At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  Nor is Spenser so remote, for whether we English have embellished the river with palaces, courts, great houses and pretty towns, or ruined it with industrial suburbs, some regard for nature is still left in us. One ice-clear winter afternoon I was looking at Hampton Court. It is a ruddy-faced, comfortable, quietly splendid palace like some agreeable wine-fed king, with its small Tudor panes like tears of cold in old eyes. The red sun was dropping into the mists that rise early here in the river valley, breaking into lilacs, violets and grays so soft one cannot speak of them. The green of the riverbanks grew more vivid as the evening closed; the miles of wiry willows were gray and brown; the air still and the straight river like a low stairway rising to some imperceptible entrance to the sky. And then—I saw them: Spenser’s swans coming down the stream, their eyes and necks seigneurial and their bodies like boats beneath them on the water.

  So purely white they were,

  That even the gentle streame, the which them bare,

  Seem’d foul to them, and bade his billowes spare

  To wet their silken feathers, lest they might

  Soyle their fayre plumes with water not so fayre,

  And marre their beauties bright,

  That shone as heaven’s light,

  Against their Brydale day, which was not long:

  Sweete Themmes! runne softly, till I end my Song.

  Day after day of your journey up the Thames you see them. They belong to the Queen. On the last Monday in July every year the quaint ceremony or lark—whatever you like—called “Swan-upping” begins at Romney Lock, where the river turns north to Windsor. It simply means that the young swans are caught and marked, and nicked on the side of the beak by emissaries of the Dyers’ and Vintners’ Companies who have some historic right under royal license to the birds they can catch and nick. To catch a swan takes some doing and, since all unmarked birds belong to the Queen, her property increases every year under the genial incompetence of the lark.

  From Putney to Henley the Thames is a pleasant resort, as packed in some places as the lakes of Berlin. Sometime in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the office workers, shop workers and factory hands became aquatic, taking to the river on weekends. Today, painted houseboats with jaunty names, cabin cruisers, tied-up barges and converted troop carriers, landing craft and torpedo boats are littered along the towpaths. There are the shack cafés and bungalows of the weekend parties, with radios and record players going hard, and the riverside pubs that have had to enlarge their bars to cater for the busloads of tourists. The grand mansion façade of Ham House, a fine example of seventeenth-century architecture and now a museum, looks down between the trees and through its great iron gates, upon a river that at times resembles a merry-go-round.

  On hot Sundays, the punts line up by the hundred to go through the locks, their occupants cursing the wash of the flashing cruisers or the packed steamers that ply regularly from Kingston to Oxford. The Londoner is a water animal—Henry James noted it and, taking time off from his addiction to country-house visiting, he was surprisingly delighted by the vulgar gaieties of the river.

  To hire a punt, after haggling with a rosy, sentimental and rapacious waterside dealer who looks as innocent as honeysuckle—and then to pole or paddle the craft along under branches of overhanging willow, with a girl, a sunshade and a radio, is a kind of heaven—if the sun doesn’t go in, if the midges don’t bite, and if insensitive bargees don’t wreck the affair with their wake and with brutal comments on love, which seems to have no appeal for them. Punting on the Thames enhances the beauty of the male. Tall, sunburned, in flashing flannels, he is Hamlet’s waterfly in person as he stands poised on the small platform at the stern of the punt, silhouetted against the sky and the luxurious summer trees. He lets the long pole slide vertically between his hands, until it just taps—he hopes—a gravel bottom; and then, adeptly moving his weight, he pushes effortlessly yet forcefully on the bottom and, as the punt glides forward, draws in his shishing pole at the prettiest low angle to renew the stroke—without, he hopes, getting a quart of water down his sleeve, or soaking the lady, or without any of those accidents that come to the self-admiring, such as being hung up on the low branches of a passing tree, or getting the pole stuck in the riverbed so that he remains, slowly sinking at the top of it, while the punt and its heavenly load shoots on like a passing smile of farewell, beyond him.

