I had planned to start on March 21, and rather late than early, to give the road time for drying. The light arrived bravely and innocently enough at sunrise; too bravely, for by eight o’clock it was already abashed by a shower. There could be no doubt that either I must wait for a better day, or at the next convenient fine interval I must pretend to be deceived and set out prepared for all things. So at ten I started, with maps and sufficient clothes to replace what my waterproof could not protect from rain.
The suburban by-streets already looked rideable; but they were false prophets: the main roads were very different. For example, the surface between the west end of Nightingale Lane and the top of Burntwood Lane was fit only for fancy cycling—in and out among a thousand lakes a yard wide and three inches deep. These should either have been stocked with gold-fish and aquatic plants or drained, but some time had been allowed[35] to pass without either course being adopted. It may be that all the draining forces of the neighbourhood had been directed to emptying the ornamental pond on Wandsworth Common. Empty it was, and the sodden bed did not improve the look of the common—flat by nature, flatter by recent art. The gorse was in bloom amidst a patchwork of turf, gravel, and puddle. Terriers raced about or trifled. A flock of starlings bathed together in a puddle until scared by the dogs. A tall, stern, bald man without a hat strode earnestly in a straight line across the grass and water, as if pleasure had become a duty. He was alone on the common. In all the other residences, that form walls round the common almost on every side, hot-cross buns had proved more alluring than the rain and the south-west wind. The scene was, in fact, one more likely to be pleasing in a picture than in itself. It was tame: it was at once artificial and artless, and touched with beauty only by the strong wind and by the subdued brightness due to the rain. Its breadth and variety were sufficient for it to respond—something as Exmoor or Mousehold Heath or Cefn Bryn in Gower would have responded—to the cloudily shattered light, the threats and the deceptions, and the great sweep of the wind. But there was no one paint[36]ing those cold expanses of not quite lusty grass, the hard, dull gravel, the shining puddles, the dark gold-flecked gorse, the stiff, scanty trees with black bark and sharp green buds, the comparatively venerable elms of Bolingbroke Grove, the backs and fronts of houses of no value save to their owners, and the tall chimney-stacks northwards. Perhaps only a solitary artist, or some coldish sort of gnome or angel, could have thoroughly enjoyed this moment. That it was waiting for such a one I am certain; I am almost equally certain that he could create a vogue in scenes like this one, which are only about a thousandth part as unpleasant as a cold bath, and possess, furthermore, elements of divinity lacking both to the cold bath and to the ensuing bun.
It is easier to like the blackbird’s shrubbery, the lawn, the big elm, or oak, and the few dozen fruit trees, of the one or two larger and older houses surviving—for example, at the top of Burntwood Lane. The almond, the mulberry, the apple trees in these gardens have a menaced or actually caged loveliness, as of a creature detained from some world far from ours, if they are not, as in some cases they are, the lost angels of ruined paradises.
Burntwood Lane, leading down from a residential district to an industrial district, is no longer[37] as pretty as its name. Also, when it seems to be aiming at the country, it turns into a street of maisonettes, with a vista of houses terminated by the two tall red chimneys of the Wimbledon Electricity Works. But it has its character. The Lunatic Asylum helps it with broad, cultivated squares, elms, and rooks’ nests, and the voices of cows and pigs behind the railings that line it on the left hand from top to bottom. On the right, playfields waiting to be built all over give it a lesser advantage. How sorry are the unprotected elms on that side! They will never be old. Man, child, and dog, walking in and out of them, climbing them, kicking and cutting them, have made them as little like trees as it is possible for them to be while they yet live. They have one hour of prettiness, when the leaf-buds are as big as peas on the little side sprays low down. Then on a Saturday—or on a Sunday, when the path is darkened by adults in their best clothes—the children come and pick the sprays in bunches instead of primroses. For there are no primroses, no celandines, no dandelions outside the fences in Burntwood Lane. And Garratt Green at the bottom is now but a railed-in, perfectly level square for games, with rules on a notice-board. It is greener than when it was crossed diagonally by paths, and honoured[38] on a Saturday by gypsies and coconut-shies. Probably it now gives some satisfaction to the greatest number possible, but nobody will ever again, until After London, think of Garratt Green as a sort of country place. I went round it and its footballers in haste. Nor is that thickening portion of London beyond it easily made to appear beautiful or interesting. It is flat and low, suitable rather for vegetables than men, and built on chiefly because people can always be enticed into new houses. The flatter and lower and more suitable for vegetables, the more easily satisfied are the people with their houses, partly because they are poor, partly because they are half country folk and like this kind of land, it may be, and the river Wandel, the watercress beds, the swampy places, the market gardens, the cabbages and lavender, and Mitcham Fair, more than they would like the church-parade along Bolingbroke Grove, the bands, the teetotallers, the atheists, and the tennis-players, on the commons which have a gravel soil.
