Afoot in England

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The contrast between this man and the ordinary villager of his
class was as great in manners and conversation as in features
and expression. His combined dignity and gentleness, and
apparent unconsciousness of any caste difference between man
and man, were astonishing in one who had been a simple toiler
all his life.

There were some grown-up children, others growing up, with
others that were still quite small. The boys, I noticed,
favoured their mother, and had commonplace faces; the girls
took after their father, and though their features were not so
perfect they were exceptionally good-looking. The eldest son
--the disjointed, fly-away-looking young man who had conquered
all his enemies--had a wife and child. The eldest daughter
was also married, and had one child. Altogether the three
families numbered about sixteen persons, each family having
its separate set of rooms, but all dining at one table.
How did they do it? It seemed easy enough to them. They were
serious people in a sense, although always cheerful and
sometimes hilarious when together of an evening, or at their
meals. But they regarded life as a serious matter, a state of
probation; they were non-smokers, total abstainers, diligent
at their work, united, profoundly religious. A fresh wonder
came to light when I found that this poor woodman, with so
large a family to support, who spent ten or twelve hours every
day at his outdoor work, had yet been able out of his small
earnings to buy bricks and other materials, and, assisted by
his sons, to build a chapel adjoining his house. Here he held
religious services on Sundays, and once or twice of an evening
during the week. These services consisted of extempore
prayers, a short address, and hymns accompanied by a
harmonium, which they all appeared able to play.

What his particular doctrine was I did not inquire, nor did I
wish for any information on that point. Doubtless he was a
Dissenter of some kind living in a village where there was no
chapel; the services were for the family, but were also
attended by a few of the villagers and some persons from
neighbouring farms who preferred a simpler form of worship to
that of the Church.

It was not strange that this little community should have been
regarded with something like disfavour by the other villagers.
For these others, man for man, made just as much money, and
paid less rent for their small cottages, and, furthermore,
received doles from the vicar and his well-to-do parishioners,
yet they could not better their position, much less afford the
good clothing, books, music, and other pleasant things which
the independent woodman bestowed on his family. And they knew
why. The woodman's very presence in their midst was a
continual reproach, a sermon on improvidence and intemperance,
which they could not avoid hearing by thrusting their fingers
into their ears.

During my stay with these people something occurred to cause
them a very deep disquiet. The reader will probably smile
when I tell them what it was. Awaking one night after
midnight I heard the unusual sound of voices in earnest
conversation in the room below; this went on until I fell
asleep again. In the morning we noticed that our landlady had
a somewhat haggard face, and that the daughters also had pale
faces, with purple marks under the eyes, as if they had kept
their mother company in some sorrowful vigil. We were not
left long in ignorance of the cause of this cloud. The good
woman asked if we had been much disturbed by the talking. I
answered that I had heard voices and had supposed that friends
from a distance had arrived overnight and that they had sat up
talking to a late hour. No--that was not it, she said; but
someone had arrived late, a son who was sixteen years old, and
who had been absent for some days on a visit to relations in
another county. When they gathered round him to hear his news
he confessed that while away he had learnt to smoke, and he
now wished them to know that he had well considered the
matter, and was convinced that it was not wrong nor harmful to
smoke, and was determined not to give up his tobacco. They
had talked to him--father, mother, brothers, and sisters
--using every argument they could find or invent to move him,
until it was day and time for the woodman to go to his woods,
and the others to their several occupations. But their
"all-night sitting" had been wasted; the stubborn youth had
not been convinced nor shaken. When, after morning prayers,
they got up from their knees, the sunlight shining in upon
them, they had made a last appeal with tears in their eyes,
and he had refused to give the promise they asked. The poor
woman was greatly distressed. This young fellow, I thought,
favours his mother in features, but mentally he is perhaps
more like his father. Being a smoker myself I ventured to put
in a word for him. They were distressing themselves too much,
I told her; smoking in moderation was not only harmless,
especially to those who worked out of doors, but it was a
well-nigh universal habit, and many leading men in the
religious world, both churchmen and dissenters, were known to
be smokers.

