Afoot in England

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

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So many and minute were the directions I received about the
way from the blessed cowkeeper, and so little attention did I
give them, my mind being occupied with other things, that they
were quickly forgotten. Of half a hundred things I remembered
only that I had to "bear to the left." This I did, although
it seemed useless, seeing that my way was by lanes, across
fields, and through plantations. At length I came to a road,
and as it happened to be on my left hand I followed it. It
was narrow, worn deep by traffic and rains; and grew deeper,
rougher, and more untrodden as I progressed, until it was
like the dry bed of a mountain torrent, and I walked on
boulder-stones between steep banks about fourteen feet high.
Their sides were clothed with ferns, grass and rank moss;
their summits were thickly wooded, and the interlacing
branches of the trees above, mingled with long rope-like
shoots of bramble and briar, formed so close a roof that I
seemed to be walking in a dimly lighted tunnel. At length,
thinking that I had kept long enough to a road which had
perhaps not been used for a century, also tired of the
monotony of always bearing to the left, I scrambled out on the
right-hand side. For some time past I had been ascending a
low, broad, flat-topped hill, and on forcing my way through
the undergrowth into the open I found myself on the level
plateau, an unenclosed spot overgrown with heather and
scattered furze bushes, with clumps of fir and birch trees.
Before me and on either hand at this elevation a vast extent
of country was disclosed. The surface was everywhere broken,
but there was no break in the wonderful greenness, which the
recent rain had intensified. There is too much green, to my
thinking, with too much uniformity in its soft, bright tone,
in South Devon. After gazing on such a landscape the brown,
harsh, scanty vegetation of the hilltop seemed all the more
grateful. The heath was an oasis and a refuge; I rambled
about in it until my feet and legs were wet; then I sat
down to let them dry and altogether spent several agreeable
hours at that spot, pleased at the thought that no human
fellow-creature would intrude upon me. Feathered companions
were, however, not wanting. The crowing of cock pheasants
from the thicket beside the old road warned me that I was on
preserved grounds. Not too strictly preserved, however, for
there was my old friend the carrion-crow out foraging for his
young. He dropped down over the trees, swept past me, and was
gone. At this season, in the early summer, he may be easily
distinguished, when flying, from his relation the rook. When
on the prowl the crow glides smoothly and rapidly through the
air, often changing his direction, now flying close to the
surface, anon mounting high, but oftenest keeping nearly on a
level with the tree tops. His gliding and curving motions are
somewhat like those of the herring-gull, but the wings in
gliding are carried stiff and straight, the tips of the long
flight-feathers showing a slight upward curve. But the
greatest difference is in the way the head is carried. The
rook, like the heron and stork, carries his beak pointing
lance-like straight before him. He knows his destination, and
makes for it; he follows his nose, so to speak, turning
neither to the right nor the left. The foraging crow
continually turns his head, gull-like and harrier-like, from
side to side, as if to search the ground thoroughly or to
concentrate his vision on some vaguely seen object.

Not only the crow was there: a magpie chattered as I came from
the brake, but refused to show himself; and a little later a
jay screamed at me, as only a jay can. There are times when I
am intensely in sympathy with the feeling expressed in this
ear-splitting sound, inarticulate but human. It is at the
same time warning and execration, the startled solitary's
outburst of uncontrolled rage at the abhorred sight of a
fellow-being in his woodland haunt.

Small birds were numerous at that spot, as if for them also
its wildness and infertility had an attraction. Tits,
warblers, pipits, finches, all were busy ranging from place to
place, emitting their various notes now from the tree-tops,
then from near the ground; now close at hand, then far off;
each change in the height, distance, and position of the
singer giving the sound a different character, so that the
effect produced was one of infinite variety. Only the
yellow-hammer remained constant in one spot, in one position,
and the song at each repetition was the same. Nevertheless
this bird is not so monotonous a singer as he is reputed. A
lover of open places, of commons and waste lands, with a bush
or dwarf tree for tower to sit upon, he is yet one of the most
common species in the thickly timbered country of the Otter,
Clyst, and Sid, in which I had been rambling, hearing him
every day and all day long. Throughout that district, where
the fields are small, and the trees big and near together, he
has the cirl-bunting's habit of perching to sing on the tops
of high hedgerow elms and oaks.

