Once in the night I awoke and heard the weir again, but the first sound in the morning was a thrush singing in a lilac next my window. For the main chorus of dawn was over. It was a still morning under a sky that was one low arch of cloud, a little whiter in places, but all gray. Big drops glistened on the undersides of horizontal rails. There had been a white frost, and, as they said, we seldom have many white frosts before it rains again. But not until I went out could I tell that it was softly and coldly raining. Everything more than two or three fields away was hidden.
Cycling is inferior to walking in this weather, because in cycling chiefly ample views are to be seen, and the mist conceals them. You travel too quickly to notice many small things; you see nothing save the troops of elms on the verge of invisibility. But walking I saw every small thing one by one; not only the handsome gateway chestnut just fully[200] dressed, and the pale green larch plantation where another chiff-chaff was singing, and the tall elm tipped by a linnet pausing and musing a few notes, but every primrose and celandine and dandelion on the banks, every silvered green leaf of honeysuckle up in the hedge, every patch of brightest moss, every luminous drop on a thorn tip. The world seemed a small place: as I went between a row of elms and a row of beeches occupied by rooks, I had a feeling that the road, that the world itself, was private, all theirs; and the state of the road under their nests confirmed me. I was going hither and thither to-day in the neighbourhood of my stopping place, instead of continuing my journey.
At a quarter-past nine it drizzled slightly more, but by ten the sky whitened, the grass gleamed. Over the broad field where the fowls and turkeys feed, and a retriever guards them, the keeper was walking slow and heavy, carrying a mattock, and after him two men, one in gaiters. While they were disappearing from sight in the corner where the field runs up into the wood, the chained retriever stood and whined piteously after them. I understood him very well. And somehow the men setting out thus for a day’s work in the woods prophesied fine weather. Yet at half-past ten the[201] gray thrust the white down again to the horizon, where the elms printed themselves against it.
The sun came out in earnest at eleven, and shone upon a field of tall yellow mustard and a man loading a cart with it, and I ceased to bend my back and crook my neck towards violet, primrose, anemone, and dog’s mercury in the blackthorn hedges, and I let the sun have a chance with me. I was trespassing, but, alas! no glory any longer attaches to trespassing, because every one is so civil unless you are a plain or ill-dressed woman, or a child, or obviously a poet. So I came well-warmed to Rudge, a hamlet collected about a meeting of roads and scattered up a steep hill, along one of these roads. The collection includes a small inn called the “Half Moon,” a plain Baptist chapel, several stone cottages, several ruins, solid but roofless, used solely to advertise sales, and a signpost pointing to Berkley and Frome past the ruined cottages, to Westbury and Bradley downhill from the inn, through the woods about the river Biss, and uphill to Road and Beckington. Southward I saw the single bare hump of Cley Hill five miles away, near Warminster: northward, the broad wooded vale rising up to hills on the horizon. I went uphill, between two bright trickles of water. The steep roadside bank, strengthened by a stone[202] wall, was well-grown with pennywort and cranesbill, overhung by goose grass and ivy, and bathed at its foot by grass and nettles. The wall in one place is hollowed out into a cavernous, dark dip-well or water-cupboard. The rest of the village is built upon the banks. First comes a Wesleyan chapel, a neat, cold, demure little barn of the early nineteenth century, having a cypress on either side of its front door, and a few gravestones round about. One of these caught my eye with the verse—
“And am I born to die,
To lay this body down,
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?”—
and the name of Mary Willcox, who died in 1901 at the age of eighty-eight. A cottage or two stand not quite opposite, behind gardens of wallflowers, mezereon, periwinkle, and tall copper-coloured peony shoots, and a wall smothered in snow-on-the-mountains or alyssum. On the same side, beyond, a dark farm-house and its outbuildings project and cause the road and water to twist. The bank on that side, the left, covered with celandines and topped with elms, now carries a footpath of broad flagstones a yard or two above the road. Where this footpath ends, the road, still ascending, forks,[203] and at once rejoins itself, thus making a small triangular island, occupied by a ruinous, ivy-mantled cottage and a cultivated vegetable garden. At the lower side a newish villa with a piano faces past the ruin uphill. At the upper side, facing past the ruin and the villa downhill, is a high-walled stone house of several gables, small enough, but possessing dignity and even a certain faint grimness: it is backed on the roadside by farm buildings. I saw and heard nobody from the “Half Moon” to this house, except a chicken. Here I turned off from the road along a lane which ended a mile away at a cottage and a farm-house, and in one of the ploughed fields I came upon a plain stone tower, consisting of two storeys, round-arched, roofless, in the company of a tall lime tree. It looks over the low land towards the White Horse at Westbury. Once, they told me, the upper storey held a water tank; but as the map shows an ancient beacon at about this spot, I thought of it as a beacon rather than as a water tower.
