THE CHILD WANDERS IN THE WOOD.
There is a very delightful old story which used to be given to children,
though I have not seen it for a long time in the hands of any children.
It was called "The Story without an End." A child wandered among the
flowers, who talked to him. That is the whole story. There were coloured
pictures in it. The story began without a beginning, and it came to a
sudden stop without an ending.
It is perhaps upon a reminiscence of this old story that Jefferies has
based nearly all his own. They are very delightful, especially the
shorter stories; but they seldom have any end. There is sometimes, but
not often, a story; there is generally only a succession of
scenes--some delightful, all beautiful, and all original in the sense
that nobody except Jefferies could possibly have written any of them.
The child wanders. That is all. Some day, when the worth of this writer
is universally recognised, these scenes and stories will be detached
from the papers with which they are published, and issued in separate
form, as beautifully illustrated as the art of the next generation--this
will not take place for another generation--will allow.
For instance, Guido--they called him Guido because they thought that in
childhood Guido the painter must have greatly resembled this boy--runs
along the grassy lane at the top of a bank between the fir-trees till he
comes to a wheat-field. Then he climbs down into this field, and sees
the most wonderful things: lovely azure corn-flowers--"curious flowers
with knobs surrounded with little blue flowers, like a lady's bonnet.
They were a beautiful blue, not like any other blue, not like the
violets in the garden, or the sky over the trees, or the geranium in the
grass, or the bird's-eyes by the path." Then he wanders on, starting a
rabbit, scaring a hawk, and listening to the birds. Presently he sits
down on the branch of an oak, with his feet dangling over a streamlet.
Then he remembers--children do remember things in the strangest
way--that if he wants to hear a story, or to talk with the grass, he
really must not try to catch the butterflies. So he touches the rushes
with his foot, and says, "Rush, rush, tell them I am here." Immediately
there follows a little wind, and the wheat swings to and fro, the
oak-leaves rustle, the rushes bow, and the shadows slip forwards and
back again. After this, of course, the nearest wheat-ear begins to talk.
Now the wheat has been so long growing for the use of man that it has
grown to love him. Think of that! And it pains the wheat to see so much
misery and needless labour among the people. Of course, we cannot expect
a wheat-ear to know that little boys do not understand the problems of
poverty and labour.
"'There is one thing we do not like, and that is, all the labour
and the misery. Why cannot your people have us without so much
labour, and why are so many of you unhappy? Why cannot they be all
happy with us as you are, dear? For hundreds and hundreds of years
now the wheat every year has been sorrowful for your people, and I
think we get more sorrowful every year about it, because, as I was
telling you just now, the flowers go, and the swallows go, the old,
old oaks go, and that oak will go, under the shade of which you are
lying, Guido; and if your people do not gather the flowers now, and
watch the swallows, and listen to the blackbirds whistling, as you
are listening now while I talk, then Guido, my love, they will
never pick any flowers, nor hear any birds' songs. They think they
will, they think that when they have toiled, and worked a long
time, almost all their lives, then they will come to the flowers,
and the birds, and be joyful in the sunshine. But no, it will not
be so, for then they will be old themselves, and their ears dull,
and their eyes dim, so that the birds will sound a great distance
off, and the flowers will not seem bright.
"'Of course, we know that the greatest part of your people cannot
help themselves, and must labour on like the reapers till their
ears are full of the dust of age. That only makes us more
sorrowful, and anxious that things should be different. I do not
suppose we should think about them had we not been in man's hand so
long that now we have got to feel with man. Every year makes it
more pitiful, because then there are more flowers gone, and added
to the vast numbers of those gone before, and never gathered, or
looked at, though they could have given so much pleasure. And all
the work and labour, and thinking, and reading, and learning that
your people do ends in nothing--not even one flower. We cannot
understand why it should be so. There are thousands of wheat-ears
in this field, more than you would know how to write down with your
pencil, though you have learned your tables, sir. Yet all of us
thinking, and talking, cannot understand why it is when we consider
how clever your people are, and how they bring ploughs, and
steam-engines, and put up wires along the roads to tell you things
when you are miles away, and sometimes we are sown where we can
hear the hum, hum, all day of the children learning in the school.
The butterflies flutter over us, and the sun shines, and the doves
are very, very happy at their nest, but the children go on hum, hum
inside this house, and learn, learn. So we suppose you must be very
clever, and yet you cannot manage this. All your work is wasted,
and you labour in vain--you dare not leave it a minute.
