CHAPTER XII
INGLE-NOOKS
The chimney-corners of the old rustic inns, in which the gossips lingered late on bitter winter nights, have ever formed an attraction for writers of the historic novel. There is no more romantic opening possible than that of the village inn, with the spiced ale warming on the hearth, and the rustics toasting their toes in the ingle-nook, what time the wind howls without, roars in the trees, like the roaring of an angry sea, and takes hold of the casements and shakes and rattles them, as though some outcast, denied admittance, would yet force his way into the warmth and comfort, out of the cheerless night. The warring elements, and the gush of wind and driven snow following the opening of the door and the entrance from time to time of other recruits for the ingle-nook, would make that cosy corner seem, if possible, only the more desirable.
THE INGLE-NOOK, “WHITE HORSE” INN, SHERE.
In fact, there is no more sure way of engrossing a reader from the very first page than that of beginning on this note. He feels that something melodramatic is in the wind, and pokes the fire, snuggles up in his arm-chair, and prepares to be thrilled. The thrill is generally not long in coming, for there was never—or, well, hardly ever—any romantic novel where an ingle-nook occurs in which we do not presently find the advent of the inscrutable and taciturn stranger who, after calling, “Ho! landlord, a tankard of your best,” relapses into a bodeful and gloomy silence, and piques the curiosity, and at the same time chills the marrow, of the assembled company, and may turn out to be anything you please, according to the period, from a king in disguise to a burglar on his way to crack some lonely crib.
Most of the ingle-nooks are gone, and modern fire-places are installed in their stead, conferring upon the survivors an additional measure and esteem of respect in these times of a reaction in favour of the old English domestic arrangements. One of the finest of these surviving examples is that of the “White Horse” at Shere, an old-world inn in midst of an equally old-world village. Shere is the most picturesque of those rural villages—Wotton, Abinger Hatch, Gomshall, Shere, Albury and Shalford—strung along the road that runs, lovely, under the southern shoulders of the bold South Downs, between Reigate and Guildford. Modern times have passed it by, and the grey Norman church, a huge and ancient tree, and the old “White Horse,” have a very special quiet nook to themselves. One would not like to hazard too close a guess as to the antiquity of the “White Horse,” whose sign is perhaps the only new thing about it—and that is a picturesque acquisition. The inn is, of course, not of the Norman and early English antiquity of the church, but it was built, let us say, “once upon a time”; which sounds vaguely impressive, and in doing so begins to do justice to the old-world air of the inn. The fine ingle-nook pictured here is to be found in the parlour, and is furnished, as usual in such hospitable contrivances, with a seat on either side and recesses for mugs and glasses. A fine array of copper kettles and brass pots, candlesticks and apothecaries’ mortars, together with an old sampler, runs along the wide beam, and on the hearth are a beautiful pair of fire-dogs and an elaborate cast-iron fireback.
A good ingle-nook, rather obscured by the alterations and “improvements” of late years, is to be found in a low-ceilinged little front room at the “Anchor,” Ripley, with a highly ornate fireback; and at the “Swan,” Haslemere, we have the ingle-nook in perhaps its simplest and roughest expression, rudely brick-and-timber built and plastered, with an exiguous little shelf running along the beam, and above that a gunrack. The simple fire-dogs are entirely in character, and have probably been here almost as long as the ingle-nook itself.