Afoot in England

W >> W.H. Hudson >> Afoot in England

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"Yes, perhaps," he said. "But who was he?"

"I don't know yet," I returned. "I can only see that his name
was Sibthorpe."

"Sibthorpe!" he exclaimed excitedly. "Why, this is the very
memorial I've been looking for all over the abbey and had
pretty well given up all hopes of finding it." With that he
went to it and began studying the inscription, which was in
Latin. John Sibthorpe, I found, was a distinguished botanist,
author of the Flora Graeca, who died over a century ago.

I asked him why he was interested in Sibthorpe's memorial.

"Well, you see, I'm a great botanist myself," he explained,
"and have been familiar with his name and work all my life.
Of course," he added, "I don't mean I'm great in the sense
that Sibthorpe was. I'm only a little local botanist, quite
unknown outside my own circle; I only mean that I'm a great
lover of botany."

I left him there, and had the curiosity to look up the great
man's life, and found some very curious things in it. He was
a son of Humphrey Sibthorpe, also a great botanist, who
succeeded the still greater Dillenius as Sherardian Professor
of Botany at Oxford, a post which he held for thirty-six
years, and during that time he delivered one lecture, which
was a failure. John, if he did not suck in botany with his
mother's milk, took it quite early from his father, and on
leaving the University went abroad to continue his studies.
Eventually he went to Greece, inflamed with the ambition to
identify all the plants mentioned by Dioscorides. Then he set
about writing his Flora Graeca; but he had a rough time of it
travelling about in that rude land, and falling ill he had to
leave his work undone. When nearing his end he came to Bath,
like so many other afflicted ones, only to die, and he was
very properly buried in the abbey. In his will he left an
estate the proceeds of which were to be devoted to the
completion of his work, which was to be in ten folio volumes,
with one hundred plates in each. This was done and the work
finished forty-four years after his death, when thirty copies
were issued to the patient subscribers at two hundred and
forty guineas a copy. But the whole cost of the work was set
down at 30,000 pounds! A costlier work it would be hard to
find; I wonder how many of us have seen it?

But I must go back to my subject. I was not in Bath just to
die and lie there, like poor Sibthorpe, with all those strange
bedfellows of his, nor was I in search of a vacant space the
size of my hand on the walls to bespeak it for my own
memorial. On the contrary, I was there, as we have seen, to
knock five years off my age. And it was very pleasant, as I
have said, so long as I confined my attention to Bath, the
stone-built town of old memories and associations--so long as
I was satisfied to loiter in the streets and wide green places
and in the Pump Room and the abbey. The bitter came in only
when, going from places to faces, I began to seek out the
friends and acquaintances of former days. The familiar faces
seemed not wholly familiar now. A change had been wrought; in
some cases a great change, as in that of some weedy girl who
had blossomed into fair womanhood. One could not grieve at
that; but in the middle-aged and those who were verging on or
past that period, it was impossible not to feel saddened at
the difference. "I see no change in you," is a lie ready to
the lips which would speak some pleasing thing, but it does
not quite convince. Men are naturally brutal, and use no
compliments to one another; on the contrary, they do not
hesitate to make a joke of wrinkles and grey hairs--their own
and yours. "But, oh, the difference" when the familiar face,
no longer familiar as of old, is a woman's! This is no light
thing to her, and her eyes, being preternaturally keen in such
matters, see not only the change in you, but what is
infinitely sadder, the changed reflection of herself. Your
eyes have revealed the shock you have experienced. You cannot
hide it; her heart is stabbed with a sudden pain, and she is
filled with shame and confusion; and the pain is but greater
if her life has glided smoothly--if she cannot appeal to your
compassion, finding a melancholy relief in that saddest cry:--

O Grief has changed me since you saw me last!

For not grief, nor sickness, nor want, nor care, nor any
misery or calamity which men fear, is her chief enemy. Time
alone she hates and fears--insidious Time who has lulled her
mind with pleasant flatteries all these years while subtly
taking away her most valued possessions, the bloom and colour,
the grace, the sparkle, the charm of other years.

