On the Other Side of the Quantocks

I

WHEN we were children, no holiday excursion gave us more happiness than a day spent on the Quantocks. These moorland hills, rising northwest from Taunton and stretching almost to the Bristol Channel, were very exciting to us. I suppose their attraction depended largely upon the nature of their scenery, which was utterly different from that of our home. We were used enough to South Somerset, with its clay and mud,—‘ bad for the rider, good for the bider,’ — whereas these wild Ishmaelitic hills possessed the charm of the unfamiliar.

The other day, after an interval of a quarter of a century, I saw them again. The occasion that impelled me this time was a sad one. I went to visit the grave of a girl who, during the cold weeks of last January, had died at the old fishing village of Watchet and had been buried there. A particular poignancy attended this death. She had left us at the New Year to look for a house in the West Country. She and her husband had found a place that suited them exactly, and were about to return to London to make the final arrangements incident to their new life when, after an illness of only two days, she was dead.¹

I have been told that the Chinese emphasize a difference between ordinary partings and these other particular partings when, in our ignorance of the crooked ways of fate, we separate from those we love forever. It is their rumor also that an approaching death will cast a forward shadow. It certainly seems to me in retrospect that when I last saw her I had had an obscure premonition of what was to happen. She was suffering from a cold, and, lying in the corner of a wide cottage bed, she looked alarmingly fragile. I remember also that there came to me, as I walked back over the downs, certain chance glimpses of her in the past, glimpses that presented themselves as distinctly as pictures. I saw her following the cart ruts that ran beside the standing August corn, her hand shading her eyes. I saw her in the seaweed pool at the bottom of the White Nose; and again I saw her by the fireside gravely quoting to me this lilt she had learned from her mother: —

Her life had not been a completely happy one. The same intensity that gave so high a quality to her writing made it hard for her to fortify herself against the thwartings and disappointments of the years. Her spirit was as delicate and as vulnerable as her body, with its bones light as the bones of a bird. She always remained a child, and if she stood on highest tiptoe could never measure more than a hogweed in a hedge.

As is so often the case with the very young, the agitations of her soul would communicate themselves directly to her body, so that if you were holding her hand when she was troubled, you would feel it vibrant and trembling like a minnow freshly taken from the net.

II

I set out on my expedition proposing to spend my first night at Crowcombe, a small village which lies at the foot of the Quantocks, and from there, the next day, to walk over the moors to Watchet. I found the village unchanged; the old red brick Court House of the Carew family standing just as I remembered it, and to the right of the church the same steep lane leading on to the hills.

I took a room at the Carew Arms and had tea before a wide old-fashioned fireplace. As I ate my meal of whortleberry jam and Devonshire cream I seemed for the first time fully to appreciate the satisfaction that Hazlitt felt on those rare occasions when he was known to the world by no nearer definition than ‘the gentleman in the parlour.’ After I had finished, I made up my mind to climb the Quantocks that very evening in order to discover the best route for my walk the following day.

Of all the lanes in the world this Crowcombe lane charms me most. I had never gone up it before in the springtime, and in this tender opening period of the year the mossy track seemed more beautiful even than I had remembered it. There were periwinkles out on the crumbling walls and everywhere primroses. The lane wound upward and upward under the most splendid beech trees. The enormous trunks of these trees, rising with silent might out of the bare ground, their horizontally interlacing branches lifted higher and ever higher, awoke the spirit to the worship of Nature’s strength, to the worship of her patient piety. The mute boughs, still winter-bare and yet united into one harmony, were to the eye as organ music to the ear. It seemed that not one gray-white outspreading branch had changed its form since the days of my childhood, since that dogday morning when, as a small boy, I had followed my Aunt Dora up the steep path, trying my best with a frond of bracken to beat away the stinging flies that troubled her. I had been impatient then to reach the top of the lane, and on this spring night the same urge was upon me. Not Table Mountain, not Mount Tamalpais, not Kenya, not Mount Carmel, not Vesuvius, not one of them all had stolen the old appeal of the West Country hill.

At last I was on the summit and once more looking with corporeal eye at this prospect, which on so many different occasions, in places so far from Crowcombe, had been present to the inward vision of my mind. It is one of the finest views in England. Under the bright cold sky of that April evening I could see the hills in all their glory, fold beyond fold, combe below combe, falling away to the western ocean. On the farthest horizon it was possible to make out the mountains of Wales, while in the mid-distance, set in the silver sea of the Bristol Channel, was the island of Steep Holmes standing black against the water, black against the parrotgreen nursery meadows that slope down to the very shore.

Always as children we had longed to see a red deer. In vain we had searched for one, diligently exploring each grove of stunted oak trees, pushing our way through every patch of bracken that seemed dense or secluded. We had followed the mountain streams from one rocky basin to another, but on no single occasion had we disturbed hind or stag. Now after all these years my luck had changed, for as I walked through the heather stalks blackened with fire I suddenly became aware that two of these animals had risen not fifty yards away. They were so large that almost I could imagine myself back in the highlands of Africa looking at water buck. For a moment they remained motionless, gazing at me with the concentrated attention characteristic of wild life suddenly disturbed by man, as though even in these latter days the appearance of our kind, erect and biped, still had something startling about it, something that demanded a more exact ocular investigation than an ordinary object in nature. Then in an instant they were away over the next ridge, their antlers clear-cut against the sky, moving with a succession of absolutely silent leaps, as animals in a dream, as beasts on a tapestry come miraculously to life.

