Afoot in England: Chapter 17

Chapter 17

An Old Road Leading Nowhere

So many and minute were the directions I received about the
way from the blessed cowkeeper, and so little attention did I
give them, my mind being occupied with other things, that they
were quickly forgotten. Of half a hundred things I remembered
only that I had to "bear to the left." This I did, although
it seemed useless, seeing that my way was by lanes, across
fields, and through plantations. At length I came to a road,
and as it happened to be on my left hand I followed it. It
was narrow, worn deep by traffic and rains; and grew deeper,
rougher, and more untrodden as I progressed, until it was
like the dry bed of a mountain torrent, and I walked on
boulder-stones between steep banks about fourteen feet high.
Their sides were clothed with ferns, grass and rank moss;
their summits were thickly wooded, and the interlacing
branches of the trees above, mingled with long rope-like
shoots of bramble and briar, formed so close a roof that I
seemed to be walking in a dimly lighted tunnel. At length,
thinking that I had kept long enough to a road which had
perhaps not been used for a century, also tired of the
monotony of always bearing to the left, I scrambled out on the
right-hand side. For some time past I had been ascending a
low, broad, flat-topped hill, and on forcing my way through
the undergrowth into the open I found myself on the level
plateau, an unenclosed spot overgrown with heather and
scattered furze bushes, with clumps of fir and birch trees.
Before me and on either hand at this elevation a vast extent
of country was disclosed. The surface was everywhere broken,
but there was no break in the wonderful greenness, which the
recent rain had intensified. There is too much green, to my
thinking, with too much uniformity in its soft, bright tone,
in South Devon. After gazing on such a landscape the brown,
harsh, scanty vegetation of the hilltop seemed all the more
grateful. The heath was an oasis and a refuge; I rambled
about in it until my feet and legs were wet; then I sat
down to let them dry and altogether spent several agreeable
hours at that spot, pleased at the thought that no human
fellow-creature would intrude upon me. Feathered companions
were, however, not wanting. The crowing of cock pheasants
from the thicket beside the old road warned me that I was on
preserved grounds. Not too strictly preserved, however, for
there was my old friend the carrion-crow out foraging for his
young. He dropped down over the trees, swept past me, and was
gone. At this season, in the early summer, he may be easily
distinguished, when flying, from his relation the rook. When
on the prowl the crow glides smoothly and rapidly through the
air, often changing his direction, now flying close to the
surface, anon mounting high, but oftenest keeping nearly on a
level with the tree tops. His gliding and curving motions are
somewhat like those of the herring-gull, but the wings in
gliding are carried stiff and straight, the tips of the long
flight-feathers showing a slight upward curve. But the
greatest difference is in the way the head is carried. The
rook, like the heron and stork, carries his beak pointing
lance-like straight before him. He knows his destination, and
makes for it; he follows his nose, so to speak, turning
neither to the right nor the left. The foraging crow
continually turns his head, gull-like and harrier-like, from
side to side, as if to search the ground thoroughly or to
concentrate his vision on some vaguely seen object.

Not only the crow was there: a magpie chattered as I came from
the brake, but refused to show himself; and a little later a
jay screamed at me, as only a jay can. There are times when I
am intensely in sympathy with the feeling expressed in this
ear-splitting sound, inarticulate but human. It is at the
same time warning and execration, the startled solitary's
outburst of uncontrolled rage at the abhorred sight of a
fellow-being in his woodland haunt.

Small birds were numerous at that spot, as if for them also
its wildness and infertility had an attraction. Tits,
warblers, pipits, finches, all were busy ranging from place to
place, emitting their various notes now from the tree-tops,
then from near the ground; now close at hand, then far off;
each change in the height, distance, and position of the
singer giving the sound a different character, so that the
effect produced was one of infinite variety. Only the
yellow-hammer remained constant in one spot, in one position,
and the song at each repetition was the same. Nevertheless
this bird is not so monotonous a singer as he is reputed. A
lover of open places, of commons and waste lands, with a bush
or dwarf tree for tower to sit upon, he is yet one of the most
common species in the thickly timbered country of the Otter,
Clyst, and Sid, in which I had been rambling, hearing him
every day and all day long. Throughout that district, where
the fields are small, and the trees big and near together, he
has the cirl-bunting's habit of perching to sing on the tops
of high hedgerow elms and oaks.

