by George Moore
But why, Percy, did you side with her and against me? he asked as soon as an opportunity occurred for them to whisper together. Before your mother and my father, Percy answered, a little diplomacy was needed. After all, your mother only expects us to come down for meals, and we must have our meals somewhere, and the visitors — I know what coming down for meals means, Percy, and you don’t, Hugh said. But what is to be done? I cannot spend these next three weeks with my mother’s visitors. I feel a restlessness that I can’t overcome. If you feel like that, Hugh, the best thing we can do is to go away; and a walking tour through Essex suggesting itself, he asked Hugh what he thought of their going away together without saying a word to anybody. Yes, that’s the only thing to do, Percy; after all, I am two-and-twenty and need not ask my mother’s permission to go away on a walking tour. But why through Essex? And he confided his ideas forthright that Essex was a straight, prim, Anglo-Saxon county in mind and in appearance, with slow peasants living contentedly in villages overlooking low-lying fields and sluggish rivers. A willow land, Percy interposed, and the tone of his friend’s voice warned Hugh that Percy was not altogether in agreement with him in his depreciation of willows. But he had to speak his mind about Essex, which, he said, was without a coast in any real sense of the word, only mud-banks and sea-side resorts, and he strove to frighten Percy with the news that they would travel day after day without meeting a ruin or hearing a legend. You see, I have been here all my life, Percy, and willows and mud-banks have grown wearisome; but you are my guest and must choose; let’s think.
And the Lake country was considered in view of the pleasure to be gotten from visiting the houses that Wordsworth, Coleridge, and De Quincey had lived in; but unlike Hugh, Percy did not care about acquiring a memory of the Lake poets, and his thought went instead to Cornwall, seeing in the castle of King Mark, in the orchards by the river (in which he would hide King Mark in a tree with a bow and arrow, waiting to shoot the lovers as they went by), subjects for drawings; he would like to return to the primitive fable of a mad Tristan returning to curse a faithless Isolde. Then let it be Cornwall, cried Hugh, but Percy was not sure that they would find more of King Mark’s castle than formless heaps of stones; and afraid that their walking tour might not come to pass, Hugh spoke of Scotland and then of Wales, for Wales was a country with a language, a history, and a literature. So, too, was Scotland, but Scotland was far away, and half their holiday would be spent in trains going there and returning. Whereas Wales is at hand, Percy. But why decide before we arrive in London? asked Percy, and that seeming plain sense they were in the train early next morning debating whether their tour should be through Scotland or Wales. Conway Castle was by the sea, and the sea, Hugh said, brought to him a sense of freedom as nothing else did. The sea, not the sea-side, he added, but without obtaining Percy’s sympathy. Why not Tintagel? Percy did not answer, and Hugh tried to remember some great Scottish ruin, something more than formless heaps of stones. He voted against the Hebrides, saying that they were too far away and were not likely to contain any fine ruins. Northumberland, he said, certainly abounds in the castles we want, but I can’t call to mind any names. But we can’t remain in London, that’s certain, Percy answered. A guide-book will give ns all the information we need, said Hugh. The men who write guide-books are not artists, my dear Hugh; we must be guided by our instinct. And on arriving at Liverpool Street they drove to Euston, and leaving their bags at the railway hotel they repaired to the station, where Percy engaged several porters in conversation, asking each what part of the country he had come from; but unluckily every one was from the Midlands. A wretched station, said Percy; if the General Manager had his wits about him he would employ porters from different parts of the country. How are we to get out of London? Nobody here seems ever to have heard of a ruin, much less seen one. Come, Hugh, let’s jump into the next train. We can leave it when we are weary. But the tickets! cried Hugh, amazed at the daring of Percy’s thought. We needn’t have tickets; we can pay the collector when he comes round for them. And having possessed themselves of their hags and taken two tickets that would give them the right to go on the platform, they waited till a train appeared destined for a long journey. We must jump in the moment the guard blows his whistle, said Percy, or if he be at the end of the platform we’ll wait till the train is rolling out.
