“We moved, and Martha with us. She had to wait still longer, because Mary was expecting another child. Mary was not so well as usual. She was very thin, and yet looked in a way younger than ever. Martha left us to devote herself to her sister. I went over once or twice: I wish now it had been oftener. Martha looked the same as ever. Mary grew still more frail, until, in a ghastly way, you could not see her body for her soul, as the poet says. Her husband being called away left her confidently in Martha’s hands.
“The nearest doctor was five miles off. She had to go for him suddenly in a night of winter thunder. The whole night was up in arms, the black clouds and the woods, the noises of a great wind and thunder trying to get the better of one another, and the rain drowning the lightning as if it had been no more than an eel in a dirty pond, and drowning thunder and the wind at last. When Martha reached the doctor’s house he was out. She found another, and having meekly delivered her message was gone before the man could offer to drive her back with him; but the horse was so helpless in the stormy, steep, crooked roads among the woods that he expected to find her there before him. When he arrived Mary was delirious, speaking of her sister, whom she seemed to see approaching and at last coming into the room; she cried out, ‘Martha!’ and never spoke again. Martha had not returned. The cowman found her lying on her face in the mire by a gateway, stopped in her swift, clumsy running by heart-failure, dead. Poor old Martha! but I have no doubt she was quite happy making for that green blind upstairs in her sister’s house, hastening half asleep, and only waking up as she stumbled over the stile. The world misses her—and her children.”
I had never met the surname before, and here upon a stranger’s tombstone it called up Martha like a mysterious incantation.
The tune of the telegraph wires became sadder, and I pushed on with the purpose of getting as far as possible before the rain fell. The road out of Alresford is dignified by a long avenue of elms, with a walk between, lining it on the right as far as the gate of Arlebury House. Opposite the last of the trees it was a pleasure to see on a wayside plot, where elms mingled with telegraph posts, a board advertising building sites, but leaning awry, mouldy, and almost illegible. Then the road went under the railway and bent south-westwards, while I turned to the right to follow a byway along the right bank of the Itchen, where there was a village every two or three miles, and I could be sure of shelter. The valley, a flat-bottomed marshy one, was full of drab-tufted grasses and new-leafed willows, and pierced by straight, shining drains. The opposite bank rose up rather steeply, and was sometimes covered with copse, sometimes carved by a chalk pit; tall trees with many mistletoe boughs grew on top. I got to Itchen Abbas, its bridge, mill, church, and “Plough,” all in a group, when the rain was beginning. I had not gone much further when it became clear that the rain was to be heavy and lasting, and I took shelter in a cart-lodge. There I was joined by a thatcher and a deaf and dumb labourer. The thatcher would talk of nothing but the other man, having begun by explaining that he could not be expected to say “Good-afternoon.” The deaf man sat on the straw and watched us. He was the son of a well-to-do farmer, but had left home because he did not get enough money and was in other ways imposed on. He had now been at the same farm thirty years. He was a good workman, understanding by signs what he had to do. Moreover, he could read the lips, though how he learnt—for he could neither read nor write—I do not know! Probably, said the thatcher, he knows what we are saying now. At half-past three the horses came in for the day. They had begun at half-past six; so, said the thatcher, “they don’t do a man’s work.” So we talked while the horses were stabled, and rain fell and it thundered, if not to the tune of “Greensleeves,” at least to that of blackbirds’ songs.
The sky was full and sagging, but actually rained little, when I started soon after four, and went on through the four Worthys,—on my left the low sweep of Easton Down, and the almost windowless high church wall among elms between it and the river; and on my right, arable country and pewits tumbling over it. Worthy Park, a place of lawns and of elms and chestnuts, adorned the road with an avenue of very branchy elms. At King’s Worthy, just beyond, I might have crossed over and taken the shortest way to Salisbury, that is to say, by Stockbridge. But, except at Stockbridge itself, there is hardly a house on the twenty miles of road, and either one inn or two. Evidently the sky could not long contain itself, and as I knew enough of English inns to prefer not arriving at one wet through, I determined to take the Roman road through Headbourne Worthy to Winchester. This brought me through a region of biggish houses, shrubberies, rookeries, motor cars, and carriages, but also down to a brook and a withy bed, and Headbourne Worthy’s little church and blunt shingled spire beside it. The blackbirds were singing their best in the hawthorns as I was passing, and in the puddles they were bathing before singing. Winchester Cathedral appeared and disappeared several times, and above it, slightly to the left, St. Catherine’s smooth hill and beechen crown. In one of these views I saw what I had never before noticed, that the top of the cathedral tower is apparently higher than the top of St. Catherine’s Hill.
