In Search of Quiet. A country journal. May-July

Front matter

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ I ■ ■ ■ I I I I LN SEAEGH OF QUIET In Search of Quiet A COUNTRY JOURNAL [MAY— JULY] BY WALTER FRITH K ' The result of my system will be to show that, so far from the world being a goddess in petticoats, it is rather the devil in a strait waistcoat ' — Colekidge LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1895 [All rights reserved] TO 'EBSKINE GOWEB' IN PROFOUND, IF SLIGHT, RECOGNITION OF HER VERY GRACIOUS AND GENEROUS SYMPATHY THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED London : November CONTENTS

Autumn IN SEAECH OF QUIET A COUNTEY JOUENAL [MAY — JULY]

Chapter I

I AEEIVE — NIGHT IX THE FABM — MAJOB BOSS— ME. AND MES. CHICK— AMONG THE GEAVES Chick's Farm, Thorpe Green. In the farmhouse apartments that are to suit the Gentleman in search of Quiet, there is silence. Night, that 'good herdsman who brings all creatures home,' has brought all home to the farm, and all are sleeping but I. Je viens d'arriver et d'unpacker. This is my sitting-room — true farmhouse sitting room of one step down — of samplers framed on the wall each side of a discoloured picture in a worm eaten black frame ; of sulphur matches, and not a bell in the house. B Upstairs, my bedroom looks out on the farmyard and two weary bearded horses, fetlock-deep in straw. Just now, when the gracious moon threw a triangular patch there on a white bust of General Booth between two blue vases, I could see a lantern flitting yellowly outside below among the straw, and hear Mr. Chick call gruffly to Boxer to ' come up out of it.' And now, in the downstairs sitting-room, not a sound but the table creaking and the fire that falls lower in the grate, like a tired old man.

Never mind ; far better than the old familiar brouhaha of South Kensington and all the slipshod picture-theatre jargon, and the wow-wow of at homes and dances. I will work at my law-book and go to lied early for a time, and make my mind clean and sweet like a North of Ireland farm with whitewash. Heaven knows it needs it after a winter in London. Not a sound here, at any rate, and a text staring at me with uneven gold letters, ' Fear not, for I am with thee.' And to think that this time last night I was helping a partner to some sort of a compote, and the Hungarian band was slashing away at a waltz. Truly I am glad to be out of it for a time. This morning, when I strolled out before breakfast, I found three yokels standing in the road, staring at a broken egg. Then I met the butcher, paddling along in carpet slippers, smoking a pipe ; and a boy, all neck and feet, shying stones at a pony and two calves.

There's life for you, eh '? there's movement ! I'm delighted with my farm, and especially pleased that it is four miles from a railway station. Also I had to change on my way down, at Reading ; so, until my law-book is finished, I don't fancy I shall do much running up to town. I don't think ' Weights and Measures ' need take long now, if I work hard ; for I've got all my autho rities together, and almost all it wants is getting thoroughly into shape and re-writing. They say the only way nowadays profitably to ' hug the attorneys ' is to write a law-book. At any rate, I may as well have a try. No remarkable adventures en route from town, but a small sort of an encounter in the railway carriage with a very disagreeable old gentleman who shared it with me. He got in at Reading and out at Warford.

Mr. Chick, who met me there with the milk cart, tells me he lives in Thorpe Green, and that his name is Major Ross. So the Gentleman in search of Quiet has one enemy in the place, at all events, already. It was the most ridiculous business ; merely 13 because I was reading with my foot up on the opposite seat ; not on the cushion, mind you, but just on the wooden edge of the seat. I felt the old gentleman was fidgeting and looking at my foot, and at last he burst out to ask me if I thought that was the right thing to do, to put my foot on the seat. I believe, by the way, he called it a hoof. I pointed out quietly it wasn't on the seat, but on the wooden edge ; whereupon the old maniac grew positively offensive. Every cad, he said, put his legs up ; having no property of thenown, they didn't mind destroying other people's ; and so on, crescendo.

