Part 4 (1/2)

Here on many a night I have listened to the sibilant screech of the white owl and the brown owl's clear, long-drawn, quavering lamentation:

”Good Ivy, what byrdys hast thou?”

”Non but the Howlet, that How! How!”

Chapter Nine: Rural Rides

”A-birding on a Broncho” is the t.i.tle of a charming little book published some years ago, and probably better known to readers on the other side of the Atlantic than in England. I remember reading it with pleasure and pride on account of the author's name, Florence Merriam, seeing that, on my mother's side, I am partly a Merriam myself (of the branch on the other side of the Atlantic), and having been informed that all of that rare name are of one family, I took it that we were related, though perhaps very distantly. ”A-birding on a Broncho” suggested an equally alliterative t.i.tle for this chapter--”Birding on a Bike”; but I will leave it to others, for those who go a-birding are now very many and are hard put to find fresh t.i.tles to their books. For several reasons it will suit me better to borrow from Cobbett and name this chapter ”Rural Rides.”

Sore of us do not go out on bicycles to observe the ways of birds.

Indeed, some of our common species have grown almost too familiar with the wheel: it has become a positive danger to them. They not infrequently mistake its rate of speed and injure themselves in attempting to fly across it. Recently I had a thrush knock himself senseless against the spokes of my forewheel, and cycling friends have told me of similar experiences they have had, in some instances the heedless birds getting killed. Chaffinches are like the children in village streets--they will not get out of your way; by and by in rural places the merciful man will have to ring his bell almost incessantly to avoid running over them. As I do not travel at a furious speed I manage to avoid most things, even the wandering loveless oil-beetle and the small rose-beetle and that slow-moving insect tortoise the tumbledung.

Two or three seasons ago I was so unfortunate as to run over a large and beautifully bright gra.s.s snake near Aldermaston, once a snake sanctuary.

He writhed and wriggled on the road as if I had broken his back, but on picking him up I was pleased to find that my wind-inflated rubber tyre had not, like the brazen chariot wheel, crushed his delicate vertebra; he quickly recovered, and when released glided swiftly and easily away into cover. Twice only have I deliberately tried to run down, to tread on coat-tails so to speak, of any wild creature. One was a weasel, the other a stoat, running along at a hedge-side before me. In both instances, just as the front wheel was touching the tail, the little flat-headed rascal swerved quickly aside and escaped.

Even some of the less common and less tame birds care as little for a man on a bicycle as they do for a cow. Not long ago a peewit trotted leisurely across the road not more than ten yards from my front wheel; and on the same day I came upon a green woodp.e.c.k.e.r enjoying a dust-bath in the public road. He declined to stir until I stopped to watch him, then merely flew about a dozen yards away and attached himself to the trunk of a fir tree at the roadside and waited there for me to go. Never in all my wanderings afoot had I seen a yaffingale dusting himself like a barn-door fowl!

It is not seriously contended that birds can be observed narrowly in this easy way; but even for the most conscientious field naturalist the wheel has its advantages. It carries him quickly over much barren ground and gives him a better view of the country he traverses; finally, it enables him to see more birds. He will sometimes see thousands in a day where, walking, he would hardly have seen hundreds, and there is joy in mere numbers. It was just to get this general rapid sight of the bird life of the neighbouring hilly district of Hamps.h.i.+re that I was at Newbury on the last day of October. The weather was bright though very cold and windy, and towards evening I was surprised to see about twenty swallows in Northbrook Street flying languidly to and fro in the shelter of the houses, often fluttering under the eaves and at intervals sitting on ledges and projections. These belated birds looked as if they wished to hibernate, or find the most cosy holes to die in, rather than to emigrate. On the following day at noon they came out again and flew up and down in the same feeble aimless manner.

Undoubtedly a few swallows of all three species, but mostly house-martins, do ”lie up” in England every winter, but probably very few survive to the following spring. We should have said that it was impossible that any should survive but for one authentic instance in recent years, in which a barn-swallow lived through the winter in a semi-torpid state in an outhouse at a country vicarage. What came of the Newbury birds I do not know, as I left on the 2nd of November--tore myself away, I may say, for, besides meeting with people I didn't know who treated a stranger with sweet friendliness, it is a town which quickly wins one's affections. It is built of bricks of a good deep rich red--not the painfully bright red so much in use now--and no person has had the bad taste to spoil the harmony by introducing stone and stucco.