Her answer, which came quickly enough, was that they did not
regard the practice of smoking as in itself bad, but they knew
that in some circumstances it was inexpedient; and in the case
of her son they were troubled at the thought of what smoking
would ultimately lead to. People, she continued, did not care
to smoke, any more than they did to eat and drink, in
solitude. It was a social habit, and it was inevitable that
her boy should look for others to keep him company in smoking.
There would be no harm in that in the summer-time when young
people like to keep out of doors until bedtime; but during the
long winter evenings he would have to look for his companions
in the parlour of the public-house. And it would not be easy,
scarcely possible, to sit long among the others without
drinking a little beer. It is really no more wrong to drink
a little beer than to smoke, he would say; and it would be
true. One pipe would lead to another. and one glass of
beer to another. The habit would be formed and at last all
his evenings and all his earnings would be spent in the
public-house.

She was right, and I had nothing more to say except to wish
her success in her efforts.

It is curious that the strongest protests against the evils of
the village pubic, which one hears from village women, come
from those who are not themselves sufferers. Perhaps it is
not curious. Instinctively we hide our sores, bodily and
mental, from the public gaze.

Not long ago I was in a small rustic village in Wiltshire,
perhaps the most charming village I have seen in that country.
There was no inn or ale-house, and feeling very thirsty after
my long walk I went to a cottage and asked the woman I saw
there for a drink of milk. She invited me in, and spreading a
clean cloth on the table, placed a jug of new milk, a loaf,
and butter before me. For these good things she proudly
refused to accept payment. As she was a handsome young woman,
with a clear, pleasant voice, I was glad to have her sit there
and talk to me while I refreshed myself. Besides, I was in
search of information and got it from her during our talk. My
object in going to the village was to see a woman who, I had
been told, was living there. I now heard that her cottage was
close by, but unfortunately, while anxious to see her, I had
no excuse for calling.

"Do you think," said I to my young hostess, "that it would do
to tell her that I had heard something of her strange history
and misfortunes, and wished to offer her a little help? Is
she very poor?"

"Oh, no," she replied. "Please do not offer her money, if you
see her. She would be offended. There is no one in this
village who would take a shilling as a gift from a stranger.
We all have enough; there is not a poor person among us."

"What a happy village!" I exclaimed. "Perhaps you are all
total abstainers."

She laughed, and said that they all brewed their own beer
--there was not a total abstainer among them. Every cottager
made from fifty to eighty gallons, or more, and they drank
beer every day, but very moderately, while it lasted. They
were all very sober; their children would have to go to some
neighbouring village to see a tipsy man.

I remarked that at the next village, which had three
public-houses, there were a good marry persons so poor that
they would gladly at any time take a shilling from any one.

It was the same everywhere in the district, she said, except
in that village which had no public-house. Not only were they
better off, and independent of blanket societies and charity
in all forms, but they were infinitely happier. And after the
day's work the men came home to spend the evening with their
wives and children.

At this stage I was surprised by a sudden burst of passion on
her part. She stood up, her face flushing red, and solemnly
declared that if ever a public-house was opened in that
village, and if the men took to spending their evenings in it,
her husband with them, she would not endure such a condition
of things--she wondered that so many women endured it--but
would take her little ones and go away to earn her own living
under some other roof!

Chapter Five: Wind, Wave, and Spirit

The rambles I have described were mostly inland: when by
chance they took us down to the sea our impressions and
adventures appeared less interesting. Looking back on the
holiday, it would seem to us a somewhat vacant time compared
to one spent in wandering from village to village. I mean if
we do not take into account that first impression which the
sea invariably makes on us on returning to it after a long
absence--the shock of recognition and wonder and joy as if we
had been suffering from loss of memory and it had now suddenly
come back to us. That brief moving experience over, there is
little the sea can give us to compare with the land. How
could it be otherwise in our case, seeing that we were by it
in a crowd, our movements and way of life regulated for us in
places which appear like overgrown and ill-organized
convalescent homes? There was always a secret intense dislike
of all parasitic and holiday places, an uncomfortable feeling
which made the pleasure seem poor and the remembrance of days
so spent hardly worth dwelling on. And as we are able to keep
in or throw out of our minds whatever we please, being
autocrats in our own little kingdom, I elected to cast away
most of the memories of these comparatively insipid holidays.
But not all, and of those I retain I will describe at least
two, one in the present chapter on the East Anglian coast, the
other later on.

