Afoot in England

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

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We are all pretty familiar from experience with the
limitations of the sense of smell and the fact that agreeable
odours please us only fitfully; the sensation comes as a
pleasing shock, a surprise, and is quickly gone. If we
attempt to keep it for some time by deliberately smelling a
fragrant flower or any perfume, we begin to have a sense of
failure as if we had exhausted the sense, keen as it was a
moment ago.

There must be an interval of rest for the nerve before the
sensation can be renewed in its first freshness. Now it is
the same, though in a less degree, with the more important
sense of sight. We look long and steadily at a thing to know
it, and the longer and more fixedly we look the better, if it
engages the reasoning faculties; but an aesthetic pleasure
cannot be increased or retained in that way. We must look,
merely glancing as it were, and look again, and then again,
with intervals, receiving the image in the brain even as we
receive the "nimble emanation" of a flower, and the image is
all the brighter for coming intermittently. In a large
prospect we are not conscious of this limitation because of
the wideness of the field and the number and variety of
objects or points of interest in it; the vision roams hither
and thither over it and receives a continuous stream or series
of pleasing impressions; but to gaze fixedly at the most
beautiful object in nature or art does but diminish the
pleasure. Practically it ceases to be beautiful and only
recovers the first effect after we have given the mind an
interval of rest.

Strolling about the green with this thought in my mind, I
began to pay attention to the movements of a man who was
manifestly there with the same object as myself--to look at
the cathedral. I had seen him there for quite half an hour,
and now began to be amused at the emphatic manner in which he
displayed his interest in the building. He walked up and down
the entire length and would then back away a distance of a
hundred yards from the walls and stare up at the spire, then
slowly approach, still gazing up, until coming to a stop when
quite near the wall he would remain with his eyes still fixed
aloft, the back of his head almost resting on his back between
his shoulders. His hat somehow kept on his head, but his
attitude reminded me of a saying of the Arabs who, to give an
idea of the height of a great rock or other tall object, say
that to look up at it causes your turban to fall off. The
Americans, when they were chewers of tobacco, had a different
expression; they said that to look up at so tall a thing
caused the tobacco juice to run down your throat.

His appearance when I approached him interested me too. His
skin was the color of old brown leather and he had a big
arched nose, clear light blue very shrewd eyes, and a big
fringe or hedge of ragged white beard under his chin; and he
was dressed in a new suit of rough dark brown tweeds,
evidently home-made. When I spoke to him, saying something
about the cathedral, he joyfully responded in broadest Scotch.
It was, he said, the first English cathedral he had ever seen
and he had never seen anything made by man to equal it in
beauty. He had come, he told me, straight from his home and
birthplace, a small village in the north of Scotland, shut
out from the world by great hills where the heather grew
knee-deep. He had never been in England before, and had come
directly to Salisbury on a visit to a relation.

"Well," I said, "now you have looked at it outside come in
with me and see the interior."

But he refused: it was enough for one day to see the outside
of such a building: he wanted no more just then. To-morrow
would be soon enough to see it inside; it would be the Sabbath
and he would go and worship there.

"Are you an Anglican?" I asked.

He replied that there were no Anglicans in his village. They
had two Churches--the Church of Scotland and the Free Church.

"And what," said I, "will your minister say to your going to
worship in a cathedral? We have all denominations here in
Salisbury, and you will perhaps find a Presbyterian place to
worship in."

"Now it's strange your saying that!" he returned, with a dry
little laugh. "I've just had a letter from him the morning
and he writes on this varra subject. 'Let me advise you,' he
tells me in the letter, 'to attend the service in Salisbury
Cathedral. Nae doot,' he says, 'there are many things in it
you'll disapprove of, but not everything perhaps, and I'd like
ye to go.'"

