A visit to the Salts Tilford home
As I am not a born cockney I have no illusions on the subject of the country. The uneven, ankle-twisting roads; the dusty hedges; the ditch with its dead dogs, rank weeds, and swarms of poisonous flies; groups of children torturing something; the dull, toil-broken, prematurely old agricultural labourer; the savage tramp; the manure heaps with their terrible odour; the chain of milestones from inn to inn, from cemetery to cemetery: all these I pass heavily by until a distant telegraph pole or signal-post tells me that the blessed rescuing train is at hand. From the village street into the railway station is a leap across five centuries from the brutalizing torpor of Nature’s tyranny over Man into the order and alertness of Man’s organized dominion over Nature.
And yet last week I allowed myself to be persuaded by my friend Henry Salt and his wife “to come down and stay until Monday” among the Surrey hills. Salt, a man of exceptional intelligence on most subjects, is country mad, and keeps a house at a hole called Tilford, down Farnham way, to which he retires at intervals, subsisting on the fungi of the neighbourhood and writing articles advocating that line of diet and justifying the weather and the season to “pent-up” London. He entertained no doubt that a day at Tilford would convert me from rusophobia to rurolatry; and as he is an excellent companion for a walk and a talk—if only he would, like a sensible man, confine himself to the Thames Embankment—I at last consented to the experiment, and even agreed to be marched to the summit of a scenic imposture called Hind Head, and there shown the downs of the south coast, the Portsmouth road (the Knightsbridge end of which I prefer), and above all, the place where three men were hunt for murdering some one who had induced them to take a country walk with him.
London was clean, fresh, and dry as I made my way to Waterloo after rising at the unnatural hour of seven on Sunday morning. Opening a book, I took care not to look out of the window between the stations until, after traversing a huge cemetery and a huge camp, we reached Farnham. As usual in the country, it was raining heavily. I asked my way to Tilford, and was told to go straight on for four miles or so. As I had brought nothing that could hurt Salt’s feelings by betraying my mistrust of his rustic paradise, I was without an umbrella; and the paradise, of course, took the fullest advantage of the omission. I do not know what the downs of the south coast may be; but I can vouch for both ups and downs as far as the Surrey roads are concerned. Between Farnham and Tilford there are nearly half a dozen hills and not one viaduct. Over these I trudged uphill on my toes and pounded downhill on my heels, making at each step an oozy quagmire full of liquid gamboge. As the landscape grew less human, the rain came down faster, reducing my book to pulp and transferring the red of the cover to my saturated grey jacket. Some waterproof variety of bird, screaming with laughter at me from a plantation, made me understand better than before why birds are habitually shot. My sleeves by this time struck cold to my wrists. Hanging my arms disconsolately so as to minimise the unpleasant repercussion, I looked down at my clinging knees, and instantly discharged a pint of black dye and rainwater over them from my hat brim. At this I laughed, much as criminals broken on the wheel used to laugh at the second stroke. A mile or two more of treadmill and gamboge churning, and I came to the outposts of a village, with a river hurrying over a bed of weeds of wonderful colours, spanned by a bridge constructed on the principle of the Gothic arch, so as to give horses the maximum of fatigue when when drawing burdens up one side, and drivers the maximum of danger when precipitated down the other. This was Tilford, uninhabited as far as I could see except by one man, whose surly looks asked me, more plainly than words could, what the devil I wanted there. Then up another hill between meeting house and church, and out upon an exposed stretch of road where the rain and wind had an unobstructed final pelt at me. Salt is mistaken in supposing that he lives at Tilford; as a matter of fact, he lives considerably beyond it; and I was on the point of turning whilst I yet had strength enough left to get back to London, when he hailed me from his door with a delighted shout of “Here he is!” and beamed at me as if my condition left nothing to be desired, and Tilford had done itself the highest credit. In no time my clothes were filling the kitchen with steam; and I, invested in some garments belonging to Salt’s brother-in-law, a celebrated poet whose figure is somewhat dissimilar to mine, was distending myself with my host’s latest discoveries in local vegetation.
My clothes dried fast. Quite early in the afternoon I put them on again, and found them some two inches shorter and tighter, but warm and desiccated. Nevertheless, I had a fit of sneezing; and Mrs. Salt produced a bottle of spirits of camphor. Unfamiliar with the violent nature of this remedy, I incautiously took a spoonful of it. It all but killed me; but I had the satisfaction, when I came to, of feeling tolerably sure that the influenza bacillus had not survived it. Then, the rain having ceased, we went out for a walk, and followed the road between the hills, which were like streaks of wet peat beneath the cloudy sky. Eventually we got out upon the uplands, where the mud was replaced by soft quicksand and whether already swept dry by the stark wind from the North Sea. Frensham Pond, like a waterworks denuded of machinery, lay to leeward of us, with a shudder passing over it from head to foot at every squall. I sympathized with it, and looked furtively at Salt, to see whether the ineffable dreariness of the scene had not dashed him. But he was used to it; and when we got home, began to plan an excursion to Hind Head for the morrow. The mere suggestion brought on a fresh fit of sneezing. I positively declined further camphor; and Mrs. Salt, by no means at the end of her resources, administered black currant jam and boiling water, which I rather liked.
Next morning I got up at eight to see the sun and hear the birds. I found, however, that I was up before them; and I neither heard nor saw them until I got back to the metropolis. Salt was jubilant because the wind was north-east, which made rain impossible. So after breakfast we started across the hills to Hind Head, through a mist that made the cows look like mammoths and the ridges like Alpine chains. When we were well out of reach of shelter the rain began. Salt declared that it would be nothing; that it could never hold out against the north-east wind. Nevertheless it did. When, after staggering and slipping up and down places which Salt described as lanes, but which were, in fact, rapidly filling beds of mountain mud and torrents, we at last got upon Hind Head (which was exactly like all the other mounds), we could hardly see one another, much less the south coast, through the mist. I saw the place where the men were hung; and I cannot deny that I felt a certain vindictive satisfaction in the idea of somebody having been served out there. When we started homeward Salt was in the highest spirits. The discovery of a wet day in a north-east wind elated him as the discovery of a comet elates an astronomer. As to Mrs. Salt, the conclusion she drew from it all was that I must come down another day. The rain gave her no more concern than if she had been a duck; and I could not help wondering whether her walking costume was not in reality a cleverly contrived bathing dress. She seemed perfectly happy, though the very sheep were brawling plaintively at the sky, and a cow to which I gave a friendly slap in passing was so saturated that the water squirted up my sleeve to the very armpit. Her chief theme whilst we were on the hills was the gentleness of her dog, whose movements in the direction of the sheep Salt was meanwhile carefully frustrating. Before we got home, my clothes contained three times as much water as they had gathered the day before. When I again resumed them they seemed to have been borrowed in an emergency from a very young brother.
I need not describe my walk back to Farnham after dinner. It rained all the way; but at least I was getting nearer to London. I have had change of air and a holiday; and I have no doubt I shall be able to throw off their efforts in a fortnight or so. Should my experience serve to warn any tempted Londoner against too high an estimate of the vernal delights of the Surrey Hills, it will perhaps not have been wasted.