Through the crowd of Winchester High Street I walked, and straight out by the West Gate and the barracks uphill. I meant to use the Romsey road as far as Ampfield, and thence try to reach Dunbridge. The sky was full of rain, though none was falling. It was a mile before I could mount, and then, for some way, the road was accompanied on the right by yew trees. Between these trees I could see the low, half-wooded Downs crossed by the Roman road to Sarum and by hardly any other road. The most insistent thing there was the Farley Tower, perched on a barrow at one of the highest points, to commemorate not the unknown dead but a horse called Beware Chalkpit, who won a race in 1734 after having leaped into a chalkpit in 1733. The eastern scene was lovelier: the clear green Downs above Twyford, Morestead, and Owslebury, four or five miles away; and then the half wooded green wall of Nan Trodd’s Hill which the road curves under to Hursley. But, first, I had to dip down to Pitt Village, which is a small cluster of thatched cottages, mud walls, and beech trees, with a pond and a bright white chalk pit, all at the bottom of a deep hollow. I climbed out of it and glided down under Nan Trodd’s Hill and its black yews, divided from the road only by a gentle rise of arable; and so, betwixt a similar but slighter yew-crowned rise and the oaks of Hursley Park, I approached Hursley. The first thing was a disused pump on the right, with an ivy-covered shelter and a fixed lamp; but before the first house there was a beech copse, and after that a farm and its attendant ricks and cottages, and at length the village. A single row of houses faced the park and its rookery beeches through a parallel row of pollard limes; but the centre was a double row of neat brick and timber houses, both old and new, a smithy, a doctor’s, and a “King’s Head” and “Dolphin.” Here also stood the spired church, opposite a branching of roads. At the beginning, middle, and end of the village, gates led into Hursley Park. And I think it was here that I saw the last oast-house in Hampshire.
Immediately after passing the fifth milestone from Winchester I turned with the Romsey road south-west instead of keeping on southward to Otterbourne. It was now darkening and still. I was on a low moist road overhung by oak trees, through which I saw, on the right, a mile away, the big many-windowed Hursley House among its trees. The road had obviously once had wide grassy margins. The line of the old hedge was marked, several yards within a field on the right, by the oaks, the primroses, and the moss, growing there and not beyond: in a wood that succeeded, it was equally clear. The primroses glimmered in the dank shadow of the trees, where the old hedge had been, and round the water standing in old wayside pits. In one place on the left, by Ratlake, the fern and gorse looked like common. Nobody was using the road except the blackbirds and robins. Hardly a house was to be seen. It might have been the edge of the New Forest. If the road could have gone on so, with no more rise and fall, for ever, I think I should have been content. The new church and its pine, and cypress, and laurel, intruded but did not break the charm. More to my taste was the pond on the other side; gorse came to its edge, oaks stood about it, and dabchicks were diving in its unrippled surface. The “White Hart” farther on tempted me. It lay rather below the road on the left, behind the yellow courtyard and the signboard, forming a quadrangle with the stables and sheds on either side. The pale walls and the broad bay window on the ground floor offered “Accommodation for Cyclists.” But I did not stop, perhaps because Ampfield House on the other side took away my thoughts from inns. This was an ivy-mantled brick house, like two houses side by side, not very far back from the road; its high blossoming fruit wall bounded the road. Travelling so easily, I was loth to dismount, and on the signpost on the right, near the third milestone from Romsey, I read MSBURY without thinking of Timsbury, which lay on my way to Dunbridge. I glided on for half a mile before thinking better of it, and turning back, discovered my mistake. Here I entered a gravelly, soft road among trees. I should have done well to put up in one of the woodmen’s shelters here under the oaks. These huts were frames of stout green branches thatched with hazel peelings and walled with fagots. One was built so that an oak divided its entrance in two, and against the tree was fastened a plain wooden contrivance for gripping and bending wood. Inside, it had other hurdlemaker’s implements—a high wooden horse for gripping and bending, and a low wooden table. White peelings were thickly strewn around the huts. The floor showed likewise such signs of life as cigarette ends, match-boxes, and a lobster’s claw. On Saturday evening a marsh-tit and a robin alone seemed to have anything to do with them. Nevertheless I went contentedly on between mossy banks, hedges of beech, rhododendrons, and woodlands of oak, beech, and larch, which opened out in one place to show me the fern and pine of Ganger Common. The earth was quiet, dark, and beautiful. The owl was beginning to hunt over the fields, while the blackbird finished his song. Pleasant were the yellow road, the roadside bramble and brier hoops, the gravel pits and gorse at corners. But the sky was wild, threatening the earth both with dark clouds impending and with momentary wan gleams between them, angrier than the clouds. Some rain sprinkled as I dipped down between roadside oaks and a narrow orchard to Brook Farm. Here the road forded a brook, and a lane turned off, with a gravelly bluff on one side, farmyard and ricks on the other. Up in the pale spaces overhead Venus glared like a madman’s eye. Yet the rain came to nothing, and for a little longer the few scattered house lights appearing and disappearing in the surrounding country were mysteriously attractive. And then arrived complete darkness and rain together, as I reached the turning where I could see the chimney stack of Michelmersh. I tried the “Malt House” on the left. They could not give me a bed because “the missus was expecting