It was cold, though the month was August; it blew and the sky
was grey and rain beginning to fall when we came down about
noon to a small town on the Norfolk coast, where we hoped to
find lodging and such comforts as could be purchased out of a
slender purse. It was a small modern pleasure town of an
almost startling appearance owing to the material used in
building its straight rows of cottages and its ugly square
houses and villas. This was an orange-brown stone found in
the neighbourhood, the roofs being all of hard, black slate.
I had never seen houses of such a colour, it was stronger,
more glaring and aggressive than the reddest brick, and there
was not a green thing to partially screen or soften it, nor
did the darkness of the wet weather have any mitigating effect
on it. The town was built on high ground, with an open grassy
space before it sloping down to the cliff in which steps had
been cut to give access to the beach, and beyond the cliff we
caught sight of the grey, desolate, wind-vexed sea. But the
rain was coming down more and more heavily, turning the
streets into torrents, so that we began to envy those who had
found a shelter even in so ugly a place. No one would take us
in. House after house, street after street, we tried, and at
every door with "Apartments to Let" over it where we knocked
the same hateful landlady-face appeared with the same
triumphant gleam in the fish-eyes and the same smile on the
mouth that opened to tell us delightedly that she and the town
were "full up"; that never had there been known such a rush of
visitors; applicants were being turned away every hour from
every door!

After three miserable hours spent in this way we began
inquiring at all the shops, and eventually at one were told of
a poor woman in a small house in a street a good way back from
the front who would perhaps be able to taken us in. To this
place we went and knocked at a low door in a long blank wall
in a narrow street; it was opened to us by a pale thin
sad-looking woman in a rusty black gown, who asked us into a
shabby parlour, and agreed to take us in until we could find
something better. She had a gentle voice and was full of
sympathy, and seeing our plight took us into the kitchen
behind the parlour, which was living- and working-room as
well, to dry ourselves by the fire.

"The greatest pleasure in life," said once a magnificent young
athlete, a great pedestrian, to me, "is to rest when you are
tired." And, I should add, to dry and warm yourself by a big
fire when wet and cold, and to eat and drink when you are
hungry and thirsty. All these pleasures were now ours, for
very soon tea and chops were ready for us; and so strangely
human, so sister-like did this quiet helpful woman seem after
our harsh experiences on that rough rainy day--that we
congratulated ourselves on our good fortune in having found
such a haven, and soon informed her that we wanted no "better
place."

She worked with her needle to support herself and her one
child, a little boy of ten; and by and by when he came in
pretty wet from some outdoor occupation we made his
acquaintance and the discovery that he was a little boy of an
original character. He was so much to his mother, who, poor
soul, had nobody else in the world to love, that she was
always haunted by the fear of losing him. He was her boy, the
child of her body, exclusively her own, unlike all other boys,
and her wise heart told her that if she put him in a school he
would be changed so that she would no longer know him for her
boy. For it is true that our schools are factories, with a
machinery to unmake and remake, or fabricate, the souls of
children much in the way in which shoddy is manufactured. You
may see a thousand rags or garments of a thousand shapes and
colours cast in to be boiled, bleached, pulled to pieces,
combed and woven, and finally come out as a piece of cloth a
thousand yards long of a uniform harmonious pattern, smooth,
glossy, and respectable. His individuality gone, he would in
a sense be lost to her; and although by nature a weak timid
woman, though poor, and a stranger in a strange place, this
thought, or feeling, or "ridiculous delusion" as most people
would call it, had made her strong, and she had succeeded in
keeping her boy out of school.

