. It was unpleasant to wake up, to go away from that cold, calm presence. Then, perhaps, I sneaked back for a talk with Mrs. Norgett, who was a little, busy woman with black needle eyes and a needle voice like a wren’s, as thin and lively as a cricket; she knew everything that happened, and much that did not. But with him she also was silent.

These two had two daughters--and, in fact, I got to know them by staying with a friend three miles away, where one of the girls was a servant: she said that there were always woodcocks round Oldhurst, and her father would introduce me. It was several years since I had seen Norgett and Oldhurst, but a letter concerning these daughters brought them again before me,--

“Martha Norgett is dead. I suppose you remember her just as a stout, nervous girl, with uncomfortable manners, tow hair, face always as red as if she had been making toast, gray eyes rather scared but alarmingly frank, always rushing about the house noisily and apologetically at the same time; willing to do anything at any time for almost anybody, but especially for you, perhaps, when you stayed with us in Summer holidays. I am sure you could not tell me offhand how old she was. I can hear you saying, ‘Well, the country girls always look much older than you said they were. I suppose it is the responsibility, and they belong to an older, more primitive type. So I always have an instinct to treat them deferentially.... She might be twenty-three or -four--say, eighteen. But then she was just the same fifteen years ago.... Thirty--thirty-five. That is absurd. I give it up.’...

“I will not tell you her age, but I want to give you something of Martha’s history, though it is now too late for the development of that instinct for treating her deferentially.

“The family has been in the parish since the beginning of the parish register, in 1597. I should say that 597 would be much nearer the date when they settled in that clearing among the oaks. Fifteen centuries is not much to a temperament like theirs, perhaps. But they will hardly see another fifteen: they have not adapted themselves. Martha and her sister Mary were old Norgett’s only children. I don’t think you ever saw Mary. You would have treated her deferentially. As bright and sweet as a chaffinch was Mary. She had small, warm brown eyes that seemed to be dissolving in a glow of amused pleasure at everything. Everybody and everything as a rule conspired to preserve the glow; but now and then--cruelly and very easily--drawing tears from them because then they were softer than ever, and one could not help smiling as one wiped the tears away, as if she had only cried for craft and prettiness. That was when she was seven or eight. For a year or so she was always either laughing or crying. Visitors used to take delight in converting one into the other. They treated her like a bird. She had very thick and long, fine and dark brown hair--such beautiful and lustrous hair! I remember treating it as if it were alive, apart from her life, as if it were a wild creature living on her shoulders.

“She was considered rather a stupid child. Some people seem to regard animals as rather stupid human beings never blessed with spectacles and baldness--it was they who called her stupid. She never said anything wise. Usually she laughed when she spoke, and you could hardly make out the words: to try to read a meaning of an accustomed sort into her speech was little better than making a translation from a brook’s song or a bird’s song; for in her case also it really meant translating from an unknown tongue. Everybody gave her presents. She had as many dolls as the cat had kittens. She was fond of people, but she seemed fonder of these, and, seeing her, I used to smile and think of the words: ‘Ye shall serve gods the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, not eat, nor smell.’

“There were a hundred differences between her and Martha. Martha had but one doll. It was an old stiff wooden doll, cut by the keeper for his first-born, and never clothed. Martha kept it in the wood-lodge, and would not have it in the house, but went to look at it just once at morning and once at night, and never missed doing so. She did not play with Mary’s, though as maid-of-all-work, bustling about seriously and untidily, often breaking and upsetting things, she treated them with immense reverence, putting them safely away in a sitting posture when their mistress was tired of them and left them on chairs, in the hearth, or on the table--anywhere. Nobody supposed that Martha cared anything for her solitary wooden idol, and if you inquired after it she only looked awkwardly into your face with those pale eyes and said nothing, or perhaps asked you if you would like to see Mary’s newest one. She was always busy, they could not keep her from work; she was strong, and never ailed or complained. If a baby was brought to the house, to see Mary’s delicate ways with it was worth a journey; surrounding it with dolls, and giving herself up to it and taking good care of it, while Martha slipped away and was not to be seen. Mary was tenderest hearted, and could never pass carelessly by anything like a calf’s head thrust out of a hole in a dark shed into the sun. As for Martha she was too busy, though of course she would run to the town, if need were, to fetch a vet.