As I left the Green I noticed Huntspill Road. Why is it Huntspill Road? I thought at once of Huntspill in Somerset, of Highbridge on the Brue, of Brent Knoll, of Burnham and Hunt’s Pond, and the sandhills and the clouded-yellow butterflies that shared the hollows of the sandhills with[39] me in the Summer once. Such is the way of street names, particularly in London suburbs, where free play is given to memory and fancy. I suppose, if I were to look, I should find names as homely as the Florrie Place and Lily Place at lower Farringdon near Alton, or the Susannah’s Cottage and Katie’s Cottage near Canute’s Palace at Southampton. But Beatrice, Ayacanora, or Megalostrate would be as likely. To the casual, curious man, these street names compose an outdoor museum as rich as any in the world. They are the elements of a puzzle map of England which gradually we fill in, now recognizing from a bus-top the name of a Wiltshire village, and again among the Downs coming upon a place which had formerly been but a name near Clapham Junction.
Not far beyond Huntspill Road, at what is called (I think) New Wimbledon, I noticed a De Burgh Street. Do you remember how Borrow, speaking of the tricks of fortune, says that he has seen a descendant of the De Burghs who wore the falcon mending kettles in a dingle? He counted himself one of the De Burghs. De Burgh Street is a double row of more than dingy—better than dingy—swarthy, mulatto cottages, ending in a barrier of elm trees. The monotony of the tiny front gardens is broken by a dark pine tree in one,[40] and by an inn called the “Sultan”—not “Sweet Sultan,” which is a flower, but “Sultan,” a dusky king. And out of the “Sultan,” towards me, strode a gaunt, dusky man, with long black ringlets dangling from under his hard hat down over his green and scarlet neckerchief. His tight trousers, his brisk gait, and his hairless jib, were those of a man used to horses and to buyers and sellers of horses. He came rapidly and to beg. Rapid was his begging, exquisitely finished in its mechanical servility. His people were somewhere not far off, said he. That night he had travelled from St. Albans to rejoin them. They were not here: they must be at Wandsworth, with the vans and horses. All questions were answered instantly, briefly, and impersonally. The incident was but a pause in his rapid career from the “Sultan” to Wandsworth. He took the price of a pint with a slight appearance of gratitude, and departed with long, very quick steps, head down, face almost hidden by his bowler.
But there was much to be seen between Huntspill Road and De Burgh Road. The scene, for instance, from the corner by the “Plough,” the “Prince Albert,” and the “White Lion,” at Summerstown, was curious and typical. These three great houses stand at the edge of the still culti[41]vated and unpopulated portion of the flat land of the Wandel—the allotment gardens, the watercress beds, the meadows plentifully adorned with advertisements and thinly sprinkled with horse and cow, but not lacking a rustic house and a shed or two, and to-day a show of plum-blossom. This suburban landscape had not the grace of Haling Park and Down, but at that moment its best hour was beginning. The main part visible was twenty acres of damp meadow. On the left it was bounded by the irregular low buildings of a laundry, a file and tool factory, and a chamois-leather mill; on the right by the dirty backs of Summerstown. On the far side a neat, white, oldish house was retiring amid blossoming fruit trees under the guardianship of several elms, and the shadow of those two tall red chimneys of the Electricity Works. On my side the meadow had a low black fence between it and the road, with the addition, in one place, of high advertisement boards, behind which lurked three gypsy vans. A mixture of the sordid and the delicate in the whole was unmistakable.