I was a little sorry for him next day when we had an
ordination service, very long, complicated, and, I should
imagine, exceedingly difficult to follow by a wild
Presbyterian from the hills. He probably disapproved of most
of it, but I greatly admired him for refusing to see anything
more of the cathedral than the outside on the first day. His
method was better than that of an American (from Indiana, he
told me) I met the following day at the hotel. He gave two
hours and a half, including attendance at the morning service,
to the cathedral, inside and out, then rushed off for an hour
at Stonehenge, fourteen miles away, on a hired bicycle. I
advised him to take another day--I did not want to frighten
him by saying a week--and he replied that that would make him
miss Winchester. After cycling back from Stonehenge he would
catch a train to Winchester and get there in time to have some
minutes in the cathedral before the doors closed. He was due
in London next morning. He had already missed Durham
Cathedral in the north through getting interested in and
wasting too much time over some place when he was going there.
Again, he had missed Exeter Cathedral in the south, and it
would be a little too bad to miss Winchester too!

Chapter Twenty-One: Stonehenge

That American from Indiana! As it was market day at Salisbury
I asked him before we parted if he had seen the market, also
if they had market days in the country towns in his State? He
said he had looked in at the market on his way back from the
cathedral. No, they had nothing of the kind in his State.
Indiana was covered with a network of railroads and electric
tram lines, and all country produce, down to the last new-laid
egg, was collected and sent off and conveyed each morning to
the towns, where it was always market day.

How sad! thought I. Poor Indiana, that once had wildness and
romance and memories of a vanished race, and has now only its
pretty meaningless name!

"I suppose," he said, before getting on his bicycle, "there's
nothing beside the cathedral and Stonehenge to see in
Wiltshire?"

"No, nothing," I returned, "and you'll think the time wasted
in seeing Stonehenge."

"Why?"

"Only a few old stones to see."

But he went, and I have no doubt did think the time wasted,
but it would be some consolation to him, on the other side, to
be able to say that he had seen it with his own eyes.

How did these same "few old stones" strike me on a first
visit? It was one of the greatest disillusionments I ever
experienced. Stonehenge looked small--pitiably small! For it
is a fact that mere size is very much to us, in spite of all
the teachings of science. We have heard of Stonehenge in our
childhood or boyhood--that great building of unknown origin
and antiquity, its circles of stones, some still standing,
others lying prostrate, like the stupendous half-shattered
skeleton of a giant or monster whose stature reached to the
clouds. It stands, we read or were told, on Salisbury Plain.
To my uninformed, childish mind a plain anywhere was like the
plain on which I was born--an absolutely level area stretching
away on all sides into infinitude; and although the effect is
of a great extent of earth, we know that we actually see very
little of it, that standing on a level plain we have a very
near horizon. On this account any large object appearing on
it, such as a horse or tree or a big animal, looks very much
bigger than it would on land with a broken surface.

Oddly enough, my impossible Stonehenge was derived from a
sober description and an accompanying plate in a sober work
--a gigantic folio in two volumes entitled "A New System of
Geography", dated some time in the eighteenth century. How
this ponderous work ever came to be out on the pampas, over
six thousand miles from the land of its origin, is a thing to
wonder at. I remember that the Stonehenge plate greatly
impressed me and that I sacrilegiously cut it out of the book
so as to have it!

Now we know, our reason tells us continually, that the mental
pictures formed in childhood are false because the child and
man have different standards, and furthermore the child mind
exaggerates everything; nevertheless, such pictures persist
until the scene or object so visualized is actually looked
upon and the old image shattered. This refers to scenes
visualized with the inner eye, but the disillusion is almost
as great when we return to a home left in childhood or boyhood
and look on it once more with the man's eyes. How small it
is! How diminished the hills, and the trees that grew to such
a vast height, whose tops once seemed "so close against the
sky"--what poor little trees they now are! And the house
itself, how low it is; and the rooms that seemed so wide and
lofty, where our footfalls and childish voices sounded as in
some vast hall, how little and how mean they look!

