"Twelve coffin deep," I quoted Kipling to myself, as my mind panted along Roman roads, and the Pilgrim's Way.
"Why, was there a cemetery there?" asked Mrs. Norton, looking mildly interested.
She, by the way, doesn't much care for ruins. She says they're so untidy.
You and I travelled till our money threatened to give out in the noble cause of sight-seeing, but I never realized history quite so potently even in Italy as I do in England. Yet that's not strange, when you think how tiny England is, compared with other countries, and how things have gone on happening there every minute since the Phœnicians found it a snug little island. Its chapters of history have to be packed like sardines, beginning down, down, far deeper than Kipling's "twelve coffins."
One Surrey village telleth another, just to slip through in a motor-car, though none could ever be tiresome in the telling; but if one stopped to hear the real story of each one, how different they would all be! There would be grand chapters of fighting, and mysterious chapters of smuggling—oh, but long ones about smuggling, since most of the manors and half the old cottages have "smugglers' rooms," where the lace and spirits used to be hidden, in their secret journey from Portsmouth to London. It's difficult to believe in these thrilling chapters now, in the rich, placid county, where the only mystery floats in the veil of blue mist that twists like a gauze scarf around the tree trunks in the woods, and the only black spots are the dark downs in the distance, with the sky pale gold behind them.
You would love motoring, not only for what you do see, but for what you nearly see, and long to see, but can't—just as Dad used to say "Thank God for all the blessings I've never had!" Why, every road you don't go down looks fantastically alluring, just twice as alluring as the one you are in. You grudge missing anything, and fear, greedily, that there may be better villages with more history beyond the line of your route. It's no consolation when Mrs. Norton says, "Well, you can't see everything!" You want to see everything. And you wish you had eyes all the way round your head. It would be inconvenient for hair and hats, but you could manage somehow.
We had to go through Petworth, a most feudal-looking old place, reeking of history since the Confessor, and mentioned in the Domesday Book (I do so respect towns or houses mentioned in the Domesday Book!), and if it had been the right day we could have seen Lord Leconsfield's collection of pictures, some of the best in England; but it was the wrong day, so we sailed on out of Surrey into Sussex, and arrived at Bignor.
All I knew about Bignor was that I must expect something amazing there. Sir Lionel asked me not to read about it in the books of which we have a travelling library in the car—one at least for each county we shall visit. He said he "wanted Bignor to be a surprise" for me; and it is odd the way one finds oneself obeying that man! Not that one's afraid of him, but—well, I don't know why exactly, but one just does it. We didn't stop in the village, though there was the quaintest grocery shop there you can imagine, perfectly mediæval; and in the churchyard yew trees grand enough to make bows for half the archers of England—if there were any in these days. We went on to quite a modern-looking farmhouse, and Sir Lionel said, "I am going to ask Mrs. Tupper if she will give us a little lunch. If she says 'yes,' it's sure to be good."
"I don't know any Tuppers, Lionel," objected Mrs. Norton. "Who are they?"
"Relatives of Martin Tupper, if that name recalls anything to your mind," said he.