"'If you left it a minute it would all be gone; it does not mount
up and make a store, so that all of you could sit by it and be
happy. Directly you leave off you are hungry, and thirsty, and
miserable like the beggars that tramp along the dusty road here.
All the thousand years of labour since this field was first
ploughed have not stored up anything for you. It would not matter
about the work so much if you were only happy; the bees work every
year, but they are happy; the doves build a nest every year, but
they are very, very happy. We think it must be because you do not
come out to us and be with us and think more as we do. It is not
because your people have not got plenty to eat and drink--you have
as much as the bees. Why, just look at us! Look at the wheat that
grows all over the world; all the figures that were ever written in
pencil could not tell how much, it is such an immense quantity. Yet
your people starve and die of hunger every now and then, and we
have seen the wretched beggars tramping along the road. We have
known of times when there was a great pile of us, almost a hill
piled up; it was not in this country, it was in another warmer
country, and yet no one dared to touch it--they died at the bottom
of the hill of wheat. The earth is full of skeletons of people who
have died of hunger. They are dying now this minute in your big
cities, with nothing but stones all round them, stone walls and
stone streets; not jolly stones like those you threw in the water,
dear--hard, unkind stones that make them cold and let them die,
while we are growing here, millions of us, in the sunshine with the
butterflies floating over us. This makes us unhappy; I was very
unhappy this morning till you came running over and played with
us.
"'It is not because there is not enough: it is because your people
are so short-sighted, so jealous and selfish, and so curiously
infatuated with things that are not so good as your old toys which
you have flung away and forgotten. And you teach the children hum,
hum, all day to care about such silly things, and to work for them,
and to look to them as the object of their lives. It is because you
do not share us among you without price or difference; because you
do not share the great earth among you fairly, without spite and
jealousy and avarice; because you will not agree; you silly,
foolish people to let all the flowers wither for a thousand years
while you keep each other at a distance, instead of agreeing and
sharing them! Is there something in you--as there is poison in the
nightshade, you know it, dear, your papa told you not to touch
it--is there a sort of poison in your people that works them up
into a hatred of one another? Why, then, do you not agree and have
all things, all the great earth can give you, just as we have the
sunshine and the rain? How happy your people could be if they would
only agree! But you go on teaching even the little children to
follow the same silly objects, hum, hum, hum, all the day, and they
will grow up to hate each other, and to try which can get the most
round things--you have one in your pocket.'
"'Sixpence,' said Guido. 'It's quite a new one.'
"'And other things quite as silly,' the Wheat continued. 'All the
time the flowers are flowering, but they will go, even the oaks
will go. We think the reason you do not all have plenty, and why
you do not do only just a little work, and why you die of hunger if
you leave off, and why so many of you are unhappy in body and mind,
and all the misery is because you have not got a spirit like the
wheat, like us; you will not agree, and you will not share, and you
will hate each other, and you will be so avaricious, and you will
_not_ touch the flowers, or go into the sunshine (you would rather
half of you died among the hard stones first), and you will teach
your children hum, hum, to follow in some foolish course that has
caused you all this unhappiness a thousand years, and you will
_not_ have a spirit like us, and feel like us. Till you have a
spirit like us, and feel like us, you will never, never be happy.'"
Was not that a fine talk for the child to have with the wheat-ear? And
there is more of it, a great deal more in this story without an end
which you will find in the book called "The Open Air."
Again, another boy--not Guido by any means, nor in the least like
Guido--had been sent to gather acorns. He gathered a few, dropped them
into his bag, and lay down in the warm corner by the root of the tree to
sleep. There his grandmother found him, and there she beat him.
"A wickeder boy never lived: nothing could be done with the
reprobate. He was her grandson--at least, the son of her daughter,
for he was not legitimate. The man drank, the girl died, as was
believed, of sheer starvation: the granny kept the child, and he
was now between ten and eleven years old. She had done and did her
duty, as she understood it. A prayer-meeting was held in her
cottage twice a week, she prayed herself aloud among them, she was
a leading member of the sect. Neither example, precept, nor the rod
could change that boy's heart. In time perhaps she got to beat him
from habit rather than from any particular anger of the moment,
just as she fetched water and filled her kettle, as one of the
ordinary events of the day. Why did not the father interfere?
Because if so he would have had to keep his son: so many shillings
a week the less for ale.
"In the garden attached to the cottage there was a small shed with
a padlock, used to store produce or wood in. One morning, after a
severe beating, she drove the boy in there and locked him in the
whole day without food. It was no use, he was as hardened as ever.
