Afoot in England

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

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The little town, we have seen, was overcrowded with late
summer visitors, all eager for the sea yet compelled to waste
so much precious time shut up in apartments, and at every
appearance of a slight improvement in the weather they would
pour out of the houses and the green slope would be covered
with a crowd of many hundreds, all hurrying down to the beach.
The crowd was composed mostly of women--about three to every
man, I should say--and their children; and it was one of the
most interesting crowds I had ever come across on account of
the large number of persons in it of a peculiarly fine type,
which chance had brought together at that spot. It was the
large English blonde, and there were so many individuals of
this type that they gave a character to the crowd so that
those of a different physique and colour appeared to be fewer
than they were and were almost overlooked. They came from
various places about the country, in the north and the
Midlands, and appeared to be of the well-to-do classes; they,
or many of them, were with their families but without their
lords. They were mostly tall and large in every way, very
white-skinned, with light or golden hair and large light blue
eyes. A common character of these women was their quiet
reposeful manner; they walked and talked and rose up and sat
down and did everything, in fact, with an air of deliberation;
they gazed in a slow steady way at you, and were dignified,
some even majestic, and were like a herd of large beautiful
white cows. The children, too, especially the girls, some
almost as tall as their large mothers, though still in short
frocks, were very fine. The one pastime of these was
paddling, and it was a delight to see their bare feet and
legs. The legs of those who had been longest on the spot
--probably several weeks in some instances--were of a deep
nutty brown hue suffused with pink; after these a gradation of
colour, light brown tinged with buff, pinkish buff and cream,
like the Gloire de Dijon rose; and so on to the delicate
tender pink of the clover blossom; and, finally, the purest
ivory white of the latest arrivals whose skins had not yet
been caressed and coloured by sun and wind.

How beautiful are the feet of these girls by the sea who bring
us glad tidings of a better time to come and the day of a
nobler courage, a freer larger life when garments which have
long oppressed and hindered shall have been cast away!
It was, as I have said, mere chance which had brought so many
persons of a particular type together on this occasion, and I
thought I might go there year after year and never see the
like again. As a fact I did return when August came round and
found a crowd of a different character. The type was there
but did not predominate: it was no longer the herd of
beautiful white and strawberry cows with golden horns and
large placid eyes. Nothing in fact was the same, for when I
looked for the swifts there were no more than about twenty
birds instead of over a hundred, and although just on the eve
of departure they were not behaving in the same excited
manner.

Probably I should not have thought so much about that
particular crowd in that tempestuous August, and remembered it
so vividly, but for the presence of three persons in it and
the strange contrast they made to the large white type I have
described. These were a woman and her two little girls, aged
about eight and ten respectively, but very small for their
years. She was a little black haired and black-eyed woman
with a pale sad dark face, on which some great grief or
tragedy had left its shadow; very quiet and subdued in her
manner; she would sit on a chair on the beach when the weather
permitted, a book on her knees, while her two little ones
played about, chasing and flying from the waves, or with the
aid of their long poles vaulting from rock to rock. They were
dressed in black frocks and scarlet blouses, which set off
their beautiful small dark faces; their eyes sparkled like
black diamonds, and their loose hair was a wonder to see, a
black mist or cloud about their heads and necks composed of
threads fine as gossamer, blacker than jet and shining like
spun glass-hair that looked as if no comb or brush could ever
tame its beautiful wildness. And in spirit they were what
they seemed: such a wild, joyous, frolicsome spirit with such
grace and fleetness one does not look for in human beings, but
only in birds or in some small bird-like volatile mammal--a
squirrel or a marmoset of the tropical forest, or the
chinchilla of the desolate mountain slopes, the swiftest,
wildest, loveliest, most airy and most vocal of small
beasties. Occasionally to watch their wonderful motions more
closely and have speech with them, I followed when they raced
over the sands or flew about over the slippery rocks, and felt
like a cochin-china fowl, or muscovy duck, or dodo, trying to
keep pace with a humming-bird. Their voices were well suited
to their small brilliant forms; not loud, though high-pitched
and singularly musical and penetrative, like the high clear
notes of a skylark at a distance. They also reminded me of
certain notes, which have a human quality, in some of our
songsters--the swallow, redstart, pied wagtail, whinchat, and
two or three others. Such pure and beautiful sounds are
sometimes heard in human voices, chiefly in children, when
they are talking and laughing in joyous excitement. But for
any sort of conversation they were too volatile; before I
could get a dozen words from them they would be off again,
flying and flitting along the margin, like sandpipers, and
beating the clear-voiced sandpiper at his own aerial graceful
game.

