the grocer’s, where the red-faced young man in the complete suit of white apron is slapping about the butter as if he could make more of it by that process: and next door to him the tailor is whistling to his blackbird, while he himself sits cross-legged like a Turk, and sews and sews, whipping out the thread as if he was positively vexed at human vanity.
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But High Elms is a railway station, and there goes the five minutes’ bell, so I must hurry on, or I shall be too late for the 11.30 train to London Bridge. But a quiet out-of-door group in a back street behind the almshouses detains me for just an instant. It seems to me so eminently suggestive of the scanty traffic that prevails in the back streets of High Elms.
In the middle of the quiet street, in front of a row of old gable-ended houses, the plaster walls of which are striped with beams, sits an itinerant tinker—the Christopher Sly of Surrey market-towns. He is sitting on the box that contains his shreds of bright tin; his smoking pot of fire is close by him, and in it is thrust his soldering-iron; his wheezy bellows lies beside it, not to forget a tea-kettle without a handle that will soon demand his medical care. At present he is employed on a bulgy bruised saucepan, much to the delight and interest of Goody Rayner’s four grandchildren, who consider it “as good as a play.” The hoop therefore rests unrevolved; the rattle ceases to shake and roll; the doll figure of the Duke of Wellington, bought at last High Elms fair, reposes doubled up in the wheeled cart, for the moment discarded. There is something mysterious and Arab-like about Sly, what with his white hat and crape band, his bare arms, and his scorched apron—a lineal descendant from Tubal Cain he is, though the genealogical tree is a tall one, and Sly is certainly at the bottom of it.
A moment more and I am at the station; the train comes grinding up with its many wheels. I am borne away on the wings of vapour and fire towards London, whose dome, from the downs above High Elms, seems no larger than a mushroom-button. Do you hear that hammer—clink, clink? Do you see those sparks glittering in the dim workshop? That’s Barnes, the High Elms blacksmith, driving out horseshoes for Squire Harcourt’s hunters, and Jack Hughes and Silly-Billy are, I declare, spectators, and lean over the hatch.
Whish! faster!—we are away. I have not lost a day as Titus did, for I have had a glimpse of a pleasant phase of tranquil unambitious English life. And now long lines of close dark elms; now bright pools, where cows wade and drink; now fallows spotted with rooks; now bushy copses where birds sing; now ricks and farmyards.
Presently a dreary change to rows of black chimneys and acres of red roofs, to sordid binns of gardens hung with clothes, to dull tea-gardens with an air of dismal vulgar pleasure about them, and I am in London.
Walter Thornbury.