Here is a true and pretty little story, which may or may not
exactly fit the theme, but is very well worth telling. A lady
of fashion, middle-aged or thereabouts, good-looking but pale
and with the marks of care and disillusionment on her
expressive face, accompanied by her pretty sixteen-years-old
daughter, one day called on an artist and asked him to show
her his studio. He was a very great artist, the greatest
portrait-painter we have ever had and he did not know who she
was, but with the sweet courtesy which distinguished him
through all his long life--he died recently at a very advanced
age--he at once put his work away and took her round his
studio to show her everything he thought would interest her.
But she was restless and inattentive, and by and by leaving
the artist talking to her young daughter she began going round
by herself, moving constantly from picture to picture.
Presently she made an exclamation, and turning they saw her
standing before a picture, a portrait of a girl, staring
fixedly at it. "Oh," she cried, and it was a cry of pain,
"was I once as beautiful as that?" and burst into tears. She
had found the picture she had been looking for, which she had
come to see; it had been there twenty to twenty-five years,
and the story of it was as follows.

When she was a young girl her mother took her to the great
artist to have her portrait painted, and when the work was at
length finished she and her mother went to see it. The artist
put it before them and the mother looked at it, her face
expressing displeasure, and said not one word. Nor did the
artist open his lips. And at last the girl, to break the
uncomfortable silence, said, "Where shall we hang it, mother?"
and the lady replied, "Just where you like, my dear, so long
as you hang it with the face to the wall." It was an
insolent, a cruel thing to say, but the artist did not answer
her bitterly; he said gently that she need not take the
portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case he
would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for
the work. She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he
never saw her again. And now Time, the humbler of proud
beautiful women, had given him his revenge: the portrait,
scorned and rejected when the colour and sparkle of life was
in the face, had been looked on once more by its subject and
had caused her to weep at the change in herself.

To return. One wishes in these moments of meeting, of
surprise and sudden revealings, that it were permissible to
speak from the heart, since then the very truth might have
more balm than bitterness in it. "Grieve not, dear friend of
old days, that I have not escaped the illusion common to all
--the idea that those we have not looked on this long time
--full five years, let us say--have remained as they were
while we ourselves have been moving onwards and downwards in
that path in which our feet are set. No one, however hardened
he may be, can escape a shock of surprise and pain; but now
the illusion I cherished has gone--now I have seen with my
physical eyes, and a new image, with Time's writing on it, has
taken the place of the old and brighter one, I would not have
it otherwise. No, not if I could would I call back the
vanished lustre, since all these changes, above all that
wistful look in the eyes, do but serve to make you dearer, my
sister and friend and fellow-traveller in a land where we
cannot find a permanent resting-place."

Alas! it cannot be spoken, and we cannot comfort a sister if
she cannot divine the thought; but to brood over these
inevitable changes is as idle as it is to lament that we were
born into this mutable world. After all, it is because of the
losses, the sadnesses, that the world is so infinitely sweet
to us. The thought is in Cory's Mimnernus in Church:

All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them is because they die.

From this sadness in Bath I went to a greater in Wells, where
I had not been for ten years, and timing my visit so as to
have a Sunday service at the cathedral of beautiful memories,
I went on a Saturday to Shepton Mallet. A small, squalid
town, a "manufacturing town" the guide-book calls it. Well,
yes; it manufactures Anglo-Bavarian beer in a gigantic
brewery which looks bigger than all the other buildings
together, the church and a dozen or twenty public-houses
included. To get some food I went to the only eating-house
in the place, and saw a pleasant-looking woman, plump and
high-coloured, with black hair, with an expression of good
humour and goodness of every description in her comely
countenance. She promised to have a chop ready by the time I
had finished looking at the church, and I said I would have it
with a small Guinness. She could not provide that, the house,
she said, was strictly temperance. "My doctor has ordered me
to take it," said I, "and if you are religious, remember that
St. Paul tells us to take a little stout when we find it
beneficial."

"Yes, I know that's what St. Paul says," she returned, with a
heightened colour and a vicious emphasis on the saint's name,
"but we go on a different principle."