I returned and went some way along the road to Beckington. A few people were walking in towards Rudge, children were picking primroses from both sides of the hedges, watched silently and steadfastly by a baby in a perambulator, not less happy in the sun than they. For the sun shone radiant and warm out of a whitewashed sky on the red ploughlands[204] and wet daisy meadows by Seymour’s Court Farm, on the teams pulling chain harrows and pewits plunging round them, and on the flag waving over Road Church as if for some natural festival. I found my first thrush’s egg of the year along this road, in which I was fortunate; for the bank below the nest had been trodden into steps by boys who had examined it before me.
I went downhill again through Rudge and took the road for North Bradley, keeping above the left bank of the river Biss and commanding the White Horse on the pale wall of the Plain beyond it. This took me past Cutteridge, a modest farm, all that remains of a great house, whose long avenues of limes, crooked and often as dense as a magpie’s nest, still radiate from it on three sides. This is a country of noble elms, spreading like oaks, above celandine banks.
Turning to the right down a steep-sided lane after passing Cutteridge I reached the flat, rushy, and willowy green valley of the Biss. The road forded the brook and brought me up into the sloping courtyard of Brook House Farm. On the right was a high wall and a pile of rough cordwood against it; on the left a buttressed, ecclesiastical-looking building with tiers of windows and three doorways, some four or five centuries old; and before me, at the[205] top of the yard, between the upper end of the high wall and the ecclesiastical-looking building, was the back of the farm-house, its brass pans gleaming. This is the remnant of Brook House. What is now a cowshed below, a cheese room above, has been the chapel of Brook House, formerly the seat of Paveleys, Joneses, and Cheneys. The brook below was once called Baron’s brook on account of the barony conferred on the owner: the family of Willoughby de Broke are said to have taken their name from it. The cows made an excellent congregation, free from all the disadvantages of believing or wanting to believe in the immortality of the soul, in the lower half of the old chapel; the upper floor and its shelves of Cheddar cheeses of all sizes could not offend the most jealous deity or his most jealous worshippers. The high, intricate rafter-work of the tiled roof was open, and the timber, as pale as if newly scrubbed, was free from cobwebs—in fact, chestnut wood is said to forbid cobwebs. Against the wall leaned long boards bearing the round stains of bygone cheeses. Every one who could write had carved his name on the stone. Instead of windows there were three doors in the side away from the quadrangle, as if at one time they had been entered either from a contiguous building or by a staircase from beneath. Evidently[206] both the upper and the lower chambers were formerly subdivided into cells of some kind.
The farmhouse is presumably the remnant of the old manor house, cool and still, looking out away from the quadrangle over a garden containing a broad, rough-hewn stone disinterred hereby, and a green field corrugated in parallelograms betokening old walls or an encampment. The field next to this is spoken of as a churchyard, but there seems to be no record of skeletons found there. Half a mile off in different directions are Cutteridge, Hawkeridge, and Storridge, but nothing nearer in that narrow, gentle valley....
The afternoon was as fine as Easter Monday could be, all that could be desired by chapel-goers for their Anniversary Tea. It was the very weather that Trowbridge people needed on Good Friday for a walk to Farleigh Castle, for beer or tea and watercress at the “Hungerford Arms.” As I bicycled into Trowbridge at four o’clock the inhabitants were streaming out along the dry road westward.
