“No,” I answered, adding what I could remember about the horse’s head over the corn chandler’s at Epsom. The Other Man had seen this, and also a similar one of white wood over a saddler’s at Dorking. He reminded me also of what I was engaged in forgetting—that Shalford had an inn called the “Sea-Horse,” and a signboard of a sea-horse with a white head and a fish-like body covered in azure scales. He said it was a better sea-horse than those over the Admiralty gates in Whitehall. Continuing, he asked me why it was that the chief inn of a town was so frequently the “Swan.” It was at Leatherhead. It was at Charing in Kent—I knew that. It was at a score of other places which I have forgotten. Nor could I remember a sufficient number of “Lions,” “Eagles,” and “Dolphins” to oppose him. Had I, was his next question, seen the “Ship” at Bishop’s Sutton, which had a signboard with a steamer on one side and a sailing ship on the other? And not long after this I was asleep.
IV.
FROM DUNBRIDGE OVER SALISBURY PLAIN.
Before the first brightening of the light on Sunday morning the rain ceased, and I returned to Dunbridge to pick up the road I had lost on Saturday evening. Above all, I wanted to ride along under Dean Hill, the level-ridged chalk hill dotted with yew that is seen running parallel to the railway a quarter of a mile on your left as you near Salisbury from Eastleigh. The sky was pale, scarcely more blue than the clouds with which it was here and there lightly whitewashed. For five miles I was riding against the stream of the river which rises near Clarendon and meets the Test near Dunbridge. The water and its alders, many of them prostrate, and its drab sedges mingled with intense green and with marsh-marigolds’ yellow, were seldom more than a hundred yards away on my right. Pewits wheeled over it with creaking wings and protests against the existence of man.
I did not stop for the villages. Butts Green, for example, where the Other Man had seen the fox weather-vane, began with an old thatched cottage and a big hollow yew, but the green itself was dull, flat, and bare, and the cottages round it newish. Lockerley Green, a mile farther on, was much like it, except that the road traversed instead of skirting the green. Between these two, and beyond Lockerley Church, where the road touched the river and had a fork leading across to East Tytherley, there was a small, but not old, mill, and a miller too, and flour. As I looked back the small sharp spire of the church stuck up over the level ridgy ploughland in a manner which, I supposed, would have made for a religious person a very religious picture. No other building was visible. The railway on my left was more silent than the river on my right, among its willow and alder and tall, tufted grass, at the foot of gorse slopes.
After crossing the railway half a mile past Lockerley Green the road went close to the base of Dean Hill, separated from it by ploughland without a hedge. On the left, that is on the Dean Hill side, stood East Dean Church, a little rustic building of patched brick and plaster walls, mossy roof, and small lead-paned windows displaying the Easter decorations of moss and daffodils. It had a tiny bell turret at the west end, and a round window cut up into radiating panes like a geometrical spider’s web. Under the yew tree, amidst long grass, dandelion, and celandine, lay the bones of people bearing the names Edney and Langridge. The door was locked. Its neighbours on the other side of the road were an old cottage with tiled roof and walls of herring-boned brick, smothered from chimney to earth with ivy, in a garden of plum blossom; and next to it, a decent, small home, a smooth clipped block of yew, and a whitewashed mud wall with a thatched coping. The other houses of East Dean, either thatched or roofed with orange tiles, were scattered chiefly on the right.
Presently I had the willows of the river as near me on the right as the green slope, the chalk pit, the sheep-folds, and yew trees of Dean Hill on the left; and the sun shone upon the water and began to slant down the hillside. The river was very clear and swift, the chalk of its bed very white, the hair of its waving weeds very dark green.
West Dean, where I entered Wiltshire, a mile from East Dean, is a village with a “Red Lion” inn, a railway station, a sawmill and timber-yard, and several groups of houses clustering close to both banks of the river, which is crossed by a road-bridge and by a white footbridge below. I went over river and railway uphill past the new but ivied church to look at the old farm-house, the old church, and the camp, which lie back from the road on the left among oaks and thickets. On that Sunday morning cows pasturing on the rushy fields below the camp, and thrushes singing in the oaks, were the principal inhabitants of West Dean. I did not go farther in this direction, for the road went north to West Tytherley and the broad woods that lie east of it, the remnant of Buckholt Forest, but turned back and west, and then south-west again on my original road, in order to be on the road nearest to Dean Hill. This took me over broad and almost hedgeless fields, and through a short disconnected fragment of an avenue of mossy-rooted beeches, to West Dean Farm. Nothing lay between the houseless road and the hillside, which is thick here with yew, except the broad arable fields, with a square or two given up to mustard flowers and sheep, and West Dean Farm itself. It is a house of a dirty white colour amidst numerous and roomy outbuildings, thatched or mellow-tiled, set in a circle of tall beeches. The road bends round the farm group and goes straight to the foot of the hill, and then along it. I went slowly, looking up at the yews and thorns on the green wall of the hill, and its slanting green trackway, and the fir trees upon the ridge. Linnets twittered in companies or sang solitarily on thorn tips. Thrushes sang in the wayside yews. Larks rose and fell unceasingly. The sheep-bells tinkled in the mustard. Away from the hill the land sloped gradually in immense arable fields, and immense grass fields newly rolled into pale green stripes, down to the river, and there rose again up to Hound Wood and Bentley Wood, where a white house shone pale in the north-east, four or five miles off.
For nearly two miles the road had not had a house upon it, and nothing separated me from the hill, the yew trees, and the brier and hawthorn thickets. In fact, West Dean Farm was the only house served by the three miles of road between West Dean and West Grimstead. Yet this did not save a chalk pit close to the road from being used as a receptacle for rubbish. Having reached the farm and the foot of the hill the road began to turn away again towards the river and to West Grimstead. It was a loose, flinty road, so that I had another reason for walking instead of riding. The larks that sang over me could not have wished for better dust baths than this road would make them, for the sun was gaining. It was almost a treeless road until I was close to West Grimstead, where there was an oak wood on the right, streaked with the silver of birch stems and tipped with the yellow flames of larches. The village consisted of a church, an inn called the “Spring Cottage,” and many thatched cottages scattered along several by-roads on either side. It ended in an old thatched cottage with outbuildings, at the verge of a deep sand pit full of sand-martins’ holes. When I had passed it I stopped at a gate and looked at the orange pit wall on the far side, the cottage above the wall, and the elm between the road and the pit. A thrush and several larks were singing, and through their songs I heard a thin voice that I had not heard for six months, very faint yet unmistakable, though I could not at once see the bird—a sand-martin. I recognized the sound, as I always recognize at their first autumnal ascent above the horizon the dim small cluster of the Pleiades on a September evening. On such a morning one sand-martin seems enough to make a summer, and here were six, flitting in narrow circles like butterflies with birds’ voices.
I went on and found myself in a flat land of oak woods and of fields that were half molehills and half rushes, and the hedge banks had gorse in blossom. It was here that I joined the Southampton and Salisbury road, a yellow road between the gorsy, rolling fragments of Whaddon Common, which came to an end at a plantation of pines on and about some mounds like tumuli on the right hand.