SUMMER--SUSSEX
Far up on the Downs the air of day and night is flavoured by
honeysuckle and new hay. It is good to walk, it is good to lie still;
the rain is good and so is the sun; and whether the windy or the quiet
air be the better let us leave to a December judgment to decide. One
day the rain falls and there is no wind, and all the movement is in
the chaos of the dark sky; and thus is made the celestial fairness of
an earth that is brighter than the heavens; for the green and lilac of
the grasses and the yellow of the goat’s-beard flowers glow, and the
ripening corn is airy light. But next day the sun is early hot. The wet
hay steams and is sweet. The beams pour into a southward coombe of the
hills and the dense yew is warm as a fruit-wall, so that the utmost
of fragrance is extracted from the marjoram and thyme and fanned by
the coming and going of butterflies; and in contrast with this gold
and purple heat on flower and wing, through the blue sky and along the
hill-top moist clouds are trooping, of the grey colour of melting snow.
The great shadows of the clouds brood long over the hay, and in the
darker hollows the wind rustles the dripping thickets until mid-day. On
another morning after night rain the blue sky is rippled and crimped
with high, thin white clouds by several opposing breezes. Vast forces
seem but now to have ceased their feud. The battle is over, and there
are all the signs of it plain to be seen; but they have laid down their
arms, and peace is broad and white in the sky, but of many colours
on the earth--for there is blue of harebell and purple of rose-bay
among the bracken and popping gorse, and heather and foxglove are
purple above the sand, and the mint is hoary lilac, the meadow-sweet
is foam, there is rose of willow-herb and yellow of fleabane at the
edge of the water, and purple of gentian and cistus yellow on the
Downs, and infinite greens in those little dense Edens which nettle and
cow-parsnip and bramble and elder make every summer on the banks of the
deep lanes. A thousand swifts wheel as if in a fierce wind over the
highest places of the hills, over the great seaward-looking camp and
its three graves and antique thorns, down to the chestnuts that stand
about the rickyards in the cornland below.
These are the hours that seem to entice and entrap the airy inhabitants
of some land beyond the cloud mountains that rise farther than the
farthest of downs. Legend has it that long ago strange children were
caught upon the earth, and being asked how they had come there, they
said that one day as they were herding their sheep in a far country
they chanced on a cave; and within they heard music as of heavenly
bells, which lured them on and on through the corridors of that cave
until they reached our earth; and here their eyes, used only to a
twilight between a sun that had set for ever and a night that had never
fallen, were dazed by the August glow, and lying bemused they were
caught before they could find the earthly entrance to their cave. Small
wonder would this adventure be from a region no matter how blessed,
when the earth is wearing the best white wild roses or when August is
at its height.
The last hay-waggon has hardly rolled between the elms before the
reaper and the reaping-machines begin to work. The oats and wheat
are in tents over all the land. Then, then it is hard not to walk
over the brown in the green of August grass. There is a roving spirit
everywhere. The very tents of the corn suggest a bivouac. The white
clouds coming up out of the yellow corn and journeying over the blue
have set their faces to some goal. The traveller’s-joy is tangled over
the hazels and over the faces of the small chalk-pits. The white beam
and the poplar and the sycamore fluttering show the silver sides of
their leaves and rustle farewells. The perfect road that goes without
hedges under elms and through the corn says, “Leave all and follow.”
How the bridges overleap the streams at one leap, or at three, in
arches like those of running hounds! The far-scattered, placid sunsets
pave the feet of the spirit with many a road to joy; the huge, vacant
halls of dawn give a sense of godlike power.
