ENGLAND, THEIR ENGLAND
CHAPTER XVII
After the long English winter, May had come at last. The trees in Royal Avenue were in bud. The shops were full of daffodils and pheasant-eyed narcissus, and violets and early tulips, and blue irises from the Scillies, and anemones. The air was clear. The Londoner's step was high and gay. The evening papers were already beginning to talk of the Advent of King Willow. The football season was almost three-quarters finished.
Donald was tired. He had been working steadily now for almost three months at work that was utterly unfamiliar to him. He had not only been writing a book. He had also been struggling to learn the art of writing from its very beginning. He was beginning to feel a little jaded. The scents of spring, overcoming the fumes of petrol and the miles of soot and asphalt, peeped in at his open window and sadly interfered with his powers of concentration.
A morning dawned even lovelier than the rest. At 7 o'clock the sky over Lambeth was all pigeon-blue and mother-of-pearl and jade-green and citron and topaz. Small, billowy, dappled cloudlets with pale-pink edges were playing about together, knowing, perhaps, like children or kittens or mice, that when the storm-clouds and the black fogs are away the cloudlets can play. A cool little breeze was bringing fragrance all the way from Essex across the desert of stone and slate which mankind thinks is an advance upon a nest or a burrow. Donald lay in bed till he could stand it no longer. An extra-insidious puff of air arrived with a cargo, Donald swore, of the scent of roses and hay-making and honeysuckle; which, of course, was impossible, as the clover and the rose were not yet in bloom and no one hay-makes in May, with however torrid a fire the sun may shine. But anyway, the result was the same, for Donald uttered a loud cry and sprang from his bed, dived into a cold bath, hurled on his clothes, rushed into the street, and drove in a taxi-cab to Waterloo Station and took a train, choosing at random, to the town of Alton.
He walked a bit from Alton, and then lorry-hopped, in army fashion, as far as the straggly, red-tiled village of Alresford, where he got off for a drink of Hampshire beer, and then lorry-hopped again across the high chalky downs until the water-meads of Itchen lay below him on the right, and below him in front, the ancient City of Winchester, city of Alfred, once capital of England, perhaps even the Camelot of Arthur.
Donald got off the lorry at the top of St. Giles' Hill and dropped leisurely down into the High Street, at the end of which is the statue of Alfred. It is a large statue, perhaps as much as a twenty-fifth of the height of the memorial which the later capital of England has built for Albert, and it faces up the steep, narrow High Street towards the Castle at the top, on the wall of which hangs the Round Table of the Knights.
Donald turned to the left and found himself suddenly reduced to the size and substance of a homunculus when he came round a corner upon the Cathedral, stretching its giant length, all grey and moss-green and pale yellow, across the grass like a sleeping leviathan.
Feeling very small and humble, he crept across the turf of the Close and timidly pushed open the west door and wandered in the dim coolness under that mighty roof, among the memorials to long-dead English soldiers, among the tattered flags of regiments, the cenotaphs of forgotten prebendaries, the brass tablets and marble sculptures, the brief rolls of honour of distant campaigns, the long lists of virtues of ancient dames, the Latin inscriptions, and the tombs of cardinals and bishops, and the effigies of unknown knights. But in all that carved and sculptured splendour of the history of England, its wars, its wealth, and its religion, its princes and prelates, and its imperial conquests, there were only two memorials that touched the heart. One was the chantry of William of Wykeham, saved from Cromwell's destroyers by the drawn sword of a Wykehamist captain, a Cromwellian, who stood upon the chantry steps and, against all comers, defended the tomb of the Founder. And the other was the little old lady of College Street, who commanded no armies and attacked no religions, who was burnt at no stake and married no prince, whose life added no faintest ripple to the waves and storms of England, and no fragment of a line to its recorded history; who is, alone among mortals, loved by all and hated by none, and who is, alone among the Great, imitated by none and parodied by none. English of the English, heart of English heart, bone of English bone, kindliest and gayest and gentlest, her memorial is not so wide as a church door nor so high as Albert's, but it is in Alfred's town, in Wykeham's cathedral, near Arthur's Table, and it will serve.
Donald spent a few minutes among the scattered gravestones outside the west front looking for the famous epitaph to the Hampshire Grenadier who caught his death by drinking cold small beer.
"Soldiers, be wise from his untimely fall, And where yere hot, drink strong or none at all."
He found it behind a memorial to other soldiers who fought in a later time, and read the proud, magnificent sweep of its inscription, which sounds like the roll of titles of a Spanish king or a blast from Milton's everlasting trumpet ...