Skirting the meadow, my road led up to the Wandel and a mean bridge. The river here is broadened for a hundred yards between the bridge and the chamois-leather mill or Copper Mill. The[42] buildings extend across and along one side of the water; a meadow comes to the sedgy side opposite. The mill looks old, has tarred boards where it might have had corrugated iron, and its neighbours are elms and the two chimneys. It is approached at one side by a lane called Copper Mill Lane, where the mud is of a sort clearly denoting a town edge or a coal district. Above the bridge the back-yards of new houses have only a narrow waste between them and the Wandel, and on this was being set up the coconut-shy that would have been on Garratt Green twenty years ago.
The rain returned as I was crossing the railway bridge by Hayden’s Road station. It was raining hard when the gypsy left the “Sultan,” and still harder when I turned to the right along Merton Road. Rather than be soaked thus early, I took the shelter offered by a bird-shop on the left hand. This was not a cheerful or a pretty place. Overhead hung a row of cages containing chaffinches—battered ones at a shilling, a neater one at eighteen-pence—that sang every now and then,—
“My life and soul, as if he were a Greek.”
Inside the shop, linnets at half a crown were rushing ceaselessly against the bars of six-inch cages, their bosoms ruffled and bloody as if from the[43] strife, themselves like wild hearts beating in breasts too narrow. “House-moulted” goldfinches (price 5s. 6d.) were making sounds which I should have recognized as the twittering of goldfinches had I heard them among thistles on the Down tops. Little, bright foreign birds, that would have been hardly more at home there than here, looked more contented. A gold-fish, six inches long, squirmed about a globe with a diameter of six inches, in the most complete exile imaginable. The birds at least breathed air not parted entirely from the south-west wind which was now soaking the street; but the fish was in a living grave. The place was perhaps more cheerless to look at than to live in, but in a short time three more persons took shelter by it, and after glancing at the birds, stood looking out at the rain, at the dull street, the tobacconist’s, news-agent’s, and confectioner’s shops alone being unshuttered. Presently one of the three shelterers entered the bird-shop, which I had supposed shut; the proprietor came out for a chaffinch; and in a minute or two the customer left with an uncomfortable air and something fluttering in a paper bag such as would hold a penn’orth of sweets. He mounted a bicycle, and I after him, for the rain had forgotten to fall. He turned up to the left towards Morden station,[44] which was my way also. Not far up the road he was apparently unable to bear the fluttering in the paper bag any longer; he got down, and with an awkward air, as if he knew how many great men had done it before, released the flutterer. A dingy cock chaffinch flew off among the lilacs of a garden, saying “Chink.” The deliverer was up and away again.
For some distance yet the land was level. The only hill was made by the necessity of crossing a railway at Morden station. At that point rows of houses were discontinued; shops and public-houses with a lot of plate-glass had already ceased. The open stretches were wider and wider, of dark earth, of vegetables in squares, or florists’ plantations, divided by hedges low and few, or by lines of tall elm trees or Lombardy poplars. Not quite rustic men and women stooped or moved to and fro among the vegetables: carts were waiting under the elms. A new house, a gasometer, an old house and its trees, lay on the farther side of the big field: behind them the Crystal Palace. On my right, in the opposite direction, the trees massed themselves together into one wood.
It is so easy to make this flat land sordid. The roads, hedges, and fences on it have hardly a reason for being anything but straight. More and more the kind of estate disappears that might[45] preserve trees and various wasteful and pretty things: it is replaced by small villas and market gardens. If any waste be left under the new order, it will be used for conspicuously depositing rubbish. Little or no wildness of form or arrangement can survive, and with no wildness a landscape cannot be beautiful. Barbed wire and ugly and cruel fences, used against the large and irresponsible population of townsmen, add to the charmless artificiality. It was a relief to see a boy stealing up one of the hedges, looking for birds’ nests. And then close up against this eager agriculture and its barbed wires are the hotels, inns, tea-shops, and cottages with ginger-beer for the townsman who is looking for country of a more easy-going nature. This was inhospitable. On many a fence and gate had been newly written up in chalk by some prophet: “Eternity,” “Believe,” “Come unto Me.”