"A footpath which crossed the field went by the cottage, and every
Sunday those who were walking to church could see the boy in the
window with granny's Bible open before him. There he had to sit,
the door locked, under terror of stick, and study the page. What
was the use of compelling him to do that? He could not read. 'No,'
said the old woman, 'he won't read, but I makes him look at his
book.'
"The thwacking went on for some time, when one day the boy was sent
on an errand two or three miles, and for a wonder started willingly
enough. At night he did not return, nor the next day, nor the next,
and it was as clear as possible that he had run away. No one
thought of tracking his footsteps, or following up the path he had
to take, which passed a railway, brooks, and a canal. He had run
away, and he might stop away: it was beautiful summer weather, and
it would do him no harm to stop out for a week. A dealer who had
business in a field by the canal thought indeed that he saw
something in the water, but he did not want any trouble, nor indeed
did he know that someone was missing. Most likely a dead dog; so he
turned his back and went to look again at the cow he thought of
buying. A barge came by, and the steerswoman, with a pipe in her
mouth, saw something roll over and come up under the rudder: the
length of the barge having passed over it. She knew what it was,
but she wanted to reach the wharf and go ashore and have a quart of
ale. No use picking it up, only make a mess on deck, there was no
reward--'Gee-up! Neddy.' The barge went on, turning up the mud in
the shallow water, sending ripples washing up to the grassy meadow
shores, while the moorhens hid in the flags till it was gone. In
time a labourer walking on the towing-path saw 'it,' and fished it
out, and with it a slender ash sapling, with twine and hook, a worm
still on it. This was why the dead boy had gone so willingly,
thinking to fish in the 'river,' as he called the canal. When his
feet slipped and he fell in, his fishing-line somehow became
twisted about his arms and legs, else most likely he would have
scrambled out, as it was not very deep. This was the end; nor was
he even remembered. Does anyone sorrow for the rook, shot, and hung
up as a scarecrow? The boy had been talked to, and held up as a
scarecrow all his life: he was dead, and that is all. As for
granny, she felt no twinge: she had done her duty."
There is another chapter among these papers which is a real story. It
is, I am certain, a true story, because the plot is not at all in the
manner of Jefferies. It is called, grimly, "Field Play." The "Story of
Dolly" it should be called--of hapless Dolly--of Dolly the village
beauty. Would you like to see how Jefferies can describe a beautiful
woman?
"So fair a complexion could not brown even in summer, exposed to
the utmost heat. The beams indeed did heighten the hue of her
cheeks a little, but it did not shade to brown. Her chin and neck
were wholly untanned, white and soft, and the blue veins roamed at
their will. Lips red, a little full perhaps; teeth slightly
prominent, but white and gleamy as she smiled. Dark-brown hair in
no great abundance, always slipping out of its confinement and
straggling, now on her forehead, and now on her shoulders, like
wandering bines of bryony. The softest of brown eyes under long
eyelashes; eyes that seemed to see everything in its gentlest
aspect, that could see no harm anywhere. A ready smile on the face,
and a smile in the form. Her shape yielded so easily at each
movement that it seemed to smile as she walked. Her nose was the
least pleasing feature--not delicate enough to fit with the
complexion, and distinctly upturned, though not offensively. But it
was not noticed; no one saw anything beyond the laughing lips, the
laughing shape, the eyes that melted so near to tears. The torn
dress, the straggling hair, the tattered shoes, the unmended
stocking, the straw hat split, the mingled poverty and
carelessness--perhaps rather dreaminess--disappeared when once you
had met the full untroubled gaze of those beautiful eyes.
Untroubled, that is, with any ulterior thought of evil or cunning;
they were as open as the day, the day which you can make your own
for evil or good. So, too, like the day, was she ready to the
making."
The miserable, hapless fate of poor Dolly, the horrible tragedy of her
life and death, is told with relentless truth and fidelity. In Arcadia
such things may happen, and, I suppose, do constantly happen. The story
belongs properly to the chapter on English country life last quarter of
the nineteenth century, which, when it is written, will, I think, be
taken altogether from the works of Jefferies and Thomas Hardy.
