SPRING--HAMPSHIRE--KENT--SURREY
Next day the wind has flown and the snow is again almost rain: there
is ever a hint of pale sky above, but it is not as luminous as the
earth. The trees over the road have a beauty of darkness and moistness.
Beyond them the earth is a sainted corpse, with a blue light over it
that is fast annihilating all matter and turning the landscape to
a spirit only. Night and the snow descend upon it, and at dawn the
nests are full of snow. The yews and junipers on a league of Downs
are chequered white upon white slopes, and the green larches support
cirrus clouds of snow. In the garden the daffodils bend criss-cross
under snow that cannot quite conceal the yellow flowers. But the snow
has ceased. The sky is at first pale without a cloud and tender as from
a long imprisonment; it deepens in hue as the sun climbs and gathers
force. The crooked paths up the Downs begin to glitter like streaks of
lightning. The thrushes sing. From the straight dark beeches the snow
cannot fall fast enough in great drops, in showers, in masses that
release the boughs with a quiver and a gleam. The green leaves close
to the ground creep out, and against them the snow is blue. A little
sighing wind rustles ivy and juniper and yew. The sun mounts, and from
his highest battlement of cloud blows a long blast of light over the
pure land. Once more the larch is wholly green, the beech rosy brown
with buds. A cart goes by all a-gleam with a load of crimson-sprouting
swedes and yellow-sprouting mangolds that seem to be burning through
the net of snow above them. Down each side of every white road runs
a stream that sings and glitters in ripples like innumerable crystal
flowers. Water drips and trickles and leaps and gushes and oozes
everywhere, and extracts the fragrance of earth and green and flowers
under the heat that hastens to undo the work of the snow. The air is
hot and wet. The snow is impatient to be water again. It still makes
a cape over the briers and brambles, and there is a constant drip and
steam and song of drops from the crossing branches in the cave below.
Loud sounds the voice of leaf and branch and imprisoned water in the
languor and joy of their escape. On every hand there is a drip and gush
and ooze of water, a crackle and rustle and moan of plants and trees
unfolding and unbending and greeting air and light; a close, humid,
many-perfumed host; wet gloom and a multitudinous glitter; a movement
of water and of the shadows like puffs of smoke that fleet over the
white fields under the clouds.
And over and through it a cuckoo is crying and crying, first overhead,
then afar, and gradually near and retreating again. He is soon gone,
but the ears are long afterwards able to extract the spirit of the
song, the exact interval of it, from among all the lasting sounds,
until we hear it as clearly as before, out of the blue sky, out of
the white cloud, out of the shining grey water. It is a word of
power--cuckoo! The melting of the snow is faster than ever, and at the
end of the day there is none left except in some hollows of the Downs
on the slopes behind the topmost of the beeches that darkly fringe the
violet sky. In the misty shutting of the light there are a thousand
songs laced by cuckoos’ cries and the first hooting of owls, and the
beeches have become merely straight lines of pearl in a mist of their
own boughs. Below them, in the high woods, goes on the fall of the
melting snow through the gloomy air, and the splash on the dead leaves.
This gloom and monotonous sound make an exquisite cloister, visited but
not disturbed by the sound of the blackbirds singing in the mist of the
vale underneath. Slowly the mist has deepened from the woods to the
vale and now the eye cannot see from tree to tree. Then the straight
heavy rain descends upon the songs and the clatterings of blackbirds,
and when they are silenced the moorhen’s watery hoot announces that the
world belongs to the beasts and the rainy dark until to-morrow.
Beautiful upon the waters, beautiful upon the mountains, is the
cuckoo’s song, and most rare over the snow. But of all places and hours
I should choose the crags of Land’s End in a dawn of June; and let it
be the end of that month and the wind be grey and cold, so that the
ships stagger in the foam and crag-like waves as they catch the early
light tenderly upon their sails. The cold beams, the high precipices
yet full of shadow and of the giddy calling of daw and gull, the black
but white-lipped water and the blacker cormorant flying straight across
it just over the foam, the sky golden yet still pallid and trembling
from the dungeon of night--through it floats that beloved voice
breaking, breaking, and the strong year at the summit of its career
has begun to decline. The song is memorable and fair also when the
drenched gardens toss and spread their petals in the grass. Many a one
hears it who will not hear it again, and many that once expected it
impatiently hears it no more because he is old and deaf or because his
heart is closed. There is not a broad and perfect day of heat and wind
and sunshine that is not haunted by that voice seeming to say the earth
is hollow under our feet and the sky hollow over our heads.
