CHAPTER IX SEVENTH DAY--STREATLEY TO SPARSHOLT, ON THE RIDGEWAY, BY SCUTCHAMER KNOB AND LETCOMBE CASTLE
When I was next at Streatley I took the Ridgeway westward chiefly because I like the Ridgeway, partly because I wished to see it again, now that it had to give up the title conferred on it by Bishop Bennet, of the Icknield Way. I went up from the bridge and at the “Bull” turned to the right and northward along the Wantage road, which is probably the Icknield Way. After getting well up on the chalk above the river this road maintains the same level of from two to three hundred feet, and for two miles keeps within a mile of the river on a terrace half-way up the slope of the hills. Streatley had spread itself in red spots along the side of the road, past the fork to Wallingford and up to where the Ridgeway turns off to the left and westward into the long coombe leading to Streatley Warren. At its mouth this coombe was wide and shallow, and was all grass, except on the left hand where there were new houses. In places, as by Rectory Farm, the road, a hard one, had a pleasant green terrace above it with wild roses rambling over it. Now the Ridgeway had risen up to its perfect freedom, away from the river and the low land, from the glaring roads and the collections of houses. I saw, however, more racehorses than confirmed hermits or aspiring warriors or reformers. Before it was ordained that cricket should be played on billiard tables, there were a pitch and a pavilion here beside the Ridgeway near the Abingdon road. Elevens drove up from Oxford, and a cheerful scene it was, albeit nobody’s fortune was made. It was too good and rustic a custom not to decay. After that, they say, the pavilion became an early-morning rendezvous for men with lurchers after the hares, a refuge for belated soldiers, a convenience for several breeds of idlers, philosophers, and adventurers. These it was decided to centralize as much as possible in prisons, workhouses, lunatic asylums, cemeteries, town “rookeries,” and the like. The pavilion thus became useless and was pulled down. Nevertheless, there it is, still very clear in a number of aging heads. So far as I could learn, it was the nearest approach to a permanent hermitage on the ridge of these downs. In their season there are shepherds’ shelters, and caravans for the steam-plough men or for persons engaged in the writing Suppose a philosopher were to live in and about these old stones, for a year or two he might be quite undisturbed. Then he would be arrested on suspicion after some crime. A ploughman would reveal that he had seen the man about. It would reach a pressman with a camera. He would get somebody to pose either in Wayland’s Smithy or a similar place at Wimbledon or Balham. A column about “the simple life” would be printed in a newspaper illustrated by these photographs. By this time the real philosopher, a hairy and uncommunicative man, would have been released. A rival pressman would travel to Wantage Road with a third-class ticket, which he would call either second or first class in his list of expenses. He would assail the philosopher, and with as much grace as is compatible with haste and a preoccupied mind, would bid him describe his experiences in answer to well-chosen leading questions. The philosopher might possibly fail to understand the pressman’s object, or even his English; he might seem to refuse. Then the other would produce his card, claiming instant attention as the representative of both the Hourly Deceiver and the Evening Tinkle-Tinkle. This would amuse, puzzle, or infuriate the hairy man. His laughter or his anger would be mistaken for rudeness. The pressman would return to Wantage Road and in the train invent far better things than ever were on sea or land, and he would have no difficulty in illustrating his article by photographs This, however, is only a possibility comparatively picturesque. The real thing was less amusing, and the scene of it was not Wayland’s Smithy but Lone Barn. That winter a man might have picked up the paper after breakfast and found descriptions of funerals and marriages, the well-attended presentation to the local member of Parliament, the successful meeting of his rival, the list of hunting I knew the farm-house and had often wondered about the man who built it in that solitude somewhere in the eighteenth century. It had walls of unusual thickness, such as could not have been overthrown simply by time and weather. It must long have been empty and subject to the hostility of discontented spirits such as probably infest a house, as they do a man, left utterly alone. I had not suspected that anybody was living in the barn, but I remember a pale, shuffling man carrying a child who begged from me monotonously as I came down the hill in mist a little before dark. I had given him something without exactly realizing that he was a man, so frail, subdued, and weak-voiced He and his wife and six children had arrived at the barn on Christmas Eve. For a week before they had been at a barn nearer the village, but as this had to be repaired they were turned out. They were allowed to settle in Lone Barn because Bishopstone had done an occasional day’s work for the farmer on whose land it stood. During