Moreover, Newbury has, in Shaw House, an Elizabethan mansion of the rarest beauty. Let him that is weary of the ugliness and discords in our town buildings go and stand by the ancient cedar at the gate and look across the wide green lawn at this restful house, subdued by time to a tender rosy-red colour on its walls and a deep dark red on its roof, clouded with grey of lichen.

From Newbury and the green meadows of the Kennet the Hamps.h.i.+re hills may be seen, looking like the South Down range at its highest point viewed from the Suss.e.x Weald. I made for Coombe Hill, the highest hill in Hamps.h.i.+re, and found it a considerable labour to push my machine up from the pretty tree-hidden village of East Woodhay at its foot. The top is a league-long tableland, with stretches of green elastic turf, thickets of furze and bramble, and clumps of ancient n.o.ble beeches--a beautiful lonely wilderness with rabbits and birds for only inhabitants. From the highest point where a famous gibbet stands for ever a thousand feet above the sea and where there is a dew-pond, the highest in England, which has never dried up although a large flock of sheep drink in it every summer day, one looks down into an immense hollow, a Devil's Punch Bowl very many times magnified,--and spies, far away and far below, a few lonely houses half hidden by trees at the bottom. This is the romantic village of Coombe, and hither I went and found the vicar busy in the garden of the small old picturesque parsonage. Here a very pretty little bird comedy was in progress: a pair of stock-doves which had been taken from a rabbit-hole in the hill and reared by hand had just escaped from the large cage where they had always lived, and all the family were excitedly engaged in trying to recapture them. They were delightful to see--those two pretty blue birds with red legs running busily about on the green lawn, eagerly searching for something to eat and finding nothing. They were quite tame and willing to be fed, so that anyone could approach them and put as much salt on their tails as he liked, but they refused to be touched or taken; they were too happy in their new freedom, running and flying about in that brilliant suns.h.i.+ne, and when I left towards the evening they were still at large.

But before quitting that small isolated village in its green basin--a human heart in a chalk hill, almost the highest in England--I wished the hours I spent in it had been days, so much was there to see and hear.

There was the gibbet on the hill, for example, far up on the rim of the green basin, four hundred feet above the village; why had that memorial, that symbol of a dreadful past, been preserved for so many years and generations? and why had it been raised so high--was it because the crime of the person put to death there was of so monstrous a nature that it was determined to suspend him, if not on a gibbet fifty cubits high, at all events higher above the earth than Haman the son of Hammedatha the Agagite? The gruesome story is as follows.

Once upon a time there lived a poor widow woman in Coombe, with two sons, aged fourteen and sixteen, who worked at a farm in the village.

She had a lover, a middle-aged man, living at Woodhay, a carrier who used to go on two or three days each week with his cart to deliver parcels at Coombe. But he was a married man, and as he could not marry the widow while his wife remained alive, it came into his dull Berks.h.i.+re brain that the only way out of the difficulty was to murder her, and to this course the widow probably consented. Accordingly, one day, he invited or persuaded her to accompany him on his journey to the remote village, and on the way he got her out of the cart and led her into a close thicket to show her something he had discovered there. What he wished to show her (according to one version of the story) was a populous hornets' nest, and having got her there he suddenly flung her against it and made off, leaving the cloud of infuriated hornets to sting her to death. That night he slept at Coombe, or stayed till a very late hour at the widow's cottage and told her what he had done.

In telling her he had spoken in his ordinary voice, but by and by it occurred to him that the two boys, who were sleeping close by in the living-room, might have been awake and listening. She a.s.sured him that they were both fast asleep, but he was not satisfied, and said that if they had heard him he would kill them both, as he had no wish to swing, and he could not trust them to hold their tongues. Thereupon they got up and examined the faces of the two boys, holding a candle over them, and saw that they were in a deep sleep, as was natural after their long day's hard work on the farm, and the murderer's fears were set at rest.

Yet one of the boys, the younger, had been wide awake all the time, listening, trembling with terror, with wide eyes to the dreadful tale, and only when they first became suspicious instinct came to his aid and closed his eyes and stilled his tremors and gave him the appearance of being asleep. Early next morning, with his terror still on him, he told what he had heard to his brother, and by and by, unable to keep the dreadful secret, they related it to someone--a carter or ploughman on the farm. He in turn told the farmer, who at once gave information, and in a short time the man and woman were arrested. In due time they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged in the parish where the crime had been committed.

