AUGUST--GOING WEST--HAMPSHIRE AND WILTSHIRE
Rain begins as I set out and mount under the beeches. The sky is dark
as a ploughed field, but the leaves overhead are full of light like
precious stones. The rain keeps the eyes down so that they see one by
one the little things of the wayside, the strings of the grey-green and
of the scarlet bryony berries, the stony bark of the young ash unveiled
by the moving leaves, the million tall straight shoots which the strong
nature of ash and hazel has soared into since the spring. Then follows
field after field of corn, of sheep among hurdled squares, of mustard
in flower, of grass, interrupted now and then by the massed laurels
and rhododendrons and the avenues of monkey puzzles that announce the
pleasure grounds of the rich. It is a high land of too level clay,
chiefly blest in that it beholds the Downs, their saddles of woodland,
and, through the deepest passes, the sea and an island rising out of it
like an iceberg; and that it is traversed by the Pilgrims’ Way, which
gathers to itself Canterbury-bells and marjoram under its hazels, and
pours traveller’s-joy cloudily over the ash and brier that overhang
the side of an old chalk pit, long, straight and even like a wall.
Just here are many grassy lanes between hazel and blackthorn hedges.
An old farmhouse with ivied chimneys and ten blind windows in front
stands bereaved with weedy garden, but for miles the air sounds with
poultry and the building of bungalows in deal and iron for strangers.
It is not a stranger that rides by. I think his fathers must have been
in this land when Wolf Hanger was not a strange name for the beeches
over the hill. He is a tall straight man with long narrow face, clear,
not too irregular features, sallow complexion, black hair and black
drooping moustache, and flashing eyes as dark as privet berries in
autumn dews.
Now it is a woodland country, of broad wooded common and low undulating
Downs crowned or fringed by woods: this is “Swineherd’s County”
according to the gypsies. Houses are few and stand either well off the
road or with scarcely a dividing line between their gardens and the
commons from which they have been filched. Their linen and red flannel
flap under enormous beeches where an old track makes its way betwixt
them. The children living here, the generations of them who have been
bred in the little flint house, are children of the woods, their minds
half made by the majestic but dark and deep-voiced trees that stand
over them day and night and by the echoes--you may hear them summoning
the echoes at evening out of the glades and see them pause as if dazed
by the wild reply. Opposite the door is a close untrodden tangle of
brier and thorn and bramble under oaks where the dead leaves of many
autumns lie untouched even by the wind--so dense is the underwood--that
sighs continually in the topmost boughs: at the edge nettles with
translucent leaves waver and nod above mossy banks. Not far off is a
Woodland Farm, a group of houses and barns and sheds built of flint
and wood and thatched, aloof. A man enters one of the cavernous sheds
with a pail; a thick, bent, knotty man, with bushy dark hair and beard
and bright black eyes, a farmer, the son’s son of one who rebuilt the
house when the woods were darker and huger still. Life is a dark simple
matter for him; three-quarters of his living is done for him by the
dead; merely to look at him is to see a man live generations thick, so
to speak, and neither Nature nor the trumpery modern man can easily
disturb a human character of that density. As I watch him going to and
fro I lose sight of everything away from his rude house and the tall
woods, because they and he are so powerful--he has the trees as well
as his ancestors at his back--and it is no flight of fancy to see him
actually cut off from all the world except the house and woods, and
yet holding his own, able to keep his fire burning, his larder full,
his back covered and his house dry. I feel but a wraith as I pass by.
I wonder what there is worth knowing that he does not know, with his
bright eyes, bright long teeth, stiff limbs capable of unceasing toil,
and that look of harmony with day and night. I see him looking on as
the wounded trooper--two hundred and fifty years, a trifle, ago--drains
the water just lifted from the well; look at his gallant face, his
delicate ardour as of another race, bright dress, restless blue eyes,
his helplessness after the defeat in a cavalry fight about nothing at
all. The cornet rides away and the woodland fellow puts all his nature
into the felling of a beech as into an object worthy of cold steel,
and as he plies his axe he smiles at the thought of that brave, that
silly face and sleek hair. He smiles to-day as he sees a youth go by
with proud looks of command, incapable, as he well understands, of
commanding anything except perhaps a wife or a groom or a regiment of
townsmen--yet his landlord.