So I had to go for my lunch to one of the big public-houses,
called hotels; but whether it called itself a cow, or horse,
or stag, or angel, or a blue or green something, I cannot
remember. They gave me what they called a beefsteak pie--a
tough crust and under it some blackish cubes carved out of the
muscle of an antediluvian ox-and for this delicious fare and a
glass of stout I paid three shillings and odd pence.

As I came away Shepton Mallet was shaken to its foundations by
a tremendous and most diabolical sound, a prolonged lupine
yell or yowl, as if a stupendous wolf, as big, say, as the
Anglo-Bavarian brewery, had howled his loudest and longest.
This infernal row, which makes Shepton seem like a town or
village gone raving mad, was merely to inform the men, and,
incidentally, the universe, that it was time for them to knock
off work.

Turning my back on the place, I said to myself, "What a fool I
am to be sure! Why could I not have been satisfied for once
with a cup of coffee with my lunch? I should have saved a
shilling, perhaps eighteen-pence, to rejoice the soul of some
poor tramp; and, better still, I could have discussed some
interesting questions with that charming rosy-faced woman.
What, for instance, was the reason of her quarrel with the
apostle; by the by, she never rebuked me for misquoting his
words; and what is the moral effect (as seen through her clear
brown eyes) of the Anglo-Bavarian brewery on the population of
the small town and the neighbouring villages?"

The road I followed from Shepton to Wells winds by the
water-side, a tributary of the Brue, in a narrow valley with
hills on either side. It is a five-mile road through a
beautiful country, where there is practically no cultivation,
and the green hills, with brown woods in their hollows, and
here and there huge masses of grey and reddish Bath stone
cropping out on their sides, resembling gigantic castles and
ramparts, long ruined and overgrown with ivy and bramble,
produce the effect of a land dispeopled and gone back to a
state of wildness.

A thaw had come that morning, ending the severest frost
experienced this winter anywhere in England, and the valley
was alive with birds, happy and tuneful at the end of January
as in April. Looking down on the stream the sudden glory of a
kingfisher passed before me; but the sooty-brown water-ouzel
with his white bib, a haunter, too, of this water, I did not
see. Within a mile or so of Wells I overtook a small boy who
belonged there, and had been to Shepton like me, noticing the
birds. "I saw a kingfisher," I said. "So did I," he returned
quickly, with pride. He described it as a biggish bird with a
long neck, but its colour was not blue--oh, no! I suggested
that it was a heron, a long-necked creature under six feet
high, of no particular colour. No, it was not a heron; and
after taking thought, he said, "I think it was a wild duck."

Bestowing a penny to encourage him in his promising researches
into the feathered world, I went on by a footpath over a hill,
and as I mounted to the higher ground there before me rose the
noble tower of St. Cuthbert's Church, and a little to the
right of it, girt with high trees, the magnificent pile of the
cathedral, with green hills and the pale sky beyond. O joy to
look again on it, to add yet one more enduring image of it to
the number I had long treasured! For the others were not
exactly like this one; the building was not looked at from the
same point of view at the same season and late hour, with the
green hills lit by the departing sun and the clear pale winter
sky beyond.

Coming in by the moated palace I stood once more on the Green
before that west front, beautiful beyond all others, in spite
of the strange defeatures Time has written on it. I watched
the daws, numerous as ever, still at their old mad games, now
springing into the air to scatter abroad with ringing cries,
only to return the next minute and fling themselves back on
their old perches on a hundred weather-stained broken statues
in the niches. And while I stood watching them from the
palace trees close by came the loud laugh of the green
woodpecker. The same wild, beautiful sound, uttered perhaps
by the same bird, which I had often heard at that spot ten
years ago! "You will not hear that woodland sound in any
other city in the kingdom," I wrote in a book of sketches
entitled "Birds and Man", published in 1901.

But of my soul's adventures in Wells on the two or three
following days I will say very little. That laugh of the
woodpecker was an assurance that Nature had suffered no
change, and the town too, like the hills and rocks and running
waters, seemed unchanged; but how different and how sad when I
looked for those I once knew, whose hands I had hoped to grasp
again! Yes, some were living still; and a dog too, one I used
to take out for long walks and many a mad rabbit-hunt--a very
handsome white-and-liver coloured spaniel. I found him lying
on a sofa, and down he got and wagged his tail vigorously,
pretending, with a pretty human hypocrisy in his gentle yellow
eyes, that he knew me perfectly well, that I was not a bit
changed, and that he was delighted to see me.