By and by I had a better bird to listen to--a redstart. A
female flew down within fifteen yards of me; her mate followed
and perched on a dry twig, where he remained a long time for
so shy and restless a creature. He was in perfect plumage,
and sitting there, motionless in the strong sunlight, was
wonderfully conspicuous, the gayest, most exotic-looking bird
of his family in England. Quitting his perch, he flew up into
a tree close by and began singing; and for half an hour
thereafter I continued intently listening to his brief strain,
repeated at short intervals--a song which I think has never
been perfectly described. "Practice makes perfect" is an
axiom that does not apply to the art of song in the bird
world; since the redstart, a member of a highly melodious
family, with a good voice to start with, has never attained to
excellence in spite of much practising. The song is
interesting both on account of its exceptional inferiority and
of its character. A distinguished ornithologist has said that
little birds have two ways of making themselves attractive--by
melody and by bright plumage; and that most species excel in
one or the other way; and that the acquisition of gay colours
by a species of a sober-coloured melodious family will cause
it to degenerate as a songster. He is speaking of the
redstart. Unfortunately for the rule there are too many
exceptions. Thus confining ourselves to a single family--that
of the finches--in our own islands, the most modest coloured
have the least melody, while those that have the gayest
plumage are the best singers--the goldfinch, chaffinch,
siskin, and linnet. Nevertheless it is impossible to listen
for any length of time to the redstart, and to many redstarts,
without feeling, almost with irritation, that its strain is
only the prelude of a song--a promise never performed; that
once upon a time in the remote past it was a sweet, copious,
and varied singer, and that only a fragment of its melody now
remains. The opening rapidly warbled notes are so charming
that the attention is instantly attracted by them. They are
composed of two sounds, both beautiful--the bright pure
gushing robin-like note, and the more tender expressive
swallow-like note. And that is all; the song scarcely begins
before it ends, or collapses; for in most cases the pure sweet
opening strain is followed by a curious little farrago of
gurgling and squeaking sounds, and little fragments of varied
notes, often so low as to be audible only at a few yards'
distance. It is curious that these slight fragments of notes
at the end vary in different individuals, in strength and
character and in number, from a single faintest squeal to half
a dozen or a dozen distinct sounds. In all cases they are
emitted with apparent effort, as if the bird strained its pipe
in the vain attempt to continue the song.

The statement that the redstart is a mimic is to be met with
in many books about birds. I rather think that in jerking out
these various little broken notes which end its strain,
whether he only squeaks or succeeds in producing a pure sound,
he is striving to recover his own lost song rather than to
imitate the songs of other birds.

So much entertainment did I find at that spot, so grateful did
it seem in its openness after long confinement in the lower
thickly wooded country, that I practically spent the day
there. At all events the best time for walking was gone when
I quitted it, and then I could think of no better plan than to
climb down into the old long untrodden road, or channel, again
just to see where it would lead me. After all, I said, my
time is my own, and to abandon the old way I have walked in so
long without discovering the end would be a mistake. So I
went on in it once more, and in about twenty minutes it came
to an end before a group of old farm buildings in a hollow in
the woods. The space occupied by the buildings was quite
walled round and shut in by a dense growth of trees and
bushes; and there was no soul there and no domestic animal.
The place had apparently been vacant many years, and the
buildings were in a ruinous condition, with the roofs falling
in.

Now when I look back on that walk I blame myself for having
gone on my way without trying to find out something of the
history of that forsaken home to which the lonely old road had
led me. Those ruinous buildings once inhabited, so wrapped
round and hidden away by trees, have now a strange look in
memory as if they had a story to tell, as if something
intelligent had looked from the vacant windows as I stood
staring at them and had said, We have waited these many years
for you to come and listen to our story and you are come at
last.

Something perhaps stirred in me in response to that greeting
and message, but I failed to understand it, and after standing
there awhile, oppressed by a sense of loneliness, I turned
aside, and creeping and pushing through a mass and tangle of
vegetation went on my way towards the coast.

Possibly that idea or fancy of a story to tell, a human
tragedy, came to me only because of another singular
experience I had that day when the afternoon sun had grown
oppressively hot--another mystery of a desolate but not in
this case uninhabited house. The two places somehow became
associated together in my mind.

The place was a little farm-house standing some distance
from the road, in a lonely spot out of sight of any other
habitation, and I thought I would call and ask for a glass
of milk, thinking that if things had a promising look on my
arrival my modest glass of milk would perhaps expand to a
sumptuous five-o'clock tea and my short rest to a long and
pleasant one.