. . . Who died in Flanders, France, Italy, Russia, Macedonia, Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Siberia, or by the Dardanelles, or were lost at sea in the Mediterranean.
Thence his wanderings took him past the Judges' Lodging and the Deanery and the lovely Canonries and the dusty Elizabethan tithe-barn, through an archway into the outer world of laymen, and through another archway into College Street. The summer term had just begun and the street was crowded with boys and young men, all wearing straw hats. A few were draped in long black gowns which Donald thought were not half so picturesque as the scarlet of Aberdeen and St. Andrews.
He visited the College Buildings, and listened to a description of them by the College porter, and carried away four memories—the loveliness of the cloisters round the lovely chantry, the darkness of the rooms off the Quadrangle in which the boys sat and worked, the Important Fact, repeated several times by the proud porter, that Winchester was nearly fifty years older than Eton and, indeed, practically founded Eton, and, fourthly, the extraordinary school motto.
Every other school or university motto he had ever heard of consisted of an invocation to an unspecified Supreme Power to allow the institution to flourish, or to prosper, or to wax strong—in general, to get on in the world. It was the natural thing. Old Boys needed a slogan to remind each other of their duty to their Alma Mater, of the happy days spent there in youth, and of their natural desire not to see the numbers diminish and the place simply go to the dogs. Besides, it made a capital toast at the Old Boys' Dinners when the diners could jump to their feet and raise their glasses and cry "Floreat St. Ethelburga's, Worksop," or "Floreat St. Francis Xavier's-in-partibus, Tel-el-Kebir."
But the Winchester motto was the extraordinary one of "Manners Makyth Man." Donald walked up and down Meads, the old school playing-field surrounded with its red-capped wall of flint and chalk, and wondered about this motto. It was obviously impossible to make it a toast at an Old Boys' Dinner; it was obviously impossible to shout it at a school football match, even if the boys were organized in American fashion by a professional cheer-leader. Donald looked at the Chapel Tower, which was just visible over an exquisite, red-brick, Wren building, and thought that on the whole it was unlikely that Winchester employed a professional cheer-leader. It almost looked, Donald decided finally, as if Winchester cared more for what happened to her boys in after-life than for her own nourishment. Perhaps, after five hundred years of flourishment, that was a justifiable attitude, but it certainly was a little unusual.
He pulled out his note-book and jotted down a brief description of the scene before him, the architecture, colouring, landscape beyond the red-capped wall, and a few other details. The trees, not yet in full leaf, bothered him—in wind-swept Buchan there are few trees to bother anybody—and he stopped a small, black-gowned boy, about twelve years of age, and asked politely:
"Can you tell me, please, what that tree is?"
The boy took off his straw hat and replied with equal politeness:
"That is Lord's tree, sir."
"Lord's tree?" said Donald, also taking off his hat. "What is that?"
"It is called that, sir, because only men in Lord's are allowed to sit on the seat at the foot of it," explained the child.
"I am sorry to appear stupid," Donald apologized, "but when you say 'Men in Lord's' do you refer to the Peers of the Realm?"
"By no means," replied the infant. "Men in Lord's are the men in the cricket eleven."
"Oh, I see. The cricket eleven is called Lord's because they go to Lord's to play cricket."
"No, sir. They don't go to Lord's."
"Then why are they called Lords?" Donald was getting confused.
"Because we used until quite recently to play at Lord's against Eton."
"Ah! Now I begin to understand. Until a few years ago; how many years, by the way?"
"About seventy or eighty, sir."
Donald kept a firm grip upon himself, and tried to speak naturally as he answered:
"Quite so. Just the other day. I see. And the boys in the cricket eleven——"
"Men," interrupted the child firmly.
"I beg your pardon."
"Men," repeated the child. "We are all men here. There are no boys."
Donald, by now quite dizzy, bowed and thanked the man for his trouble.
"It was a pleasure," replied the man, bowing courteously and removing his hat again and going on his way.
Donald, hat in hand, turned and watched him, and was immensely relieved to see the man halt after going a few yards, and extract a huge and sticky piece of toffee from his trouser-pocket, and cram it into his mouth.
From College it is only a step into Meads, and from Meads only another step through the gate in the flinty wall into Lavender Meads, and from Lavender Meads into the green expanse of Riddings', and from Riddings' to Dogger's Close, and from Dogger's Close, the last of Winchester's playing-fields, it is hardly more than a step to the ancient Abbey of St. Cross which presides with venerable dignity over the Greenjackets' cricket-ground, and which still gives a free horn of ale to the wayfarer. Thus a traveller who has a little time to spare, and who is not trying desperately to cut the existing record for home-bred citizens of North and South Dakota for the "doing" of the College of the Blessed Virgin Mary apud Winton, crosses the threshold of the Outer Gate of College and finds himself only beginning to awaken from his mediaeval trance in the Abbey of St. Cross.