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[46] 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-[47]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[48] 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. Never[49]theless, 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,[50] 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[51] 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[52] 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,[53] 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[54] 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.” ...
CUCKOO FLOWERS
Leatherhead Mill.
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,[55] 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[56] 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[57] 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,[58] 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[59] 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[60] 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[61] 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—
[62]
“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:—”
[63]
“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[64] 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.” ...
An impossibly noble savage might seem to have been his desire, a combination of Shakespeare and a Huron, of a “Wild god-ridden courser” and a study chair, though in practice perhaps a George Borrow delighted him less than a Leslie Stephen.[65] But what he thought matters little compared with what he succeeded in saying, and with that sensuousness and vigour, both bodily and intellectual, which at his best he mingled as few poets have done. His “Love in the Valley” is the most English of love poems: the girl and the valley are purely and beautifully English. His early poem, “Daphne,” though treating a Greek myth, is equally English—altogether an open-air piece. No pale remembered orb, but the sun itself, and the wind, sweeten and brace the voluptuousness of both poems. And therefore it is that in passing Box Hill, whether the leaves of “the sudden-lighted whitebeam” are flashing, or lying, as now they were, but dimly hoary in the paths, I think of Meredith as I should not think of other poets in their territories. He was not so much an admirer and lover of Nature, like other poets, as a part of her, one of her most splendid creatures, fit to be ranked with the whitebeam, the lark, and the south-west wind that—
“Comes upon the neck of night,
Like one that leapt a fiery steed
Whose keen, black haunches quivering shine
With eagerness and haste.” ...
Riding against the south-west wind is quite another thing. That fiery steed which I had been dragging with me, as it were, instead of riding it,[66] was not in the least exhausted, and I knew that I was unlikely to reach Farnham that evening. The telegraph wires wailed their inhuman lamentation. Thunder issued a threat of some sort far off.
At three, after eating, I was on the road again, making for Guildford by way of Wotton, Shere, and Shalford. If Dorking people will not have wine and women on top of Box Hill on a Sunday, they were, at any rate, strolling on the paths of their roadside common. The road was level, impossible to cycle on against the wind. But the eye was not starved; there was no haste. I now had the clear line of the Downs on my right hand, and was to have them so to Shalford. At first, in the region of Denbies, they were thoroughly tamed, their smoothness made park-like, their trees mostly fir. Beyond, their sides, of an almost uniform gentle steepness, but advancing and receding, hollowed and cleft, were adorned by unceasingly various combinations of beech wood, of scattered yew and thorn, of bare ploughland or young corn, and of naked chalk. The rolling commons at their feet, Milton Heath and Westcott Heath, were traversed by my road. Milton Heath, except for some rugged, heathery, pine-crested mounds on the right, was rather unnoticeable in comparison with[67] Buryhill, a roof-like hill at right angles to the road on my left. This hill has a not very high but distinct, even ridge, and steep slopes of grass. Its trees are chiefly upon the top, embowering a classic, open summer-house.
After Milton Street came Westcott Heath and a low shingled spire up amid the gorse. The road was now cutting through sand, and the sand walls were half overgrown with moss and gorse, ivy and celandine, and overhung by wild cherry and beech. Behind me, as I climbed, a moment’s sunlight brought out the white scar of Box Hill.
Between the rising road and the Downs lay a hollow land, for nearly two miles occupied in its lowest part by the oaks of a narrow wood, called Deerleap Wood, running parallel to the road: sometimes the gray trunks were washed faintly with light, the accumulated branch-work proved itself purplish, and here and there the snick of a lost bough was bright. Over the summit of the wood I could see the chalky ploughland or pasture of the Downs, and their beechen ridge. The hollow land has a kind of island, steep and naturally moated, within it, and close to the road. Here stands Wotton Church, the home of dead Evelyns of Wotton, alone among tall beeches and chestnuts.