Children, they are very little,

the poet says, and they measure things by their size; but it
seems odd that unless we grow up amid the scenes where our
first impressions were received they should remain unaltered
in the adult mind. The most amusing instance of a false
picture of something seen in childhood and continuing through
life I have met was that of an Italian peasant I knew in South
America. He liked to talk to me about the cranes, those great
and wonderful birds he had become acquainted with in childhood
in his home on the plains of Lombardy. The birds, of course,
only appeared in autumn and spring when migrating, and passed
over at a vast height above the earth. These birds, he said,
were so big and had such great wings that if they came down on
the flat earth they would be incapable of rising, hence they
only alighted on the tops of high mountains, and as there was
nothing for them to eat in such places, it being naked rock
and ice, they were compelled to subsist on each other's
droppings. Now it came to pass that one year during his
childhood a crane, owing to some accident, came down to the
ground near his home. The whole population of the village
turned out to see so wonderful a bird, and were amazed at its
size; it was, he said, the strangest sight he had ever looked
on. How big was it? I asked him; was it as big as an
ostrich? An ostrich, he said, was nothing to it; I might as
well ask him how it compared with a lapwing. He could give me
no measurements: it happened when he was a child; he had
forgotten the exact size, but he had seen it with his own eyes
and he could see it now in his mind--the biggest bird in the
world. Very well, I said, if he could see it plainly in his
mind he could give some rough idea of the wing-spread--how
much would it measure from tip to tip? He said it was perhaps
fifty yards--perhaps a good deal more!

A similar trick was played by my mind about Stonehenge. As
a child I had stood in imagination before it, gazing up
awestruck on those stupendous stones or climbing and crawling
like a small beetle on them. And what at last did I see with
my physical eyes? Walking over the downs, miscalled a plain,
anticipating something tremendous, I finally got away from the
woods at Amesbury and spied the thing I sought before me far
away on the slope of a green down, and stood still and then
sat down in pure astonishment. Was this Stonehenge--this
cluster of poor little grey stones, looking in the distance
like a small flock of sheep or goats grazing on that immense
down! How incredibly insignificant it appeared to me, dwarfed
by its surroundings--woods and groves and farmhouses, and by
the vast extent of rolling down country visible at that point.
It was only when I had recovered from the first shock, when I
had got to the very place and stood among the stones, that I
began to experience something of the feeling appropriate to
the occasion.

The feeling, however, must have been very slight, since it
permitted me to become interested in the appearance and
actions of a few sparrows inhabiting the temple. The common
sparrow is parasitical on man, consequently but rarely found
at any distance from human habitations, and it seemed a little
strange to find them at home at Stonehenge on the open plain.
They were very active carrying up straws and feathers to the
crevices on the trioliths where the massive imposts rest on
the upright stones. I noticed the birds because of their
bright appearance: they were lighter coloured than any
sparrows I have ever seen, and one cock bird when flying to
and fro in the sunlight looked almost white. I formed the
idea that this small colony of about a dozen birds had been
long established at that place, and that the change in their
colouring was a direct result of the unusual conditions in
which they existed, where there was no shade and shelter of
trees and bushes, and they were perpetually exposed for
generations to the full light of the wide open sky.

On revisiting Stonehenge after an interval of some years I
looked for my sparrows and failed to find them. It was at the
breeding-season, when they would have been there had they
still existed. No doubt the little colony had been extirpated
by a sparrow-hawk or by the human guardians of "The Stones,"
as the temple is called by the natives.

It remains to tell of my latest visit to "The Stones." I had
resolved to go once in my life with the current or crowd to
see the sun rise on the morning of the longest day at that
place. This custom or fashion is a declining one: ten or
twelve years ago, as many as one or two thousand persons would
assemble during the night to wait the great event, but the
watchers have now diminished to a few hundreds, and on some
years to a few scores. The fashion, no doubt, had its origin
when Sir Norman Lockyer's theories, about Stonehenge as a Sun
Temple placed so that the first rays of sun on the longest day
of the year should fall on the centre of the so-called altar
or sacrificial stone placed in the middle of the circle, began
to be noised about the country, and accepted by every one as
the true reading of an ancient riddle. But I gather from
natives in the district that it is an old custom for people to
go and watch for sunrise on the morning of June 21. A dozen
or a score of natives, mostly old shepherds and labourers who
lived near, would go and sit there for a few hours and after
sunrise would trudge home, but whether or not there is any
tradition or belief associated with the custom I have not
ascertained. "How long has the custom existed?" I asked a
field labourer. "From the time of the old people--the
Druids," he answered, and I gave it up.

