A RETROSPECT AND A PROPHECY
Hedges of England, peppered with sloes; hedges of England, rows and rows of thorn and brier raying out from the fire where London burns with its steaming lights, throwing a glare on the sky o' nights. Hedges of England, road after road, lane after lane, and on again to the sea at the North, to the sea at the East, blackberry hedges, and man and beast plod and trot and gallop between hedges of England, clipped and clean; beech, and laurel, and hornbeam, and yew, wheels whirl under, and circle through, tunnels of green to the sea at the South; wind-blown hedges to mark the mouth of Thames or Humber, the Western rim. Star-point hedges, smooth and trim.
Star-point indeed, with all His Majesty's mails agog every night for the provinces. Twenty-seven fine crimson coaches drawn up in double file in Lombard Street. Great gold-starred coaches, blazing with royal insignia, waiting in line at the Post-Office. Eight of a Summer's evening, and the sun only just gone down. "Lincoln," "Winchester," "Portsmouth," shouted from the Post-Office steps; and the Portsmouth chestnuts come up to the collar with a jolt, and stop again, dancing, as the bags are hoisted up. "Gloucester," "Oxford," "Bristol," "York," "Norwich." Rein in those bays of the Norwich team, they shy badly at the fan-gleam of the lamp over the Post-Office door. "All in. No more." The stones of St. Martin's-le-Grand sparkle under the slap of iron shoes. Off you go, bays, and the greys of the Dover mail start forward, twitching, hitching, champing, stamping, their little feet pat the ground in patterns and their bits fleck foam. "Whoa! Steady!" with a rush they are gone. But Glasgow is ready with a team of piebalds and sorrels, driven chess-board fashion. Bang down, lids of mail-boxes—thunder-lids, making the horses start. They part and pull, push each other sideways, sprawl on the slippery pavement, and gather wave-like and crashing to a leap. Spicey tits those! Tootle-too! A nice calculation for the gate, not a minute to spare, with the wheelers well up in the bit and the leaders carrying bar. Forty-two hours to Scotland, and we have a coachman who keeps his horses like clock-work. Whips flick, buckles click, and wheels turn faster and faster till the spokes blur. "Sound your horn, Walter." Make it echo back and forth from the fronts of houses. Good-night, London, we are carrying the mails to the North. Big, burning light which is London, we dip over Highgate hill and leave you. The air is steady, the night is bright, the roads are firm. The wheels hum like a gigantic spinning-jenny. Up North, where the hedges bloom with roses. Through Whetstone Gate to Alconbury Hill. Stop at the Wheatsheaf one minute for the change. They always have an eye open here, it takes thirty seconds to drink a pot of beer, even the post-boys sleep in their spurs. The wheels purr over the gravel. "Give the off-hand leader a cut on the cheek." Whip! Whew! This is the first night of three. Three nights to Glasgow; hedges—hedges—shoot and flow. Eleven miles an hour, and the hedges are showered with glow-worms. The hedges and the glow-worms are very still, but we make a prodigious clatter. What does it matter? It is good for these yokels to be waked up. Tootle-toot! The diamond-paned lattice of a cottage flies open. Post-office here. Throw them on their haunches. Bag up—bag down—and the village has grown indistinct behind. The old moon is racing us, she slices through trees like a knife through cheese. Distant clocks strike midnight. The coach rocks—this is a galloping stage. We have a roan near-wheel and a grey off-wheel and our leaders are chestnuts, "quick as light, clever as cats."
The sickle-flame of our lamps cuts past sequences of trees and well-plashed quickset hedges—hedges of England, long shafts of the nimbus of London. Hurdles here and there. Park palings. Reflections in windows. On—on—through the night to the North. Over stretched roads, with a soft, continuous motion like slipping water. Nights and days unwinding down long roads.
In the green dawn, spires and bell-towers start up and stare at us. Hoary old woods nod and beckon. A castle turret glitters through trees. There is a perfume of wild-rose and honey-bine, twining in the hedges—Northerly hedges, sliding away behind us. The pole-chains tinkle tunes and play a saraband with sheep-bells beyond the hedges. Wedges of fields—square, flat, slatted green with corn, purple with cabbages. The stable clocks of Gayhurst and Tyringham chime from either side of the road. The Ouse twinkles blue among smooth meadows. Go! Go! News of the World! Perhaps a victory! the "Nile" or "Salamanca"! Perhaps a proclamation, or a fall in the rate of consols. Whatever it is, the hedges of England hear it first. Hear it, and flick and flutter their leaves, and catch the dust of it on their shining backs. Bear it over the dumpling hills and the hump-backed bridges. Start it down the rivers: Eden, Eshe, Sark, Milk, Driff, and Clyde. Shout it to the sculptured corbels of old churches. Lurch round corners with it, and stop with a snap before the claret-coloured brick front of the Bell at Derby, and call it to the ostler as he runs out with fresh horses. The twenty Corinthian columns of pale primrose alabaster at Keddleston Hall tremble with its importance. Even the runaway couples bound for Gretna Green cheer and wave. Laurels, and ribbons, and a red flag on our roof. "Wellesley forever!"
