On the whole, Edwin was satisfied (as was obviously Aunt Laura) with Mr. Ingleby’s appearance. He certainly looked more like the father of a fellow of Balliol than Sir Joseph Hingston. The money descended with a series of opulent splashes into the brass salver that the rector held in front of the chancel steps: the organist (in private life he was a carpenter) meanwhile extemporising vaguely in the key of C. The rector carried the salver arm-high to the altar, as though he were exhibiting to the Almighty the personal fruits of his oratory. Mr. Ingleby stole quietly to his seat bathed in the admiring glances of Aunt Laura. A short prayer . . . “And now to God the father. . . .” The organist launched into his latest achievement: the Gavotte from Mignon.
Outside the church the summer sunlight seemed more exhilarating than ever. It was worth while, Edwin thought, to have suffered the dreariness of the morning’s service to experience this curious feeling of lightness and relief. He supposed that he was not alone in this sensation; for the crowd that moved slowly from the churchyard gates with a kind of gathering resilience was a happy crowd, and its voices that at first were hushed soon became gay and irresponsible in spite of the slight awkwardness that its Sunday clothes imposed on it. No doubt they were anticipating their Sundaydinner, for, as Edwin had noticed, the liturgy of the Church of England has some value as anapéritif. Even Aunt Laura was full of a subdued playfulness. “What a shame, Albert,” she said, “that the rector didn’t appoint you to collect to-day.” She patted his arm.
“Oh, I don’t know, my dear. . . . It wasn’t my turn, you know.”
“Oh, I know that,” said Aunt Laura, “but on a day like this it would have been rather a delicate compliment. I must speak to the rector about it.”
“I don’t think I should do that,” said Uncle Albert, with some alarm.
She laughed gently. “Don’t be an old juggins,” she said.
All down the High Street, in the moving crowd, Edwin could smell the savour of roast beef and baked potatoes and cabbage water wafted from innumerable kitchen windows. . . .
In the afternoon they left Aunt Laura and Uncle Albert asleep in two arm-chairs on opposite sides of the drawing-room fireplace, and Edwin and his father went for a walk by the old abbey fish-ponds. It was the first time for many years that Edwin had been for a walk with his father, and the experience promised a new and exciting intimacy to which he looked forward with eagerness.
Even at this hour of the day the Sabbath atmosphere imposed itself on the countryside. The road that they followed was long and straightwith an open frontage above the reedy pools, and along the cinder path at the side of it a great number of men were lounging: a strange and foreign population of miners from the Mawne pits, who only emerged from their cavernous occupation on this day of the week, and other industrial workers from the great steel rolling mills that lay in the Stour Valley to westward.
None of them took any notice of Edwin and his father. It was even doubtful if they knew who they were; for these men passed a curiously separate existence, and Mr. Ingleby would only be familiar to their wives who did the family shopping on Saturday nights while their masters were waiting for the football results in their favourite pubs. On this day the miner’s passion for sport of all kinds asserted itself in the presence of a great number of slim, jacketed whippets, each warranted to beat anything on four legs for speed, slinking tenderly at their masters’ heels.
It seemed strange to Edwin that his father should know none of these men. It showed him again how remote and solitary the man’s life must have been in this ultimate corner of the Black Country. “We don’t really belong here,” he thought. “We’re foreigners. . . .” And the reflection pleased him, though he remembered, with a tinge of regret, that by this denial he dissociated himself from his old idol the poet of the Pastoral Ballad.
Soon they left the cinder path behind, and plunged into a green lane descending to a water-mill, turned by the tawny Stour, as yet unsulliedby the refuse of factories. At a sandstone bridge, whose parapet was deeply carved with the initials of lovers long since dead or disillusioned, they paused, and, for the first time, began to talk.
“It’s a funny thing, father,” Edwin said, “but I don’t even know where we are going to-morrow. . . .”
Mr. Ingleby smiled. “Don’t you, Edwin? Well, the doctor said it would be best for me to go to my native air; and it struck me as rather a good plan. I never went there with your mother. It belonged to another life. It is quite twenty years since I have been in Somerset.”
“Somerset . . .? I didn’t even know it was Somerset.”
“No. . . . Well, as I say, it was another world.”
Somerset. . . . Edwin’s imagination began to play with the word. He could remember very little: only a huge green county sprawling on a map with rivers . . . yes, and hills. A county stretched beside the Severn Sea. The Severn again! A western county. Cheddar cheese. Lorna Doone. Cider. Coleridge. Sedgemoor.
“But what part of Somerset?”
“The eastern end.”
That was a pity. The farther west the better.
“I suppose it’s rather a flat county?”
“A great part of it. Did you ever hear of Mendip?
“‘The rugged miners poured to warFrom Mendip’s sunless caves.’”
“Yes, of course. . . .”
“I came from a little village on the top of Mendip. Twenty years ago it was decaying. Now I expect there’s next to nothing left of it. Twenty years makes a lot of difference. It’s made a lot of difference to me.”
“And what was the name of the village?”
“I don’t suppose you will ever have heard it. It was called Highberrow.”
“Highberrow . . . no. It’s a jolly name.”
“I don’t think it ever struck me in that light.”
“Highberrow . . . is it right in the hills?”
“Yes . . . quite high up. I don’t know how many hundreds of feet. I wasn’t interested in that sort of thing then. It lies right under Axdown, the highest point of the range. On a clear day you can see right over the Bristol Channel into Wales. All the mountains there. The Brecon Beacons. The Sugarloaf. The Black Mountain.”
“The Black Mountain. But how strange. Why, when you were a little boy you must have been nearly able to see the place where mother lived. With a big sea between. It must have been wonderful . . .”
“Yes . . . I suppose it was. I scarcely remember. Look right down in that deep pool. That’s a trout.”
“A trout. . . . Where? Do show me . . .”
The vision of Mendip faded instantly, and Edwin only saw the rufous sands of the pool beneath the bridge, and in it a shadowy elongated figure with its head to the slow stream and faintly quivering fins. In Devonshire, Widdup had told him, therivers swarmed with trout: you could catch them all day long if you wanted to, and Edwin, loyal to his own county’s excellences, had only been able to produce the silvery roach of the millpool, shoaling round the water-lilies and the mythical legend of carnivorous pike lurking in Mr. Willis’s ponds in the Holloway. He wished he had known that there were veritable trout in the Stour. Now it was too late to do anything; but when they returned from their holiday, he determined that he would catch this shadowy creature, even if he had to induce it to gorge a worm. Still, it was quite possible that by the time he returned he would have captured many trout. For Somerset lay next to Devon on the map.
“Are there many trout in Mendip?” he asked.
“No. . . . There is only one river of any size. The Ax, that runs underground and comes out of Axcombe gorge, and there are practically no trout in the Ax. It’s a dry country. Limestone. Very barren too.”