On my way back to Bath I had a day at Bristol. It was
cattle-market day, and what with the bellowings, barkings, and
shoutings, added to the buzz and clang of innumerable electric
tramcars and the usual din of street traffic, one got the idea
that the Bristolians had adopted a sort of Salvation Army
theory, and were endeavouring to conquer earth (it is not
heaven in this case) by making a tremendous noise. I amused
myself strolling about and watching the people, and as train
after train came in late in the day discharging loads of
humanity, mostly young men and women from the surrounding
country coming in for an evening's amusement, I noticed again
the peculiarly Welsh character of the Somerset peasant--the
shape of the face, the colour of the skin, and, above all, the
expression.

Freeman, when here below, proclaimed it his mission to prove
that "Englishmen were Englishmen, and not somebody else." It
appeared to me that any person, unbiassed by theories on such
a subject, looking at that crowd, would have come to the
conclusion, sadly or gladly, according to his nature, that we
are, in fact, "somebody else."

Chapter Fourteen: The Return of the Native

That "going back" about which I wrote in the second chapter to
a place where an unexpected beauty or charm has revealed
itself, and has made its image a lasting and prized possession
of the mind, is not the same thing as the revisiting a famous
town or city, rich in many beauties and old memories, such as
Bath or Wells, for instance. Such centres have a permanent
attraction, and one who is a rover in the land must return to
them again and again, nor does he fail on each successive
visit to find some fresh charm or interest. The sadness of
such returns, after a long interval, is only, as I have said,
when we start "looking up" those with whom we had formed
pleasant friendly relations. And all because of the illusion
that we shall see them as they were--that Time has stood still
waiting for our return, and by and by, to our surprise and
grief, we discover that it is not so; that the dear friends of
other days, long unvisited but unforgotten, have become
strangers. This human loss is felt even more in the case of a
return to some small centre, a village or hamlet where we knew
every one, and our intimacy with the people has produced the
sense of being one in blood with them. It is greatest of all
when we return to a childhood's or boyhood's home. Many
writers have occupied themselves with this mournful theme, and
I imagine that a person of the proper Amiel-like tender and
melancholy moralizing type of mind, by using his own and his
friends' experiences, could write a charmingly sad and pretty
book on the subject.

The really happy returns of this kind must be exceedingly
rare. I am almost surprised to think that I am able to recall
as many as two, but they hardly count, as in both instances
the departure or exile from home happens at so early a time of
life that no recollections of the people survived--nothing, in
fact, but a vague mental picture of the place. One was of a
business man I knew in London, who lost his early home in a
village in the Midlands, as a boy of eight or nine years of
age, through the sale of the place by his father, who had
become impoverished. The boy was trained to business in
London, and when a middle-aged man, wishing to retire and
spend the rest of his life in the country, he revisited his
native village for the first time, and dicovered to his joy
that he could buy back the old home. He was, when I last saw
him, very happy in its possession.

The other case I will relate more fully, as it is a very
curious one, and came to my knowledge in a singular way.

At a small station near Eastleigh a man wearing a highly
pleased expression on his face entered the smoking-carriage in
which I was travelling to London. Putting his bag on the
rack, he pulled out his pipe and threw himself back in his
seat with a satisfied air; then, looking at me and catching my
eye, he at once started talking. I had my newspaper, but
seeing him in that overflowing mood I responded readily
enough, for I was curious to know why he appeared so happy and
who and what he was. Not a tradesman nor a bagman, and not a
farmer, though he looked like an open-air man; nor could I
form a guess from his speech and manner as to his native
place. A robust man of thirty-eight or forty, with blue eyes
and a Saxon face, he looked a thorough Englishman, and yet he
struck me as most un-English in his lively, almost eager
manner, his freedom with a stranger, and something, too, in
his speech. From time to time his face lighted up, when,
looking to the window, his eyes rested on some pretty scene--a
glimpse of stately old elm trees in a field where cattle were
grazing, of the vivid green valley of a chalk stream, the
paler hills beyond, the grey church tower or spire of some
tree-hidden village. When he discovered that these hills and
streams and rustic villages had as great a charm for me as for
himself, that I knew and loved the two or three places he
named in a questioning way, he opened his heart and the secret
of his present happiness.