Everybody was delighted, and Coombe most delighted of all, for it happened that some of their wise people had been diligently examining into the matter and had made the discovery that the woman had been murdered just outside their borders in the adjoining parish of Inkpen, so that they were going to enjoy seeing the wicked punished at somebody else's expense. Inkpen was furious and swore that it would not be saddled with the cost of a great public double execution. The line dividing the two parishes had always been a doubtful one; now they were going to take the benefit of the doubt and let Coombe hang its own miscreants!

As neither side would yield, the higher authorities were compelled to settle the matter for them, and ordered the cost to be divided between the two parishes, the gibbet to be erected on the boundary line, as far as it could be ascertained. This was accordingly done, the gibbet being erected at the highest point crossed by the line, on a stretch of beautiful smooth elastic turf, among prehistoric earthworks--a spot commanding one of the finest and most extensive views in Southern England. The day appointed for the execution brought the greatest concourse of people ever witnessed at that lofty spot, at all events since prehistoric times. If some of the ancient Britons had come out of their graves to look on, seated on their earthworks, they would have probably rubbed their ghostly hands together and remarked to each other that it reminded them of old times. All cla.s.ses were there, from the n.o.bility and gentry, on horseback and in great coaches in which they carried their own provisions, to the meaner sort who had trudged from all the country round on foot, and those who had not brought their own food and beer were catered for by traders in carts. The crowd was a hilarious one, and no doubt that grand picnic on the beacon was the talk of they country for a generation or longer. The two wretches having been hanged in chains on one gibbet were left to be eaten by ravens, crows, and magpipes, and dried by sun and winds, until, after long years, the swinging, creaking skeletons with their chains on fell to pieces and were covered with the turf, but the gibbet itself was never removed.

Then a strange thing happened. The sheep on a neighbouring farm became thin and sickly and yielded little wool and died before their time. No remedies availed and the secret of their malady could not be discovered; but it went on so long that the farmer was threatened with utter ruin. Then, by chance, it was discovered that the chains in which the murderers had been hanged had been thrown by some evil-minded person into a dew-pond on the farm. This was taken to be the cause of the malady in the sheep; at all events, the chains having been taken out of the pond and buried deep in the earth, the flock recovered: it was supposed that the person who had thrown the chains in the water to poison it had done so to ruin the farmer in revenge for some injustice or grudge. But even now we are not quite done with the gibbet! Many, many years had gone by when Inkpen discovered from old doc.u.ments that their little dishonest neighbour, Coombe, had taken more land than she was ent.i.tled to, that not only a part but the whole of that n.o.ble hill-top belonged to her! It was Inkpen's turn to chuckle now; but she chuckled too soon, and Coombe, running out to look, found the old rotten stump of the gibbet still in the ground. Hands off! she cried. Here stands a post, which you set up yourself, or which we put up together and agreed that this should be the boundary line for ever. Inkpen sneaked off to hide herself in her village, and Coombe, determined to keep the subject in mind, set up a brand-new stout gibbet in the place of the old rotting one. That too decayed and fell to pieces in time, and the present gibbet is therefore the third, and n.o.body has ever been hanged on it. Coombe is rather proud of it, but I am not sure that Inkpen is.

That was one of three strange events in the life of the village which I heard: the other two must be pa.s.sed by; they would take long to tell and require a good pen to do them justice. To me the best thing in or of the village was the vicar himself, my put-upon host, a man of so blithe a nature, so human and companionable, that when I, a perfect stranger without an introduction or any excuse for such intrusion came down like a wolf on his luncheon-table, he received me as if I had been an old friend or one of his own kindred, and freely gave up his time to me for the rest of that day. To count his years he was old: he had been vicar of Coombe for half a century, but he was a young man still and had never had a day's illness in his life--he did not know what a headache was. He smoked with me, and to prove that he was not a total abstainer he drank my health in a gla.s.s of port wine--very good wine. It was Coombe that did it--its peaceful life, isolated from a distracting world in that hollow hill, and the marvellous purity of its air. ”Sitting there on my lawn,” he said, ”you are six hundred feet above the sea, although in a hollow four hundred feet deep.” It was an ideal open-air room, round and green, with the sky for a roof. In winter it was sometimes very cold, and after a heavy fall of snow the scene was strange and impressive from the tiny village set in its stupendous dazzling white bowl. Not only on those rare arctic days, but at all times it was wonderfully quiet. The shout of a child or the peaceful crow of a c.o.c.k was the loudest sound you heard. Once a gentleman from London town came down to spend a week at the parsonage. Towards evening on the very first day he grew restless and complained of the abnormal stillness. ”I like a quiet place well enough,” he exclaimed, ”but this tingling silence I can't stand!” And stand it he wouldn't and didn't, for on the very next morning he took himself off. Many years had gone by, but the vicar could not forget the Londoner who had come down to invent a new way of describing the Coombe silence. His tingling phrase was a joy for ever.

