The Red Dragon, Compton Fereday, April 10, 1904

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_ DEAR HERBERT,--I was really too busy to write last week, but I am going to try and make up for it. This letter is going to be a diary. Expect more of it.--T. B.

April 7.--I find myself, after all, compelled to begin my walking tour alone. At the last moment Murchison has thrown me over. His father is ill, and he is compelled to spend his holidays at home. I do not altogether like to set off by myself, but it is too late to try and arrange for another companion. I had rather, however, go by myself than with some one who is not absolutely congenial. One requires on these occasions to have a companion whose horizon is the same as one's own. I daresay I could find an old friend, who is not also a colleague, to go with me, but it would mean a certain amount of talk to bring us into line. Then, too, I have had a very busy term; besides my form work, I have had a good deal of extra teaching to do with the Army Class boys. It is interesting work, for the boys are interested, not in the subjects so much, as in mastering them for examination purposes. Yet it matters little how the interest is obtained, as long as the boys believe in the usefulness of what they are doing. But the result is that I am tired out. I have lived with boys from morning to night, and my spare time has been taken up with working at my subjects. I have had hardly any exercise, and but a scanty allowance of sleep. Now I mean to have both. I shall spend my days in the open air, and I shall sleep, I hope, like a top at nights. Gradually I shall recover my power of enjoyment; for the worst of such weeks as I have been passing through is that they leave one dreary and jaded; one finds oneself in that dull mood when one cannot even realise beautiful things. I hear a thrush sing in a bush, or the sunset flames broadly behind the elms, and I say to myself, "That is very beautiful if only I could feel it to be so!" Boys are exhausting companions--they are so restless, so full-blooded, so pitilessly indifferent, so desperately interested in the narrow round of school life; and I have the sort of temperament that will efface itself to any extent, if only the people that I am concerned with will be content. I suppose it is a feeble trait, and that the best schoolmasters have a magnetic influence over boys which makes the boys interested in the master's subjects, or at least hypnotises them into an appearance of interest. I cannot do that. It is like a leaden weight upon me if I feel that a class is bored; the result is that I arrive at the same end in my own way. I have learnt a kind of sympathy with boys; I know by instinct what will interest them, or how to put a tiresome thing in an interesting way.

But I shudder to think how sick I am of it all! I want a long bath of silence and recollection and repose. I want to fill my cistern again with my own thoughts and my own dreams, instead of pumping up the muddy waters of irrigation. I don't think my colleagues are like that. I sate with half-a-dozen of them last night at supper. They were full of all they meant to do. Two of the most energetic were going off to play golf, and the chief pleasure of the place they were going to was that it was possible to get a round on Sundays; they were going to fill the evening with bridge, and one of them said with heart-felt satisfaction, "I am only going to take two books away with me--one on golf and the other on bridge--and I am going to cure some of my radical faults." I thought to myself that if he had forborne to mention the subjects of his books, one might have supposed that they would be a Thomas-a-Kempis and a Taylor's Holy Living, and then how well it would have seemed! Two more were going for a rapid tour abroad in a steamer chartered for assistant masters. That seemed to me to be almost more depressing. They were going to ancient historical places, full of grave and beautiful associations; places to go to, it seemed to me, with some single like-minded associate, places to approach with leisurely and untroubled mind, with no feeling of a programme or a time-table--and least of all in the company of busy professional people with an academical cicerone.

Still, I suppose that this is true devotion to one's profession. They will be able, they think, to discourse easily and, God help us, picturesquely about what they have seen, to intersperse a Thucydides lesson with local colour, and to describe the site of the temple of Delphi to boys beginning the Eumenides. It is very right and proper, no doubt, but it produces in me a species of mental nausea to think of the conditions under which these impressions will be absorbed. The arrangements for luncheon, the brisk interchange of shop, the cheery comments of fellow-tradesmen, the horrible publicity and banality of the whole affair!

My two other colleagues were going, one to spend a holiday at Brighton--which he said was very bracing at Easter, adding that he expected to fall in with some fellows he knew. They will all stroll on the Parade, smoke cigarettes together, and adjourn for a game of billiards. No doubt a very harmless way of passing the time, but not to me enlivening. But Walters is a conventional person, and, as long as he is doing what he would call "the correct thing," he is perfectly and serenely content. The sixth and last is going to Surbiton to spend the holidays with a mother and three sisters, and I think he is the most virtuously employed of all. He will walk out alone, with a terrier dog, before lunch; and after lunch he will go out with his sisters; and perhaps the vicar will come to tea. But then it will be home, and the girls will be proud of their brother, and will have the dishes he likes, and he will have his father's old study to smoke in. I am not sure that he is not the happiest of all, because he is not only pursuing his own happiness.

