I walked out another long street, quite alone now in the dusk, and met a man driving an ox, also evidently to market.
There was a school in session at one place, a boys’ school—low, ancient in its exterior equipment and silent as I passed. It was out, but there was no running—no hallooing. The boys were going along chatting rather quietly in groups. I do not understand this. The American temper is more ebullient. I went into one bar—Mrs. Davidge’s—and found a low, dark room, with a very small grate fire burning and a dark little bar where were some pewter mugs, some pink-colored glasses and a small brass lamp with a reflector. Mrs. Davidge must have served me herself, an old, slightly hunched lady in a black dress and gray gingham apron. “Can this place do enough business to support her?” I asked myself. There was no one in the shop while I was there.
The charm of Marlowe to me was its extreme remoteness from the life I had been witnessing in London and elsewhere. It was so simple. I had seen a comfortable inn somewhere near the market place and this I was idly seeking, entertaining myself with reflections the while. I passed at one place a gas manufacturing plant which looked modern enough, in so far as its tank was concerned, but not otherwise, and then up one dark street under branches of large trees and between high brick walls, in a low doorway, behind which a light was shining, saw a shovel-hatted curate talking to an old woman in a shawl. All the rest was dark. At another corner I saw a thin old man, really quite reverential looking, with a peaked intelligent face, fine in its lines (like Calvin or Dante or John Knox) and long thin white hair, who was pulling a vehicle—a sort of revised baby carriage on which was, of all things, a phonograph with a high flower-like tin horn. He stopped at one corner where some children were playing in the dark and putting on a record ground out a melody which I did not consider very gay or tuneful. The children danced, but not, however, with the lightness of our American children. The people here seemed either like this old man, sad and old and peaked, with a fine intellectuality apparent, or thick and dull and red and stodgy.
When I reached the market I saw a scene which something—some book or pictures had suggested to me before. Solid women in shawls and flat, shapeless wrecks of hats, and tall shambling men in queer long coats and high boots—drovers they looked like—going to and fro. Children were playing about and laborers were going home, talking a dialect which I could not understand, except in part.
Five men came into the square and stood there under the central gas lamp, with its two arms each with a light. One of them left the others and began to sing in front of various doors. He sang and sang—“Annie Laurie,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Sally in our Alley,” in a queer nasal voice, going in and coming out again, empty-handed I fancy. Finally he came to me.
“Would you help us on our way?” he asked.
“Where are you going?” I inquired.
“We are way-faring workmen,” he replied simply, and I gave him some coppers—those large English “tuppences” that annoyed me so much. He went back to the others and they stood huddled in the square together like sheep, conferring, but finally they went off together in the dark.
At the inn adjacent I expected to find an exceptional English scene of some kind but I was more or less disappointed. It was homey but not so different from old New England life. The room was large with an open fire and a general table set with white linen and plates for a dozen guests or more. A shambling boy in clothes much too big for him came and took my order, turning up the one light and stirring the fire. I called for a paper and read it and then I sat wondering whether the food would be good or bad.
While I was waiting a second traveler arrived, a small, dapper, sandy-haired person, with shrewd, fresh, inquisitive eyes—a self-confident and yet clerkly man.