SUSSEX
A few miles south of that great presiding pollard beech is the boundary
line between Surrey and Kent on the north and Sussex on the south. A
few miles over the line the moorland organ roll of heather and birch
and pine succeeds the grassy undulations and the well-grown beech and
oak. The yellow roving lines of the paths cut through the heather
into the sand add to the wildness of the waste, by their suggestion
of mountain torrents and of channels worn in the soft rock or clay
by the sea. The same likeness in little is often to be seen upon a
high-pitched roof of thatch when the straw is earth-coloured and
tunnelled by birds and seamed by rain. Here the houses are of stone,
unadorned, heather-thatched. The maker of birch-heath brooms plies his
trade. There are stacks of heath and gorse in the yard. All the more
fair are the grooves in the moorland, below the region of pines, where
the tiled white-boarded mill stands by the sheen of a ford, and the
gorse is bright and white clothes are blowing over neat gardens and
the first rose. On a day of rain and gloom the answer of the gorse to
sudden lights and heats is delicious; all those dull grey and glaucous
and brown dry spines bursting into cool and fragrant fire is as great a
miracle as the turning of flames to roses round a martyr’s feet.
It is only too easy for the pheasant lords to plant larch in
parallelograms: to escape from them it is necessary to go in
amongst them. Yet there are parts of the forest large and dark and
primeval in look, with a few poor isolated houses and a thin file
of telegraph posts crossing it among the high gloomy pines and down
to the marshy hollows, to the strewn gold of dwarf willows, and up
again to the deserted wooden windmill, the empty boarded cottage,
the heather-thatched sheds at the southern edge of the moor. Looking
at this tract of wild land the mind seems to shed many centuries of
civilization and to taste something of the early man’s alarm in the
presence of the uncultured hills--an alarm which is in us tempered
so as to aid an impression of the sublime. Its influence lingers in
the small strips of roadside gorse beyond its proper boundary. Then,
southward, there are softly dipping meadows, fields of young corn,
and oaks thrown among the cowslips. The small farmhouses are neat and
good--one has a long stone wall in front, and, over the road, tall
Scotch firs above a green pond dappled by the water crowfoot’s white
blossoms and bordered by sallow and rush. Narrow copses of oak or wide
hedges of hazel and sallow line the road; and they are making cask
hoops under lodges of boughs at the woodsides. Bluebells and primroses
and cuckoo flowers are not to be counted under the trees. The long
moist meadows flow among the woods up and down from farm to farm and
spire to tower. Each farmhouse group is new--this one is roofed and
walled with tiles; and opposite is a tangle of grass and gorse, with
fowls and hen-coops amongst it, a sallowy pond, a pile of faggots, some
crooked knees of oak, some fresh-peeled timber: old grey hop poles lean
in a sheaf all round a great oak. The gates are of good unpainted
oak, and some few are of a kind not often seen elsewhere, lower than
a hurdle and composed of two stout parallel bars united by twenty
uprights and by two pieces meeting to form a V across these. The gates
deserve and would fill a book by themselves.
Green lucent calipers of flags shadow one another in little wayside
ponds, white-railed; for this is the Weald, the land of small clay
ponds. The hazels are the nightingale’s. In many of the oak woods the
timber carriages have carved a way through primroses and bluebells deep
into the brown clay. The larger views are of cloudy, oak woods, ridge
behind ridge, and green corn or grass and grey ploughland between; and
of the sun pouring a molten cataract out of dark machicolated clouds
on to one green field that glows a moment and is insignificant again:
the lesser are of little brambly precipitous sandpits by the road, of
a white mill at a crossing, of carved yews before black-timbered inns,
of a starling that has learned the curlew’s call perched on a cottage
roof, of abeles all rough silver with opening leaf shivering along
the grass-bordered evening road, of two or three big oaks in a meadow
corner and in their shadow unblemished parsley and grasses bowed as
if rushing in the wind. At an inn door stands a young labourer, tall
and straight but loosely made, his nose even and small, his eyes blue
and deep set, his lips like those of Antinous, his face ruddy and
rough-grained, his hair short and brown and crisp upon his fair round
head; his neck bound by a voluminous scarf (with alternate lozenges of
crimson and deep green divided by white lines) that is gathered beneath
his chin by a brass ring and thence flows down under his blue coat;
his trousers of grey cord, dirty and patched with drab to a weathered
stone colour, fitting almost tightly to his large thighs and calves and
reaching not too near to his small but heavily-shod feet. A prince--a
slave. He is twenty, unmarried, sober, honest, a noble animal. He goes
into a cottage that stands worn and old and without a right angle in
its timbers or its thatch any more than in its apple trees and solitary
quince which all but hide the lilac and massed honesty of the little
garden. This is a house--I had almost said this is a man--that looked
upon England when it could move men to such songs as, “Come, live with
me and be my love,” or--
“Hey, down a down!” did Dian sing,
Amongst her virgins sitting;
“Than love there is no vainer thing,
For maidens most unfitting.”
And so think I, with a down, down derry.
For a moment or less as he goes under the porch I seem to see that
England, that swan’s nest, that island which a man’s heart was not
too big to love utterly. But now what with Great Britain, the British
Empire, Britons, Britishers, and the English-speaking world, the choice
offered to whomsoever would be patriotic is embarrassing, and he is
fortunate who can find an ideal England of the past, the present, and
the future to worship, and embody it in his native fields and waters or
his garden, as in a graven image.
The round unending Downs are close ahead, and upon the nearest hill
a windmill beside a huge scoop in the chalk, a troop of elms below,
and then low-hedged fields of grass and wheat. The farms are those of
the downland. One stands at the end of the elm troop that swerves
and clusters about its tiled roof, grey cliff of chimney-stack, and
many gables; the stables with newer tiles; the huge slope of the
barn; the low mossy cart-lodge and its wheels and grounded shafts;
the pale straw stacks and the dark hay ricks with leaning ladders. A
hundred sheep-bells rush by with a music of the hills in the wind.
The larks are singing as if they never could have done by nightfall.
It is now the hour of sunset, and windy. All the sky is soft and
dark-grey-clouded except where the sun, just visible and throbbing in
its own light, looks through a bright window in the west with a glow.
Exactly under the sun the grass and wheat is full both of the pure
effulgence and of the south-west wind, rippling and glittering: there
is no sun for anything else save the water. North of the sun and out of
its power lies a lush meadow, beyond it a flat marshland cut by several
curves of bright water, above that a dark church on a wooded mound, and
then three shadowy swoops of Down ending at a spire among trees.
South-west, the jagged ridgy cluster of a hillside town, a mill and a
castle, stand dark and lucid, and behind them the mere lines of still
more distant downs.