Hers was an interesting story. Left alone in the world she
had married one in her own class, very happily as she
imagined. He was in some business in a country town, well off
enough to provide a comfortable home, and he was very good; in
fact, his one fault was that he was too good, too open-hearted
and fond of associating with other good fellows like himself,
and of pledging them in the cup that cheers and at the same
time inebriates. Nevertheless, things went very well for a
time, until the child was born, the business declined, and
they began to be a little pinched. Then it occurred to her
that she, too, might be able to do something. She started
dressmaking, and as she had good taste and was clever and
quick, her business soon prospered. This pleased him; it
relieved him from the necessity of providing for the home,
and enabled him to follow his own inclination, which was to
take things easily--to be an idle man, with a little ready
money in his pocket for betting and other pleasures. The
money was now provided out of "our business." This state of
things continued without any change, except that process of
degeneration which continued in him, until the child was about
four years old, when all at once one day he told her they were
not doing as well as they might. She was giving far too much
of her time and attention to domestic matters--to the child
especially. Business was business--a thing it was hard for a
woman to understand--and it was impossible for her to give her
mind properly to it with her thoughts occupied with the child.
It couldn't be done. Let the child be put away, he said, and
the receipts would probably be doubled. He had been making
inquiries and found that for a modest annual payment the boy
could be taken proper care of at a distance by good decent
people he had heard of.

She had never suspected such a thought in his mind, and this
proposal had the effect of a stunning blow. She answered not
one word: he said his say and went out, and she knew she would
not see him again for many hours, perhaps not for some days;
she knew, too, that he would say no more to her on the
subject, that it would all be arranged about the child with or
without her consent. His will was law, her wishes nothing.
For she was his wife and humble obedient slave; never had she
pleaded with or admonished him and never complained, even
when, after her long day of hard work, he came in at ten or
eleven o'clock at night with several of his pals, all excited
with drink and noisy as himself, to call for supper.
Nevertheless she had been happy--intensely happy, because of
the child. The love for the man she had married, wondering
how one so bright and handsome and universally admired and
liked could stoop to her, who had nothing but love and worship
to give in return--that love was now gone and was not missed,
so much greater and more satisfying was the love for her boy.
And now she must lose him. Two or three silent miserable days
passed by while she waited for the dreadful separation, until
the thought of it became unendurable and she resolved to keep
her child and sacrifice everything else. Secretly she
prepared for flight, getting together the few necessary things
she could carry; then, with the child in her arms, she stole
out one evening and began her flight, which took her all
across England at its widest part, and ended at this small
coast town, the best hiding-place she could think of.

The boy was a queer little fellow, healthy but colourless,
with strangely beautiful grey eyes which, on first seeing
them, almost startled one with their intelligence. He was shy
and almost obstinately silent, but when I talked to him on
certain subjects the intense suppressed interest he felt would
show itself in his face, and by and by it would burst out in
speech--an impetuous torrent of words in a high shrill voice.
He reminded me of a lark in a cage. Watch it in its prison
when the sun shines forth--when, like the captive falcon in
Dante, it is "cheated by a gleam"--its wing-tremblings, and
all its little tentative motions, how the excitement grows and
grows in it, until, although shut up and flight denied it, the
passion can no longer be contained and it bursts out in a
torrent of shrill and guttural sounds, which, if it were free
and soaring, would be its song. His passion was all for
nature, and his mother out of her small earnings had managed
to get quite a number of volumes together for him. These he
read and re-read until he knew them by heart; and on Sundays,
or any other day they could take, those two lonely ones would
take a basket containing their luncheon, her work and a book
or two, and set out on a long ramble along the coast to pass
the day in some solitary spot among the sandhills.

With these two, the gentle woman and her quiet boy over his
book, and the kitchen fire to warm and dry us after each
wetting, the bad weather became quite bearable although it
lasted many days. And it was amazingly bad. The wind blew
with a fury from the sea; it was hard to walk against it. The
people in hundreds waited in their dull apartments for a lull,
and when it came they poured out like hungry sheep from the
fold, or like children from a school, swarming over the green
slope down to the beach, to scatter far and wide over the
sands. Then, in a little while; a new menacing blackness
would come up out of the sea, and by and by a fresh storm of
wind would send the people scuttling back into shelter. So it
went on day after day, and when night came the sound of the
ever-troubled sea grew louder, so that, shut up in our little
rooms in that back street, we had it in our ears, except at
intervals, when the wind howled loud enough to drown its great
voice, and hurled tempests of rain and hail against the roofs
and windows.