"The Story of Bevis" is the story of Guido writ large. It is also the
story of Jefferies himself as a boy. Observe, most writers of fiction,
if they were proposing to write the story of a boy, would first create
an imaginary boy, and then surround him with imaginary adventures,
invented on purpose for that boy. Jefferies does nothing of the kind. It
is not his method. He remembers his own boyhood--the most delightful
part of it--when he played with his brother and his cousin upon the
shores of the lake behind the farmhouse, and made his canoe, and paddled
about the water exploring the creeks and islets, the bays and harbours
of that wonderful coast. The boy, Bevis, is, in fact, himself.
Therefore, he does all the things that Jefferies and his brother did in
their boyhood. Bevis even makes a raft, and, when the raft is made, he
sails down the Mississippi as far as Central Africa, where, of course,
he encounters savages, and has to fight them. To discover an unknown
island on such a voyage is an adventure certain to be met with. To build
a hut, to provision a cave, and to dwell for a while upon that island is
another adventure equally certain when one goes to Central Africa, and
there is no reason at all why such a story should ever have any end.
Consequently, there is none--only a full stop, and then a line with
"Finis" written under it. In fact, there never was such a book of boy's
make-believe. Observe, if you please, a thing which shows the real
genius of the writer. It is that you feel, all the time you are reading
the book, the village itself only a quarter of a mile from Central
Africa. The bailiff, and the dogs, and the village lads are always
coming across us in the midst of the Central African jungle in the most
natural and absurd way. For boys, as Jefferies remembered, are never
quite carried away by their own imaginations. There are many very fine
passages in the book, which has only one fault--it is three times as
long as it should have been. The conception is delightful. In the
execution the author has not known when to stay his hand. Perhaps one of
those limitations of which I have spoken already was an imperfect
faculty of selection. For boys, the story should have been compressed
into one volume. One cannot understand, indeed, how his publishers
consented to put forth the book in three-volume novel form. Nobody,
after the first chapter, could possibly accept it as a three-volume
novel. But it contains many very striking and beautiful and poetic
pages.
For instance, Bevis watches the sunrise:
"The sun had not yet stood out from the orient, but his precedent
light shone through the translucent blue. Yet it was not blue, nor
is there any word, nor is a word possible to convey the feeling
unless one could be built up of signs and symbols like those in the
book of the magician, which glowed and burned to and fro the page.
For the blue of the precious sapphire is thick to it, the turquoise
dull: these hard surfaces are no more to be compared to it than
sand and gravel. They are but stones, hard, cold, pitiful: that
which gives them their lustre is the light. Through delicate
porcelain sometimes the light comes, and it is not the porcelain,
it is the light that is lovely. But porcelain is clay, and the
light is shorn, checked, and shrunken. Down through the beauteous
azure came the Light itself, pure, unreflected Light, untouched,
untarnished even by the dew-sweetened petal of a flower,
descending, flowing like a wind, a wind of glory sweeping through
the blue. A luminous purple glowing as Love glows in the cheek, so
glowed the passion of the heavens.
"Two things only reach the soul. By touch there is indeed emotion.
But the light in the eye, the sound of the voice! the soul trembles
and like a flame leaps to meet them. So to the luminous purple
azure his heart ascended."
In "Wood Magic" Jefferies carries on the story of "Bevis" and of
"Guido." The creatures all talk to the boy, which makes going into the
fields and woods a much more delightful thing than it is to other boys,
to whom they will not address one single word. There is a wicked weasel,
for instance, caught in a gin, who tells such abominable lies as one may
expect from a weasel. There is also a fable about a magpie and a jay,
which fails, somehow, to arrest the reader. But when you have got
through the business with the creatures--I do not care in the least for
them unless Bevis is with them--you presently arrive at a most
delightful chapter where Bevis is instructed by the wind. It is such a
wise, wise wind, it knows so much. If Bevis will only remember the half
of what the wind has taught him!
"'Bevis, my love, if you want to know all about the sun, and the
stars, and everything, make haste and come to me, and I will tell
you, dear. In the morning, dear, get up as quick as you can, and
drink me as I come down from the hill. In the day go up on the
hill, dear, and drink me again, and stay there if you can till the
stars shine out, and drink still more of me.
"'And by-and-by you will understand all about the sun, and the
moon, and the stars, and the Earth which is so beautiful, Bevis. It
is so beautiful, you can hardly believe how beautiful it is. Do not
listen, dear, not for one moment, to the stuff and rubbish they
tell you down there in the houses where they will not let me come.
