AFTER I had been at Bridgely Level four or five days Barfleur suggested that I visit Marlowe, which was quite near by on the Thames, a place which he said fairly represented the typical small country town of the old school.
“You will see there something which is not so generally common now in England as it was—a type of life which is changing greatly, I think; and perhaps you had better see that now before you see much more.”
I promised to go and Barfleur gave positive instructions as to how this was to be achieved. I was to say to the maid when I would be ready. Promptly at that hour one of the boys was to come and escort me to some point in the road where I could see Marlowe. From there I was to be allowed to proceed alone.
“You won’t want to be bothered with any company, so just send him back. You’ll find it very interesting.”
The afternoon had faired up so beautifully that I decided I must go out of doors. I was sick of writing. I gave notice to Dora, the maid, at luncheon that I should want one of the boys for a guide at three o’clock, and at ten minutes of the hour Percy entered my room with the air of a soldier.
“When shall you be ready for your walk to Marlowe?” he asked, in his stately tone.
“In just ten minutes now.”
“And have you any objection to our walking to Marlowe with you?”
“Yes. My brother Charles and myself.”
“None whatever. Your father doesn’t mind, does he?”
“No, he doesn’t mind.”
So at three Percy and Charles appeared at the window. Their faces were eager with anticipation and I went at once to get my cap and coat. We struck out along a road between green grass, and although it was December you would have thought it April or May. The atmosphere was warm and tinged with the faintest, most delicate haze. A lovely green moss, very fine, like powdered salt, was visible on the trunks of the trees. Crows were in the air, and robins—an English robin is a solemn-looking bird—on the lawns. I heaved a breath of delight, for after days of rain and chill this burst of golden light was most delicious.
On the way, as I was looking about, I was being called upon to answer questions such as: “Are there any trees like these in Amáyreeka? Do you have such fine weather in Amáyreeka? Are the roads as good as this in Amáyreeka?”
“Quite as good as this,” I replied, referring to the one on which we were walking, for it was a little muddy.
The way lay through a patch of nearly leafless trees, the ground strewn thick with leaves, and the sun breaking in a golden shower through the branches. I laughed for joy at being alive—the hour was so fine. Presently, after going down a bank so steep that it was impossible not to run if you attempted to walk fast, we came to an open field, the west border of which was protected by a line of willows skirting the banks of a flume which gave into the Thames somewhere. Below the small bridge over which we passed was fastened a small punt, that quaint little boat so common on the Thames. Beyond that was a very wide field, fully twenty acres square, with a yellow path running diagonally across it and at the end of this path was Marlowe.
In the meantime my young friends insisted on discussing the possibility of war between America and England and I was kept busy assuring them that England would not be able to do anything at all with the United States. The United States was so vast, I said. It was full of such smart people. While England was attempting to do something with its giant navy, we should be buying or building wonderful ships and inventing marvelous machines for destroying the enemy. It was useless to plead with me as they did that England had a great army and we none. “We can get one,” I insisted, “oh, a much vaster army than you could.”
“And then Can-ee-dah,” insisted Percy wisely, “while you would be building your navy or drilling your army, we should be attacking you through Can-ee-dah.”
“But Canada doesn’t like you,” I replied. “And besides it only has six million people.”
He insisted that Canada was a great source and hope and I finally said: “Now, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You want England to whip the United States, don’t you?”
“Yes,” echoed both Percy and Charles heartily.
“Very well, then for peace and quiet’s sake, I’ll agree that it can. England can whip the United States both on sea and land. Now is that satisfactory?”
“Yes,” they echoed, unanimously.
“Very well then,” I laughed. “It is agreed that the United States is badly beaten everywhere and always by England. Isn’t Marlowe lovely?” and fixed my interested gaze on the approaching village.
In the first glimpse of Marlowe some of the most joyous memories of my childhood came back. I don’t know whether you as a boy or a girl loved to look in your first reader at pictures of quaint little towns with birds flying above belfries and gabled roofs standing free in some clear, presumably golden air, but I did. And here, across this green field lay a little town, the sweetness of which was most appealing. The most prominent things were an arched bridge and a church, with a square gray belfry, set in a green, tree-grown church-yard. I could see the smooth surface of the Thames running beside it, and as I live, a flock of birds in the sky.
