The rain returned as I was crossing the railway bridge by Hayden’s Road station. It was raining hard when the gypsy left the “Sultan,” and still harder when I turned to the right along Merton Road. Rather than be soaked thus early, I took the shelter offered by a bird-shop on the left hand. This was not a cheerful or a pretty place. Overhead hung a row of cages containing chaffinches—battered ones at a shilling, a neater one at eighteen-pence—that sang every now and then,—
“My life and soul, as if he were a Greek.”
Inside the shop, linnets at half a crown were rushing ceaselessly against the bars of six-inch cages, their bosoms ruffled and bloody as if from the strife, themselves like wild hearts beating in breasts too narrow. “House-moulted” goldfinches (price 5s. 6d.) were making sounds which I should have recognized as the twittering of goldfinches had I heard them among thistles on the Down tops. Little, bright foreign birds, that would have been hardly more at home there than here, looked more contented. A gold-fish, six inches long, squirmed about a globe with a diameter of six inches, in the most complete exile imaginable. The birds at least breathed air not parted entirely from the south-west wind which was now soaking the street; but the fish was in a living grave. The place was perhaps more cheerless to look at than to live in, but in a short time three more persons took shelter by it, and after glancing at the birds, stood looking out at the rain, at the dull street, the tobacconist’s, news-agent’s, and confectioner’s shops alone being unshuttered. Presently one of the three shelterers entered the bird-shop, which I had supposed shut; the proprietor came out for a chaffinch; and in a minute or two the customer left with an uncomfortable air and something fluttering in a paper bag such as would hold a penn’orth of sweets. He mounted a bicycle, and I after him, for the rain had forgotten to fall. He turned up to the left towards Morden station, which was my way also. Not far up the road he was apparently unable to bear the fluttering in the paper bag any longer; he got down, and with an awkward air, as if he knew how many great men had done it before, released the flutterer. A dingy cock chaffinch flew off among the lilacs of a garden, saying “Chink.” The deliverer was up and away again.
For some distance yet the land was level. The only hill was made by the necessity of crossing a railway at Morden station. At that point rows of houses were discontinued; shops and public-houses with a lot of plate-glass had already ceased. The open stretches were wider and wider, of dark earth, of vegetables in squares, or florists’ plantations, divided by hedges low and few, or by lines of tall elm trees or Lombardy poplars. Not quite rustic men and women stooped or moved to and fro among the vegetables: carts were waiting under the elms. A new house, a gasometer, an old house and its trees, lay on the farther side of the big field: behind them the Crystal Palace. On my right, in the opposite direction, the trees massed themselves together into one wood.
It is so easy to make this flat land sordid. The roads, hedges, and fences on it have hardly a reason for being anything but straight. More and more the kind of estate disappears that might preserve trees and various wasteful and pretty things: it is replaced by small villas and market gardens. If any waste be left under the new order, it will be used for conspicuously depositing rubbish. Little or no wildness of form or arrangement can survive, and with no wildness a landscape cannot be beautiful. Barbed wire and ugly and cruel fences, used against the large and irresponsible population of townsmen, add to the charmless artificiality. It was a relief to see a boy stealing up one of the hedges, looking for birds’ nests. And then close up against this eager agriculture and its barbed wires are the hotels, inns, tea-shops, and cottages with ginger-beer for the townsman who is looking for country of a more easy-going nature. This was inhospitable. On many a fence and gate had been newly written up in chalk by some prophet: “Eternity,” “Believe,” “Come unto Me.”
I welcomed the fences for the sake of what lay behind them. Now it was a shrubbery, now a copse, and perhaps a rookery, or a field running up mysteriously to the curved edge of a wood, and at Morden Hall it was a herd of deer among the trees. The hedges were good in themselves, and for the lush grass, the cuckoo-pint, goose-grass, and celandine upon their banks. Walking up all the slightest hills because of the south-west wind, I could see everything, from the celandines one by one and the crowding new chestnut leaves, to the genial red brick tower of St. Laurence’s Church at Morden and the inns one after another—the “George,” the “Lord Nelson,” the “Organ,” the “Brick Kiln,” the “Victoria.” Nelson’s hatchment is still on the wall of Merton Church: his name is the principal one for inns in the neighbourhood. Ewell, for example, has a “Lord Nelson,” where the signboard shows Nelson and the telescope on one side, and the Victory on the other.
The liberator of the chaffinch and I no longer had the road to ourselves as we struggled on in the mud between old houses, villas, dingy tea-shops, hoardings, and fields that seemed to produce crops of old iron and broken crockery. If the distant view at one moment was all elm trees, at the next it was a grand new instalment of London, ten fields away. But all of us must have looked mainly at the road ahead, making for some conjectural “world far from ours.” The important thing was to get out of this particular evil, not to inquire whether worse came after.
Only the most determined people were on the road. Motor cycles and side-cars bore middle-aged men with their wives or children, poorish-looking young men with their girls. Once or twice a man dashed by with a pretty girl smiling above his back wheel, perfectly balanced. But the greater number of my fellow-travellers were cyclists carrying luncheons and waterproofs. In one band seven or eight lean young chaps in dark clothes bent over their handle-bars, talking in jerks as they laboured, all stopping together at any call for a drink or to mend a puncture. They swore furiously, but (I believe) not in anger, at a nervous woman crossing in front of them. If conversation flagged, one or other of them was certain to break out into song with,—
“Who were you with last night
Out in the pale moonlight?