The house I found on coming nearer was small and mean-looking
and very old; the farm buildings in a dilapidated condition,
the thatch rotten and riddled with holes in which many
starlings and sparrows had their nests. Gates and fences were
broken down, and the ground was everywhere overgrown with
weeds and encumbered with old broken and rusty implements, and
littered with rubbish. No person could I see about the place,
but knew it was inhabited as there were some fowls walking
about, and some calves shut in a pen in one of the numerous
buildings were dolefully calling--calling to be fed. Seeing a
door half open at one end of the house I went to it and rapped
on the warped paintless wood with my stick, and after about a
minute a young woman came from an inner room and asked me what
I wanted. She was not disturbed or surprised at my sudden
appearance there: her face was impassive, and her eyes when
they met mine appeared to look not at me but at something
distant, and her words were spoken mechanically.

I said that I was hot and thirsty and tired and would be glad
of a glass of milk.

Without a word she turned and left me standing there, and
presently returned with a tumbler of milk which she placed on
a deal table standing near me. To my remarks she replied in
monosyllables, and stood impassively, her hands at her side,
her eyes cast down, waiting for me to drink the milk and go.
And when I had finished it and set the glass down and thanked
her, she turned in silence and went back to that inner room
from which she first came. And hot and tired as I had felt a
few moments before, and desirous of an interval of rest in the
cool shade, I was glad to be out in the burning sun once more,
for the sight of that young woman had chilled my blood and
made the heat out-of-doors seem grateful to me.

The sight of such a face in the midst of such surroundings had
produced a shock of surprise, for it was noble in shape, the
features all fine and the mouth most delicately chiselled, the
eyes dark and beautiful, and the hair of a raven blackness.
But it was a colourless face, and even the lips were pale.
Strongest of all was the expression, which had frozen there,
and was like the look of one on whom some unimaginable
disaster or some hateful disillusionment had come, not to
subdue nor soften, but to change all its sweet to sour, and
its natural warmth to icy cold.

Chapter Eighteen: Branscombe

Health and pleasure resorts and all parasitic towns in fact,
inland or on the sea, have no attractions for me and I was
more than satisfied with a day or two of Sidmouth. Then one
evening I heard for the first time of a place called
Branscomb--a village near the sea, over by Beer and Seaton,
near the mouth of the Axe, and the account my old host gave me
seemed so attractive that on the following day I set out to
find it. Further information about the unknown village came
to me in a very agreeable way in the course of my tramp. A
hotter walk I never walked--no, not even when travelling
across a flat sunburnt treeless plain, nearer than Devon by
many degrees to the equator. One wonders why that part of
Devon which lies between the Exe and the Axe seems actually
hotter than other regions which undoubtedly have a higher
temperature. After some hours of walking with not a little of
uphill and downhill, I began to find the heat well-nigh
intolerable. I was on a hard dusty glaring road, shut in by
dusty hedges on either side. Not a breath of air was
stirring; not a bird sang; on the vast sky not a cloud
appeared. If the vertical sun had poured down water instead
of light and heat on me my clothing could not have clung to me
more uncomfortably. Coming at length to a group of two or
three small cottages at the roadside, I went into one and
asked for something to quench my thirst--cider or milk. There
was only water to be had, but it was good to drink, and the
woman of the cottage was so pretty and pleasant that I was
glad to rest an hour and talk with her in her cool kitchen.
There are English counties where it would perhaps be said of
such a woman that she was one in a thousand; but the Devonians
are a comely race. In that blessed county the prettiest
peasants are not all diligently gathered with the dew on them
and sent away to supply the London flower-market. Among the
best-looking women of the peasant class there are two distinct
types--the rich in colour and the colourless. A majority are
perhaps intermediate, but the two extreme types may be found
in any village or hamlet; and when seen side by side--the lily
and the rose, not to say the peony--they offer a strange and
beautiful contrast.

This woman, in spite of the burning climate, was white as any
pale town lady; and although she was the mother of several
children, the face was extremely youthful in appearance; it
seemed indeed almost girlish in its delicacy and innocent
expression when she looked up at me with her blue eyes shaded
by her white sun-bonnet. The children were five or six in
number, ranging from a boy of ten to a baby in her arms--all
clean and healthy looking, with bright, fun-loving faces.

I mentioned that I was on my way to Branscombe, and inquired
the distance.

"Branscomb--are you going there? Oh, I wonder what you will
think of Branscombe!" she exclaimed, her white cheeks
flushing, her innocent eyes sparkling with excitement.

What was Branscombe to her, I returned with indifference; and
what did it matter what any stranger thought of it?

"But it is my home!" she answered, looking hurt at my careless
words. "I was born there, and married there, and have always
lived at Branscombe with my people until my husband got work
in this place; then we had to leave home and come and live in
this cottage."