“Are those rooks?” I asked of Percy, hoping for poetry’s sake that they were.
“Rooks or crows,” he replied, “I don’t know which.”
“Are there rooks in Amáyreeka?”
“No—there are no rooks.”
“Ah, that’s something.”
I walked briskly because I wanted to reach this pretty scene while the sun was still high, and in five minutes or so we were crossing the bridge. I was intensely interested in the low gray stone houses, with here and there a walk in front with a gate, and a very pretty churchyard lying by the water, and the sylvan loveliness of the Thames itself.
On the bridge I stopped and looked at the water. It was as smooth as glass and tinged with the mellow light which the sun casts when it is low in the west. There were some small boats anchored at a gate which gave into some steps leading up to an inn—The Compleat Angler. On the other side, back of the church was another inn—the Lion and Elk or something like that—and below the bridge, more towards the west, an old man in a punt, fishing. There was a very old man such as I have often seen pictured in Punch and the Sketch, sitting near the support of the bridge, a short black pipe between his very wrinkled lips. He was clad in thick greenish-brown clothes and heavy shoes and a low flat hat some curate may have discarded. His eyes, which he turned up at me as I passed, were small and shrewd, set in a withered, wrinkled skin, and his hands were a collection of dried lines, like wrinkled leather.
“There,” I thought, “is a type quite expressive of all England in its rural form. Pictures of England have been teaching me that all my life.”
I went into the church, which was located on the site of one built in the thirteenth century—and on the wall near the door was a list of the resident vicars and their patrons, beginning with some long-since-forgotten soul. The monks and the abbots of the pre-Reformation period were indicated and the wars of the Reformation also. I think that bridge which I had crossed had been destroyed by Cromwell and rebuilt only sixty or seventy years before, but my memory is not good and I will not guarantee these facts.
From the church we went out into the street and found an old stock inside an iron fence, dating from some older day where they punished people after that fashion. We came to a store which was signaled by a low, small-paned window let into a solid gray wall, where were chocolates and candies and foreign-manufactured goods with labels I had never seen before. It is a strange sensation to go away from home and leave all your own familiar patent medicines and candies and newspapers and whiskies and journey to some place where they never saw or heard of them.
Here was Marlowe, and lovely as it was, I kept saying to myself, “Yes, yes, it is delicious, but how terrible it would be to live here! I couldn’t. It’s a dead world. We have passed so far beyond this.” I walked through the pretty streets as smooth and clean as though they had been brushed and between rows of low, gray, winding houses which curved in pretty lines, but for the life of me I could not help swinging between the joy of art for that which is alive and the sorrow for something that is gone and will never be, any more. Everything, everything spoke to me of an older day. These houses—all of them were lower than they need be, grayer than they need be, thicker, older, sadder. I could not think of gas or electricity being used here, although they were, or of bright broad windows, open plumbing, modern street cars, a stock of modern, up-to-date goods, which I am sure they contained. I was impressed by a grave silence which is apathetic to me as nothing else—a profound peace. “I must get out of this,” I said to myself, and yet I was almost hugging myself for joy at the same time.
I remember going into one courtyard where an inn might once have been and finding in there a furniture shop, a tin shop, a store room of some kind and a stable, all invisible from the street. Do you recall Dickens’ description of busy inn scenes? You came into this one under the chamber belonging to a house which was built over the entry way. There was no one visible inside, though a man did cross the court finally with a wheel spoke in his hand. One of the houses or shops had a little circular cupola on it, quite white and pretty and surmounted by a faded weather cock. “How lovely,” I said, “how lovely,” but I was as sad as I could be.
In the stores in the main street were always small, many-paned windows. There were no lights as yet and the rooms into which I peered and the private doors gave glimpses of things which reminded me of the poorest, most backward and desolate sections of our own country.
