Mr Torrance openly objected to Ann’s epitaph for David Morgan, preferring his own choice of one from Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”:  
“And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?”
“But” said Mr Morgan, “Shelley was born only a hundred years ago, and died at thirty, I think that in the matter of mountains an older man is better.”
 
“But, father,” said Roland, “how do you know that Jeremiah was not drowned at thirty with a copy of ‘Ecclesiastes’ clasped to his bosom?”
 
“You read and see, my son,” answered Mr Morgan. “Shelley could not pass himself off as an old man, though you know he did once claim to be eighty-nine, and Jeremiah would not have pretended to be thirty. That is only my opinion. I prefer the prophet, like Ann.”
 
[113]
 
Mr Torrance muttered that anyone who preferred Jeremiah to Shelley had no right to an opinion. It was just like Mr Torrance. He was always saying foolish things and fairly often doing them, and yet we felt, and Mr Morgan once declared, that he had in him the imperishable fire of a divine, mysterious wisdom. After walking the full length of the Abbey Road, where he lived, to discover him smiling in his dark study, was sufficient proof that he had a wisdom past understanding.
 
Abbey Road was over two miles long. At its south end was a double signboard, pointing north “To London,” south “To Forden, Field, and Cowmore”; at its north end it ran into pure London. Every year the horse-chestnut branches had to be shortened in May because their new leaf smothered the signboard. As if anyone who had reached that point could wish to be directed to London! Almost as few could wish to know the way in order to avoid it. But the horse-chestnut had to suffer. It was fortunate in not being cut down altogether and carried away. The cemetery saved it. The acute angle between the Abbey Road and another was filled by a large new cemetery, and the tree was the first of a long line within its railings. Even[114] had the signboard been on the other side of the road it would have been as badly off among the tall thorns and stunted elms of the hedges. Behind this hedge was a waste, wet field, grazed over by a sad horse or two all through the year; for on account partly of the cemetery, partly of the factory which manufactured nobody quite knew what except stench, this field could not be let or sold. Along its far side ran a river which had no sooner begun to rejoice in its freedom to make rush and reed at pleasure on the border of the field than it found itself at the walls of the factory. Northward, past the cemetery and the factory, began the houses of Abbey Road, first a new house, occupied but with a deserted though not wild garden, and next to it a twin house, left empty. Then followed a sluttery of a few pairs or blocks of small houses, also new, on both sides of the road—new and yet old, with the faces of children who are smeared, soiled, and doomed, at two. They bordered on the old inn, “The Woodman’s Arms,” formerly the first house, having a large kitchen garden, and masses of dahlias and sunflowers behind. It lay back a good space from the road, and this space was gravel up to the porch, and in the middle of it stood a stone drinking trough.[115] Often a Gypsy’s cart and a couple of long dogs panting in the sun were to be seen outside, helping the inn to a country look, a little dingy and decidedly private and homely, so that what with the distance between the road and the front door, and the Gypsy’s cart, the passer-by was apt to go on until he came to an ordinary building erected for the sale of beer and spirits, and for nothing else. Such a one lay not much further on, beyond a row of cottages contemporary with “The Woodman’s Arms.” These had long narrow gardens behind wooden posts and rails—gardens where everything tall, old-fashioned, and thick grew at their own sweet will, almost hiding the cottages of wood covered in creeper. You could just see that some were empty, their windows smashed or roughly boarded up, and that others were waiting for some old woman to die before they also had their windows smashed or boarded up. The dahlias, the rose-of-Sharon, the sweet rocket, the snow-on-the-mountains, the nasturtiums, the sunflowers, flourished too thick for weeds to make headway, and so probably with small help from the inhabitants, the gardens earned many a wave of the whip from passing drivers. The row of cottages meant “the first bit of country,” with a sweep at one[116] end, a rat-catcher at the other, announced in modest lettering. Between the last of them and the new public-house a puddled lane ran up along old and thick, but much broken, hedges to the horse-slaughterer’s. “The Victoria Hotel” was built in the Jubilee year of that sovereign, and was a broad-faced edifice of brick with too conspicuous stone work round the windows and doorways and at the corners. The doors were many and mostly of glass. The landlord of “The Victoria” had no time to stand on his doorstep—whichever was his—like the landlord of “The Woodman”; moreover, all his doorsteps were right on the road, and he could have seen only the long row of cottages, by the same builder, which looked as if cut off from a longer, perhaps an endless row, with a pair of shears; while from the old inn could be seen grass sloping to the willows of the river, and a clump of elms hiding the factory chimneys. All the glass and brass of the “Victoria” shone spotless as if each customer out of the regiments in the crowded straight streets gave it a rub on entering and leaving.
 
Beyond the “Victoria” the road straightened itself after a twist, and was now lined by a hundred houses of one pattern but broken by[117] several branch streets. These were older houses of gray stucco, possessing porches, short flights of steps up to the doors, basements, and the smallest of front gardens packed with neglected laurel, privet, marigold, and chickweed. At the end of the hundred—at No. 367—a man walking “To London” would begin to feel tired, and would turn off the pavement into the road, or else cross to the other side where the scattered new shops and half-built houses had as yet no footway except uneven bare earth. On this side the turnings were full of new houses and pavements, and admitted the eye to views of the welter of slate roofs crowding about the artificial banks of the river which ran as in a pit. Of the branch streets interrupting the stucco hundred, one showed a wide, desolate, untouched field of more and more thistles in the middle, more and more nettles at the edge, and, facing it, a paltry miracle of brand-new villas newly risen out of a similar field; the second was the straight line of a new street, with kerb-stones neat and new, but not a house yet among the nettles; another, an old lane, was still bordered by tender-leafed lime trees, preserved to deck the gardens of houses to come. The lane now and then had a Gypsy’s fire in it for a few hours,[118] and somebody had told the story that Aurelius was born under one of the trees; to which Aurelius answered, “The trees and I were born about the same time, but a hundred miles apart.”
 
The stucco line gave way to a short row of brick houses, low and as plain as possible, lying well back from the road behind their split-oak fences, thorn hedges, laburnums and other fancy trees. Ivy climbed over all; each was neat and cheerful, but the group had an exclusive expression. Yet they had to look upon half-built shops and houses, varied by a stretch of tarred and barbed fence protecting the playing ground of some football club, whose notice board stood side by side with an advertisement of the land for building on leasehold; over the fence leaned an old cart-horse with his hair between his eyes.
 
There followed repetitions and variations of these things—inhabited houses, empty houses, houses being erected, fields threatened by houses—and finally a long, gloomy unbroken cliff of stained stucco. The tall houses, each with a basement and a long flight of steps up to a pillared porch, curved away to the number 593, and the celebrated “Horse-shoe Hotel” next door, which looked with dignity and still more[119] ostentation, above its potted bay-trees, on the junction of Abbey Road and two busy thoroughfares. Opposite the tall stucco cliff a continuous but uneven line of newish mean shops of every kind and not more than half the height of the private houses, curved to a public-house as large as the “Horse-shoe” which it faced.
 
As each rook knows its nest among the scores on the straight uniform beeches, so doubtless each inhabitant could after a time distinguish his own house in this monotonous series, even without looking at the number, provided that there was light and that he was not drunk. Each house had three storeys, the first of them bay-windowed, above the basement. Probably each was divided between two, or, like No. 497, between three, families. Who had the upper storeys I never knew, except that there was an old woman who groaned on the stairs, a crying baby and its mother, and some ............