Dust dims the hedges. A light travelling chariot running sixteen miles an hour with four blood mares doing their bravest. Whip, bound, and cut again. Loose rein, quick spur. He stands up in the chariot and shakes a bag full of broad guineas, you can hear them—clinking, chinking—even above the roar of wheels. "Go it! Go it! We are getting away from them. Fifty guineas to each of you if we get there in time." Quietly wait, grey hedges, it will all happen again: quick whip, spur, strain. Two purple-faced gentlemen in another chariot, black geldings smoking hot, blood and froth flipped over the hedges. They hail the coach: "How far ahead? Can we catch them?" "Ten minutes gone by. Not more." The post-boys wale their lunging horses. Rattle, reel, and plunge.
But the runaways have Jack Ainslee from the Bush, Carlisle. He rides in a yellow jacket, and he knows every by-lane and wood between here and the border. In an hour he will have them at Gretna, and to-night the lady will write to her family at Doncaster, and the down mail will carry the letter, with tenpence halfpenny to pay for news that nobody wishes to hear.
"Buy a pottle of plums, Good Sir." "Cherries, fine, ripe cherries O." Get your plums and cherries, and hurry into the White Horse Cellar for a last rum and milk. You are a poet, bound to Dover over Westminster Bridge. Ah, well, all the same. You are an Essex farmer, grown fat by selling your peas at Covent Garden Market at four guineas a pint. Certainly; as you please. You are a prebend of Exeter or Wells, timing your journey to the Cathedral Close. If you choose. You are a Corinthian Buck going down to Brighton by the Age which runs "with a fury." Mercury on a box seat.
Get up, beavers and top-boots. Shoot the last parcel in. Now—"Let 'em go. I have 'em." That was a jerk, but the coachman lets fly his whip and quirks his off-wheeler on the thigh. Out and under the archway of the coach-yard, with the guard playing "Sally in our Alley" on his key-bugle. White with sun, the streets of London. Cloud-shadows run ahead of us along the streets. Morning. Summer. England. "Have a light, Sir? Tobacco tastes well in this fresh air."
Hedges of England, how many wheels spatter you in a day? How many coaches roll between you on their star-point way? What rainbow colours slide past you with the fluency of water? Crimson mails rumble and glide the night through, but the Cambridge Telegraph is a brilliant blue. The Bull and Mouth coaches are buttercup yellow, those of the Bull are painted red, while the Bell and Crown sports a dark maroon with light red wheels. They whirl by in a flurry of dust and colours. Soon all this will drop asunder like the broken glass of a kaleidoscope. Hedges, you will see other pictures. New colours will flow beside you. New shapes will intersect you. Tut! Tut! Have you not hawthorn blossoms and the hips and haws of roses?
Trundle between your sharp-shorn hedges, old Tally-hoes, and Comets, and Regents. Stop at the George, and turn with a flourish into the yard, where a strapper is washing a mud-splashed chaise, and the horsekeeper is putting a "point" on that best whip of yours. "Coach stops here half an hour, Gentlemen: dinner quite ready." A long oak corridor. Then a burst of sunshine through leaded windows, spangling a floor, iris-tinting rounds of beef, and flaked veal pies, and rose-marbled hams, and great succulent cheeses. Wine-glasses take it and break it, and it quivers away over the table-cloth in faint rainbows; or, straight and sudden, stamps a startling silver whorl on the polished side of a teapot of hot bohea. A tortoise-shell cat naps between red geraniums, and myrtle sprigs tap the stuccoed wall, gently blowing to and fro.
Ah, hedges of England, have you led to this? Do you always conduct to galleried inns, snug bars, beds hung with flowered chintz, sheets smelling of lavender?
What of the target practice off Spithead? What of the rocking seventy-fours, flocking like gulls about the harbour entrances? Hedges of England, can they root you in the sea?
Your leaves rustle to the quick breeze of wheels incessantly turning. This island might be a treadmill kept floating right side up by galloping hoofs.
Gabled roofs of Green Dragons, and Catherine Wheels, and Crowns, ivy-covered walls, cool cellars holding bins and bins of old port, and claret, and burgundy. You cannot hear the din of passing chaises, underground, there is only the sound of beer running into a jug as the landlord turns the spiggot of a barrel. Green sponge of England, your heart is red with wine. "Fine spirits and brandies." Ha! Ha! Good old England, drinking, blinking, dreading new ideas. Queer, bluff, burly England. You have Nelsons, and Wellesleys, and Tom Cribbs, but you have also Wordsworths and Romneys, and (a whisper in your ear) Arkwrights and Stevensons. "Time's up, Gentlemen; take your places, please!" The horn rings out, the bars rattle, the horses sidle and paw and swing; swish—clip—with the long whip, and away to the hedges again. The high, bordering hedges, leading to Salisbury, and Bath, and Exeter.
Christmas weather with a hard frost. Hips and haws sparkle in the hedges, garnets and carnelians scattered on green baize. The edges of the coachman's hat are notched with icicles. The horses slip on the frozen roads. Loads are heavy at this time of year, with rabbits and pheasants tied under the coach, but it is all hearty Christmas cheer, rushing between the hedges to get there in time for the plum-pudding. Old England forever! And coach-horns, and waits, and Cathedral organs hail the Star of Bethlehem.