“Mary was not nearly so strong, but she continued to grow in grace and charm. At seventeen I think she was the loveliest human being of her sex that I ever saw. I say of her sex, because she was so absolutely and purely a woman that she seemed a species apart, even to me a mystery; every position of her, every attitude, action, everything she did and did not do, proclaimed her a woman newly created out of the elements which but yesterday made her a child, an animal or bird in human form. Many would have liked to marry her. Her round soft chin, her rather long, and not too thin, smiling mouth, her living hair, her wild eyes, won her lovers wherever she was seen. And yet I had a feeling that she would not marry.... However, I came back from Italy one year to find her married to a young farmer near Alton.

“Martha had already been with us for some years. When Mary began to have babies Martha was over at the farm as often as possible. Mary grew paler and thinner, but not less beautiful, and hardly less gay and childlike. She did as she pleased--always perfectly dressed, while others, and, above all, Martha, busied themselves in a hundred ways for her and her baby. Now that she was obviously delicate as well as beautiful, her hair looked more than ever like a wild life of some kind affectionately attached to her. Martha worked harder for her, if that were possible, than for us. I have heard her panting away as she swept the stairs and sometimes sighing, too, but never stopping for that luxury, and her sister would call out and laughingly chide her for it, to which she replied with another laugh, not ceasing to pant or to sweep. Mary was adored by her husband.

“Few men, I should say, took notice of Martha. She was very abrupt with them, and had nothing to say if they spoke out of a wish to be agreeable. Now and then she reported some advance--a soldier, for example, offered to carry her parcels home for her at night; but as soon as they turned from the high road into our dark lane she found an excuse, swept up all the parcels into her arms and was off without a word. Another time she allowed herself to be taken home on several evenings by a young man whose real sweetheart was away for a time: he had told her the fact, and politely asked if she would like him to take her home in the interval. What Martha wanted was a baby. She was the laughing-stock of the kitchen for confessing it. She did not mind: she stitched away at baby’s underclothing which all went for her sister’s infants, but was meant for her own. She once bought a cradle at an auction sale--do you feel deferential now? Yet one man she put off by telling him she already had a lover.

“Did you ever hear of her one dream? She came in and told us in great excitement that she had had a dream. She said, ‘It was as plain as plain, and all the family were eating boiled potatoes with their fingers except me. Law, mum, that ever I should have dreamed such a thing.’... She blushed that the family should have been put to shame in a dream of hers.

“At last we heard that she had a lover. Her fellow servants accused her of doing the courting, and he was younger than she. She was not impatient, even now. When she heard that we were to move in a year’s time, she made up her mind that she must go to the new house and see what it was like living there. ‘He’s not so bad,’ she said quietly. ‘Father and mother think the world of him. It’s not love. Oh, no! I’m too old for that, and I won’t have any nonsense. But he says he’ll marry me. We shall love after that, maybe; but if not, there’ll be the children. We shall have a nice little home. Charley has bought a mirror, and he is saving up for a ring with a real stone in it.’ And so she went on soberly, yet perhaps madly.

“We moved, and Martha with us. She had to wait still longer, because Mary was expecting another child. Mary was not so well as usual. She was very thin, and yet looked in a way younger than ever. Martha left us to devote herself to her sister. I went over once or twice: I wish now it had been oftener. Martha looked the same as ever. Mary grew still more frail, until, in a ghastly way, you could not see her body for her soul, as the poet says. Her husband being called away left her confidently in Martha’s hands.

“The nearest doctor was five miles off. She had to go for him suddenly in a night of winter thunder. The whole night was up in arms, the black clouds and the woods, the noises of a great wind and thunder trying to get the better of one another, and the rain drowning the lightning as if it had been no more than an eel in a dirty pond, and drowning thunder and the wind at last. When Martha reached the doctor’s house he was out. She found another, and having meekly delivered her message was gone before the man could offer to drive her back with him; but the horse was so helpless in the stormy, steep, crooked roads among the woods that he expected to find her there before him. When he arrived Mary was delirious, speaking of her sister, whom she seemed to see approaching and at last coming into the room; she cried out, ‘Martha!’ and never spoke again. Martha had not returned. The cowman found her lying on her face in the mire by a gateway, stopped in her swift, clumsy running by heart-failure, dead. Poor old Martha! but I have no doubt she was quite happy making for that green blind upstairs in her sister’s house, hastening half asleep, and only waking up as she stumbled over the stile. The world misses her--and her children.”

I had never met the surname before, and here upon a stranger’s tombstone it called up Martha like a mysterious incantation.