Hugh was very nearly left behind, but Percy managed to pull him in, and they sat looking at each other, wondering what was going to happen next. The ticket collector will tell us that we are in the wrong train, said Percy, but we must beg of him to take the money for the journey’s end without telling us what the end will be, for all the fun will be spoilt if we know where we are going. Hugh was afraid that the ticket collector would think them mad, and he began to foresee their adventure ending in a police court with an alienist giving evidence in the witness box. Now mind you ask no questions, Hugh, but just pay the money and give him a tip to hold his tongue. Hugh promised, but he blundered in his answers and Percy had to come to his help. The story Hugh was attempting to tell soon straightened out in Percy’s telling; the ticket collector beamed, took their money, and wished them a pleasant journey. We shall pass, he began, through many pleasant — But Percy held up his finger, and Hugh expatiated in the pleasure of the fine weather till the collector retired to the next carriage. We shall alight when the spirit moves us, said Percy. We are in a train bound for a long journey, Hugh answered, for a restaurant car is attached to it. So much the better, said Percy. I hope the luncheon is a good one, for I’m sharp-set, aren’t you? Hugh admitted that he could eat, and after luncheon Percy proposed that they should jump out at the next stop, and Hugh, who was hardening to the adventure, swore that if the next town was without a ruin or a picture gallery they would hop into another train and leave it — When we are tired of it, Percy interjected. We are in search of adventures, and it is said that whoever seeks adventures finds them; and if nothing comes our way, we shall know at least that the man who invented the maxim was a liar.
IV
The town that they found themselves in had all the appearance of being fully organised with trams and hotels and large shops. It had sprung up in the middle of a plain during the last fifty years, and was by many degrees uglier than London; such was the belief of the young travellers, who left it next morning, their budget of information regarding English towns enlarged. But the train that took them away was a slow one, and leaving it they lounged about a platform at which few express trains stopped, till Percy called Hugh’s attention to a train advertising a strange name. An almost impossible bourne, he cried in his spleen. I don’t believe that any such place exists in fact. I believe that Mow Cop exists only in the railway company’s imagination. Let’s jump in, and if we don’t arrive we can bring an action against the company. Two hours later the guard cried: All change here for Mow Cop, and after a moment’s consultation Hugh and Percy agreed that travelling by train had become so monotonous that they would do better to start across country on foot, trudging from inn to inn, their knapsacks on their back, for only in this way would they escape from the rut of civilization, which they took pleasure in defining as members of Parliament, professors of art and literature, and — Schoolmasters! cried Percy, forgetful that his father was one, till Hugh’s solemn face reminded him of his mistake, which he strove to put right by including parsons of the Church of England in his list of the useless classes. The dissidents pay their own ministers as we do, Hugh said, and Percy interposed that Catholicism was a State religion on the Continent, a remark that called into question the temporal power of the Pope, which Hugh said the present Pope had no power to resign. I suppose you’re right, Percy answered, but however that may be, the beauty of the morning makes it almost a voluptuousness to live, and Hugh, anxious to show that Percy’s thought was common to him, answered that it was by leaving the rut of civilization that he could regain his youth. You have not lost yours, Percy, he said, an avowal trembling on his lips, but he did not like to
make any definite charge against his mother, nor to ask Percy if he did not feel that Stanislaus College and his father would in the end rob him too of his youth. The fairest thing we have and the briefest, he said, finding it not reprehensible to say as much, so long as he did not draw conclusions; and though he thought the words: To live on such a day was almost a voluptuousness, sounded odd on the lips of a boy dedicated to religion, he refrained from questioning Percy, and the beauty of the morning absorbed him without stint till returning to the thought of their escape from civilization, he asked Percy if he did not feel that there were two classes and only two: those who work in the fields and draw their substance from the earth which God has given them to till, and those who teach men to raise their thoughts above the earth to heaven: We being neither all spirit, nor all body. In answer to him Percy said that he would like to add that he could barely separate the artist from the priest, for art was a religion, and it, too, raised men’s thoughts from the earth, that is to say, from material interests and desires, from the merely natural cravings of the flesh.
