As I turned into the inn and left him he was inclined either to put down that evening half to happiness and half to melancholy, or to cross out one or other of those headings as being in his case tautological.
The landlady at my inn was the first that ever told me outright, at once, and without being asked, what she charged for a bed, and as the sum was reasonable I was doubly pleased. She was a jaunty, probably childless London woman not far from forty, who referred to her husband as “my sweetheart.” She had a skittish, falsetto laugh, whether she was talking to me about their old horse John and all his merits, or to the labourers about such and such a “sweet old house” in the neighbourhood. They were speaking of the coronation bonfire that was building on the Beacon Hill, and she became important and full of reminiscences of the Hampstead Heath bonfire, and, thereanent, the Spaniards, Vale of Health, and so on. She hovered between them and me, anxious to tell me that much as she liked a country life she missed the gas and the bathroom of a London house. Now and then she left us all, to talk to the parrot in a loud voice intended for mankind as well as Polly. Her “sweetheart” turned out to be a little active man, superficially jaunty but silent and brooding and hanging down his head. He was sandy-haired with dull, restless, blue eyes, and had not recently been shaved. His turned-out feet stepped quickly hither and thither. He was dressed anyhow and as if he slept in his clothes to ensure a fit; a white scarf was tied round his neck and his trousers were turned up. He carried a cigarette either in the corner of his mouth or behind his ear. He was one of those creatures provided by an almighty providence for attending on that “noble animal” (such he called it) the horse; but this did not prevent him from calling his own horse John “old son.” He never carried a whip, because, he said, he did not believe in hurting “dumb animals.” A man who knows horses well is equally at home in town or country, and though this man was as full-blooded a Cockney as his wife, he was, like her, contented with his three or four years of country solitude; it was, he said, a “happy life, yes, a happy life,” better than what we had learnt to call the “bustle and confusion” of London. I asked him about the Icknield Way, which he knew by that name, and he told me that it was a Roman road and that he had heard a man could walk on it for twelve months and come back to the same place again. What that place was he did not say; probably he meant any place and imagined that the road made a circuit of this island or belike of the great globe itself. There could be no better landlord and landlady of a small wayside inn with one horse, one trap, and one spare bed. The bed was clean and comfortable, and I fell asleep in it while the stone-curlews were piping on the downs and a pair of country wheels were rolling by, late and slow.
CHAPTER VI
FOURTH DAY—EDLESBOROUGH TO STREATLEY, ON THE UPPER ICKNIELD WAY, BY WENDOVER, KIMBLE, WHITELEAF, GIPSIES’ CORNER, IPSDEN, AND CLEEVE
“Five o’clock, sir,” said the Cockney at my door next morning, and I looked out to see a hot day slowly and certainly preparing in mist and silence. There was nobody in the fields. The hay-waggon stood by the rick where it had arrived too late to be unloaded last night. To one bred in a town this kind of silence and solitariness perhaps always remains impressive. We see no man, no smoke, and hear no voice of man or beast or machinery, and straightway the mind recalls very early mornings when London has lain silent but for the cooing of pigeons. That silence of so many things that can and will make sounds gives some of its prestige to the country silence of very quiet things. Therefore when I have looked out of a strange window for the first time and seen nothing move but leaves on the earth and clouds in the sky, I have often for a moment felt as if it were dawn and have slipped into a mood of dawn; it might be possible on a cloudy day and in a new country to be deceived thus even at noon. Thus the innocence of silent London is transferred to the downs, the woods, the vacant fields, and the road without a wheel or a foot upon it for miles and miles.
I had about forty miles to cover before the end of the daylight, so I had to help myself by driving with my host and his “old son” John. I was now thoroughly foot-sore. One foot was particularly bad, and in trying to save it I used different muscles in the leg, which were quickly tired. Then, to help myself, I had leaned heavily on my stick at every step and so brought arm and shoulder to a state of discomfort, if not pain. Finally, the stick was unsuitable for its purpose and sorely afflicted the palm of the hand that grasped it. I had carried the stick for many single days of walking and liked it. For it was a tapered oak sapling cut in the Weald and virtually straight because its slightly spiral curves counteracted one another. But it had almost no handle, and so drove itself into one small portion of the palm when leaned on. It had also in the winter shown itself hard to retain in the hand when a few inches of it were in mud. Nevertheless, it was so nicely balanced and being oak so likely to last a lifetime that, for six years, I put up with its faults, and now, having been in my company for so many miles in a splendid June, it has a fresh hold upon me. Also I am not certain that any other handle, a larger and rounder knob or a stout natural crook, would have been much better in a hand not made of iron. Perhaps a really long staff grasped some way from its upper end would be right. But there is something too majestic, patriarchal even, about such a staff. A man would have to build up his life round about it if it had been deliberately adopted. And gradually he would become a celebrity. Of course, if he had an inclination towards such a staff, as the natural and accredited form among pedestrians, there would be an end of the matter, but that is not very likely in a town-bred Englishman. He must meditate upon what might have been, and be content to make five shillings out of his meditation, if he is a journalist.
