CHAPTER XV WANTED
We took no tearful leaving,
'Twas time and time to go;
Behind lay dock and Dartmoor,
Ahead lay Callao!
The Broken Men.
The hamlet of Woodlands is near Wrotham, in the county of Kent. To reach it you must take the old Chatham and Dover at Victoria and get out at Otford, a sweet-scented village sitting at ease in the wide vale of the Darenth. Leaving that behind, you will turn eastwards by the Pilgrims' Way, which winds along the lower spurs of the Downs, above Kemsing, Ightham, St. Clere, on its way to Canterbury. That too you leave in half-a-mile, and strike into the hills on your left, up a perpendicular lane where the contour lines on the ordnance map jostle each other, four, five, six, seven hundred feet in the width of as many yards, the woods climbing with you, arching your road in a green tunnel. They thin, they dispart, and you are on the summit of the Downs; great rolling fluted hills covered with thymy turf, knots of gorse, noble trees standing singly with a scattering of bracken in their shade, innumerable rabbits tossing up their little white scuts as they bolt into their burrows. Very steep and graceful in their lines, these Kentish hills; very beautiful the green floor of the valley outspread below, the wooded height of River Hill, the hare-bell blue of distant chains, rising half transparent against the sky..
On you go, turning your back on all this, over the ridge, into the heart of the Downs. Your lane twists, dropping into nameless green dells, rising over nameless green knolls, between woods that slope a dozen ways at once, and hedgerows which "the primroses run down to, carrying gold"—even in October. Next you pass a farm, with its warm-scented yellow ricks, its black barns, mossy-thatched, its garden full of milk-white phlox, magenta chrysanthemums, black and yellow sun-flowers, tan and purple snapdragons. You wheel round a corner, you descend another break-neck lane all grass and flints, and here in a green nest among the hills, which rise steep all round, here you will find your journey's end—the hamlet of Woodlands. Half-a-dozen old cottages, a minute school-house, a minute church, and the vicarage.
Gardiner's birthplace was a square white house with a red roof, green jalousies, and bay windows on either side of a pillared porch. In front, a square of lawn was guarded from the road by a laurel hedge, and bisected by a gravel walk leading to the door. Picture the place in October. Those white walls are hidden, partly by Gloire de Dijon roses, still thick with yellow buds and creamy blossoms, for it is warm in this nest among the hills; and partly by creepers, cardinal, carmine, red-rose, fringing out in trails of daffodil green. The borders are full of flowers, roses and chrysanthemums blooming together, yellow and brown nasturtiums among their thin round emerald leaves, Michaelmas daisies, a bank of lilac against the laurels. The woods are full-leaved still and autumn-glorious; there is russet of oaks, orange of hawthorns, lemon-yellow of maples, and here and there, like black-cowled monks at a pageant, the scattered yews which always haunt the line of the Pilgrims' Way. Woods, woods, and woods all round, rising like a golden cup, save only to the north. Here a valley opens, and the unfenced, unmetalled road winds away, between hills of thin grayish-green turf, white-scarred with chalk and dotted with sheep, towards Maplescombe, Farningham, and civilization, represented by the unpleasant town of Dartford.