Rough grass and scattered thorns and lofty groups of mossy-pedestalled
beeches lie on either side of the road, and grassy tracks lead to
thatched cottages in the woods. A grey-clouded silver sky moves
overhead. Along the road the telegraph wires go humming the one shrill
note in this great harmony of men and woods and sky. Beyond, a broad
champaign of corn and grey grass heaves from the woodland edge. The
road is gay with red polished fruit and equally red soft leaves, with
darkest purple and bronze and wine-red and green berries and leaves,
and beam foliage still pure green and white. So high now are the
unkempt hedges that the land is hid and only the sky appears above
the coloured trees: except at a meeting of ways when a triangular
patch of turf is sacred to burdock, ragwort and thistle and--touching
the dust of the road--the lowly silverweed; an oak overhangs, yet
the little open space admits a vision of the elephantine Downs going
west in the rain. In a moment the world is once again this narrow
one of the high-hedged lane, where I see and touch with the eye and
enjoy the shapes of each bole and branch in turn, their bone-like
shapes, their many colours of the wood itself, wrinkled and grooved,
or overlaid by pale green mould, silver lichen or dark green moss.
Each bend in the road is different. At one all the leaves are yellow
but green-veined, the bramble, the hazel, the elder; and there is a
little chalk pit below, fresh white and overhung by yew and the dark
purple elder berries, small but distinct: at another there is a maple
of exquisite small leaves and numerous accordingly, a fair-built tree
in a lovely attitude and surmounted by a plume, only a small plume, of
traveller’s-joy. In Swineherd’s County they call it “Angel’s hair.”
Suddenly there is a village of thatched roofs, phlox in the gardens,
good spaces of green and of sycamore-trees between one house and the
next, and a green-weeded crystal river pervading all with its flash
and sound. The anvil rings and the fire glows in the black smithy.
The wheel-wright’s timber leans outside his thatched shed against an
ancient elder, etherealized by lucent yellow leaves. Before the inn a
jolly ostler with bow legs and purple neck washes the wheels of a cart,
ever and anon filling his pail from the stream and swishing the bright
water over the wheels as they spin. A decent white-haired old man
stands and watches, leaning on his stick held almost at arm’s length so
as to make an archway underneath which a spaniel sprawls in the sun.
The men are all at the corn and he does not know what to do. Can he
read? asks the ostler, knowing the answer very well. No! We all read
now, chuckles the ostler as he flings a pailful over the wheel. The
old man is proud at least to have lived into such a notable day: “Yes,
man reads now almost as well as master--quite as well. They used to be
dummies, the working class people, yes, that they was. You can’t tell
what will happen now.” Meantime the ostler fills his pail and the old
man having too many thoughts to say any more, lays his blackthorn on
the bench and calls for his glass of fourpenny ale.
Close by there is an entrance to the more open Downs. The uncut hedges
are so thick that the lane seems a cutting through a wood, and soon
it becomes a grassy track of great breadth under ash-trees and amidst
purple dogwood and crimson-hearted traveller’s-joy, and finally it is
a long broad field full of wild carrot and scabious through which many
paths meander side by side until the last gate gives a view, under oak
and hazel sprays, on to the green undulations of hill and coombe, their
sides studded with juniper and thorn, with something of oceanic breadth
in the whole, as far as the utmost bound, leagues away, where a line of
small trees stands against the sky in the manner of ships. The hedges
in this downland are low or broken. A few ricks stand at the borders
of stubble and grass. Sheep munch together in square pens. There is no
house, and the rain has wiped out everything that moved save its own
perpendicular fringes waving along the hills. This solitude of grey
and brown is completed by the owner’s notice, on a frail and tottering
post: “Trespassers will be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the
law.” Towards the farther verge compact copses of beech begin to saddle
the ridges and invade the hollows so as to form cliffy dark sides to
the friths of pale stubble or turf amongst them. And then the green way
runs into a Roman road, and in the twilight and rain I can see many
other narrow ancient tracks winding into the white road as straight as
a sword, losing themselves in it like children in a dragon’s mouth.
The turf alongside is mounded by tumuli; and against the hedge a gypsy
family pretend to shelter from the windy rain; the man stands moody,
holding the pony, the women crouch with chins upon knees, the children
laugh and will not be still. They belong to the little roads that are
dying out: they hate the sword-like shelterless road, the booming cars
that go straight to the city in the vale below. They are less at home
there than the swallows that haunt the leeward sides of the sycamores,
ever rushing up towards the trees and ever beaten back, like children
playing “I’m the king of the castle,” at the verge of the city. There,
by the inn piano, soldiers and their friends and women sing with vague
pathos songs about “Mother” and “Dear Love” and “Farewell” and “Love is
all” and “The girls,” while the streets glitter and gurgle with rain.
