by Denton Welch
I went away, thinking how I would like to restore the church. I began to climb up again on to the Downs. At one point some large trees were being cut down. A very fine young man was working in one corner of the wood. I watched his axe swing several times, then ventured a few words; but he did not seem to want to talk. He took a swig from his bottle, wiped his hand across his sweating face, then went in search of another woodman.
I picked some berries off a bush and moved on. I was beginning to feel lonely. All that afternoon I walked with too much grim determination. Towards tea-time I dipped down again and came out by a group of cottages which looked as if they had been built as almshouses or homes for the labourers on a big estate.
Two women stood in the hot, dusty, white road in front of the houses. They looked at me as I passed but said nothing. A few moments later one of them caught me up. She was plump and carried a basket.
‘You must be tired; wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?’ she said sweetly.
I was very surprised.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said. ‘I am rather tired. I’ve been walking a long way.’
‘I live just up here,’ she said, leading me to one of the cottages.
Inside it was very full, but very neat, if stuffy. There was an oleograph of a terrier tearing up a poor child’s rag doll and several photographs of stolid men in uniform. The woman took the kettle, which was already on the range, and soon had it boiling. She poured the water into the brown teapot with the red rubber spout, and cut some thick slices of bread which she buttered. She handed me a large white cup with a piece of bread and butter in the saucer. I thanked her and she smiled contentedly.
‘This is your lucky day,’ she said. She seemed to be almost crooning to herself with pleasure.
I said again what a pleasant surprise it was to have so much kindness. I could see how much her action meant to her.
She tapped the table dreamily and repeated, ‘This’ll be one of your lucky days.’ There was a pause. ‘My husband will be in any moment now,’ she added. ‘He’ll be pleased I asked you in, too.’
I got up to go, not wanting to thank the husband as well as the wife. I told her again how grateful I was, and she accepted it all. She saw me to the door and smiled hazily all over her face as she wished me luck on my journey and asked God to bless me.
I trudged on down the white road, thinking of the woman and wondering where I should spend the night.
A few miles on I came to a tiny hamlet; there only seemed to be a pub and a few cottages. I went into the pub and asked if they had a room for me. There was talk and argument behind the bar and then a girl took me up to a bare little room with coarse lace curtains. I was so tired that anything would have looked delightful to me. I said I would have it, but even as I spoke the lady of the house climbed up the stairs, painfully calling out between her gasps for breath that she was very sorry she couldn’t manage to have anybody, as the girl went home in the evenings and she had no one to help with the meals.
I said that I could eat what I had with me and that all I needed was a bed. I told them that I had already walked over thirty miles that day and that I could go no further. The thought of being turned out made me feel desperate, but the landlord’s wife only looked at me sorrowfully and said again with firmness, ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t manage it.’
I was so angry that I regained some energy. I pushed down the stairs, shouting over my shoulder what I thought of her. She was still wheezing and gasping a sort of apology as I jerked open the door and let myself out.
I was determined to get to Midhurst somehow; I knew that I would get no shelter anywhere else. But the thought of the four or five miles to that town so appalled me that I often despaired of reaching it. I asked everyone I passed how far it was and their different answers maddened me.
‘It can’t be so far as that,’ I rapped out to one old man who told me it was six miles.
‘You seem to know more’n I do,’ he drawled laconically; then turned his back and left me staring down the road.
I walked on, noticing hardly anything except that the light was turning to red and gold. A tawny haystack, its neatly cut sections lit up into flaming steps by the evening glow, sticks in my mind, and the black threads of the telephone wires against the higher, bird’s-egg-blue sky. The colour was so thin and pure that it sent one weak dart of pleasure through all my tiredness.
I came into the town in a sort of daze. I felt that I could never stop walking, for if I did I would lie where I fell for ever. I saw the Spread Eagle before me. It looked so welcoming that I could have cried. I climbed up the steps and spoke to the girl in the office.