To be near the spot I went to stay at Shrewton, a downland
village four miles from "The Stones"; or rather a group of
five pretty little villages, almost touching but distinct,
like five flowers or five berries on a single stem, each with
its own old church and individual or parish life. It is a
pretty tree-shaded place, full of the crooning sound of
turtle-doves, hidden among the wide silent open downs and
watered by a clear swift stream, or winter bourne, which dries
up during the heats of late summer, and flows again after the
autumn rains, "when the springs rise" in the chalk hills.
While here, I rambled on the downs and haunted "The Stones."
The road from Shrewton to Amesbury, a straight white band
lying across a green country, passes within a few yards of
Stonehenge: on the right side of this narrow line the land is
all private property, but on the left side and as far as one
can see it mostly belongs to the War Office and is dotted over
with camps. I roamed about freely enough on both sides,
sometimes spending hours at a stretch, not only on Government
land but "within bounds," for the pleasure of spying on the
military from a hiding-place in some pine grove or furze
patch. I was seldom challenged, and the sentinels I came
across were very mild-mannered men; they never ordered me
away; they only said, or hinted, that the place I was in was
not supposed to be free to the public.

I come across many persons who lament the recent great change
on Salisbury Plain. It is hateful to them; the sight of the
camp and troops marching and drilling, of men in khaki
scattered about everywhere over a hundred square leagues of
plain; the smoke of firing and everlasting booming of guns.
It is a desecration; the wild ancient charm of the land has
been destroyed in their case, and it saddens and angers them.
I was pretty free from these uncomfortable feelings.

It is said that one of the notions the Japanese have about the
fox--a semi-sacred animal with them--is that, if you chance
to see one crossing your path in the morning, all that comes
before your vision on that day will be illusion. As an
illustration of this belief it is related that a Japanese who
witnessed the eruption of Krakatoa, when the heavens were
covered with blackness and kindled with intermitting flashes
and the earth shaken by the detonations, and when all others,
thinking the end of the world had come, were swooning with
extreme fear, veiwed it without a tremor as a very sublime but
illusory spectacle. For on that very morning he had seen a
fox cross his path.

A somewhat similar effect is produced on our minds if we have
what may be called a sense of historical time--a consciousness
of the transitoriness of most things human--if we see
institutions and works as the branches on a pine or larch,
which fail and die and fall away successively while the tree
itself lives for ever, and if we measure their duration not by
our own few swift years, but by the life of nations and races
of men. It is, I imagine, a sense capable of cultivation, and
enables us to look upon many of man's doings that would
otherwise vex and pain us, and, as some say, destroy all the
pleasure of our lives, not exactly as an illusion, as if we
were Japanese and had seen a fox in the morning, but at all
events in what we call a philosophic spirit.

What troubled me most was the consideration of the effect of
the new conditions on the wild life of the plain--or of a very
large portion of it. I knew of this before, but it was
nevertheless exceedingly unpleasant when I came to witness it
myself when I took to spying on the military as an amusement
during my idle time. Here we have tens of thousands of very
young men, boys in mind, the best fed, healthiest, happiest
crowd of boys in all the land, living in a pure bracing
atmosphere, far removed from towns, and their amusements and
temptations, all mad for pleasure and excitement of some kind
to fill their vacant hours each day and their holidays.
Naturally they take to birds'-nesting and to hunting every
living thing they encounter during their walks on the downs.
Every wild thing runs and flies from them, and is chased or
stoned, the weak-winged young are captured, and the nests
picked or kicked up out of the turf. In this way the
creatures are being extirpated, and one can foresee that when
hares and rabbits are no more, and even the small birds of the
plain, larks, pipits, wheatears, stonechats, and whincats,
have vanished, the hunters in khaki will take to the chase
of yet smaller creatures--crane-flies and butterflies and
dragon-flies, and even the fantastic, elusive hover-flies
which the hunters of little game will perhaps think the most
entertaining fly of all.

But it would be idle to grieve much at this small incidental
and inevitable result of making use of the plain as a military
camp and training-ground. The old god of war is not yet dead
and rotting on his iron hills; he is on the chalk hills with
us just now, walking on the elastic turf, and one is glad to
mark in his brown skin and sparkling eyes how thoroughly alive
he is.