I looked at him in amazement, and then, with drawing my foot, went on with my book ; and all the ■way between Reading and Warford he kept on sim mering and fuming and girding at me, steadily reading Jean Paul Richter. Nice old gentleman, Major Ross. I trust we shan't often meet in Thorpe Green, or there'll be wigs on it. . . . As for my farm, it is known simply as Chick's Farm, and stands on the road a quarter of a mile outside the village ; on the farther side, that is, from Warford, towards Oxford. The household consists simply of Mr. and Mrs Chick, his second wife. Mr. Chick is a very shy man, much given to dartine out of my way. When caught and addressed, he re gards my tie, occasionally throwing furtive and alarmed glances up at my straw hat from under his bushy eyebrows. An excellent piece of nature this farmer of mine — always busy, always cheerful, always, as he says, ' earning his crust ; ' either with a sickle, hacking away at the rough grass on the ragged bit of lawn, where the black and white kitten plays in front of my window ; or, bent double, rummaging among the potatoes ; or with his great hand thwacking the cows, to bring them faster home ; or carrying a world of straw on his back, crossed with broad braces like a St. Andrew.

And a pipe, always a pipe, and a broken straw hat and a narrow belt of dank leather round his huge loins. He can't write, and I don't suppose can do more than spell out the capital letters ; never wa3 in London but once, and doesn't want to go there ever again. Put him down in a copse, he says, and he knows where he is ; but put him down in a large town, and he ' sort o' goes senseless.' Which, by the way, will account (I should imagine) for the ease with which country people are bubbled by that amazing confidence trick. A ceaseless worker, Mr. Chick, even on Sunday (much to the mournful apprehension of the clergyman of Thorpe Green, who has kindly come to call on me), and an excellent husband. Twice a week he is to be seen driving his wife into Warford to sell the butter. Prim and contented, side by side they sit in the milk cart.

Such men work down to the very last moment of life ; till Death, out for a country holiday, human haymaking, chances to look in at the farm. I knew one like him in Somersetshire. ' Seems to me I don't feel s' very well,' said he one morning, straightening himself, looking frightened at the unaccustomed sen sation. In a quarter of an hour he was dead. De tefabula ! Mr. Chick ; only, as I don't wish to alarm him unnecessarily, I don't propose to tell him so. Mr. Kearsley, the clergyman the Rev. Nathaniel Kearsley, M.A., formerly scholar of Clare, fifteenth classic, 1856 — tells me Mr. Chick's great fault is an excessive love of money. ' Oh, my friends, have we not all an excessive love of money ! ' One knows so well the absurd first-lesson voice of the average clergy. For some years, it seems Mr. Chick was in the habit of making caches about the farm, of actually driving piles of twenty and fifty sovereigns into the orchard, or tucking them in the thatch ; until Mr. Kearsley, worked on by Mrs. Chick, persuaded him to dig them all up and bank them.

And when they were weighed at the bank counter, it was discovered that somehow the three hundred sovereigns weighed a good deal more than they ought ; due to the fact, Mr. Chick explained, that, in his adoring care, he had given each gold piece an elaborate dressing of oil. Mrs. Chick was housekeeper and cook at the rectory for some years before Mr. Chick won her to the farm. She is a thin, small-featured, genteel, anxious sort of body, and walks about with the soft step of a person accustomed to be noiseless in gentlefolk's houses, and (I am humbly thankful to say it) she is an excellent cook. The Rev. Mr. Kearsley, who, having a small parish and considerable means, can afford both time and the money to be a confirmed invalid (and whose constant companion, indoors and out, is a large grey shawl), groans a good deal over her defection.

Mrs. Chick says Mr. Kearsley was always very fussy about his food and the draughts ; in fact, ' a regular old bachelor ' ; than which, woman can say nothing more scornful of man. Rather a trying atmosphere altogether that of the rectory ; for it's kept as hot as a conservatory, and, in this somewhat chilly spell of weather that's come upon us, Mr. Kearsley (with his head in the shawl and his legs in a rug) lies breathing heavily on the slippery horsehair dining-room sofa. There, in his roomy, well-found house, he lives alone all the year ; except when he goes for a month's holiday in the autumn to Torquay (which he pro nounces as though it rhymed to Torbay), and when he receives the visit of an elderly maiden sister, Miss Sophia, who comes to him hi June and stays exactly three weeks. There was a Miss Chick, by the way ; poor Susan, a daughter of the first wife, who died, unhappily, in the winter.