I saw an automobile here and there, not many, and some girls on bicycles,—not very good looking. Say what you will, you could not find an atmosphere like this in an American town, however small, unless it had already been practically abandoned. It would not contain a contented population of three or four hundred. Instead of saloons I saw “wine and spirit merchants” and also “Mrs. Jane Sawyer, licensed wine and spirit dealer.” The butcher shops were the most American things I saw, because their ruddy goods were all displayed in front with good lights behind, and the next best things were the candy stores. Dressmakers, milliners, grocers, hardware stores, wine shops, anything and everything—were apparently concealed by solid gray walls or at best revealed by small-paned windows. In the fading afternoon I walked about hunting for schools, some fine private houses, some sense of modernness—but no—it was not there. I noticed that in two directions the town came abruptly to an end, as though it had been cut off by a knife, and smooth, open, green fields began. In the distance you could see other towns standing out like the castellated walls of earlier centuries—but here was an end, sharp, definite, final.
I saw at one place—the end of one of these streets and where the country began—an old gray man in a shabby black coat bending to adjust a yoke to his shoulders to the ends of which were attached two buckets filled with water. He had been into a low, gray, one-story inn entitled, “Ye Bank of England,” before which was set a bench and also a stone hitching post. For all the world he looked like some old man in Hardy, wending his fading, reflective way homeward. I said to myself here—England is old; it is evening in England and they are tired.
I went back toward the heart of things along another street, but I found after a time it was merely taking me to another outer corner of the town. It was gray now, and I was saying to my young companions that they must be hurrying on home—that I did not intend to go back so soon. “Say I will not be home for dinner,” I told them, and they left after a time, blessed with some modern chocolate which they craved very much.
Before they left, however, we reconnoitered another street and this led me past low, one-story houses, the like of which, I insist, can rarely be duplicated in America. Do you recall the log cabin? In England it is preserved in stone, block after block of it. It originated there. The people, as I went along, seemed so thick and stolid and silent to me. They were healthy enough, I thought, but they were raw, uncouth, mirthless. There was not a suggestion of gaiety anywhere—not a single burst of song. I heard no one whistling. A man came up behind us, driving some cattle, and the oxen were quite upon me before I heard them. But there were no loud cries. He was so ultra serious. I met a man pushing a dilapidated baby carriage. He was a grinder of knives and mender of tinware and this was his method of perambulating his equipment. I met another man pushing a hand cart with some attenuated remnants of furniture in it. “What is that?” I asked. “What is he?”
“Oh, he’s somebody who’s moving. He hasn’t a van, you know.”
Moving! Here was food for pathetic reflection.
I looked into low, dark doors where humble little tin and glass-bodied lamps were beginning to flicker.
“Thank God, my life is different from this,” I said, and yet the pathos and the beauty of this town was gripping me firmly. It was as sweet as a lay out of Horace—as sad as Keats.
Before a butcher shop I saw a man trying to round up a small drove of sheep. The grayish-yellow of their round wooly backs blended with the twilight. They seemed to sense their impending doom, for they ran here and there, poking their queer thin noses along the ground or in the air and refusing to enter the low, gray entry way which gave into a cobbled yard at the back where were located the deadly shambles they feared. The farmer who was driving them wore a long black coat and he made no sound, or scarcely any.
“Sooey!” he called softly—“Ssh,” as he ran here and there—this way and that.
The butcher or his assistant came out and caught one sheep, possibly the bell-wether, by the leg and hauled him backward into the yard. Seeing this, the silly sheep, not recognizing the enforced leadership, followed after. Could there be a more convincing commentary on the probable manner in which the customs and forms of life have originated?
I walked out another long street, quite alone now in the dusk, and met a man driving an ox, also evidently to market.
There was a school in session at one place, a boys’ school—low, ancient in its exterior equipment and silent as I passed. It was out, but there was no running—no hallooing. The boys were going along chatting rather quietly in groups. I do not understand this. The American temper is more ebullient. I went into one bar—Mrs. Davidge’s—and found a low, dark room, with a very small grate fire burning and a dark little bar where were some pewter mugs, some pink-colored glasses and a small brass lamp with a reflector. Mrs. Davidge must have served me herself, an old, slightly hunched lady in a black dress and gray gingham apron. “Can this place do enough business to support her?” I asked myself. There was no one in the shop while I was there.