He was a native of the district, born at a farmhouse of which
his father in succession to his grandfather had been the
tenant. It was a small farm of only eighty-five acres, and as
his father could make no more than a bare livelihood out of
it, he eventually gave it up when my informant was but three
years old, and selling all he had, emigrated to Australia.
Nine years later he died, leaving a numerous family poorly
provided for; the home was broken up and boys and girls had to
go out and face the world. They had somehow all got on very
well, and his brothers and sisters were happy enough out
there, Australians in mind, thoroughly persuaded that theirs
was the better land, the best country in the world, and with
no desire to visit England. He had never felt like that;
somehow his father's feeling about the old country had taken
such a hold of him that he never outlived it--never felt at
home in Australia, however successful he was in his affairs.
The home feeling had been very strong in his father; his
greatest delight was to sit of an evening with his children
round him and tell them of the farm and the old farm-house
where he was born and had lived so many years, and where some
of them too had been born. He was never tired of talking of
it, of taking them by the hand, as it were, and leading them
from place to place, to the stream, the village, the old stone
church, the meadows and fields and hedges, the deep shady
lanes, and, above all, to the dear old ivied house with its
gables and tall chimneys. So many times had his father
described it that the old place was printed like a map on his
mind, and was like a picture which kept its brightness even
after the image of his boyhood's home in Australia had become
faded and pale. With that mental picture to guide him he
believed that he could go to that angle by the porch where the
flycatchers bred every year and find their nest; where in the
hedge the blackberries were most abundant; where the elders
grew by the stream from which he could watch the moorhens and
watervoles; that he knew every fence, gate, and outhouse,
every room and passage in the old house. Through all his busy
years that picture never grew less beautiful, never ceased its
call, and at last, possessed of sufficient capital to yield
him a modest income for the rest of his life, he came home.
What he was going to do in England he did not consider. He
only knew that until he had satisfied the chief desire of his
heart and had looked upon the original of the picture he had
borne so long in his mind he could not rest nor make any plans
for the future.

He came first to London and found, on examining the map of
Hampshire, that the village of Thorpe (I will call it), where
he was born, is three miles from the nearest station, in the
southern part of the county. Undoubtedly it was Thorpe; that
was one of the few names of places his father had mentioned
which remained in his memory always associated with that vivid
image of the farm in his mind. To Thorpe he accordingly went
--as pretty a rustic village as he had hoped to find it. He
took a room at the inn and went out for a long walk--"just to
see the place," he said to the landlord. He would make no
inquiries; he would find his home for himself; how could he
fail to recognize it? But he walked for hours in a widening
circle and saw no farm or other house, and no ground that
corresponded to the picture in his brain.

Troubled at his failure, he went back and questioned his
landlord, and, naturally, was asked for the name of the farm
he was seeking. He had forgotten the name--he even doubted
that he had ever heard it. But there was his family name to
go by--Dyson; did any one remember a farmer Dyson in the
village? He was told that it was not an uncommon name in that
part of the country. There were no Dysons now in Thorpe, but
some fifteen or twenty years ago one of that name had been the
tenant of Long Meadow Farm in the parish. The name of the
farm was unfamiliar, and when he visited the place he found it
was not the one he sought.

It was a grievous disappointment. A new sense of loneliness
oppressed him; for that bright image in his mind, with the
feeling about his home, had been a secret source of comfort
and happiness, and was like a companion, a dear human friend,
and now he appeared to be on the point of losing it. Could it
be that all that mental picture, with the details that seemed
so true to life, was purely imaginary? He could not believe
it; the old house had probably been pulled down, the big trees
felled, orchard and hedges grabbed up--all the old features
obliterated--and the land thrown into some larger neighbouring
farm. It was dreadful to think that such devastating changes
had been made, but it had certainly existed as he saw it in
his mind, and he would inquire of some of the old men in the
place, who would perhaps be able to tell him where his home
had stood thirty years ago.

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