I had some thoughts of branching off on one of the green lanes to the left, that would have led me past a thatched cottage or two up to the ridge5 of the Quantocks, to Stowborrow Hill, Beacon6 Hill, Thorncombe Hill, Great Hill, Will’s Neck, Lydeard[291] Hill, Cothelstone Hill, and down to Taunton; but I kept to my road of last night as far as West Quantoxhead. There, beyond the fountain, I entered the road between ranks of lime trees towards Stogumber. Before I had gone a mile the rain returned, and made the roads so bad that I had to take to the highway from Williton to Taunton, and so saw no more of Bicknoller than its brown tower. But I had hopes of the weather, and the rain did no harm to the flowers of periwinkle and laurustinus in the hedges I was passing, and only added a sort of mystery of inaccessibleness to the west wall of the Quantocks, with which I was now going parallel. It was a wall coloured in the main by ruddy dead bracken and dark gorse, but patched sometimes with cultivated strips and squares of green, and trenched by deep coombs of oak, and by the shallow, winding8 channels of streams—streams not of water but of the most emerald grass. Seagulls mingled9 with the rooks in the nearer fields. The only people on the road were road-menders working with a steam-roller; the corduroys of one were stained so thoroughly10 by the red mud of the Quantocks, and shaped so excellently by wear to his tall, spare figure, that they seemed to be one with the man. It reminded me of “Lee Boo,” and how the Pelew Islanders doubted whether the clothes and bodies[292] of the white men did not “form one substance,” and when one took off his hat they were struck with astonishment11, “as if they thought it had formed part of his head.”
The rain ceased just soon enough not to prove again the vanity of waterproofs12. I have, it is true, discovered several which have brought me through a storm dry in parts, but I have also discovered that sellers of waterproofs are among the worst of liars14, and that they communicate their vice15 with their goods. The one certain fact is that nobody makes a garment or suit which will keep a man both dry and comfortable if he is walking in heavy and beating rain. Suits of armour16 have, of course, been devised to resist rain, but at best they admit it at the neck. The ordinary (and extraordinary) waterproof13 may keep a man dry from neck to groin, though it is improbable exceedingly that both neck and wrists will escape. As for the legs, the rain gets at the whole of them with the aid of wind and capillary17 attraction. Whoever wore a coat that kept his knees dry in a beating rain? I am not speaking of waterproof tubes reaching to the feet. They may be sold, they may even be bought. They may be useful, but not for walking in.
For moderate showers one waterproof is about[293] as good as another. The most advertised have the advantage of being expensive, and conferring distinction: otherwise they are no better, and wear worse, than a thing at two-thirds of the price which is never advertised at all. In such a one I was riding now, and I got wet only at the ankles. It actually kept my knees dry in the heavy rain near Timsbury. But if I had been walking I should have been intolerably hot and embarrassed in this, and very little less so in the lighter18, more distinguished19, more expensive garment. Supposing that a thorough waterproof exists, so light as to be comfortable in mild weather, it is certain to have the grave disadvantage of being easily tearable, and therefore of barring the wearer from woods.
Getting the body wet even in cold weather is delicious, but getting clothes and parts of the body wet, especially about and below the knee, is detestable. Trousers, and still more breeches, when wet through, prove unfriendly to man, and in some degree to boy. If the knees were free and the feet bare, I should think there would be no impediment left to bliss20 for an active man in shower or storm, except that he would provoke, evoke21, and convoke22 laughter, and ninety-nine out of a hundred would prefer to this all the evils of rain and of waterproofs. It is to save our clothes and to lessen[294] the discomfort23 of them that a waterproof is added.