By and by I had a better bird to listen to--a redstart. A
female flew down within fifteen yards of me; her mate followed
and perched on a dry twig, where he remained a long time for
so shy and restless a creature. He was in perfect plumage,
and sitting there, motionless in the strong sunlight, was
wonderfully conspicuous, the gayest, most exotic-looking bird
of his family in England. Quitting his perch, he flew up into
a tree close by and began singing; and for half an hour
thereafter I continued intently listening to his brief strain,
repeated at short intervals--a song which I think has never
been perfectly described. "Practice makes perfect" is an
axiom that does not apply to the art of song in the bird
world; since the redstart, a member of a highly melodious
family, with a good voice to start with, has never attained to
excellence in spite of much practising. The song is
interesting both on account of its exceptional inferiority and
of its character. A distinguished ornithologist has said that
little birds have two ways of making themselves attractive--by
melody and by bright plumage; and that most species excel in
one or the other way; and that the acquisition of gay colours
by a species of a sober-coloured melodious family will cause
it to degenerate as a songster. He is speaking of the
redstart. Unfortunately for the rule there are too many
exceptions. Thus confining ourselves to a single family--that
of the finches--in our own islands, the most modest coloured
have the least melody, while those that have the gayest
plumage are the best singers--the goldfinch, chaffinch,
siskin, and linnet. Nevertheless it is impossible to listen
for any length of time to the redstart, and to many redstarts,
without feeling, almost with irritation, that its strain is
only the prelude of a song--a promise never performed; that
once upon a time in the remote past it was a sweet, copious,
and varied singer, and that only a fragment of its melody now
remains. The opening rapidly warbled notes are so charming
that the attention is instantly attracted by them. They are
composed of two sounds, both beautiful--the bright pure
gushing robin-like note, and the more tender expressive
swallow-like note. And that is all; the song scarcely begins
before it ends, or collapses; for in most cases the pure sweet
opening strain is followed by a curious little farrago of
gurgling and squeaking sounds, and little fragments of varied
notes, often so low as to be audible only at a few yards'
distance. It is curious that these slight fragments of notes
at the end vary in different individuals, in strength and
character and in number, from a single faintest squeal to half
a dozen or a dozen distinct sounds. In all cases they are
emitted with apparent effort, as if the bird strained its pipe
in the vain attempt to continue the song.

The statement that the redstart is a mimic is to be met with
in many books about birds. I rather think that in jerking out
these various little broken notes which end its strain,
whether he only squeaks or succeeds in producing a pure sound,
he is striving to recover his own lost song rather than to
imitate the songs of other birds.

So much entertainment did I find at that spot, so grateful did
it seem in its openness after long confinement in the lower
thickly wooded country, that I practically spent the day
there. At all events the best time for walking was gone when
I quitted it, and then I could think of no better plan than to
climb down into the old long untrodden road, or channel, again
just to see where it would lead me. After all, I said, my
time is my own, and to abandon the old way I have walked in so
long without discovering the end would be a mistake. So I
went on in it once more, and in about twenty minutes it came
to an end before a group of old farm buildings in a hollow in
the woods. The space occupied by the buildings was quite
walled round and shut in by a dense growth of trees and
bushes; and there was no soul there and no domestic animal.
The place had apparently been vacant many years, and the
buildings were in a ruinous condition, with the roofs falling
in.

Now when I look back on that walk I blame myself for having
gone on my way without trying to find out something of the
history of that forsaken home to which the lonely old road had
led me. Those ruinous buildings once inhabited, so wrapped
round and hidden away by trees, have now a strange look in
memory as if they had a story to tell, as if something
intelligent had looked from the vacant windows as I stood
staring at them and had said, We have waited these many years
for you to come and listen to our story and you are come at
last.

Something perhaps stirred in me in response to that greeting
and message, but I failed to understand it, and after standing
there awhile, oppressed by a sense of loneliness, I turned
aside, and creeping and pushing through a mass and tangle of
vegetation went on my way towards the coast.

Possibly that idea or fancy of a story to tell, a human
tragedy, came to me only because of another singular
experience I had that day when the afternoon sun had grown
oppressively hot--another mystery of a desolate but not in
this case uninhabited house. The two places somehow became
associated together in my mind.

The place was a little farm-house standing some distance
from the road, in a lonely spot out of sight of any other
habitation, and I thought I would call and ask for a glass
of milk, thinking that if things had a promising look on my
arrival my modest glass of milk would perhaps expand to a
sumptuous five-o'clock tea and my short rest to a long and
pleasant one.

The house I found on coming nearer was small and mean-looking
and very old; the farm buildings in a dilapidated condition,
the thatch rotten and riddled with holes in which many
starlings and sparrows had their nests. Gates and fences were
broken down, and the ground was everywhere overgrown with
weeds and encumbered with old broken and rusty implements, and
littered with rubbish. No person could I see about the place,
but knew it was inhabited as there were some fowls walking
about, and some calves shut in a pen in one of the numerous
buildings were dolefully calling--calling to be fed. Seeing a
door half open at one end of the house I went to it and rapped
on the warped paintless wood with my stick, and after about a
minute a young woman came from an inner room and asked me what
I wanted. She was not disturbed or surprised at my sudden
appearance there: her face was impassive, and her eyes when
they met mine appeared to look not at me but at something
distant, and her words were spoken mechanically.

I said that I was hot and thirsty and tired and would be glad
of a glass of milk.

Without a word she turned and left me standing there, and
presently returned with a tumbler of milk which she placed on
a deal table standing near me. To my remarks she replied in
monosyllables, and stood impassively, her hands at her side,
her eyes cast down, waiting for me to drink the milk and go.
And when I had finished it and set the glass down and thanked
her, she turned in silence and went back to that inner room
from which she first came. And hot and tired as I had felt a
few moments before, and desirous of an interval of rest in the
cool shade, I was glad to be out in the burning sun once more,
for the sight of that young woman had chilled my blood and
made the heat out-of-doors seem grateful to me.

The sight of such a face in the midst of such surroundings had
produced a shock of surprise, for it was noble in shape, the
features all fine and the mouth most delicately chiselled, the
eyes dark and beautiful, and the hair of a raven blackness.
But it was a colourless face, and even the lips were pale.
Strongest of all was the expression, which had frozen there,
and was like the look of one on whom some unimaginable
disaster or some hateful disillusionment had come, not to
subdue nor soften, but to change all its sweet to sour, and
its natural warmth to icy cold.

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