That didn’t really matter. In a day or two Edwin would be able to see for himself. On their way home they spoke very little. His father seemed to find it difficult to talk to him; and in a little while Edwin became conscious of his own unending string of questions that led nowhere.
But all that night he dreamed of Mendip. A vast, barren, mountain-country, his dreams pictured it; waterless, and honeycombed with the dark caves from which Macaulay’s miners had poured to war; a deserted countryside full of broken villages and bounded by steep cliffs against which theisolating waters of the Severn Sea broke in a soundless tumult. And there Ax, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man. A fluent gentleman with a noble brow and burning grey eyes pointed out the course of the river to him. He was the only other soul beside Edwin and his father, in all that desert country, and Edwin introduced him to Mr. Ingleby as Mr. Coleridge—rather diffidently, for he was not sure how the poet would take it until he remembered and explained that Keats was a chemist. There, on the high crown of Axdown, his mother joined them. She, it seemed, was not afraid of Mr. Coleridge. She took his arm so familiarly that Edwin trembled for her; but the poet only smiled, while she pointed out to him a mass of huge fantastic mountains ranged beyond the gleaming sea. “You’ve got to look over there,” she said. “You see that level ridge dropping suddenly? Well, it’s the third farm from the end. Can you see the little bedroom window on the extreme left? . . . quite a little window?” Coleridge nodded, and Mr. Ingleby, too, shielded his eyes with his hands and looked. “It was my last chance of showing it to you,” she said.
“But there are practically no trout in the Alph,” said Coleridge.
Thenext evening, when Edwin and his father reached Bristol, a steady drizzle had set in from the west. They pushed their bicycles out of the station yard at Temple Meads and rode between slippery tramway lines towards a small hotel, a stone’s-throw from Bristol Bridge, where Mr. Ingleby had decided to put up for the night. “It’s no use trying to ride on to Wringford this evening,” he said, “for the wind will be against us and it’s collar work most of the way. I think we can be comfortable here to-night. I used to know the landlord of this place. He was a Mendip man.”
The Mendip landlord, of course, had been dead for many years, having made his descent by the route that is particularly easy for licensed victuallers; but it happened that his daughter had married the new tenant, and this woman, a comfortable creature who spoke with the slight burr that appeared in Mr. Ingleby’s speech in times of anger or any other violent emotion, welcomed them for her father’s sake, and gave them a bare but cleanly room on the second story.
The windows of this room looked down obliquelyon to the tidal basin of the Avon, thronged with small coasting tramps and sailing ships: and Edwin was content to stay there watching them; for he had never seen the traffic of a harbour before. It was still too wet to think of going out onto the quays; but even from a distance the misty spectacle, enveloped in veils of driving rain, was romantic.
Edwin watched while a pair of busy tugboats pushed and pulled and worried the hull of a wooden schooner in to mid-stream. The water was high, and she was due to catch the falling tide to Avonmouth. Whither was she bound? He did not know. Perhaps her way lay down channel to pick up a cargo of bricks from Bridgewater. Perhaps she was setting out at that moment to essay the icy passage of the Horn. Perhaps, in another four months, she would have doubled the Cape and lie wallowing in the torpid seas about Zanzibar. It inspired Edwin to think that he was standing at one of the gateways of the world. From the site of the stone bridge above their lodging, just four hundred years ago, the Venetian pilot, Cabot, had cast loose in the selfsame way, and sailed westward with his three sons, Lewes, Sebastyan, and Sancto, to the mainland of unknown America. To-day, from the same wet quays, other adventurous prows were stretching forth to the ends of the earth. To China . . . To Africa.Here begins the sea that ends not till the world’s end.
With his accustomed curiosity as to the origins of his own emotions Edwin was not long in deciding that his growing eagerness to see the beauty andstrangeness of the world must have sprung from the fact that his ancestors had lived upon the shores of this great waterway. From Highberrow, his father had told him, you could see the whole expanse of the Bristol Channel. From Highberrow, perhaps, some forbear of his own had watched the caravels of Cabot setting down channel with the ebb tide. He was bewildered with the splendour of his heritage. It was impossible to imagine that Sir Joseph Hingston’s family had the least share in such a romantic past.
In the evening, after supper, the rain ceased, and Mr. Ingleby proposed that they should go for a walk through the city. He had known it well in his youth, and it seemed to fill him with an almost childish delight to show Edwin the things that he remembered. They passed through many narrow winding streets where the overhanging houses of the merchant venturers stood, and ancient churches had been huddled into corners by the growing city. “I remember every inch of it,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a happy laugh. Again they crossed the river, and skirting a line of shipping warehouses, now cavernous and deserted, they plunged into a sordid quarter full of sailors’ drinking dens that smelled of rum, and marine stores that smelled of tar.
“Where are we going?” Edwin asked.
“You’ll see in a minute,” said Mr. Ingleby. And, in a minute, Edwin saw.
They had emerged from the huddled houses into a large open space, and in the midst of it rose a miracle of beauty such as Edwin had never seenbefore: a structure too delicate in its airy loveliness to have been built of stone; so fragile in its strength that it seemed impossible that the slender flying buttresses should support it. The shadowy spire could be seen dimly piercing a sky that had been washed to clearness by the rain; but inside the church, for some reason unknown, the lamps had been lighted, and the whole building glowed as though it had been one immense lantern. There could not be another miracle of this kind in the world, Edwin thought.
He remembered a white model of the Taj Mahal at Agra, that stood beneath a dome of glass in Mrs. Barrow’s drawing-room, an intricate carving of ivory with a huge dome and many fretted minarets. Edwin remembered that the Taj Mahal was supposed to be one of the wonders of the world; but he could not believe that it was as beautiful as this: it was too fanciful, too complicated in its detail, while this church, for all its delicacy, was so amazingly simple in its design.
“St. Mary Redcliffe,” said Mr. Ingleby. “I always thought it was a fine church, but I don’t think I ever saw it lit up like this before.” He paused, and they gazed at the church for a little while in silence. “It’s a funny thing,” he said at last, “that a great master can sign a picture and the name of a poet be remembered by his writings, while the greatest artists of the Middle Ages, people who planned and built wonderful things like this . . . and I suppose it is more beautiful to-day than when it was first finished . . . should be quite forgotten. A funny thing. . . . I should think theman who made this church must have devoted his life to it.”
Edwin glowed. It came as a delightful surprise to him that his father should think of a thing like this. He was ashamed to confess that he hadn’t believed him capable of it. It was the sort of thing that he would only have expected of his mother. “What a rotten little snob I am,” he thought. And though he happened to know, quite by accident, from the Rowley Poems of Chatterton, that the builder of Redcliffe was William Cannynge, round whose shadowy reputation the work of the wondrous boy had grown, he could not for the life of him reveal this piece of learning, since it would have spoiled the originality of his father’s reflection. He only said, “Yes,” but the train of thought was so strong in him that he couldn’t resist asking Mr. Ingleby if he knew which was the muniment room.
