Part 7

Immediately after passing the fifth milestone from Winchester I turned with the Romsey road south-west instead of keeping on southward to Otterbourne. It was now darkening and still. I was on a low moist road overhung by oak trees, through which I saw, on the right, a mile away, the big many-windowed Hursley House among its trees. The road had obviously once had wide grassy margins. The line of the old hedge was marked, several yards within a field on the right, by the oaks, the primroses, and the moss, growing there and not beyond: in a wood that succeeded, it was equally clear. The primroses glimmered in the dank shadow of the trees, where the old hedge had been, and round the water standing in old wayside pits. In one place on the left, by Ratlake, the fern and gorse looked like common. Nobody was using the road except the blackbirds and robins. Hardly a house was to be seen. It might have been the edge of the New Forest. If the road could have gone on so, with no more rise and fall, for ever, I think I should have been content. The new church and its pine, and cypress, and laurel, intruded but did not break the charm. More to my taste was the pond on the other side; gorse came to its edge, oaks stood about it, and dabchicks were diving in its unrippled surface. The “White Hart” farther on tempted me. It lay rather below the road on the left, behind the yellow courtyard and the signboard, forming a quadrangle with the stables and sheds on either side. The pale walls and the broad bay window on the ground floor offered “Accommodation for Cyclists.” But I did not stop, perhaps because Ampfield House on the other side took away my thoughts from inns. This was an ivy-mantled brick house, like two houses side by side, not very far back from the road; its high blossoming fruit wall bounded the road. Travelling so easily, I was loth to dismount, and on the signpost on the right, near the third milestone from Romsey, I read MSBURY without thinking of Timsbury, which lay on my way to Dunbridge. I glided on for half a mile before thinking better of it, and turning back, discovered my mistake. Here I entered a gravelly, soft road among trees. I should have done well to put up in one of the woodmen’s shelters here under the oaks. These huts were frames of stout green branches thatched with hazel peelings and walled with fagots. One was built so that an oak divided its entrance in two, and against the tree was fastened a plain wooden contrivance for gripping and bending wood. Inside, it had other hurdlemaker’s implements--a high wooden horse for gripping and bending, and a low wooden table. White peelings were thickly strewn around the huts. The floor showed likewise such signs of life as cigarette ends, match-boxes, and a lobster’s claw. On Saturday evening a marsh-tit and a robin alone seemed to have anything to do with them. Nevertheless I went contentedly on between mossy banks, hedges of beech, rhododendrons, and woodlands of oak, beech, and larch, which opened out in one place to show me the fern and pine of Ganger Common. The earth was quiet, dark, and beautiful. The owl was beginning to hunt over the fields, while the blackbird finished his song. Pleasant were the yellow road, the roadside bramble and brier hoops, the gravel pits and gorse at corners. But the sky was wild, threatening the earth both with dark clouds impending and with momentary wan gleams between them, angrier than the clouds. Some rain sprinkled as I dipped down between roadside oaks and a narrow orchard to Brook Farm. Here the road forded a brook, and a lane turned off, with a gravelly bluff on one side, farmyard and ricks on the other. Up in the pale spaces overhead Venus glared like a madman’s eye. Yet the rain came to nothing, and for a little longer the few scattered house lights appearing and disappearing in the surrounding country were mysteriously attractive. And then arrived complete darkness and rain together, as I reached the turning where I could see the chimney stack of Michelmersh. I tried the “Malt House” on the left. They could not give me a bed because “the missus was expecting some friends.” I pushed on against wind and rain to the “Bear and Ragged Staff,” a bigger inn behind a triangle of rushy turf and a walnut tree. “Accommodation for Cyclists” was announced, which I always used to assume meant that there was a bed; but it does not. It was raining, hailing, and blowing furiously, but they could not give me a bed because they were six in family: no, not any sort of a bed. They directed me to the “Mill Arms” at Dunbridge. Crossing the Test by Kim Bridge Mill, the half-drowned fields smelt like the sea. The mill-house windows shone above the double water plunging away into blackness. Then, for a space, when I had turned sharply north-westward the wind helped me. Actually I was now at the third inn. They were polite and even smiling, but they informed me that I could by no means have a bed, seeing that the lady and gentleman from somewhere had all the beds. Nor could they tell me of a bed anywhere, because it was Easter and people with a spare room mostly had friends. Luckily a train was just starting which would bear me away from Dunbridge to Salisbury. I boarded it, and by eight o’clock I was among the people who were buying and selling fish and oranges to the accompaniment of much chaffing, but no bad temper, in Fish Row. And, soon, though not at once, I found a bed and a place to sit and eat in, and to listen to the rain breaking over gutters and splashing on to stones, and pipes swallowing rain to the best of their ability, and signboards creaking in the wind; and to reflect on the imperfection of inns and life, and on the spirit’s readiness to grasp at all kinds of unearthly perfection such, for instance, as that which had encompassed me this evening before the rain. At that point a man entered whom I slowly recognized as the liberator of the chaffinch on Good Friday. At first I did not grasp the connection between this dripping, indubitably real man and the wraith of the day before. But he was absurdly pleased to recognize me, bowing with a sort of uncomfortable graciousness and a trace of a cockney accent. His expression changed in those few moments from a melancholy and too yielding smile to a pale, thin-lipped rigidity. I did not know whether to be pleased or not with the reincarnation, when he departed to change his clothes.