There are whole nights when the cuckoo will not sleep, and the woods
on either side of a road twenty miles long emit the cry of these
conquerors under the full moon and the white stars of love. If you
pause it will appear that it is not a silence that this song rules
over; for what was a silence was full of sounds, as many sounds as
there are leaves, sounds of creeping, gliding, pattering, rustling,
slow wormlike continuous noises and sudden sounds. And strangely at
length is the glorious day reared high upon the ruins of this night, of
which the survivors slink away into the old forgotten roads, the dense
woods, the chimneys of deserted houses.
It is a jolly note only when the bird is visible close at hand and
the power of his throat is felt. Often two or three will answer one
another, or for half a day will loiter about a coombe for the sake
of an echo. It is one of the richest sounds in nature when two sing
together, the second note of one being almost blended with the first
of the other; and so they continue as if themselves entranced by the
harmony, and the navvy leans upon his pick to listen.
* * * * *
On the day after the great melting of the snow the white beam tree,
at the edges of high woods and in the midst of the beeches, has its
hour, when its thousands of large white buds point upward like a
multitudinous candelabrum. For me the white beam is always associated
with wayfaring. Its white buds are the traveller’s joy of spring. The
buds like blossoms or flames bewitch from afar off. They are always
upon sloping ground and usually upon hillsides in the chalk land. In
the autumn their leaves often shrivel before falling, and turn to a
colour that looks like pink almond blossom by contrast with juniper and
yew. When they have fallen, they are as much to be noticed. They lie
commonly with their white undersides uppermost, and though rain soaks
them and wind scatters them and they are trodden down, they preserve
their whiteness until the winter or the following spring. It is a
tree that belongs, above all others except the yew, to the Pilgrims’
Way, and it is impossible to forget these leaves lying white on the
untouched wayside sward, among the dewy purple and crimson and gold of
other leaves, sparkling in the sun and entering into all the thoughts
and fancies and recollections that come to one who goes in solitude
along that old road when the scent of the dying year is pungent as
smoke and sweet as flowers.
KENT, SURREY AND HAMPSHIRE.
The beam tree is bright on the soft hills all through the days of
rain following upon the snow and sun. There are days when earth is
absorbed in her delights of growth and multiplication. The rain is
a veil which she wraps about her that she may toil and sing low at
her myriad divine domesticities untroubled. Delicate snails climb the
young stalks of grass and flower, and their houses, pearly, chocolate,
tawny, pure or ringed or chequered, slide after them. The leaves,
with their indescribable charm of infinitely varied division, of wild
clematis, maple, brier, hawthorn, and many more, come forth into the
rain which hangs on their drooping points and on the thorns. The lichen
enjoys the enduring mist of the woods; the blackthorns are crusted
and bearded with lichens of fleshy green-silver and ochre which grow
even on the thorns themselves and round the new leaves and flowers.
The birch is now an arrested shower of green, but not enough to hide
the white limbs of the nymph in the midst of it. The beech trunk is
now most exquisitely coloured: it is stained and spotted and blotched
with grey and rough silver and yellow-green lichen, palest green
mould, all the greens of moss, and an elusive dappling and graining of
greys, of neutral tints and almost blacks in the wood itself, still
more diversified by the trickling rain and the changing night. The yew
bark is plated and scaled and stained with greens and reds and greys,
powdered with green mould, and polished in places to the colour of
mahogany. Even the long-deserted thistly cornfields are dim purple with
ground-ivy flowers and violets. The marsh, the pasture, the wood, the
hedge, has each its abundance of bloom and of scent; so, too, has the
still water and the running water. But this is the perfect hour of the
green of grass, so intense that it has an earthly light of its own in
the sunless mist. It is best seen in meadows bounded on two or three
sides by the sheer dark edges of woods; for in that contrast the grass
seems a new element, neither earth, nor water, nor sky--under our feet
like the earth, gleaming and even as water, remote and celestial as the
sky. And the voices of the green growing in the rain are innumerable.