“The muniment room. Why?”
“Because it was in the muniment room that Chatterton pretended that he found the Rowley manuscripts.”
“Chatterton? Ah, yes. . . . Thomas Chatterton, the poet.”
“Yes.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. I never read any of his poems, but I believe he starved in London and committed suicide with Arsenious Oxide.”
This gleam of professional interest tickled Edwin. Keats: Beatings. Chatterton: Arsenious Oxide.
“They found Arsenic on his lips. He made nomistake about it. The lethal dose is a very small one. A grain or so would have done it. Why, it’s beginning to rain again. We’d better go. I hope it will clear up by to-morrow.”
They walked back to their lodging in a fine drizzle. On the way Edwin’s father took his arm. The action gave Edwin a curious sensation. It suggested to him that his father was lonely; that the natural instinct of love in the man was making him eager for some sort of sympathy. It was pitiable; for, in reality, they were strangers . . . there was no getting away from the fact that they were strangers.
“I must make it easy for him,” Edwin thought. “However impossible it may seem, I must make it easy. I must know him. I must love him. Whatever it costs I must love him. It is ridiculous that I should have to choose my words and even at times be a little dishonest when it ought to be the most natural and easy thing in the world to be myself with him. Of course it’s difficult at present; but later on, when we know each other better, it will be all right.”
When they returned to their lodging their clothes were wet, and they went together into the kitchen of the defunct publican’s daughter. She gave them two of her husband’s coats to wear while their own were drying, and for a long time they sat over the fire talking to her. It was evident that though Mr. Ingleby was himself unknown to her, she knew all about his family; for she asked him many questions about various people in Highberrow and Wringford, whom they knew in common. Mr.Ingleby could tell her very little, but the landlady was able to supply him with a lot of gossip from the Mendip villages.
“We heard that you were married,” she said.
“Yes,” replied Mr. Ingleby. “But I’ve just had a great blow. I’ve lost my wife.”
“Dear, dear . . . that’s very sad for ’ee.”
“Yes. . . . I shall never get over it.”
“And this is your eldest? My word, how time flies!”
“Yes. . . . He’s the only one.”
“To look at him at first you wouldn’t say there was much of an Ingleby in him.”
“No. He takes after his mother’s family.”
“And yet, on second thoughts, he’s got a look of your brother William’s boy, Joe, about his eyes. Now that’s a strange thing. Talking of your brother William, I haven’t seen or heard of him for years.”
“I haven’t seen him for twenty years myself. We’re cycling to Wringford to-morrow. We shall put up with him.”
“Well, remember me to him. He was always a great favourite of dad’s.”
“Will’s a good fellow.”
“I suppose he’s in the same place? Mr. Grisewood would be a fool to get rid of a man like that. Good gardeners are scarce. . . .”
Edwin could not understand this at all. It was obvious that the woman must be making some mistake; for it was clearly impossible that his Uncle William could be a gardener. Still, his father offered no protest.
“They tell me,” she went on in her soft West-country voice, “that he’ve apprenticed that boy Joe to Hares, the shoeing-smith.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Mr. Ingleby.
“Well, of course, it may be all right,” the landlady went on, “but there’s always the future to think on. My husband always says that the day of the horse is over. What with steam and electricity, and these new things that I see in the paper they are running from London to Brighton! There’s a gentleman near Bridgewater who has one of these new motor-cars on the road. Of course, I suppose they are fairly reliable on the flat.”
Edwin was thankful that the excitements of motor traction had diverted her from the uncomfortable subject of his cousin’s profession. . . . if that were the right word to apply to the calling of a shoeing-smith; but the matter still troubled and bewildered him when they went upstairs to bed. It was one that would not wait for explanation, and so he tackled his father as soon as they were alone.
“Father, what was that woman talking about? What did she mean when she said that Uncle Will was a gardener?”
“What did she mean?” Mr. Ingleby laughed. “Why she meant what she said. Heisa gardener. He’s never been anything else.”
“But, father . . . it’s impossible.”
“It isn’t impossible, boy. It’s the truth. Didn’t you know? Didn’t mother ever tell you?”
“No. . . . I don’t think she ever spoke of him. I . . . I can’t understand it.”
“You sound as if it had come as a shock to you, Eddie.”
“No . . . yes . . . I suppose it did.”
“You didn’t imagine that you’d find your ancestry in Debrett, Eddie?”
“No . . . but that’s different. It’s . . . it’s sort of bowled me over.”
Mr. Ingleby laughed. It seemed that he was really amused at Edwin’s consternation.
“I suppose it’s natural for a schoolboy to be a bit snobbish,” he said.
“No . . . it isn’t that. Honestly it isn’t, father. Only I’d kind of taken us for granted. I wish you’d tell me all about it. You see, I know absolutely nothing.”
“It’s a long story, Eddie. But of course I’ll tell you. Then you won’t have any more of these distressing surprises. Suppose you get into bed first.”
It was a strange sight to Edwin to see his father kneel down in his Jaeger nightgown and pray. The boy had never done that since his second term at St. Luke’s.
Lying in bed with his father’s arm about him, Edwin listened to a long and strange narration that overwhelmed him with alternations of humiliation that made him ashamed, and of romance that thrilled him. Mr. Ingleby began at the beginning. Their family had lived, it appeared, for years without number, in the village of Highberrow on Mendip in a combe beneath the great camp of Silbury, and the calling of all these Inglebys had been thatof the other inhabitants of Highberrow: they were miners, working for lead in the seams that the Romans, and perhaps the Phoenicians before them, had discovered in the mountain limestone. Even so early as in the youth of Edwin’s father the industry had been decaying, for the traditional methods of the Mendip miner were unscientific: he had been content to dig for himself a shallow working from which he collected enough of the mineral that is called calamine to keep him in pocket and in drink.
“We Mendip folk,” said Mr. Ingleby, “are a strange people, very different in our physique from the broad Saxons of the turf-moors beneath us. I suppose there is a good deal of Cornish blood in us. Wherever there are mines there are Cornishmen; but I think there’s another, older strain: Iberian . . . Roman . . . Phoenician. I don’t know what it is; but I do know that we’re somehow different from all the rest of the Somerset people: a violent, savage sort of folk. Did you ever hear of Hannah More?”
“No.” Edwin had been born too late in the century.
“Well, she was before my time too; but she made the Mendip miners notorious by trying to convert them. I don’t suppose she succeeded. At any rate neither she nor her influences would ever have converted your grandfather. He was a wonderful man. Even though my memory is mostly of the way in which I was afraid of him, I can see what a wonderful man he was. And your Uncle Will would tell you the same.”
“He was a miner . . . ?”
“Yes. . . . A miner amongst other things. He was a dowser too.”
“A dowser? What is that?”
