THIRD DAY—ODSEY TO EDLESBOROUGH, BY BALDOCK, LETCHWORTH, ICKLEFORD, LEAGRAVE, AND DUNSTABLE

The rooks had been talking in my sleep much too long before I started next day. Their voices and the blazing window-blind described the morning for me before I stirred. I could see and feel it all; and if I could write it down as I saw and felt it this would be a good book and no mistake. The long grasses were dewy cool, the trees lightly rustling and full of shadow, the sky of so soft a greyness that it seemed an impossible palace for a sun so gorgeous. The thrushes sang, and seeing a perfect crimson strawberry, I picked it, and found that it was as hot as a strawberry can be, and therefore at its sweetest and richest.

Deadman’s Lane, Baldock.

Winding a little more than before, and still closely attended on its right by the Great Northern Railway, the road entered Baldock, or rather it approached that town, and then, refusing to be a main road any longer, turned off before the Toll Bar Inn to the right. Thus it dipped into the northern edge of the town close to the railway and the station, as a long, sordid lane called Bygrave Lane or Dead[123]man’s Lane, past the gasworks, past the “Stag,” the “Swan,” and the “Black Eagle” in a row. This was the abode of the “Sand Boys,” who sold sand all over the country, and bought bones and rabbit skins. It is also the reputed scene of the death of Gypsy Smith’s wife and his own conversion. Past the nobly named public-houses the narrow street became a lane, rutted and half[124] green, and edged on the left with nettles of wondrous height and density. The railway was closer and closer on the right; on the left was a new cemetery behind tall railings. At length the railway passed under the road. I was now again between high, extravagant hedges of thorn and wild roses. The road was wider, but rough, half green and half rutted, and in places divided into two by a thicket of blackthorn standing in the midst. A nightingale was singing among the roses above some old chalk pits.

After a road from a level crossing had come in on the left, I kept straight on along the right side of a hedge dividing the railway from a big field, and past the left edge of a shallow chalk pit. There was no road here, but several tracks went through the long grass, and mistake was impossible. On the right two paths went off to some of the new houses of the Letchworth Garden City, and to a building gigantically labelled “IDRIS.” This was, I suppose, the temple of this city’s god, though the name, except as the Welsh equivalent for Arthur, was unknown to me. They say now that Arthur was a solar hero, and when in doubt men might do worse than to worship the sun, if they could discover how. At Letchworth they were endeavouring to do so. The sun was not benign or even merciful in return for these efforts. He responded by telling the truth with his most brilliant beams, so that the city resembled a caravan of bathing machines, except that there was no sea and the machines could not conveniently be moved.[125] At the end of the big field I crossed a new road and entered among the elders and thorn trees of the edge of Norton Common. Here there were several parallel paths, and on the left behind a hedge was a garden-city street called “Icknield Way.” This represented the line of the road, but whether this or the path on the other side of the hedge was more on the old course I cannot say. Past the houses “Icknield Way” ceased to be a road fit for perambulators and became a rough track, chiefly used for carrying building materials. It followed along a hedge and past a sand pit, in one place a little hollowed out. It was miserable with the rank grass of newly “developed” districts. After a road came in from under the railway on the left, it began to curve away north and leave the railway. Once more it was between hedges; but with all its vicissitudes it had remained a parish boundary all the way from Slip Inn Hill near Odsey. It was going uphill, and presently I could see not only the corn, sainfoin, and houses growing round about, but in the south-west the line of hedged and wooded hills above Ippollitts, Offley, and Pirton. Letchworth was still in sight, like so many wounds on the earth and so much sticking-plaster. But, though behind me, it was fascinating, like all these raw settlements. It is a curious pleasure to see them besieged by docks and nettles, and, as sometimes happens, quietly overcome by docks and nettles. They look new until suddenly they are unvenerably old. Letchworth may turn out to be an exception, but as I[126] hurried through it, some back gardens, some forlorn new roads, and the tune of “She’s off with the wraggle-taggle gipsies, oh!” sent my thoughts mysteriously but irresistibly to the desolate new-old settlements I have known.

The Ford, Ickleford.
 
Ickleford Church.