The tune of the telegraph wires became sadder, and I pushed on with the purpose of getting as far as possible before the rain fell. The road out of Alresford is dignified by a long avenue of elms, with a walk between, lining it on the right as far as the gate of Arlebury House. Opposite the last of the trees it was a pleasure to see on a wayside plot, where elms mingled with telegraph posts, a board advertising building sites, but leaning awry, mouldy, and almost illegible. Then the road went under the railway and bent south-westwards, while I turned to the right to follow a byway along the right bank of the Itchen, where there was a village every two or three miles, and I could be sure of shelter. The valley, a flat-bottomed marshy one, was full of drab-tufted grasses and new-leafed willows, and pierced by straight, shining drains. The opposite bank rose up rather steeply, and was sometimes covered with copse, sometimes carved by a chalk pit; tall trees with many mistletoe boughs grew on top. I got to Itchen Abbas, its bridge, mill, church, and “Plough,” all in a group, when the rain was beginning. I had not gone much further when it became clear that the rain was to be heavy and lasting, and I took shelter in a cart-lodge. There I was joined by a thatcher and a deaf and dumb labourer. The thatcher would talk of nothing but the other man, having begun by explaining that he could not be expected to say “Good-afternoon.” The deaf man sat on the straw and watched us. He was the son of a well-to-do farmer, but had left home because he did not get enough money and was in other ways imposed on. He had now been at the same farm thirty years. He was a good workman, understanding by signs what he had to do. Moreover, he could read the lips, though how he learnt--for he could neither read nor write--I do not know! Probably, said the thatcher, he knows what we are saying now. At half-past three the horses came in for the day. They had begun at half-past six; so, said the thatcher, “they don’t do a man’s work.” So we talked while the horses were stabled, and rain fell and it thundered, if not to the tune of “Greensleeves,” at least to that of blackbirds’ songs.

The sky was full and sagging, but actually rained little, when I started soon after four, and went on through the four Worthys,--on my left the low sweep of Easton Down, and the almost windowless high church wall among elms between it and the river; and on my right, arable country and pewits tumbling over it. Worthy Park, a place of lawns and of elms and chestnuts, adorned the road with an avenue of very branchy elms. At King’s Worthy, just beyond, I might have crossed over and taken the shortest way to Salisbury, that is to say, by Stockbridge. But, except at Stockbridge itself, there is hardly a house on the twenty miles of road, and either one inn or two. Evidently the sky could not long contain itself, and as I knew enough of English inns to prefer not arriving at one wet through, I determined to take the Roman road through Headbourne Worthy to Winchester. This brought me through a region of biggish houses, shrubberies, rookeries, motor cars, and carriages, but also down to a brook and a withy bed, and Headbourne Worthy’s little church and blunt shingled spire beside it. The blackbirds were singing their best in the hawthorns as I was passing, and in the puddles they were bathing before singing. Winchester Cathedral appeared and disappeared several times, and above it, slightly to the left, St. Catherine’s smooth hill and beechen crown. In one of these views I saw what I had never before noticed, that the top of the cathedral tower is apparently higher than the top of St. Catherine’s Hill.

Through the crowd of Winchester High Street I walked, and straight out by the West Gate and the barracks uphill. I meant to use the Romsey road as far as Ampfield, and thence try to reach Dunbridge. The sky was full of rain, though none was falling. It was a mile before I could mount, and then, for some way, the road was accompanied on the right by yew trees. Between these trees I could see the low, half-wooded Downs crossed by the Roman road to Sarum and by hardly any other road. The most insistent thing there was the Farley Tower, perched on a barrow at one of the highest points, to commemorate not the unknown dead but a horse called Beware Chalkpit, who won a race in 1734 after having leaped into a chalkpit in 1733. The eastern scene was lovelier: the clear green Downs above Twyford, Morestead, and Owslebury, four or five miles away; and then the half wooded green wall of Nan Trodd’s Hill which the road curves under to Hursley. But, first, I had to dip down to Pitt Village, which is a small cluster of thatched cottages, mud walls, and beech trees, with a pond and a bright white chalk pit, all at the bottom of a deep hollow. I climbed out of it and glided down under Nan Trodd’s Hill and its black yews, divided from the road only by a gentle rise of arable; and so, betwixt a similar but slighter yew-crowned rise and the oaks of Hursley Park, I approached Hursley. The first thing was a disused pump on the right, with an ivy-covered shelter and a fixed lamp; but before the first house there was a beech copse, and after that a farm and its attendant ricks and cottages, and at length the village. A single row of houses faced the park and its rookery beeches through a parallel row of pollard limes; but the centre was a double row of neat brick and timber houses, both old and new, a smithy, a doctor’s, and a “King’s Head” and “Dolphin.” Here also stood the spired church, opposite a branching of roads. At the beginning, middle, and end of the village, gates led into Hursley Park. And I think it was here that I saw the last oast-house in Hampshire.