He took me to the church--one of the tiniest churches in the country, just the right size for a church in a tiny village and a.s.sured me that he had never once locked the door in his fifty years--day and night it was open to any one to enter. It was a refuge and shelter from the storm and the Tempest, and many a poor homeless wretch had found a dry place to sleep in that church during the last half a century. This man's feeling of pity and tenderness for the very poor, even the outcast and tramp, was a pa.s.sion. But how strange all this would sound in the ears of many country clergymen! How many have told me when I have gone to the parsonage to ”borrow the key” that it had been found necessary to keep the church door locked, to prevent damage, thefts, etc. ”Have you never had anything stolen?” I asked him. Yes, once, a great many years ago, the church plate had been taken away in the night. But it was recovered: the thief had taken it to the top of the hill and thrown it into the dewpond there, no doubt intending to take it out and dispose of it at some more convenient time. But it was found, and had ever since then been kept safe at the vicarage. Nothing of value to tempt a man to steal was kept in the church. He had never locked it, but once in his fifty years it had been locked against him by the churchwardens. This happened in the days of the Joseph Arch agitation, when the agricultural labourer's condition was being hotly discussed throughout the country.

The vicar's heart was stirred, for he knew better than most how hard these conditions were at Coombe and in the surrounding parishes. He took up the subject and preached on it in his own pulpit in a way that offended the landowners and alarmed the farmers in the district. The church wardens, who were farmers, then locked him out of his church, and for two or three weeks there was no public wors.h.i.+p in the parish of Coombe. Doubtless their action was applauded by all the substantial men in the neighbourhood; the others who lived in the cottages and were unsubstantial didn't matter. That storm blew over, but its consequences endured, one being that the inflammatory parson continued to be regarded with cold disapproval by the squires and their larger tenants. But the vicar himself was unrepentant and unashamed; on the contrary, he gloried in what he had said and done, and was proud to be able to relate that a quarter of a century later one of the two men who had taken that extreme course said to him, ”We locked you out of your own church, but years have brought me to another mind about that question. I see it in a different light now and know that you were right and we were wrong.”

Towards evening I said good-bye to my kind friend and entertainer and continued my rural ride. From Coombe it is five miles to Hurstbourne Tarrant, another charming ”highland” village, and the road, sloping down the entire distance, struck me as one of the best to be on I had travelled in Hamps.h.i.+re, running along a narrow green valley, with oak and birch and bramble and thorn in their late autumn colours growing on the slopes on either hand. Probably the beauty of the scene, or the swift succession of beautiful scenes, with the low sun flaming on the ”coloured shades,” served to keep out of my mind something that should have been in it. At all events, it was odd that I had more than once promised myself a visit to the very village I was approaching solely because William Cobbett had described and often stayed in it, and now no thought of him and his ever-delightful Rural Rides was in my mind.

Arrived at the village I went straight to the ”George and Dragon,” where a friend had a.s.sured me I could always find good accommodations. But he was wrong: there was no room for me, I was told by a weird-looking, lean, white-haired old woman with whity-blue unfriendly eyes. She appeared to resent it that any one should ask for accommodation at such a time, when the ”shooting gents” from town required all the rooms available. Well, I had to sleep somewhere, I told her: couldn't she direct me to a cottage where I could get a bed? No, she couldn't--it is always so; but after the third time of asking she unfroze so far as to say that perhaps they would take me in at a cottage close by. So I went, and a poor kind widow who lived there with a son consented to put me up. She made a nice fire in the sitting-room, and after warming myself before it, while watching the firelight and shadows playing on the dim walls and ceiling, it came to me that I was not in a cottage, but in a large room with an oak floor and wainscoting. ”Do you call this a cottage?” I said to the woman when she came in with tea. ”No, I have it as a cottage, but it is an old farm-house called the Rookery,” she returned. Then, for the first time, I remembered Rural Rides. ”This then is the very house where William Cobbett used to stay seventy or eighty years ago,” I said. She had never heard of William Cobbett; she only knew that at that date it had been tenanted by a farmer named Blount, a Roman Catholic, who had some curious ideas about the land.