But Donald had not even begun to awaken from his trance when he left St. Cross and wandered over the water-meads that the Itchen and its branches and canals have chiselled in the green valley. He had not begun to awaken when he climbed the first slopes of St. Catherine's Hill, or when at last he reached the clump of trees on the top of the hill and found a little grassy slope which fitted his back like a deck-chair at full stretch, and lay down and tilted his hat over his forehead and joined his hands behind his head.
At his feet were the glittering streams of the Itchen, that small, magic river of silver and dry-flies and trout. Beyond them were the playing-fields with their white dots of cricketers, and beyond them the tower of the College Chapel, and beyond that the slumbering leviathan, Wykeham's House of God. The air was filled with little sounds, the tinkling of sheep-bells across the vales of the chalkland, the click of cricket-ball on cricket-bat, the whispers of the fitful puffs of wind in the trees behind him, the megaphoned shouts of the coaches as the racing-fours went up the stream with flashing blades, and from across the valley the bells of the Cathedral, deep and far, like the strong clang of Thor's anvil in Valhalla.
Twenty or thirty feet below the grassy deck-chair on which Donald was by now half dozing ran the circular trench which the Britons dug as a defence against the Legions. The line of the Roman road was clear, a chalky arrow, as far as the blue horizon. Saxon Alfred's statue might have been as visible through a field-glass as the pale-yellow Norman transept of the Cathedral was to the eye. The English school, whose motto puts kindliness above flourishment or learning, lay among its water-meads, and all around was the creator, the inheritor, the ancestor, and the descendant of it all, the green and kindly land of England.
Donald went on dozing until he was gradually aroused by the consciousness that something queer was going on down below in the valley. The landscape seemed somehow to be different. The little streams were not so twinkly. The grass of the playing-fields had become more like the colour of grey-white olive-trees than of new-mown green. The Roman road and the horizon itself had disappeared, and the transept's amber was fading fast.
Donald sat up and rubbed his eyes. A thick white mist was rolling swiftly up the valley from the direction of the sea, and the advance guard was already wreathing itself round the ancient town. The small sounds were no longer audible, and even the reverberating echoes of the bells were muffled, and their vibrations died quickly. In another minute or two the water-meads were covered with a great pall. The College Tower sank out of sight, and the fringes of mist lapped over the edge of the British entrenchment. Even the fitful breeze had dropped. The bell ceased. The silence was like the silence of eternal snows.
Donald lay back again and gazed at the white bank that eddied so softly across the spring marguerites and buttercups and dandelions. Although it had come with such a rush, it hardly seemed to be moving at all now. The eddies and ripples became even softer. Here and there the antics of a wisp which had slipped away from the rest became quieter and quieter, until gradually the great fleece of mist slid and swayed and rocked itself imperceptibly to a standstill.
He felt no surprise. The mediaeval spell of Winchester had not yet completely worn off, and he was too sleepy after his long day in the open air, and too tired after the months of concentrated work, to feel surprised at anything. When, therefore, the fog gradually flattened itself, and narrowed itself, and spun itself out into the shape of a snow-white road that stretched, as far as the eye could reach, towards the English Channel in the south and over the edge of the English downs in the north, Donald was quite unmoved. It seemed a perfectly natural thing for a mist to do. If a road could become suddenly a solid wall of mist, why should not a solid wall of mist suddenly become a road?
It was a very reasonable place to have a road. It was a capital place to have a road. It was queer that no one had ever had the sense to put a road there before. It was an ideal place for a road. The mist was quite right to turn itself into a road. Mists are obstructive. Roads are beautiful. Especially a road that runs just at the foot of lovely grassy slopes like St. Catherine's Hill, where a man may lie at his ease and watch the world and its wayfarers. That was the way to learn about a country or a people. Lie on the grass among spring marguerites and buttercups and dandelions and watch the country and the people passing along below. Ten thousand times better than rushing about wildly with a note-book hunting for material. Let the material come to you. That was the ticket. Let it come along its roads to you. All you have to do is to find a road and a grassy hill above it. And was there ever such a road as this—smooth and broad and straight and firm? Incidentally it was clever of the mist to have made itself into so firm a surface, after having been so soft before.
The only odd thing about the road was that there seemed to be no traffic upon it. From end to end, the snowy ribbon was unmarred by the little black dots which men are, when seen from a little way away, a very little way away.