This Other Man, as I shall call him, ate his supper in silence, and then adjusted himself in the armchair, stretching himself out so that all of him was horizontal except his head. He was smoking a cigarette dejectedly, for he had left his pipe behind at Romsey. I offered him a clay pipe. No; he would not have it. They stuck to his lips, he said. But he volunteered to talk about clay pipes, and the declining industry of manufacturing them. He seemed to know all about ten-inch and fifteen-inch pipes, from the arrival of the clay out of Cornwall in French gray blocks to the wetting of the clay and the beating of it up with iron rods; the rough first moulding of the pipes by hand, and the piercing of the stems; the baking in moulds, the scraping of rough edges by girls, down to the sale of the pipes in the two months round about Christmas to Aldershot, Portsmouth, and such places. These longer pipes, at any rate, have become chiefly ceremonious and convivial, though personally I have hardly ever seen them smoked except by literary people under thirty. No wonder that in one of the principal factories only one artist is left, as the Other Man declared, to pierce the stems with unerring thrust. It seemed to him wonderful that even one man could be found to push a wire up the core of a long thin stick of clay. He had never himself been able to avoid running the wire out at the side before reaching the end. The great man who always succeeded had once made him a pipe with five bowls.

He could not tell me why the industry is decaying. But two causes seem at least to have contributed. First, a great many of the men who used to smoke clays smoke cheap cigarettes. Second, those who have not taken to cigarettes smoke briar pipes. Cigarettes appear to give less trouble than pipes. Any one, drunk or sober, can light them and keep them alight. They can be put out at any moment and returned to the cigarette case or tucked behind the ear. Also, it is held by snobs as well as by haters of foul pipes that cigarettes are more genteel, or whatever the name is of our equivalent vice. But if a pipe is to be smoked, the briar is believed to cast some sort of faint credit on the smoker which the clay does not. That Tennyson used clays probably now only influences a small number of young men--and that but for a year or two--of a class that would not take to clays as a matter of course. A few others of the same class begin in imitation of labourer, sailor, or gamekeeper, with whom they have come in exhilarating contact; and, in turn, others imitate them. The habit so gained, however, is not likely to endure. Nearly every one sheds it, either because he really does not enjoy it, or he has for some reason to keep it in abeyance too long for it to be resumed, or he supposes himself to be conspicuous and prefers not to be.