But I have no such duties before me. I might, I suppose, go down to my sister Helen at the Somersetshire vicarage where she lives so full a life. But the house is small, there are four children, and not much money, and I should only be in the way. Charles would do his best to welcome me, but he will be in a great fuss over his Easter services; and he will ask me to use his study as though it was my own room, which will necessitate a number of hurried interviews in the drawing-room, my sister will take her letters up to her bedroom, and the doors will have to be carefully closed to exclude my tobacco smoke.

This is all very sordid, no doubt, but I am confronted with sordid things to-day. The boys have just cleared off, and they are beginning to sweep out the schoolrooms. The inky, dreary desks, the ragged books, the odd fives-shoes in the pigeon-holes, the wheelbarrows full of festering orange-peel and broken-down fives-balls: this is not a place for a self-respecting person to be in. I want to be mooning about country lanes, with the smell of spring woods blowing down the valley. I want to be holding slow converse with leisurely rustic persons, to be surveying from the side of a high grassy hill the rich plain below, to hear the song of birds in the thickets, to try and feel myself one with the life of the world instead of a sordid sweeper of a corner of it. This is all very ungrateful to my profession, which I love, but it is a necessary reaction; and what at this moment chiefly makes me grateful to it is that my pocket is full enough to let me have a holiday on a liberal scale, without thinking of small economies. I may give pennies to tramps or children, or a shilling to a sexton for showing me a church. I may travel what class I choose, and put up at a hotel without counting the cost; and oh! the blessedness of that. I would rather have a three-days' holiday thus than three weeks with an anxious calculation of resources.

April 8.--I am really off to the Cotswolds. I packed my beloved knapsack yesterday afternoon. I put in it--precision is the essence of diarising--a spare shirt, which will have to serve if necessary as a nightgown, a pair of socks, a pair of slippers, a toothbrush, a small comb, and a sponge; that is sufficient for a philosopher. A pocket volume of poetry--Matthew Arnold this time--and a map completed my outfit. And I sent a bag containing a more liberal wardrobe to a distant station, which I calculated it would take me three days to reach. Then I went off by an afternoon train, and, by sunset, I found myself in a little town, Hinton Perevale, of stone-built houses, with an old bridge. I had no sense of freedom as yet, only a blessed feeling of repose. I took an early supper in a small low-roofed parlour with mullioned windows. By great good fortune I found myself the only guest at the inn, and had the room to myself; then I went early and gratefully to bed, utterly sleepy and content, with just enough sense left to pray for a fine day.

My prayer is answered this morning. I slept a dreamless sleep, and was roused by the cheerful crowing of cocks, which picked about the back yard of the inn. I dressed quickly, only suspending my task to watch the little dramas of the inn yard--the fowls on the pig-sty wall; the horse waiting meekly, with knotted traces hanging round it, to be harnessed; the cat, on some grave business of its own, squeezing gracefully under a closed barn door; the weary, flat-footed duck, nuzzling the mud of a small pool as delicately as though it were a rich custard. I was utterly free; I might go and come as I liked. Time had ceased to exist for me, and it was pleasant to reflect, as I finished my simple breakfast, that I should under professional conditions have been hurrying briskly into school for an hour of Latin Prose. The incredible absurdity and futility of it all came home to me. Half the boys that I teach so elaborately would be both more wholesomely and happily employed if they were going out to farm-work for the day. But they are gentlemen's sons, and so must enter what are called the liberal professions, to retire at the age of sixty with a poor digestion, a peevish wife, and a family of impossible children. But it is only in such inconsequent moments that I allow myself to think thus slightingly of Latin Prose. It is a valuable accomplishment, and, when I have repaired the breaches made by professional work in the mental equilibrium, I shall rejoin my colleagues with a full sense of its paramount importance.

I scribble this diary with a vile pen, and ink like blacking, on the corner of my breakfast-table. I have packed my knapsack, and in a few minutes I shall set out upon my march.