The very ground has now one voice of its own, the gurgle of its soaking
hollow places.
HAMPSHIRE.
The fields where the green is now greenest, those bounded on two or
more sides by woods, are of a kind not peculiar to Hampshire. They are
usually on the greensand and lie in smooth, often winding, hollows
like the beds of rivers. Sometimes the banks of these beds are steep,
and they are clothed in woods or in hedges of hornbeam, hazel, ash and
thorn that have grown almost to woods. The meadows are green broad
rivers running up between the dark trees that bathe their roots in
primroses. Sometimes there is a stream of water running down the midst
of such a field, but as the stream, being a boundary, is often lined
with bushes, the particular charm is lost. In the perfect examples
there is the smoothness of the long hollowed meadow, the green, the
river-like form, the look of being a court or cloister between the
trees. Another kind of field of great charm is made by the convexity of
the land rising up from one side or both of such a hollow meadow. These
heaving fields, some of a regular domed shape, are favourites of the
sunset light, in spring when they are grassy, in August when they bear
corn: at noon when there are cattle grazing on the steep slope, their
shadows are an exact inversion of themselves, as in water.
* * * * *
Out of the rain and mist spring has now risen full-grown, tender and
lusty, fragrant, many-coloured, many-voiced, fair to see, so that it
is beyond a lover’s power to make even an inventory of her lovely
ways. She is tall, she is fresh and bold, sweet in her motion and in
her tranquillity; and there is a soft down upon her lip as there is a
silken edge to the young leaves of the beeches.
KENT.
Even the motor road is pleasant now when the nightingales sing out of
the bluebell thickets under oak and sweet chestnut and hornbeam and
hazel. Presently it crosses a common, too small ever to draw a crowd, a
rough up-and-down expanse of gorse and thorn, pierced by grassy paths
and surrounded by turf that is rushy and mounded by old ant heaps; and
here, too, there are nightingales singing alone, the sweeter for the
contrast between their tangled silent bowers and the sharp, straight
white road. The common is typical of the lesser commons of the south.
Crouch’s Croft in Sussex is another, in sight of the three dusk
moorland breasts of Crowborough; gorse-grown, flat, possessing a pond,
and walled by tall hollies in a hedge. Piet Down, close by, is a fellow
to it--grass and gorse and irregular pine--a pond, too--rough, like
a fragment of Ashdown or Woolmer, and bringing a wild sharp flavour
into the mellow cultivated land. Yet another is at Stone Street, very
small, a few oaks up to their knees in blackthorn, gorse and bramble,
with dusty edge and the hum of the telegraph wire for a song.
After the little common and long meadows, oak and ash, an old stone
house with seven hundred years of history quiet within its walls
and dark tiles--its cedar and yew and pine, its daisied grass, its
dark water and swans--the four oast cones opposite, all taste more
exquisitely. How goodly are the names hereabout!--Dinas Dene, the
coombe in which the old house stands; Balk Shaw, Cream Crox, Dicky
May’s Field, Ivy Hatch, Lady Lands, Lady’s Wood, Upper and Lower
Robsacks, Obram Wood, Ruffats, Styant’s Mead, the Shode, and, of
course, a Starvecrow. Almost due west goes one of the best of footpaths
past hop garden, corn, currant plantations, rough copses, with glimpses
of the immense Weald to the east, its trees massed like thirty miles
of wood, having sky and cloud over its horizon as if over sea, and
southward the wild ridge of Ashdown. Then the path enters tall woods of
ash and oak, boulder-strewn among their anemone and primrose, bluebell
and dog’s mercury, and emerges in a steep lane at the top of which are
five cowled oast houses among cherry blossom and under black firs.
Beyond there is a hollow winding vale of meadow and corn, its sides
clothed in oak, hazel and thorn, revealing primroses between. Woods
shut it away from the road and from all houses but the farm above one
end. A few cattle graze there, and the sun comes through the sloping
woods and makes the grass golden or pale.