At first thought, it is humiliating to realize that we have spent many centuries in this climate and never produced anything to keep us dry and comfortable in rain. But who are we that complain? Not farmers, labourers, and fishermen, but people who spend much time out of doors by choice. We can go indoors when it rains; only, we do not wish to, because so many of the works of rain are good—in the skies, on the earth, in the souls of men and also of birds. When youth is over we are not carried away by our happiness so far as to ignore soaked boots and trousers. We like hassocks to kneel on, and on those hassocks we pray for a waterproof. As the prayer is only about a hundred years old—a hundred years ago there were no such beings—it is not surprising that the answer has not arrived from that distant quarter. Real outdoor people have either to do without waterproofs, or what they use would disable us from our pleasures. Naturally, they have done nothing to solve our difficulties. They have not written poetry for us, they have not made waterproofs for us. They do not read our poetry, they do not wear our waterproofs. We must solve the question by complaint and experiment, or by learning to go wet—an[295] increasingly hard lesson for a generation that multiplies conveniences and inconveniences rather faster than it does an honest love of sun, wind, and rain, separately and all together.
By the time I reached Crowcombe, the sun was bright. This village, standing24 at the entrance to a great cloudy coomb of oaks and pine trees, is a thatched street containing the “Carew Arms,” a long, white inn having a small porch, and over it a signboard bearing a coat of arms and the words “J’espère bien.” The street ends in a cross, a tall, slender, tapering25 cross of stone, iron-brown and silver-spotted. Here also sang a chiffchaff, like a clock rapidly ticking. The church is a little beyond, near the rookery of Crowcombe Court. Its red tower on the verge26 of the high roadside bank is set at the north-west corner in such a way—perhaps it is not quite at right angles—that I looked again and again up to it, as at a man in a million.
After passing Flaxpool, a tiny cluster of dwellings27 and ricks, with a rough, rising orchard28, then a new-made road with a new signpost to Bridgwater, and then a thatched white inn called the “Stag’s Head,” I turned off for West Bagborough, setting my face toward the wooded flank of Bagborough Hill. Bagborough Church and Bagborough House stand at the edge of the wood. The village houses[296] either touch the edge of the road, or, where it is very steep, lie back behind walls which were hanging their white and purple clouds of alyssum and aubretia down to the wayside water. Rain threatened again, and I went into the inn to eat and see what would happen. Two old men sat in the small settle at the fireside talking of the cold weather, for so they deemed it. Bent29, grinning, old men they were, using rustic30, deliberate, grave speech, as they drank their beer and ate a few fancy biscuits. One of them was so old that never in his life had he done a stroke of gardening on a Good Friday; he knew a woman that did so once when he was a lad, and she perished shortly after in great pain. His own wife, even now, was on her death-bed; she had eaten nothing for weeks, and was bad-tempered31, though still sensible. But when the rain at last struck the window like a swarm32 of bees, and the wind drove the smoke out into the room, the old man was glad to be where he was, not out of doors or up in the death room. His talk was mostly of the weather, and his beans, and his peas, which he was so pleased with that he was going to send over half a pint33 of them to the other old man. The biscuits they were eating set him thinking of better biscuits. For example, now, a certain kind made formerly34 at Watchet was very[297] good. But the best of all were Half Moon biscuits. They had a few caraways in them, which they did not fear, because, old as they were, they were not likely to have leisure for appendicitis35. Half a one in your cup of tea in the morning would plim out and fill the cup. They told me the street, the side of the street, the shop, its neighbours on either side, in Taunton, where I might hope to buy Half Moon biscuits even in the twentieth century. The whitening sky and the drops making the window pane36 dazzle manifested the storm’s end, and the old men thought of the stag hounds, which were to meet that day.... Just above Bagborough there, seven red stags had been seen, not so long ago.