In the first place he may have been moved partly by a desire to be conspicuous, to signalize his individuality by a visible symbol, but such can seldom be a conscious motive with the most self-conscious of men. For some years I met plenty of youths of my own age who were experimenting with clay pipes, nervously colouring small thorny ones, or lying back and making of themselves cushions for long churchwardens, or carrying the bowl of a two-inch pipe upside down like a navvy. But I was never much tempted myself until I went to live permanently in the country. As I was pretty frequently walking at lunch time I took that meal at an inn, and one day remembering that as a child I had got clays from a publican for nothing I asked for one with my beer, and got it. I shall not pretend that this pipe was in any way remarkable, for I have no recollection of it. All I know is that it was not the last. Most, if not all, of my briar pipes at the time were foul. I took more and more to smoking clay pipes when I was alone or where it would not attract attention.

It was not long before I made the discovery that there are clays and clays. Those given away or sold for a halfpenny by innkeepers between the North and South Downs were usually thin and straight, sometimes embellished with a design in relief, particularly with a horned head and the initial letters of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes. Many and many a one of these mere smoking utensils was broken very soon in my teeth or in my pocket, or discarded because I did not like the feel or look of it, or simply because it was an unnecessary addition to my supply. For a time I could and did smoke almost anything, fortified possibly by a feeling (though I cannot recall it) that the custom was worth persisting in. At any rate it was persisted in.

If I pursued singularity I was not blindfold. Not many weeks were occupied in learning that thin clays were useless, or were not for me. They began by burning my tongue, and they were very soon bitten through. On the other hand, thickness alone was not sufficient. For example, Irish pipes up to a third of an inch thick were as rapidly bitten through as the harder thin clays. It was necessary to fit them with mouth-pieces connected by a tin band, and since these would corrode, I refused them. Even a clay that was hard as well as thick was not therefore faultless. I kept one for several years, at intervals trying to make terms with it on account of its good shape--the bowl set at more than a right angle to the stem, and adorned with a conventional ribbed leaf underneath--but always in vain; the clay, being hard after the manner of flint, gritted on the teeth and was no sweeter at the tenth than at the first pipe.

Wherever I went I bought a clay pipe or two. The majority were indifferent. Only after a time was the goodness of the good ones manifest, and by then I might be a hundred miles away from the shop, if I had not forgotten where it came from. These I did everything to preserve. Some of them went through the purification of fire a score of times before they came to an end by falling or, which was rare, by being worn too short. They had the great virtue of being hard, without being stony. They resembled bone in their close grain, sometimes being as smooth as if glazed. But I had little to do with the glazed “colouring” clays. They stank, and I was not ambitious except of achieving a cool, everlasting, and perfectly shaped pipe.

How to use the fire on a foul pipe was learnt by very slow degrees. Many a good pipe cracked or flaked in the flames. They had, I was at last to discover, been too suddenly submitted to great heat. If it was done gradually, the fiercest heat could be and should be imposed on them: they lay pinkish white in the heart of the fire until they possessed more than their original purity. A few of the best would emerge with almost an old ivory hue all over. Some I remember breaking when they had come safely out and were nearly cool, by tapping them to shake out the fur. Most of them were toughened as well as sweetened in the process.

How very rare were those good pipes! Probably I did not find more than one in twelve months, though I bought scores. I was continually trying Irish clays in a stupid hope that they would not be bitten through. The best pipe in the majority of shops was merely one that was not bad. It did not burn _much_; it was not bitten through until it was just reaching its ripeness.

Perhaps I should have remembered more varieties of goodness and badness had I not twelve months ago met a perfect clay pipe. It is so hard that I have only once bitten one through, yet it is soft to the teeth and tongue. Nor is it very thick; the bowl in particular I should have been inclined at first sight to condemn as too thin. It is smooth, in fact polished. Its shape is graceful; the stem slightly curved, slightly flattened, but thickening and developing roundness where it _becomes_ rather than joins the bowl, into which it flows so as to form something like a calabash. There are other shapes of this excellent material.

