Y

JULIA CLORY

A blind and melancholy fiddler

CHAPTER XIV

OVER BEACHY HEAD TO ALFRISTON

ESTERDAY we had walked through meadows

that were but half reclaimed from marsh and it

had seemed like a kingdom insecurely held from watery conquest, but Eastbourne terminates to the southwest in the high ridge of the South Downs. These hills run eastward for a hundred miles from Chichester along the coast, but here at last they get their courage to plunge headlong to the sea. I have seen boys run along a pier to gather this same courage.

Eastbourne of late years has grown in popularity and its last houses are dotted up the slope of Beachy Head, as if the town had hurled its whitened spray against the cliff. We turned, of course, to look down upon the

general roofs, the stretch of pier, the pretty plots of grass and flowers that grow beside the sand. Halfway up a sharp-pitched meadow we sat for rest where the town had fallen out of sight below the shoulder of the hill.

The ocean lay five hundred feet below us. Sails winked in the morning sun, and steamers went about their business like stolid merchants who smoke a black cigar. A ship put off for France from New Haven down the coast with a trail of water widening at the stern. It is the wake of a ship, I am told, that betrays it first to the aeroplane, and on Beachy Head we saw how this is true. There were higher downs above us to the north, and the wind was too busy with the traffic of the clouds to visit our sheltered slope.

"Now I've done it," said Bill. "I thought a wisp of hay would be the very thing to clean my cigarette holder. But the fuzzy end has stuck."

Each of us in turn vainly bellowed out his lungs to clear the tube.

"And now" said Bill, "what's become of the spring that goes inside?"

So we lay on our stomachs and scrutinized the ground. We moved on presently and dropped a penny in the cup of a blind and melancholy fiddler who played for trippers beside the path. He heard the rattle of the coin and nodded his acknowledgment as he sawed his pathetic tune.

At the top of the incline there is a hotel and a pavilion for refreshment.

We were now beyond the highest ridge of Beachy Head and our view swept the ocean to the west, with

much high tumbled land upon the north where church towers here and there marked a town that lay snugly in a valley; for man seeks an easy living, safe from the windy racket of an upland. There are few trees or hedges on these downs, and the lower growth of shrub and thistle crouches near the soil to be shielded from the storms of winter that play at noisy tag from top to top. On many of these rounded summits, as my map informs me, there are remains of Roman camps, and even to the eye the markings of mound and fosse are quite apparent. This is the home of South Down mutton, and patches of sheep stood munching for our eternal lunch. Far off across the world we saw a wind-mill in outline on a hill, but its lazy arms did not answer to the breeze.

This was our first acquaintance with the downs of Sussex. It is a district of which many poets have written, and always with a touch of homesickness as if they wrote in foreign lands and dreamed of coming back. Of these poets chiefly are Kipling, Swinburne and Hilaire Belloc. I shall be scanty in quotation, for an author must write his own book to earn an honest royalty. The lines of Swinburne are too softly fluent for this windy coast. He should have been of Latin race and applied his melodies to a lazy climate.

Hills and valleys where April rallies his radiant squadron of flowers and birds,

Steep strange beaches and lustrous reaches of fluctuant sea that the land engirds,

Fields and downs that the sunrise crowns with life

diviner than lives in words.

And this that follows is from Hilaire Bellochomely stuff that does not twist the tongue.

When I am living in the Midlands,

That are sodden and unkind,
I light my lamp in the evening:
My work is left behind;

And the great hills of the South Country
Come back into my mind.

If I ever become a rich man,

Or if ever I grow to be old,

I will build a house with deep thatch
To shelter me from the cold,

And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex told.

I will hold my house in the high wood
Within a walk of the sea,

And the men who were boys when I was a boy

Shall sit and drink with me.

"Does it occur to you" I asked, "that this would be an excellent place for a pint of stout?"

"You read my heart," said Bill.

He sat for a long time in meditation, slowly swishing the liquid in his cup, his eye lost in the vastness of the Downs. He nodded to thoughts that swayed his brain. A dreamy mask settled on his face. What would issue from those lips? I hushed Beezer with a warning finger. Some phrase of Teufelsdröckh, perhaps, aloft upon his tower of Weissnichtwo-a line from Shelley of the Caucasus-a flash to pierce with lightning our dumber

sense. At last he spoke-in even tones-calmly, as fits an utterance of wisdom. "It's"-he paused for emphasis and swished the liquor in his cup. "It's a very, very lovely view," is what he said.

We hoisted out and followed a rocky motor road with a wide prospect of ocean and hill to the village of Birling Gap.

Here we had lunch in an old-fashioned room with a picture of a young lady in flounces, romping with a spaniel. There was, also, a clock which did not run. And I am now convinced that these idle clocks of England, knowing how faulty is their guess upon the hour, have decided it is nobler to be right once each day and night than to dawdle wrong forever around the dial. We have known persons unlike them who, prattling their ignorance without cessation, would be better if their machinery also stayed unwound.

At Birling Gap we struck uphill backward from the ocean and, mist now lying on the sea, ships floated in the sky with the horizon's chart quite lost.

Green Sussex fading into blue

With one gray glimpse of sea.

A great valley sloped upon our right, with the hotel on Beachy Head cut sharp against the sky. And in the lowland was a lonely grange with buildings huddled close. Bill is quick at horrible suggestion, and in the manner of Sherlock Holmes he laid here a plot for a murder and pointed out the barn where the body was discovered. But now a friendly sun shone on the hills, and storm and night were needed for his dark invention.