By and by I was favoured with a fine exhibition of the spirit
animating these two little things. The weather had made it
possible for the crowd of visitors to go down and scatter
itself over the beach, when the usual black cloud sprang up
and soon burst on us in a furious tempest of wind and rain,
sending the people flying back to the shelter of a large
structure erected for such purposes against the cliff. It was
a vast barn-like place, open to the front, the roof supported
by wooden columns, and here in a few minutes some three or
four hundred persons were gathered, mostly women and their
girls, white and blue-eyed with long wet golden hair hanging
down their backs. Finding a vacant place on the bench, I sat
down next to a large motherly-looking woman with a robust or
dumpy blue-eyed girl about four or five years old on her lap.
Most of the people were standing about in groups waiting
for the storm to blow over, and presently I noticed my two
wild-haired dark little girls moving about in the crowd. It
was impossible not to seen them, for they could not keep still
a moment. They were here, there, and everywhere, playing
hide-and-seek and skipping and racing wherever they could
find an opening, and by and by, taking hold of each other,
they started dancing. It was a pretty spectacle, but most
interesting to see was the effect produced on the other
children, the hundred girls, big and little, the little ones
especially, who had been standing there tired and impatient to
get out to the sea, and who were now becoming more and more
excited as they gazed, until, like children when listening to
lively music, they began moving feet and hands and soon their
whole bodies in time to the swift movements of the little
dancers. At last, plucking up courage, first one, then
another, joined them, and were caught as they came and whirled
round and round in a manner quite new to them and which they
appeared to find very delightful. By and by I observed that
the little rosy-faced dumpy girl on my neighbour's knees was
taking the infection; she was staring, her blue eyes opened to
their widest in wonder and delight. Then suddenly she began
pleading, "Oh, mummy, do let me go to the little girls--oh, do
let me!" And her mother said "No," because she was so little,
and could never fly round like that, and so would fall and
hurt herself and cry. But she pleaded still, and was ready to
cry if refused, until the good anxious mother was compelled to
release her; and down she slipped, and after standing still
with her little arms and closed hands held up as if to collect
herself before plunging into the new tremendous adventure, she
rushed out towards the dancers. One of them saw her coming,
and instantly quitting the child she was waltzing with flew to
meet her, and catching her round the middle began spinning her
about as if the solid little thing weighed no more than a
feather. But it proved too much for her; very soon she came
down and broke into a loud cry, which brought her mother
instantly to her, and she was picked up and taken back to the
seat and held to the broad bosom and soothed with caresses and
tender words until the sobs began to subside. Then, even
before the tears were dry, her eyes were once more gazing at
the tireless little dancers, taking on child after child as
they came timidly forward to have a share in the fun, and once
more she began to plead with her "mummy," and would not be
denied, for she was a most determined little Saxon, until
getting her way she rushed out for a second trial. Again the
little dancer saw her coming and flew to her like a bird to
its mate, and clasping her laughed her merry musical little
laugh. It was her "sudden glory," an expression of pure
delight in her power to infuse her own fire and boundless
gaiety of soul into all these little blue-eyed rosy phlegmatic
lumps of humanity.