And whilst Hugh considered the introduction of the artist into the scheme of life as formulated by him, he remarked, on turning to Percy with some new thought, or what seemed to him one, that Percy had already forgotten both artist and priest. For the loveliness of the world is enough for him, he said to himself, and envying Percy his detachment from moral beliefs, he sought forgetfulness of his own in the beauty of the woods and fields and the high loitering clouds. And for a while he admired the spectacle of the day without being able to feel it was enough, whereas to Percy the afternoon was a thing in itself, a discovery that awoke a grief in his heart or a sad tenderness; and looking backward for the cause of this division, he began to attribute it to early circumstance, to his lonely life with his mother in Wotton Hall, or was he more susceptible to the Virgilian sense of the tears that are in things than Percy, more Pagan than Percy, who was going to be a priest? As the miles went by the wonderment of the young travellers increased at the emptiness of the fields, with no more than a horse grazing by the hedgerow in this field, and in the next a few cattle, but nowhere a yoke of oxen making with trailing gait for the headland. Percy regretted the oxen on the ground that their absence robbed husbandry of a sign of its antique lineage. If my vacation were longer, we might have gone to France, he said, and thick in the new desire the walking tour they were now engaged on began to seem but a prelude of some greater tour that they would undertake through the southern provinces of France, from Avignon southward, through the great Roman country, stopping at all the Roman towns, Orange, Carcasonne, and Arles. There was no reason why it should not be undertaken after Percy’s ordination, or before it next year. My holidays in the summer are two months, Percy said, and my father is anxious that I should have opportunities of practising drawing.
Whereupon was projected an illustrated account of the forthcoming summer tour in France, amid Hugh’s misgivings that no drawing he might do would bear comparison, even for the moment, with Percy’s slightest casual jottings in his notebook — any one of those delightful remembrances of a vagrant or a ruin, of the shape of a river as it wheeled round a field shadowed by willow trees.
The lads saw the world with different eyes; to Hugh the fields were full of beauty, it is true, but empty and silent, whereas to Percy the life of the hedgerows was always under his eyes — the field flowers not yet over, and these he knew by their leaves and petals; and he had eyes for the hedgehog in the brambles and ears for the cry of the rabbit pursued by a stoat. He would call Hugh to see the kestrel high in the air at poise, watching, he said, for a field-mouse. There, he drops, he has got him! Nor were his interests confined to beast-kind and bird-kind; he loved his fellows and engaged them in talk, getting a whole life’s history from the old man of eighty who had walked every morning from village to village for more than seventy years, and thought it as likely as not that he would do so till he was over the hundred. Percy’s drawing of the old fellow did not require a sitting; it was done after bidding him good-bye. Soon after they met with a man who had partridges to sell, and of these they were glad to buy three, for their last dinner was not a pleasant remembrance. These will make a nice dinner for us, said Percy, turning to the man who had sold them the birds. They will indeed; finer birds I have never seen, he answered, ruffling their feathers, and asking Hugh to feel the breasts. Plumper than any dairymaid’s, he added with a chuckle, annoying Hugh, who mentioned to Percy when the man had departed that he believed him to be a poacher, and that they shouldn’t have bought the birds from him. You see how anxious he was to get rid of them. Had he come by them honestly, he wouldn’t have sold them to us for a shilling apiece. Well, Percy answered, we have got them now, and let us hope the landlady — How far away did he say the village was? About two miles, Hugh replied, and they fared on through a rough country, covered with short herbage, a dark green country, almost treeless, with long, low hills in the near distance, the dusty road continually ascending and descending, till walking became monotonous and they too weary to admire the patches of vivid green around the steads wherever there were a few trees, a warrant that there had been rain lately. At last a grove showed against the sky, and Hugh said: — He told us to look out for a grove, saying that we should find the village behind it. And they found the inn, not at all as the poacher had described it, but a mere public house, where they judged they would find little but drink, and to be consumed on the premises at that. We were lucky to have fallen in with the man with partridges, Percy said, to which Hugh answered: We shall be luckier still if we are not asked where we got them. You see, I am a landlord, and buying birds that have been poached — There was no time for him to finish his sentence, for they were at the inn door; and it was pleasing to find that there was a parlour to be let, and a maid-of-all-work, who carried their bags upstairs to the first floor, inviting them to follow her. Any of these rooms you can have, she said, and having chosen the two that seemed the cleanest, they returned to their parlour, surprised that the interior of the house should be better than the exterior. It’s generally the other way round, said Hugh, and the young travellers threw themselves into two armchairs to wait for the coming of their dinner.
