Afoot in England: Chapter 22

Chapter 22

The Village and "The Stones"

My experiences at "The Stones" had left me with the idea that
but for the distracting company the hours I spent there would
have been very sweet and precious in spite of the cloud in the
east. Why then, I asked, not go back on another morning, when
I would have the whole place to myself? If a cloud did not
matter much it would matter still less that it was not the day
of the year when the red disc flames on the watcher's sight
directly over that outstanding stone and casts first a shadow
then a ray of light on the altar. In the end I did not say
good-bye to the village on that day, but settled down to
listen to the tales of my landlady, or rather to another
instalment of her life-story and to further chapters in the
domestic history of those five small villages in one. I had
already been listening to her every evening, and at odd times
during the day, for over a week, at first with interest, then
a little impatiently. I was impatient at being kept in, so to
speak. Out-of-doors the world was full of light and heat,
full of sounds of wild birds and fragrance of flowers and
new-mown hay; there were also delightful children and some
that were anything but delightful--dirty, ragged little
urchins of the slums. For even these small rustic villages
have their slums; and it was now the time when the young birds
were fluttering out of their nests--their hunger cries could
be heard everywhere; and the ragged little barbarians were
wild with excitement, chasing and stoning the flutterers to
slay them; or when they succeeded in capturing one without
first having broken its wings or legs it was to put it in a
dirty cage in a squalid cottage to see it perish miserably in
a day or two. Perhaps I succeeded in saving two or three
threatened lives in the lanes and secret green places by the
stream; perhaps I didn't; but in any case it was some
satisfaction to have made the attempt.

Now all this made me a somewhat impatient listener to the
village tales--the old unhappy things, for they were mostly
old and always unhappy; yet in the end I had to listen. It
was her eyes that did it. At times they had an intensity in
their gaze which made them almost uncanny, something like the
luminous eyes of an animal hungrily fixed on its prey. They
held me, though not because they glittered: I could have gone
away if I had thought proper, and remained to listen only
because the meaning of that singular look in her grey-green
eyes, which came into them whenever I grew restive, had dawned
on my careless mind.

She was an old woman with snow-white hair, which contrasted
rather strangely with her hard red colour; but her skin was
smooth, her face well shaped, with fine acquiline features.
No doubt it had been a very handsome face though never
beautiful, I imagine; it was too strong and firm and resolute;
too like the face of some man we see, which, though we have
but a momentary sight of it in a passing crowd, affects us
like a sudden puff of icy-cold air--the revelation of a
singular and powerful personality. Yet she was only a poor
old broken-down woman in a Wiltshire village, held fast in her
chair by a hopeless infirmity. With her legs paralysed she
was like that prince in the Eastern tale on whom an evil spell
had been cast, turning the lower half of his body into marble.
But she did not, like the prince, shed incessant tears and
lament her miserable destiny with a loud voice. She was
patient and cheerful always, resigned to the will of Heaven,
and--a strange thing this to record of an old woman in a
village!--she would never speak of her ailments. But though
powerless in body her mind was vigorous and active teeming
with memories of all the vicissitudes of her exceedingly
eventful, busy life, from the time when she left her village
as a young girl to fight her way in the great world to her
return to end her life in it, old and broken, her fight over,
her children and grandchildren dead or grown up and scattered
about the earth.

Chance having now put me in her way, she concluded after a few
preliminary or tentative talks that she had got hold of an
ideal listener; but she feared to lose me--she wanted me to go
on listening for ever. That was the reason of that painfully
intense hungry look in her eyes; it was because she discovered
certain signs of lassitude or impatience in me, a desire to
get up and go away and refresh myself in the sun and wind.
Poor old woman, she could not spring upon and hold me fast
when I attempted to move off, or pluck me back with her claws;
she could only gaze with fiercely pleading eyes and say
nothing; and so, without being fascinated, I very often sat on
listening still when I would gladly have been out-of-doors.

She was a good fluent talker; moreover, she studied her
listener, and finding that my interest in her own interminable
story was becoming exhausted she sought for other subjects,
chiefly the strange events in the lives of men and women who
had lived in the village and who had long been turned to dust.
They were all more or less tragical in character, and it
astonished me to think that I had stayed in a dozen or twenty,
perhaps forty, villages in Wiltshire, and had heard stories
equally strange and moving in pretty well every one of them.

If each of these small centres possessed a scribe of genius,
or at any rate one with a capacity for taking pains, who would
collect and print in proper form these remembered events,
every village would in time have its own little library of
local history, the volumes labelled respectively, "A Village
Tragedy", "The Fields of Dulditch", "Life's Little Ironies",
"Children's Children", and various others whose titles every
reader will be able to supply.

