Said she, with a laugh: "O, I am the lucky one who
doesn't want to work; though sometimes I get it, for I serve as a model
to Mistress Philippa there when she wants one: she is our head carver;
come and see her."
She led us up to the door
of the unfinished house, where a rather little woman was working with
mallet and chisel on the wall nearby. She seemed very intent on what she
was doing, and did not turn round when we came up; but a taller woman,
quite a girl she seemed, who was at work nearby, had already knocked off,
and was standing looking from Clara to
[Page 204]
Dick with delighted eyes. None of the others paid much heed to us.
The blue-clad girl laid her hand on the carver's
shoulder and said: "Now, Philippa, if you gobble up your work like that,
you will soon have none to do and what will become of you then?"
The carver turned round hurriedly and showed us
the face of a woman of forty (or so she seemed), and said rather
pettishly, but in a sweet voice:
"Don't talk
nonsense, Kate, and don't interrupt me if you can help it." She stopped
short when she saw us, then went on with the kind of smile of welcome
which never failed us. "Thank you for coming to see us, neighbours; but I
am sure that you won't think me unkind if I go on with my work,
especially when I tell you that I was ill and unable to do anything all
through April and May; and this open air and the sun and the work
together, and my feeling well again too, make a mere delight of every
hour to me; and excuse me, I must go on."
She fell to work accordingly on a carving in low
relief of flowers and figures, but talked on amidst her mallet strokes:
"You see, we all think this the prettiest place for a house up and down
these reaches; and the site has been so long encumbered with an unworthy
one, that we masons were determined to pay off fate and destiny for once,
and build the prettiest house we could compass here -- and so -- and so
-- "
Here she lapsed into mere carving, but
the tall foreman came up and said: "Yes, neighbours, that is it: so it is
going to be all ashlar because we want to carve a kind of wreath of
flowers and figures all round it; and we have been much hindered by one
thing or other -- Philippa's illness amongst others, -- and though we
could have managed our wreath without her --
"
[Page 205]
"Could you,
though?" grumbled the last-named from the face of the wall.
"Well, at any rate, she is our best carver, and it
would not have been kind to begin the carving without her. So you see,"
said he, looking at Dick and me, "we really couldn't go haymaking, could
we, neighbours? But you see, we are getting on so fast now with this
splendid weather, that I think we may well spare a week or ten days at
wheat-harvest and won't we go at that work then! Come down
then to the acres that lie north and by west at our backs and you shall
see good harvesters, neighbours."
"Hurrah,
for a good brag!" called a voice from the scaffold above us; "our foreman
thinks that an easier job than putting one stone on another!"
There was a general laugh at this sally, in which
the tall foreman joined; and with that we saw a lad bringing out a little
table into the shadow of the stone-shed, which he set down there, and
then going back, came out again with the inevitable big wickered flask
and tall glasses, whereon the foreman led us up to due seats on blocks of
stone, and said:
"Well, neighbours, drink to
my brag coming true, or I shall think you don't believe me! Up there!"
said he, hailing the scaffold, "are you coming down for a glass?" Three
of the workmen came running down the ladder as men with good "building
legs" will do; but the others didn't answer except the joker (if he must
so be called), who called out without turning round: "Excuse me,
neighbours, for not getting down. I must get on: my work is not
superintending, like the gaffer's yonder; but, you fellows, send us up a
glass to drink the haymakers' health." Of course, Philippa would not turn
away from her beloved work; but the other woman server came; she turned
out to be Philippa's daughter but was a
[Page 206]
tall strong girl, black-haired and gipsey-like of face and curiously
solemn of manner. The rest gathered round us and clinked glasses, and the
men on the scaffold turned about and drank to our healths; but the busy
little woman by the door would have none of it all but only shrugged her
shoulders when her daughter came up to her and touched her.
So we shook hands and turned our backs on the
Obstinate Refusers, went down the slope to our boat, and before we had
gone many steps heard the full tune of tinkling trowels mingle with the
humming of the bees and the singing of the larks above the little plain
of Basildon.
Chapter 27 The Upper Waters
We
set Walter ashore on the Berkshire side, amidst all the beauties of
Streatley, and so went our ways into what once would have been the deeper
country under the foot-hills of the White Horse; and though the contrast
between half-cockneyfied and wholly unsophisticated country existed no
longer, a feeling of exultation rose within me (as it used to do) at
sight of the familiar and still unchanged hills of the Berkshire range.