[68]
I had left behind me most cyclists from London, but I was now continually amongst walkers. There were a few genial muscular Christians with their daughters, and equally genial muscular agnostics with no children; bands of scientifically-minded ramblers with knickerbockers, spectacles, and cameras; a trio of young chaps singing their way to a pub.; one or two solitaries going at five miles an hour with or without hats; several of a more sentimental school in pairs, generally chosen from both sexes, disputing as to the comparative merits of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Arthur Sidgwick; and a few country people walking, not for pleasure, but to see friends seven or eight miles away, whom perhaps they had not visited for years, and, after such a Good Friday as this, never will again.
These travellers gave me a feeling that I had been forestalled (to put it mildly), and as the light began to dwindle, and to lose all intention of being brilliant, I allowed Guildford to hover before my mind’s eye, particularly when I saw St. Martha’s Church, a small, clear hilltop block six miles away, and I knew that Guildford was not two miles from it, by the Pilgrim’s Way or not. It was a satisfaction, though a trifling one, to be going with the water which was making for the Wey at Shalford. The streamlet, the Tillingbourne,[69] began to assert itself at Abinger Hammer. Just before that village it runs alongside the road instead of a hedge, nourishing willows and supplying the bronzed watercress beds. The beginning of the village is a wheelwright’s shed under an elm by the road. Many hoops of wheels lean against the shed, many planks against the elm. The green follows, and Abinger Hammer is built round it. I preferred Gomshall—which only showed to the main road its inns and brewery—and the wet, bushy Gomshall Common. It is a resort of gypsies. A van full of newly-made baskets stood among the bushes, and the men sat on the shafts instead of joining the ramblers at the “Black Horse” or the “Compasses.” The downs opposite them were speckled black with yew.
I did not stop at Shere, “the prettiest village in Surrey,” and I saw no reason why it should not bear the title, or why it should be any the better liked for it. But I went to see the Silent Pool. Until it has been seen, everything is in the name. I had supposed it circular, tenebrous, and deep enough to be the receptacle of innumerable romantic skeletons. It is, in fact, an oblong pond of the size of a swimming bath, overhung on its two long sides and its far, short side, by ash trees. Its unrippled lymph, on an irregular chalk bottom[70] of a singular pallid green, was so clear and thin that it seemed not to be water. It concealed nothing. A few trout glided here and there over the chalk or the dark green weed tufts. It had no need of romantic truth or fiction. Its innocent lucidity fascinated me.
Now another short cut to Guildford offered itself, by the road—an open and yellow road—up over Merrow Down. But the Downs were beginning to give me some shelter, and I went on under them, glad of the easier riding. The Tillingbourne here was running closer under the Downs, and the river level met the hillside more sharply than before. The road bent above the meadows and showed them flat to the very foot of a steep, brown slope covered with beeches. The sky lightened—lightened too much: St. Martha’s tower, almost reaching up into the hurrying white rack, was dark on its dark hill. So I came to Albury, which has the streamlet between it and the Downs, unlike Abinger Hammer, Gomshall, and Shere. The ground, used for vegetables and plum trees, fell steeply down to the water, beyond which it rose again as steeply in a narrow field bounded horizontally by a yet steeper strip of hazel coppice; beyond this again the rise was continued in a broader field extending to the edge of the main hillside beechwood. Albury is[71] one of those villages possessing a neglected old church and a brand-new one. In this case the new is a decent enough one of alternating flint and stone, built among trees on a gradual rise. But the old one is too much like a shameless unburied corpse.
Twice I crossed the Tillingbourne, and came to where it broadened into a pond. This water on either side of the road was bordered by plumed sedges and clubbed bulrushes. At the far side, under the wooded Downside crowned by St. Martha’s, was a pale, shelterless mill of a ghostly bareness. The aspens were breaking into yellow-green leaves round about, especially one prone aspen on the left where a drain was belching furious, tawny water into the stream, and shaking the spears of the bulrushes.
As I went on towards Chilworth, gorse was blossoming on the banks of the road. Behind the blossom rose up the masses of hillside wood, now scarcely interrupted save by a few interspaces of lawn-like grass; and seated at the foot of all this oak and pine were the Chilworth powder mills. Two centuries have earned them nobody’s love or reverence; for there is something inhuman, diabolical, in permitting the union which makes these unrelated elements more powerful than any beast, crueller than any man.