What was it in these human mites, these fantastic Brownies,
which, in that crowd of Rowenas and their children, made them
seem like beings not only of another race, but of another
species? How came they alone to be distinguished among so
many by that irresponsible gaiety, as of the most volatile of
wild creatures, that quickness of sense and mind and sympathy,
that variety and grace and swiftness--all these brilliant
exotic qualities harmoniously housed in their small beautiful
elastic and vigorous frames? It was their genius, their
character--something derived from their race. But what
race? Looking at their mother watching her little ones at
their frolics with dark shining eyes--the small oval-faced
brown-skinned woman with blackest hair--I could but say that
she was an Iberian, pure and simple, and that her children
were like her. In Southern Europe that type abounds; it is
also to be met with throughout Britain, perhaps most common in
the southern counties, and it is not uncommon in East Anglia.
Indeed, I think it is in Norfolk where we may best see the two
most marked sub-types in which it is divided--the two
extremes. The small stature, narrow head, dark skin, black
hair and eyes are common to both, and in both these physical
characters are correlated with certain mental traits, as, for
instance, a peculiar vivacity and warmth of disposition; but
they are high and low. In the latter sub-division the skin is
coarse in texture, brown or old parchment in colour, with
little red in it; the black hair is also coarse, the forehead
small, the nose projecting, and the facial angle indicative of
a more primitive race. One might imagine that these people
had been interred, along with specimens of rude pottery and
bone and flint implements, a long time back, about the
beginning of the Bronze Age perhaps, and had now come out of
their graves and put on modern clothes. At all events I don't
think a resident in Norfolk would have much difficulty in
picking out the portraits of some of his fellow-villagers in
Mr. Reed's Prehistoric Peeps.

The mother and her little ones were of the higher sub-type:
they had delicate skins, beautiful faces, clear musical
voices. They were Iberians in blood, but improved; purified
and refined as by fire; gentleized and spiritualized, and to
the lower types down to the aboriginals, as is the bright
consummate flower to leaf and stem and root.

Often and often we are teased and tantalized and mocked by
that old question:

Oh! so old--
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told--

of black and blue eyes; blue versus black and black versus
blue, to put it both ways. And by black we mean black with
orange-brown lights in it--the eye called tortoise-shell; and
velvety browns with other browns, also hazels. Blue includes
all blues, from ultramarine, or violet, to the palest blue of
a pale sky; and all greys down to the grey that is almost
white. Our preference for this or that colour is supposed
to depend on nothing but individual taste, or fancy, and
association. I believe it is something more, but I do find
that we are very apt to be swayed this way and that by the
colour of the eyes of the people we meet in life, according as
they (the people) attract or repel us. The eyes of the two
little girls were black as polished black diamonds until
looked at closely, when they appeared a beautiful deep brown
on which the black pupils were seen distinctly; they were so
lovely that I, predisposed to prefer dark to light, felt that
this question was now definitely settled for me--that black
was best. That irresistible charm, the flame-like spirit
which raised these two so much above the others--how could it
go with anything but the darkest eyes!

But no sooner was the question thus settled definitely and for
all time, to my very great satisfaction, than it was unsettled
again. I do not know how this came about; it may have been
the sight of some small child's blue eyes looking up at me,
like the arch blue eyes of a kitten, full of wonder at the
world and everything in it;

"Where did you get those eyes so blue?"
"Out of the sky as I came through";

or it may have been the sight of a harebell; and perhaps it
came from nothing but the "waste shining of the sky." At all
events, there they were, remembered again, looking at me from
the past, blue eyes that were beautiful and dear to me, whose
blue colour was associated with every sweetness and charm in
child and woman and with all that is best and highest in human
souls; and I could not and had no wish to resist their appeal.

Then came a new experience of the eye that is blue--a meeting
with one who almost seemed to be less flesh than spirit. A
middle-aged lady, frail, very frail; exceedingly pale from
long ill-health, prematurely white-haired, with beautiful grey
eyes, gentle but wonderfully bright. Altogether she was like
a being compounded as to her grosser part of foam and mist and
gossamer and thistledown, and was swayed by every breath of
air, and who, should she venture abroad in rough weather,
would be lifted and blown away by the gale and scattered like
mist over the earth. Yet she, so frail, so timid, was the one
member of the community who had set herself to do the work of
a giant--that of championing all ill-used and suffering
creatures, wild or tame, holding a protecting shield over them
against the innate brutality of the people. She had been
abused and mocked and jeered at by many, while others had
regarded her action with an amused smile or else with a cold
indifference. But eventually some, for very shame, had been
drawn to her side, and a change in the feeling of the people
had resulted; domestic animals were treated better, and it was
no longer universally believed that all wild animals,
especially those with wings, existed only that men might amuse
themselves by killing and wounding and trapping and caging and
persecuting them in various other ways.