It was hot again at last as I climbed away from the valley and its gently sloping green and rosy37 squares and elmy hedges, up between high, loose banks of elder and brier, and much tall arum, nettle38, and celandine, and one plant of honesty from the last cottage garden. High as it was, the larch39 coppice on the left far up had a chiffchaff singing in it, and honeysuckle still interwove itself in the gorse and holly40 of the roadside. A parallel, deep-worn, green track mounted the hill, close on my right, and there was a small square ruin covered with ivy41 above it among pine trees. It[298] was not the last building. A hundred feet up, in a slight dip, I came to a farm-house, Tilbury Farm. Both sides of the road there are lined by mossy banks and ash and beech43 trees, and deep below, southward, on the right hand, I saw through the trees the gray mass of Cothelstone Manor44-house beside its lake, and twelve miles off in the same direction the Wellington obelisk45 on the Black Down Hills. A stone seat on the other side of the trees commands both the manor house beneath and the distant obelisk. The seat is in an arched-over recess46 in the thickness of a square wall of masonry47, six or seven feet in height and breadth. A coeval48 old hawthorn49, spare and solitary50, sticks out from the base of the wall. The whole is surmounted51 by a classic stone statue of an emasculated man larger than human, nude52 except for some drapery falling behind, long-haired, with left arm uplifted, and under its feet a dog; and it looks straight over at the obelisk. I do not know if the statue and the obelisk are connected, nor, if so, whether the statue represents the Iron Duke, his king, or a classic deity53; the mutilation is against the last possibility. Had the obelisk not been so plainly opposite, I should have taken the figure for some sort of a god, the ponderous54, rustic-classic fancy of a former early nineteenth-century owner of Cothelstone[299] Manor. The statue and masonry, darkened and bitten by weather, in that high, remote, commanding place, has in any case long outgrown55 the original conception and intention, and become a classi-rustical, romantic what-you-please, waiting for its poet or prose poet. I should have liked very well, on such a day, in such a position, to think it a Somerset Pan or Apollo, but could not. It was mainly pathetic and partly ridiculous. In the mossy bank behind it the first woodsorrel flower drooped56 its white face among primroses57 and green moschatel knobs; they made the statue, lacking ivy and moss42, seem harsh and crude. Some way farther on, where the beeches59 on that hand come to an end, two high stout60 pillars, composed of alternate larger and smaller layers of masonry, stand gateless and as purposeless as the king, duke, or god.
For a while I rested in a thatched shed at the summit, 997 feet up, where the road turns at right angles and makes use of the ridge track of the Quantocks. A roller made of a fir trunk gave me a seat, and I looked down this piece of road, which is lined by uncommonly61 bushy beeches, and over at Cothelstone Hill, a dome62 of green and ruddy grasses in the south-east, sprinkled with thorn trees and capped by the blunt tower of a beacon. The[300] primrose58 roots hard by me had each sufficient flowers to make a child’s handful.
Turning to the left again, when the signpost declared it seven and three-quarter miles to Bridgwater, I found myself on a glorious sunlit road without hedge, bank, or fence on either side, proceeding63 through fern, gorse, and ash trees scattered64 over mossy slopes. Down the slopes I looked across the flat valley to the Mendips and Brent Knoll7, and to the Steep and Flat Holms, resting like clouds on a pale, cloudy sea; what is more, through a low-arched rainbow I saw the blueness of the hills of South Wales. The sun had both dried the turf and warmed it. The million gorse petals65 seemed to be flames sown by the sun. By the side of the road were the first bluebells66 and cowslips. They were not growing there, but some child had gathered them below at Stowey or Durleigh, and then, getting tired of them, had dropped them. They were beginning to wilt67, but they lay upon the grave of Winter. I was quite sure of that. Winter may rise up through mould alive with violets and primroses and daffodils, but when cowslips and bluebells have grown over his grave he cannot rise again: he is dead and rotten, and from his ashes the blossoms are springing. Therefore, I was very glad to see them. Even to have seen them on[301] a railway station seat in the rain, brought from far off on an Easter Monday, would have been something; here, in the sun, they were as if they had been fragments fallen out of that rainbow over against Wales. I had found Winter’s grave; I had found Spring, and I was confident that I could ride home again and find Spring all along the road. Perhaps I should hear the cuckoo by the time I was again at the Avon, and see cowslips tall on ditchsides and short on chalk slopes, bluebells in all hazel copses, orchises everywhere in the lengthening68 grass, and flowers of rosemary and crown-imperial in cottage gardens, and in the streets of London cowslips, bluebells, and the unflower-like yellow-green spurge.... Thus I leapt over April and into May, as I sat in the sun on the north side of Cothelstone Hill on that 28th day of March, the last day of my journey westward to find the Spring.