But it is hard to make anything like a truce between these two
incompatible desires, the one for going on and on over the earth, the
other that would settle for ever, in one place as in a grave and have
nothing to do with change. Suppose a man to receive notice of death, it
would be hard to decide whether to walk or sail until the end, seeing
no man, or none but strangers; or to sit--alone--and by thinking or
not thinking to make the change to come as little as is permitted. The
two desires will often painfully alternate. Even on these harvest days
there is a temptation to take root for ever in some corner of a field
or on some hill from which the world and the clouds can be seen at a
distance. For the wheat is as red as the most red sand, and up above it
tower the elms, dark prophets persuading to silence and a stillness
like their own. Away on the lesser Downs the fields of pale oats are
liquid within their border of dark woods; they also propose deep
draughts of oblivion and rest. Then, again, there is the field--the
many fields--where a regiment of shocks of oats are ranked under the
white moon between rows of elms on the level Sussex land not far from
the sea. The contrast of the airy matter underfoot and the thin moon
overhead, with the massy dark trees, as it were, suspended between;
the numbers and the order of the sheaves; their inviolability, though
protected but by the gateway through which they are seen--all satisfy
the soul as they can never satisfy the frame. Then there are the mists
before heat which make us think of autumn or not, according to our
tempers. All night the aspens have been shivering and the owls exulting
under a clear full moon and above the silver of a great dew. You
climb the steep chalk slope, through the privet and dog-wood coppice;
among the scattered junipers--in this thick haze as in darkness they
group themselves so as to make fantastic likenesses of mounted men,
animals, monsters; over the dead earth in the shade of the broad yews,
and thence suddenly under lightsome sprays of guelder-rose and their
cherry-coloured berries; over the tufted turf; and then through the
massed beeches, cold and dark as a church and silent; and so out to the
level waste cornland at the top, to the flints and the clay. There a
myriad oriflammes of ragwort are borne up on all stems of equal height,
straight and motionless, and near at hand quite clear, but farther away
forming a green mist until, farther yet, all but the flowery surface
is invisible, and that is but a glow. The stillness of the green and
golden multitudes under the grey mist, perfectly still though a wind
flutters the high tops of the beech, has an immortal beauty, and that
they should ever change does not enter the mind which is thus for the
moment lured happily into a strange confidence and ease. But the sun
gains power in the south-east. It changes the mist into a fleeting
garment, not of cold or of warm grey, but of diaphanous gold. There is
a sea-like moan of wind in the half-visible trees, a wavering of the
mist to and fro until it is dispersed far and wide as part of the very
light, of the blue shade, of the colour of cloud and wood and down.
As the mist is unwoven the ghostly moon is disclosed, and a bank of
dead white clouds where the Downs should be. Under the very eye of the
veiled sun a golden light and warmth begins to nestle among the mounds
of foliage at the surface of the low woods. The beeches close by have
got a new voice in their crisp, cool leaves, of which every one is
doing something--cool, though the air itself is warm. Wood-pigeons coo.
The white cloud-bank gives way to an immeasurable half-moon of Downs,
some bare, some saddle-backed with woods, and far away and below, out
of the ocean of countless trees in the southern veil, a spire. It is
a spire which at this hour is doubtless moving a thousand men with a
thousand thoughts and hopes and memories of men and causes, but moves
me with the thought alone that just a hundred years ago was buried
underneath it a child, a little child whose mother’s mother was at the
pains to inscribe a tablet saying to all who pass by that he was once
“an amiable and most endearing child.”
And what nights there are on the hills. The ash-sprays break up the
low full moon into a flower of many sparks. The Downs are heaved up
into the lighted sky--surely they heave in their tranquillity as with a
slowly taken breath. The moon is half-way up the sky and exactly over
the centre of the long curve of Downs; just above them lies a long
terrace of white cloud, and at their feet gleams a broad pond, the rest
of the valley being utterly dark and indistinguishable, save a few
scattered lamps and one near meadow that catches the moonlight so as to
be transmuted to a lake. But every rainy leaf upon the hill is brighter
than any of the few stars above, and from many leaves and blades hang
drops as large and bright as the glowworms in their recesses. Larger
by a little, but not brighter, are the threes and fours of lights
at windows in the valley. The wind has fallen, but a mile of woods
unlading the rain from their leaves make a sound of wind, while each
separate drop can be heard from the nearest branches, a noise of rapt
content, as if they were telling over again the kisses of the shower.
The air itself is heavy as mead with the scent of yew and juniper and
thyme.