Part 9

“There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees; humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver rivers; meadows enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers; thickets which, being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so too by the cheerful disposition of many well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory craved the dams’ comfort; here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he never should be old; there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice-music.” ...

(A charming companion to this first view of Arcadia is where FitzGerald speaks of the home-brewed at Yardley, in the days before “he knew he was to die.”) For a page or two the least learned of us can enjoy the ghostly rustle of these vaporous, eloquent forms that never were alive, yet once gave joy to men who were friends of Shakespeare and Drake; the phantoms of their felicity in gardens and fair women. Then the beauty of visible things, of dress, for example, abounds and is very real, especially Pyrocles’ dress in his Amazon’s disguise--the hair arrayed in “careless care” under a coronet of pearl and gold and feathers, the doublet “of sky-coloured satin, with plates of gold, and, as it were, nailed with precious stones.” The princeliness of the Arcadians’ manners and morals may seem to reflect Sidney’s self “divinely mild, a spirit without spot.” There are thoughts, too, beyond such as the convention demanded, as when Pyrocles says,--

“I am not yet come to that degree of wisdom to think light of the sex of whom I have my life, since if I be anything, which your friendship rather finds than I acknowledge, I was, to come to it, born of a woman, nursed of a woman.... Truly we men, and praisers of men, should remember that if we have such excellences it is reasonable to think them excellent creatures, of whom we are--since a kite never brought forth a good flying hawk.” And some of the situations, conventional enough, only the weary or those that never loved can pass unsaluted; such as Amphialus’ too felicitous courtship of Queen Helen on behalf of his foster-brother, Philoxenos. The conceits, too, do not tower so often, so bravely, so rashly, into the cloudy altitudes without meeting what would not have been found at home: as in Kalander’s hunting,--

“The wood seemed to conspire with them against his own citizens [that is, the stags], dispersing their noise through all his quarters, and even the nymph left to bewail the loss of Narcissus and became a hunter.”

The nymphs themselves, enchanted by the pleasant ways of the pastoral, are sometimes lured out of their fastnesses to bless it with a touch of eternal Nature or of true rusticity, as in the Eclogue in the third book: “The first strawberries he could find, were ever in a clean washed dish sent to Kala; thus posies of the spring flowers were wrapped up in a little green silk, and dedicated to Kala’s breasts; thus sometimes his sweetest cream, sometimes the best cake-bread his mother made, were reserved for Kala’s taste. Neither would he stick to kill a lamb when she would be content to come over the way unto him.”

Delightful, too, is the use of experience when it is said of Pyrocles that his mind was “all this while so fixed upon another devotion, that he no more attentively marked his friend’s discourse than the child that hath leave to play marks the last part of his lesson.”

This has nothing to do with the Plain. We know, indeed, that Sidney wrote it below there at Wilton, in his sister, the Countess of Pembroke’s house. But what has “Arcadia” to do with Wilton, save that it was written there? There, says Aubrey, the Muses appeared to Sidney, and he wrote down their dictates in a book, even though on horseback. “These romancy plaines and boscages did no doubt,” says he, a Wiltshire man, “conduce to the heightening of Sir Philip Sidney’s phansie.” It cannot be said that they did more, that they reflected themselves in the broad, meandering current of the “Arcadia.” At most, perhaps, after heightening the poet’s fancy, they offered no impediments to it. If Salisbury Plain was not Arcadia, it contained the elements of Arcadia and a solitude in which they could be mingled at liberty. Every one must wish for a larger leaven of passages like that one where he compares Pyrocles to the impatient schoolboy, for something to show us what he and the countess said and did at Wilton, and what the Plain was like, three hundred years ago, when the book was being written. Even so it is a better preparation for Salisbury Plain than it would be for Sedgemoor or Land’s End; but I shall not labour the point since I had seen the Plain before I had read the book, and Berwick St. James is as little affected by “Arcadia” as “Arcadia” by Berwick St. James.

As soon as my road was outside Berwick St. James it mounted above the river and was absolutely clear of houses, hedges, and fences for a mile, and showed me nothing more than the bare and the green arable land flowing away on every side in curves like flight, and compact masses of beeches on certain ridges, like manes or combs. At the end of the mile my northward road ran into a westward road from Amesbury, turned sharp along it for a hundred yards or so, and then out of it sharp to the left and north again, thus seeing nothing of the village of Winterbourne Stoke but a group of sycamores and a thatched white mud wall round which it twisted. Out and up the road took me again to the high arable without a hedge, and the music of larks, and the mingling sounds of pewits and sheep-bells. Before me scurried partridges, scarce willing to give up their love-making in the sunlit and sun-warmed dust. Looking over my shoulder I saw two hills striped with corn, and one of them crested with beeches, curve up apart from one another, so as to frame in the angle thus made between them the bare flank of Berwick Down and the outline of Yarnbury Castle ramparts upon the bare ridge of it. Very far northward hung the dark-wooded inland promontory of Martinsell, near Savernake, and in the east the Quarley and Figsbury range, their bony humps just tipped with dark trees.