  Two hundred and nine miles from the Nore Light Tower, in the softer and wetter climate of the west of England where the hills rise higher, there is a soggy meadow and a tree on which someone has cut the letters T. H. Not far off is a dried-up Roman well, and near that the embankment of the Fosse Way, the Roman road from Cirencester to Bath; under the embankment is a small tunnel. They have called the culvert Thames Head Bridge. Somewhere here is the source of the river, the childish stream that is to grow into the Father.

  In its progress from here to the sea it has its pastoral, its academic, its poetic, its sporting, its royal and its mercantile phases. Pastorally, it is a curl of silver clasping the parklands and the great houses, running through fields of buttercups and cooling the cows. It has its odd villages and odder churches; at Dorchester Abbey there is an epitaph to a lady who died “a martyr to excessive sensibility,” uncalmed by the rural stream. Oxford rules its academic and poetic life: there it belongs to poets and undergraduates—and there, by some freak of English pedantry, tradition or local tenacity, it changes its name to Isis. Why? Was it a splitting up of the old name Themesis or Tamesis? Or a corruption of the common English names for a river—Ouse or Isca, so that people said Thames Ouse or Thames Isca for Thames River? Here, too, when it does not belong to the undergraduates who go to Salter’s boat landing to talk of dinghies, gigs, skiffs, scullers, randans, whiffs, Roy Roys, funnies and other such vessels, it belongs to the poets.

  Shelley heard a skylark at Bablock Hythe, Keats planned Endymion’s journey hereabouts, Southey “sailed unskillfully” at Nuncham, Pope translated the Iliad, and Wordsworth listened to that oldest and most delicate of Thames sounds, “the dripping of the oar suspended.”

  But if we start drifting down the literature of the Thames or indeed its historical anecdotage, we shall never end until we pass Falstaff dining at his inn at Windsor, Wolsey filling Hampton Court with four hundred guests, Henry VIII calmly stealing the property from him, and Magna Carta being signed at Runnymede all over again.

  The sky is the least of the things that are reflected in Thames water; the light on its water is the long light of time itself. It bears away British history and habit of life. No great falls break its course: no high mountains dominate; it runs into no lakes; has no great islands; its weirs are mild, its locks domestic, its bridges without drama. It has no splendor, no wildness and no mythology. It is simply a sly, idle stream that has enticed a civilization and a lot of swans.

  [1960]

  14

  The Appalachian

  Mountains

  Overture to a Mountain Theme

  The southern train had cannoned me loudly over Virginia into Tennessee. And after an eventless waiting at a junction there, I was tugged under difficult steam up a light railway into the mountains of the North Carolina border. I had seen the blue lips of these mountains before, briefly arched over and beyond nearer hills.

  To live in blue mountains, I began to think; to alight in that horizon unawares and extravagantly to plunge one’s body in it! And then I was drawn over narrow steel into those very mountains. They circled by as we trudged. We invaded their gorges, serpenting through them, striking arcs into their townships, outlining their bases. And as we passed, echoes like unleashed dogs ran barking up the mountain sides and were lost in the woods.

  The hills were at times huddled like sheep, at times scattered and grouped like herds. The sunlight was golden on them, the gold of laden furnaces, but the deep shades sunken between the ridges had the winding, varying blue of turf smoke. The processional hills trended back and down and away; ne
w ones came before old ones had been grasped or regretted. I wished for the power of a king to halt them; and for the gifted hands of a poet to grasp them and pull them into myself. For a mountain is something high and blue within one.

  We pelted into N——, galloped in like mountaineer horsemen and reined in sharply at Jenkins’s store. N——is highly set, like a pool on a mountain summit. There is a low, surrounding ridge of woods and the village itself has twenty timber shacks of all kinds, and about fifty-three inhabitants, including children. Of these, all the men sit on the platform of Jenkins’s store, accompanied by “Zeb” Jenkins, and wait for the daily train to arrive.

