It Is A Five-Mile Road Through A
Beautiful Country, Where There Is Practically No Cultivation,
And The Green Hills,
With brown woods in their hollows, and
here and there huge masses of grey and reddish Bath stone
cropping out
On their sides, resembling gigantic castles and
ramparts, long ruined and overgrown with ivy and bramble,
produce the effect of a land dispeopled and gone back to a
state of wildness.
A thaw had come that morning, ending the severest frost
experienced this winter anywhere in England, and the valley
was alive with birds, happy and tuneful at the end of January
as in April. Looking down on the stream the sudden glory of a
kingfisher passed before me; but the sooty-brown water-ouzel
with his white bib, a haunter, too, of this water, I did not
see. Within a mile or so of Wells I overtook a small boy who
belonged there, and had been to Shepton like me, noticing the
birds. "I saw a kingfisher," I said. "So did I," he returned
quickly, with pride. He described it as a biggish bird with a
long neck, but its colour was not blue - oh, no! I suggested
that it was a heron, a long-necked creature under six feet
high, of no particular colour. No, it was not a heron; and
after taking thought, he said, "I think it was a wild duck."
Bestowing a penny to encourage him in his promising researches
into the feathered world, I went on by a footpath over a hill,
and as I mounted to the higher ground there before me rose the
noble tower of St. Cuthbert's Church, and a little to the
right of it, girt with high trees, the magnificent pile of the
cathedral, with green hills and the pale sky beyond. O joy to
look again on it, to add yet one more enduring image of it to
the number I had long treasured! For the others were not
exactly like this one; the building was not looked at from the
same point of view at the same season and late hour, with the
green hills lit by the departing sun and the clear pale winter
sky beyond.
Coming in by the moated palace I stood once more on the Green
before that west front, beautiful beyond all others, in spite
of the strange defeatures Time has written on it. I watched
the daws, numerous as ever, still at their old mad games, now
springing into the air to scatter abroad with ringing cries,
only to return the next minute and fling themselves back on
their old perches on a hundred weather-stained broken statues
in the niches. And while I stood watching them from the
palace trees close by came the loud laugh of the green
woodpecker. The same wild, beautiful sound, uttered perhaps
by the same bird, which I had often heard at that spot ten
years ago! "You will not hear that woodland sound in any
other city in the kingdom," I wrote in a book of sketches
entitled "Birds and Man", published in 1901.
But of my soul's adventures in Wells on the two or three
following days I will say very little. That laugh of the
woodpecker was an assurance that Nature had suffered no
change, and the town too, like the hills and rocks and running
waters, seemed unchanged; but how different and how sad when I
looked for those I once knew, whose hands I had hoped to grasp
again! Yes, some were living still; and a dog too, one I used
to take out for long walks and many a mad rabbit-hunt - a very
handsome white-and-liver coloured spaniel. I found him lying
on a sofa, and down he got and wagged his tail vigorously,
pretending, with a pretty human hypocrisy in his gentle yellow
eyes, that he knew me perfectly well, that I was not a bit
changed, and that he was delighted to see me.
On my way back to Bath I had a day at Bristol. It was
cattle-market day, and what with the bellowings, barkings, and
shoutings, added to the buzz and clang of innumerable electric
tramcars and the usual din of street traffic, one got the idea
that the Bristolians had adopted a sort of Salvation Army
theory, and were endeavouring to conquer earth (it is not
heaven in this case) by making a tremendous noise. I amused
myself strolling about and watching the people, and as train
after train came in late in the day discharging loads of
humanity, mostly young men and women from the surrounding
country coming in for an evening's amusement, I noticed again
the peculiarly Welsh character of the Somerset peasant - the
shape of the face, the colour of the skin, and, above all, the
expression.
Freeman, when here below, proclaimed it his mission to prove
that "Englishmen were Englishmen, and not somebody else." It
appeared to me that any person, unbiassed by theories on such
a subject, looking at that crowd, would have come to the
conclusion, sadly or gladly, according to his nature, that we
are, in fact, "somebody else."
Chapter Fourteen: The Return of the Native
That "going back" about which I wrote in the second chapter to
a place where an unexpected beauty or charm has revealed
itself, and has made its image a lasting and prized possession
of the mind, is not the same thing as the revisiting a famous
town or city, rich in many beauties and old memories, such as
Bath or Wells, for instance. Such centres have a permanent
attraction, and one who is a rover in the land must return to
them again and again, nor does he fail on each successive
visit to find some fresh charm or interest. The sadness of
such returns, after a long interval, is only, as I have said,
when we start "looking up" those with whom we had formed
pleasant friendly relations.
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