January and February he did several more days’ work. The wife and children remained in the barn. The two eldest had measles, the sixth had pneumonia; all were verminous. On Christmas Day a seventh had been born in Lone Barn. The mother, who had fainted in court a week before and had been remanded, pleaded guilty of neglect, but said that “she could not do in a barn as she could in a cottage,” there being no bed, no furniture, and no water except from a cattle pond half a mile away. The man had been unable to get a cottage. The family had been found lying round a fire in the barn, and after medical examination arrested. Bishopstone hardly spoke in answer to the questions and insults of the bench, but he was understood to say, “The Lord is on my side,” and several other blasphemous or unintelligible things, which were no defence or excuse. The nine were now condemned to the comfort of the workhouse and the prison until haymaking time. I went to Lone Barn again, the birthplace of Francis Albert Edward Bishopstone. The black brook, full of the white reflections of its snowy banks and beginning to steam in the sun, was hourly growing and coiling all its long loops joyously through the land. The dabchick was laughing its long shrill titter under the alder roots. Faint, soft shadows fell on to the snow from the oaks, whose grey skeletons were outlined in snow against the clear deep blue of the now dazzling sky. Thrushes were beginning to sing, as if it had always been warm and bright. In hedge and thicket and tall wood, myriads of drops were falling and singing in the still air. Against the south the smooth downs were white under a diaphanous haze of grey, and upon them seemed to rest heavenly white mountains, very still, dream-like, and gently luminous. Lone Barn lay up in the haze invisible. At the foot of the hills the land was divided by low hedges into broad fields. There no birds sang and no stream gurgled. The air was full of the pitiful cries of young lambs at their staggering play in the shallow snow. One ewe stood with her new-born lamb in a stamped, muddy circle tinged with blood amidst the pure white. The lamb was yellowish green in colour; it stumbled at her teats, fell down and sucked upon its knees. The big mother stood still, shaggy, stubborn, meek, with her head down, her eyes upon me, her whole nature upon the lamb buried in her wool, part of her. The hill was hedgeless save where a narrow, ancient road deeply trenched it in ascending curves, lined by thorns. The road had probably not been trodden since that procession of ten had descended An old plum tree, planted when barn and house were built, and now dead and barkless, stood against one end, and up it had climbed a thick ivy stem that linked barn and tree inseparably with a profusion of foliage, emerald and white. The last of its doors lay just outside in the dead embers of the tramps’ fire. Thus open on both sides to the snow-light and the air the barn looked the work rather of nature than of man. The old thatch was grooved, riddled, and gapped, and resembled a grassy bank that has been under a flood the winter through; covered now in snow it had the outlines in miniature of the hill on which it was built. The patched walls, originally of tarred timber laid in horizontal planks, were of every hue of green and yellow that moss, lichen, and mould can bestow, each strip of board being of a different date and a different shade. What gave them something in common with one another was the fresh black stains which ran from the melting eaves to the nettle-bed below. The A starved thrush lay dead in a corner. That was all. I stirred the bed with my stick, meaning to set fire to it. An old coat was concealed beneath it, and out of the pocket fell a book. On the front page was written, “A. A. Bishopstone, —— College, Oxford, October, 1890.” The first pages were filled with accounts of expenditure, subscriptions, purchases, etc., the items abbreviated Make me thy lyre even as the forest is. Next, in March of the same year, he had written down, perhaps from dictation, the names of historical books, with a few words showing that in the following summer he would have to go up for the examination which had qualified him for a degree. Evidently he was resolved to work hard at special books and to put behind him the intellectual luxuries of Rabelais, etc. Whether he read too hard or not is uncertain, but the entry for September of that year was merely, “Brain fever and a 2nd class. I am now alone.” The next entry was in 1893: “Sell all thou hast and follow Me.” In the same year came the words: “I possess my working clothes and a Greek testament. I earn 14s. a week.” There was no more for that year, but under 1894 were a number of detached thoughts, such as:— “‘All men are equal’ is only a corollary of ‘All men are different’—if only the former had been forgot instead of latter. It might have changed things less—and more.” “Forgive we one another, for we know not what we do. “Each man suffers for the whole world and the whole world for each man. There is little distinction between the destinies of one man and another if this is understood. “Let us not exalt worldly distinctions, titles, etc., by saying that they make no