“Don’t you know? The divining-rod. A thing that all the scientists have been unable to explain. In a dry country like Mendip the dowser is a most important person; for neither man nor beast can live without water, and he is the only person who can tell where a well should be sunk. Your grandfather was a strange looking man with very clear grey eyes under a black head of hair and heavy bristling brows. Even when he grew very old his hair and his beard were black.
“I was the youngest of the family. All the others, except your Uncle Will, have died—and for some reason or other I was not brought up in my father’s cottage but in that of my grandmother, a tiny, tumbledown affair lying in the valley under Silbury. We were very humble people, Eddie. I don’t suppose anywhere in the world I could have passed a quieter childhood. It’s a long way off now. One only remembers curious, unimportant things.
“When I was four years old I was sent to the village school. I don’t think it exists any longer. You see the population of Highberrow disappeared naturally with the abandonment of the mining. Even in my childhood, as I told you, the workings were running pretty thin. The miners were beginning to find that they couldn’t pick up much of a living on their own calamine claims; and so they drifted back gradually—your grandfather along with them—to the oldest workings of all: the minesthat the Romans had made two thousand years ago. You may be certain that the Romans, with their thoroughness, hadn’t left much behind. Why, in their days, Mendip must have been a great place, with a harbour of its own on the mouth of the Ax, and great roads radiating everywhere: to Cirencester, Exeter, and Bath. Even in the Middle Ages there was a population of fifty thousand souls on Mendip. Now I don’t suppose there are a thousand in all the mining villages put together.
“So my father went to work in the Roman mines at Cold Harbour; for a new company had been started that was reclaiming the sublimated lead that had been left in the Romans’ flues. And there, as a little boy, I used to carry him his dinner, through the heather, over the side of Axdown. You’ll see Axdown for yourself to-morrow: a great bow of a hill. There used to be a pair of ravens that built there. I’ve seen them rising in great wide circles. They seemed very big to me. I was almost frightened of them; and when I found the skeleton of a sheep one day on the top of Axdown under the barrows, I made sure that the ravens had killed it.
“I suppose I was a pretty intelligent boy. I know that the men at the workings by Cold Harbour, where I took father’s dinner, used to joke with me a good deal. They used to like the way in which I hit back at them with my tongue. Father didn’t take any notice of it. He was always the same dark, silent man, with very few words, and no feelings, as you’d imagine, except the violent passions into which he would burst out when he’dbeen drinking. He didn’t often drink, though. He was a good man, Eddie. A good man. . . . And so I myself came to work in the mines.”
“I can’t believe it, you know, father. It’s so unlike you . . . and mother.”
“Of course it was long before I knew your mother. And it does seem funny, looking back on it. I’m very glad now, mind you, that I had the experience. It’s a fine thing for any man at some time of his life to have had to face the necessity of earning his living by the use of his hands. You’ll never know what that means, I suppose. It’s a pity. . . .
“Well, while I was working at Cold Harbour, my mother died. I forgot to tell you that Grannie had died some years before, and her cottage under Silbury had been left empty—there was no one living in Highberrow to fill it—and was already tumbling into ruins. I haven’t told you about your grandmother—my mother. I don’t know that I can tell you much. I think she was in some ways a little hard. I don’t know. . . . I thought the world of her, and perhaps it was my father’s difficult nature that made her seem harder than she was. Besides, being brought up with Grannie, I was a sort of stranger to her. I don’t know how father came across her. There’s no doubt about she was a superior woman. If you’re still feeling a little sore about your social origin, Eddie, you can console yourself with the fact that she had a cousin who was a solicitor—or was it a solicitor’s clerk?—somewhere near London. At any rate, poor soul, she died. She was ill for several months, and I,being the youngest, had to stay at home and nurse her. It was in that way that I met Dr. Marshall. . . .
“I’ll tell you about him in a moment; but thinking of the days of my mother’s death puts me in mind of a strange thing that happened at the time that will show you what sort of man your grandfather was. Early on in the family there had been a girl that died to whom my mother was particularly devoted; and a little before the end—she knew that it couldn’t be many weeks—mother told my father that she would like to be buried in a particular corner of the churchyard near to this daughter of theirs.
“Father never spoke of it. He rarely spoke of anything. But I suppose he took it in all the same. Anyway, when she was dead, the old sexton came up to see father about the grave, and he told him where she had said she wanted to lie. The next night the sexton came up again. I can see him now—a funny, old-fashioned little man with red whiskers—and said it couldn’t be done, because the soil was so shallow at that particular point. I can see my father now. He hadn’t been drinking; but be flew suddenly into such a black rage that the poor little gravedigger (Satell was his name) ran out frightened for his life. I think I was pretty frightened too, for father went out after him carrying one of the great iron bars that the miners use for drilling. I thought for a moment that the loss of mother had turned his head. It hadn’t. He just went there and then, in the night, to the churchyard, and worked away with his mining tools atthe rock that poor old Satell said he couldn’t dig. He bored his holes and he blasted the rock with the black powder they used in those days, and he dug my mother’s grave in the place where she wanted it. You see what a strange man he was! You may say what you like, Eddie—I’ve often thought of it since—but that was a grandfather worth having.”
“Yes . . . he was worth having,” Edwin agreed.
“But I was speaking of Dr. Marshall,” his father continued. “He was the beginning of my new life. But for the accident of my mother’s illness I don’t suppose I should ever have met him. During the last month he came fairly often: not that he could do much good for her, poor thing, but because she was—it’s a wretched phrase—a superior woman, and because no doubt she liked to talk to him, and he knew it. Practice in Highberrow can’t have been very profitable; though I’m sure that my father paid him every penny that he owed him. He was that kind of man.
“And when she died, Dr. Marshall took a fancy to me. I could tell you a good deal about him if it were worth while. He was a physician of the old school, learned in experience rather than in books. It is probable that he made mistakes; but I’m equally certain that he learned by them. The week after mother died he asked your grandfather if he could have me to wash bottles and make myself generally useful in his surgery at Axcombe. And my father didn’t refuse. It would have been unlike him if he had done so; for I think his idea in life was to let every individual work out his ownsalvation for himself. It was a good plan, for it made the responsibility definite. . . .
“So I went to Axcombe to Dr. Marshall’s house. There was plenty of hard work in it. I think a country doctor earns a poor living more honestly than most men. I had to share the doctor’s work—getting up early in the morning (that was no hardship to a miner’s son)—to clean up the surgery (and I can tell you it took some cleaning), to turn out of bed in the middle of the night to harness the pony if the message that called him took him over roads, or to saddle the cob if the hill tracks were too rough for wheels.
“Sometimes I had long night journeys on my own; for the doctor, in spite of his practical head for dealing with disease, was curiously unmethodical and would often leave behind the particular instrument that he wanted most, and in the middle of the night a boy of my own age from one of the hill villages would come battering at the door as though his life depended on it. And they’d go on battering, you know, as if they thought that the sound of it would make me get up more quickly. Perhaps it did: at any rate I can remember scrambling downstairs in the dark and reading the notes that the doctor sent by candlelight: and then I would turn out, half asleep, and walk over the hills above Axcombe when the gorge was swimming to the brim with fine milky mist and a single step, if one were silly enough to go dreaming, would have sent one spinning down, a sheer four hundred feet like the hunting king in the legend. I’mforgetting that you don’t know the legend and have never seen the gorge. . . .