A little after midnight on the morning of June 21, 1908, a
Shrewton cock began to crow, and that trumpet sound, which I
never hear without a stirring of the blood, on account of old
associations, informed me that the late moon had risen or was
about to rise, linking the midsummer evening and morning
twilights, and I set off to Stonehenge. It was a fine still
night, without a cloud in the pale, dusky blue sky, thinly
sprinkled with stars, and the crescent moon coming up above
the horizon. After the cock ceased crowing a tawny owl began
to hoot, and the long tremulous mellow sound followed me for
some distance from the village, and then there was perfect
silence, broken occasionally by the tinkling bells of a little
company of cyclists speeding past towards "The Stones." I was
in no hurry: I only wished I had started sooner to enjoy
Salisbury Plain at its best time, when all the things which
offend the lover of nature are invisible and nonexistent.
Later, when the first light began to appear in the east before
two o'clock, it was no false dawn, but insensibly grew
brighter and spread further, until touches of colour, very
delicate, palest amber, then tender yellow and rose and
purple, began to show. I felt then as we invariably feel
on such occasions, when some special motive has called us
forth in time to witness this heavenly change, as of a new
creation--

The miracle of diuturnity
Whose instancy unbeds the lark,

that all the days of my life on which I had not witnessed it
were wasted days!

O that unbedding of the lark! The world that was so still
before now all at once had a sound; not a single song and not
in one place, but a sound composed of a thousand individual
sounds, rising out of the dark earth at a distance on my right
hand and up into the dusky sky, spreading far and wide even as
the light was spreading on the opposite side of the heavens--a
sound as of multitudinous twanging, girding, and clashing
instruments, mingled with shrill piercing voices that were not
like the voices of earthly beings. They were not human nor
angelic, but passionless, and it was as if the whole visible
world, the dim grassy plain and the vast pale sky sprinkled
with paling stars, moonlit and dawnlit, had found a voice to
express the mystery and glory of the morning.

It was but eight minutes past two o'clock when this "unbedding
of the lark" began, and the heavenly music lasted about
fourteen minutes, then died down to silence, to recommence
about half an hour later. At first I wondered why the sound
was at a distance from the road on my right hand and not on my
left hand as well. Then I remembered what I had seen on that
side, how the "boys" at play on Sundays and in fact every day
hunt the birds and pull their nests out, and I could only
conclude that the lark has been pretty well wiped out from all
that part of the plain over which the soldiers range.

At Stonehenge I found a good number of watchers, about a
couple of hundred, already assembled, but more were coming in
continually, and a mile or so of the road to Amesbury visible
from "The Stones" had at times the appearance of a ribbon of
fire from the lamps of this continuous stream of coming
cyclists. Altogether about five to six hundred persons
gathered at "The Stones," mostly young men on bicycles who
came from all the Wiltshire towns within easy distance, from
Salisbury to Bath. I had a few good minutes at the ancient
temple when the sight of the rude upright stones looking black
against the moonlit and star-sprinkled sky produced an
unexpected feeling in me: but the mood could not last; the
crowd was too big and noisy, and the noises they made too
suggestive of a Bank Holiday crowd at the Crystal Palace.

At three o'clock a ribbon of slate-grey cloud appeared above
the eastern horizon, and broadened by degrees, and pretty soon
made it evident that the sun would be hidden at its rising at
a quarter to four. The crowd, however, was not down-hearted;
it sang and shouted; and by and by, just outside the
barbed-wire enclosure a rabbit was unearthed, and about three
hundred young men with shrieks of excitement set about its
capture. It was a lively scene, a general scrimmage, in which
everyone was trying to capture an elusive football with ears
and legs to it, which went darting and spinning about hither
and thither among the multitudinous legs, until earth
compassionately opened and swallowed poor distracted bunny up.
It was but little better inside the enclosure, where the big
fallen stones behind the altar-stone, in the middle, on which
the first rays of sun would fall, were taken possession of by
a crowd of young men who sat and stood packed together like
guillemots on a rock. These too, cheated by that rising cloud
of the spectacle they had come so far to see, wanted to have a
little fun, and began to be very obstreperous. By and by they
found out an amusement very much to their taste.

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