Just before night the sky clears. It is littered with small dark clouds
upon rose, like rocks on a wild and solitary coast of after-tempest
calm, and it is infinitely remote and infinitely alluring. Those clouds
are the Islands of the Blest. Even so alluring might be this life
itself, this world, if I were out of it. For a moment I fancy how I
might lean and watch it all, being dead. For a moment only, since the
poverty of death is such that we cannot hope from it such a gift of
contemplation from afar, cannot hope even that once out of the world we
may turn round and look at it and feel that we are not of it any more,
nor hope that we shall know ourselves to be dead and be satisfied. Rain
shrouds the islands of the sky: the singers find them in their song.
In the morning the ground is beautiful with blue light from one
white-clouded pane of sky that will not be hidden by the tumultuous
rain. Outside the city the new thatch of the ricks shines pale in the
sodden land, which presently gives way to a great water with leaning
masts and a majestic shadowy sweep of trees down to the flat shore, to
level green marsh and bridges crossing the streams that are announced
by ripples in the sun, by swishing sedge, by willows blenching. Beyond
is forest again. First, scattered cottages and little yellow apples
beaming pale on crooked trees; then solitudes of heather and bracken,
traversed and lighted by blue waters, ponds and streams among flats
of rushes; and beyond, at either hand, woods on low and high land
endlessly changing from brightness to gloom under windy clouds. The
roads are yellow, and oaks and beeches hang over them in whispering
companies. The wind reigns, in the high magnificent onset of the
clouds, in the surging trees, in the wings of rooks and daws, in bowing
sedges and cotton grass, in quivering heather and grass, in rippling
water, in wildly flying linen; yet in the open there is a strange
silence because the roar in my ears as I walk deafens me to all sound.
White ponies graze by dark waters and stir the fragrance of the bog
myrtle. The rises of the heathery moor are scarred yellow where the
gravel is exposed. Sometimes great beeches, plated with green lichen
and grey, wave their stiffening foliage overhead; or there is a group
of old hollies encircled by coeval ivy whose embraces make them one,
and both seem of stone. Sometimes the yellow road runs green-edged
among heather and gorse, shadowed by pines that shake and plunge in
the wind but are mute. A white fungus shines damp in the purple moor.
There are a myriad berried hawthorns here, more gorse, more heather and
bracken. The tiny pools beneath are blown into ripples like a swarming
of bees, but the infuriate streams cannot trouble the dark water and
broad lily leaves in their bays. Other pools again are tranquil and
lucid brown over submerged moss and pennywort and fallen leaves, worlds
to themselves with a spirit indwelling in the pure element. Presently,
denser trees hold back the wind save in their tempestuous crests,
and now the road is carpeted with pine needles and nothing can be
seen or felt but the engulfing sound of wind and rain. The pines are
interrupted by tall bracken, hollies and thorns, by necks of turf and
isolated hawthorns thereon; and far away the light after rain billows
grandly over the mounded forest. Many a golden stream pours through
the dark trees. Oaks succeed, closing in lichened multitudes about a
grassy-rutted ferny road, but suddenly giving way to beeches pallid
and huge. One lies prone across the road, still green of leaf, having
torn up a mound of earth and bracken and bramble as large as a house in
its upheaval. Others have lost great branches, and the mossy earth is
ploughed by their fall. They seem to have fought in the night and to be
slumbering with dreams of battle to come; and their titanic passions
keep far away the influence of the blue sky and silver clouds that
laugh out unconcerned after the rain.
After them birches and birchlings grow out of the heather backed by
a solid wall of oaks. And again there are many beeches over mossy
golden turf, and one tree of symmetrical rounded foliage makes a
circle of shade where nothing grows, but all about it a crowd of
dwarf brackens twinkle and look like listeners at an oracle. Beyond,
countless pillars of dark pines tower above green grass. Then the road
forks; a shapely oak, still holding up dead arms through clouds of
greenery, stands at one side; at the other a green road wanders away
under beeches in stately attitudes and at ceremonious distance from
one another: straight ahead, open low meadows surround a reedy water
where coot and moorhen cry to each other among willow islets and the
reflex of a bright and windy heaven. And yet once more the road pierces
the dense woodland roar, form and colour buried as it were in sound,
except where a space of smoothest turf expands from the road, and out
of the crimson berries of an old thorn comes the voice of a robin
singing persistently; and past that, inevitably, is a cottage among
the beeches. More cottages are set in the moorland that rolls to an
horizon of ridgy oak away from small green meadows behind the cottages.