“Still, I shall never forget those strange night-journeys. I don’t think I had begun to appreciate Mendip until I walked the hills at night. I found that I could think so clearly, and I was just beginning, you see, to have so much to think about. Books. . . .
“At Highberrow, in my father’s cottage, there were only two books altogether: the Bible, and a tract by Miss Hannah More called ‘The Religion of the Fashionable World.’ But Dr. Marshall’s house at Axcombe was crammed with books: rubbish, most of them, I expect; but printed books; and whenever I was not working I was reading. It was the pure excitement of attaining knowledge of any kind that made me read; and of course I wasted a great deal of valuable time in ways that were unprofitable. The doctor did not help me much; he was far too busy to worry much about my education; but I know that he approved of my eagerness, and liked to see me reading. I used to sleep in the loft above the stable in those days, and I know that my candles made him rather nervous of fire. But he did help me, in his own way. He put me on to a little Latin, with the strictly practical idea of making it more easy for me to dispense the prescriptions that he wrote in the old manner without abbreviations; and he also introduced me to another book that I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of: calledReligio Mediciby Sir Thomas Browne.”
“I know it,” said Edwin.
“Do you? I supposed it was merely a medical curiosity. Latin, he thought, would be useful to me in other ways. You see, like many of the old medical practitioners that spent their lives in the lanes, he was very interested in botany: not scientific botany—just the identification and botanical names of the flowers that blossomed year by year in the hedges. In the early summer he would drive home with the bottom of the dogcart tangled with flowers that he had picked while he walked the pony up some hill; and he would pitch them over to me and tell me to learn the names of them. It wasn’t very difficult; for in the surgery shelves there was a fine set of Ann Pratt with excellent illustrations. And sometimes he would come home with a small insect of some kind in a pillbox and arrange it under the microscope on the table under the dispensary window; and he’d say, ‘Wonderful . . . wonderful!’ not because he’d made any biological observations, but just because it revealed a lot of unsuspected detail.
“It was a favourite trick of his to show his patients a sample of their own blood corpuscles under the microscope too. ‘There they are,’ he’d say, ‘like a pile of golden guineas, and if you had a millionth part as many guineas as you have of these in your body, you’d be the richest man in England.’ This sort of thing used to impress his patient’s tremendously. And he knew it. I suppose it gave them confidence in him; though he didn’t need any superstitious aids of this kind. The whole history of his life as a doctor should have been enough to make them trust him. Still, I suppose it was theold tradition of the medicine man who dealt in curious magic. His common sense and the craftsmanship that he had won by experience were his real guarantees.
“He was extraordinarily practical in everything except money matters. In these, even I could have taught him a good deal. It was a pathetic sight to see him making out his bills. He always put off the evil day, with the result that they were only sent out about once in three years. I don’t suppose doctors can afford to be like that in these days. . . . But then, what was the use of money to him? All his tastes were simple and inexpensive. He was unmarried. During all the years that I was with him he never took a holiday, unless it were to go to Taunton and buy a new horse. I do not think there are many of his kind left.
“You can see, though, what a huge difference he made to my life. If I hadn’t gone to live with him at Axcombe, I might still have been a miner—if thereareany miners left on Mendip—or perhaps a gardener like your Uncle Will. And where would you have been, Eddie? He was careful, and I think very wisely careful, not to turn my head. ‘Ambition,’ he would say to me, ‘is all very well in moderation. But don’t be too ambitious, John. Happiness is more important in this life than success, and very few men have a full share of both. Still, you’re a sharp lad, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get on in the world and be happy too if you don’t expect too much.’ As time went on we began to talk a little about my future. ‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry,’ he used to say. ‘You’reyoung, and there’s plenty of time ahead of you.’
“Of course it would be ridiculous to suppose that I hadn’t ambitions. Naturally enough, I had determined to be a doctor like my master. The small things that I did for him convinced me that it would be an easy matter. When he was out in the country people who had walked in from remote villages would ask me to prescribe for them, and sometimes, with an immense sense of importance, I would do so. It wasn’t difficult. He ran his practice, to all intents and purposes, on three stock mixtures and half a dozen pills. But I shall never forget one evening when one of my father’s fellow workmen from Highberrow came in with a raging toothache, and I, being anxious to show off, volunteered to take the tooth out for him. I remember I showed him a microscopic sample of his own blood as a preliminary. But when I came to take out the tooth I made a mess of it. He was a tremendous big fellow with jaws like steel, and though I pulled hard enough to move him in the chair, I only succeeded in breaking the tooth and making the pain worse. I got my head well smacked for my trouble, and decided that whatever else I were to be, I wouldn’t risk dentistry as a career.
“‘There’s no reason,’ the doctor would say, ‘why you shouldn’t make a good chemist in time.’ Of course that seemed a very small thing to me; and yet . . . think what I might have been! I was sixteen, just your own age, Eddie, when he died. Of course he killed himself, as many doctors do, with work. People make a great fuss when a missionary in some outlandish country lays down his life,as they call it, for his flock. But country doctors are doing that every month in the year all over England—I don’t mean the social successes in Harley Street—and from what I’ve seen of it their widows can’t count on much gratitude.
“It was a hard winter . . . the year eighteen sixty-seven . . . and there happened to be a great deal of illness in the hills. We were worked pretty hard, both of us, but the doctor had no chance of taking a rest: he was the only medical man living within ten miles: and in the end he, too, caught a heavy cold, and had to go on working through it. In the end he had to give up. It was pneumonia; and the last thing he did was to write a letter asking a consultant in Bristol to come down and see him. He was a kindly man, but I suppose Dr. Marshall was to him only a case. The old fellow refused to have any one but me to nurse him. ‘John and I understand each other,’ he said.
“It was a terrible battle: to see a great strong man like that fighting for breath. They didn’t give oxygen in those days. It went on for four days and on the fifth, or rather in the middle of the night—he called to me faintly, and I found him lying on his back breathing more softly, very pale and drenched with sweat. ‘This is the crisis . . . fifth day . . .’ he said. He told me to cover him with all the blankets I could find, to give him some brandy, and to take his temperature. It was a funny job for a boy. I had never seen a great man suddenly go weak like that. His temperature had fallen below normal. ‘Ah . . .’ he said. ‘I thought so. . . . Brandy. . .’
“But he couldn’t take it himself. ‘You’ve got to be the doctor now, John,’ he said. There wasn’t any more fight left in him. All that day he hardly spoke at all, but at night he called me to his side and told me to make a bonfire of all the books and the bills we’d been making out the week before. ‘I shan’t want any more money,’ he said. ‘But you will . . . a little. . . . I’ve seen to that. You’re a good lad. Don’t aim too high. And don’t think too much about money. Money is the root of all evil. . .’