April 9.--I spent an almost perfect day yesterday. It was a cool bright day, with a few clouds like cotton-wool moving sedately in a blue sky. I first walked quietly about my little town, which was full of delicate beauties. The houses are all built of a soft yellow stone, which weathers into a species of rich orange. Heaven knows where the designers came from, but no two houses seem alike; some of them are gabled, buttressed, stone-mullioned, irregular in outline, but yet with a wonderful sense of proportion. Some are Georgian, with classical pilasters and pediments. Yet they are all for use and not for show; and the weak modern shop-windows, which some would think disfigure the delicate house-fronts, seem to me just to give the requisite sense of contrast. At the end of the street stands the church, with a stately Perpendicular tower, and a resonant bell which tells the hour. This overlooks a pile of irregular buildings, now a farm, but once a great manor-house, with a dovecote and pavilions; but the old terrace is now an orchard, and the fine oriel of the house looks straight into the byre. Inside the church--it is open and well-kept--you can trace the history of the manor and its occupants, from Job Best, a rich mercer of London, whose monument, with marble pillars and obelisks, adorns the south aisle; his son was ennobled, whose effigy--more majestic still, robed and coroneted, with his Viscountess by his side, and her dog (with his name, Jakke, engraven on his shoulder)--lies smiling, the slender hands crossed in prayer. But the house was not destined to survive. The Viscount's only daughter, the Lady Penelope, looks down from the wall, a fair and delicate lady, the last of her brief race, who, as the old inscription says with a tender simplicity, "dyed a mayd." I cannot help wondering, my pretty lady, what your story was; and it will do you no hurt if one, who looks upon your gentle face, sends a wondering message of tenderness behind the veil to your pure spirit, regret for your vanished charm, and the fragrance of your soft bloom, and sadness for all sweet things that fade.

The manor, so I learn, was burnt wantonly by the Roundheads--there was a battle hereabouts--on the charge that it had harboured some followers of the king; and so our dreams of greatness and permanence are fulfilled.

The whole church was very neat and spruce; it had suffered a restoration lately. The walls were stripped of their old plaster and pointed, so that the inside is now rougher than the outside, a thing the ancient builders never intended. The altar is fairly draped with good hangings behind, and the chancel fitted with new oak stalls and seats, all as neat as a new pin. As I lingered in the church, reading the simple monuments, a rosy, burly vicar came briskly in, and seeing me there, courteously showed me all the treasures of his house, like Hezekiah. He took me into the belfry, and there, piled up against the wall, were some splendid Georgian columns and architraves, richly carved in dark brown wood. I asked what it was. "Oh, a horrible pompous thing," he said; "it was behind the altar--most pagan and unsuitable; we had it all out as soon as I came. The first moment I entered the church, I said to myself, 'THAT must go,' and I have succeeded, though it was hard enough to collect the money, and actually some of the old people here objected." I did not feel it was worth while to cast cold water on the good man's satisfaction--but the pity of it! I do not suppose that a couple of thousand pounds could have reproduced it; and it is simply heart-rending to see such a noble monument of piety and careful love sacrificed to a wave of so-called ecclesiastical taste. The vicar's chief pride was a new window, by a fashionable modern firm; quite unobjectionable in design, and with good colour, but desperately uninteresting. It represented some mild, unemphatic, attenuated saints, all exactly alike, languidly and decorously conversing together, weighed down by heavy drapery, as though wrapped in bales of carpets. In the lower compartments knelt some dignified persons, similarly habited, in face exactly like the saints above, except that they were fitted out with unaccountable beards--all pretty and correct, but with no character or force. I suppose that fifty years hence, when our taste has broadened somewhat, this window will probably be condemned as impossible too. There can be no absolute canon of beauty; the only principle ought to be to spare everything that is of careful and solid workmanship, to give it a chance, to let time and age have their perfect work. It is the utter conventionality of the whole thing that is so distressing; the same thing is going on all over the country, the attempt to put back the clock, and to try and restore things as they were; history, tradition, association, are not considered. The old builders were equally ruthless, it is true; they would sweep away a Norman choir to build a Decorated one; but at all events they were advancing and expanding, not feebly recurring to a past period of taste, and trying to obliterate the progress of the centuries.

About noon I left the little town, and struck out up a winding lane to the hills. The copses were full of anemones and primroses; birds sang sharply in the bushes which were gemmed with fresh green; now and then I heard the woodpecker laugh as if at some secret jest among the thickets. Presently the little town was at my feet, looking small and tranquil in the golden noon; and soon I came to the top. It was grassy, open down-land up here, and in an instant the wide view of a rich wooded and watered plain spread before me, with shadowy hills on the horizon. In the middle distance I saw the red roofs of a great town, the smoke going peacefully up; here was a shining river-reach, like a crescent of silver. It was England indeed--tranquil, healthy, prosperous England.

The rest of the day I need not record. It was full of delicate impressions--an old, gabled, mullioned house among its pastures; a hamlet by a stream, admirably grouped; a dingle set with primroses; and over all, the long, pure lines of upland, with here and there, through a gap, the purple, wealthy plain.

I write this in the evening, at a little wayside inn, in a hamlet under the hill. The name alone, Wenge Grandmain, is worth a shilling. It is very simple, but clean, and the people are kind; not with the professional manner of those who bow, smiling, to a paying guest, but of those who welcome a wanderer and try to make him a home. And so, in a dark-panelled little parlour, with a sedate-ticking clock, I sit while the sounds of life grow fainter and rarer in the little street. _

Read next: The Crossfoxes Inn, Bourton-On-The-Wold, April 16, 1904

Read previous: Upton, March 25, 1904

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