We stopped at Wallingford for our midday meal; of
course, all signs of squalor and poverty had disappeared from the streets
of the ancient town, and many ugly houses had been taken down and many
pretty new ones built, but I thought it curious, that the town still
looked like the old place I remembered so well; for indeed it looked like
that ought to have looked.
[Page 207]
At dinner we fell in with an old, but very bright
and intelligent man, who seemed in a country way to be another edition
of old Hammond. He had an extraordinary detailed knowledge of the ancient
history of the countryside from the time of Alfred to the days of the
Parliamentary Wars, many events of which, as you may know, were enacted
round about Wallingford. But, what was more interesting to us, he had
detailed record of the period of the change to the present state of
things, and told us a great deal about it, and especially of that exodus
of the people from the town to the country, and the gradual recovery by
the town-bred people on one side, and the country-bred people on the
other, of those arts of life which they had each lost; which loss, as he
told us had at one time gone so far that not only was it impossible to
find a carpenter or a smith in a village or a small country town, but
that people in such places had even forgotten how to bake bread, and that
at Wallingford, for instance, the bread came down with the newspapers by
an early train from London, worked in some way, the explanation of which
I could not understand. He told us also that the townspeople who came
into the country used to pick up the agricultural arts by carefully
watching the way in which the machines worked, gathering an idea of
handicraft from machinery; because at that time almost everything was
done by elaborate machines used quite unintelligently by the labourers.
On the other hand, the old men amongst the labourers managed to teach the
younger ones gradually a little artisanship, such as the use of the saw
and the plane, the work of the smithy, and so forth; for once more by
that time it was as much as -- or rather, more than -- a man could do to
fix an ash pole to a rake by handiwork; so that it would take a machine
worth a thousand pounds, a
[Page 208]
group of
workmen, and a half a day's travelling, to do five shillings' worth of
work. He showed us, among other things, an account of a certain village
council who were working hard at all this business; and the record of
their intense earnestness in getting to the bottom of some matter which
in time past would have been thought quite trivial, as, for example, the
due proportions of alkali and oil for soap-making for the village wash,
or the exact heat of the water into which a leg of mutton should be
plunged for boiling -- all this joined to the utter absence of anything
like the party feeling, which even in a village assembly would
certainly have made its appearance in an earlier epoch, was very amusing,
and at the same time instructive.
This old
man, whose name was Henry Morsom, took us, after our meal and a rest,
into a biggish hall which contained a large collection of articles of
manufacture and art from the last days of the machine period to that day;
and he went over them with us, and explained them with great care. They
also were very interesting, showing the transition from the make-shift
work of the machines (which was at about its worst a little after the
Civil War before told of) into the first years of the new handicraft
period. Of course, there was much overlapping of the periods: and at
first the new handiwork came in very slowly.
"You must remember," said the old antiquary, that
the handicraft was not the result of what used to be called material
necessity: on the contrary, by that time the machines had been so much
improved that almost all necessary work might have been done by them: and
indeed many people at that time, and before it, used to think that
machinery would entirely supersede handicraft; which certainly, on the
face of it, seemed more than likely. But there was another opinion, far
less logical, prevalent amongst the rich
[Page 209]
people before the days of freedom, which did not die out at once after
that epoch had begun. This opinion, which from all I can learn seemed as
natural then, as it seems absurd now, was, that while the ordinary
daily work of the world would be done entirely by automatic machinery,
the energies of the more intelligent part of mankind would be set free to
follow the higher forms of the arts, as well as science and the study of
history. It was
strange, was it not, that they should thus ignore that aspiration after
complete equality which we now recognise as the bond of all happy
human society?"
I did not answer, but thought
the more. Dick looked thoughtful, and said:
"Strange, neighbour? Well, I don't know. I have
often heard my old kinsman say the one aim of all people before our time
was to avoid work, or at least they thought it was; so of course the work
which their daily life forced them to do, seemed more like
work than that which they seemed to choose for themselves."
"True enough," said Morsom. Anyhow, they soon
began to find out their mistake, and that only slaves and slave-holders
could live solely by setting machines going."