“I scarcely took any notice of what he said. I only knew that I was going to lose the only friend I had. He died early next morning, and I was just like a dog: I couldn’t bring myself to leave him.
“I stayed in the house . . . you see, it seemed as if I couldn’t go anywhere else, until after the funeral. Then the lawyers told me that he had left me a hundred and fifty pounds in his will. It seemed to me a tremendous lot of money. I didn’t realise what a little way it would go; but it seemed to make my dreams possible. I would be a doctor, like him . . . as near like him as it was possible to be. That was my first idea; but then I remembered what he had told me, and decided that it would be better to become a chemist first. In that way I could make sure of my living.
“I left Axcombe. It was necessary that I should go to some big city to study and more or less by accident I chose North Bromwich. It was a tremendous change for me who had lived all my life in the country: I was very lonely and awkward at first. But that wasn’t the worse of it. I began todiscover my own ignorance: to see that, as a matter of fact, I knew nothing but the homely routine of the doctor’s surgery, the names of a few drugs and their doses, a smattering of Latin, and the botany of the local wild flowers. I knew nothing of life. I couldn’t even pull out a tooth without breaking it.
“It came as an awful shock to me. I began to see the reasons of the doctor’s cautious advice. He realised that I had a great deal of the dreamer in me. I rather think that you have it too, Eddie. No doubt it comes to both of us from those strange, dark, mining-people. I saw that I should have to pull myself together and drive myself hard if my ambitions were not to end in disaster. I had to pinch and scrape. I had to set out and learn the most elementary things from the beginning. I had thought that my fortune was made. Perhaps it was a wise thing that the doctor had left me no more money. It taught me that nobody could make my fortune but myself.
“It was a hard fight, I can tell you: for while I was building my schemes for the future I had to provide for the present. You see I had soon realised that it wouldn’t do to spend any of my little capital. I won’t tell you now how I lived. It would be too long a story. But I can assure you that I had a hard time in North Bromwich, getting all my dreams knocked out of me one by one, thirsting—literally thirsting for clean air and country ways.
“It sounds rather like a tract, but it’s quite true to say that town life has a lot of temptations too for a country boy. I could see everywhere thepower of money and the luxuries that money could purchase without realising the work that money represents, and all this was very disconcerting to a boy of my temperament with more than a hundred pounds in the bank. Still, as it happened, nothing went wrong. In the day-time I worked with my hands. At night I tried to educate myself, very slowly, very hardly—for in those days poor people had not the opportunities of education that are open to them in these. I sometimes wonder if people to-day realise the difference.
“I worked on quietly for years, never wasting a penny or an hour. Don’t take it for virtue in me. It wasn’t that. It was just that the old doctor’s influence on me had been sound and I couldn’t afford to do otherwise. As a matter of fact I suppose there must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men in that city in exactly the same situation. Only I didn’t know one of them. I was lonely . . . absolutely solitary. I never heard an accent of my own country’s speech. I never saw a patch of real green or a sky that hadn’t smoke in it. I made my friends in books: not the kind of books that you’ve been brought up on—I hadn’t time for poetry or frills of that kind: books of solid facts: knowledge for the sake of knowledge. You see all the things that you would take for granted, having known them as a birthright, so to speak, were new and unknown to me. One book was a sort of gospel to me. It was calledSelf Help, written by a man named Smiles.
“So when you hear of a self-made man it may mot mean much; but a self-educated man, I cantell you, means a good deal. In the end, of course, I gradually came within sight of my ambition. From a van-driver to a firm of wholesale chemists I became an assistant, an apprentice in their retail house. I took my examinations. I qualified as a dispensing chemist. Later, by a curious piece of chance, I met your mother. We became friends. She was the first person in whom I had confided since I left Mendip. She seemed to understand. It was a strange thing for me, after all those years, to be able to talk about myself. I can’t tell you what a wonderful relief it was. And then we found that we loved one another and married. We went out into the country near North Bromwich to find a village to make a home in, and we came across Halesby. The place was very different from what it is now twenty years ago. We were very happy. No. . . . I won’t talk about it. But you can see now, that behind your life there were quite a lot of complicated things that don’t appear on the surface. It’s really better that you should know them.”
“It makes me love you, father,” said Edwin. “Because, of course, it is all so wonderful. I expect if I had been you I should still have been in Axcombe. I don’t think I could have done what you did.”
“You might have done a great deal more. There’s no knowing what’s in us until we are tried. That sounds like Samuel Smiles; but it’s quite true. At any rate it’s time we were asleep, boy. I think the rain has stopped.”
They said good-night, and Edwin kissed hisfather; but for several hours later he heard the clocks of Bristol chiming. In a little time he knew by the quiet breathing of his father that he was asleep, and hearing this sound and thinking of the grey man who lay beside him, he was overwhelmed with an emotion in which pity and passionate devotion were curiously mingled. He felt strangely protective, as though it were the man who had fought such a hard battle who was weak, and he, who had never endured anything, were the stronger.
He conceived it a kind of sacred duty to see that for all the rest of his life his father should never suffer any pain or even discomfort from which he could protect him. It was a more vivid version of the feeling that had bowled him over once before, when they had knelt together after his mother’s death. It was a wholly illogical sentiment—and yet, when he came to think it over, he came to the conclusion that something of the same kind must have underlain his mother’s tenderness towards his father. He was eager to persuade himself that there was no compassion in it: only love and admiration.
“He is the most wonderful man in the world,” he thought, “and I never knew it.” Remorse overcame him when he remembered that once, at St. Luke’s, he had been ashamed of Mr. Ingleby’s calling. There couldn’t be another chap in the school who had a father that was a patch on him. He remembered a more recent cause for shame: the shiver of discomfort that the landlady’s revelation of his Uncle Will’s occupation had given him. He had thought that a gardener uncle would be anuncomfortable skeleton in the cupboard of a Fellow of Balliol. Instead of that he now knew that he should have been proud of it: he should have been proud of anything in the world that did honour to his father. Everything that he was, every shred of culture that he possessed had its origin in the devotion and the sufferings of this wonderful man, and, whatever happened, he determined that he would be worthy of them.
The cathedral clock slowly chimed two. Edwin turned over and fell asleep in a mood of strange, exalted happiness.
Undera sky of rain-washed blue they had left Bristol, and after an hour of hard riding came to an easy upland plateau where the road lay white and clear before them, so clean between its wide margins of rough turf, that it seemed to have some affinity with the sky. On their way they had met few people, but the carters with whom they had exchanged a morning greeting were all smiling and friendly, very different from the surly colliers that slouched about the cinder-paths at Halesby.
“Good-maarnin’,” they said, and the very dialect was friendly.