At the hill-top the road made westward, a shady hedge on the left, sunny sainfoin on the right, and arrived at Wilbury Camp. The north side of the camp touched the Bedfordshire border. The high, irregular earth walls overgrown with thorn trees made an uneven and much delved enclosure, where it was impossible to distinguish gravel pit from camp, and through this hollow and among its thorns went the path I took instead of along the southern hedge and wall, which appears to be the canonical Icknield Way and the parish boundary. Across it goes the hard road coming from Brook End over Wilbury Hill and down to Walsworth. On the other side of this road it was a wide, many-tracked, green way, winding through open cornland down to the trees of Ickleford; and on its left, at the convenient distance of two miles, the tower and roof clusters and trees of Hitchin replaced the spots of Letchworth. There were hedges with elms for the mowers to rest under, and on the right was the white wall of a chalk pit, with roses and privet overhanging, and black bryony and elder growing below. The way descended to be crossed by two lines of railway a few yards apart. Between the two it was grassy and elm-shaded. Beyond the second the road forded the River Hiz, and even waded in it for thirty yards or so. Ickleford village had a green with chestnut trees, a “Green Man” and an “Old George,” and a church wall decorated regularly all over with an incised design of saws, swords, handcuffs, crowns, etc. The road passed St. Catherine’s Church and the[128] “Green Man” on its right, and went out of Ickleford at “Ickleford Gate” on the Hitchin road. This it crossed and went against the course of the River Oughton, which flowed and turned a mill a little below upon the left. At first it was a green-edged road of good surface, with hedges and telegraph posts, making for the downs, for Telegraph Hill, Deacon Hill, and Tingley Wood, between Pirton[129] and Lilley. But at the mill, its modern use gone, the road was once more a broad, green way dipping with many ruts down among the willowy buttercup meads of the Oughton. Doves cooed; blackcaps poured out their cool, fiery wine of melody; and the cattle meditated about nothing under the elms. The road was rising again, crossed the Pirton and Hitchin road at Punch’s Cross, and entered through the gate of an oat-field, travelling along its hedge and out by another gate. At Punch’s Cross it became a parish boundary, which it ceased to be at the River Hiz. Up on the right above the ploughland lay Tingley Wood and a beech clump. On the left charlock and corn divided by elms and hedges extended to a wall of low wooded hills. Out of the field the way was a green-hedged lane entered under the rustling welcome of beech trees. Then it became part of the main road from Barton-in-the-Clay to Hitchin, and at the turning southward to Offley a boundary between Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. This part of the road was partly on a terrace along the side of a hill sloping to the south, and there were roses and traveller’s joy buds in the hedges. At one point the land on the left had apparently been too steep to enclose at its lower side, and the hedge was at the top of this steep portion, which was therefore a broad, rough triangle of open turf beside the road. Beyond this the way had good grass banks or level margins with hazel and thorn hedges, and ash or elm trees above them. It was drawing near to a rough and thorny chalk hill called Deacon Hill, and as it was bent on[130] climbing over this range, the modern road left it, and, going westward, avoided the heights above three hundred feet. The Icknield Way took a south-westerly course, and mounted steeply up as a green, almost rutless lane between high hedges. It was green and even as soon as it left the hard road, and now for the first time made a real bold ascent of the chalk. It looked more like a part of the Ridgeway, but for the high hedges, than the[131] unadventurous road that I travelled from Thetford. There were daisies all over it, and roses hung upon either side. Nearing the hill-top it narrowed, and had steep banks on the left with brambles and thorns over them. But right to the top it kept those high hedges. Below on the right lay a neat, green-hedged vale and a long, gentle slope covered with woods or horizontal lines of trees up to a straight low ridge. Telegraph Hill, which the road crossed, is over six hundred feet high. It is difficult to understand why it should make this climb instead of circumventing the hill by a sharp curve southward. It never again does such a thing or rises to such an altitude. At the summit a green ridgeway leaves it. It was easy to glide into this and wind with it to Lilley Hoo and Lilley. The track was a hedgeless, green band among thistles and isolated thorns, glittering dark hollies, and ash trees. Here and there the sheep rested in the shade of a little bramble and thorn thicket, where an oak or ash buried its trunk, and roses climbed. The clear, high tinkling of the bells on still wandering sheep was almost as gay as if the bells were on dancers’ feet. The turf on the track was the finest, and was bounded by a tussocky line on one side, if not both. And so it serpentined on the high, flat back of the hills, always among old, isolated thorns or small, clear-cut thickets.

On Telegraph Hill.

