CHAPTER XX
THROUGH ENGLISH LANES
The early summer in England, especially in Surrey, is very beautiful, and as the work was light we had many opportunities to walk through the lovely country roads. But even prettier than the highways were the lanes that led off from them and went winding, with their hedges, through copse and field, and quaint little red-brick villages, each with its century-old, ivy-covered church that had come down from the good old Catholic days. In some of them a statue of some saint still stood, and in many were ancient holy-water stoops and baptismal fonts.
Often gigantic chestnut or oak trees, grouped near a quaint old gate, told us of the entrance to some baronial estate or castle; but nearly always our only view of the estate was a piece of road with very carefully trimmed box-hedge or a great blazing hedge-row of rhododendrons, and a small white board, attached to a gate-post or tree, which informed the passing wayfarer that there was “No Thoroughfare.”
It was very pleasant to steal away from the camp and the sounds of shouted orders, and practicing military bands and bugle notes, to the quiet country where the birds sang blithely and the strange notes of the cuckoo’s solitary call from some distant tarn or wood came sweetly to the ears; one forgot, for the moment, the thought of war and all associated with it.
I remember one afternoon I had taken a walk with Father Hingston and Father Crochetiere down a shady lane that wound, for the most part, through a high woodland, when we came suddenly to a small village of seven or eight houses. To our right was a long box-hedged foot-path, winding through a field or two till it was swallowed up in a grove of tall, full-leafed beech and oak trees that stood presumably before a rich country seat. But we did not take the foot-path to the right. Instead, the priests,—both had been here before,—turned to the left and presently we had passed through a little gate into a very small but lovely rose garden. A tiny path, with a tiny boxwood hedge not more than a foot high, led from the gate to the door of an old-fashioned white house. Just before the door was built a latticed portico, over which climbing roses grew. We were admitted by an elderly housekeeper and were asked to go upstairs.
There we found a priest whose age might have been forty-five and whose hair was just beginning to turn grey about the temples. He was about medium height, rather slight, with an ascetic face. He was sitting in a low room which was very bare save for a table on which were some morning papers. Across the hall was a room in which was a great old-fashioned fire-place with an ingle-nook. The priest’s name was Father McCarty, but he spoke with a decidedly English accent. He was a member of a religious community known as the Salesian Fathers. Knowing that he had such a very small parish, I asked him if he found the time heavy on his hands. He replied that he did not; and that although he had only three or four families in all, including the rich household of Capt. Rusbrook, whose large estate we had passed on entering the village, he was quite busy, as he was writing the life of the founder of his order, Don Bosco; he also from time to time helped the chaplains at Witley Camp.