Clara broke in here, flushing a little as she
spoke: "Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery
that they had been living? -- a life which was always looking upon
everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate -- "nature," as people
used to call it -- as one thing, and mankind as another. It was natural
to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make "nature"
their slave, since they thought `nature' was something outside them."
"Surely," said Morsom; and they were puzzled as to
what to do, till they found the feeling against a mechanical life, which
had begun before the Great
[Page 210]
Change amongst
people who had leisure to think of such things, was spreading insensibly;
till at last under the guise of pleasure that was not supposed to be
work, work that was pleasure began to push out the mechanical toil, which
they had once hoped at the best to reduce to narrow limits indeed, but
never to get rid of; and which, moreover, they found they could not limit
as they had hoped to do."
"When did this new
revolution gather head?" said I.
"In the
half-century that followed the Great Change," said Morsom, "it began to be
noteworthy; machine after machine was quietly dropped under the excuse that
machines could not produce works of art, and that works of art were more
and more called for. Look here," he said, "here are some of the works of
that time -- rough and unskilful in handiwork, but solid and showing some
sense of pleasure in the making."
"They are
very curious," said I, taking up a piece of pottery from amongst the
specimens which the antiquary was showing us; "not a bit like the work of
either savages or barbarians, and yet with what would once have been
called a hatred of civilisation impressed upon them."
"Yes," said Morsom, You must not look for delicacy
there: in that period you could only have got that from a man who was
practically a slave. But now, you see," said he, leading me on a little,
"we have learned the trick of handicraft, and have ad
ded the utmost refinement of workmanship to the freedom of fancy and
imagination."
I looked, and wondered indeed at
the deftness and abundance of beauty of the work of men who had at last
learned to accept life itself as a pleasure, and the satisfaction of the
common needs of mankind and the
[Page 211]
preparation
for them, as work fit for the best of the race. I mused silently; but at
last I said:
"What is to come after this?"
The old man laughed. "I don't know," said he; we
will meet it when it comes."
"Meanwhile,"
quoth Dick, we have got to meet the rest of our day's journey; so out
into the street and down to the strand! Will you come a turn with us,
neighbour? Our friend is greedy of your stories."
"I will go as far as Oxford with you," said he; I
want a book or two out of the Bodleian Library. I suppose you will sleep
in the old city?"
"No," said Dick, we are
going higher up; the hay is waiting us there, you know."
Morsom nodded, and we all went into the street
together, and got into the boat a little above the town bridge. But just
as Dick was getting the sculls into the rowlocks, the bows of another
boat came thrusting through the low arch. Even at first sight it was a
gay little craft indeed -- bright green, and painted over with elegantly
drawn flowers. As it cleared the arch, a figure as bright and gay-clad
as the boat rose up in it; a slim girl dressed in light blue silk that
fluttered in the draughty wind of the bridge. I thought I knew the
figure, and sure enough, as she turned her head to us, and showed her
beautiful face, I saw with joy that it was none other than the fairy
godmother from the abundant garden on Runnymede -- Ellen, to wit.
We all stopped to receive her. Dick rose in the
boat and cried out a genial good morrow; I tried to be as genial as Dick,
but failed; Clara waved a delicate hand to her; and Morsom nodded and
looked on with interest. As to Ellen, the beautiful brown of her face was
deepened by a flush, as she brought the gunwale of her boat alongside
ours, and said:
"You see, neighbours, I had
some doubt if you
[Page 212]
would all three come
back past Runnymede, or if you did, whether you would stop there; and
besides, I am not sure whether we -- my father and I -- shall not be away
in a week or two, for he wants to see a brother of his in the north
country, and I should not like him to go without me. So I thought I might
never see you again, and that seemed uncomfortable to me, and -- and so I
came after you."
"Well," said Dick, I am
sure we are all very glad of that; although you may be sure that as for
Clara and me, we should have made a point of coming to see you, and of
coming the second time, if we had found you away at first. But, dear
neighbour, there you are alone in the boat, and you have been sculling
pretty hard, I should think, and might find a little quiet sitting
pleasant; so we had better part our company into two."
"Yes," said Ellen, I thought you would do that, so
I have brought a rudder for my boat: will you help me to ship it,
please?"