But this was not the Icknield Way, which went straight over Telegraph Hill, and steeply and deeply worn, down to a green lane on[132] the other side, where it was joined on the left by another track descending from a little tumulus with two thorns on it. The green lane winding south-westward was broad, but the spread of the beeches on its left side was broader and roofed it wholly; the turf was better when this line of trees came to an end. Suddenly a chalk pit on the left narrowed it, and this narrowness had been continued on, and used for wheat as far as the next turning. Thenceforward it widened, and had rough hedges of elder and nettles, holly and ash, between it and the undulating corn. In front bulked the smooth ridge of Galley Hill. Past the turning to Offley there were four or five tracks parallel but on different levels, with an embanked one in the centre. Soon it was again on the turf of the Downs, curving around the right base of Galley Hill, the open land on the left, hedges and fields on the right; past the hill there were two hedges and ploughed land on either hand. Hereby was the entrance into Bedfordshire. Then it came almost at right angles to the straight mound of Dray’s Ditches, but turned to the right along it, followed by the parish boundary into the Luton and Bedford road. If, instead of going alongside the ditches, I had gone straight ahead upon the line of the way, I should have struck this road at the sixteenth milestone, and at the opposite turning to Leagrave which I actually took. The boundary, on the other hand, went on over the main road towards Houghton. The road down to Leagrave was an ordinary hedged road with narrow, green[133] edges. After passing a little copse on the left I turned on the same side, by an ash a century old, into a broad green track to Limbury. It had hedges, but that on the left strayed away round a huge rushy space. Beyond this was the clean orange wall of a sand pit, and then a green field, and then the tree-tops, and the crowd of roofs and the tall chimneys of Luton, and in the midst a tower above all the rest. But the hedge returned and the way narrowed, and it had to cross Leagrave Marsh and the tiny Lea. There was a choice of road or path. Entering the brand-new, jerry-built, slated cages of combined Limbury and Leagrave Marsh, I turned to the right along Limbury Road, and found on my left the Icknield Way, giving its name to an estate and a new street.

Leagrave Marsh was evidently a pleasant little ford village before it became what it now seems to be—a safety-valve for Luton. The harsh, new streets led me to a rushy common threaded by the Lea, and bounded on my side by a road that crossed the stream with a bridge. At one side of the bridge the “Three Horse Shoes” faced over the common and along the water; ponies, traps, and dogs were clustered at the door in the sun. Their owners were either inside, getting hot, or lying on the grass over the way. But one driver was taking his horse and trap through the stream close to the bridge; and the whipped foam was shining and the spokes flashing. Some boys were paddling a little way above; and above them the village geese were nibbling among the rush tufts. In and out among[134] horses and traps, men, dogs, boys, and geese, the martins were flying.

The Icknield Way went between the new houses and across the Midland Railway and so down a field rotten-ripe for building into Oak Road, which leads from old Leagrave into the Luton and Dunstable road. This road interrupted my way, which went formerly as a footpath straight across it and into the main road a little west of the Half-way House, between Dunstable and Luton. This path was ploughed up and its course only in part noticeable among the crops. The Luton and Dunstable road now looked like a river and the footpath a tiny brooklet whose drying up made no difference to the main stream. But in Robert Morden’s map of 1695 the “Icnal Way” is a clear, good road past Leagrave and into Dunstable, while the road to that town from Luton is parallel with the “Icnal Way,” and apparently the same as the road and footpath running half a mile south of the present road and just south of the Hatfield, Luton, and Dunstable branch of the Great Northern line. This main road was a substantial, broad, straightforward highway running along level ground and parallel to the downs on its left. There were a few beeches in its low hedges, and the margins of grass were of the ordinary width and rich in dust. Three or four miles of the clear hills, here and there crowned by trees, curved alongside and then slightly across my course. Opposite the turning to Houghton the lime works of Blow’s Down broke the green wall with white.
 
Dunstable Downs.