It was a pleasure to drive with Mr. Willcocks. He became quite silent apart from civility. He evidently understood the horse, and the horse him, in the mutual manner usually expected from a legal monogamous union. If he had sat on the horse’s back the combination would have been nothing like a centaur. But with one between the shafts and the other holding the reins they were one spirit in two bodies.
As we began to curve round the foot of the Ivinghoe Hills, which were on our left, we passed another but larger deep cleft, like those at Well Head and Cross Waters, below the road, upon our right, called Coombe Hole. There was another Coombe a mile to the south; but before this I had not met the name (hardly the thing, except on the west of Royston) since I left Thetford. We went close under the steep slope of Beacon Hill which was tipped with a tumulus and scored upon its flanks by many old descending trackways. Away to the right there was no land so high as our road—about five hundred feet; the hill-tops were half as high again—for farther than eye could see; and to all this low land of dairy and garden the road was a boundary. We were approaching the place where the Icknield Way is said to divide into two parallel courses. A road from Leighton Buzzard strikes athwart the course and following along this to the left for half a mile you turn to the right into the “Upper Icknield Way”; following it to the right you reach Ivinghoe and there turn to the left into the “Lower Icknield Way.” We were going to take the Upper, so called as being higher up the slope of the land. Just before the Leighton Buzzard road we passed on our left a long cleft, smooth and flat-bottomed, with horses feeding in it, and hereabouts the old course or part of its original width was clear over the left-hand hedge. On our right was a high bank round which went the road to Ivinghoe, and this bank would explain the sharp turn. Originally it may well have been that the road forked, the Lower going past the old windmill straight ahead and so to Pitstone Green and missing Ivinghoe; the Upper going with it to the old windmill and there diverging to the left past Pitstone Church and out into the road now marked “Upper Icknield Way” at Folly Farm. Along this road there was a border of close grass; chestnuts or sycamores of about thirty years stood up here and there in the hedge, and over it I saw Ivinghoe Church tower and the silly spire, short and sharp, on top of it, the misty woods behind, and the protuberance of Southend Hill, having its sides carved into thorny terraces, “linces” or “linchetts”; the Pitstone Church tower and an elm, throned on a rise together, and the broad wooded valley beyond. The air was sweet now with roses, now with yellow bedstraw. Larks sang, and a yellowhammer that forgot the end of its song, and once a blackbird. I had left behind the Ivinghoe Hills, but Pitstone Hill, their successor, was of the same brood. It was chiefly bare, and its flanks much-modelled as well as scarred by a slanting trackway. The land between the foot of it and the road was carved with the utmost ingenuity of which chalk is capable. Once there was a succession of long parallel deep rolls at right angles to the road; wheat and barley grew on them except in one or two places where the fall was too steep and there were thorns amidst the corn. I saw also several of those natural walls formed by a sudden change of level. These are generally used as divisions between fields. Here there was wheat above and wheat below, and along the bottom of the wall a cart track went between lines of poppies up to the hill. Another such wall, but higher, had beeches on its slope, and it made a fine curve up to its end at the foot of the hill.
Half a mile past the turn to Pitstone Church the way becomes a boundary between Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire as far as the bridge over the Grand Junction Canal, where I entered Hertfordshire again, leaving it nearly two miles beyond and not far from the junction with Akeman Street. At a dip from Tring wharf the road narrowed and lost its green edges, but regained them on the more level ground. For a little while after the crossing to Tring Church a narrow green track was raised on the right above the road and between it and the hedge. Here there was an elm, and there several, and here an ash; and there was never no charlock. The hills on the left were more and more wooded with beeches; and they curved round so as to lie slightly across our course. On the right lay the broad reservoirs of the canal at the edge of the Vale of Aylesbury.