I
August holiday-makers in Windlecombe are mainly of the normal, obvious kind, the people for whom guide-books and picture postcards are produced, and by whom the job-masters and the boat proprietors gain a livelihood. But September brings to the village a wandering crew of an altogether different complexion. There is something about the temperate sunshine and general slowing up and sweetening of life during this month, that draws from their hiding-nooks in the city suburbs a class of man and woman for whom I have long entertained the profoundest respect. With every year, as soon as September comes round, I find myself looking out for these stray, for the most part solitary, folk, and, in quite a humble, unpretentious spirit, taking them beneath my avuncular wing.
That they seek the quiet of an inland village in September, and not the feverish, belated distractions of the seaside town, is an initial point in their favour. But almost invariably they bring with them a much more subtle recommendation. They are down for a holiday, but they have come entirely without premeditation. Suddenly yielding to a sort of migratory impulse, they have locked up dusty chambers, or left small shops to the care of wives, or begged a few precious days from niggardly employers; and come away on a spate of emotional longing for country quiet and greenery, irresistible this time, though generally the impulse has been felt and resisted every autumn for twenty years back. Indeed, there must be some specially fatal quality about this period of time, for I constantly hear the same story—no holiday taken for twenty years.
At noon to-day, after a long tramp through the fields, I came up the village street, and paused irresolutely outside the Three Thatchers Inn. The morning had been hot, and the walk tiring; moreover, it was the first of September, and the guns had been popping distressfully in all the coverts by the way. I knew that before sundown a brace or two of partridges would be certain to find their road to my door; but this did not prove, and never has proved, compensation for the flurry and disturbance carried by the noise of the guns into all my favourite conning-places, or arenas for quiet thought. The whole world of wild life was in a panic, and I with it.
The red-ochred doorstep of the inn glowed in the sunshine at my feet, and from the cool darkness beyond came a chink of glasses and murmur of many tongues. It all seemed eminently consolatory for the moment’s mood. Within there, no one would fire a gun off at my ear, nor stalk past me with a shoulder-load of limp, sanguinary spoil, nor warn me out of my favourite coppices with a finger to the lip, as though a nation of babies slumbered within. I was a lost man even before I began to hesitate. I stood my stout furze walking-stick in the porch beside a drover’s staff, a shepherd’s crook, and three or four undenominational cudgels; and plunged down the two steps into the bar.
Now, before my eyes had accustomed themselves to the subdued light, and I could see what company was about me, I had become aware of a strange odour in the air. It was the scent of a tobacco, happily unknown in Windlecombe: neither wholly Latakia nor Turkish, not honeydew alone nor red Virginia, cavendish nor returns, but a curious internecine blend of all these. I knew it at once to be something for which I have a constitutional loathing—one of the new town mixtures, wherein are confused and mutually stultified all the good smoking-weeds in the world.
Looking more narrowly about me, after the usual greetings, I discovered a vast and elaborate meerschaum pipe in the corner, and behind it a little diffident smiling man. But this could not entirely account for the overpowering exotic reek in the room. I missed the familiar smell of our own good Windlecombe shag, although there were half a dozen other pipes in full blast round me. And then I realised the situation. The stranger had seduced all the company to his pestilent combination; and now, as I lowered at him through the haze, he was holding out his pouch even to me, who would not have touched his garbage if it had been the last pipe-fill left on earth. But he took my curt, almost surly refusal as if it were an intended kindness.
‘Ah! you do not smoke? Well: it does seem a kind of insult to the pure country air. But in towns, you know, what with the din and the dust, and the strain on one’s nerves, everybody— And of course I must not quarrel with my bread-and-butter!’
I produced my own pipe and pouch, and filled brutally under his very nose. Serenely he watched the operation, and without a trace of offence.
‘I am in the trade, as I was telling these gentlemen here when you came in. Do you know the Walworth Road, in London? My shop is just behind the Elephant, and any day you are passing, I— But wasn’t I glad to get away, if only for the few hours! And I do assure you, sir, I haven’t been out of London for nearly—nearly—’
‘Twenty years, I suppose?’