‘Have you a single room for the night?’ I asked firmly, becoming acutely conscious of the sweat on my face, the mud on my shoes and my shorts and open shirt.
The correct demure-looking girl gave me rather an amused but quite friendly look.
‘Ought I to bring out my money and offer to pay now, or does a rucksack ‘count’ as luggage?’ I asked myself. Then I decided that I would make no concessions, that they must take me as I was and be pleased to do it. I bolstered myself up with a little arrogance.
‘Yes, sir,’ the girl said, in a tone of voice which seemed to show that she thought she was good-naturedly playing an amusing part. ‘We’ve got a single room; I’ll show you up to it.’ She looked at me more closely. ‘You must be tired, but it’s been a lovely day.’
She led me down a long passage, which seemed very low and broad; there was a rich red carpet on the floor, which troubled my eyes as I looked down at it. She left me at the door of the neat little room, which had ‘hotel’ written all over it, from the notices about meals, tipping and the lights down to the green waste-paper basket sprayed with gold paint.
I shut the door behind her and latched it; then I cleaned my teeth, washed my face and hands and remembered that I had packed no pyjamas. I got into bed in my cotton shirt and lay there, not able to go to sleep for some time. This is what being ‘over-tired’ means, I thought. I never used to believe that you could be too tired to go to sleep; now I do.
I was still walking in my dreams for most of the night. When the maid knocked on my door in the morning, I remembered it was latched. I wondered if I could jump out of bed, open the door, and jump in again before she could see that I only wore a shirt. I decided to risk it, and darted my naked legs and thighs under the bed clothes just as she brought in the tea.
She was plump and round, rather waxy and Dutch-dollish with her wide unsmart maid’s cap. She looked at my rucksack and asked me if I’d walked very far the day before and whether I felt rested.
As she spoke I realised that my body ached and that my back and legs were stiff; but it did not feel unpleasant, it seemed rather delicious. I told her modestly that I had walked more than thirty-five miles the day before; and I took pleasure when I saw her mouth gape open in astonishment.
She left me and I drank the tea contentedly. I opened Wuthering Heights which I had brought with me, but I felt again that it is a pity and a waste to read a book for pure pleasure, more than once. Read it to study it, read it to know it, but do not read it only for delight again, I thought.
I bathed and shaved and came back to pack up my rucksack. I put in my washing things, my ivory comb, Wuthering Heights, but must have forgotten the George IV spoon with the Prince of Wales feathers on it, which I had found amongst the greasy base-metal cutlery at school, and which I had appropriated to myself with such satisfaction two years before. I had often wondered how it came to be mixed with the modern stuff, and if it had originally belonged to an inn called the Prince of Wales.
I suppose the maid found it on the washstand after I had left and took it down to the kitchen. I did not miss it until that night, when it was too late to go back.
I went down to the dining-room and ate the whole large hotel breakfast: grapefruit, porridge (with that special hotel castor sugar), eggs, toast, marmalade and coffee. I wished that the other guests had no
t looked quite so respectable and bourgeois. Their ties, tweed coats and imitation pearls made my bare knees and throat feel specially naked.
I paid my bill. The girl of the night before was not there. Then I walked down the steps into the sun, wishing that hotels were less expensive or that I had more money. I was sorry to leave the fifteen-odd shillings on the desk.
I walked down the street to where two swans were sailing on a rather murky pond. As I leant over the railings the two birds began to make love, or rather the male bird became masterful and vicious, and tried to bend the other to his will. I watched them fascinated, but also a little ashamed of what passers-by might think of this spectacle and my close attention to it. There was much flapping of huge oily wings and splashing of water as the male chased the female and pinned her down at last. The wicked swan necks turned and darted and the flat beaks snapped. The heavy bodies sank lower in the brown water. I turned away and asked someone where Cowdray was. I wanted to see the ruins.