difference.” In 1895 came the words, “East Anglia—the Fens—Yorkshire—the Lakes,” and the isolated thought: “To be alone in eternity is the human lot of a man, but to be alone in time, alas! alas!” The next year he had not touched the book: it was the year of his marriage, for in 1897 he had written: “We have now been married one year.” A list of villages followed showing a zigzag course right across England; then the thought: “There is nothing like the visible solitude of another soul to teach us our own. Two hungers, two thirsts, two solitudes, begetting others.” Was it perhaps at the birth of a child—the date is not given, it might have been the same year, 1897—that he wrote this? “To him who is born into eternity it matters little what happens in time, and a generation of pain is as the falling of a leaf.” Then:— “Unhappiness is apart from pain. When they tell us that in the Middle Ages and even in the last century men suffered more pain and discomfort than we, they do not tell us that they also had less unhappiness. Many a battlefield has seen more joy than pain; many a festival as little of either.” And then, on a page to itself:— “We are looking for straight oak sticks in a world where it is hazel that grows straight.” That he was still travelling was indicated only by names of places written down without comment. A week’s accounts showed the expenditure of 10s. “The road northward out of Arundel leads to Heaven”; to which he had added, “So does Lavender Hill.” Other thoughts were set down in the same year: “The man who is discontented with this world is like a blackbird who desires to be a plover that calls by night in the wandering sky. “To have loved truly, be it for an hour only, is to be sure of eternity. Love is eternity. And if we have not loved, then also we are destined to eternity in order that in some other condition we may yet love. “If only we did not know that in this world it is often well to attempt what it would not be well to achieve. “Preach extravagance and extremes and ideals that haply we may achieve something above mediocrity. If we preach compromise we may not achieve more than desolation. And yet even out of desolation may bloom the rose. “Exactly the same proportion of marriages as of illicit unions are immoral, even in a worldly sense.” In 1899 it must have been the death of a child that dictated the words:— “I do not shed tears: I did that when she was born, for I saw her lie dead in the cot where she smiled.” There was a long interval and then one short entry:— “I possess everything, but in the world’s sense The next and final entries all belonged to the winter which he spent in the barn. On Christmas Eve:— “Life will never be better or nobler, nor has ever been, than here at this instant in my breast. But—may I never be content to know it lest to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow be the less for it.” Then:— “What is man? One moment he is a prayer, another a flower of God, another a flame to consume he knows not what save that it is himself. And, again, he is but a dungeon in which an infant’s cry is echoing. One day I saw soldiers, and I was nothing but, as it were, a sea-shell to record the clattering hoofs, the scarlet, the shattering trumpet. “The children have a doll that was given to them. They are talking to it and about it—as I talk to and about another man. “I heard the wind rustle in the dead leaves this morning, I heard it rustle over my grave, and over the world’s, and over the embers of all the stars, and I was not afraid. “What name has my beautiful barn in heaven? In it was born a man in the sight of his brothers “A doctor has been here, a man not used to our life. He too felt that it was cold. He said that little Francis—whom Mary calls Albert Edward—is ill and may die. If he does, then it may be from the corpse of an infant the saviour of society will be born.” These were the last words. On the day after the doctor’s visit the arrest was made. Arthur Aubrey Bishopstone and two of the children died in the infirmary of the prison. Francis Albert Edward, born at Lone Barn on Christmas Day, recovered from the effects of his birth and left the workhouse at the end of June with his mother and four brothers. I believe that after Lone Barn there was nothing they missed less than Arthur Aubrey Bishopstone. If they had been given to considering such matters, they would have said that he ought to have lived solitary and let his hair grow in Wayland’s Smithy instead of marrying and begetting seven children, of whom only two were able to die in infancy. Lone Barn has since been burnt to the ground, and should Francis Albert Edward (his real name) or the world visit the scene of his nativity, to worship or verify the facts, they would find in that hollow of Coming to the telegraph posts of Abingdon Lane—the Abingdon and Newbury road—the turf was furrowed this way and that. Gorse and thorn, surrounding the crossing of the straight, white road and the green way, made a frame as for some wayside event of no common kind, such as the birth of Francis; but the sun shone and the wind blew and betrayed nothing. Then the road was a central track of very little rutted turf, and flowers and long grass on either side; it had banks, but