He looked at me in placid surprise.
‘Lor’, how did you know that now? But it is quite true. Being single-handed, you see, it isn’t easy to— But I was glad, I tell you! And I had never seen a real country village in my life, until I got out of the train at Stavisham and walked on here. Isn’t it quiet! And how funny it seems—no asphalt-paving, and no wires running all ways over the house-tops, and the singing-birds all loose in the trees! And flowers! I suppose there is a law to prevent people picking ’em: there were no end along by the road I came.’
Somehow my heart warmed to this inconsiderable by-product of civilisation that had strayed amongst us; and presently, as much to my own surprise as his, I found myself loitering down the hill again, with him at my elbow, having promised to show him that there were other flowers in the country beside the dust-throttled daisies and dandelions of the roadside.
We took the path that runs between the river and the wood. He soon let his pipe go out, for he moved in open-mouthed wonder all the way, which rendered smoking impracticable. At last we came to a bend in the river, where the bank sloped gently down to the water-side covered with all the rich-hued September growths, and we sat down to rest. I did not plague him with the names of things, nor with any talk at all; but lay, for the most part silently, watching the effect of the place upon him, as one might study the demeanour of a dormouse let loose amidst the like surroundings, straight from Ratcliff Highway.
He took off coat and hat, and sat quite still for awhile with legs drawn up, and his chin upon his knees. But presently he fell to wandering about like a child, ducking his pallid bald head over each flower as he came to it, but keeping his itching fingers resolutely clasped behind his back. It was a brave show, even for this brave time of year. Though other months afford perhaps a greater variety in colour and kind, Nature in early autumn seems more forceful and impressive because she concentrates her energies into the dealing of the one blow, the urging of the one appeal upon the colour sense. It was the Purple Month. Look where we would, the same royal colour filled the sunshine. Purple loosestrife edged the river, and purple knapweed, thistles, heather, purple thyme and willowherb and climbing vetch hemmed us in on every side. Paler of hue, yet still of the same regal dye, the wild mint and cranesbill, marjoram and calamint, crowded upon one another; and close to the water’s edge, the Michaelmas daisies were already in full flower—under both banks the soil was tinged with their pure cool lilac, mirrored again yet more faintly in the drowsy water below.
For half an hour, perhaps, the little tobacconist wandered up and down this enchanted place; and then he came back to me, treading on tiptoe, hushed, and solemn-eyed, as if he were in church.
‘You live hereabouts?’ he asked, in a voice little above a whisper, ‘all the year round, don’t you? And nothing to do but just put on a hat whenever you want to come here, and in ten minutes here you are! Nothing to pay, and no trouble. Oh, my stars!’
‘And it is not always the same, you know. I pass this way nearly every week, and there is always something different. The flowers change with every month. You hear different birds singing, according to the season. The leaves on the trees come and go, and the sky shows you a new picture every time you look at it. Even the river changes. It is the top of the tide now: that log, floating out there, has not moved a dozen feet in the last five minutes. But in an hour’s time the water will be driving down swift and strong, and all the reeds and rushes, that now stand up quite straight and still in the sunshine, will bending and trembling in the flow.’
‘Ah!’ He crowded a perfectly bewildering variety of emotions into the breathed monosyllable. ‘Is that a nightingale singing over there?’
‘No; you are too late for nightingales: they have done singing these two months and more. That is a robin. The robins have just begun to sing again after their summer silence; and when that happens, you know the summer is almost done.’
He sat now mute at my side for so long, that at last I must steal a glance at him. I saw him brush a hand hastily across his eyes.
