Day opened cold, dull, and windy in Shepton Mallet. After paying the usual bill of about four shillings for supper, bed, and breakfast, I tried to get into the churchyard again; but it was locked, and I set out for Wells. The road led me past the principal edifice in Shepton on the west side, as the prison is on the east—the Anglo-Bavarian Brewery, which is also the highest in position. It is a plain stone heap and a tubular chimney-stack of brick. A lover of size or of beer at any price might love it, but no one else. I rode from it in whirls of dust down to Bowlish and into the valley of the Sheppey. To within a mile of Wells I was to have this little river always with me and several times under me. Telegraph posts also accompanied the road. It was a delightful exit; the brewery was behind me, a rookery before me in the beech trees of the outskirts. On both hands grassy banks rose up steeply. The left one, when the[236] rookery was passed, was topped with single thorn trees, and pigs and chickens did their duty and their pleasure among the pollard ashes below. Most of the cottages of Bowlish are on the other side, their gardens reaching down in front of them to the stream, their straggling orchards of crooked apple trees behind within walls of ivy-covered stone. Where Bowlish becomes Darshill, the cottages are concentrated round a big square silk-mill and its mill pond beside the road. Up in the high windows could be seen the backs or faces of girls at work. All this is on the right, at the foot of the slope. The left bank being steeper, is either clothed in a wood of ivied oaks, or its ridgy turf and scattering of elms and ash trees are seldom interrupted by houses. A sewage farm and a farmhouse ruined by it take up part of the lower slope for some way past the silk-mill: a wood of oak and pine invades them irregularly from above. Then on both hands the valley does without houses. The left side is a low, steep thicket rising from the stream, which spreads out here into a sedgy pool before a weir, and was at this moment bordered by sheaves of silver-catkined sallow, fresh-cut. But the right side became high and precipitous, mostly bare at first, then hanging before me a rocky barrier thinly populated by oaks. This compelled[237] the road to twist round it in a shadowy trough. In fact, so much has the road to twist that a traveller coming from the other direction would prepare himself for scaling the barrier, not dreaming that he could slink in comfort round that wild obstacle.
Out of this crooked coomb I emerged into dust whirls and sunshine. The village of Crosscombe was but a little way ahead, a long village of old stone cottages and slightly larger houses, and two mills pounding away. The river running among stones sounds all through it. At the bridge, where it foams over the five steps of a weir, a drinking fountain is somewhat complicated by the inscription: “If thou knewest the gift of God, thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water.” At the “Rose and Crown,” outside which is a cross, or rather a knobbed pillar surmounting some worn steps, I branched up a steep lane to St. Mary’s Church. It has a spire instead of a tower, and an image of the Virgin at the base of it. Its broad-tailed weather-cock flashed so in the sun as to be all but invisible. The grass was at its greenest, the daisies at their whitest, in the churchyard, under the black cypress wedges, where lies something or other of many a Chedzoy, Perry, Hare, Hodges, and Pike. The upper side is bounded by[238] a good ancient wall, cloaked in ivy and tufted with yellow wallflower. Another chiffchaff was singing here. While I was inside the building, a girl hung about, rattling the keys expectantly (but no more persuasively than the Titanic roadsters told their tale at Erlestoke), while I walked among the dark pews and choir stalls of carven oak, and looked at the tablets of the Hares and Pippets, great Clothiers of this country, and the brass of Mr. William Bisse, and his nine daughters and nine sons, and Mrs. Bisse, in the costume of 1625. The church has a substantial business flavour belonging to the days when it was so little known as to be beyond dispute that blessed are the rich, for they do inherit this world and probably the next. A few yards higher up the slope from the church is a Baptist chapel and a cottage in one, evidently adapted with small skill or expense from a church building older than the sect. Nothing divided the vegetable garden of the cottage from the graveyard of the chapel, and it looked as if the people of Crosscombe were ill content to raise merely violets from the ashes of their friends.
CROSSCOMBE.
