IX.
BRIDGWATER TO THE SEA.
The night at Bridgwater was still. I heard little after ten except the clear deep bells of St. Mary’s telling the quarters. They woke me with the first light, and I was glad to be out of the hotel early because the three other guests (I think, commercial travellers) not only did not talk—which may have been a blessing—but took no notice of “Good evening” or “Good morning.” It was a clean, new, and unfriendly place, that caused a sensation as of having slept in linoleum. The charge for supper, bed, and breakfast was the usual one, a few pence over four shillings.
I wandered about the western half of the town. This being built on a slight hill above the river, was older and better worth looking at than the flat eastern half, though it was lacking in trees, as may be guessed from the fact that some rooks had had to nest in horse-chestnut trees, which they avoid if possible. Castle Street is the pleasantest in the town, a wide, straight old street of three-storey brick houses, rising almost imperceptibly away from the quay. The houses, all private, have round-topped windows and are flat-fronted, except for two at the bottom which have bays. Across the upper end a big, sunlit, ivied house, taller than the others and of mellower brick, with a chestnut tree, projects somewhat, and on the pavement below it is a red pillar box.
The quay itself is good enough to recall Bideford. The river is straight for a distance, and separated from the quayside buildings only by the roadway. These buildings, ship-brokers’ and contractors’, port authority’s and customs and excise offices, a steam sawmill, and the “Fountain,” “Dolphin,” and “King’s Head,” are plain enough, mostly with tall flat fronts with scant lettering and no decoration, all in a block, looking over at the low level of the Castle Field north-eastward, where cattle grazed in the neighbourhood of chimney-stacks and railway signals. The Arthur was waiting for a cargo. The Emma was unloading coal. But for the rest the quay was quiet, and a long greyhound lay stretched out across the roadway, every inch of him content in the warm sun.
The next best thing to the quay was the broad sandstone Church of St. Mary and its tall spire, standing on a daisied, cropped turf among thorns and a few tombstones, and walled in on three sides by houses, shops, and the “White Lion” and “Golden Ball.” The walls inside provide recesses for many tombs. The most memorable tomb in the church is that of an Irish soldier named Kingsmill. He is a fine fellow, albeit of stone, leaning on his elbow and looking at the world or nothing as if satisfied with his position. He “sleeps well”—no man, I should say, better. This and his features reminded me of a man still living, a man of brawn and spirit, a despiser of beastly foreigners, and a good sleeper. I have seen him looking like old Kingsmill, with this one difference—that when he was in that stage of wakingness he had a cigarette between his lips invariably. He awoke, smiling at the goodness of sleep and of the world, and lay back, whoever called him, to sleep again. Resurrected at length, or partly so, he would sigh, but not in sorrow, and then swear, and turn over to reach a cigarette from beside the bed. The lighted cigarette regilded the world: he envied no man, any more than Kingsmill does, and certainly no woman. The cigarette, though enchanted, came to an end, even so; and he did what Kingsmill perhaps never did, took a cold bath, but in a manner which Kingsmill would have admired. The bath being filled to within an inch or two of overflowing, he let himself slowly in until he was completely under water, where he lay in a state apparently of bliss lasting many seconds, for beneficent providence had ordained that he should be almost as much aquatic as he was earthly, worldly, and territorial. Then out he came like Mars rising from the foam. After drying himself for ten minutes he lit another cigarette and rambled about his room without artificial covering until he had smoked it. Next he began dressing, an operation not to be described in my style in less than two volumes octavo, and worthy of something incomparably more godlike, for he was as a god and his dressing was godlike.... After Kingsmill’s effigy the chief spectacle of St. Mary’s is the unexpected, big Italianate picture of Christ’s descent from the cross, which forms an altar-piece. The story is that it was taken from a Spanish vessel—some add that it was one of the Great Armada; that it reached Bridgwater after a long seclusion at Plymouth, and was claimed by Plymouth when Bridgwater was seen to have it, but that Bridgwater kept it in a packing case for two years.
With the quay and the church ranks the statue of Robert Blake, if only for the inscription,—
“Born in this town, 1598.
Died at sea, 1657.”
I am told that there is also a passage quoted from one Edmund Spencer, but I did not see it; nor is it so great an error as the inscription about Jefferies in Salisbury Cathedral, and they have less time in Bridgwater market-place than in Salisbury Cathedral for literary accuracy.
It was half-past ten on a beautiful morning when I rode out of the town by a very suburban suburb of villas, elms, and a cemetery. My road carried me at first along a low ridge, so that over the stone walls I looked down east and northward to the vale of the Parrett; a misty, not quite flat expanse of green, alternating with reddish and already crumbling ploughland, which was interrupted a mile away by the red walls, elms, and orchard of Chilton Trinity, and farther off, by the pale church tower of Cannington. Two horses were drawing a scarifier across the furrows of a field by the roadside. On my left or westward I looked beyond a more broken country, with white linen blowing on cottage garden bushes, to the dim Quantocks still far off. The sun was hot, but the wind blew from behind me, and the dust was not an offence when a motor car was not passing me. A chiff-chaff was singing at Wembdon. Larks crowded their songs into a maze in every quarter. Overhead a single telegraph wire sizzled.