‘I—I am glad I came, of course,’ said he, musing, ‘but—but I have been the worst kind of fool all the same. Just think of going back there to-night! Lor’! just think of it! Yesterday morning I watered the geraniums in the window-boxes, and gave the canary his seed; and, says I, “Here’s singing-birds and flowers, as good as any you’ll get in the country!” Then I went to the shop door, and saw a cart full of straw going by, and another of green cabbages for Boro’ Market. “Lor’!” I says, “the country comes on wheels to your very door in London! London for me!” And now I’ll never get that feeling back again, no, never! The very worst kind of fool, I don’t think!’
Close by us there grew a great tuft of valerian. As he sat staring tragically at its disc of deep red blossom, butterflies came to it with every moment, sipped awhile, then passed on. Painted ladies, red admirals, little tortoiseshells always in twos or threes; finally a peacock butterfly sailed over to the valerian and settled there, her rich colours aflare in the sunshine. She spread out her great vanes, the upper covering the lower. Then she gently slid her upper wings forward, and gradually the wonderful spots on the lower wings appeared, like a pair of slowly opening, drowsy, violet eyes. The little tobacconist breathed hard.
‘I can see it all clear enough,’ he said tremulously. ‘A man gets a real chance here. Come worry, come sickness, come bad luck, come anything you like—all you have got to do is to open your eyes and ears, and off it goes like the bundle of sins in the Pilgrim’s Progress book. But in London—’ He stopped short; then, in a tone of deep, despairing disgust, ‘Geraniums!—Canaries!—Cartloads of cabbages! bah!’
I had not found myself confronted by so difficult a proposition for many a long day. If only the Reverend had been there! But there was nothing for it but to try a joust with the situation alone.
‘Depend upon it,’ said I, ‘if coming amongst the beautiful natural things of the world has made you despise the mean, ugly, necessary parts of your life, then you have been a fool indeed—one of the worst kind. But are you really the sort of fool you think? And have you not overstated both cases alike? In neither town nor country is there all of good, or all of evil. There are plenty of geraniums and cabbages in Windlecombe, and—alas!—canaries. And in London there is plenty of beauty, if you look for it with the right eyes.’
‘Beauty?—in London?’ he repeated incredulously.
‘Yes, truly; and the people who see it, and enjoy it most, are just those people who have the deepest knowledge of, and love for, the natural things of the country-side. Now, shall I tell you what sort of a fool you really are?’
He thought a moment, eyeing me in some perplexity. ‘Well—yes,’ said he at last, ‘if it isn’t too much trouble.’
‘It is a lot of trouble, and I am not sure I can do it. But I will try. Did you ever hear of the saying, “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise?”’
‘No: I can’t say that I ever—’
‘Well, you have fallen right into that trap. You have given yourself twenty years of that kind of bliss, and now you have got to pay for it. But what was it made you start off this morning in such a hurry to get to the country, when only yesterday you were quite content with your window-boxes and your screeching yellow gewgaw?’
He considered a little, then blushed to his eyes.
‘It was an old book,’ he said mysteriously, looking round apparently to make certain we were alone, ‘nothing but an old book on a bookstall. I picked it up just out of curiosity as I went by last night, and there were some dried flowers in it—dog-roses, I think. And then I looked up and saw the moon shining very small and bright high up in the sky; and it came over me that though she kept one eye dutifully on the Walworth Road, with the other eye she might well be looking down on the country lane where those roses grew years ago. And thinks I, all of a creep, like, Why can’t a man look two ways at once; and if he must give one eye to business, why can’t he give the other to just what he likes? And then I—’
‘And then you certainly left off being the kind of fool I mean—left off for ever. Well: that saves us both a lot of trouble, for we are both wrong about your case, it seems. You need not fear to go home to-night. You will find those geraniums as fresh and sweet as the valerian there, and just as populous of butterflies. And the canary—you will hear in his song every morning the notes of all the wild birds that have sung to you to-day. And when next a wagonload of straw goes by your shop, it will not be mere straw, but a field of wheat under the country sunshine: the sound of the wind in the Walworth telephone wires will be for you only the rustle of wind in the corn. That is what I meant by London beauty.’