The road climbed away from Crosscombe up the left wall of the valley, which is given a mountainous expression by the naked rock protruding both at the ridge and on the slope of Dulcote Hill. The[239] river runs parallel on the right beneath, and along its farther bank the church and cottages of Dinder in a string; and the sole noise arising from Dinder was that of rooks. At a turning overshadowed by trees, at Dulcote, a path travels straight through green meadows to Wells, and to the three towers of the cathedral at the foot of a horizontal terrace-like spur of oak, pine, and beech, that juts out from the main line of Mendip leftwards or southwards. The river, which follows that main line up to this spot, now quits it, and follows the receding left wall of its valley, and consequently my road had its company no longer. My way lay upward and over the spur. The white footpath was to be seen going comfortably below on the left through parklike meadows, and beyond it, the pudding-shaped Hay Hill and Ben Knowle Hill, and the misty dome of Glastonbury Tor farther off.
By ten o’clock I was in the cathedral, and saw the painted dwarf up on the wall kick the bell ten times with his heel, and the knights race round and round opposite ways, clashing together ten times, while their attendant squires rode in silence; and I heard the remote, monotonous priest’s voice in the Benedicite, and the deep and the high responses of men and boys. Up there in the transepts and choir chapels are many rich tombs, and[240] recumbent figures overarched by stone fretwork; but the first and lasting impression is of the clean spaciousness of the aisles and nave, clear of all tombs and tablets.
But clear and clean as was the cathedral, the outer air was clearer and cleaner. The oblong green, walled in on three sides by homely houses, and by the rich towered west front on the fourth, echoed gently with the typical cathedral music, that of the mowing-machine, destroying grass and daisies innumerable, with a tone which the sun made like a grasshopper’s, not out of harmony with the song of a chaffinch asseverating whatever it is he asseverates from one of the bordering lime trees. The market-place, too, was warm; the yellowish and grayish and bluish walls, the windows of all shapes and all sizes, and the water of the central fountain, answered the sun.
Two gateways lead out of one side of the market-place to the cathedral and the palace grounds. Taking the right-hand one, I came to the palace, and the moat that flows along one side, between a high wall climbed by fruit trees and ivy, and a walk lined with old pollard elms. Rooks inhabited the elm tops, and swans the water. Rooks are essential to a cathedral anywhere, but Wells is perfected by swans. On the warm palace roof[241] behind the wall—a roof smouldering mellow in the sun—pigeons lay still ecclesiastically. Sometimes one cooed sleepily, as if to seal it canonical that silence is better; the rooks cawed; the water foamed down into the moat at one end between bowery walls. Away from the cathedral on that side to the foot of the Mendips expanded low, green country. I walked along the moat into the Shepton road, and turning to the left, and passing many discreet, decent, quiet houses such as are produced by cathedrals, and to the left again, so made a circuit of the cathedral and its high tufted walls and holly trees, back to the market-place.
It was difficult to know what to do in all this somewhat foreign tranquillity. I actually entered an old furniture shop, and looked over a number of second-hand books, Spectators, sermons that were dead, theology that had never been alive, recent novels preparing for their last sleep, books about Wells, “Clarissa Harlowe,” Mr. Le Gallienne’s “English Poems,” “The Marvels of the Polar World,” and hundreds of others. A cat slept in the sun amongst them, curled superbly, as if she had to see justice done to the soporific powers of the cathedral city and the books that nobody wanted. For the sake of appearances, I bought “The History of Prince Lee Boo” for twopence. I thought to[242] read this book over my lunch, but there was better provender. The restaurant was full of farmers, district councillors and their relatives, and several school children. The loudest voice, the longest tongue, and the face best worth looking at, belonged to a girl. She was a tomboy of fifteen, black-haired, pale, strong-featured, with bold though not very bright eyes. Her companion was a boy perhaps a little younger than herself, and she was talking in a quick, decided manner.
“I like a girl that sticks to a chap,” she began suddenly.