As I entered Dunstable there was already a touch of night in the light, and it fell with a sad blessing upon the low-towered church and the sheep grazing in the churchyard up above the road on my left. The crossing of the Icknield Way and Watling Street makes Dunstable. Watling Street was wider and had the town hall, the post office, the bigger shops, and the chief inns. The Icknield Way, known[136] first as Church Street, then as West Street, was the more rustic, humble, and informal, and beyond the crossing it had trees by its side; and this seemed natural and just. It had become thoroughly suburban before leaving the town and coming to the smooth high downs on the left, where children were playing and girls walking about above a field of barley and charlock beside the road. On my right there was a wide border of level down turf and no hedge between it and the corn. The downs, or I should say the Chiltern Hills, proceeded majestically southward, but six or seven miles away advanced somewhat to the east, half clothed in woods, until the bare Beacon Hill stopped steep and abrupt above a high plateau of cornland which fell away into a broad, wooded lowland on my right. Round this Beacon I could see that my road would bend; I thought I could see the ledge it must follow. In that lower land on my right there were several rises. Such was the smooth, easy sweep of Toternhoe, close to Luton; such the wooded heave upon which rose the dark, noble tower of Edlesborough Church; and such the terraced hill near Edlesborough, with a few thorns on the slopes between the terraces, and at its foot a long, neat orchard of late plums or “prunes.” The broad, wayside strip on the right hand sometimes showed the old course of my way much below the level of the present road; and after Well Head this lower course was beyond and below the modern hedge. On the left, at Well Head, I noticed a little hill on this side of the main ridge very prettily terraced, with thorns on the[137] slopes between the terraces. At Well Head a deep, smooth-sided cleft winds away to Dolittle Mill, with the first waters of the Ouse. A similar cleft a mile or so beyond, at the Cross Waters, close to the entrance into Buckinghamshire, carries water to the mills of Eaton Bray. As I came out of Dunstable I thought there could be nothing there equal to the sweep of the downs before me, ending in the wooded Ivinghoe Hills and the Beacon. But when I had gone more than half-way towards the end of the sweep I looked back and saw that the downs behind me were equal to those I was approaching, and even advanced a little out of the straight like the others, ending also in a promontory above Dunstable. The air was now still and the earth growing dark and already very quiet. But the sky was light and its clouds of utmost whiteness were very wildly and even fiercely shaped, so that it seemed the playground of powerful and wanton spirits knowing nothing of earth. And this dark earth appeared a small though also a kingly and brave place in comparison with the infinite heavens now so joyous and so bright and out of reach. I was glad to be there, but I fell in with a philosopher who seemed to be equally moved yet could not decide whether his condition was to be described as happiness or melancholy. He talked about himself. He was a lean, indefinite man; half his life lay behind him like a corpse, so he said, and half was before him like a ghost. He told me of just such another evening as this and just such another doubt as to whether it was to be put down to the account of [139] happiness or melancholy. He said that he had been digging all day in a heavy soil, often jarring the fork against immovable flints, lifting more often than not a weight of clay only just short of the limit of his strength. He had thought and thought until his brain could do nothing but remain aware of dull misery and the violent shocks of the hard work. But his eyes saw the sun go down with a brief pomp of crimson soon covered up by funereal drifts, and these in their turn give way to a soft blue, full of whitest stars and without one cloud. They saw the far hills once more take on their night look of serene and desolate vastness, and felt the meadows of the valley become dark and uncertain, the woods much duller but distinct. The woods immediately below him on the hill-side thickened and appeared more wild and impossible; the road winding up between them like a long curl of smoke was wholly concealed. Slowly the solid world was whittled away. The lights of the small town half-way across the valley, towards the hills, came out.

Beacon Hill, Ivinghoe.

As an owl in the woods announced the triumph of night with one large, clear note, he straightened himself slowly and painfully among the clods. It would have been easier to continue his toil than to do this, but he did it, and then cleaned the prongs of his upright fork with the toe of his boot, prolonging the action as if he either hoped to arrive now at some significant conclusion with its help or feared the next step that had to be taken. When he could no longer clean the prongs he raised his head and looked out beyond the woods over the valley to the[140] far hills. The quiet, the magnitude of space, the noble lines of the range a little strengthened his spirit. He remained still. The surface of his hands was dry to brittleness; he was stiff and yet unsatisfied with the result of his labour; he felt the dulness of his eyes; and no thing or person in the world or out of it came into his mind with any conscious delight or quickness; yet he still looked along the ridges of the hills from one end to the other, from star to star, without a thought save the sleeping, underlying one that he was growing old.

A motor-car climbed nervously up the invisible hill-road, the lamps of it darting across a hundred little spaces between one tree and another of the vague woods. It left the silence stronger than ever.

The man leaned with his chest upon his hands, which were upon the handle of his fork. Only a few years ago—either three or four—he could not have ascertained by any searching of memory—he had been young, and treated with contempt or with pitiful kindness by those of more years. But now he had come by unknown ways to feel that he differed from mature men, not by anything positive that could be called youth, but only by some undefinable lack which condemned him to a kind of overblown immaturity. Thus when he consciously or unconsciously demanded a concession such as might be due to youth for some act or attitude, he met, in the individual or in society in some corporate form or other, a blankness or positive severity at which he recoiled with open but as yet uncertainly comprehending eyes. Of young men he was now[141] sometimes jealous; of middle-aged men afraid and no longer defiant. Towards the contemporaries with whom he had shared thought and experience for some years he felt jealousy, if he seemed to have outstripped them in the unwilling race; fear, if it was himself that lagged; and towards only one or two a fair and easy freedom, and that only intermittently. Therefore no more destitute and solitary man looked that night on the stars. Yet they were as bright and the hills under them as noble as those we saw to-day on the road from Dunstable.