This perfect clay pipe came from a shop at Oxford. A month later I bought some of the same kind, but an inferior shape, at Melksham. Everywhere else I have looked in vain for them. I have never seen any one else smoking them who had not got them from me.

Tastes differ, but in this matter I cannot believe that any one capable of distinguishing one clay from another would deny this one’s excellence.

The Other Man cared nothing for the matter. He awoke from the stupor to which he had been reduced by listening, and asked,--

“Did you see that weather-vane at Albury in the shape of a pheasant? or the fox-shaped one by the ford at Butts Green? or the pub with the red shield and the three tuns and three pairs of wheatsheaves for a sign?”

“No,” I answered, adding what I could remember about the horse’s head over the corn chandler’s at Epsom. The Other Man had seen this, and also a similar one of white wood over a saddler’s at Dorking. He reminded me also of what I was engaged in forgetting--that Shalford had an inn called the “Sea-Horse,” and a signboard of a sea-horse with a white head and a fish-like body covered in azure scales. He said it was a better sea-horse than those over the Admiralty gates in Whitehall. Continuing, he asked me why it was that the chief inn of a town was so frequently the “Swan.” It was at Leatherhead. It was at Charing in Kent--I knew that. It was at a score of other places which I have forgotten. Nor could I remember a sufficient number of “Lions,” “Eagles,” and “Dolphins” to oppose him. Had I, was his next question, seen the “Ship” at Bishop’s Sutton, which had a signboard with a steamer on one side and a sailing ship on the other? And not long after this I was asleep.

IV.

FROM DUNBRIDGE OVER SALISBURY PLAIN.

Before the first brightening of the light on Sunday morning the rain ceased, and I returned to Dunbridge to pick up the road I had lost on Saturday evening. Above all, I wanted to ride along under Dean Hill, the level-ridged chalk hill dotted with yew that is seen running parallel to the railway a quarter of a mile on your left as you near Salisbury from Eastleigh. The sky was pale, scarcely more blue than the clouds with which it was here and there lightly whitewashed. For five miles I was riding against the stream of the river which rises near Clarendon and meets the Test near Dunbridge. The water and its alders, many of them prostrate, and its drab sedges mingled with intense green and with marsh-marigolds’ yellow, were seldom more than a hundred yards away on my right. Pewits wheeled over it with creaking wings and protests against the existence of man.

I did not stop for the villages. Butts Green, for example, where the Other Man had seen the fox weather-vane, began with an old thatched cottage and a big hollow yew, but the green itself was dull, flat, and bare, and the cottages round it newish. Lockerley Green, a mile farther on, was much like it, except that the road traversed instead of skirting the green. Between these two, and beyond Lockerley Church, where the road touched the river and had a fork leading across to East Tytherley, there was a small, but not old, mill, and a miller too, and flour. As I looked back the small sharp spire of the church stuck up over the level ridgy ploughland in a manner which, I supposed, would have made for a religious person a very religious picture. No other building was visible. The railway on my left was more silent than the river on my right, among its willow and alder and tall, tufted grass, at the foot of gorse slopes.

After crossing the railway half a mile past Lockerley Green the road went close to the base of Dean Hill, separated from it by ploughland without a hedge. On the left, that is on the Dean Hill side, stood East Dean Church, a little rustic building of patched brick and plaster walls, mossy roof, and small lead-paned windows displaying the Easter decorations of moss and daffodils. It had a tiny bell turret at the west end, and a round window cut up into radiating panes like a geometrical spider’s web. Under the yew tree, amidst long grass, dandelion, and celandine, lay the bones of people bearing the names Edney and Langridge. The door was locked. Its neighbours on the other side of the road were an old cottage with tiled roof and walls of herring-boned brick, smothered from chimney to earth with ivy, in a garden of plum blossom; and next to it, a decent, small home, a smooth clipped block of yew, and a whitewashed mud wall with a thatched coping. The other houses of East Dean, either thatched or roofed with orange tiles, were scattered chiefly on the right.