The next village was five villages in one--Rollestone, Maddington, Shrewton, Orcheston St. George, and Orcheston St. Mary. Here many roads from the high land descended to the river and crossed mine. The cluster of villages begins with orchard and ends in a field where the grass is said to grow twelve feet high. After passing over the Winterbourne and running along under its willows to Shrewton’s little domed dungeon of blackened stone, and an inn that stands sideways to the road, with the sign of a Catherine-wheel, the road again bridges the river from waterside Shrewton to waterside Maddington. But I kept along the Shrewton bank on a by-road. The stream here flows as clear as glass over its tins and crockery, between roadside willows and a white mud wall, and I followed it round past the flint-towered church and the “Plume of Feathers” and its pair of peacock yews. I was looking for Orcheston St. Mary. One sunny February day, when the fields by the road hither from Tilshead were flooded with pools and channels of green, peacock blue, and purple by the Winterbourne, I had seen below me among the loops of the water a tiny low-towered church with roof stained orange, and a white wall curving and long, and a protective group of elms, which was Orcheston St. Mary. I continued along the stream and its banks of parsley and celandine, its troop of willows, beeches, and elms, but found myself at Orcheston St. George. A cottage near the church bore upon its wall these words, out in stone, before Queen Victoria’s time,--

“Fear God Honour the King Do good to all men.”

Probably it dates from about the year of Alton Workhouse, from the times when kites and ravens abounded, and thrived on the corpses of men who were hanged for a little theft committed out of necessity or love of sport. The fear of God must have been a mighty thing to bring forth such laws and still more the obedience to them. And yet, thanks to our capacity for seeing the past and the remote in rose-colour, that age frequently appears as at least a silver age; perhaps even our own will appear German silver. I confess I did not think about the lad who was hanged for a hare when I caught sight of the church at Orcheston St. George, but rather of some imaginary, blissful time which at least lacked our tortures, our great men, our shame and conscience. It is a flint church with an ivied tower standing on terms of equality among thatched farm buildings and elms. The church was stifling, for a stove roared among dead daffodils and moss and the bodies of Ambrose Paradice, gent, dead since 1727, and Joan his wife, and the mere tablet of John Shettler of Elston, who died at Harnham (“from the effects of an accident”) on December 6, 1861, when he was fifty-two, and went to Hazelbury Brian in Dorset to be buried. Outside, the sun was almost as warm on the daisies and on the tombstone of Job Gibbs, who died in 1817 at the age of sixty-four, and proclaimed, or the sexton did for him,--

“Ye living men the Tomb survey Where you must quickly dwell. Mark how the awful summons sounds In ev’ry funeral knell. Give joy or sorrow, care or pain, Take life and blends away, But let me find them all again In that eternal day.”

Close by, Ann Farr from Shropshire, a servant for fifty years at the Rectory, had a tablet between her and oblivion.

From Orcheston St. George the road advances three miles with hardly a hedge. On the right rose and spread broad pastures mainly, on the left arable lands, new ploughed, or green with young corn, or cut up into squares of swedes or mustard for the long-horned sheep. There was no flooded river now to shine in the sun. Clouds began to thicken over the sky. The dust whirled. The straw caught in the hawthorns fluttered. A motor car raced by me. Therefore I did not get off my bicycle to visit that crescent beech and fir wood against a concavity of the chalk upon my right. A farm road curves past it, the wood hanging above it as beautifully as if above a river. I hoped to reach Tilshead before it rained, or, better still, the elms and farm buildings at Joan-a-Gore’s at the crossing of the Ridge Way. Tilshead’s trees lay visible before me for a mile or more. Its street of cottages and houses that are more than cottages I entered before the rain. I even stopped at the church--a flint and stone one--to see the tower and the churchyard, and its white mud wall, and the chestnut tree, and the ash that weeps over the box tombs of people named Wilkins and Parham, and the graves of the Husseys and Laweses, and that boast of William Cowper the schoolmaster in 1804,--

“When the Archangel’s trump shall sound, And slumbering mortals bid to rise, I shall again my form assume To meet my Saviour in the skies.”

A man was just stepping out of a motor car into the “Black Horse,” carrying a scarlet-hooded falcon upon his wrist; but I did not stop here, nor at the “Rose and Crown,” or the “Bell.”