And as I began to show interest she went on to tell me that
Branscombe was, oh, such a dear, queer, funny old place! That
she had been to other villages and towns--Axmouth, and Seaton,
and Beer, and to Salcombe Regis and Sidmouth, and once to
Exeter; but never, never had she seen a place like Branscombe
--not one that she liked half so well. How strange that I had
never been there--had never even heard of it! People that
went there sometimes laughed at it at first, because it was
such a funny, tumbledown old place; but they always said
afterwards that there was no sweeter spot on the earth.

Her enthusiasm was very delightful; and, when baby cried, in
the excitement of talk she opened her breast and fed it before
me. A pretty sight! But for the pure white, blue-veined skin
she might have been taken for a woman of Spain--the most
natural, perhaps the most lovable, of the daughters of earth.
But all at once she remembered that I was a stranger, and with
a blush turned aside and covered her fair skin. Her shame,
too, like her first simple unconscious action, was natural;
for we live in a cooler climate, and are accustomed to more
clothing than the Spanish; and our closer covering "has
entered the soul," as the late Professor Kitchen Parker would
have said; and that which was only becoming modesty in the
English woman would in the Spanish seem rank prudishness.

In the afternoon I came to a slender stream, clear and swift,
running between the hills that rose, round and large and high,
on either hand, like vast downs, some grassy, others wooded.
This was the Branscombe, and, following it, I came to the
village; then, for a short mile my way ran by a winding path
with the babbling stream below me on one side, and on the
other the widely separated groups and little rows of thatched
cottages.

Finally, I came to the last and largest group of all, the end
of the village nearest to the sea, within ten minutes' walk of
the shingly beach. Here I was glad to rest. Above, on the
giant downs, were stony waste places, and heather and gorse,
where the rabbits live, and had for neighbours the adder,
linnet, and wheatear, and the small grey titlark that soared
up and dropped back to earth all day to his tinkling little
tune. On the summit of the cliff I had everything I wanted
and had come to seek--the wildness and freedom of untilled
earth; an unobstructed prospect, hills beyond hills of
malachite, stretching away along the coast into infinitude,
long leagues of red sea-wall and the wide expanse and
everlasting freshness of ocean. And the village itself, the
little old straggling place that had so grand a setting, I
quickly found that the woman in the cottage had not succeeded
in giving me a false impression of her dear home. It was just
such a quaint unimproved, old-world, restful place as she had
painted. It was surprising to find that there were many
visitors, and one wondered where they could all stow
themselves. The explanation was that those who visited
Branscombe knew it, and preferred its hovels to the palaces
of the fashionable seaside town. No cottage was too mean to
have its guest. I saw a lady push open the cracked and
warped door of an old barn and go in, pulling the door to
after her--it was her bed-sitting-room. I watched a party of
pretty merry girls marching, single file, down a narrow path
past a pig-sty, then climb up a ladder to the window of a loft
at the back of a stone cottage and disappear within. It was
their bedroom. The relations between the villagers and their
visitors were more intimate and kind than is usual. They
lived more together, and were more free and easy in company.
The men were mostly farm labourers, and after their day's work
they would sit out-of-doors on the ground to smoke their
pipes; and where the narrow crooked little street was
narrowest--at my end of the village--when two men would sit
opposite each other, each at his own door, with legs stretched
out before them, their boots would very nearly touch in the
middle of the road. When walking one had to step over their
legs; or, if socially inclined, one could stand by and join in
the conversation. When daylight faded the village was very
dark--no lamp for the visitors--and very silent, only the low
murmur of the sea on the shingle was audible, and the gurgling
sound of a swift streamlet flowing from the hill above and
hurrying through the village to mingle with the Branscombe
lower down in the meadows. Such a profound darkness and quiet
one expects in an inland agricultural village; here, where
there were visitors from many distant towns, it was novel and
infinitely refreshing.

No sooner was it dark than all were in bed and asleep; not one
square path of yellow light was visible. To enjoy the
sensation I went out and sat down, and listened alone to the
liquid rippling, warbling sound of the swift-flowing
streamlet--that sweet low music of running water to which the
reed-warbler had listened thousands of years ago, striving to
imitate it, until his running rippling song was perfect.