These give way to treeless undulations like gigantic long barrows,
coloured by sand, by burnt gorse and by bracken; farther away a wooded
hump all dark under threatenings of storm; and farthest of all, the
Downs, serene and pale. The plough begins to invade the forest. The
undulations sink to rest in a land of corn and cloud, of dark green
levels, of windy whitened abeles, and a shining flood gilded by a lofty
western sky of gold and grey. Beside the darkling waters couches an
old town with many windows looking under thatch and tile upon grave
streets, ending in a spread of the river where great horses wading
lift their knees high as they splash under a long avenue of aspens and
alarm the moorhens. Beautiful looks the running river under the night’s
hunting of the clouds and the few bright stars, and beautiful again,
broad blue, or streaked, or shadowy, or glittering, or reed-reflecting,
beside a white mill or company of willows, under the breezes and pearl
of dawn; and I wish there were a form for saluting a new country’s gods
and the _adhuc ignota ... flumina_.
Two roads go northward against the stream; the main road straight or in
long curves on one side of the river, the other on the opposite bank
in a string of fragments zigzagging east and west and north. These
fragments connect houses or groups of houses with one another, and it
looks as if only by accident they had made the whole which now connects
two towns. Their chief business is to serve the wheels and feet of
those bound upon domestic or hamlet but not urban business. Seen upon
the map the road sets out straight for a town far north; but in two
miles the hospitality of a great house seems to draw it aside, then of
“The Plough”; emerging again it wanders awhile before returning to its
northward line; and this it does time after time, and as often as it
pauses a lesser road runs out of it to the great road across the river.
There are scores of such parallel roads--sometimes the lesser is in
part, or entirely, a footpath--in England, and in avoiding the dust,
the smell, the noise, the insolence of the new traffic, the lesser are
an invaluable aid. This one proceeds without rise or fall through the
green river levels, but looks up to a ridge of white-scarred purple
moor away from the stream, with oak and thatched cottages below the
heather. It creeps in and out like an old cottage woman at a fair
and sees everything. It sees all the farms and barns. It sees the
portly brick house and its gardens bounded by high fruit walls and
its walnut-trees in front, on the bank of a golden brook that sings
under elms and sallows; the twenty-four long white windows, the decent
white porch, the large lawns, the pond and its waterfowl sounding in
the reeds, the oaks and acacias, the horse mowing the lawn lazily, the
dogs barking behind the Elizabethan stables. It sees the broad grassy
borders--for this is not a road cut by a skimping tailor--and the woods
of oak and ash and hazel which the squirrel owns, chiding, clucking
and angrily flirting his tail at those who would like to share his
nuts. At every crossing road these grassy borders, which are in places
as broad as meadows so that cattle graze under their elms, spread out
into a green; and round about are yellow thatched cottages with gardens
full of scarlet bean flowers and yellow dahlias; and a pond reflects
the blue and white sky, wagtails flutter at the edge and geese launch
themselves as if for a voyage. The only sound upon the road is made by
the baker’s cart carrying a fragrant load.
After ten miles the road crosses the river and wanders even farther
from the highway. Here there are more woods of hazel and oak, and
borders where sloe and blackberry shine, polished by rain, among
herbage of yellow ragwort and flea-bane, purple knapweed, yellowing
leaves. The gateways show steep meadows between the woods. One shows
two lovers of sixteen years old gathering nuts in the warm sun, the
silence, the solitude. The boy bends down and she steps quickly and
carelessly upon his back to reach a cluster of six, and then descending
looks away for a little while and turns her left cheek to him, softly
smiling wordless things to herself, so that her lover could not but
lean forward and kiss her golden skin where it is most beautiful
beneath her ear and her looped black hair. There is a maid whose ways
are so wonderful and desirable that it would not be more wonderful and
desirable if Helen had never grown old and Demeter had kept Persephone.
For a day white-throated convolvulus hides all the nettles of life.
Of all the delicate passing things I have seen and heard--the slow,
languid, gracious closing and unclosing of a pewit’s rounded wings as
it chooses a clod to alight on; the sound of poplar leaves striving
with the sound of rain in a windy summer shower; the glow of elms where
an autumn rainbow sets a foot amongst them; the first fire of September
lighted among men and books and flowers--not one survives to compare
with this gateway vision of a moment on a road I shall never travel
again. To rescue such scenes from time is one of the most blessed
offices of books, and it is a book that I remember now as I think of
that maiden smiling, a book[5] which says--
[5] _The Heifer of the Dawn_, by F. W. Bain.
And I could tell thee stories that would make thee laugh at all thy
trouble, and take thee to a land of which thou hast never dreamed.