On leaving Tilshead, as on leaving Berwick St. James, Winterbourne Stoke, and Orcheston, I was free of houses; and of the few that lay in the hollows of the Plain only one was visible--a small one on my right a quarter of a mile away among ricks and elm trees--until I came to Joan-a-Gore’s. It is a hedgeless road, with more or less wide margins of rough grass, along which proceed two lines of poplars, some dead, some newly planted, all unprosperous and resembling the sails of windmills. A league of ploughland on either hand was broken only by a clump or two on the high ridges and a rick on the lower. As it was Sunday no white and black teams were crossing these spaces, sowing or scarifying. The rooks of Joan-a-Gore’s flew back and forth, ignorant of the falconer; the pewit brandished himself in the air; the lark sang continually; on one of the dead poplars a corn bunting delivered his unvaried song, as if a handful of small pebbles dropped in a chain dispiritedly. Nobody was on the road, it being then two o’clock, except a young soldier going to meet a girl. The rain came, but was gone again before I reached Joan-a-Gore’s. The farm-house, the spacious farm-yard and group of irregular, shadowy, thatched buildings, and the surrounding rookery elms, all on a gently-sloping ground next to the road--this is the finest modern thing on the Plain. The farm itself is but a small, slated house, gray-white in colour, with a porch and five front windows, half hid among elm trees; but the whole group probably resembles a Saxon chief’s homestead. The trees make a nearly continuous copse with the elms and ashes that stand around and above the thatched cart lodges and combined sheds and cottages at Joan-a-Gore’s Cross. No hedge, wall, or fence divides this group from my road or from the Ridge Way crossing it, and I turned into one of the doorless cart lodges to eat. I sat on a wagon shaft, looking out north over the Ridge Way and the north edge of the Plain. Where it passed the cart lodge the Ridge Way was a dusty farm track; but on the other side of the crossing it was a fair road, leading past a new farm group towards Imber. Chickens peeked round me in the road dust and within the shed. Sparrows chattered in the thatch. The bells of sheep folded in neighbouring root fields tinkled. In the rookery the rooks cawed, and nothing intimated that the falcon had killed one. The young soldier had met his girl, and was walking back with her hand in his. The heavy dark sagging clouds let out some rain without silencing the larks. As the sun came out again a trapful of friends of the cottagers drove up. The trap was drawn up alongside of me with a few stares: the women went in; the men put away the horse and strolled about. Well, I could not rest here when I had finished eating. Perhaps Sunday had tainted the solitude and quiet; I know not. So I mounted and rode on north-westward.

The road was beginning to descend off the Plain. The poplars having come to an end, elms lined it on both sides. When the descent steepened the roadside banks became high and covered in arum, parsley, nettle, and ground ivy, and sometimes elder and ivy. No hedgerow on the left hid the great waves of the Plain towards Imber, and the fascinating hollow of the Warren close at hand. The slabby ploughland sinks away to a sharp-cut, flat-bottomed hollow of an oblong tendency, enclosed by half-wooded, green terraced banks all round except at the entrance, which is towards the road. This is the Warren, a most pleasant thing to see, a natural theatre unconsciously improved by human work, but impossible to imitate entirely by art, and all the better for being empty.

Nearing the foot of the descent the road on the left is blinded by a fence, so that I could hardly see the deep wooded cleave parallel to me, and could only hear the little river running down it to Lavington. Very clear and thin and bright went this water over the white and dark stones by the wayside, as I came down to the forge at West Lavington and the “Bridge” inn. West Lavington is a street of about two miles of cottages, a timber-yard, inns, a great house, a church, and gardens, with interruptions from fields. All Saints’ Church stands upon a steep bank on the left, a towered church with a staircase corner turret and an Easter flag flying. Round about it throng the portly box tombs and their attendant headstones, in memory of the Meads, Saunderses, Bartlets, Naishes, Webbs, Browns, Allens, and the rest. Among the Browns is James Brown, shepherd “for thirty-nine years,” who died in 1887, and was then but forty-six. The trees and thatched and tiled roofs of the village hid the Plain from the churchyard. Inside, the church wall was well lined with tablets to the Tinkers, the Smiths, and the family of Amor; but the principal thing is the recumbent marble figure of Henry Danvers, twenty-one years old when he died in 1654. He is musing over a book which appears to be slipping from his grasp. The figure of his mother, Elizabeth, near him is also holding but not reading a book. Between the two an earlier female effigy, head on cushion, slumbers in a recess. Under one of the largest tablets a tiny stone with quaint lettering was inset to keep in mind Henevera Yerbury, who died at Coulston on March 4, 1672.