The charm of Marlowe to me was its extreme remoteness from the life I had been witnessing in London and elsewhere. It was so simple. I had seen a comfortable inn somewhere near the market place and this I was idly seeking, entertaining myself with reflections the while. I passed at one place a gas manufacturing plant which looked modern enough, in so far as its tank was concerned, but not otherwise, and then up one dark street under branches of large trees and between high brick walls, in a low doorway, behind which a light was shining, saw a shovel-hatted curate talking to an old woman in a shawl. All the rest was dark. At another corner I saw a thin old man, really quite reverential looking, with a peaked intelligent face, fine in its lines (like Calvin or Dante or John Knox) and long thin white hair, who was pulling a vehicle—a sort of revised baby carriage on which was, of all things, a phonograph with a high flower-like tin horn. He stopped at one corner where some children were playing in the dark and putting on a record ground out a melody which I did not consider very gay or tuneful. The children danced, but not, however, with the lightness of our American children. The people here seemed either like this old man, sad and old and peaked, with a fine intellectuality apparent, or thick and dull and red and stodgy.
When I reached the market I saw a scene which something—some book or pictures had suggested to me before. Solid women in shawls and flat, shapeless wrecks of hats, and tall shambling men in queer long coats and high boots—drovers they looked like—going to and fro. Children were playing about and laborers were going home, talking a dialect which I could not understand, except in part.
Five men came into the square and stood there under the central gas lamp, with its two arms each with a light. One of them left the others and began to sing in front of various doors. He sang and sang—“Annie Laurie,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Sally in our Alley,” in a queer nasal voice, going in and coming out again, empty-handed I fancy. Finally he came to me.
“Would you help us on our way?” he asked.
“Where are you going?” I inquired.
“We are way-faring workmen,” he replied simply, and I gave him some coppers—those large English “tuppences” that annoyed me so much. He went back to the others and they stood huddled in the square together like sheep, conferring, but finally they went off together in the dark.
At the inn adjacent I expected to find an exceptional English scene of some kind but I was more or less disappointed. It was homey but not so different from old New England life. The room was large with an open fire and a general table set with white linen and plates for a dozen guests or more. A shambling boy in clothes much too big for him came and took my order, turning up the one light and stirring the fire. I called for a paper and read it and then I sat wondering whether the food would be good or bad.
While I was waiting a second traveler arrived, a small, dapper, sandy-haired person, with shrewd, fresh, inquisitive eyes—a self-confident and yet clerkly man.
“Good evening,” he said, and I gave him the time of day. He bustled to a little writing table nearby and sat down to write, calling for a pen, paper, his slippers—I was rather puzzled by that demand—and various other things. On sight this gentleman (I suppose the English would abuse me for that word) looked anything but satisfactory. I suspected he was Scotch and that he was cheap minded and narrow. Later something about his manner and the healthy, brisk way in which, when his slippers came, he took off his shoes and put them on—quite cheerful and homelike—soothed me.
“He isn’t so bad,” I thought. “He’s probably a traveling salesman—the English type. I’d better be genial, I may learn something.”
Soon the waiter returned (arrayed by this time, remarkable to relate, in a dress suit the size of which was a piece of pure comedy in itself), and brought the stranger toast and chops and tea. The latter drew up to the other end of the table from me with quite an air of appetite and satisfaction.
“They don’t usually put us fellows in with you,” he observed, stating something the meaning of which I did not grasp for the moment. “Us traveling men usually have a separate dining- and writing-room. Our place seems to be shut up here to-night for some reason. I wouldn’t have called for my slippers here if they had the other room open.”
“Oh, that’s quite all right,” I replied, gathering some odd class distinction. “I prefer company to silence. You say you travel?”