This afternoon I saw Mrs. Chick kneeling over the grave, on which lay stiffly a wreath of black and white beads. She was plucking away the weeds and looking sadly down. Among the uneven mounds and sunken lichen-studded headstones the village children were gathering buttercups. How strange and beautiful it is, the tender fashion Nature deals even with the memorials of death — she that is all life and growth ! For does she not level all the mounds, warp and break the wooden crosspieces, draw down even the vaults into ' the everlasting arms ' '? There was a stone in the churchyard they can well remember, a nameless stone, with only a verse from Job on it, now quite sunk and disappeared. Nature hath called the very tablet home. The village dead all lie on the south side of the old, old, irregular church ; none on the north, for that is out of the sun.

On the north, right against the church wall, the last incumbent used to grow his plum trees. The north is bad and restless for the dead, but good for plums. Ten o'clock strikes. Mrs. Chick draws the heavy bolt of our front door, and I will go to bed. And to think there are awnings in the squares, and linkmen, and kid gloves, and tuberoses, or orange-tawny violets, or whatever is going to be the fashionable flower. Ofiunum strepitumque ! 0 cigarettes and babble ! I am glad to be rid of them both :— for a time.

Chapter II

A QUAKES BUEIAL-GEOUND — BEAN'S BOW — THE BEV. KEAESLEY AND EMMA — THE BEDAN The more I see of my farm and Thorpe Green, the more I like both ; it's all so peaceful, and sunny, and flowery. The days I pass here are going to resemble each other. I can see that very clearly ; and so far I haven't even set eyes agahi on the truculent Major Ross ; for which, thanks be. Meantime, I work as hard as I can at my law and oversmoke myself, and am very tolerably happy. A strong sweet wind is blowing to-daj', making the delicious apple blossom tremble. This morning before lunch I found an ex-groom, in a faded M.C.C. tie, to show me the old Quaker burial-ground that lies not far from the village green, at the end of a queer retreat called the Redan. The meeting-house has become a schoolroom for little ladies and gentlemen, who are driven in in the morning for instruction — a nest of small sun-bonnets iu governess and ralli-carts— and out again at four.

The school door was open ; I could see in among the tiny scholars, buzzing like young Arabs over the Koran. The Quaker graveyard lies at the back ; for death, a weedy ragged place of buttercups, to be sure. Old West, father of Benjamin, second President of the Academy, lies somewhere among them, but I couldn't find him. Forlorn and neglected, it reminded me of nothing so much as the burial-ground in a gaol. At the back, a door (like ' the planched gate ' Isabella speaks of, in the moated grange, out at St. Luke's), leads on to a narrow path that under elms and alongside a brook draggles down to Marling and the river. They call it still 'The Quaker's path,' though 'tis years since a gray bonnet trod it. The high wall of the burial ground is all plastered with gaudy bills of Loisset's Circus, and ' Warden's clothing,' and tattered scraps of ' Vote for Peachey and the Union,' or for ' Flack, the agricultural labourer's friend ' ; scare crows from the last General Election.

I may take it that Thorpe begins where the Quaker burial-ground ends ; for just round the corner of it is the post-office, with its bell'd door and fusty smell of candles and soap ; kept by one of those tiresome vague old creatures who leans with purple knuckles and mittens worked with gilt beads on the counter, and, to all my inquiries, is sure she don't know and can't tell, and the rest of it. Opposite the post-office, a little retired from the road on the left, there's a slatternly double row of cottages, the Suburra of Thorpe, where the ' bud mashes ' all live ; where the dirty children smear themselves with occasional bread and jam, and the women stand at the doors, scratching their elbows. They have their own pump and then own code of immorals ; for if ever there's drunkenness, or poaching, or a fight in Thorpe, the home of it is sure to be in Bean's Row ; a black patch on the gay and sweet smelling quilt which does, perhaps, a little relieve il from insipidity— at all events to me, an arrant cockney, who finds matter for delight even in Clare Market.

