THE FOUR ROADS
THE FOUR ROADS
PART I: TOM
1
FOUR roads in Sussex mark out a patch of country that from the wooded, sea-viewing hills behind Dallington slips down over fields and ponds and spinneys to the marshes of Hailsham and Horse Eye. The North Road, slatting the heights with its pale, hard streak, runs from far Rye to further Lewes, a road of adventures and distances, passing Woods Corner and Three Cups Corner, Punnetts Town and Cade Street, till it joins the London Road at Cross-in-Hand. The South Road borders the marsh, sometimes dry on the shelving ground above it, sometimes soggy on the marsh level, or perhaps sheeted with the overflow of the Hurst Haven. It comes from Senlac and Hastings, and after skirting the flats, crosses the River Cuckmere, and runs tamely into Lewes, where all roads meet. The East Road is short and shaggy, running through many woods, from the North Road, which it joins at Woods Corner, to the throws at Boreham Street. Along this road is a string of farms—Cowlease, and Padgham, and Slivericks, mangy holdings for the most part, with copses running wild and fields of thistles, doors agape and walls atumble, and gable-ends stooping towards the ponds. The West Road is grass-grown, and in July St. John’s wort and rest-harrow straggle in the ruts and make the dust smell sickly-sweet. It forks from the North Road at Punnetts Town, and runs through Rushlake Green and the Foul Mile to Hailsham in the south.
In the swale of the day, towards Easter-time, the Reverend Mr. Sumption was walking along the North Road from Dallington to Woods Corner. Dallington is the mother-parish of the country bounded by the Four Roads, though there is also a church at Brownbread Street, in charge of a curate. Mr. Sumption had no truck with either Rector or curate, for he was a minister of the Particular Baptists, who had a Bethel in Sunday Street, as the lane was called which linked the East Road with one that trailed in and out of farms and woods to the throws at Bucksteep Manor. Not that the sect of the Particular Baptists flourished in the parish of Dallington, but the Bethel being midway between the church and the chapel, a fair congregation could be raked in on wet Sundays from the middle district, where doctrine, like most things in that land of farms, was swung by the weather.
The Reverend Mr. Sumption was a big, handsome man of forty-five, and wore a semi-clerical suit of greenish-black, with a shabby hat and a dirty collar. His face was brown, darkening round the jaw with a beard that wanted the razor twice a day, but did not get it. His eyes were dark and sunk deep in his head, gleaming like deep ditch-water under eyebrows as smooth and black as broom-pods. His teeth were very white, and his hair was grey and curly like a fleece.