Then the North Downs come in sight, above a church tower amid
stateliest pale-foliaged beeches and vast undulations of meadow. They
are suffused in late sunshine, their trees misty and massed, under a
happy sky. Those beeches lie below the road, lining the edge of one
long meadow. The opposite sun pours almost horizontal beams down upon
the perfectly new leaves so as to give each one a yellow-green glow
and to some a silver shimmer about the shadowy boles. For the moment
the trees lose their anchor in the solid earth. They are floating,
wavering, shimmering, more aërial and pure and wild than birds or any
visible things, than aught except music and the fantasies of the brain.
The mind takes flight and hovers among the leaves with whatsoever
powers it has akin to dew and trembling lark’s song and rippling water;
it is throbbed away not only above the ponderous earth but below the
firmament in the middle world of footless fancies and half thoughts
that drift hither and thither and know neither a heaven nor a home.
It is a loss of a name and not of a belief that forbids us to say
to-day that sprites flutter and tempt there among the new leaves of the
beeches in the late May light.
Almost every group of oast houses here, seen either amongst autumn
fruit or spring blossom, is equal in its effect to a temple, though
different far, even when ivy-mantled as they occasionally are, from
the grey towered or spired churches standing near. The low round
brick tower of the oast house, surmounted by a tiled cone of about
equal height, and that again crested with a white cowl and vane, is a
pleasant form. There are groups of three which, in their age, mellow
hue, roundness, and rustic dignity, have suggested the triple mother
goddesses of old religions who were depicted as matrons, carrying
babes or fruit or flowers, to whom the peasant brought thank-offerings
when sun and rain had been kind. Those at Kemsing, for example, stand
worthily beside the perfect grey-shingled spire, among elm and damson,
against the bare cloudy Down. And there are many others near the
Pilgrims’ Way of the same charm.
That road, in its winding course from Winchester to Canterbury, through
Hampshire, Surrey and Kent, sums up all qualities of roads except
those of the straight highway. It is a cart-way from farm to farm; or
a footpath only, or a sheaf of half-a-dozen footpaths worn side by
side; or, no longer needed except by the curious, it is buried under
nettle and burdock and barricaded by thorns and traveller’s joy and
bryony bines; it has been converted into a white country road for a
few miles of its length, until an ascent over the Downs or a descent
into the valley has to be made, and then once more it is left to
footsteps upon grass and bird’s foot trefoil or to rude wheels over
flints. Sometimes it is hidden among untended hazels or among chalk
banks topped with beech and yew, and the kestrel plucks the chaffinch
there undisturbed. Or it goes free and hedgeless like a long balcony
half-way up the Downs, and unespied it beholds half the South Country
between ash tree boles. Church and inn and farm and cottage and tramp’s
fire it passes like a wandering wraith of road. Some one of the little
gods of the earth has kept it safe--one of those little and less than
omnipotent gods who, neglecting all but their own realms, enjoy the
earth in narrow ways, delighting to make small things fair, such as
a group of trees, a single field, a pure pool of sedge and bright
water, an arm of sea, a train of clouds, a road. I see their hands
in many a by-way of space and moment of time. One of them assuredly
harbours in a rude wet field I know of that lies neglected between two
large estates: three acres at most of roughly sloping pasture, bounded
above by the brambly edge of a wood and below by a wild stream. Here a
company of meadow-sweet invades the grass, there willow herb tall with
rosy summits of flowers, hoary lilac mint, dull golden fleabane, spiry
coltstails. The snake creeps careless through these thickets of bloom.
The sedge-warbler sings there. One old white horse is content with the
field, summer and winter, and has made a plot of it silver with his
hairs where he lies at night. The image of the god is in the grey riven
willow that leans leafless over the stream like a peasant sculpture
of old time. There is another of these godkins in a bare chalk hollow
where the dead thistles stick out through a yard of snow and give
strange thoughts of the sailless beautiful sea that once rippled over
the Downs: one also in the smell of hay and mixen and cow’s breath at
the first farm out of London where the country is unsoiled. There is
one in many a worthless waste by the roadside, such as that between
two roads that go almost parallel for a while--a long steep piece,
only a few feet broad, impenetrably overgrown by blackthorn and
blackberry, but unenclosed: and one in each of the wayside chalk-pits
with overhanging beech roots above and bramble below. One, too, perhaps
many, were abroad one August night on a high hillside when the hedge
crickets sang high up in the dogwood and clematis like small but
deafening sewing machines, and the glowworms shone in the thyme, and
the owl’s crying did not rend the breathless silence under the full
moon, and in the confused moonlit chequer of the wood, where tree
and shadow were equals, I walked on a grating of shadows with lights
between as if from under the earth; the hill was given over to a light
happiness through which I passed an unwilling but unfeared intruder.