But after ten minutes’ rest, Percy detected the smell of a bar, and the bar of a wayside inn he could not resist, the talk of hinds and vagrants always supplying him with memories literary and pictorial. So tracing the smell of beer down a long passage, he came upon the bar in a dark corner, and calling for a glass of ale that would save him from appearing to be an eavesdropper, he gave ear to the local idiom, relishing each turn of phrase, till the sound of voices further away beguiled him from the bar down another stretch of twisting passage leading to the kitchen, a low-ceilinged room with a fire at the end of it, and a table set cross-wise at which several men and women sat eating their supper. A poorer class of wayfarers than ourselves, Percy said to Hugh, who had joined him; kitchen and dormitory in one, he whispered, indicating with a nod the beds that he had already discovered in the corner. There’s a smell of the sea in this kitchen, he added aloud, or is it drains? Cockles! said the woman next to him, a round-faced, black-haired woman, splashed with mud. The finest in Wales, she continued, and I might say in England, for there’s no such cockles picked as on these Welsh shores. Now let me show you what I have in my basket. These are samples, but I can sell you the samples. And do you do well at cockle picking? Percy asked. Fairly well, sir, round about seven-and-six a day; but not a word of that, for I get seven-and-six a week parish relief, and if it were known I might get prisoned. But you are gentlemen, or not far away from gentlemen; I can tell that by your clothes, and discovering her basket of samples, she began to extol the quality of her cockles, gathered by herself, she said, wading up to her knees; but not satisfied with her words, she hoisted her petticoats, showing a pair of coarse calves, and feet thrust into broken boots, and so that she might continue her patter, Percy bought a pint of cockles from her. And the other gentleman —
he’ll want a pint, too? A pint will be nothing between you. Hugh consented to be a purchaser, and whilst she was measuring out the second pint, Percy asked her if she had come from the sea that day, to which she answered that she came yesterday, and had slept in the bed yonder. And the others, said Percy, whom I see? Well, they slept too. But there are but two beds. The sociable ones, she explained, sleep together. And the unsociable ones? he asked. Oh, they sleep in the chimney corners, like old Ellen there. She won’t come into bed with us. She’s asleep now. And through the drifting smoke from the range they caught sight of a thin, middle-aged woman in an old green cloak that barely covered her. We are glad not to have her sleep with us, said the cockle-seller, for she keeps us awake with her dreams. Percy was eager to learn more about the kitchen folk — we are only the parlour folk, he said to Hugh. Now, are you, sir? said the cockle-seller, overhearing him, and what line of business are you in? But before he could answer her the landlady came, making her way with difficulty through her children and guests. You won’t mind waiting for your dinner a little longer, sirs, for old Ellen, who can pluck a fowl in half the time of anybody else in the parish, is asleep. You see, she’s tired, poor thing, for thinking of her son she lost in the war. So if you don’t mind waiting a few minutes more, my daughter will clean the birds, though she isn’t handy at the job.
At that moment a great burr of voices came down the passage from the bar, beery breaths and belchings, and drinking and shouting and telling of a great capture of poachers they had made that afternoon, a rout of gamekeepers and hirelings from some great estate in the neighbourhood came through the doorway, saying how they had gotten three to the police station and that with the evidence they had against them none of the three would get less than three months hard. Hugh and Percy learnt that the poachers had escaped the keepers till now, their dodge being gamecocks, so said a spare man with a red beard and small, thin grey eyes. They comes into the woods with a gamecock with steel spurs fixed over the natural, and to get the cock to crow they crows themselves; they’ve got the pheasant’s crow to the pitch, and down comes a pheasant and ’e gets a spur through ’is ‘ead in the first bout. This time the cock wants no sham crow to set hisself off; ’e crows ’is battle crow and down comes another pheasant, and ’e is served the same way as the last. Not the sound of a gun in the woods, and ’ow is a man to tell that the cock-crowing isn’t in the vale. Why, nobody can tell. There’s no more daring poacher than the Welshman; ‘e’s out with ’is cock every moonlight night. A wily lot, but this time we was the wiliest. Hullo! Why, what’s this? Three partridges! And off our fields, I’ll be bound. Now, ‘oo’s been selling partridges ’ere? The two young gentlemen sitting in front of you, said the landlady, brought the birds to me to be cooked, and you can see for yourself that they are not poachers. We didn’t say they was poachers, answered the head gamekeeper, a burly, redfaced man in a buff coat, but I’d like to hear how they come by the birds. Before I answer that question, said Percy, will you tell me who you are? We are Sir Charles’s keepers, and all the men you see about are under-keepers and men in his employ. Is that good enough for you? One more question, said Percy. By what right do you put these questions to me? By the right — well, we’ll talk about the right, said the man (whose mind was already a bit dim with the drink he had taken), at the police station. Come along with me, both of you. My guests are not taken in my house! cried the landlady. These gentlemen have come from London —
