An old-fashioned carrier's cart, such as you may still meet on the roads of Sussex, tilted, one-horsed, and moving at the leisurely pace of a bye-gone age, turned East at the Turnpike, and made slowly along the Lewes-Beachbourne road under the northern scarp of the Downs one evening of autumn in 1908. In it, at the back of the driver, were a young man and a young woman, the only passengers, ensconced among hen-coops, flitches of bacon, and baskets of greens.
They sat hand-in-hand.
The woman was a noble creature, about her the majestic tranquillity of a great three-decker that comes to rest in sunset waters after its Trafalgar. The man, but for a certain wistfulness about his eyes which betokened undue sensibility, was not remarkable. Till he spoke you would have said he was a gentleman—that is to say if your eyes confined their scrutiny to his face and refused to see his hands, his boots, his clothes. When he spoke you would have recognised at once that he was Sussex of the soil as, surely, was the woman beside him; though the speech of both was faintly marred with the all-pervading cockney accent of those who have passed beyond the village-green into the larger world of the England of to-day.
Both ca-a-ad musically enough; but less by far than the little carrier, whose round back blocked the view of the road, and the twitching ears of old mare Jenny. For nearly fifty years, man and boy, Isaac Woolgar had travelled twice a day, six days a week, the road on which he was travelling now. He had seen the long-horns—those "black runts" so familiar to old-world Sussex—give place to horses in the plough upon the hill; the horses in their turn supplanted on the road by motors; and men using the legs God had given them to trundle wheels instead of walk. Undisturbed, he plodded on his way, accompanied always by the wires lifted on tall black poles, crowned with tiers of tiny porcelain chimney-pots unknown in his youth, which had linked Lewes with Beachbourne these forty years; and he would so plod until he died. The Star on the hill in Old Town, Beachbourne, marked one end of his day's journey; and the equally ancient Lamb, at Aldwoldston, black-timbered and gabled too, marked the other. He had never been further "oop country," as he called it, than Heathfield. Lewes was the utmost term of his wanderings West, Beau-nez East; while the sea at Newhaven had bounded him on the South. Within this tiny quadrilateral, which just about determined also the wanderings of an old dog-fox in Abbot's Wood, he had passed his life; and nothing now would ever induce him to pass the bounds he had allotted himself.
To the man and woman in the cart old Mus. Woolgar had been a familiar figure from childhood. The little girl skipping by the market-cross in Aldwoldston would stop to watch him start; the little boy would wait at Billing's Corner on the top of the hill to see him come along the New Road past Motcombe at the end of his journey. Long before either had been aware of the other's existence the old carrier had served as an invisible link between them.