I am not fond of crowds, but this holiday crowd caused no particular distaste. Away from their town and separated into small groups they had no cumulative effect. They were for the time being travellers as much as I was. In any case, a town[207] like Trowbridge is used to strangers of all kinds passing through it: it would take a South Sea Islander in native costume to make it stare as a village does. The crowd that I dislike most is the crowd near Clapham Junction on a Saturday afternoon. Though born and bred a Clapham Junction man, I have become indifferently so. Perhaps I ought to call my feeling fear: alarm comes first, followed rapidly by dislike. It is a crowd of considerable size, consisting of women shopping, of young men and women promenading, mostly apart, though not blind to one another, and of men returning from offices. They take things fairly easily, even these last, and can look about. I shall not pretend to define the difference between them and a village or a provincial town crowd. It is less homely than a village, less compact and abounding in clear types than a town. It is a disintegrated crowd, rather suspicious and shy perhaps, where few know, or could guess much about, the others. When I find myself among them, I am more confused and uneasy than in any other crowd. I cannot settle down in it to notice the three or four or half a dozen types, as I should do at Swindon, or Swansea, or Coventry; nor yet to please myself as with the general look of a village mob of forty or fifty, and a few of the most remarkable individuals. Here,[208] at Clapham Junction, each one asks a separate question. In a quarter of an hour I am bewildered and dejected.
How different it is from a London crowd. In London everybody is a Londoner. Once in the Strand or Oxford Street I am as much at home as any one. If I were to walk up and down continuously for a week I should not be noticed any more than I am now. For all they know I am an Old Inhabitant. So is every one else from Cartmel or Tregaron. There are no lookers on: all are lookers on. I look hard at every one as at the pictures in a gallery, and no offence is taken. I can lose myself comfortably amongst them, and wake up again only when I find myself alone. Each day, except in the shops, an entirely new set of faces is seen, so far as memory tells me. A burly flower-girl, a white-haired youth, and a broken-down, long-haired actor or poet, are the only strangers in London I have seen more than once. Yet the combination is familiar. I am a Londoner, and I am at home. But I am not a Clapham Junction man any more than I am a Trowbridge man. Perhaps the reason of my discontent is that there are no Clapham Junction men, that all are strangers and aware of it, that they never truly make a mob like the factory men at New Swindon,[209] and yet are too numerous to be regarded as villagers like the people of Rudge.
I did not stop in Trowbridge. Its twenty chimneys were as tranquil as its tall spire, and its slaughter-house as silent as the adjacent church, where the poet Crabbe, once vicar, is commemorated by a tablet, informing the world that he rose by his abilities. In fact, the noisiest thing in Trowbridge was the rookery where I left it. Like nearly all towns—market towns, factory towns—Trowbridge is girdled by villas, chestnuts, and elms, and in the trees rooks build, thus making a ceremoniously rustic entrance or exit. While the rooks cawed overhead, the blackbirds sang below.
As far as Hilperton and the “Lion and Fiddle,” houses and fields alternated along the road, but after that I entered a broad elmy country of young corn and new-ploughed land sweeping gradually away on my right up to grass slopes, and to the foot of dark Roundway Down and pale Beacon Hill, above Devizes. Far to the left the meadow land swelled up into the wooded high land above Lacock, Corsham, and Bath. Under elms near Semington the threshing-machine boomed; its unchanging note mingled with a hiss at the addition of each sheaf. Otherwise the earth was the rooks’, heaven was the larks’, and I rode easily[210] on along the good level road somewhere between the two.