Bean's Row is, I fear, a very large thorn in Mr. Kearsley's groaning side. He tries to do his duty by its denizens, no doubt ; but directly he's seen coming up off the road, wrapped in his gray shawl, bang ! go all the doors, and all he has left him to regard with his large moist eyes is an inexpressively filthy child thumping an old corned-beef tin. One brand, he has, at any rate, lately plucked from the burning, in the person of Emma, a half witted woman of uncertain figure : whose unsettled, yet cautious eye craftily gleams beneath her tidy hair and bent straw hat. Emma, it appears, was persuaded to marry a Bean's Row widower, no more richly gifted mentally than herself ; for both of whom the leaping backwards over a stick in the bar of the ' Red Cow,' amid much running ribaldry, was considered sufficient marriage ceremony.

Her did Mr. Kearsley, with much difficulty, per suade to come to church and complete the contract with somewhat fuller rites ; and the good man even waited in patience while the bridegroom (just before pronouncing the fatal words ' I will ') retired behind the lectern to shed salt tears to the memory of the spouse whom he had buried just one month before the stick-leaping episode. Nos bons villageois ! When I am not at work I spend my time strolling about, glorying in the blowing lilacs, the pouting laburnum, the pink and white bouquets of the may that already begin to make the air dizzy. The spring is a little late, but it is all the more luxuriant and gay- Let me say right here — more Americano — that the most attractive part of Thorpe I have discovered hitherto is an odd sort of a square that has for one of its sides the entrance to the Quaker Meeting-house, now the school.

You enter it under a house built over the entrance on the village side, down a flagged passage opposite the church, between the butcher's and the forge ; and immediately you find yourself in an enclosure with a huge elm at the lower meeting house end. It's rather like a miniature Inn of Court, and is called the ' Redan.' The small, decent houses are all numbered, No. 1, the Redan, No. 2, and so on. It's so retired and unexpected, one might live in Thorpe for years, I imagine, without being aware of its exist ence, unless you happened to be of my prying dis position. Why called the Redan, I can't conceive ; for there's not a house in it that isn't at least twice as old as the Crimean War. It's the fashionable quarter, the Berkeley Square of Thorpe, and on Sundays smells richly of hot roast beef.

There, I have taken quite a fancy to lounging away the early afternoon, listening under the elm (which has a seat round it) to the murmurs of the school-house and the fitful piano-playing from No. 5. I say early afternoon, because I'm proud to say that at five I ahvays go back to tea at Chick's Farm and my great law work on 'Weights aud Measures.' Somebody at No. 5 plays Chopin, particularly the Nocturnes, with a weight of expression (though rather inaccurately) that bespeaks the yearning, youthful female soul. Who can that be, I wonder? Truly, there's a charm about the Redan, a repose that endears it to me deeply. Life seems there creeper-covered and slumbrous, stagnant and yet evergreen as in a backwater ; like a river and like life, only without the movement and the flow. The call of the birds there is more delicately fluted, and even the pungency of the butcher boy's whistle drops half a tone as he jingles in down the passage with his basket, cheerful and greasy.

All the little houses, with their neat steps and palings, their musk blooms, geraniums, and pots of fuchsias in the windows, seem half asleep ; the tiled roofs come sloping down over the windows, as though they had been pulled there to keep the sun out of their eyes. There should be ' No burdens or cries in the Inn ' written up, as there is at the entrance of Clement's ; though, indeed, who' would wish to bring a burden or a cry into so still and drowsy an atmo sphere ? The small dwellings all seem comfortably inhabited save one, one rather longer and lower than the others, near the entrance on the left, as you come in. It is one of those shallow shelters you can see right through among the trees behind ; more especially once a fortnight, when the white lace curtains are sent to the wash. I must get Mrs. Chick to tell me who lives in the Redan and the houses round the Green.