“Yes, I’m connected with a house in London. I travel in the south of England.”
“Tell me,” I said, “is this a typical English town from the point of view of life and business, or is it the only one of its kind? It’s rather curious to me.”
“It’s one of the poorest I know, certainly the poorest I stop at. There is no life to speak of here at all. If you want to see a typical English town where there’s more life and business you want to see Canterbury or Maidenhead. No, no, you mustn’t judge England by this. I suppose you’re traveling to see things. You’re not English, I see.”
“No, I’m from America. I come from New York.”
“I had a strong notion before I came to London to go to America after I left school”—and to have heard him pronounce school alone would have settled his identity for those who know the Scotch. “Some of my friends went there, but I decided not. I thought I’d try London instead and I’m glad I did.”
“You like it?”
“Oh, yes, from a money point I do. I make perhaps fifty per cent. more than I did in Scotland but I may say, too, it costs me almost fifty per cent. more to live.” He said this with a sigh. I could see Scotch thrift sticking out all over him. An interesting little man he proved, very intelligent, very cautious, very saving. You could see early religious training and keen desire to get up in the world in his every gesture.
We fell into a most interesting conversation, to me, for knowing so little of England I was anxious to know more. Despite the littleness of my companion and his clerkly manner I found him entertaining. He wanted to know what I thought of England and I told him—as much as I could judge by a few days’ stay. He told me something of London life—its streets, sections and so on and asked a great many questions about America. He had the ability to listen intelligently which is a fine sign. He wanted to know particularly what traveling salesmen receive in America and how far their money goes. He was interested to know the difference between English and American railroads. By this time the meal had ended and we were toasting our toes before the fire. We were quite friendly.
“It’s some little distance back to my place and I think I’ll be going,” I said. “I don’t know whether I really know how to get there, but I’ll try. I understand there is no direct railroad connection between here and there. I may not be able to find my way at night as it is.”
“Well, I’ll walk with you a little way if you don’t mind,” he replied solicitously. “I have nothing else to do.”
The idea of companionship soothed me. Walking around alone and standing in the market place looking at the tramping men had given me the blues. I felt particularly lonely at moments, being away from America, for the difference in standards of taste and action, the difference in modes of thought and practice, and the difference in money and the sound of human voices was growing on me. When you have lived in one country all your life and found yourself comfortable in all its ways and notions and then suddenly find yourself out of it and trying to adjust yourself to things that are different in a hundred little ways, it is rather hard.
“That’s very nice of you. I’d like to have you,” and out we went, paying our bills and looking into a misty night. The moon was up but there was a fairly heavy fog and Marlowe looked sheeted and gray. Because I stated I had not been in any of the public houses and was interested to go, he volunteered to accompany me, though I could see that this was against his principles.
“I don’t drink myself,” he observed, “but I will go in with you if you want to. Here’s one.”
We entered and found a rather dimly lighted room,—gas with a mantle over it,—set with small tables and chairs, and a short bar in one corner. Mrs. Davidge’s bar had been short, too, only her room was dingier and small. A middle-sized Englishman, rather stout, came out of a rear door, opening from behind the bar, and asked us what we would have. My friend asked for root beer. I noticed the unescapable open fire and the array of pink and green and blue wine glasses. Also the machinery for extracting beer and ale from kegs, a most brassy and glowing sight. Our host sold cigars and there were boards about on the tables for some simple games.
This and a half-dozen other places into which we ventured gave me the true spirit of Marlowe’s common life. I recalled at once the vast difference between this and the average American small town saloon. In the latter (Heaven preserve us from it) the trade might be greater or it might not, but the room would be larger, the bar larger, the flies, dirt, odor, abominable. I hope I am not traducing a worthy class, but the American saloon keeper of small town proclivities has always had a kind of horror for me. The implements of his trade have always been so scummy and ill-kept. The American place would be apt to be gayer, rougher, noisier. I am thinking of places in towns of the same size. Our host was no more like an American barkeeper than a bee is like a hornet. He was a peaceful-looking man, homely, family marked, decidedly dull. Your American country barkeeper is another sort, more intelligent, perhaps, but less civil, less sensible and reliable looking. The two places were miles apart in quality and feeling. Here in Marlowe and elsewhere in England, wherever I had occasion to inspect them, the public houses of the small-town type were a great improvement over the American variety. They were clean and homelike and cheerful. The array of brass, the fire, the small tables for games, all pleased me. I took it to be a place more used as a country club or meeting-house than as in our case a grimy, orgiastic resort. If there were drunken men or women in any of the “pubs,” this night I did not see them. My Scotch friend assured me that he believed them, ordinarily, to be fairly respectable.