“We’re over the worst of the road,” said Mr. Ingleby. “In a minute or two we shall see the hills.”
And, from a final crest, the road suddenly fell steeply through the scattered buildings of a hamlet. An inn, with a wide space for carts to turn in, stood on a sort of platform at the right-hand side of the highway, and in front of the travellers lay the mass of Mendip: the black bow of Axdown with its shaggy flanks, the level cliffs of Callow, and a bold seaward spur, so lost in watery vapours that it might well have claimed its ancient continuity with the islands that swam beyond in the grey sea.In the light of his new enthusiasm Edwin found it more impressive than any scene that he remembered: more inspiring, though less vast in its perspective, than the dreamy plain of the Severn’s upper waters that he had seen so many times from Uffdown. For these hills were very mountains, and mightier in that they rose sheer from a plain that had been bathed in water within the memory of man. And, more than all this . . . far more . . . they were the home of his fathers.
“Now that we are in Somerset we should drink the wine of the country.”
They pushed their bicycles on to the platform before the inn door, and Mr. Ingleby called for cider, a pale, dry liquid with a faint acridity very different from the sugary stuff that comes to the cities in bottles from Devonshire.
“Yes, it’s good cider,” said Mr. Ingleby, tasting. “Where does it come from?” he asked the landlord, who brought it.
“It do be a tidy drop o’ zidur,” said the man. “It do come from Mr. Atwell’s varm into Burrowdown.”
“In” with the accusative, thought Edwin.
“Is old Aaron Atwell still living?” asked his father.
The landlord laughed. The gentleman must have been away a long time from these parts. Mr. Atwell had been dead these fifteen years.
“The cider’s the same,” said Mr. Ingleby.
“’Tis a marvellous archard, sure ’nuff,” said the landlord. “And last year was a wunnerful year for apples. ’Tis all accardin’ . . .”
They left him, and coasted gently down the hill. Descending, it seemed to Edwin that the dome of Axdown lost some of its mountainous quality; and by the time that they had reached the level of the plain in which Wringford lay, he was hardly conscious of its imminence more than as a reminder that this soft, green country was not wholly devoted to quietude and sleep, but that a cool and lively air must always be rolling from the hidden slopes. They came to a green, bordered by elms in heavy leaf, on which a solitary donkey and a flock of geese were grazing. Now the road was dead level and the hedges rich with fragile dog-rose petals and thickets of hemp-agrimony that were not yet in flower. Superficially, the road might have been part of Warwickshire; but there was nothing of the Midlands in the air that moved above it.
“Take the next turn to the right,” shouted Mr. Ingleby to Edwin, riding ahead.
In the middle of a village drenched with the perfume of roses, Edwin turned to the right down a narrow lane. By this time his father had reached his level. “Here we are,” he said. They dismounted.
It was a small cottage with a green-painted porch and carefully tended garden in front of it. The place was built of the stone of the country and washed with the pinkish lime of the hills. In the garden roses and bright annuals were blooming, and a huge acacia, hung with ivory blossom, shadowed the garden gate. On the gate itself Edwin read a crudely painted name: GeraniumCottage. Mr. Ingleby smiled. “Your Uncle Will is very fond of geraniums.” They opened the gate and pushed in their bicycles. Everything in the garden was so meticulously orderly that to wheel them over the mown grass seemed sacrilegious. The porch, at which they waited, was full of choice geraniums. Their hot scent filled the air. Mr. Ingleby knocked gently with a polished brass knocker. Slow steps were heard within moving over a flagged floor. The door was opened, disclosing a stone passage that smelt of coolness and cleanliness. It was like the smell of a sweet dairy. An elderly woman, with a plump and placid face and grey hair, received them. All her figure except her black sateen bodice was covered with a coarse but snowy apron.
“Why, John,” she said. “It do be a treat to see you.”
She took Mr. Ingleby in her arms and kissed him. “Poor fellow, too,” she said. The embrace implied more than any of the condolences that Edwin had heard in Halesby.
“And this is Edwin,” she said. “Well, what a great big man, to be sure!” She proceeded to embrace Edwin, and he became conscious of the extraordinary softness and coolness of her face.
“Come in and make yourselves comfortable,” said Aunt Sarah Jane. “We’re used to bicycles in this house. Our Joe has one. He goes to work on it every day, and sometimes on a Sunday rides over to Clevedern on it. Come in, John.” Edwin followed his father into the living-room. It was clean, strikingly clean, and curiously homely. On thewalls hung a picture of Queen Victoria, looking like a pouter pigeon in her jubilee robes, and another of the sardonic Disraeli. There were several padded photograph albums with gilt clasps, and other photographs decorated the mantelpiece and a side table. These were all accommodated in fretwork frames.
“Joe do keep us supplied with up-to-date photograph frames,” said Aunt Sarah Jane, following Edwin’s glances with a touch of motherly pride. “He’s like his father. Clever with his fingers.”
Edwin found that the photographs were familiar. His father was there: an ardent, younger father, with black whiskers and a determined mouth. A father confident in the virtue of self-help. His mother, too, in a tight-fitting costume of the eighties, with a row of buttons down the front from the throat to the hem. And, wonder of wonders, there was Edwin himself in a sailor suit. The discovery of his own portrait did something to destroy the illusion of unreality that occupied the place. Obviously he really belonged to it. For years, without his knowing it, his image had been part of this unfamiliar room. Even though he had not known of their existence he had evidently been a familiar accepted person to these people. Even their friends must have known him by sight. It was strange. It was pathetic. “I can see a touch of our Joe in him, John,” said his aunt, who had been examining him closely. “An’ there do be a look of your father as well.”
“Do you think so?” said Mr. Ingleby.
“Joe’s a great boy, too,” said Aunt Sarah Jane lovingly.
It was clear enough who was the idol of this household.
“There now, your dinner will be spoiling. Take the boy upstairs, John.”
She left them, and Edwin followed his father up a crooked stair to a low room above the garden. A cool wind was blowing down from Axdown, and the filigree shadow of the lace window-curtains danced on the white coverlet of the bed. The room smelt faintly of lavender. It seemed to Edwin a wonderful room, “full of sweet”—he couldn’t remember the line—“peace and health and quiet breathing.” There was nothing quite so placid as this in the life that he had known.
They washed their dusty faces and came downstairs again, and Edwin, seated by the sunny window of the front room, relapsed into a state of perfect drowsiness, content merely to exist and drink in the sweet and simple atmosphere of humble content. This, he supposed, was what his father by his struggles and sacrifices had lost. Was it worth while? The complications of this question were far too great for Edwin to decide.