Where the trees have ever blossoms, and are noisy with the humming
of intoxicated bees. Where by day the suns are never burning,
and by night the moon-stones ooze with nectar in the rays of the
camphor-laden moon. Where the blue lakes are filled with rows of
silver swans, and where, on steps of lapis-lazuli, the peacocks dance
in agitation at the murmur of the thunder in the hills. Where the
lightning flashes without harming, to light the way to women, stealing
in the darkness to meetings with their lovers, and the rainbow hangs
for ever like an opal on the dark blue curtain of the clouds. Where,
on the moonlit roofs of crystal palaces, pairs of lovers laugh at the
reflection of each other’s lovesick faces in goblets of red wine,
breathing as they drink air heavy with the fragrance of the sandal,
wafted from the mountain of the south. Where they play and pelt each
other with emeralds and rubies, fetched at the churning of the ocean
from the bottom of the sea. Where rivers, whose sands are always
golden, flow slowly past long lines of silent cranes that hunt for
silver fishes in the rushes on their banks. Where men are true, and
maidens love for ever, and the lotus never fades....
The great old books do the same a hundred times. Take _The Arabian
Nights_ for example. They are full of persons, places and events
depicted with so strong an appeal to our eyes and to that part of our
intelligence which by its swiftness and simplicity corresponds to
our eyes, that no conceivable malversation by a translator can matter
much. They are proof against it, just as our tables and chairs and
walking-sticks are proof against the man who tears our books and cracks
our glass cases of artificial grapes or stuffed kingfishers when we
move to a new house. This group of women is beyond the reach of time or
an indifferent style--
Ten female slaves approached with a graceful and conceited gait,
resembling moons, dazzling the sight, and confounding the imagination.
They stood in ranks, looking like the black-eyed damsels of Paradise;
and after them came ten other female slaves, with lutes in their
hands, and other instruments of diversion and mirth; and they saluted
the two guests, and played upon the lutes, and sang verses; and every
one of them was a temptation to the servants of God....
A hundred others flock to my mind, competing for mention like a company
of doves for a mere pinch of seed--Rose-in-Bloom sitting at a lattice
to watch the young men playing at ball, and throwing an apple to
Ansal Wajoud, “bright in countenance, with laughing teeth, generous,
wide-shouldered”; or that same girl letting herself down from her
prison and escaping over the desert in her most magnificent apparel
and a necklace of jewels on her neck; Sindbad returning home rich
from every voyage, and as often, in the midst of the luxuries of his
rest, going down to the river by Bagdad and seeing a fair new ship and
embarking for the sake of profit and of beholding the countries and
islands of the world.
These clear appeals come into the tales like white statues suddenly
carven to our sight among green branches. But they are also something
more than a satisfaction to our love of what is large, bright,
coloured, in high relief. Every one knows how, at a passage like that
in the _Æneid_, when the exiled Æneas sees upon the new walls of the
remote city of Carthage pictures of that strife about Troy in which he
was a great part, or at a verse in a ballad like--
“It was na in the ha’, the ha’;
It was na in the painted bower;
But it was in the good greenwood,
Amang the lily flower.”
--how the cheek flushes and the heart leaps up with a pleasure which
the incidents themselves hardly justify. We seem to recognize in them
symbols or images of ideas which are important to mortal minds. They
are of a significance beyond allegories. They are as powerful, and
usually as mysterious in their power, as the landscape at sight of
which the gazer sighs in his joy, he knows not why. In such passages
the _Nights_ abound.
One of the finest is in _Seifelmolouk and Bedia Eljemal_. The hero
and his memlooks were captured by a gigantic Ethiopian king. Some
were eaten. The survivors so pleased the king by the sweetness of
their voices while they were crying and lamenting that they were hung
up in cages for the king to hear them. Seifelmolouk and three of his
companions the king gave to his daughter, and when the youth sat
thinking of the happy past, and crying over it, she was overjoyed at
the singing of her little captive. Perhaps more pleasing still is the
door in the grass which has only to be removed to discover a splendid
subterranean palace and a “woman whose aspect banished from the heart
all anxiety and grief and affliction,” even when the finder is the son
of a king cutting wood in a forest, far from his lost home and from
those who know him as the son of a king. The incognito appearances of
the great Caliph make scenes of the same class. A young man sits with
his mistress, and the sound of her lovely singing draws four darwishes
to the door; he descends and lets them in; they promise to do him an
immense and undreamed-of service--
“Now these darwishes,” says the tale, “were the Khalifeh Harun
Er-Rashid, and the Wezir Ja’far El-Barmeki, and Abu-Nuwas El-Hasan, the
son of Hani, and Mesrur the Executioner.”