[72]
Crossing the little railway from the mills, I came in sight of the Hog’s Back, by which I must go to Farnham. That even, straight ridge pointing westward, and commanding the country far away on either side, must have had a road along it since man went upright, and must continue to have one so long as it is a pleasure to move and to use the eyes together. It is a road fit for the herald Mercury and the other gods, because it is as much in heaven as on earth. The road I was on, creeping humbly and crookedly to avoid both the steepness of the hills and the wetness of the valley, was by comparison a mole run. Between me and the Hog’s Back flowed the Wey, and as the Tillingbourne approached it the valley spread out and flattened into Shalford’s long, wet common. My road crossed the common, a rest for gypsies and their ponies. Shalford village also is on the flat, chiefly on the right hand side of the road, nearer the hill, and away from the river, so that its outlook over the levels gives it a resemblance to a seaside village. Instead of the sea it had formerly a fair ground of a hundred and forty acres. Its inn is the “Queen Victoria”—charmless name.
To avoid the Wey and reach Guildford, which is mainly on this side of the water, I had to turn sharp to the right at Shalford, and to penetrate, along[73] with the river, the hills which I had been following. Within half a mile of Guildford I was at the point where the Pilgrim’s Way, travelling the flank of these hills, descends towards the Wey and the Hog’s Back opposite. A small but distinct hill, with a precipitous, sandy face, rises sheer out of the far side of the river where the road once crossed. The silver-gray square of the ruins of St. Catherine’s Chapel tops the cliff. The river presently came close to my bank; the road climbed to avoid it, and brought me into Guildford by Quarry Road, well above the steep-built, old portion of the town and its church and rookery sycamores, though below the castle.
The closed shops, plate glass, and granite roadway of the High Street put the worst possible appearance on the rain that suddenly poured down at six. A motor car dashed under the “Lion” arch for shelter. The shop doorways were filled by foot-passengers. The plate glass, the granite, and the rain rebounding from it and rushing in two torrents down the steep gutters, made a scene of physical and spiritual chill under a sky that had now lost even the pretence to possess a sun. I had thought not to decide for or against going on to Farnham that night until I had drunk tea. But having once sat in a room—not of the “Jolly[74] Butcher,” but a commercial temperance hotel—where I could only hear the rain falling from the sky and dripping from roofs, I glided into the resolution to spend the night there. A fire was lit; the servant stood a poker vertically against the grate to make it burn; and, after some misgivings, it did burn. The moon was mounting the clear east, and Venus stood with Orion in the west above a low, horizontal ledge of darkest after-sunset cloud. There could not have been a better time for those ten miles to Farnham; but I did not go. Not until after supper did I go out to look at the night I had lost, the cold sea of sky, the large bright moon, the white stars over the shimmering roofs, and the yellow street lamps and window panes of Guildford. I walked haphazard, now to the right, now to the left, often by narrow passages and dark entries. I skirted the railings of the gardens which have been made out of the castle site, the square ivy-patched keep, the dry moat full of sycamores; and hereby was a kissing corner. I crossed Quarry Road and went down Mill Lane to the “Miller’s Arms,” the water-works, and the doubled Wey roaring in turbid streams. A footbridge took me to Mill Mead, the “Britannia,” and the faintly nautical cottages that look, over a gas-lit paved space, at the river[75] and the timber sheds of the other bank. The dark water, the dark houses, the silvered, wet, moonlit streets, called for some warm, musical life in contrast. But except that a sacred concert was proceeding near the market place, there was nothing like it accessible. Many couples hurried along: at corners here and there a young man, or two young men, talked to a girl. The inns were not full, too many travellers having been discouraged. I had the temperance commercial hotel to myself, but for two men who had walked from London and had no conversation left in them, as was my case also. I dallied alternately with my maps and with the pictures on the wall. One of these I liked, a big square gloomy canvas, where a dark huntsman of Byron’s time, red-coated and clean-shaven, turned round on his horse to cheer the hounds, one of them almost level with him, glinting pallid through the mist of time, two others just pushing their noses into the picture; it had a background of a dim range of hills and a spire. The whole picture was as dim as memory, but more powerful to recall the nameless artist and nameless huntsman than that cross at Leatherhead.