I suppose someone does. At present, I've scarcely seen a soul about ; probably because the hours I choose for my walks abroad are precisely those the inhabitants select for their meals at home. Now it grows eventide, and I must be getting home ; home to my lodgings across the cowslip fields, the stiles ; along the coppice and the little wood ; home to my frugal dinner, my pipe, my sweet rough bed, my pleasant waking in the morning. The children are laughing in the village road, the ophicleide of the village band plays moodily from his cottage ' God bless the Prince of Wales.'

Chapter III Thoepe Hall

— SIE AETHUE TOYNDEE — MISS FLOEA — THE OLD CHUECH — DE. MAETIN — THE C.VELTONS — THE EEDAN — MAJOE BOSS — MISS HAEEWOOD I have called Mrs. Chick to my aid, who, rubbing one hand gently over another, has kindly given me a deal of information. First, about Thorpe Hall, the old house Mrs. Chick daresays I've noticed at the far end of the Green. Thorpe Hall was the ancestral home of the Baynfords, many of whom I must have observed lie in the church. Yes, I have observed them ; particularly the showy coloured tomb of Sir Nicholas, founder of the family, a Chief Justice of James II.'s time ; who, in cap and coif and pointed beard, kneels with a humility I don't suppose he ever felt in court. The family stops short — dead short — in 1835 with Major Baynford, H.E.I.C.S., and the Rev. Walter, ' for forty-three years rector of this parish.' Since then, Baynfords mafeesh, as they say on the Nile, and c Thorpe Hall has been gradually travelling the down ward path to decay.

The discoloured old picture on the wall behind me as I write, of a young lady in Hussar uniform, comes from the Hall, when the furniture was all sold out of it years ago. From the vivacity of her pose, the shapeliness of her hands, the dusty brightness of her roving eye, I judge her to have been the wilful wife of the Squire of Thorpe, of about 180L ; who, in his hearty loyalty, no doubt raised a troop of tenant yeomanry to keep out the French, and must have made the light-hearted Louisa colonel. I can see her on inspection day, cantering in her gay uniform down the badly-dressed line on the Green, and I can hear the farmer-troopers cheer and swear they will follow her across the water and smash Boney as he sits devouring children in the Tuileries. What became of her, I wonder ? Which of the still-room maids was it, for love of her old mistress, made her husband buy the picture for the farm ?

Rubbing one hand gently over another, impassive Mrs. Chick is afraid she can tell me nothine. O They say the Hall was built by Inigo Jones (which, seeing the dates, I don't think it could have been, if Sir Nicholas paid for it) ; and now it stands, with battered griffins guarding gates that look as if they were never opened, except to carry out the tenants, feet first. ' But the paths are full of weeds, and some of the windows are boarded up, and yet someone lives there, Mrs. Chick ? ' ' Dear me, yes, sir ; Sir Arthur Poynder and his lady ; ' haven't I seen them walking about ? Oh, to be sure ! an old gentleman with a clipped white moustache and a youthful figure ; an old lady, veiled, an indistinguishable pile of sombre cloaks and petticoats, like a lady in Stamboul ; who walk the lanes together, some distance apart, silent and absorbed. ' That is Sir Arthur and his lady,' says Mrs. Chick ; an impoverished baronet of ancient Worcestershire family, who is glad to get Thorpe Hall for 30/. a year, and live an absolutely retired life in part of it.

Lady Poynder is a Greek, from the island of Corfu, which will account for her resemblance to an ancient dim Light of the Harem. They have one son, John, a fine young gentleman, at present quartered with his regi ment somewhere in Yorkshire, Mrs. Chick believes. Forbidding and inhospitable as the old Hall looks now, it was not always so, however, even in Mrs. Chick's memory ; for she can just recall festal days when Mr. Adams and his sister, Miss Flora, lived there c and saw a great deal of company. They used to give balls and dinner parties, and young gentlemen from Oxford came over to dance and stay the night. Now Mr. Adams lies in the church under a kindly epitaph, while Miss Flora still lives, a very old lady, at Torquay. For nineteen years — positively, nineteen years ! — Miss Flora was engaged to marry one Peacock, a well to-do brewer at Warford.