Then there is that page where Nimeh and the Persian sage open a shop in
Damascus, and stock it with costly things, and the sage sits with the
astrolabe before him, “in the apparel of sages and physicians”--to wait
for Nimeh’s lover, or some one who has news of her, to appear. Of a
more subtly appealing charm is a sentence in the story of “Ala-ed-din,”
where a man tells the father of one who is supposed to have been
executed that another was actually slain in his stead, “for I ransomed
him, by substituting another, from among such as deserved to be put to
death.” A good book might be made of the stories of such poor unknown
men in famous books as this prisoner who was of those that deserved to
die.
Lofty, strange, and infinite in its suggestiveness is the tale of
Kamar-ez-Zeman and the Princess Budur. Two demons, an Efrit and an
Efritch, contend as to the superiority in beauty of a youth and a girl
whom they watch asleep in widely remote parts of the earth; and they
carry them through the midnight sky and lay the two side by side to
judge. On the morrow, the youth longs for the girl and the girl for
the youth. Of their dreams, the King, the father of the youth, says:
“Probably it was a confused dream that thou sawest in sleep,” and the
father of the girl chains her up as mad. But in the end, after many
wanderings and impediments, they transcend the separation of space and
are married. Noblest of all, perhaps, is one of the short “Anecdotes”
about the discovery of a terrestrial paradise.
Abd-allah went out to seek a straying camel, and chanced upon a superb
and high-walled city lying silent in the desert. And when the Caliph
inquired about that city, a learned man told him that it was built by
Sheddad, the King. This prince was fond of ancient books, and took
delight in nothing so much as in descriptions of Paradise, so that
his heart enticed him to make one like it on the earth. Under him
were a hundred thousand kings, and under each of them were a hundred
thousand soldiers, and he furnished them with the measurements and
set them to collect the materials of gold and silver and ruby and
pearl and chrysolite. For twenty years they collected. Then he sought
a fit place among rivers on a vast open plain. In twenty years they
built the city and finished its impregnable fortifications. For twenty
years he laboured in equipping himself, his viziers, his harem and his
troops for the occupation of this Paradise. Then when he was rejoicing
on his way, “God sent down upon him and upon the obstinate infidels
who accompanied him a loud cry from the heaven of his power, and it
destroyed them all by the vehemence of its sound. Neither Sheddad nor
any of those who were with him arrived at the city or came in sight
of it, and God obliterated the traces of the road that led to it;
but the city remaineth as it was in its place until the hour of the
judgment.”...
Beyond the gateway the Downland and the corn begins, and with it the
rain, so that the great yellow-banded bee hangs long pensive on the
lilac flower of the scabious. Hereby is a farm with a wise look in its
narrow window on either side of the white door under the porch; the
walls of the garden and the farmyard are topped with thatch; opposite
rises up a medlar tree, russet-fruited: and those two eyes of the
little farm peep out at the stranger. From the next hill-top the land
spreads out suddenly--an immense grey hedgeless land of pasture and
ploughland and stubble with broadcast shadows of clouds and lines,
and clumps of dark-blue trees a league apart. These woods are of pine
and thorn and elder and beam, and some yew and juniper, haunted by
the hare and the kestrel, by white butterflies going in and out, by
the dandelion’s down. Sometimes under the pines a tumulus whispers
a gentle _siste viator_ and the robin sings beside. Far away, white
rounds of cloud bursting with sunlight are lifted up out of the ground;
born of earth they pause a little upon the ridge and then take flight
into the blue profound, their trains of shadow moving over the corn
sheaves, over the ploughs working along brown bands of soil, the furzy
spaces, the deeply cloven grassy undulations, the lines of yews and of
corn-stacks. Slowly a spire like a lance-head is thrust up through the
Downs into the sky.
Beyond the spire a huge woody mound rises up from the low flowing land,
huge and carved all round by an entrenchment as if by the weight of a
crown that it had worn for ages. Certainly it wears no crown to-day.
Not a human being lives there; they have all fled to the riverside
and the spire, leaving their ancient home to the triumphs of the
wide-flowering traveller’s-joy, to the play of children on the sward
within its walls, and to the archæologist: and very sad and very noble
it looks at night when it and the surrounding Downs lift up their dark
domes of wood among the mountains of the sky, and the great silence
hammers upon the ears.
Then a hedgeless road traverses without interrupting the long Downs.
One after another, lines of trees thin and dark and old come out
against the pale bright sky of late afternoon and file away, beyond
the green turf and roots and the grey or yellow stubble. As the sun
sets, dull crimson, at the foot of a muslin of grey and gold which his
course has crimsoned, the low clouds on the horizon in the north become
a deathly blue white belonging neither to day nor to night, while
overhead the light-combed cloudlets are touched faintly with flame. Now
the glory and the power of the colour in the west, and now the pallid
north, fill the brain to overflowing with the mingling of distance,
of sublime motion, and of hue, and intoxicate it and give it wings,
until at last when the west is crossed by long sloping strata as of
lava long cooled they seem the bars of a cage impassable. But even they
are at last worn away and the sky is as nothing compared with earth.