But our star, our London, gutters with fog. The Thames rolls like smoke under charcoal. The dome of St. Paul's is gone, so is the spire of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, only the fires of torches are brisk and tossing. Tossing torches; tossing heads of horses. Eight mails following each other out of London by torchlight. Scarcely can we see the red flare of the horn lantern in the hand of the ostler at the Peacock, but his voice blocks squarely into the fog: "York Highflyer," "Leeds Union," "Stamford Regent." Coach lamps stream and stare, and key-bugles play fugues with each other; "Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?" and "The Flaxen Headed Plough-boy" canon and catch as the mails take the road. There will be no "springing" the horses over the "hospital ground" on a day like this; we cannot make more than three miles an hour in such a fog. Hedges of England, you are only ledges from which water drips back to the sea. The rain is so heavy the coach sways. There will be floods farther on. Floods over the river Mole, with apples, and trees, and hurdles floating. Have a care with your leaders there, they have lost the road, and the wheelers have toppled into a ditch of swirling, curling water. The wheelers flounder and squeal and drown, but the coach is hung up on the stump of a willow-tree, and the passengers have only a broken leg or two among them.
Double thong your team, Coachman, that creaking gibbet on the top of Hindhead is an awesome sight at the fall of night, with the wind roaring and squeaking over the heather. The murder, they say, was done at this spot. Give it to them on the flank, good and hot. "Lord, I wish I had a nip of cherry-brandy." "What was that; down in the bowl!" "Drop my arm, Damn you! or you will roll the coach over!" Teeth chatter, bony castanets—click—click—to a ghastly tune, click—click—on the gallows-tree, where it blows so windily. Blows the caged bones all about, one or two of them have dropped out. The up coach will see them lying on the ground like snow-flakes to-morrow. But we shall be floundering in a drift, and shifting the mailbags to one of the horses so that the guard can carry them on.
Hedges of England, smothered in snow. Hedges of England, row after row, flat and obliterate down to the sea; but the chains are choked on the gallows-tree. Round about England the toothed waves snarl, gnarling her cliffs of chalk and marl. Crabbed England, consuming beef and pudding, and pouring down magnums of port, to cheat the elements. Go it, England, you will beat Bonaparte yet. What have you to do with ideas! You have Bishops, and Squires, and Manor-houses, and—rum.
London shakes with bells. Loud, bright bells clashing over roofs and steeples, exploding in the sunlight with the brilliance of rockets. Every clock-tower drips a tune. The people are merry-making, for this is the King's Birthday and the mails parade this afternoon.
"Messrs. Vidler and Parrat request the pleasure of Mr. Chaplin's company on Thursday the twenty-eighth of May, to a cold collation at three o'clock and to see the Procession of the Mails."
What a magnificent spectacle! A coil of coaches progressing round and round Lincoln's Inn Fields. Sun-mottled harness, gold and scarlet guards, horns throwing off sprays of light and music. Liverpool, Manchester—blacks and greys; Bristol, Devonport—satin bays; Holyhead—chestnuts; Halifax—roans, blue-specked, rose-specked ... On their box-seat thrones sit the mighty coachmen, twisting their horses this way and that with a turn of the wrist. These are the spokes of a wheeling sun, these are the rays of London's aureole. This is her star-fire, reduced by a prism to separate sparks. Cheer, good people! Chuck up your hats, and buy violets to pin in your coats. You shall see it all to-night, when the King's arms shine in lamps from every house-front, and the mails, done parading, crack their whips and depart. England forever! Hurrah!
England forever—going to the Prize Fight on Copthorne Common. England forever, with a blue coat and scarlet lining hanging over the back of the tilbury. England driving a gig and one horse; England set up with a curricle and two. England in donkey-carts and coaches. England swearing, pushing, drinking, happy, off to see the "Game Chicken" punch the "Nonpareil's" face to a black-and-blue jelly. Good old England, drunk as a lord, cursing the turn-pike men. Your hedges will be a nest of broken bottles before night, and clouds of dust will quench the perfume of your flowers. I bet you three bulls to a tanner you can't smell a rose for a week.
They've got the soldiers out farther along. "Damn the soldiers! Drive through them, Watson." A fine, manly business; are we slaves? "Britons never—never—" Waves lap the shores of England, waves like watchdogs growling; and long hedges bind her like a bundle. Sit safe, England, trussed and knotted; while your strings hold, all will be well.
But in the distance there is a puff of steam. Just a puff, but it will do. Post-boys, coachmen, guards, chaises, melt like meadow rime before the sun.
You spun your webs over England, hedge to hedge. You kept England bound together by your spinning wheels. But it is gone. They have driven a wedge of iron into your heart. They have dried up the sea, and made pathways in the swimming air. They have tapped the barrels in your cellars and your throats are parched and bleeding. But still the hedges blow for the Spring, and dusty soldiers smell your roses as they tramp to Aldershot or Dorchester.
England forever! Star-pointed and shining. Flinging her hedges out and asunder to embrace the world.