some friends.” I pushed on against wind and rain to the “Bear and Ragged Staff,” a bigger inn behind a triangle of rushy turf and a walnut tree. “Accommodation for Cyclists” was announced, which I always used to assume meant that there was a bed; but it does not. It was raining, hailing, and blowing furiously, but they could not give me a bed because they were six in family: no, not any sort of a bed. They directed me to the “Mill Arms” at Dunbridge. Crossing the Test by Kim Bridge Mill, the half-drowned fields smelt like the sea. The mill-house windows shone above the double water plunging away into blackness. Then, for a space, when I had turned sharply north-westward the wind helped me. Actually I was now at the third inn. They were polite and even smiling, but they informed me that I could by no means have a bed, seeing that the lady and gentleman from somewhere had all the beds. Nor could they tell me of a bed anywhere, because it was Easter and people with a spare room mostly had friends. Luckily a train was just starting which would bear me away from Dunbridge to Salisbury. I boarded it, and by eight o’clock I was among the people who were buying and selling fish and oranges to the accompaniment of much chaffing, but no bad temper, in Fish Row. And, soon, though not at once, I found a bed and a place to sit and eat in, and to listen to the rain breaking over gutters and splashing on to stones, and pipes swallowing rain to the best of their ability, and signboards creaking in the wind; and to reflect on the imperfection of inns and life, and on the spirit’s readiness to grasp at all kinds of unearthly perfection such, for instance, as that which had encompassed me this evening before the rain. At that point a man entered whom I slowly recognized as the liberator of the chaffinch on Good Friday. At first I did not grasp the connection between this dripping, indubitably real man and the wraith of the day before. But he was absurdly pleased to recognize me, bowing with a sort of uncomfortable graciousness and a trace of a cockney accent. His expression changed in those few moments from a melancholy and too yielding smile to a pale, thin-lipped rigidity. I did not know whether to be pleased or not with the reincarnation, when he departed to change his clothes.
This Other Man, as I shall call him, ate his supper in silence, and then adjusted himself in the armchair, stretching himself out so that all of him was horizontal except his head. He was smoking a cigarette dejectedly, for he had left his pipe behind at Romsey. I offered him a clay pipe. No; he would not have it. They stuck to his lips, he said. But he volunteered to talk about clay pipes, and the declining industry of manufacturing them. He seemed to know all about ten-inch and fifteen-inch pipes, from the arrival of the clay out of Cornwall in French gray blocks to the wetting of the clay and the beating of it up with iron rods; the rough first moulding of the pipes by hand, and the piercing of the stems; the baking in moulds, the scraping of rough edges by girls, down to the sale of the pipes in the two months round about Christmas to Aldershot, Portsmouth, and such places. These longer pipes, at any rate, have become chiefly ceremonious and convivial, though personally I have hardly ever seen them smoked except by literary people under thirty. No wonder that in one of the principal factories only one artist is left, as the Other Man declared, to pierce the stems with unerring thrust. It seemed to him wonderful that even one man could be found to push a wire up the core of a long thin stick of clay. He had never himself been able to avoid running the wire out at the side before reaching the end. The great man who always succeeded had once made him a pipe with five bowls.
He could not tell me why the industry is decaying. But two causes seem at least to have contributed. First, a great many of the men who used to smoke clays smoke cheap cigarettes. Second, those who have not taken to cigarettes smoke briar pipes. Cigarettes appear to give less trouble than pipes. Any one, drunk or sober, can light them and keep them alight. They can be put out at any moment and returned to the cigarette case or tucked behind the ear. Also, it is held by snobs as well as by haters of foul pipes that cigarettes are more genteel, or whatever the name is of our equivalent vice. But if a pipe is to be smoked, the briar is believed to cast some sort of faint credit on the smoker which the clay does not. That Tennyson used clays probably now only influences a small number of young men—and that but for a year or two—of a class that would not take to clays as a matter of course. A few others of the same class begin in imitation of labourer, sailor, or gamekeeper, with whom they have come in exhilarating contact; and, in turn, others imitate them. The habit so gained, however, is not likely to endure. Nearly every one sheds it, either because he really does not enjoy it, or he has for some reason to keep it in abeyance too long for it to be resumed, or he supposes himself to be conspicuous and prefers not to be.
In the first place he may have been moved partly by a desire to be conspicuous, to signalize his individuality by a visible symbol, but such can seldom be a conscious motive with the most self-conscious of men. For some years I met plenty of youths of my own age who were experimenting with clay pipes, nervously colouring small thorny ones, or lying back and making of themselves cushions for long churchwardens, or carrying the bowl of a two-inch pipe upside down like a navvy. But I was never much tempted myself until I went to live permanently in the country. As I was pretty frequently walking at lunch time I took that meal at an inn, and one day remembering that as a child I had got clays from a publican for nothing I asked for one with my beer, and got it. I shall not pretend that this pipe was in any way remarkable, for I have no recollection of it. All I know is that it was not the last. Most, if not all, of my briar pipes at the time were foul. I took more and more to smoking clay pipes when I was alone or where it would not attract attention.