The sight of that burning and shining spirit in its frail
tenement--for did I not actually see her spirit and the very
soul of her in those eyes?--was the last of the unforgotten
experiences I had at that place which had startled and
repelled me with its ugliness.

But, no, there was one more, marvellous as any--the experience
of a day of days, one of those rare days when nature appears
to us spiritualized and is no longer nature, when that which
had transfigured this visible world is in us too, and it
becomes possible to believe--it is almost a conviction--that
the burning and shining spirit seen and recognized in one
among a thousand we have known is in all of us and in all
things. In such moments it is possible to go beyond even the
most advanced of the modern physicists who hold that force
alone exists, that matter is but a disguise, a shadow and
delusion; for we may add that force itself--that which we call
force or energy--is but a semblance and shadow of the
universal soul.

The change in the weather was not sudden; the furious winds
dropped gradually; the clouds floated higher in the heavens,
and were of a lighter grey; there were wider breaks in them,
showing the lucid blue beyond; and the sea grew quieter. It
had raved and roared too long, beating against the iron walls
that held it back, and was now spent and fallen into an uneasy
sleep, but still moved uneasily and moaned a little. Then all
at once summer returned, coming like a thief in the night, for
when it was morning the sun rose in splendour and power in a
sky without a cloud on its vast azure expanse, on a calm sea
with no motion but that scarcely perceptible rise and fall as
of one that sleeps. As the sun rose higher the air grew
warmer until it was full summer heat, but although a "visible
heat," it was never oppressive; for all that day we were
abroad, and as the tide ebbed a new country that was neither
earth nor sea was disclosed, an infinite expanse of pale
yellow sand stretching away on either side, and further and
further out until it mingled and melted into the sparkling
water and faintly seen line of foam on the horizon. And over
all--the distant sea, the ridge of low dunes marking where the
earth ended and the flat, yellow expanse between--there
brooded a soft bluish silvery haze. A haze that blotted
nothing out, but blended and interfused them all until earth
and air and sea and sands were scarcely distinguishable. The
effect, delicate, mysterious, unearthly, cannot be described.

Ethereal gauze . . .
Visible heat, air-water, and dry sea,
Last conquest of the eye . . .

Sun dust,
Aerial surf upon the shores of earth,
Ethereal estuary, frith of light. . . .
Bird of the sun, transparent winged.

Do we not see that words fail as pigments do--that the effect
is too coarse, since in describing it we put it before the
mental eye as something distinctly visible, a thing of itself
and separate. But it is not so in nature; the effect is of
something almost invisible and is yet a part of all and makes
all things--sky and sea and land--as unsubstantial as itself.
Even living, moving things had that aspect. Far out on the
lowest further strip of sand, which appeared to be on a level
with the sea, gulls were seen standing in twos and threes and
small groups and in rows; but they did not look like gulls
--familiar birds, gull-shaped with grey and white plumage.
They appeared twice as big as gulls, and were of a dazzling
whiteness and of no definite shape: though standing still they
had motion, an effect of the quivering dancing air, the
"visible heat"; at rest, they were seen now as separate
objects; then as one with the silver sparkle on the
sea; and when they rose and floated away they were no longer
shining and white, but like pale shadows of winged forms
faintly visible in the haze.

They were not birds but spirits--beings that lived in or were
passing through the world and now, like the heat, made
visible; and I, standing far out on the sparkling sands, with
the sparkling sea on one side and the line of dunes,
indistinctly seen as land, on the other, was one of them; and
if any person had looked at me from a distance he would have
seen me as a formless shining white being standing by the sea,
and then perhaps as a winged shadow floating in the haze. It
was only necessary to put out one's arms to float. That was
the effect on my mind: this natural world was changed to a
supernatural, and there was no more matter nor force in sea or
land nor in the heavens above, but only spirit.

