"There Are Your
Boys Still Patiently Waiting To Begin Their Practice - Such
Nice Quiet Fellows!"
"Yes, they are," he returned a little bitterly, a sudden
accent of weariness in his voice and no trace now
Of what I
had seen in his countenance a little while ago - the light that
shone and brightened behind the dark eye and the little play
about the corners of the mouth as of dimpling motions on the
surface of a pool.
And in that new guise, or disguise, I left him, the austere
priest with nothing to suggest the whimsical or grotesque in
his cold ascetic face. Recrossing the bridge I stood a little
time and looked once more at the noble church tower standing
dark against the clear amber-coloured sky, and said to myself:
"Why, this is one of the oddest incidents of my life! Not
that I have seen or heard anything very wonderful - just a
small rustic village, one of a thousand in the land; a big new
church in which some person was playing rather madly on the
organ, a set of unruly choir-boys; a handsome stained-glass
west window, and, finally, a nice little chat with the vicar."
It was not in these things; it was a sense of something
strange in the mind, of something in some way unlike all other
places and people and experiences. The sensation was like
that of the reader who becomes absorbed in Henry Newbolt's
romance of The Old Country, who identifies himself with the
hero and unconsciously, or without quite knowing how, slips
back out of this modern world into that of half a thousand
years ago. It is the same familiar green land in which he
finds himself - the same old country and the same sort of
people with feelings and habits of life and thought
unchangeable as the colour of grass and flowers, the songs
of birds and the smell of the earth, yet with a difference.
I recognized it chiefly in the parish priest I had been
conversing with; for one thing, his mediaeval mind evidently
did not regard a sense of humour and of the grotesque as out
of place in or on a sacred building. If it had been lighter I
should have looked at the roof for an effigy of a semi-human
toad-like creature smiling down mockingly at the worshippers
as they came and went.
On departing it struck me that it would assuredly be a mistake
to return to this village and look at it again by the common
lights of day. No, it was better to keep the impressions I
had gathered unspoilt; even to believe, if I could, that no
such place existed, but that it had existed exactly as I had
found it, even to the unruly choir-boys, the ascetic-looking
priest with a strange light in his eyes, and the worshippers
who kept pet toads in the church. They were not precisely
like people of the twentieth century. As for the eccentric
middle-aged or elderly person whose portrait adorned the west
window, she was not the lady I knew something about, but
another older Lady Y - , who flourished some six or seven
centuries ago.
Chapter Three: Walking and Cycling
We know that there cannot be progression without
retrogression, or gain with no corresponding loss; and often
on my wheel, when flying along the roads at a reckless rate of
very nearly nine miles an hour, I have regretted that time of
limitations, galling to me then, when I was compelled to go on
foot. I am a walker still, but with other means of getting
about I do not feel so native to the earth as formerly. That
is a loss. Yet a poorer walker it would have been hard to
find, and on even my most prolonged wanderings the end of each
day usually brought extreme fatigue. This, too, although my
only companion was slow - slower than the poor proverbial snail
or tortoise - and I would leave her half a mile or so behind to
force my way through unkept hedges, climb hills, and explore
woods and thickets to converse with every bird and shy little
beast and scaly creature I could discover. But mark what
follows. In the late afternoon I would be back in the road or
footpath, satisfied to go slow, then slower still, until - the
snail in woman shape would be obliged to slacken her pace to
keep me company, and even to stand still at intervals to give
me needful rest.
But there were compensations, and one, perhaps the best of
all, was that this method of seeing the country made us more
intimate with the people we met and stayed with. They were
mostly poor people, cottagers in small remote villages; and
we, too, were poor, often footsore, in need of their
ministrations, and nearer to them on that account than if we
had travelled in a more comfortable way. I can recall a
hundred little adventures we met with during those wanderings,
when we walked day after day, without map or guide-book as our
custom was, not knowing where the evening would find us, but
always confident that the people to whom it would fall in the
end to shelter us would prove interesting to know and would
show us a kindness that money could not pay for. Of these
hundred little incidents let me relate one.
It was near the end of a long summer day when we arrived at a
small hamlet of about a dozen cottages on the edge of an
extensive wood - a forest it is called; and, coming to it, we
said that here we must stay, even if we had to spend the night
sitting in a porch. The men and women we talked to all
assured us that they did not know of anyone who could take us
in, but there was Mr. Brownjohn, who kept the shop, and was
the right person to apply to.
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