Suddenly he awakened and thrilled to the sound of a woman’s voice singing alone somewhere away from where he stood. He forgot who and where he was. He was no longer weary and muddied by self-supporting thoughts. His imagination went out of him and grasped each note simply and boldly. Where there had been nothing, there the liquid voice mounted in its beautiful, unseen form amidst the darkness. The singer was among the dark trees, probably in the climbing road to one side of him; the curve of that ascent, always a thing of simplicity and nobleness, was now glorious, romantic as it soared out of the valley to the clear heights.

Either the singer was walking slowly up or she was riding, but no footfall or turn of wheel was to be heard. It was a powerful voice, confident and without care. It leapt up with a wild, indolent flight, for one short verse of indistinguishable words, in a melody exulting in the wildness of love and pride of youth, and then fell upon silence. That silence bore its part also.
 
But the listener had no sooner lost the first joy over the insurrection of melody, begun to consider—whilst waiting breathless for its return—who she might be, what she was doing now, whether a lover was walking beside her, when she sang again, higher up the road. The first note rose up to the highest stars, clear and fresh and having a power like light over the gloom. Other notes hovered after it at the same height, and then with one swoop as of an eagle fell to the earth and silence before even a verse was finished. A low laugh drawn out very long an instant afterwards confirmed the first impression of the singer’s ease and joyousness. The man could see her neck lifted eagerly and her eyes flashing towards the lover or towards the stars, her lips parted, her breast heaving with deep draughts of the night and passion, her feet pacing with languid strength. He himself stood still as any tree in the ebb of the wind.

Oh, for a horse to ride furiously, for a ship to sail, for the wings of an eagle, for the lance of a warrior or a standard streaming to conquest, for a man’s strength to dare and endure, for a woman’s beauty to surrender, for a singer’s fountain of precious tones, for a poet’s pen!

He trembled and listened. The silence was unbroken; not a footstep or whisper was to be extracted from it by his eager and praying ear. He shivered in the cold. The last dead leaves shook upon the beeches, but the silence out there in that world still remained. She was walking or she was in her lover’s arms, for aught he knew. No sound[143] came up to him where he stood eager and forlorn until he knew that she must be gone away for ever, like his lyric desires, and he went into his house and it was dark and still and inconceivably empty.

As I turned into the inn and left him he was inclined either to put down that evening half to happiness and half to melancholy, or to cross out one or other of those headings as being in his case tautological.

The landlady at my inn was the first that ever told me outright, at once, and without being asked, what she charged for a bed, and as the sum was reasonable I was doubly pleased. She was a jaunty, probably childless London woman not far from forty, who referred to her husband as “my sweetheart.” She had a skittish, falsetto laugh, whether she was talking to me about their old horse John and all his merits, or to the labourers about such and such a “sweet old house” in the neighbourhood. They were speaking of the coronation bonfire that was building on the Beacon Hill, and she became important and full of reminiscences of the Hampstead Heath bonfire, and, thereanent, the Spaniards, Vale of Health, and so on. She hovered between them and me, anxious to tell me that much as she liked a country life she missed the gas and the bathroom of a London house. Now and then she left us all, to talk to the parrot in a loud voice intended for mankind as well as Polly. Her “sweetheart” turned out to be a little active man, superficially jaunty but silent and brooding and hanging down his head. He was sandy-haired with dull, restless, blue eyes, and had not recently been[144] shaved. His turned-out feet stepped quickly hither and thither. He was dressed anyhow and as if he slept in his clothes to ensure a fit; a white scarf was tied round his neck and his trousers were turned up. He carried a cigarette either in the corner of his mouth or behind his ear. He was one of those creatures provided by an almighty providence for attending on that “noble animal” (such he called it) the horse; but this did not prevent him from calling his own horse John “old son.” He never carried a whip, because, he said, he did not believe in hurting “dumb animals.” A man who knows horses well is equally at home in town or country, and though this man was as full-blooded a Cockney as his wife, he was, like her, contented with his three or four years of country solitude; it was, he said, a “happy life, yes, a happy life,” better than what we had learnt to call the “bustle and confusion” of London. I asked him about the Icknield Way, which he knew by that name, and he told me that it was a Roman road and that he had heard a man could walk on it for twelve months and come back to the same place again. What that place was he did not say; probably he meant any place and imagined that the road made a circuit of this island or belike of the great globe itself. There could be no better landlord and landlady of a small wayside inn with one horse, one trap, and one spare bed. The bed was clean and comfortable, and I fell asleep in it while the stone-curlews were piping on the downs and a pair of country wheels were rolling by, late and slow.