no thorns growing on them. The valley was beautiful, the mile-distant tedded hay looking like sea sand, the elms very dark in their lines or masses above the green corn, the villages hidden and the single farm-houses dim among trees, and the land rising beyond to a ridge saddled here and there with dark clumps on the horizon. In one place a far-off upland of newly ploughed chalk was almost snowy in misty whiteness. The clouds of the sky and the hot mist of earth dimmed the pale ploughland and the corn until the trees appeared to be floating on them as on a sea. They were cutting hay a little way off to my left, and as the horses and the mowing-machine came into sight at some speed it seemed to me that but for the seat it was probably much like a British war chariot. To the right the slope of the down was turf. Sometimes the road had a bank on each side, sometimes only on one; near the crossing of the road to East Hendred it was for a time without a bank; in other places the ditch Above Lockinge Park the road was about forty yards wide of level turf, between a bank and fence on the right and a natural low wall of turf above it on the left. But the new reservoir, the new plantation of firs and their iron fences, at this point might have persuaded the traveller that Lockinge Park was going to absorb the Ridgeway as it did the Icknield Way two centuries ago. At a very high point near by was a slender white column and cross upon a mound of turf erected in memory of Robert Loyd Lindsay, Baron Wantage, by his wife. The road went lightly away from this over the bare turf, having on its left the thorny slopes of Yew Down and on the right a sunken tumulus. Several deep tracks descended towards Lockinge, and at a I noticed that I seldom did more than glance at the country southward on my left. The steep downward slope that was never far off on the right, the wide vale below and the very distant hills sometimes visible beyond, could always draw my eyes from the south. On that side there was a beautiful region falling and then rising again to a height not much lower than the Ridgeway, and crowned with trees at the top of the rise, as e.g. beyond Fawley. There were several rough, thorny slopes on that side, each thorn distinct; and these are peculiarly attractive. Yet I could not look at them long. It was the same when I walked back in the opposite direction. The vale spread out in the north was satisfying, and the horizon was distant enough to quiet if it ever awakened desire: I never wished to descend. The two or three miles of country visible in the south was far more positively attractive, as well as by chance less known to me. Perhaps the horizon was too near and was soon merely tantalizing: certainly it gave no rest. Also the land fell away very little before rising again to this horizon, and consequently gave none of the pleasure of a low and, as it were, subject landscape. The scene awakened desire, but I could not turn aside to satisfy it. Therefore, perhaps, since it could not The road was going broad and green and straight between bare banks in the course set by the tributary from Farnborough, when suddenly it bent to the south for a few yards, and then again west by a little pond under some willows. It descended, much narrowed and hedged, past the ash trees and sycamores of White House, and then, with a sharp northward turn along the Wantage road and in a few yards another to the west at Red House, it recovered its direction and presumably its original course. Probably the half a mile or more between the two crooks is not an innovation, but the crooks themselves are, as it were, the punishment inflicted on the old road by two newer or at some time more vigorous roads cutting across it. Beyond Red House I passed Letcombe Castle or Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver’s brain.... It is not that they see the blasphemy of it like that of Babel or of the Titans. But they know that the builders of Babel and the Titans will fail, and if they cannot beat them themselves they will be on the side of the one who can. I should myself I do not know if it was called a Folly, but there was a plantation at the cross-road from Sparsholt to Lambourn which I liked—a long, narrow plantation of beeches close together alongside the cross-road and touching the Ridgeway on one side; on the other was a tumulus. Here it was a broad road with no hedges, there being corn on the right, and sheep, enclosed by a wire fencing, on the left. It was now near its highest point, nearly eight hundred feet, at the Hill Barn that stands with its company of stacks amidst a group of ash trees above Sparsholt. The purple meadow crane’s-bill was growing beside the road near Hill Barn. I left the Ridgeway that morning by the Blowingstone Hill and its woods, and went to Sparsholt, which has a quarter-mile of chestnut and lime, and then beech and elm shadow on the road to its church. One bee was buzzing inside as I walked over the stones and brasses of the floor and looked at the Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the royal arms, on the wall, but chiefly at three recumbent stone effigies lying asleep and private within a chapel, guarded by stone lions, railings, and a locked gate. |