It looked almost inhabitable as I first came upon it. I walked under the gateway and bought a little booklet on the house. I read of Dr Johnson’s visit, of the curse on the family—that it should perish by fire and water.
Across the court, in the great hall, a group of others were staring up at the walls. I passed them and went into the chapel where pieces of eighteenth-century-looking plasterwork still clung to the arches of the windows. I climbed up to what was marked on my little map as Queen Elizabeth’s room. The fireplace had been bricked up and made smaller at several different times. I took note of this for some reason.
I thought of the house on the night of the fire, when the young owner was in Germany, soon to be drowned. I imagined the housekeeper, running from room to room, half-mad with despair.
Standing in what once had been a window in Queen Elizabeth’s room, I looked across the light golden cornfields and wished again that I had someone to talk to. ‘Perhaps I will find someone,’ I thought, ‘as I walk along today.’ I tried to throw off my depression and went to look at the huge octagonal kitchen, the only roofed-in part.
I thought with delight of the whole ruin as belonging to me. I would live in the wonderful kitchen and the rooms above it, I told myself, as I climbed up the spiral staircase to the Muniment Room.
I thought of myself behind the thick walls on freezing winter nights, with the ruins all round me, in the moonlight. I have always wanted a little house built in the heart of wonderful ruins. At school it had been the corner of a Greek temple, where I grew plants and had a window in a wall contrived between the drums of two huge Doric columns.
I looked at the prints and the records in the Muniment Room, and thought of the pictures and the treasures of the house crackling in the flames. Outside again, I looked at the outhouses, the laundry, the brewery, the stables and then, after gazing at some stairs which seemed to lead down to a cellar, I left the place with all its crusted history and started on my day’s journey.
Being so stiff and sore, I decided to go no more than a few miles. I remembered my great-aunt and uncle and their daughter, who lived at Petersfield. I had not seen them since I was nine years old, when I and my mother had stayed with them for a week or two in the autumn. I remembered how I had tried to paint the coloured leaves and holly in the gardens, and how the daughter, Marjorie, had invited me to a fudge and toffee-making in her sitting-room one wet and misty afternoon. I remembered watching her pouring the thick condensed milk into the saucepan, and how I hoped that I wouldn’t taste the tin when the fudge was made. Of course to me she was quite old, twenty-four or twenty-five. I did not like the way she did her hair in two buns over her ears.
I wondered, now, as I walked along, whether I should call on them and cadge a bed for the night. ‘They won’t know who I am until I’ve explained,’ I thought. I wondered if I could brave it out, or whether it seemed too insolent. They were really such distant relations and my family had only kept in touch with them once a year, at Christmas.
I passed a lot of children playing in the road under the shade of a large-leafed tree. For some reason they struck me; it may have been the colour of their clothes under the heavy green shade. I thought of this moment in the cruel, romping, dirty children’s lives. ‘I’ve caught it in my mind for ever,’ I thought. ‘They’ll all grow up and get diseased and die; but I shall remember them always like this.’
Just outside Petersfield I sat down in the long grass at the side of the road and eased the rucksack off my back. My bright blue shirt was stuck to my skin with sweat. I pulled it off and flapped it to and fro to fan my flesh and to dry it. I decided to look up my great-uncle’s address in the telephone book, as I could not remember it. I went in search of a booth and soon found one, luckily. Next I found the address, and then asked a passer-by the way.
As I walked down the drive I felt horribly self-conscious and at a disadvantage. I could not imagine what my reception would be like; and yet I felt that it was cowardly not to make use of these convenient relations when I was so in need of somewhere for the night.
I found my uncle alone; my aunt and cousin had gone out to some sale-of-work in a friend’s garden. I hurriedly and confusedly explained about myself and how I could not walk any farther that day.
He asked me about my father, who was his real nephew; then he said rather diffidently, as if he felt that, young as I was, yet even I might object to so outrageous a hint, ‘Of course, there are buses.’ My face went red and I became very flustered and angry and more determined than ever to dig my toes in.