The boy mumbled something. She looked sharply at him, as if to make sure that he did exist, though he had not the gift of speech; then directed her eyes out into the street. Having been silent for half a minute, she stood up, pressing her face to the window to see better, and exclaimed,—
“Look, look! There’s lovely hair.”
The boy got up obediently.
“There’s lovely hair,” she repeated, indicating some one passing; “she isn’t good-looking to it, but it is lovely now. Look! isn’t it?”
The boy, I think, agreed before sitting down. What impressed him most was the girl’s frank enthusiasm. She remained standing and looking out. But in a moment something else had pleased[243] her. She beckoned to the boy, still with her eyes on the street, and said,—
“There’s a nice little boy.” As she said this she tapped the glass and smiled animatedly. So in half a minute up came another boy of about the same age as the first, and took a seat at the next table, smiling but not speaking. Only when he had half eaten a cake did he begin to talk casually about what had been passing at school—how an unpopular master had been ragged, but dared not complain, though nobody did any work. The girl listened intently, but when he had done, merely asked,—
“Have you ever been caned?”
“Lots of times,” he answered.
“Have you?” she asked the boy at her own table.
“Once,” he laughed.
“Have you?” she mused. “I haven’t. My mother told them they were to cane me at one school, and they did try once, but I never went back again after.” ... On finishing her lunch, she got up and strode out of the room silently, without a farewell. She was shorter than I had guessed, but more unforgettable than Prince Lee Boo. I put the book away unopened. Even what passes for a good book is troublesome to read after a few[244] days out of doors, and the highest power of most of them is to convey an invitation to sleep. And yet I thought of one writer at Wells, and that was Mr. W. H. Hudson, who has written of it more than once. He says that it is the only city where the green woodpecker is to be heard. It comes into his new book, “Adventures among Birds,” because it was here that he first satisfied his wish to be in a belfry during the bell-ringing and hear “a symphony from the days of the giants, composed (when insane) by a giant Tschaikovsky to be performed on ‘instruments of unknown form’ and gigantic size.” But the book is really all about birds and his journeys in search of them, chiefly in the southern half of England. It is one of his best country books. It is, in fact, the best book entirely about birds that is known to me. The naturalist may hesitate to admit it, though he knows that no such descriptions of birds’ songs and calls are to be found elsewhere, and he cannot deny that no other pages reveal English birds in a wild state so vividly, so happily, so beautifully. Mr. Hudson is in no need of recommendation among naturalists. This particular claim of his is mentioned only in order to impress a class of readers who might confuse him with the fancy dramatic naturalists, and the other class who will[245] appreciate the substantial miracle of a naturalist and an imaginative artist in one and in harmony.
Were men to disappear they might be reconstructed from the Bible and the Russian novelists; and, to put it briefly, Mr. Hudson so writes of birds that if ever, in spite of his practical work, his warnings and indignant scorn, they should cease to exist, and should leave us to ourselves on a benighted planet, we should have to learn from him what birds were.
Many people, even “lovers of Nature,” would be inclined to look for small beer in a book with the title of “Adventures among Birds.” If they are ignorant of Mr. Hudson’s writings, they are not to blame, since bird books are, as a rule, small beer. Most writers condescend to birds or have not the genius to keep them alive in print, whether or not they have the eternal desire “to convey to others,” as Mr. Hudson says, “some faint sense or suggestion of the wonder and delight which may be found in Nature.” He does not condescend to birds, “these loveliest of our fellow-beings,” as he calls them, “these which give greatest beauty and lustre to the world.” He travels “from county to county viewing many towns and villages, conversing with persons of all ages and conditions,” and when these persons are his theme he writes like a master, like[246] an old master perhaps, as everybody knows, who has read his “Green Mansions,” “The Purple Land,” and “South American Sketches.” It might, therefore, be taken for granted that such an artist would not be likely to handle birds unless he could do so with the same reality and vitality as men. And this is what he does.