The men folk of Geranium Cottage did not return to dinner, and after that meal, in which suet dumplings played an important part, Edwin retired to a trellised structure at the back of the garden, bowery with honeysuckle, that Aunt Sarah Jane described as the harbour. Here, drugged with more cider and fresh air, he dozed away the early afternoon. He was asleep when his father came tocall him for tea. After all, it was not surprising that he was sleepy, for they had talked into the small hours the night before. Certainly Aunt Sarah Jane’s tea was worth waking up for. Quince marmalade and clotted cream, and wheaten scones that she had baked that morning. Edwin, ready now for any further revelations, would not now have been shocked to hear that in her young days she had been a cook. In this beatific state of refreshment he was anxious to explore.
“When are we going to Highberrow, father?”
“And this was to be a restful holiday,” Mr. Ingleby laughed. “Why, now, if you like.”
Edwin would have run to the linhay behind the house for the bicycles, but his father called him back. The hill was so steep, he told him, that it would be easier for them to walk.
“Well, John, Will’ll be tarrable disappointed if you aren’t here when he comes home from work,” said Aunt Sarah Jane. “This young man of yours do go too fast for me.”
“Oh, we won’t be long,” said Mr. Ingleby.
And so they set off together for Highberrow, making, first of all, a straight line for the base of the hills and then following a green lane that skirted the foot of them but was so overshadowed with hazel that the slopes could not be seen. In a mile or so they cut into the main road again, by an iron milestone that said “Bridgwater 18: Bristol 14.” The road climbed along a quarried terrace in the hill-side, and to the left of it lay a deep valley, on the farther slope of which lay half a dozen pink-washed cottages with gardens fallingto the bed of an attenuated stream; and behind the cottages a steep hill-side rose abruptly to a bare height crowned with ancient earthworks.
“That,” said Mr. Ingleby, “is Silbury camp. There’s an old rhyme about it. It is supposed to be full of buried gold. When I was a boy I often used to lie up there in the sun, gazing out over the channel. In spring all the meadows between the camp and Highberrow Batch are full of daffodils. I often used to wish there were daffodils in Halesby. . . .”
In a little while they came to the church of Highberrow, placed like a watch-tower on the edge of the Batch, surveying the immense relics of paganism on the opposite side of the valley. It was a humble and not very beautiful building; but Edwin entered the churchyard with awe, for it seemed to him that so much of the past that had made him lay buried there. And the inscriptions on the tombstones reinforced this idea; for the churchyard was veritably crowded with the remains of dead Inglebys. It made the past, a piece of knowledge so recent to him that it still held an atmosphere of unreality and phantasy, so ponderable, that in comparison with it his present condition seemed almost unreal. His father led him through the long grass, starry with yellow ragwort, to the corner in which his grandmother was buried.
“This is the place that I told you about,” he said.
“The place where my grandfather went out at night and blasted the rock?”
“Yes.”
It was incredible. Until that moment the story had been only a legend. Edwin wondered how ever his father could have broken away from the tradition of centuries and left the hills. The roots of their family had pierced so deeply into the soil, yes, even beneath the soil and into the veins of the solid rock. The conditions of his own life seemed to him the tokens of an unnatural and artificial thing.
They left the churchyard by a narrow lane that always climbed. They passed the village inn: a long, windswept building, so bare and so exposed to weather that even the tenure of the lichen on the tiles seemed precarious. Over the lintel a weathered board showed them the name of Ingleby in faded letters. Edwin pointed to it.
“Yes,” said his father. “I suppose he is some remote cousin of yours. Everybody that is left in this village must be related to us in some degree; though I don’t suppose any of them would remember me. You see, I went to Axcombe when I was a good deal younger than you.” He smiled. “I am like a ghost returning to its old home. Like a ghost. . . .”
And yet, to Edwin, the whole place seemed familiar. He was not in the least surprised when, opposite a windy farm-house, in front of which the dry blades of a dishevelled dracæna shivered as though protesting against its wintry exile, his father turned off to the left along a road that had once been gay with cottage gardens and trim buildings of stone, but was now suggestive of nothing but ruin and desolation. By one of these pathetic ruins his father paused.
“This was your grandfather’s house, Eddie. It was here that I was born.”
Now there remained only the ground-plan of a house, and the only sign of habitation in all the ruin was to be seen in the smoke-blackened stones of the chimney. The garden, indeed, lay beautiful in decay, for there, as everywhere in this deserted countryside, the golden ragwort had taken possession; but within the walls of the house only nettles shivered.
“You’ll always find nettles in deserted human habitations. I don’t know why,” said Mr. Ingleby. “There is a rather unusual botanical curiosity to be found among the workings at Cold Harbour,” he went on, “the Roman Nettle. Urtica . . . Urtica. . . . My memory isn’t what it used to be. It has a bigger leaf than the ordinary nettle and a much more poisonous sting. It’s only found in places where the Romans have been.”
Why, in the face of this harrowing desolation, should he be thinking of things like that? A ghost . . . with as little passion or feeling as a ghost: emotions so different from the passionate resentment that now filled Edwin’s heart.
“Ah . . . here is the school. I suppose they couldn’t pull that down. I remember when it was newly built. It was there that I learnt my alphabet. . . .”
In the whole of the lane the school was the only whole building.
“If you come to the edge of the Batch you will see the valley bottom where I spent my childhood with your great-grandmother.”
They passed on, and saw, a hundred feet beneath them, the valley of the little stream. More ruins, many of them; but one or two cottages still inhabited. The lower cottages lay close to the water, and in four or five places the stream was spanned by a clapper bridge. In one of the gardens ghostly children were playing, and in another ghostly washing flapped in a breeze that had risen with the coolness of evening. Mr. Ingleby pointed out to Edwin his great-grandmother’s home. It was the cottage in the garden of which the children were playing.
From the chimney a trail of smoke dwindled up against the grey hill-side.
“I should like to see inside it,” said Edwin.
“Would you? No . . . I don’t think it would be worth going down into the hollow to see it. You’d only be disappointed. I don’t expect there’d be anything much to see. Besides, we haven’t time. I want to take you to a little farm—it isn’t really big enough to be called a farm—at the top of the lane under Axdown. They call it the Holloway. Why I can’t imagine, for it is the highest point of the whole village. Your aunt tells me that your grandfather’s sister, your own great-aunt Lydia, is still living there, and I think I had better go and see her.”
He turned again, and Edwin followed him. It seemed strange to him that his father should not be anxious to look inside the house where his childhood had been spent. A ghost . . . a ghost. . . .
They passed the windy farm once more. A man, in muddy gaiters, was driving cows into the yard.He was the first creature—apart from the ghostly children in the valley—that they had seen. A tall man, with a gaunt, grey face, who did not even turn to look at them or give them good-evening, although they must surely have been the only living people that he had seen that day. It was impossible to believe from the sight of its exterior that the farm was now inhabited.
“Who do you think he is?” Edwin asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t the least idea. The people at that farm used to be named Ingleby; and he certainly has the figure of your grandfather. . . .”
“Won’t you stop and speak to him?”
“Why should we?”
“But he would be awfully pleased to see you and know who you are. . . .”
“I don’t expect he would.”