  I remember the men, fifteen of them, taller than corn, but scarcely stouter, wearing blue overalls and wide black hats, with brims flapped this way and that with the challenging nonchalance of raven’s wings. There were no exceptions; each man wore blue overalls and a black hat. Each man was thin and nasal, drawling to canny length, with a startling amount of bone, with a reach as long as the dawn.

  Each man had blue eyes and fair hair. It was as though these mountaineers were wearing a uniform, and my sensations were like those of Rip Van Winkle when he came upon the Dutchmen. As I watched these fifteen men, long and thin as turnpikes, looking wordlessly at me, and with their idle lengths of leg hung over the platform of the store, a fear seized me that by a general conspiracy of men, trains and blue mountains I had been thrown into an outlaw stronghold, and that the outlaws were just taking their time.

  I found myself listening for their thoughts, trying to meet their spare blue gaze. But impossible. The main thoroughfare of N——was the railway track, by which stood a few shacks and a sawmill, and as I turned back to escape this way I could feel that fifteen black hats, cocked at all angles of defiance, had turned with me, that thirty blue eyes turned and perforated me; and that the silence was refining to its ultimate frigidity. Oh, for a stout man!

  As though answering, a rotund fellow came from behind a wagon and smiled at me, seized me and undertook my defense, strode over railway tracks and fields, gave me a bed for the night, and fed me on corn bread and chunks of salt bacon, and dippers of spring water. The strangeness of blue mountains departed and they attended my walk that night with so warm a familiarity that I did not even think about them. It was dark, and as I reconnoitered the tracks and the store, there was not a man of that lanky band to be seen.

  The world had been blackened out by the heavy charcoal of night. There was no moon. But the sky was vaguely luminous, a dome of light in which the stars swung, and their keen votive smoke brought involuntary tears to the eyes and dimmed them, as wood smoke will. The white stars burned at a far, heatless distance. On that sky they might have been the white-hot and minute cinders of diamonds, which the wind had raked down, blown and scattered.

  The hills which had waited with heads raised, like lowing cattle, during the day, were now straightened and flattened into a one-dimensional rim circling the world, and bluntly standing out against the light of void thrown up from beyond it. The earth was like a black caldron swinging over the reflected glow of the night fires of space.

  I found a dimmed road and followed it to the liquid pulsations of the crickets. There were shrill encampments of these insects blotted in the fields and hills. Their notes were the sizzling of the caldron. Over the floor of silence ricocheted the sudden barking of dogs. A fan of yellow light opened across the fields, from the porch of a house, and in the porch two men were talking.

  I heard solitary words drop on to the air and eddying briefly down, extinguish into the dark. I passed closed doors, and windows in which oil lamps burned sparingly and laid a film of yellow light on the heads of talking people. A hand moving the light would start a whirligig of shadows over the walls, like the wings of big moths; and settling would cast and fix a new fantasy.

  I passed a shack on a hill, and out of its window was hopping the skirl of a gramophone. But the trees broke up and subdued the noise, and the black silence crept closely in as though it had been the breathing of the earth. I blotted myself into the woods, led on by a light which I discovered to be the lamp of a white frame church standing up naively like a child’s toy.

  In the church a wide voice was preaching, and words of the sermon jumped out of the open door into its funnel of light and fell out of the light to earth like the turning leaves. There was singing, a reverent monody. After, a deep silence, and I expected to see the lights put out. But a long silence of vacant dark. A chestnut aimed to earth.

  The lights clicked out. The preacher came out of the church and by the light of a storm lantern walked with a dozen men and women between the trees. The preacher, seeing the star smoke above, sang out courageously the tune of a hymn, till a woman’s voice stopped him with,

  “Right smart o’ chestnuts bin fallin’, Mr. Cooper. Last night one fell and hit Doc McDowell plum’ on the head.”

  The high nasal comment from Doc:

  “Yes. And I hain’t never seen no chestnut the size o’ that-a-one. Seemed like it kind o’ fell searchin’ for me.”

  Then the moon rose, yellow as candle light, and I could see the group by the boles of the columnar trees. The men were wearing black hats and blue overalls.