THE END
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1
glistened
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| v.湿物闪耀，闪亮( glisten的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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blemished
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| v.有损…的完美，玷污( blemish的过去式 ) | |
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westward
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| n.西方，西部；adj.西方的，向西的；adv.向西 | |
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drenched
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| adj.湿透的；充满的v.使湿透( drench的过去式和过去分词 )；在某人（某物）上大量使用（某液体） | |
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ridge
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| n.山脊；鼻梁；分水岭 | |
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beacon
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| n.烽火，（警告用的）闪火灯，灯塔 | |
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knoll
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| n.小山，小丘 | |
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winding
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| n.绕，缠，绕组，线圈 | |
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mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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waterproofs
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| n.防水衣物，雨衣 usually plural( waterproof的名词复数 )v.使防水，使不透水( waterproof的第三人称单数 ) | |
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13
waterproof
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| n.防水材料；adj.防水的；v.使...能防水 | |
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liars
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| 说谎者( liar的名词复数 ) | |
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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armour
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| （=armor）n.盔甲；装甲部队 | |
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capillary
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| n.毛细血管；adj.毛细管道；毛状的 | |
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18
lighter
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| n.打火机，点火器；驳船；v.用驳船运送；light的比较级 | |
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19
distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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bliss
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| n.狂喜，福佑，天赐的福 | |
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evoke
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| vt.唤起，引起，使人想起 | |
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convoke
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| v.召集会议 | |
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discomfort
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| n.不舒服，不安，难过，困难，不方便 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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tapering
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| adj.尖端细的 | |
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verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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dwellings
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| n.住处，处所( dwelling的名词复数 ) | |
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orchard
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| n.果园，果园里的全部果树，(美俚)棒球场 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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rustic
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| adj.乡村的，有乡村特色的；n.乡下人，乡巴佬 | |
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bad-tempered
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| adj.脾气坏的 | |
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swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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pint
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| n.品脱 | |
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formerly
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| adv.从前，以前 | |
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appendicitis
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| n.阑尾炎，盲肠炎 | |
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pane
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| n.窗格玻璃，长方块 | |
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rosy
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| adj.美好的，乐观的，玫瑰色的 | |
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nettle
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| n.荨麻；v.烦忧，激恼 | |
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larch
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| n.落叶松 | |
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holly
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| n.[植]冬青属灌木 | |
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ivy
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| n.常青藤，常春藤 | |
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42
moss
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| n.苔，藓，地衣 | |
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43
beech
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| n.山毛榉；adj.山毛榉的 | |
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manor
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| n.庄园，领地 | |
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obelisk
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| n.方尖塔 | |
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46
recess
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| n.短期休息，壁凹（墙上装架子，柜子等凹处） | |
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47
masonry
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| n.砖土建筑；砖石 | |
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48
coeval
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| adj.同时代的；n.同时代的人或事物 | |
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49
hawthorn
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| 山楂 | |
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50
solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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51
surmounted
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| 战胜( surmount的过去式和过去分词 )； 克服（困难）； 居于…之上； 在…顶上 | |
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52
nude
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| adj.裸体的；n.裸体者，裸体艺术品 | |
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53
deity
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| n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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54
ponderous
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| adj.沉重的，笨重的，(文章)冗长的 | |
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55
outgrown
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| 长[发展] 得超过（某物）的范围( outgrow的过去分词 )； 长[发展]得不能再要（某物）； 长得比…快； 生长速度超过 | |
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56
drooped
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| 弯曲或下垂，发蔫( droop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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57
primroses
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| n.报春花( primrose的名词复数 )；淡黄色；追求享乐（招至恶果） | |
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58
primrose
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| n.樱草，最佳部分， | |
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beeches
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| n.山毛榉( beech的名词复数 )；山毛榉木材 | |
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61
uncommonly
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| adv. 稀罕(极，非常) | |
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62
dome
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| n.圆屋顶，拱顶 | |
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proceeding
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| n.行动，进行，(pl.)会议录，学报 | |
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64
scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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65
petals
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| n.花瓣( petal的名词复数 ) | |
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66
bluebells
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| n.圆叶风铃草( bluebell的名词复数 ) | |
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67
wilt
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| v.(使)植物凋谢或枯萎；(指人)疲倦，衰弱 | |
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68
lengthening
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| （时间或空间）延长，伸长( lengthen的现在分词 )； 加长 | |
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