‘Look ye!’ said the old ferryman from his seat in the boat, waving a scornful hand towards his garden, as I chanced along the river bank one fine Saturday afternoon. ‘’Twur me as painted un, an’ me as putt un up, jest fer peace’s sake; but I’d ha’ taken an’ chucked un in th’ river if I’d only ha’ knowed what sort o’ peace ’ud come on ’t!’
A great white board reared itself on ungainly legs above the elder-hedge of the garden, and on it, in huge irregular characters, appeared the single word, ‘TEAS.’ By the side of the ferry-punt half a dozen town rowing-boats lay moored. And from the green depths of the garden there arose a confusion of voices, shrill laughter, and an incessant clatter of crockery. I had hardly realised what it all meant, when Mrs. Runridge showed a vast white apron and a hot perspiring face in the gateway. She bore down upon us with upraised hand, as though she intended bodily harm to one or both.
‘Here, Joe!’ cried she, giving the old ferryman a coin. ‘Change fer half a suvverrin, an’ shaarp ’s th’ wured! Try th’ Thatchers, or Mist. Weaverly, or belike— Doan’t sit starin’ there, looney! Dear, oh Lor! was there ever sech a man! An’ us all run purty nigh off our legses, we be!’
‘Th’ seventh time,’ gasped Runridge, as we hurried together up the steep street, ‘or like as not th’ eighth—I dunno! An’ ut bean’t as though ’a warnted money. Money?—th’ bed bean’t fit fer Christian folk to sleep on, wi’ th’ lumps in ’t! An’ to-morrer ull be wuss, if ’tis fine. Lor’ send a hearthquake, or Noah’s flood, or summat!’
When a naturally silent man attempts self-commiseration in words, his case is sure to be a desperate one. But we are all fated to share in his trouble now. On any fine Saturday or Sunday in the month, Runridge will be a familiar figure, hunting down from door to door the change that, in villages, is so scanty and so hard to discover. On Mondays we shall all suffer from our foolish kindness in allowing this reckless exportation of bullion. Only Susan Angel at the sweetstuff shop, and her small customers, will be unincommoded; for the handful of battered farthings that has served them as currency during whole decades past will be necessarily saved by its insignificance, and will remain, no doubt, in the village for service amidst generations yet unborn.
But disturbing visitors to Windlecombe do not all come by the river. There is an iniquitous job-master in Stavisham who has long had the village in his evil eye; and at intervals, fortunately rare, he descends upon us with charabancs drawn by three horses, and filled with heterogeneous human gleanings—the flotsam and jetsam of holiday-land strayed for the day into Stavisham from contiguous seaside towns.
They come in families, in amorous couples, in collective friendships of each sex and every number and age. They bring baskets of provisions, cameras, balls wherewith to play rounders on the green; and of musical instruments many weird kinds—concertinas, mouth-organs, babies, and often yapping terriers that set all our own dogs frantic on their chains. An altruist, whose convictions have grown up amidst the quiet slow neighbourliness of the country, never finds his principles less easy of application than when he must atune himself to the holiday moods of people escaped from the town. There is no harm in all the shouting and laughter and fatuous horseplay. Inebriety is practically extinct among those who make summer the season, and the country the scene, of their year’s brief merry-making. And yet it all seems mistaken, reprehensible, on the same principle that a blunder is worse than a crime. It is futile to tell him so, unless he already knows it, and then it is equally unnecessary; but when the day-tripper learns to enjoy himself on the green country-side in the true spirit for which the sun was made to shine and the flowers to grow, he will have found the Philosopher’s Stone that is to change, not mere lead and iron, but Time and Life themselves into gold.
On most mornings in August the more careful of us will go about thrusting greasy paper-scraps out of sight under bushes, flicking the incongruous yellow of banana-peel into obscure corners, lamenting stripped boughs, and marvelling at nosegays thrown heedlessly away, as if the joy of them had lain in the mere plucking. But all the strange folk that use the village for their pleasuring at this time, do not leave these unlovely tokens behind them. Only yesterday, as I sat on the edge of the old worked-out, riverside chalk-pit here—whence you have a view north and south of the glittering water for miles—there came a new sound in the air, and I must throw aside my sheaf of galley-proofs to listen. The sound came from the river, and was still afar off. Many voices were joined in singing one of the old catch-songs, which go round a circle of three or four phrases, and to which there is never an end until you make an end of its beginning in slow time.
The sweet medley grew louder and clearer, and presently there was united to it the rhythmic plash of oars. A great tarry old sea-boat came round the water’s bend, holding a party of a dozen or so. At last the labouring craft and the music came to a halt together, and the singers clambered ashore. I should have forgotten all about them now, for they soon passed out of sight amid the waterside foliage. But as I was coming homeward up the village street, I heard the voices again; and there, under the Seven Sisters on the green, the little company were standing together, singing apparently for their own solace and delight. It was a strange thing, here in unemotional England, and many of the village folk had been drawn wonderingly to their doors. Yet the singers did not seem to remark this, nor to regard their action as anything out of the common. For, the song finished, they broke into several parties and sauntered on, talking quietly amongst themselves as if to make music were part of the daily conversation of their lives.
All that afternoon, from the quiet of my garden, I heard the voices at intervals, and from different points about the village, near and far. Once I saw the party right on the top of Windle Hill, strolling about in twos and threes, looking like foraging crows on the heights. After a while I saw them get together in a little circle; and then, right at the ear’s-tip, I could just catch the higher notes of their singing—a strange wild song, much like the song of the larks that must be contending with them up there against the blue sky.