AN OLD FARM
The sun rose two hours ago, but he is not to be found in the sky.
Rather he seems to have disembodied himself and to be lazily concealed
in the sweet mist that lies white and luminous over the half-mile of
level meadows at the foot of this hill. Those meadows are brown with
yet untouched grasses, grey and silken with the placid ruffled waves of
yesterday’s new swathes, and liquid emerald where the hay has already
been carted; and now the brown, now the grey, now the emerald warms and
becomes visible under the feet of the light that dwells in the mist.
Beyond the level rises a low but sudden hill of large, round-topped,
colourless, misty trees, known by their outline alone, and in the heart
of them a moving gleam as of sudden surf now and then, for there also
the sun is wandering and hiding himself but not his light. I turn my
head and, looking again, the sun is once more in the sky, the mist
has gone. The vast, hunched, hot, purring summer country is clearly
enjoying the light and warmth. The swallows flying are joyous and vivid
in colour and form as if I had the eyes of some light-hearted painter
of the world’s dawn. Where the gleam was, that haunt of the sun’s, that
half-hour’s inn to which he turns from the long white road of the sky
to rest, is seen to be the white farm house that stands in the midst
of woods and ricks.
Yet, though so clear, the house, half a mile off, seems to have been
restored by this fair and early light and the cooing of doves to the
seeming happy age in which it was built. The long, tearing crow of the
cock, the clink of dairy pans, the palpitating, groaning shout of the
shepherd, _Ho! ho! ho! ho! ho!_ now and then, even the whirr of the
mowing machines, sound as if the distance that sweetens them were the
distance of time and not only of space. They set a tune on this fair
morning to “What a dainty life the milkmaid leads” or that old song:--
“Pack clouds away, and welcome day!
With night we banish sorrow.
Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft
To give my love good morrow.
Wings from the wind to please her mind,
Notes from the lark I’ll borrow:
Bird, prune thy wing, nightingale, sing,
To give my love good morrow.
To give my love good morrow,
Notes from them all I’ll borrow.
Wake from thy nest, robin redbreast!
Sing, birds, in every furrow,
And from each bill let music shrill
Give my fair love good morrow.
Blackbird and thrush in every bush,
Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow,
You pretty elves, amongst yourselves
Sing my fair love good morrow.
To give my love good morrow,
Sing, birds, in every furrow.”
In those days when the house was built the poets were mainly townsmen,
preferring the town. Of the modern sad passion of Nature they had
nothing: they loved the fields in their season. They went out into
the country and in their _fêtes champêtres_ there was something gay
and foreign from us, the thought of which calls up a vision of fields
more unspoiled than they are now. There were elves in those days;
country people saw them, if poets failed. If you were returning home
after nightfall, from a day’s shooting, you might see the torches among
the oaks that lit the king of the cats to his grave. The country had
always been there and was to be there for ever. Men greeted it and
smiled as once they greeted Helen, not thinking of her immortality.
And there--yonder, half a mile away--lingers that age. I see it in the
green and silver wheat, and its glimmering, rustling hurry, and in
the bright path beside; the very noises of a gun rolling and breaking
up and embedding themselves in the dense wood cannot mutilate it, but
rather hint that somewhere, where the echoes last play, a spirit of
mirth is in hiding still.
The farmer himself confirms the superstition. Though nearly seventy,
he is staunch and straight, and spending most of his day on horseback,
with his calm, large-featured, sandstone face, filling easily and
handsomely with clear-souled anger and delight, he suggests the thought
of a Centaur, an impossible, noble dream of horse and man created by
a god dissatisfied with man and beast. Thirty centuries ago such a
man, so marvellously in harmony with the earth, would have gone down
in men’s memories as a demi-god or the best-loved of the fauns. His
voice rings over the meadows or across the table at the inn as strong
as a cow’s, as deep and humming and sweet as a bee’s in a chimney. When
he passes by men look at him, I think, as if he cast no shadow, so
compact of light is he. He has known sorrow, he has known pains that
threaten to crack the brain, but never melancholy. There is a kind of
gaiety in his sorrow even as in his joy; for sorrow changes him only
as a shadow changes a merry brook. He breathes of a day when men had
not so far outstripped the lark and nightingale in heaviness as we have
done. His jesting bathes the room or the lane in the light of a Golden
Age and the freshness of all the May days we can never recover. Nor do
I know anything human more pleasant than his grave smiling as he stands
in the newly reaped cornfields under the last light and sees the large
purple land and takes it all unto himself, and then turns without a
sigh and, drawing a long draught of his own cider in the cool granary,
drinks deep. He rises early and yet is as cheerful when he goes first
afield as when he goes to bed.
His house, dark with panelling and heavy furniture of every generation
since it was built, would be gloomy were it not for his blithe
sentiment about the past. He speaks of the long-dead generations not
as if they were names, but so that they are known certainly to have
lived and worked and enjoyed. That one planted the spreading oak,
that globed green world of nightingale and willow-wren and dove; that
added the knolled pasture and cut the deep, stony lane that leads to
it through the brook; another built the fruit wall and bought the copy
of _Tristram Shandy_ that stands with a hundred other books in the
dining-room. The books themselves are good to look at, all of them
original or early editions. There is _The Whole Duty of Man_ and many
sermons, Prior, _The Spectator_, Thomson’s _Seasons_, Fielding, _The
Rambler_, _The Task_, _The Deserted Village_, _The Waverley Novels_,
Dickens, and nothing later than _In Memoriam_; at that the family seems
to have stopped buying books. He knows them shrewdly enough, but it is
as what the family has approved and lived on that he values them. Never
was a man who seemed to take his mortality so happily and naturally.
One day, showing me a small board of ancient things, he brought out
a tray of coins, none earlier than Charles II., but each connected
with one or another of the family. Amongst them was a modern sixpence.
That was his third deposit, after the guinea and the groat, and he was
too much pleased with these slender memorials not to do his own part
in continuing them. “What,” he said carelessly, “would they think of
me in a hundred years’ time if I had not put a sixpence in?” And he
smiled lightly as if he had been on a hill and seen the long tracts of
time ahead and his farm and strangers of his own blood working in its
fields.