If they say the Earth is not beautiful, tell them they do not speak
the truth. But it is not their fault, for they have never seen it,
and, as they have never drank me, their eyes are closed, and their
ears shut up tight. But every evening, dear, before you get into
bed, do you go to your window--the same as you did the evening the
Owl went by--and lift the curtain and look up at the sky, and I
shall be somewhere about, or else I shall be quiet in order that
there may be no clouds, so that you may see the stars. In the
morning, as I said before, rush out and drink me up.
"'The more you drink of me, the more you will want, and the more I
shall love you. Come up to me upon the hills, and your heart will
never be heavy, but your eyes will be bright, and your step quick,
and you will sing and shout----'
"'So I will,' said Bevis, 'I will shout. Holloa!' and he ran up on
to the top of the little round hill, to which they had now
returned, and danced about on it as wild as could be.
"'Dance away, dear,' said the Wind, much delighted. 'Everybody
dances who drinks me. The man in the hill there----'
"'What man?' said Bevis, 'and how did he get in the hill; just tell
him I want to speak to him.'
"'Darling,' said the Wind, very quiet and softly, 'he is dead, and
he is in the little hill you are standing on, under your feet. At
least, he was there once, but there is nothing of him there now.
Still it is his place, and as he loved me, and I loved him, I come
very often and sing here.'
"'When did he die?' said Bevis. 'Did I ever see him?'
"'He died just about a minute ago, dear; just before you came up
the hill. If you were to ask the people who live in the houses,
where they will not let me in (they carefully shut out the sun,
too), they would tell you he died thousands of years ago; but they
are foolish, very foolish. It was hardly so long ago as yesterday.
Did not the Brook tell you all about that?
"'Now this man, and all his people, used to love me and drink me,
as much as ever they could all day long and a great part of the
night, and when they died they still wanted to be with me, and so
they were all buried on the tops of the hills, and you will find
these curious little mounds everywhere on the ridges, dear, where I
blow along. There I come to them still, and sing through the long
dry grass, and rush over the turf, and I bring the scent of the
clover from the plain, and the bees come humming along upon me. The
sun comes, too, and the rain. But I am here most; the sun only
shines by day, and the rain only comes now and then.'
* * * * *
"'There never was a yesterday,' whispered the Wind presently, 'and
there never will be to-morrow. It is all one long to-day. When the
man in the hill was you were too, and he still is now you are here;
but of these things you will know more when you are older, that is
if you will only continue to drink me. Come, dear, let us race on
again.' So the two went on and came to a hawthorn-bush, and Bevis,
full of mischief always, tried to slip away from the Wind round the
bush, but the Wind laughed and caught him.
"A little further and they came to the fosse of the old camp. Bevis
went down into the trench, and he and the Wind raced round along it
as fast as ever they could go, till presently he ran up out of it
on the hill, and there was the waggon underneath him, with the load
well piled up now. There was the plain, yellow with stubble; the
hills beyond it and the blue valley, just the same as he had left
it.
"As Bevis stood and looked down, the Wind caressed him and said,
'Good-bye, darling, I am going yonder, straight across to the blue
valley and the blue sky, where they meet; but I shall be back
again when you come next time. Now remember, my dear, to drink
me--come up here and drink me.'
"'Shall you be here?' said Bevis; 'are you quite sure you will be
here?'
"'Yes,' said the Wind, 'I shall be quite certain to be here; I
promise you, love, I will never go quite away. Promise me
faithfully, too, that you will come up and drink me, and shout and
race and be happy.'
"'I promise,' said Bevis, beginning to go down the hill; 'good-bye,
jolly old Wind.'
"'Good-bye, dearest,' whispered the Wind, as he went across out
towards the valley. As Bevis went down the hill, a blue harebell,
who had been singing farewell to summer all the morning, called to
him and asked him to gather her and carry her home, as she would
rather go with him than stay now autumn was near.
"Bevis gathered the harebell, and ran with the flower in his hand
down the hill, and as he ran the wild thyme kissed his feet and
said, 'Come again, Bevis, come again.' At the bottom of the hill
the waggon was loaded now; so they lifted him up, and he rode home
on the broad back of the leader."
There is one more story. I must not quote it, because it is too long,
but I cannot pass it over in silence. It will be found in "Nature Round
London." It is the story of a trout, and it has always filled me with
the most profound and most sincere admiration. So little did Jefferies
understand that he was here working out a picture of the most original
kind, of the deepest interest, that he actually divides it in two, goes
off to something else, and then returns to it. His inexhaustible mind
scattered its treasures about as lavishly as Nature herself scatters
abroad her flowers and her seeds, and with almost as little care about
arrangement, selection, and grouping.