To me the most amazing thing was the spectacle of the swifts.
It was late for them, near the end of August; they should now
have been far away on their flight to Africa; yet here they
were, delaying on that desolate east coast in wind and wet,
more than a hundred of them. It was strange to see so many at
one spot, and I could only suppose that they had congregated
previous to migration at that unsuitable place, and were being
kept back by the late breeders, who had not yet been wrought
up to the point of abandoning their broods. They haunted a
vast ruinous old barn-like building near the front, which was
probably old a century before the town was built, and about
fifteen to twenty pairs had their nests under the eaves. Over
this building they hung all day in a crowd, rising high to
come down again at a frantic speed, and at each descent a few
birds could be seen to enter the holes, while others rushed
out to join the throng, and then all rose and came down again
and swept round and round in a furious chase, shrieking as if
mad. At all hours they drew me to that spot, and standing
there, marvelling at their swaying power and the fury that
possessed them, they appeared to me like tormented beings, and
were like those doomed wretches in the halls of Eblis whose
hearts were in a blaze of unquenchable fire, and who, every
one with hands pressed to his breast, went spinning round in
an everlasting agonized dance. They were tormented and crazed
by the two most powerful instincts of birds pulling in
opposite directions--the parental instinct and the passion of
migration which called them to the south.

In such weather, especially on that naked desolate coast,
exposed to the fury of the winds, one marvels at our modern
craze for the sea; not merely to come and gaze upon and listen
to it, to renew our youth in its salt, exhilarating waters and
to lie in delicious idleness on the warm shingle or mossy
cliff; but to be always, for days and weeks and even for
months, at all hours, in all weathers, close to it, with its
murmur, "as of one in pain," for ever in our ears.

Undoubtedly it is an unnatural, a diseased, want in us, the
result of a life too confined and artificial in close dirty
overcrowded cities. It is to satisfy this craving that towns
have sprung up everywhere on our coasts and extended their
ugly fronts for miles and leagues, with their tens of
thousands of windows from which the city-sickened wretches may
gaze and gaze and listen and feed their sick souls with the
ocean. That is to say, during their indoor hours; at other
times they walk or sit or lie as close as they can to it,
following the water as it ebbs and reluctantly retiring before
it when it returns. It was not so formerly, before the
discovery was made that the sea could cure us. Probably our
great-grandfathers didn't even know they were sick; at all
events, those who had to live in the vicinity of the sea were
satisfied to be a little distance from it, out of sight of its
grey desolation and, if possible, out of hearing of its
"accents disconsolate." This may be seen anywhere on our
coasts; excepting the seaports and fishing settlements, the
towns and villages are almost always some distance from the
sea, often in a hollow or at all events screened by rising
ground and woods from it. The modern seaside place has, in
most cases, its old town or village not far away but quite as
near as the healthy ancients wished to be.

The old village nearest to our little naked and ugly modern
town was discovered at a distance of about two miles, but it
might have been two hundred, so great was the change to its
sheltered atmosphere. Loitering in its quiet streets among
the old picturesque brick houses with tiled or thatched roofs
and tall chimneys--ivy and rose and creeper-covered, with a
background of old oaks and elms--I had the sensation of having
come back to my own home. In that still air you could hear
men and women talking fifty or a hundred yards away, the cry
or laugh of a child and the clear crowing of a cock, also the
smaller aerial sounds of nature, the tinkling notes of tits
and other birdlings in the trees, the twitter of swallows and
martins, and the "lisp of leaves and ripple of rain." It was
sweet and restful in that home-like place, and hard to leave
it to go back to the front to face the furious blasts once
more. Rut there were compensations.

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