In places these gods preside over some harmony of the earth with the
works of men. There is one such upon the Pilgrims’ Way, where I join
it, after passing the dark boughs and lightsome flowers of cherry
orchards, grass full of dandelions, a dark cluster of pines, elms in
groups and cavalcades, and wet willowy meadows that feed the Medway.
Just at the approach there is a two-storied farm with dormers in the
darkly mellowed roof, protected by sycamores and chestnuts, and before
it a weather-boarded barn with thatched roof, and then, but not at
right angles, another with ochre tiles, and other outbuildings of old
brick and tile, a waggon lodge of flint and thatch beside a pond, at
the edge of a broad unhedged field where random oaks shadow the grass.
Behind runs the Pilgrims’ Way, invisible but easily guessed under that
line of white beam and yew, with here and there an ash up which the
stout plaited stems of ivy are sculptured, for they seem of the same
material as the tree, and both of stone. Under the yew and white beam
the clematis clambers over dogwood and wayfaring trees. Corn grows up
to the road and sometimes hops; beyond, a league of orchard is a-froth
round farmhouses or islands of oak; and east and west sweeps the
crescent of the North Downs.
With the crescent goes the road, half-way up the sides of the hills but
nearly always at the foot of the steepest slopes where the chalk-pits
are carved white, like the concave of a scallop shell, out of the green
turf. Luxuriant hedges bar the view except at gateways and stiles. At
one place the upper hedge gives way to scattered thickets scrambling up
the hill, with chalky ruts and rabbit workings between. Neither sheep
nor crops cover the hill, nor yet is it common. Any one can possess
it--for an hour. It is given up to the rabbits until Londoners can be
persuaded to build houses on it. At intervals a road as old as the Way
itself descends precipitously in a deep chalk groove, overhung by yew
and beech, or hornbeam, or oak, and white clouds drifting in a river
of blue sky between the trees; and joins farther south the main road
which winds, parallel with the Pilgrims’ Way and usually south of it,
from Winchester, through Guildford, Dorking, Westerham, Maidstone,
Ashford, and Canterbury to Dover Strait. Not only chalk-pits and deep
roads hollow the hills. For miles there is a succession of small
smooth coombes, some grown with white thorn, some grassy, above the
road, alternating with corresponding smooth breasts of turf. Towers
and spires, but chiefly towers, lie beneath, and in the mile or so
between one and the next there are red farms or, very rarely, a greater
house at the end of a long wave of grass among trees. Above, the white
full-bosomed clouds lean upon the green rampart of the hills and look
across to the orchards, the woods beyond, the oaken Weald and its
lesser ridges still farther, and then the South Downs and a dream of
the south sea.
Rain falls, and in upright grey sheaves passes slowly before the
fresh beech leaves like ghosts in shadowy procession; and once again
the white clouds roll over the tops of the trees, and the green is
virginal, and out of the drip and glimmer of the miles of blissful
country rises the blackbird’s song and the cuckoo’s shout. The rain
seems not only to have brightened what is to be seen but the eye that
sees and the mind that knows, and suddenly we are aware of all the joy
in the grandeur and mastery of an oak’s balance, in those immobile
clouds revealed on the farthest horizon shaped like the mountains
which a child imagines, in the white candles of the beam tree, in the
black-eyed bird sitting in her nest in the hawthorn with uplifted
beak, and in the myriad luxuriant variety of shape and texture and
bright colour in the divided leaves of wood sanicle and moschatel and
parsley and cranesbill, in the pure outline of twayblade and violet
and garlic. Newly dressed in the crystal of the rain the landscape
recalls the earlier spring; the flowers of white wood-sorrel, the pink
and white anemone and cuckoo flower, the thick-clustered, long-stalked
primroses and darker cowslips with their scentless sweetness pure as an
infant’s breath; the solitary wild cherry trees flowering among still
leafless beech; the blackbirds of twilight and the flower-faced owls;
the pewits wheeling after dusk; the jonquil and daffodil and arabis and
leopard’s bane of cottage gardens; the white clouds plunged in blue
floating over the brown woods of the hills; the delicate thrushes with
speckled breasts paler than their backs, motionless on dewy turf; and
all the joys of life that come through the nostrils from the dark, not
understood world which is unbolted for us by the delicate and savage
fragrances of leaf and flower and grass and clod, of the plumage of
birds and fur of animals and breath and hair of women and children.