And she went aft in her boat and
pushed along our side till she had brought the stern close to Dick's
hand. He knelt down in our boat and she in hers, and the usual fumbling
took place over hanging the rudder on its hooks; for, as you may imagine,
no change had taken place in the arrangement of such an unimportant
matter as the rudder of a pleasure boat. As the two beautiful young faces
bent over the rudder, they seemed to me to be very close together, and
though it lasted only a moment, a sort of pang shot through me as I
looked on. Clara sat in her
place and did not look round, but presently she said, with just the least
stiffness in her tone:
"How shall we divide?
Won't you go into Ellen's boat, Dick, since, without offence to our
guest, you are the better sculler?"
Dick stood
up and laid his hand on her shoulder,
[Page 213]
and
said:"No, no; let Guest try what he can do -- he ought to be getting into
training now. Besides, we are in no hurry: we are not going far above
Oxford; and even if we are benighted, we shall have the moon, which will
give us nothing worse of night than a greyer day"
"Besides," said I, I may manage to do a little
more with my sculling than merely keeping the boat from drifting
down-stream."
They all laughed at this, as if
it had been a very good joke; and I thought that Ellen's laugh, even
amongst the others, was one of the pleasantest sounds I had ever heard.
To be short, I got into the new-come boat, not a
little elated, and taking the sculls, set to work to show off a little.
For -- must I say i? -- I felt as if even that happy world were made
happier for my being so near this strange girl; although I must say that
of all persons I had seen in that world renewed, she was the most
unfamiliar to me, the most unlike what I could have though of. Clara, for
instance, beautiful and bright as she was, was not unlike a
very pleasant and unaffected young lady; and the other girls
also seemed nothing more than specimens of very much improved types which
I had known in other times. But this girl was not only beautiful with a
beauty quite different from that of "a young lady," but was in all ways
so strangely interesting; so that I kept wondering what she would say or
do next to surprise and please me. Not, indeed, that there was anything
startling in what she actually said or did; but it was all done in a new
way, and always with that indefinable interest and pleasure of life,
which I had noticed more or less in everybody, but which in her was more
marked and more charming than in any one else that I had seen.
[Page 214]
We were soon under
way and going at a fair pace through the beautiful reaches of the river,
between Bensington and Dorchester. It was now about the middle of the
afternoon, warm rather than hot, and quite windless; the clouds high up
and light, pearly white, and gleaming, softened by the sun's burning,
but did not hide the pale blue in most places, though they seemed to give
it height and consistency; the sky, in short, looked really like a vault,
as poets have someteimes called it, and not like mere limitless air, but
a vault so vast and full of light that it did not in any way oppress the
spirits. It was the sort of afternoon that Tennyson must have been
thinking about, when he said of the Lotos-Eaters' land that it was a land
where it was always afternoon.
Ellen leaned
back in the stern and seemed to enjoy herself thoroughly I could see that
she was really looking at things and let nothing escape her, and as I
watched her, an uncomfortable feeling that she had been a little touched
by love of the deft, ready, and handsome Dick, and that she had been
constrained to follow us because of it, faded out of my mind; since if it
had been so, she surely could not have been so excitedly pleased, even
with the beautiful scenes we were passing through. For some time she did
not say much, but at last, as we had passed under Shillingford Bridge
(new built, but somewhat on its old lines), she bade me hold the boat
while she had a good look at the landscape through the graceful arch.
Then she turned about to me and said:
"I do
not know whether to be sorry or glad that this is the first time that I
have been in these reaches. It is true that it is a great
pleasure to see all this for the first time; ;but if I had had a year or
two of memory of it, how sweetly it would all have
[Page
215]
mingled with my life, waking or dreaming! I am so glad
Dick has been pulling slowly, so as to linger out the time here. How do
you feel about your first visit to these waters?"
I do not suppose she meant a trap for me, but
anyhow I fell into it, and said: "My first visit! It is not my first
visit by many a time. I know these reaches well; indeed, I may say that I
know every yard of the Thames from Hammersmith to Cricklade."
I saw the complications that might follow, as her
eyes fixed mine with a curious look in them, that I had seen before at
Runnymede, when I had said something which made it difficult for others
to understand my present position amongst these people. I reddened, and
said, in order to cover my mistake: "I wonder you have never been up so
high as this, since you live on the Thames, and moreover row so well that
it would be no great labour to you. Let alone," quoth I,
insinuatingly,"that anybody would be glad to row you."