III

I have often noticed that any particularly favored sight of Nature’s more perfect disciplines is apt to remove for a certain time those limitations of perception that use and wont so quickly impose upon us. Without warning, without reason, we find ourselves suddenlyable to experience emotions roaming and marginal, to see life with the eye of Merlin! This happened to me now as I rested on a heap of dry heather halfway down the lane, at the very spot where as a boy I had lost my birthday watch among the whortleberries.

Night was already falling. Never had I seen the planet Venus more beautiful, never had I seen her shine with a light more firm and faëry. As I looked at her in her isolated loveliness, the heels of my boots pressing into the soft mould of the familiar earth, and with my senses enmeshed in mystery, suddenly there was the sound of church bells upon the twilight air. It was at that moment as if this Christian sound coming up from the village below belonged really and truly to another world, a world without sorrow or death, a world no longer rude, a world where love was as gentle as mill-stream flowers and as eternal as light. Up through the naked beech-tree branches came the sound as from a great distance, the fitful cadence of its tintinnabulation borne, now soft, now loud, upon the restless winds of the wood.

All Christmas nights were in the sound and all New Year Eves. It tolled for the passing of the souls of all men and of all women; it chimed for the wedding processions of true lovers who for centuries have slept dreamless far under the roots of red-berried yew trees. Now it sounded dolorous as the stroke of a harbor bell giving warning of danger in the dusk of an autumn evening; now happy as a carillon from the turret of a chantry, when cuckooflowers and kingcups are out in the water meadows, and the prince and princess at play in their garden bower.

It was as though these bell clappers were truly ancient mediæval tongues telling of days out of the past; telling of antique cradles, of the enchanted web of flaxen sheets gray with age; telling of churchyards still prosperous and emerald bright, but where the strife of this naughty world has been forever canceled, and where the knight and his lady have been lying in innocence for a period without computation, and where the rook boy elbows the goose girl and the hen wife the swineherd with ugly brown teeth. It was a music out of the past. It told of what might have been and never has been; a music of the very borderland of the willful senses; a music of a paradise serene and blithe, where impassioned phantoms wander free, their minds, their bodies, at peace at last.

IV

When I waked the next morning it was raining. ‘You are never going on to the hills to-day,’ remarked my hostess as she brought in my breakfast. However, by the time I had reached the top of the lane the day had begun to improve.

Hidden among some trees I came upon a small hut. I knocked on its door. A rough man appeared, and I asked him which of the tracks would bring me to Watchet. He rubbed his sandy gray hair and looked suspiciously at me. He was large-boned and unkempt, and his boots were unlaced. Eventually he gave me the directions I wanted. I stood talking to him. He had lived in his small house all his life. He made a livelihood by fetching away the carcasses of the deer killed by the hounds, and distributing the venison among the farmers and village people. For the performance of this task he had a cart, and a pony that, was as hard and tough as himself; and he assured me that knowing the Quantocks as he did, and the habits of the red deer, he scarcely ever failed to be in at the death. He told me that his name was Truggins. What the correct word in the lore of venery would be to describe a man with his duties I do not know.

I now made my way along the high ridge that lies to the west of the hills, and a proud walk it is over this shoulder of the Quantocks. To the left the traveler looks down upon the lowlands that separate the Quantocks from Dunkery Beacon. The ploughed fields showed the red tilth characteristic of Devonshire, and the meadows were small and regular as chessboard squares. I came upon a weather-beaten, weather-bitten thorn tree standing by itself in a place where five grassy tracks met. Judging from the size of its trunk, it must have been of a great age. It was hoar with crisp crinkled lichen, but I noticed that every twig was decorated with living buds. It was difficult to imagine this ancient hawthorn in flower, its twisted besom branches soft with the plenary sweetness of the Mayflower.

What a wild, strange trysting place this tree would make! Almost certainly it had before now been used for this recurring human need, perhaps by Ruth herself before ever she had come to wander mad and was observed by Wordsworth trifling with her toys in the brown trout streams.

V

I came down from the Quantocks at their northwestern extremity to discover that I still had several miles to walk before reaching Watchet. The hotel where the novelist had died was an old and attractive building. The proprietor and his wife had done all within their powder to help her. I looked at these good people with wonder and gratitude, selected as they had been out of all the population of England to cherish the last hours of this girl’s life. They showed me her room. It was an ordinary hotel bedroom, but I noticed that between the roofs of the houses across the street a wide space of open sky must have been visible from her pillow. It has always seemed to me no inconsequent matter what our eyes look upon in the hour of death. It was garden birds twittering in the clematis outside her window that made up my mother’s last impression of earth life.

I walked to the churchyard on the hill. There was the grave under the farther wall, with the mould still showing raw and with strips of green turf laid unevenly on the mound.

The church of Watchet is dedicated to Saint Decuman. It stands on the summit of a hill midway between Exmoor and the Quantocks. The body of the church is hidden by trees, but its tower is visible from a great distance like a kind of Glastonbury Tor rising by itself. I was happy to know that she who had always been so steadfast a champion of the spiritually oppressed should have her burial plot marked by so brave a sign.

When all has been said, how abject a grave can look! ‘ We are the dead ’ — ‘ We are the dead ’ — ‘We are the dead!’ Yet out of the dumb ground there rose no word of resentment, no word of reproach. ‘Every day, every hour that you breathe you experience a miracle. You are still free and alive under the blessed light of the sun. Brief as a rainbow your dream also will be. There is no clemency, no reprieve, no escape; no, not for the strongest heart deep mortised in life. “A straw, a hair hath done it.”’