For there, as I move, the infinite greys and yellows of the crops, the
grass, the bare earth, the clumps of firs, the lines of beeches and
oaks, play together in the twilight, and the hills meet and lose their
lines and flow into one another and build up beautiful lines anew, the
outward and visible signs of a great thought. Out of the darkness in
which they are submerged starts a crying of pewits and partridges; and
overhead and close together the wild duck fly west into the cold gilded
blue.
At dawn a shallow crystal river runs over stones and waves green hair
past ancient walls of flint, tall towers and many windows, with vines
about the mullions, past desolate grass of old elmy meads, high-gated,
and umbrageous roads winding white by carven gateways, under sycamore
and elm and ash and many alders and haughty avenues of limes, past
an old great church, past a park where elms and oaks and bushy limes
hide a ruin among nettles and almost hide a large stone house from
which peacocks shout, past a white farm, red-tiled, that stands with a
village of its own thatched barns, cart-lodges and sheds under walnut
and elm, enclosed within a circuit of old brick with a tower that looks
along the waters. It is a place where man has known how to aid his own
stateliness by that of Nature. The trees are grand and innumerable, but
they stand about in aristocratic ways; the bright young water does not
flout the old walls but takes the shadow of antiquity from them and
lends them dew-dropping verdure in return. The pebbles under the waves
are half of them fallen from the walls; the curves round which they
bend are of masonry; so that it is unapparent and indifferent whether
the masonry has been made to fit the stream or the stream persuaded to
admit the masonry. As I look, I think of it as Statius thought of the
Surrentine villa when he prayed that Earth would be kind to it and not
throw off that ennobling yoke. Everywhere the river rushes and shines,
or roars unseen behind trees. The sun is warm and the golden light
hangs as if it were fruit among the leaves over the ripples.
Above the stream the elms open apart and disclose a wandering grey land
and clumps of beeches, a grey windy land and a grey windy sky in which
the dark clumps are islanded. Flocks of sheep move to and fro, and with
them the swallows. Two shepherds, their heavy grey overcoats slung
about their shoulders and the sleeves dangling, their flat rush baskets
on their backs, stand twenty yards apart to talk, leaning on their
sticks, while their swallow-haunted flocks go more slowly and their two
dogs converse and walk round one another.
The oats have been trampled by rain, and two men are reaping it by
hand. They are not men of the farm, but rovers who take their chance
and have done other things than reaping in their time. One is a
Hampshire man, but fought with the Wiltshires against “Johnny Boer”--he
liked the Boers ... “they were very much like a lot of working men....
We never beat ’em.... No, we never beat ’em.” He is a man of heroic
build; tall, lean, rather deep-chested than broad-shouldered, narrow in
the loins, with goodly calves which his old riding breeches perfectly
display; his head is small, his hair short and crisp and fair, his
cheeks and neck darkly tanned, his eye bright blue and quick-moving,
his features strong and good, except his mouth, which is over large
and loose; very ready to talk, which he does continually in a great
proud male voice, however hard he is working. A man as lean and hard
and bright as his reaping hook. First he snicks off a dozen straws
and lays them on the ground for a bond, then he slashes fast along
the edge of the corn for two or three yards, gathers up what is cut
into his hook and lays it across the straws: when a dozen sheaves are
prepared in the same way he binds them with the bonds and builds them
into a stook of two rows leaning together. It is impossible to work
faster and harder than he does in cutting and binding; only at the
end of each dozen sheaves does he stand at his full height, straight
as an ash, and laugh, and round off what he has been saying even more
vigorously than he began it. Then crouching again he slays twelve other
sheaves. Then he goes over to the four-and-a-half-gallon cask in the
hedge: it is a “fuel” that he likes, and he pays for it himself. In
his walk and attitude and talk--except in his accent--there is little
of the countryman. He is a citizen of the world, without wife or home
or any tie except to toil--and after that pleasure--and toil again. A
loose bold liver--and lover--there can be no doubt. The spirit of life
is strong in him, in limbs and chest and eyes and brain, the spirit
which compels one man to paint a picture, one to sacrifice his life
for another, one to endure poverty for an idea, another to commit a
murder. What is there for him--to be the mark for a bullet, to contract
a ravenous disease, to bend slowly under the increasing pile of years,
of work, of pleasures? He does not care. He is always seeing “a bit of
life” from town to town, from county to county, a peerless fleshly man
casting himself away as carelessly as Nature cast him forth into the
world. His father before him was the same, ploughboy, circus rider,
brickmaker, and day labourer again on the land, one who always “looked
for a policeman when he had had a quart.” He set out on his travels
again and disappeared. His wife went another way, and she is still to
be met with in the summer weather, not looking as if she had ever borne
such a son as this reaper. As she grows older she seems to stretch out
a connecting hand to long-vanished generations, to the men and women
who raised the huge earthen walls of the camps on these hills. She
has a trembling small face, wrinkled and yellow like old newspaper,
above a windy bunch of rags, chiefly black rags. A Welshwoman who has
been in England fifty years, she remembers or thinks of chiefly those
Welsh years when, as a girl, she rode a pony into Neath market. She
hums a Welsh tune and still laughs at it because she heard it first in
those days from one then poor and old and abject--she herself tall and
wilful--and the words of it were: “O, my dear boy, don’t get married.”