But Donald was not worried about this. It was obvious that as soon as people knew of the existence of this road of roads, they would scramble to use it. All he needed was a little patience. So he clasped his hands again behind his head and waited.
He had not long to wait. A tiny black dot appeared over the downs away to the north and other black dots followed it, and still more black dots, until a perfect host of men came straggling over the horizon. The whiteness of the road was steadily obliterated, as if a giant painter were methodically running a black brush over it. The mass came nearer and nearer.
Donald wondered how long it would be before they reached him, and he glanced southwards to make a rough estimate of the distance, and saw that another great mass of men were coming up the road from the sea.
As the two columns came straggling towards St. Catherine's Hill, a low rumbling sound began to fall upon the air. It was not in the least like the sound of marching feet, for it was deeper, and it had no rhythm, and it came in gusts, sometimes in a long, resistless roar like the fall of sea waves on sand upon summer nights, and sometimes with the short crash of a thunder-clap.
Soon Donald could see that, although they walked out of step, in groups and parties, mingling with each other and changing from moment to moment, with here and there a man by himself, although in fact they did not remotely resemble the disciplined ad vance of an army on the march, nevertheless, every single one carried a weapon of some sort, even if it was only a cross-bow or a bill-hook or a scythe. And yet none of them wore anything that might be described as a uniform; mostly they wore black suits or shabby corduroys, and they carried their weapons in a careless, amateurish way. The rumbling noise grew louder and more continuous. The faces of the two vanguards were now visible, and Donald saw that all the men of those two armed bodies of civilians were shaking and quaking and heaving with inexhaustible laughter. The vanguards met immediately below St. Catherine's Hill, where the road had widened out, somehow without Donald noticing it, into a great broad open space, and in a few moments all the men were talking and laughing together. Nobody listened very much to anybody, but they all seemed to be in raging, towering spirits. They threw their weapons down apparently at random, and pulled books and scrolls and parchments and pieces of paper out of their pockets and chattered away and declaimed and recited; and suddenly and queerly and instinctively Donald knew that they were all poets. Once there seemed to be some sort of alarm sounded, for they all sprang to arms with inconceivable rapidity, and ranged themselves in battle array and handled their jumble of weapons in a manner that was the complete reverse of carelessness and amateurishness. When it was found to have been a false alarm, they shoved their weapons away again—one, a little fellow, stuffed a great meat-axe casually into one coat-pocket and hauled a quarto volume out of the other, and one arranged his Hotchkiss machine-gun into a three-legged table and sat down on the ground and began to write a poem upon it—and fell to talking and laughing and scribbling and shouting and declaiming.
Donald gazed and gazed upon the enchanted scene. Time did not move. The clouds above him were motionless. Even the sun, surely, had given up its mad race with eternity.
Then a faint dull clang filtered laboriously through the mist, and Donald lazily wondered why the Cathedral bell had begun again, and then he wondered how the sound had come through the mist, and then he saw that the edges of the mist were stirring softly among the wild flowers and the stray wreaths were once more playing at spirals with each other.
He sprang up and rubbed his eyes. Everything was changing quickly now. The road had vanished entirely, and the open space that was covered with the poets and their weapons was narrowing as the mist closed in upon it. The poets themselves were changing fantastically, for half of them were growing fatter and redder and jollier, and half of them were growing thinner and brighter-eyed and bearded, and, one by one and group by group, they were vanishing, but whether they were vanishing into the deepening, swallowing bank of fog, or whether by some curious trick they were vanishing into each other, Donald could not make out.
At last only two were left. One was the survivor of the fat men, the fattest and reddest and jolliest of them, with the kindliest and gayest and most gigantic of laughs. He had lost his weapon and was swigging away all the time at a monstrous jar of canary-sack which he carried under his arm. The second was the survivor of the thin men, and he was thin and had a small pointed beard, and his eyes were the brightest of them all, and he was full of silent laughter, and he was the gayest and the kindliest of them all. By some queer optical delusion, although these two men were really so very different, yet for a moment their faces seemed very like each other, and then for a moment both looked a little like Mr. Hodge.
Just as the mist reached these last two, the Stratford man's eyes flashed with mischief, and he turned and said something to the fat man, who roared like a waterfall and then said—or at least it sounded as if he said—"Shall we shog, Will?"—and then they linked arms and vanished, and below St. Catherine's Hill there was no longer any trace of the passing of that absurd host of kindly, laughter-loving, warrior poets, but only what they have left behind them—the muted voices of grazing sheep, and the merry click of bat upon ball, and the peaceful green fields of England, and the water-meads, and the bells of the Cathedral.
Donald got up and yawned and stretched himself and went off to find some tea.
