From Kentford the road ran straight for four miles into Newmarket, taking with it the Suffolk and Cambridge boundary now on its right and now on its left. Telegraph posts and trees accompanied it, and below them very broad, rough margins, half overgrown by thorns and young elms, and marked by half a dozen parallel footpaths. The old course of the road from the third milestone was doubtless the green track on the right, divided from the new by a broken hedge; for it is this that the boundary follows. Before the second milestone this track traversed the new and was continued thenceforward by a beech grove shadowing deep, narrow horse-paths to the first milestone and the beginning of the Newmarket red brick. On the right no hedge came between the road and an open country sloping down to the treeless fenland of Fordham, Wicken, and Soham, where fifty feet above sea-level makes a hill. Nearest the road were plains from which tumuli have long been smoothed to make an exercising ground for horses.
By the first milestone a child came running up to me to ask if I had found a penny among the trees, and I did not until afterwards suspect that this was a brilliant variation from straightforward begging.
Newmarket.
As I came into Newmarket before dark, but after the closing of shops, the long wide street and a strange breed of men standing or slowly walking about on its pavements made me feel that scarcely after a dozen reincarnations should I enter Newmarket and be at home. The man who discovered that we are “all God’s creatures” had an uncanny eye for resemblance, and I often doubt the use of the discovery, without disputing its accuracy. Everyone was talking of horses except those who preferred lords and professional golfers. I saw some caddies industriously swallowing temperance hot drinks instead of beer, in the hope of earning as much as James Braid at some distant time. As for the horsy men, they seemed to understand lords as well as horses, so well as to illustrate the saying, “To know all is to pardon all”: nay! to go beyond that, to admire all, and to believe that men are more or less worthy as they are more or less lords. One of them was imitating the bad language of Lord ——, and it was admitted perfect; but I can quite believe that to be a lord is very different from being able to imitate one after a glass of ale. There can be little doubt that to the influence of either lords or horses, or perhaps both, we must attribute the brilliant beggar at the first milestone. A Scotch baker directed me to a place—“It is not very elaborate, but it is clean”—where I could get a bed such as I could afford.
I lay awake for some time listening to the motor-cars. Most of them rushed through the town; a few came there to rest and silence; others paused for a minute only with drumming suspense. I thought I should not easily tire of these signals from unknown travellers. Not that I spent much time on definite and persistent conjecture as to who they were, whence they had come, and whither and why they travelled. I was too sleepy, though at any time such a labour would have been irksome. No; I was more than content to let these noises compose a wordless music of mystery and adventure within my brain. The cars could bring together lovers or enemies or conspirators so swiftly that their midnight alarums suggest nothing else. It is hard to connect their subjugated frenzy with mere stupid haste. The little light steals through a darkness so vast that the difference between a star and a lantern is nothing to it. The thing is so suitable for a great adventure that straightway the mind conceives one. Hark! on a winter’s night the sound and the idea are worthy of the storm and in harmony with it:—
Hark ’tis an elfin storm from fairyland,