The marriage was so long delayed owing to the dutiful impossibility the good girl felt of leaving her bachelor brother. But, alas for Peacock ! when her brother did at last die, and the faithful lover drove over in his gig to claim the fulfil ment of the ancient promise, coy Flora found another impossibility — she didn't care for him sufficiently ! — and the wretched Peacock had to drive home again in his gig, alone. So much for Thorpe Hall, where now Sir Arthur amuses himself wood-carving and writing semi-learned papers on British tumuli, and in tracing the old pack saddle path that used to cross the country from the Norfolk coast. The old church, among whose tumbled graves lies poor Susan Chick, stands alone, right in the middle of the village. It has an uneven broken-backed look, like a weary old lizard petrified in its effort to creep down to the water side.

The vane on the spire, the only new thing about the edifice, was put up seventy years ago. There's an old man still living in Bean's Row who rode astride of it before they took down the scaffolding. Inside age and decay and churchwardens' handi craft everywhere. It's just an ancient church, in short, untouched by the Tractarian movement, or Ritualism, or any modern form of religious thought whatsoever; just as one sometimes goes into a London house, Russell Square way, left absolutely high and dry above the picturesque damp of æstheticism. Even the royal arms that hang over the door still carry the lilies of France, and are still charged with the Hanoverian shield of pretence. But though halls be ancient and churches in decay, life in its phases as we know it of to-day will not be denied. Sir Arthur's may be a strange figure, but I'll be bound her ladyship takes in a society paper ; he may look like the old baronet out of a Christmas Annual, but I doubt not if ever I come to know him (not that I in the very least want to) I shall find him in touch somewhere with modernity.

There are no old-fashioned people left, unless it be some few un pleasant children. And, after all, isn't it only right it should be so ? for, though * up to date ' and ' dans le mouvement ' are detestable phrases, on the other hand you can't ignore your century, you mustn't be ' a bastard to the time,' as Philip says in ' King John.' Meantime, Mrs Chick goes on. In the house next Mr. Kearsley's rectory, covered just now with purple bunches of wisteria, and with a rickety little cupola belfry on the top, lives Dr. Martin, the young doctor with the tight, trim red whiskers I have seen driving about in a gig. His grandmother Martin, a wonder fully vigorous old lady of eighty-three, lives there with him. The doctor is engaged to be married to Miss Constance Ryle, daughter of an Indian colonel, who rides a tricycle in and about Baj-swater.

They have been engaged some years, says Mrs. Chick, and are to be married at the beginning of the autumn. Miss Ryle generally comes down for a few weeks in the summer ; a very nice young lady and a rare hand at lawn tennis. Across the Green, where the geese are mostly to be found delving and hissing over a very bad cricket pitch, there's a solid comfortable dwelling, a farm, owned by the Westons. Mrs. Chick has nothing more to say about them than that they are comfortably off, and quiet, respectable people. Just now they are in deep mourning, and attend church choking in all that overwhelming wealth of crape the lower middle-class revel in when they lose an aunt who leaves them a bit of money. Next the Westons stands a very pleasant, long, low cottage, with white posts and sticky black chains in front.

Mr. and Mrs. Carlton live there, a young married couple with one baby boy. Mr. Carlton is a poet, according to Mrs. Chick ; though, to be sure, she can't give me the titles of any songs he may have sung. Mrs. Carlton was the daughter of the rector of Bur ford, near Oxford ; her father used to take pupils for the University. Mr. Carlton was a pupil there when he fell in love with Miss Rosemary, and married her soon after taking his degree. She's a tall young lady with a nice face ; perhaps I've seen her on the Green in the afternoons with the perambulator ? Indeed I have, Mrs. Chick ; a girl of twoor three and-twenty, with the most charming, gentle, serious, what I may call stained-glass expression, and beautiful braided masses of hair, something between red and gold. Mrs. Chick laughs and describes the husband as a short young gentleman with a moustache, who is always smoking a pipe.