How can our thoughts, the movements of our bodies, our human
kindnesses, ever fit themselves with this blithe world? Is it but vain
remorse at what is lost, or is it not rather a token of what may yet
be achieved, that makes these images blind us as does the sight of
children dressed for a play, some solemn-thoughtful, some wholly gay,
suddenly revealed to us in brilliant light after the night wind and
rain?
But at morning twilight I see the moon low in the west like a broken
and dinted shield of silver hanging long forgotten outside the tent of
a great knight in a wood, and inside are the knight’s bones clean and
white about his rusted sword. In the east the sun rises, a red-faced
drover and a million sheep going before him silent over the blue
downs of the dawn: and I am ill-content and must watch for a while
the fraying, changeful edges of the lesser clouds drift past and into
the great white ones above, or hear rebellious music that puts for
one brief hour into our hands the reins of the world that we may sit
mightily behind the horses and drive to the goal of our dreams.
A footpath leads from the Pilgrims’ Way past the divine undulations and
beech glades of a park--a broad piece of the earth that flows hither
and thither in curves, sudden or slow but flawless and continuous, and
everywhere clothed in a seamless garment of grass. The path crosses
the white main road into a lesser one that traverses a common of
beech and oak and birch. The leaves make an unbroken roof over the
common: except the roads there is not a path in it. For it is a small
and narrow strip of but a few acres, without any open space, gloomy,
much overgrown by thickets. Last year’s leaves lie undisturbed and of
the colour of red deer under the silky green new foliage and round
the huge mossy pedestals of beech and in caves behind the serpentine
locked roots. No child’s shout is heard. No lover walks there. The
motor-car hurries the undesirable through and down into the Weald. And
so it is alone and for themselves that the beeches rise up in carven
living stone and expand in a green heaven for the song of the woodwren,
pouring out pearls like wine.
Southward, on either side of the steep road, the slope is, below
the beeches, given to corn and hops; at the foot are all the oaks
and pasture of the Weald, diversified by hop gardens on many of
the slanting fields that break up its surface. Looking back from
here the hills above are less finely modelled than the downs still
farther behind us in the north. But they also have their shallow
coombes, sometimes two tiers of them, and they are indented by deep,
wide-mouthed bays. One of them begins in copses of oak and hazel and
sallow, a little arable, a farm, three oast cones, and a little steep
orchard in a hollow of their own, which give way to hops, followed by
grass and then a tortuous ploughland among the oaks and firs of the
great woods that cover the more precipitous sides of the upper end of
the bay. Exquisitely cultivated, this bay is yet a possession of cuckoo
and nightingale, singing under the yellow-green and black-branched oaks
and above the floor of bluebell and dark dog’s mercury.
Out of the coombe a deep lane ascends through beech, hazel and beam to
another common of heather, and whinberry bathing the feet of scattered
birch, and squat oak and pine, interrupted by yellow gravel pits.
Beyond is a little town and a low grey spire, neighboured by sycamores
that stretch out horizontal boughs of broad leaves and new yellow-green
flower tassels over long grass. Past the town--rapidly and continually
resuming its sleep after the hooting of motor-cars--begins a wide and
stately domain. At its edge are cottages doddering with age, but trim
and flowery, and assuredly wearing the livery of the ripe, grave house
of brick that stands on the grassy ascent above them, among new-leaved
beech masses and isolated thorns dreaming over their shadows. That
grove of limes, fair and decorous, leading up to the house is the work
of Nature and the squire. His chestnut and pine plantations succeed.