His chief pleasure from his childhood on the Pampas has been in wild birds; he has delighted in their voices above all sounds. “Relations,” he calls the birds, “with knowing, emotional, and thinking brains like ours in their heads, and with senses like ours, only brighter. Their beauty and grace so much beyond ours, and their faculty of flight which enables them to return to us each year from such remote, outlandish places, their winged, swift souls in winged bodies, do not make them uncanny, but only fairy-like.”
Only the book itself can persuade the reader of the extraordinary love and knowledge of birds which have thus been nourished. If I were to quote the passage where he speaks of his old desire to pursue wild birds over many lands, “to follow knowledge like a sinking star, to be and to know much until I became a name for always wandering with a hungry heart;” or where he declares that the golden oriole’s clear whistle was more to him[247] “than the sight of towns, villages, castles, ruins, and cathedrals, and more than adventures among the people;” or where he calls being “present, in a sense invisible”—with the aid of silence and binoculars—“in the midst of the domestic circle of beings of a different order, another world than ours,” nearly every one would probably pronounce him an extravagant sentimentalist, a fanatic, or, worst of all, an exaggerator. He is none of these. When he writes of his first and only pet bird and its escapes, there is no pettiness or mere prettiness: it is not on the human scale, yet it is equal to a story of gods or men. He is an artist, with a singular power of sympathizing with wild life, especially that of birds. Their slender or full throated songs, the “great chorus of wild, ringing, jubilant cries,” when “the giant crane that hath a trumpet sound” assembles, the South American crested screamers counting the hours “when at intervals during the night they all burst out singing like one bird, and the powerful ringing voices of the incalculable multitude produce an effect as of tens of thousands of great chiming bells, and the listener is shaken by the tempest of sound, and the earth itself appears to tremble beneath him;” the colouring of birds, brilliant or delicate, their soaring or man?uvring or straight purposed flight, their games and battles,[248] all their joyous, or fierce, passionate, and agitated cries and motions, delight him at least as much as music delights its most sensitive and experienced lovers. At sight of the pheasant he cannot help loving it, much as he hates the havoc of which it is the cause.
There is a very large variety in his enjoyment. It is exquisite and it is vigorous; it is tender and at times almost superhuman in grimness. It is a satisfaction of his senses, of his curious intelligence, and of his highest nature. The green eggs of the little bittern thrill him “like some shining supernatural thing or some heavenly melody.” He is cheerful when his binoculars are bringing him close to birds “at their little games”—a kestrel being turned off by starlings, a heron alighting on another heron’s back, a band of starlings detaching themselves from their flock to join some wild geese going at right angles to their course; for “the playful spirit is universal among them.” The songs of blackbird, nightingale, thrush, and marsh warbler delight him, and yet at other times the loss of the soaring species, eagles and kites, oppresses him, and he speaks contemptuously of “miles on miles of wood, millions of ancient noble trees, a haunt of little dicky birds and tame pheasants.” His vision of the Somerset of the lake-dwellers, of “the paradise[249] of birds in its reedy inland sea, its lake of Athelney,” makes a feast for the eyes and ears. Moreover, he is never a mere bird man, and the result of this variety of interest and pleasure on the part of a man of Mr. Hudson’s imagination, culture, and experience, is that while his birds are intensely alive in many different ways, and always intensely birdlike, presenting a loveliness beyond that of idealized or supernaturalized women and children, yet at the same time their humanity was never before so apparent. The skylark is to him both bird and spirit, and one proof of the intense reality of his love is his ease in passing, as he does in several places, out of this world into a mythic, visionary, or very ancient world. This also is a proof of the powers of his style. At first sight, at least to the novice who is beginning to distinguish between styles without discriminating, Mr. Hudson’s is merely a rather exceptionally unstudied English, perhaps a little old-fashioned. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is, in fact, a combination, as curious as it is ripe and profound, of the eloquent and the colloquial, now the one, now the other, predominating in a variety of shades which make it wonderfully expressive for purpo............