  An Aside on the Mountaineers

  After hearing Doc McDowell’s widely drawling voice tell how the bursting chestnut hit him “plumb on the head,” I hurried home, feeling the ice of mountain strangeness had been cracked by this small wedge of overheard speech. But I awoke the next morning to see the immutable highlands waiting for me. They seemed to be mirrored in the air, like glass, to resist anything but a surface acquaintance.

  North Carolina is proud. Proud of having less than I percent of foreign blood in its stock. Proud of its pure Scottish, Irish and English blood. There you hear a strange dialect, not an acquired twang, but a traditional, custom-hewn brogue, something which hovers naïvely between a Devonshire accent and the Oxford manner.

  In these border mountains of western North Carolina, in the Unakas and Blue Ridge, it is said you may hear the English of Shakespeare and Chaucer; though in my wanderings to the remote parts of these mountains I did not experience the happiness of noting anything so rare, except the name Leander.

  Sitting in his storm-thinned and weather-split shack in one of the highest ranges, fifteen miles from a railway and eight miles from any road but a rough wagon trail, was Leander, tall, shaggy, unkempt as a furze bush; and his brother Beaumont. They could neither read nor write. Beaumont and Leander Wiggins, who gave us apples and asked, “Now is you-uns kin to ol’ Uncle Moses P——on the yon side o’ Little Rock Creek?” That is as near to Shakespeare as we ever got!

  The mountaineers are perhaps America’s only peasantry. These men and women have been shut up in their loved mountains since the coming of the first settlers, and have conserved their rough, antique modes of living. The mountains still hold more of mysterious life than a stranger can quickly penetrate.

  The scattered huts shelter men almost startled by their own voices. Their speech has the intonation of solitude. Within the last two or three years roads have been carved into the mountains, and it is possible for the avid to “do” them at anything up to forty miles an hour. But the mountaineers accept the change suspiciously, keep to where one can travel only on horseback, and often only on foot.

  One sees the tall blue figures, with narrow heads looking to the ground, with hands in pockets, and gun laid across their arms, behind their backs—one sees them stalking along in depths of thought beyond the length of our conventional-sounding chains.

  Is it as grim as it appears to be? What does this brooding betoken? The thoughts of the mountaineer flow in deep, evasive channels. One is warned of the suspicious nature and lawless tendencies of these men. But I am safely back in New York to testify that a more hospitable and genial people does not exist, that they have what Pío Baroja—who would have been enthusiastic about them—would call a “dynamic” sense of freedom, the unconfiding,
unadministered freedom of bears and squirrels, and that like the rest of us they do not want outsiders to meddle in their affairs.

  I became involved in no feuds. I discovered no stills—about which hearsay has brought forth a vast brood of exaggerations, though there was vague evidence of both feuds and stills. But, even in these desperate matters, I prefer to remember these men are living according to the customs of 150 or 200 years ago. Better education and roads have only begun to penetrate their retreats. They have been a law unto themselves, have lived as clansmen and hunters, shot, hewn and eaten for their own bare needs in solitudes where even the echo of an ordered society has not been heard.

  Knowing only the stark changes of life, the unexplained varying of sun, wind, rain, the diurnal infusions of light and darkness, and the sporadic labor of the open air, the mountaineer obeys instinct without discriminating. Though unconsciously he carries within him, as he breaks into the laurel, that primal instinct of all, the instinct for law.

  The mountaineer fights hard for his liquor yet, and will do so until his adventurous impulses and his active mind are given occupations measuring up to his powers. Meanwhile, he is shrewd enough to let his children take advantage of the better opportunities for education which are now offering.

  I heard of one aged mountaineer, whose wild career had become a by-word in the country, but who fell upon hard times and was forced to live in the corner of a sawmill shed throughout a severe winter. When strangers commiserated and asked how he spent the long, bare evenings, he said he taught his two grandchildren to read and write. “Thar never hain’t bin no ignorant Perkinses,” he said proudly.