She would like once again to lie in her warm bed and hear the steady
rain falling in the black night upon the mountain. She feels the sharp
flint against the sole of her foot and appears not to be annoyed or
indignant or resolved to be rid of the pain, but only puzzled by the
flintiness of God as she travels, in the long pageant of those who go
on living, the lonely downland road among the gorse and the foxgloves,
in the hot but still misty morning when the grey and the chestnut
horses, patient and huge and shining among the sheaves, wait for the
reaping machine to be uncovered and the day’s work to begin.
Through the grey land goes a narrow and flat vale of grass and of
thatched cottages. The river winds among willows and makes a green
world, out of which the Downs rise suddenly with their wheat. Here
stands a farm with dormers in its high yellow roof and a square
of beeches round about. There a village, even its walls thatched,
flutters white linen and blue smoke against a huge chalk scoop in the
Downs behind. For miles only the cherry-coloured clusters of the
guelder-rose break through the rain and the gently changing grey of the
cornland and green of the valley, until several farms of thatched brick
gather together under elms and mellowing chestnuts and make a crooked
hamlet. Or at a bend in the road a barn like a diminutive down stands
among ricks and under elms; behind is a red farm and church tower
embowered; in front, the threshing machine booms and smokes and an old
drenched woman stands bent aloft receiving the sheaves in her blue
stiff claws. Close by, a man leads a horse away from a field and its
companion looks over the gate with longing, and turns away and again
returning almost jumps it, but failing through fearfulness at seeing
the other so near the bend in the road, races down the hedge and back
and stands listening to the other’s whinny, and then scattering the
turf dashes into an orchard beyond and whinnies as he gallops.
In majesty, rigid and black, the steam ploughs are working up against
the treeless sky; and, just seen in the rain, the white horse carved
upon the hill seems a living thing, but of mist.
Now, as if for the sake of the evening bells and the gleaners, the
rain withholds itself, and over the drenching stubble the women and
children, in black and grey and dirty white, crawl, doubled up,
careless of the bells and of the soft moist gold of the sun that
envelops them, as of the rain and wind that after a little while cover
up the gold upon the field and the green and rose of the sky.
And so to the inn. Why do not inns have a regular tariff for the
poorish man without a motor-car? Let inn-keepers bleed the rich, by all
means, but why should they charge me one shilling and ninepence for a
cod steak or a chop or the uneatable cold roast beef of new England,
and then charge the same sum for the best part of a duckling and
cheese and a pint of ale? I once asked the most enterprising publisher
in London whether he would print a book that should tell the sober
truth about some of our English inns, and he said that he dared not
do anything so horrible. For fear of ruining my publisher I will not
mention names, but simply say that at nine inns out of ten the charges
are incalculable and excessive unless the traveller makes a point of
asking beforehand what they are going to be, a course that provokes
discomfort in his relation to the host outweighing what is saved. The
tea room, on the other hand, is inexpensive. It lies behind a shop and
there is a slaughter-house adjacent--even now the butcher can be heard
parting the warm hide from the flesh. Inside, the room is green and the
little light and the rain also come sickly through windows of stained
glass and fall upon a piano, a bicycle, an embroidered deck chair,
vases of dead grass on a marble-topped table, a screen pasted over with
scraps from the newspapers, and, upon the walls, a calendar from the
butcher depicting a well-dressed love scene, a text or two, pictures of
well-dressed children and their animals, and upon the floor, oilcloth
odorous and wet. Here, as at the inns, the adornments are dictated by
a taste begotten by the union of peasant taste and town taste, and are
entirely pretentious and unrelated to the needs of the host or of the
guests.