Motion was extraordinarily easy that afternoon, and I had no doubts that I did well to bicycle instead of walking. It was as easy as riding in a cart, and more satisfying to a restless man. At the same time I was a great deal nearer to being a disembodied spirit than I can often be. I was not at all tired, so far as I knew. No people or thoughts embarrassed me. I fed through the senses directly, but very temperately, through the eyes chiefly, and was happier than is explicable or seems reasonable. This pleasure of my disembodied spirit (so to call it) was an inhuman and diffused one, such as may be attained by whatever dregs of this our life survive after death. In fact, had I to describe the adventure of this remnant of a man I should express it somewhat thus, with no need of help from Dante, Mr. A. C. Benson, or any other visitors to the afterworld. In a different mood I might have been encouraged to believe the experience a foretaste of a sort of imprisonment in the viewless winds, or of a spiritual share in the task of keeping the cloudy winds “fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.” Supposing I were persuaded to provide this afterworld with some of the usual furniture, I could borrow several visible things[211] from that ride through Semington, Melksham, and Staverton. First and chief would be the Ph?nix “Swiss” Milk Factory where I crossed the Avon at Staverton. It is an enormous stone cube, with multitudinous windows all alike, and at the back of it two tall chimneys. The Avon winding at its foot is a beautiful, willowy river. On the opposite side of the road and bridge the river bank rises up steeply, clothed evenly with elms, and crowned by Staverton’s little church which the trees half conceal.... This many-windowed naked mass, surmounted by a stone ph?nix, immediately over the conspicuous information that it was burnt on November 5, 1834, and rebuilt on April 28 of the next year, is as big as a cathedral, and like a cathedral in possessing a rookery in the riverside elms behind it. With the small, shadowed church opposite, I feel sure that it would need little transmutation to fall into the geography of a land of shades. But the most beautiful thing of all was the broad meadow called Challimead on the west of Melksham, and the towered church lying along the summit of the gentle rise in which it ends. I bicycled along the north-west side of it immediately after leaving Melksham on the way to Holt. Elms of a hundred years’ growth lined the road, some upright, most lying amid the wreckage of their branchwork far[212] out over the grass. Parallel with the road and much nearer to it than to the church the Avon serpentined along the meadow without disturbing the level three furlongs of its perfect green. The windows of the church flamed in the last sunbeams, the tombstones were clear white. For this meadow at least there should be a place in any Elysium. It would be a suitable model for the meadow of heavenly sheen where ?neas saw the blessed souls of Ilus and Assaracus and Dardanus and the bard Mus?us, heroes and wise men, and the beautiful horses of the heroes, in that diviner air lighted by another sun and other stars than ours.
But our sun was fading over Challimead. The air grew cold as I went on, and the pewits cried as if it were winter. The rooks were now silent dots all over the elms of the Trowbridge rookery. A light mist was brushing over the fields, softening the brightness of Venus in the pale rosy west, and the scarlet flames that leapt suddenly from a thorn pile in a field. Probably there would be another frost to-night.... People were returning to the town in small and more scattered groups. At corners and crossways figures were standing talking, or bidding farewell. I rode on easily through the chill, friendly land. Clear hoofs hammering and men or girls talking in traps were but an added music to the quiet[213] throughout the evening. I began to feel some confidence in the Spring.
I went out into the village at about half-past nine in the dark, quiet evening. A few stars penetrated the soft sky; a few lights shone on earth, from a distant farm seen through a gap in the cottages. Single and in groups, separated by gardens or bits of orchard, the cottages were vaguely discernible: here and there a yellow window square gave out a feeling of home, tranquillity, security. Nearly all were silent. Ordinary speech was not to be heard, but from one house came the sounds of an harmonium being played and a voice singing a hymn, both faintly. A dog barked far off. After an interval a gate fell-to lightly. Nobody was on the road.
The road was visible most dimly, and was like a pale mist at an uncertain distance. When I reached the green all was still and silent. The cottages on the opposite side of the road all lay back, and they were merely blacker stains on the darkness. The pollard willows fringing the green, which in the sunlight resemble mops, were now very much like a procession of men, strange prim?val beings, pausing to meditate in the darkness.
The intervals between the cottages were longer here, and still longer; I ceased to notice them[214] until I came to the last house, a small farm, where the dog growled, but in a subdued tone, as if only to condemn my footsteps on the deserted road.
Rows of elm trees on both sides of the road succeeded. I walked more slowly, and at a gateway stopped. While I leaned looking over it at nothing, there was a long silence that could be felt, so that a train whistling two miles away seemed as remote as the stars. The noise could not overleap the boundaries of that silence. And yet I presently moved away, back towards the village, with slow steps.
I was tasting the quiet and the safety without a thought. Night had no evil in it. Though a stranger, I believed that no one wished harm to me. The first man I saw, fitfully revealed by a swinging lantern as he crossed his garden, seemed to me to have the same feeling, to be utterly free of trouble or any care. A man slightly drunk deviated towards me, halted muttering, and deviated away again. I heard his gate shut, and he was absorbed.
The inn door, which was now open, was as the entrance to a bright cave in the middle of the darkness: the illumination had a kind of blessedness such as it might have had to a cow, not without foreignness; and a half-seen man within it belonged to a world, blessed indeed, but far different from this one of mine, dark, soft, and tranquil. I felt[215] that I could walk on thus, sipping the evening silence and solitude, endlessly. But at the house where I was staying I stopped as usual. I entered, blinked at the light, and by laughing at something, said with the intention of being laughed at, I swiftly again naturalized myself.