“The Black Mountain. But how strange. Why, when you were a little boy you must have been nearly able to see the place where mother lived. With a big sea between. It must have been wonderful . . .”
“Yes . . . I suppose it was. I scarcely remember. Look right down in that deep pool. That’s a trout.”
“A trout. . . . Where? Do show me . . .”
The vision of Mendip faded instantly, and Edwin only saw the rufous sands of the pool beneath the bridge, and in it a shadowy elongated figure with its head to the slow stream and faintly quivering fins. In Devonshire, Widdup had told him, the rivers swarmed with trout: you could catch them all day long if you wanted to, and Edwin, loyal to his own county’s excellences, had only been able to produce the silvery roach of the millpool, shoaling round the water-lilies and the mythical legend of carnivorous pike lurking in Mr. Willis’s ponds in the Holloway. He wished he had known that there were veritable trout in the Stour. Now it was too late to do anything; but when they returned from their holiday, he determined that he would catch this shadowy creature, even if he had to induce it to gorge a worm. Still, it was quite possible that by the time he returned he would have captured many trout. For Somerset lay next to Devon on the map.
“Are there many trout in Mendip?” he asked.
“No. . . . There is only one river of any size. The Ax, that runs underground and comes out of Axcombe gorge, and there are practically no trout in the Ax. It’s a dry country. Limestone. Very barren too.”
That didn’t really matter. In a day or two Edwin would be able to see for himself. On their way home they spoke very little. His father seemed to find it difficult to talk to him; and in a little while Edwin became conscious of his own unending string of questions that led nowhere.
But all that night he dreamed of Mendip. A vast, barren, mountain-country, his dreams pictured it; waterless, and honeycombed with the dark caves from which Macaulay’s miners had poured to war; a deserted countryside full of broken villages and bounded by steep cliffs against which the isolating waters of the Severn Sea broke in a soundless tumult. And there Ax, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man. A fluent gentleman with a noble brow and burning grey eyes pointed out the course of the river to him. He was the only other soul beside Edwin and his father, in all that desert country, and Edwin introduced him to Mr. Ingleby as Mr. Coleridge—rather diffidently, for he was not sure how the poet would take it until he remembered and explained that Keats was a chemist. There, on the high crown of Axdown, his mother joined them. She, it seemed, was not afraid of Mr. Coleridge. She took his arm so familiarly that Edwin trembled for her; but the poet only smiled, while she pointed out to him a mass of huge fantastic mountains ranged beyond the gleaming sea. “You’ve got to look over there,” she said. “You see that level ridge dropping suddenly? Well, it’s the third farm from the end. Can you see the little bedroom window on the extreme left? . . . quite a little window?” Coleridge nodded, and Mr. Ingleby, too, shielded his eyes with his hands and looked. “It was my last chance of showing it to you,” she said.
“But there are practically no trout in the Alph,” said Coleridge.