Presently I had the willows of the river as near me on the right as the green slope, the chalk pit, the sheep-folds, and yew trees of Dean Hill on the left; and the sun shone upon the water and began to slant down the hillside. The river was very clear and swift, the chalk of its bed very white, the hair of its waving weeds very dark green.

West Dean, where I entered Wiltshire, a mile from East Dean, is a village with a “Red Lion” inn, a railway station, a sawmill and timber-yard, and several groups of houses clustering close to both banks of the river, which is crossed by a road-bridge and by a white footbridge below. I went over river and railway uphill past the new but ivied church to look at the old farm-house, the old church, and the camp, which lie back from the road on the left among oaks and thickets. On that Sunday morning cows pasturing on the rushy fields below the camp, and thrushes singing in the oaks, were the principal inhabitants of West Dean. I did not go farther in this direction, for the road went north to West Tytherley and the broad woods that lie east of it, the remnant of Buckholt Forest, but turned back and west, and then south-west again on my original road, in order to be on the road nearest to Dean Hill. This took me over broad and almost hedgeless fields, and through a short disconnected fragment of an avenue of mossy-rooted beeches, to West Dean Farm. Nothing lay between the houseless road and the hillside, which is thick here with yew, except the broad arable fields, with a square or two given up to mustard flowers and sheep, and West Dean Farm itself. It is a house of a dirty white colour amidst numerous and roomy outbuildings, thatched or mellow-tiled, set in a circle of tall beeches. The road bends round the farm group and goes straight to the foot of the hill, and then along it. I went slowly, looking up at the yews and thorns on the green wall of the hill, and its slanting green trackway, and the fir trees upon the ridge. Linnets twittered in companies or sang solitarily on thorn tips. Thrushes sang in the wayside yews. Larks rose and fell unceasingly. The sheep-bells tinkled in the mustard. Away from the hill the land sloped gradually in immense arable fields, and immense grass fields newly rolled into pale green stripes, down to the river, and there rose again up to Hound Wood and Bentley Wood, where a white house shone pale in the north-east, four or five miles off.

For nearly two miles the road had not had a house upon it, and nothing separated me from the hill, the yew trees, and the brier and hawthorn thickets. In fact, West Dean Farm was the only house served by the three miles of road between West Dean and West Grimstead. Yet this did not save a chalk pit close to the road from being used as a receptacle for rubbish. Having reached the farm and the foot of the hill the road began to turn away again towards the river and to West Grimstead. It was a loose, flinty road, so that I had another reason for walking instead of riding. The larks that sang over me could not have wished for better dust baths than this road would make them, for the sun was gaining. It was almost a treeless road until I was close to West Grimstead, where there was an oak wood on the right, streaked with the silver of birch stems and tipped with the yellow flames of larches. The village consisted of a church, an inn called the “Spring Cottage,” and many thatched cottages scattered along several by-roads on either side. It ended in an old thatched cottage with outbuildings, at the verge of a deep sand pit full of sand-martins’ holes. When I had passed it I stopped at a gate and looked at the orange pit wall on the far side, the cottage above the wall, and the elm between the road and the pit. A thrush and several larks were singing, and through their songs I heard a thin voice that I had not heard for six months, very faint yet unmistakable, though I could not at once see the bird--a sand-martin. I recognized the sound, as I always recognize at their first autumnal ascent above the horizon the dim small cluster of the Pleiades on a September evening. On such a morning one sand-martin seems enough to make a summer, and here were six, flitting in narrow circles like butterflies with birds’ voices.

I went on and found myself in a flat land of oak woods and of fields that were half molehills and half rushes, and the hedge banks had gorse in blossom. It was here that I joined the Southampton and Salisbury road, a yellow road between the gorsy, rolling fragments of Whaddon Common, which came to an end at a plantation of pines on and about some mounds like tumuli on the right hand.