‘I really am terribly tired,’ I said. ‘It would be marvellous if I could just stay here for the night and rest.’
‘Of course, of course,’ he said correctly, with no feeling at all.
Tea was brought in, on a large silver tray with kettle and tea caddy. I tried very hard to make out the crests winking on all the glistening pieces, for at home I had a book with two Bois crests in it and I wondered which one my uncle used, or whether he had something quite different—even of his own manufacture, I added maliciously, thinking of the hint about the buses.
I could not crane my neck and stare indefinitely at the silver, so I took a scone and started to talk as pleasantly as I could to my uncle. Presently my aunt and cousin came in, and my uncle said, rather repressively, ‘Oh, this is Denton, who’s on a walking tour and he’s going to spend the night with us.
My aunt gave me a sharp, quick look, then dowsed it. Her white hair and the blue velvet bow under the rim of her hat looked mild, but her face didn’t.
‘Oh, how nice,’ she said, with no colouring in her words. I began to feel that they all thought my behaviour extraordinary.
‘Oh, we saw you sitting in the grass at the side of the road,’ my cousin said. ‘I remember that blue shirt but I didn’t know it was you of course.’
I was taken out on to the terrace to look at the magnificent view. The house was built on the ridge of a steep hill. The garden fell away in terraces.
Afterwards I looked into the drawing-room and remembered the ugly satin-wood cabinets filled with curiosities which I had loved as a child. I now thought them shoddy and dull—the Japanese ivories—horrible. The Persian helmet with its veil of chain-mail still hung above the staircase. I had believed my uncle before when he had told me that it was probably some Crusader’s; now I felt that it, with many others, must have been manufactured specially to hang above the staircase in the houses of people like my uncle.
That night I went up to my room thankfully. I was sorry that I had come, yet glad that I should have a comfortable bed and that I should have to pay nothing for it. I tried to read but could not concentrate, so I turned out the light and fell asleep.
The first thing in the morning I began to worry about the tip to be left in my room. Was two shillings enough? I hoped very much that it was; it seemed far too much to me. But then I knew that I was a biased judge and that my sudden appearance must have been disconcerting.
We all sat in the dining-room
talking quite pleasantly. They had evidently got over their surprise at my descent. They seemed to accept me as something rather odd but fairly inoffensive. At the end of the meal my Aunt Maggie made signs at my Uncle Percy to take me on to the terrace. It appeared that one of the maids had given notice and that my aunt and Marjorie were going to help the rest of the household by clearing the table.
‘Can’t I help?’ I asked, grabbing up something and taking it to the service hatch.
‘No, no,’ my aunt said hurriedly, almost angrily. ‘Go out with Percy on to the terrace, we can manage much better without you.’
I was amazed and rather hurt at not being allowed to make myself useful to them when I had made them useful to me.
Can she be so ridiculous as to be ashamed of clearing her own table before me? Or is it just her old-fashioned idea that males cannot do anything in the house and that it is wrong, almost indecent, for them to offer to help?
I went out with my uncle on to the terrace and we walked down into a sort of water garden with clipped yews and an old lead cistern. The trimness, the flagged walk and the leaded panes of the house were all very much the businessman’s idea of home. It looked very prosperous and dull and soothing.
‘We’re trying to sell it,’ my uncle said gloomily. ‘Too big for just Maggie and me and Marjorie, now that the others have flown, but would you believe it, we can’t get an offer that will anything like cover all the money we’ve spent on it. Why, the garden was a wilderness and look at it now!’
‘That’s always the way, isn’t it?’ I said as comfortably as possible.
‘Other people only see the results, they don’t know what’s gone into it.’
We walked to the edge of the wood still exchanging platitudes; then I went back to my bedroom, left the two shillings rather reluctantly, and came down again to say goodbye.
They were all pleasant and distant and half-dead; so I made my escape and did not breathe again freely until I was in the road.