Chapter Six: By Swallowfield

One of the most attractive bits of green and wooded country
near London I know lies between Reading and Basingstoke and
includes Aldermaston with its immemorial oaks in Berkshire and
Silchester with Pamber Forest in Hampshire. It has long been
one of my favourite haunts, summer and winter, and it is
perhaps the only wooded place in England where I have a home
feeling as strong as that which I experience in certain places
among the South Wiltshire downs and in the absolutely flat
country on the Severn, in Somerset, and the flat country in
Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, especially at Lynn and about
Ely.

I am now going back to my first visit to this green retreat;
it was in the course of one of those Easter walks I have
spoken of, and the way was through Reading and by Three Mile
Cross and Swallowfield. On this occasion I conceived a
dislike to Reading which I have never quite got over, for it
seemed an unconscionably big place for two slow pedestrians to
leave behind. Worse still, when we did leave it we found that
Reading would not leave us. It was like a stupendous octopus
in red brick which threw out red tentacles, miles and miles
long in various directions--little rows and single and double
cottages and villas, all in red, red brick and its weary
accompaniment, the everlasting hard slate roof. These square
red brick boxes with sloping slate tops are built as close as
possible to the public road, so that the passer-by looking in
at the windows may see the whole interior--wall-papers,
pictures, furniture, and oftentimes the dull expressionless
face of the woman of the house, staring back at you out of her
shallow blue eyes. The weather too was against us; a grey
hard sky, like the slate roofs, and a cold strong east wind to
make the road dusty all day long.

Arrived at Three Mile Cross, it was no surprise to find it no
longer recognizable as the hamlet described in Our Village,
but it was saddening to look at the cottage in which Mary
Russell Mitford lived and was on the whole very happy with her
flowers and work for thirty years of her life, in its present
degraded state. It has a sign now and calls itself the
"Mitford Arms" and a "Temperance Hotel," and we were told that
you could get tea and bread and butter there but nothing else.
The cottage has been much altered since Miss Mitford's time,
and the open space once occupied by the beloved garden is now
filled with buildings, including a corrugated-iron dissenting
chapel.

From Three Mile Cross we walked on to Swallowfield, still by
those never-ending roadside red-brick cottages and villas, for
we were not yet properly out of the hated biscuit metropolis.
It was a big village with the houses scattered far and wide
over several square miles of country, but just where the
church stands it is shady and pleasant. The pretty church
yard too is very deeply shaded and occupies a small hill with
the Loddon flowing partly round it, then taking its swift way
through the village. Miss Mitford's monument is a plain,
almost an ugly, granite cross, standing close to the wall,
shaded by yew, elm, and beech trees, and one is grateful to
think that if she never had her reward when living she has
found at any rate a very peaceful resting-place.

The sexton was there and told us that he was but ten years old
when Miss Mitford died, but that he remembered her well and
she was a very pleasant little woman. Others in the place
who remembered her said the same--that she was very pleasant
and sweet. We know that she was sweet and charming, but
unfortunately the portraits we have of her do not give that
impression. They represent her as a fat common-place looking
person, a little vulgar perhaps. I fancy the artists were
bunglers. I possess a copy of a very small pencil sketch made
of her face by a dear old lady friend of mine, now dead, about
the year 1851 or 2. My friend had a gift for portraiture in a
peculiar way. When she saw a face that greatly interested
her, in a drawing-room, on a platform, in the street, anywhere,
it remained very vividly in her mind and on going home she
would sketch it, and some of these sketches of well known
persons are wonderfully good. She was staying in the country
with a friend who drove with her to Swallowfield to call on
Miss Mitford, and on her return to her friend's house she
made the little sketch, and in this tiny portrait I can see
the refinement, the sweetness, the animation and charm which
she undoubtedly possessed.

But let me now venture to step a little outside of my own
province, my small plot--a poor pedestrian's unimportant
impressions of places and faces; all these p's come by
accident; and this I put in parenthetically just because an
editor solemnly told me a while ago that he couldn't abide and
wouldn't have alliteration's artful aid in his periodical.
Let us leave the subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of
her day who knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pass
away every year and in a little while are no more remembered
than the bright-plumaged bird that falls in the tropical
forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some one has
said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful
thing. Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of
another generation of all she was and did?

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