A fresh surprise and pleasure awaited me when I explored the
coast east of the village; it was bold and precipitous in
places, and from the summit of the cliff a very fine view of
the coast-line on either hand could be obtained. Best of all,
the face of the cliff itself was the breeding-place of some
hundreds of herring-gulls. The eggs at the period of my visit
were not yet hatched, but highly incubated, and at that stage
both parents are almost constantly at home, as if in a state
of anxious suspense. I had seen a good many colonies of this
gull before at various breeding stations on the coast--south,
west, and east--but never in conditions so singularly favourable
as at this spot. From the vale where the Branscombe pours its
clear waters through rough masses of shingle into the sea the
ground to the east rises steeply to a height of nearly five
hundred feet; the cliff is thus not nearly so high as many
another, but it has features of peculiar interest. Here, in
some former time, there has been a landslip, a large portion
of the cliff at its highest part falling below and forming a
sloping mass a chalky soil mingled with huge fragments of rock,
which lies like a buttress against the vertical precipice and
seems to lend it support. The fall must have occurred a very
long time back, as the vegetation that overspreads the rude
slope--hawthorn, furze, and ivy--has an ancient look. Here
are huge masses of rock standing isolated, that resemble in
their forms ruined castles, towers, and churches, some of them
completely overgrown with ivy. On this rough slope, under the
shelter of the cliff, with the sea at its feet, the villagers
have formed their cultivated patches. The patches, wildly
irregular in form, some on such steeply sloping ground as to
suggest the idea that they must have been cultivated on all
fours, are divided from each other by ridges and by masses of
rock, deep fissures in the earth, strips of bramble and thorn
and furze bushes. Altogether the effect was very singular
the huge rough mass of jumbled rock and soil, the ruin wrought
by Nature in one of her Cromwellian moods, and, scattered
irregularly about its surface, the plots or patches of
cultivated smoothness--potato rows, green parallel lines
ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant
cabbage-globes--each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion
leaves, crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs. Here the
villagers came by a narrow, steep, and difficult path they had
made, to dig in their plots; while, overhead, the gulls,
careless of their presence, pass and repass wholly occupied
with their own affairs.

I spent hours of rare happiness at this spot in watching the
birds. I could not have seen and heard them to such advantage
if their breeding-place had been shared with other species.
Here the herring-gulls had the rock to themselves, and looked
their best in their foam-white and pearl-grey plumage and
yellow legs and beaks. While I watched them they watched me;
not gathered in groups, but singly or in pairs, scattered up
and down all over the face of the precipice above me, perched
on ledges and on jutting pieces of rock. Standing motionless
thus, beautiful in form and colour, they looked like
sculptured figures of gulls, set up on the projections against
the rough dark wall of rock, just as sculptured figures of
angels and saintly men and women are placed in niches on a
cathedral front. At first they appeared quite indifferent to
my presence, although in some instances near enough for their
yellow irides to be visible. While unalarmed they were very
silent, standing in that clear sunshine that gave their
whiteness something of a crystalline appearance; or flying to
and fro along the face of the cliff, purely for the delight of
bathing in the warm lucent air. Gradually a change came over
them. One by one those that were on the wing dropped on to
some projection, until they had all settled down, and, letting
my eyes range up and down over the huge wall of rock, it was
plain to see that all the birds were watching me. They had
made the discovery that I was a stranger. In my rough old
travel-stained clothes and tweed hat I might have passed for a
Branscombe villager, but I did no hoeing and digging in one of
the cultivated patches; and when I deliberately sat down on a
rock to watch them, they noticed it and became suspicious; and
as time went on and I still remained immovable, with my eyes
fixed on them, the suspicion and anxiety increased and turned
to fear; and those that were sitting on their nests got up and
came close to the edge of the rock, to gaze with the others
and join in the loud chorus of alarm. It was a wonderful
sound. Not like the tempest of noise that may be heard at the
breeding-season at Lundy Island, and at many other stations
where birds of several species mix their various voices--the
yammeris and the yowlis, and skrykking, screeking, skrymming
scowlis, and meickle moyes and shoutes, of old Dunbar's
wonderful onomatopoetic lines. Here there was only one
species, with a clear resonant cry, and as every bird uttered
that one cry, and no other, a totally different effect was
produced. The herring-gull and lesser black-backed gull
resemble each other in language as they do in general
appearance; both have very powerful and clear voices unlike
the guttural black-headed and common gull. But the
herring-gull has a shriller, more piercing voice, and
resembles the black-backed species just as, in human voices, a
boy's clear treble resembles a baritone. Both birds have a
variety of notes; and both, when the nest is threatened with
danger, utter one powerful importunate cry, which is repeated
incessantly until the danger is over. And as the birds breed
in communities, often very populous, and all clamour together,
the effect of so many powerful and unisonant voices is very
grand; but it differs in the two species, owing to the quality
of their voices being different; the storm of sound produced
by the black-backs is deep and solemn, while that of the
herring-gulls has a ringing sharpness almost metallic.

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