Not knowing my way through the woods adjacent and having spent much time in this way I finally decided to take a train or conveyance of some kind. But there was no train to be had for some time to come. The trains there were did not run my way and no “fly” would convey me, as one bar mistress informed me, because there was a hard hill to climb and the rain which had fallen during the day had made the roads bad. I began to meditate returning to the inn. Finally the lady observed, “I can tell you how to get there, if you want to walk. It’s not more than an hour and it is a perfectly good road all the way.” She drew with her finger an outline of the twists of the road. “If you’re not afraid of a few screech owls, there’s nothing to harm you. You go to the bridge up here, cross it and take the first road to your left. When you come to a culvert about a mile out you will find three roads dividing there. One goes down the hollow to somewhere, I forgot the name; one goes up the hill to Bridgely Level, it’s a bridle path; and one goes to the right. It’s a smooth, even road—that’s the one you want.”
It was a lovely night. The moon overhead was clear and bright and the fog gave the fields a white eerie look. As we walked, my friend regaled me with what he said was a peculiar custom among English traveling men. At all English inns there is what is known as the traveling men’s club. The man who has been present at any inn on any stated occasion for the greatest number of hours or days is ipso facto, president of this club. The traveling man who has been there next longest if only for ten minutes less than the first, or more than the third, is vice president. Every inn serves what is known as the traveling man’s dinner at twelve o’clock or thereabouts and he who is president by virtue of the qualifications above described, is entitled to sit at the head of the table and carve and serve the roast. The vice president, if there be one, sits at the foot of the table and carves and serves the fowl. When there are two or more traveling men present, enough to provide a president and a vice president for this dinner, there is a regular order of procedure to be observed. The president arriving takes his seat first at the head of the table; the vice president then takes his place at the foot of the table. The president, when the roast beef is served, lifts the cover of the dish and says, “Mr. Vice President, we have here, I see, some roast beef.” The vice president then lifts the cover of his dish and says, “Mr. President we have here, I see, some roast goose.” “Gentlemen,” then says the president, bowing to the others present, “the dinner is for all,” and begins serving the roast. The vice president later does his duty in turn. The next day in all likelihood, the vice president or some other becomes president, and so it goes. My little Scotchman was most interested in telling me this, for it appealed to his fancy as it did to mine and I could see he relished the honor of being president in his turn.
It was while he was telling this that we saw before us three paths, the middle one and the one to the right going up through the dark woods, the one to the left merely skirting the woods and keeping out in the light.
“Let’s see, it’s the left you want, isn’t it?” he asked.
“No, it’s the right,” I replied.
“I think she said the left,” he cautioned. “Well, anyhow here’s a sign post. You lift me up and I’ll read what it says.”
It wasn’t visible from the ground.
I caught him about the legs and hoisted him aloft and he peered closely at all three signs. He was a dapper, light little man.
“You’re right,” he said.
We shook hands and wished each other luck. He struck off back along the road he had come in the fog and I mounted musingly through the woods. It was dark and delightfully odorous, the fog in the trees, struck by the moonlight, looking like moving sheeted ghosts. I went on gaily expecting to hear a screech owl but not one sounded. After perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes of walking I came out into the open road and then I found that I really did not know where Bridgely Level was after all. There was no sign.
I went from house to house in the moonlight—it was after midnight—rousing drowsy Englishmen who courteously gave me directions and facing yowling dogs who stood in the open roadway and barked. I had to push one barking gua