Instead of going straight on through Potterne and Devizes, I turned to the left by the Dauntsey Agricultural College, and entered a road which follows the foot of the Plain westward to Westbury and Frome. Thus I had the north wall of the Plain always visible on my left as I rode through Little Cheverell, Erlestoke, Tinhead, and Edington. The road twisted steeply downhill between high banks of loose earth and elm roots, half draped by arum, dandelion, ground ivy, and parsley, and the flowers of speedwell and deadnettle; then up again to Little Cheverell. Here I mounted a bank of nettles and celandines under elm trees into the churchyard, and between two pairs of pollard limes to the door of the church, and walked round it and saw the two box tombs smothered in ivy, and the spotted old carved stones only two feet out of the ground. Behind the church rises Strawberry Hill. A cow was lowing in the farmyard over the road. Fowls were scratching deeper and deeper the holes among the elm roots on the church bank.

Then for a distance the road traversed hedgeless arable levels that rose gently in their young green garments up to the Plain. I looked back, and saw the vast wall of the Plain making an elbow at West Lavington, and crooking round to a clump on a straw-coloured hill above Urchfont, the farthest point visible. Before me stretched the woods of Erlestoke Park, crossing the road and slanting narrow and irregular up and along the hillside, lining it with beech and fir for over a mile, under the name of Hill Wood. The road dipped steeply through the grounds of the park, and its high banks of gray sand, dressed in dog’s mercury and ivy, and overhung by pine trees, shut out everything on either hand. Several private bridges crossed the deep road, and a woman had stopped that her child might shout, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” under the arch of one of them. Emerging from these walls, the road cut through a chain of ponds. Erlestoke Park lay on both sides. On the right its deer fed by the new church under a steep rise of elms and sycamores; on the left rooks cawed among the elms and chestnuts scattered on lawn that sloped up to Hill Wood.

A timber-yard, a “George and Dragon,” and many neat thatched cottages compose the wayside village of Erlestoke. Water was flashing down the gutters. Quite a number of people were on the road, but no one could tell me the meaning of the statuary niched on the cottage walls. It must have come from “some old ancient place,” they said. An old man who had dwelt for eighteen years in one of the cottages thus adorned, and had worked as a boy with old men that knew the place, could tell me no more. Some of the figures were nudes--one a female, with the coy hands of Venus, rising from her bath--others classical, and symbolic or grotesque: all astonishing in that position, ten feet up on a cottage wall, and unlikely to have come from the old church in Erlestoke Park.

Not a mile of this road was without cottagers strolling with their children or walking out to see friends in the beautiful weather. But just outside Erlestoke I met two slightly dilapidated women, not cottage women, with a perambulator, and twenty yards behind them two weatherbeaten, able-bodied men in caps, better dressed than the women. As I went by, one of them gave a shout, which I did not take as meant for me. He continued to shout what I discovered to be “Sir” in a loud voice until I turned round and had to get down. They advanced to meet me. The shorter man, a stocky fellow of not much past thirty, with very little nose, thin lips, and a strong, shaven chin, hastened up to me and inquired, in an unnecessarily decided manner, the road to Devizes, and if there were many houses on the way. The taller man, slender and very upright, with bright blue eyes, had by this time come up, and the two began to beg, telling rapidly, loudly, emphatically, and complainingly, a combined story into which the _Titanic_ was introduced. One of them pointed out that he was wearing the button of the Seamen’s Guild. They wanted me to look at papers. The two women, who were still walking on, they claimed as their wives. The more they talked the less inclined did I feel to give them money. Though they began to call down a blessing on me, I still refused. They persisted. The shorter one was not silent while I mounted my bicycle. So I rode away out of reach of their blessings without giving them anything. I tried to explain to myself why. For sixpence I might have purchased two loaves or three pints for them, and for myself blessings and possibly some sort of glow. I did not know nearly enough of mankind to condemn them as mere beggars; besides, mere beggars must live, if any one must. But they were very glib and continuous. Also they were hearty men in good health--which should have been a reason for giving them what I could afford. The strongest reason against it was probably alarm at being given some responsibility at one blow for five bodies in some ways worse off than myself, and shame, too, at the act of handing money and receiving thanks for it. My conscience was uneasy. I could not appease it with sixpence, nor with half a sovereign, which might have been thought generous if I had told the story. If I was to do anything I ought to have seen the thing through, to have accompanied these people and seen that they slept dry and ate enough, and got work or a pension. To give them money was to take mean advantage of the fact that in half a mile or so I could stow them away among the mysteries and miseries of the world. Too late I concluded that I ought to have listened to their story to the end, to have read their papers and formed an opinion, and to have given what I could, because in any case I should be none the worse, and they might be the better, if only to the extent of three pints between them. I made a resolution--a sort of a resolution--to give sixpence in future to every beggar, and leave the question of right or wrong till--

“When the Archangel’s trump shall sound And slumbering mortals bid to rise,”

and the schoolmaster’s expectation is answered. Nevertheless, I was uneasy--so uneasy that the next beggar got nothing from me. It was simpler to pass by with a helpless “_Que sais-je?_” shrug, than to stop and have a look at him and say something, while I felt in my pockets and made the choice between my coppers and my smallest silver.