The effect of a long spell of listening to these unwritten
tragedies was sometimes strong enough to cloud my reason, for
on going directly forth into the bright sunshine and listening
to the glad sounds which filled the air, it would seem that
this earth was a paradise and that all creation rejoiced in
everlasting happiness excepting man alone who--mysterious
being!--was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks fly
upwards. A pure delusion, due to our universal and
ineradicable passion for romance and tragedy. Tell a man of a
hundred humdrum lives which run their quiet contented course
in this village, and the monotonous unmoving story, or hundred
stories, will go in at one ear and out at the other. Therefore
such stories are not told and not remembered. But that which
stirs our pity and terror--the frustrate life, the glorious
promise which was not fulfilled, the broken hearts and broken
fortunes, and passion, crime, remorse, retribution--all this
prints itself on the mind, and every such life is remembered
for ever and passed on from generation to generation. But it
would really form only one brief chapter in the long, long
history of the village life with its thousand chapters.

The truth is, if we live in fairly natural healthy condition,
we are just as happy as the lower animals. Some philosopher
has said that the chief pleasure in a man's life, as in that
of a cow, consists in the processes of mastication,
deglutition, and digestion, and I am very much inclined to
agree with him. The thought of death troubles us very little
--we do not believe in it. A familiar instance is that of the
consumptive, whose doctor and friends have given him up and
wait but to see the end, while he, deluded man, still sees
life, an illimitable, green, sunlit prospect, stretching away
to an infinite distance before him.

Death is a reality only when it is very near, so close on us
that we can actually hear its swift stoaty feet rustling over
the dead leaves, and for a brief bitter space we actually know
that his sharp teeth will presently be in our throat.

Out in the blessed sunshine I listen to a blackcap warbling
very beautifully in a thorn bush near the cottage; then to the
great shout of excited joy of the children just released from
school, as they rush pell-mell forth and scatter about the
village, and it strikes me that the bird in the thorn is not
more blithe-hearted than they. An old rook--I fancy he is
old, a many-wintered crow--is loudly caw-cawing from the elm
tree top; he has been abroad all day in the fields and has
seen his young able to feed themselves; and his own crop full,
and now he is calling to the others to come and sit there to
enjoy the sunshine with him. I doubt if he is happier than
the human inhabitants of the village, the field labourers and
shepherds who have been out toiling since the early hours, and
are now busy in their own gardens and allotments or placidly
smoking their pipes at their cottage doors.

But I could not stay longer in that village of old unhappy
memories and of quiet, happy, uninteresting lives that leave
no memory, so after waiting two more days I forced myself to
say good-bye to my poor old landlady. Or rather to say "Good
night," as I had to start at one o'clock in the morning so as
to have a couple, of hours before sunrise at "The Stones"
on my way to Salisbury. Her latest effort to detain me a day
longer had been made and there was no more to say.

"Do you know," she said in a low mysterious voice, "that it is
not safe to be alone at midnight on this long lonely road--the
loneliest place in all Salisbury Plain?" "The safest," I
said. "Safe as the Tower of London--the protectors of all
England are there." "Ah, there's where the danger is!" she
returned. "If you meet some desperate man, a deserter with
his rifle in his hand perhaps, do you think he would hesitate
about knocking you over to save himself and at the same time
get a little money to help him on his way?"

I smiled at her simulated anxiety for my safety, and set forth
when it was very dark but under a fine starry sky. The
silence, too, was very profound: there was no good-bye from
crowing cock or hooting owl on this occasion, nor did any
cyclist pass me on the road with a flash of light from his
lamp and a tinkle from his bell. The long straight road on
the high down was a dim grey band visible but a few yards
before me, lying across the intense blackness of the earth.
By day I prefer as a rule walking on the turf, but this road
had a rare and peculiar charm at this time. It was now the
season when the bird's-foot-trefoil, one of the commonest
plants of the downland country, was in its fullest bloom, so
that in many places the green or grey-green turf as far as one
could see on every side was sprinkled and splashed with
orange-yellow. Now this creeping, spreading plant, like most
plants that grow on the close-cropped sheep-walks, whose
safety lies in their power to root themselves and live very
close to the surface, yet must ever strive to lift its flowers
into the unobstructed light and air and to overtop or get away
from its crowding neighbours. On one side of the road, where
the turf had been cut by the spade in a sharp line, the plant
had found a rare opportunity to get space and light and had
thrust out such a multitude of bowering sprays, projecting
them beyond the turf, as to form a close band or rope of
orange-yellow, which divided the white road from the green
turf, and at one spot extended unbroken for upwards of a mile.
The effect was so singular and pretty that I had haunted this
road for days for the pleasure of seeing that flower border
made by nature. Now all colour was extinguished: beneath and
around me there was a dimness which at a few yards' distance
deepened to blackness, and above me the pale dim blue sky
sprinkled with stars; but as I walked I had the image of that
brilliant band of yellow colour in my mind.