And now a pollard beech, bossy-rooted on a mound of moss and crumbling
earth, its grotesque torso decorated as by childish hands with new
leaves hanging among mighty boughs that are themselves a mansion for
squirrel and jay and willow wren and many shadows, looks grimly down
at the edge of a wood and asks for the wayfarer’s passport--has he
lived well, does he love this world, is he bold and free and kind?--and
if he have it not seals him with melancholy as he enters among the
innumerable leaves of innumerable beeches beginning to respond to the
straight, still, after-sunset rain, while the last cuckoos cry and the
last footsteps and wheels of the world die away behind. The foliage
has a pale, almost white, light of its own among the darkly dripping
boughs, and when that is gone the rain and leaf under a spongy grey
sky have a myriad voices of contentedness. Below, invisible in the dark
rain but not unfelt, is the deep hollow land of the Weald. The owls
whimper and mew and croon and hoot and shriek their triumphs.
SURREY.
In the morning a storm comes up on bellying blue clouds above the pale
levels of young corn and round-topped trees black as night but gold
at their crests. The solid rain does away with all the hills, and
shows only the solitary thorns at the edge of an oak wood, or a row of
beeches above a hazel hedgerow and, beneath that, stars of stitchwort
in the drenched grass. But a little while and the sky is emptied and
in its infant blue there are white clouds with silver gloom in their
folds; and the light falls upon round hills, yew and beech thick upon
their humps, the coombes scalloped in their sides tenanted by oaks
beneath. By a grassy chalk pit and clustering black yew, white beam
and rampant clematis, is the Pilgrims’ Way. Once more the sky empties
heavy and dark rain upon the bright trees so that they pant and quiver
while they take it joyfully into their deep hearts. Before the eye
has done with watching the dance and glitter of rain and the sway of
branches, the blue is again clear and like a meadow sprinkled over with
blossoming cherry trees.
The decent vale consists of square green fields and park-like slopes,
dark pine and light beech: but beyond that the trees gather together in
low ridge after ridge so that the South Country seems a dense forest
from east to west. On one side of the hill road is a common of level
ash and oak woods, holly and thorn at their edges, and between them
and the dust a grassy tract, sometimes furzy; on the other, oaks and
beeches sacred to the pheasant but exposing countless cuckoo flowers
among the hazels of their underwood. Please trespass. The English game
preserve is a citadel of woodland charm, and however precious, it has
only one or two defenders easily eluded and, when met, most courteous
to all but children and not very well dressed women. The burglar’s
must be a bewitching trade if we may judge by the pleasures of the
trespasser’s unskilled labour.
In the middle of the wood is a four-went way, and the grassy or white
roads lead where you please among tall beeches or broad, crisp-leaved
shining thorns and brief open spaces given over to the mounds of ant
and mole, to gravel pits and heather. Is this the Pilgrims’ Way, in the
valley now, a frail path chiefly through oak and hazel, sometimes over
whin and whinberry and heather and sand, but looking up at the yews and
beeches of the chalk hills? It passes a village pierced by straight
clear waters--a woodland church--woods of the willow wren--and then,
upon a promontory, alone, within the greenest mead rippled up to its
walls by but few graves, another church, dark, squat, small-windowed,
old, and from its position above the world having the characters of
church and beacon and fortress, calling for all men’s reverence. Up
here in the rain it utters the pathos of the old roads behind, wiped
out as if writ in water, or worn deep and then deserted and surviving
only as tunnels under the hazels. I wish they could always be as
accessible as churches are, and not handed over to land-owners--like
Sandsbury Lane near Petersfield--because straight new roads have taken
their places for the purposes of tradesmen and carriage people, or
boarded up like that discarded fragment, deep-sunken and overgrown,
below Colman’s Hatch in Surrey. For centuries these roads seemed to
hundreds so necessary, and men set out upon them at dawn with hope
and followed after joy and were fain of their whiteness at evening:
few turned this way or that out of them except into others as well
worn (those who have turned aside for wantonness have left no trace at
all), and most have been well content to see the same things as those
who went before and as they themselves have seen a hundred times. And
now they, as the sound of their feet and the echoes, are dead, and the
roads are but pleasant folds in the grassy chalk. Stay, traveller, says
the dark tower on the hill, and tread softly because your way is over
men’s dreams; but not too long; and now descend to the west as fast as
feet can carry you, and follow your own dream, and that also shall in
course of time lie under men’s feet; for there is no going so sweet as
upon the old dreams of men.