The town in its turn does watch “The Jolly Drover Tap” and its life. Why should there be all that space wasted where the elm stands? people wonder; it is quite old-fashioned, and they smile pityingly, yet tenderly, when the old tree is crowding into leaf. But when there are half a dozen rough men and women talking aloud and gesticulating like foreigners over the price of a long, brown dog that shivers under a cart, they do not see why it should be so; only, it is “The Jolly Drover,” and rather difficult to attack. It is extraordinary, they think as they pass by the turning down to the Tap, how a lot of lazy fellows, with nothing to do and with only rags on them, can get enough to spend half a day there. That ought certainly not to be allowed. These are not the honest poor. Either a man must work, or be looking out for work in a serious manner, or be so well dressed that he obviously need not work; or something is wrong. Nor do they invariably look starved and miserable. They eat and drink and talk to one another. Where do they come from? Of course they do not live in Coldiston: then why come here to drink? They cannot, of course, be stuffed into prison or workhouse or asylum; but is there no other cesspool possible in an age with a genius for sanitation?
When the blinds are down and the lamp lit, what a jolly place it is! The light pours out through the door on to the old tree, and makes it look friendly as you go in, and romantic as you come out. It is best at haymaking or harvest time in fine weather. The irregular labourers come into the town, especially on a Saturday, and break their journey at “The Jolly Drover Tap.” The townsman glances in as he passes, and sees a tall, straight man in a restful attitude standing up at the bar, and he has just raised his pot to drink. It is only a glimpse of a second, but it remains in the mind. The passer-by could not say how the drinker was clad, except that he wore a loose, broad-brimmed hat on his head, pushed back so as to leave quite clear against the lamp the whole of a big-featured, long face, the brow, and the curled hair up to the crown. Was it coat and trousers, or just shirt and trousers? At any rate the whole man could be seen underneath. Not that the observer did not as a rule admire a man fully and fashionably dressed. Only, in this light, just this harvest evening of purple and of great silence, the tall man drinking with head thrown back at the end of the passage looked more like the statues of a bygone age, or the representations of magnificent men seen in pictures, or the soldiers he has read of in books about the wars of Roundhead and Cavalier or the invasions of Wales and Scotland—yes! the height and carriage of this man call up the words “rough borderer.” A lance or a long sword would look well in his hands. His hat is not unlike a foot-soldier’s helmet. And then the face—coarse, fearless, and careless—is an enigma. He is some fellow without a house, or wife, or any goods or gods, yet this is how the admirer used to picture lords and generals when a little boy at school. He is not thinking about rent, accounts, education, clothes, the poor, church, chapel, appendicitis, or this time next year. He is not apparently in a hurry. He has no vote, and one party in power is as good as the other to him. No doubt a wasteful fellow—has fallen, perhaps, through drink—is good-natured possibly, but would not stop short at violence on occasion—idle with all his strength—and yet.... And yet? The figure and face against the light stick in the mind of the man out in the street. He is discontented. He grumbles at his wife when he goes in because she has not done something, and he does more, he grows enraged, when he finds that she really has done it, but has not had time to tell him. He lies still in bed on his back, thinking for a long time. His wife lies still, and he knows that she also is awake thinking. He says “Good night,” hoping she will say something to comfort him for his fruitless wakefulness. But she says “Good night,” and no more. They remain silent. He has the image of the drinker clear in the darkness before he falls asleep. Left entirely alone his wife sighs, and presently she also is asleep.
But I do not wish to say that Wallingford is as respectable as Coldiston. All I can say is that the ford below is very old, and it is highly probable that some travellers on the Icknield Way followed the road I had been on from Gypsies’ Corner to Wallingford and then into the Berkshire Ickleton Street at Blewbury, if not before. Others, avoiding Wallingford, might have crossed at Little Stoke, from which a westward road goes up, called the “Papist Way.”
From Wallingford I made for the “Papist Way,” following a series of paths and roads about a quarter of a mile east of the river. I went past the little towerless and spireless church of Newnham Murren, which had a number of crooked, ivy-coloured tombstones, and was itself covered with ivy, which traveller’s joy was beginning to climb. Then over Grim’s Ditch, a mile and a half west of the Icknield Way crossing, I came to Mongewell park, and my path was along a line of huge elms and sweet limes. On my left, the main road and its telegraph wires ran bordered with charlock along the top of a low ridge above these meadows. From North Stoke there was a good road. I turned aside to the church, but found what was better, a big range of tiled, thatched sheds and barns extending on either side of my path, with a cattle-yard in the midst full of dazzling straw and richly-stinking cow dung, and a big black sow lying on it like a recumbent statue on a huge pedestal. Swifts were shrieking above and chickens clucking in the corners. From the road the tiled church and the thatched barn fell into line, and seemed one, especially as the farm pigeons were perched on the ridges of both. On a corn-rick behind I saw the figure of a sheep on a weather-vane. This road went alongside hedgeless barley on the left, over which I could see the bare, low hills between me and the Icknield Way, and far beyond them the wooded hills about Nuffield and Nettlebed; on the right there was hay to the river; there was succory on the roadside, scabious, knapweed, rest-harrow, and long grass.
To reach the ferry at Little Stoke I turned off to the right under elm trees and was rowed across. The boy told me that the road up from the ferry was called Asylum Road, there being a big, red lunatic asylum on the right-hand side of it, just as it crossed the Reading and Wallingford road. Only beyond this crossing is it marked “Papist Way” on the map. I have not discovered why it was named so, for the name suggests too late a date to be connected with the monastery which lay near where the road reaches the Great Western railway station at Cholsey. It points to the Astons, Blewbury, and Upton, and may at one time have formed part of a road running through them to Wantage; unless this road is rather a protraction of the road from South Stoke and Moulsford, which may, however, have joined the “Papist Way” at Lollingdon.
They were talking about roads at the “Morning Star” on the left side of the “Papist Way.” The fat drayman and the smart butcher’s boy agreed that motor-cars were ruining the good roads. The rubber wheels can travel on the smoothest possible surface, which is the modern ideal. Hoofs, on the other hand, need something to bite into. The drayman, with his heavy waggon, would do away with steam-rollers. Here the needy cyclist interrupted, and said that he had never known better times; the smooth roads were as good for him as for motor-cars. All cursed their dust, their stink, their insolence, and all looked with some admiration at the foreign-looking chauffeur who came in for a glass and out again in a minute. Outside, the flies were “terrifying” the horses for the first time in the summer, and the drivers inside yelled at them, but seldom moved from their beer. One driver was a man with big, red ears, and a serious, quizzical face, with a beard. He came in wearing a fine musk thistle, which he seemed to think was Scotch, but immediately on being given a bunch of sweet peas he threw it away. If this had been his preference it would have been absurd enough—as if a musk thistle were not better than all the sweet peas ever contrived by man and God!—but he took the garden flowers because they were things having a price, and because they were a gift.
By Lollingdon Farm.