By and by the late moon rose, and a little later the east
began to grow lighter and the dark down to change
imperceptibly to dim hoary green. Then the exquisite colours
of the dawn once more, and the larks rising in the dim
distance--a beautiful unearthly sound--and so in the end I
came to "The Stones," rejoicing, in spite of a cloud which now
appeared on the eastern horizon to prevent the coming sun from
being seen, that I had the place to myself. The rejoicing
came a little too soon; a very few minutes later other
visitors on foot and on bicycles began to come in, and we all
looked at each other a little blankly. Then a motorcar
arrived, and two gentlemen stepped out and stared at us, and
one suddenly burst out laughing.

"I see nothing to laugh at!" said his companion a little
severely.

The other in a low voice made some apology or explanation
which I failed to catch. It was, of course, not right; it was
indecent to laugh on such an occasion, for we were not of the
ebullient sort who go to "The Stones" at three o'clock in the
morning "for a lark"; but it was very natural in the
circumstances, and mentally I laughed myself at the absurdity
of the situation. However, the laugher had been rebuked for
his levity, and this incident over, there was nothing further
to disturb me or any one in our solemn little gathering.

It was a very sweet experience, and I cannot say that my early
morning outing would have been equally good at any other
lonely spot on Salisbury Plain or anywhere else with a wide
starry sky above me, the flush of dawn in the east, and the
larks rising heavenward out of the dim misty earth. Those
rudely fashioned immemorial stones standing dark and large
against the pale clear moonlit sky imparted something to the
feeling. I sat among them alone and had them all to myself,
as the others, fearing to tear their clothes on the barbed
wire, had not ventured to follow me when I got through the
fence. Outside the enclosure they were some distance from me,
and as they talked in subdued tones, their voices reached me
as a low murmur--a sound not out of harmony with the silent
solitary spirit of the place; and there was now no other sound
except that of a few larks singing fitfully a long way off.

Just what the element was in that morning's feeling which
Stonehenge contributed I cannot say. It was too vague and
uncertain, too closely interwoven with the more common feeling
for nature. No doubt it was partly due to many untraceable
associations, and partly to a thought, scarcely definite
enough to be called a thought, of man's life in this land from
the time this hoary temple was raised down to the beginning of
history. A vast span, a period of ten or more, probably of
twenty centuries, during which great things occurred and great
tragedies were enacted, which seem all the darker and more
tremendous to the mind because unwritten and unknown. But
with the mighty dead of these blank ages I could not commune.
Doubtless they loved and hated and rose and fell, and there
were broken hearts and broken lives; but as beings of flesh
and blood we cannot visualize them, and are in doubt even as
to their race. And of their minds, or their philosophy of
life, we know absolutely nothing. We are able, as Clifford
has said in his Cosmic Emotion, to shake hands with the
ancient Greeks across the great desert of centuries which
divides our day from theirs; but there is no shaking hands
with these ancients of Britain--or Albion, seeing that we are
on the chalk. To our souls they are as strange as the
builders of Tiuhuanaco, or Mitla and Itzana, and the cyclopean
ruins of Zimbabwe and the Carolines.

It is thought by some of our modern investigators of psychic
phenomena that apparitions result from the coming out of
impressions left in the surrounding matter, or perhaps in the
ether pervading it, especially in moments of supreme agitation
or agony. The apparition is but a restored picture, and
pictures of this sort are about us in millions; but for our
peace they are rarely visible, as the ability to see them is
the faculty of but a few persons in certain moods and certain
circumstances. Here, then, if anywhere in England, we, or the
persons who are endowed with this unpleasant gift, might look
for visions of the time when Stonehenge was the spiritual
capital, the Mecca of the faithful (when all were that), the
meeting-place of all the intellect, the hoary experience, the
power and majesty of the land.

But no visions have been recorded. It is true that certain
stories of alleged visions have been circulated during the
last few years. One, very pretty and touching, is of a child
from the London slums who saw things invisible to others.
This was one of the children of the very poor, who are taken
in summer and planted all about England in cottages to have a
week or a fortnight of country air and sunshine. Taken to
Stonehenge, she had a vision of a great gathering of people,
and so real did they seem that she believed in the reality
of it all, and so beautiful did they appear to her that she
was reluctant to leave, and begged to be taken back to see
it all again. Unfortunately it is not true. A full and
careful inquiry has been made into the story, of which there
are several versions, and its origin traced to a little
story-telling Wiltshire boy who had read or heard of the
white-robed priests of the ancient days at "The Stones," and
who just to astonish other little boys naughtily pretended
that he had seen it all himself!

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