She laughed, clearly not at my compliment (as I am
sure she need not have done, since it was a very commonplace fact), but
at something which was stirring in her mind; and she still looked at me
kindly, but with the above-said keen look in her eyes, and then she said:
"Well, perhaps it is strange, though I have a
good deal to do at home, what with looking after my father, and dealing
with two or three young men who have taken a special liking to me, and
all of whom I cannot please at once. But you, dear neighbour; it seems
to me stranger that you should know the upper river, than that I should
not know it; for, as I understand, you have only been in England a few
days. But perhaps you mean that you have read
[Page
216]
about it in books, and seen pictures of it? -- though that
does not come to much either,"
"Truly," said
I. Besides, I have not read any books about the Thames: it was one of the
minor stupidities of our time that no one thought fit to write a decent
book about what may fairly be called our only English river."
The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I
saw that I had made another mistake; and I felt really annoyed with
myself, as I did not want to go into a long explanation just then, or
begin another series of Odyssean lies. Somehow, Ellen seemed to see
this, and she took no advantage of my slip; her piercing look changed
into one of mere frank kindness, and she said:
"Well, anyhow I am glad that I am travelling these
waters with you, since you know our river so well, and I know little of
it past Pangbourne, for you can tell me all I want to know about it."
She paused a minute, and then said: "Yet you must understand that the
part I do know, I know as thoroughly as you do. I should be sorry for you
to think that I am careless of a thing so beautiful and interesting as
the Thames."
She said this quite earnestly,
and with an air of affectionate appeal to me which pleased me very much;
but I could see that she was only keeping her doubts about me for another
time.
Presently we came to Day's Lock, where
Dick and his two sitters had waited for us. He would have me go ashore,
as if to show me something which I had never seen before; and nothing
loth I followed him, Ellen by my side, to the well-remembered Dykes, and
the long church beyond them, which was still used for various purposes by
the good folk of Dorchester: where, by the way, the village guest-house
[Page 217]
still had the sign of the Fleur-de-luce which
it used to bear in the days when hospitality had to be bought and sold.
This time, however, I made no sign of
all this being familiar to me: though as we sat for a while on the mound
of the Dykes looking up at Sinodun and its clear-cut trench, and its
sister mamelon of Whittenham, I felt somewhat uncomfortable
under Ellen's serious attentive look, which almost drew from me the cry,
"How little anything is changed here!"
We
stopped again at Abingdon, which, like Wallingford, was in a way both old
and new to me, since it had been lifted out of its nineteenth-century
degradation, and otherwise was as little altered as might be.
Sunset was in the sky as we skirted Oxford by
Oseney; we stopped a minute or two hard by the ancient castle to put
Henry Morsom ashore. It was a matter of course that so far as they could
be seen from the river, I missed none of the towers and spires of that
once don-beridden city; but the meadows all round which, when I had last
passed through them, were getting daily more and more squalid, more and
more impressed with the seal of the "stir and intellectual life of the
nineteenth century," were no longer intellectual, but had once again
become as beautiful as they should be, and the little hill of Hinksey,
with two or three very pretty stone houses new-grown on it (I use the
word advisedly; for they seemed to belong to it) looked down happily on
the full streams and waving grass, grey now, but for the sunset, with its
fast-ripening seeds.
The railway having
disappeared, and therewith the various level bridges over the streams of
Thames, we were soon through Medley Lock and in the wide
[Page
218]
water that washes Port Meadow, with its numerous
population of geese nowise diminished; and I thought with interest how
its name and use had survived from the older imperfect communal period,
through the time of the confused struggle and tyranny of the rights of
property, into the present rest and happiness of complete Communism.
I was taken ashore again at Godstow, to see the
remains of the old nunnery, pretty nearly in the same condition as I had
remembered them; and from the high bridge over the cut close by, I could
see, even in the twilight, how beautiful the little village with its grey
stone houses had become; for we had now come into the stone-country, in
which every house must be either built, walls and roof, of grey stone or
be a blot on the landscape.
We still rowed
on after this, Ellen taking the sculls in my boat; we passed a weir a
little higher up, and about three miles beyond it came by moonlight again
to a little town, where we slept at a house thinly inhabited, as its folk
were mostly tented in the hay-fields.