THE END OF SUMMER--KENT--BERKSHIRE--HAMPSHIRE--SUSSEX--THE FAIR
The road mounts the low Downs again. The boundless stubble is streaked
by long bands of purple-brown, the work of seven ploughs to which the
teams and their carters, riding or walking, are now slowly descending
by different ways over the slopes and jingling in the rain. Above is
a Druid moor bounded by beech-clumps, and crossed by old sunken ways
and broad grassy tracks. It is a land of moles and sheep. At the end
of a shattered line of firs a shepherd leans, bunched under his cape
of sacking, to watch his black-faced flock dull-tinkling in the short
furze and among the tumuli under the constant white rain. Those old
roads, being over hilly and open land, are as they were before the
making of modern roads, and little changed from what they were before
the Roman. But it is a pity to see some of the old roads that have been
left to the sole protection of the little gods. One man is stronger
than they, as may be known by any one who has seen the bones, crockery,
tin and paper thrown by Shere and Cocking into the old roads near by
as into a dust-bin; or seen the gashes in the young trees planted down
Gorst Road, Wandsworth Common; or the saucy “Private” at the entrance
to a lane worn by a hundred generations through the sand a little
north of Petersfield; or the barbed wire fastened into the living
trees alongside the footpath over a neighbouring hill that has lately
been sold. What is the value of every one’s right to use a footpath
if a single anti-social exclusive landowning citizen has the right to
make it intolerable except to such as consider it a place only for
the soles of the feet? The builder of a house acquires the right to
admit the sunlight through his window. Cannot the users of a footpath
acquire a right, during the course of half-a-dozen dynasties or less,
to the sight of the trees and the sky which that footpath gives them
in its own separate way? At least I hope that footpaths will soon
cease to be defined as a line--length without breadth--connecting one
point with another. In days when they are used as much for the sake
of the scenes historic or beautiful through which they pass as of the
villages or houses on this hand or that, something more than the mere
right to tread upon a certain ribbon of grass or mud will have to be
preserved if the preservation is to be of much use, and the right of
way must become the right of view and of very ancient lights as well.
By enforcing these rights some of the mountains of the land might even
yet be saved, as Mr. Henry S. Salt wishes to save them.[6] In the
meantime it is to be hoped that his criticisms will not be ignored by
the tourists who leave the Needle Gully a cascade of luncheon wrappings
and the like; for it is not from a body of men capable of such manners
that a really effective appeal against the sacrifice of “our mountains”
to commercial and other selfishness is like to spring.
[6] See his valuable _On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills_ (Fifield).
And those lone wayside greens, no man’s gardens, measuring a few feet
wide but many miles in length--why should they be used either as
receptacles for the dust of motor-cars or as additions to the property
of the landowner who happens to be renewing his fence? They used to
be as beautiful and cool and fresh as rivers, these green sisters of
the white roads--illuminated borders of many a weary tale. But now,
lest there should be no room for the dust, they are turning away from
them the gypsies who used to camp there for a night. The indolent
District Council that is anxious to get rid of its difficulties--for
the moment--at the expense of a neighbouring district--it cares
not--will send out its policemen to drive away the weary horses and
sleeping children from the acre of common land which had hitherto been
sacred--to what?--to an altar, a statue, a fountain, a seat?--No! to a
stately notice-board; half-a-century ago the common of which this is a
useless patch passed on easy terms to the pheasant lords. The gypsies
have to go. Give them a pitch for the night and you are regarded as
an enemy of the community or perhaps even as a Socialist. The gypsies
shall be driven from parish to parish, and finally settle down as
squalid degenerate nomads in a town where they lose what beauty and
courage they had, in adding to the difficulties of another council.
Yet if they were in a cage or a compound which it cost money to see,
hundreds would pay for a stare at their brown faces and bright eyes,
their hooped tents, their horses, their carelessness of the crowd, and
in a few years an imitation of these things will be applauded in a
“pageant” of the town which has destroyed the reality.
The grassy way ends with the moor at a pool beside a road, on one side
of it six thatched cottages fenced by sycamore and ash and elm, on the
other a grey farm and immense brown barn, within a long wall roofed
with mossy thatch; and the swallows fly low and slowly about the trees.
First beeches line the rising and descending road--past a church whose
ivied tombstones commemorate men of Cornish name--as far as an inn
and a sycamore nobly balanced upon a pedestal of matted roots. Then
there are ash-trees on either side and ricks of straw wetted to an
orange hue, and beyond them the open cornland, and rising out of it an
all-day-long procession in the south, the great company of the Downs
again, some tipped with wood, some bare; in the north, a broken chain
of woods upon low but undulating land seem the vertebræ of a forest
of old time stretching from east to west like the Downs. Hither and
thither the drunken pewits cry over the furrows, and thousands of
rocks and daws wheel over the stubble. As the day grows old it grows
sweet and golden and the rain ceases, and the beauty of the Downs in
the humid clearness does not long allow the eyes to wander away from
them. At first, when the sun breaks through, all silver bright and
acclaimed by miles of clouds in his own livery, the Downs below are
violet, and have no form except where they carve the sky with their
long arches. It is the woods northward that are chiefly glorified by
the light and warmth, and the glades penetrating them and the shining
stubble and the hedges, and the flying wood-pigeons and the cows of
richest brown and milky white; the road also gleams blue and wet. But
as the sun descends the light falls on the Downs out of a bright cave
in the gloomy forest of sky, and their flanks are olive and their
outlines intensely clear. From one summit to another runs a string of
trees like cavalry connecting one beech clump with another, so that
they seem actually to be moving and adding themselves to the clumps.
Above all is the abstract beauty of pure line--coupled with the beauty
of the serene and the uninhabited and remote--that holds the eye until
at length the hills are humbled and dispread as part of the ceremony
of sunset in a tranquil, ensanguined, quietly travelling sky. The blue
swallows go slowly along the silent road beside me, and the last rays
bless a grooved common grazed upon by cows and surrounded by ranges
of low white buildings and a row of lichened grotesque limes, dark of
bole, golden-leaved, where children are playing and an anvil rings.
Frost follows after the blue silence and chill of twilight, and the
dawn is dimmest violet in a haze that reveals the candied grass, the
soaking blue dark elms painted yellow only in one place, the red roofs,
all in a world of the unborn, and the waters steaming around invisible
crying coots. Gradually round white clouds--so dim that the sky seems
but to dream of round white clouds--appear imbedded in the haze; the
beams grow hot, and a breeze joins with them in sucking and scattering
all the sweet of the first fallen leaves, the weed fires and the late
honeysuckle.
Why are there no swifts to race and scream? We fret over these stages
of the descending year; we dream on such a day as this that there is no
need of farther descent. We would preserve those days of the reaping;
we have lost them; but we recall them now when the steam-plough has
furrowed the sheeny stubble, and long for the day when the gentle
north wind can only just stir the clusters of aspen-leaves, and the
branches are motionless. The nut bushes hang dreamily, heavily, over
the white cool roads. The wood-pigeon’s is the sole voice in the oak
woods of the low hills, except that once or twice a swift screams as
he pursues that martial flight of his--as of one who swings a sword as
he goes--towards the beeches and hop gardens of the higher hills in
the north; it is perhaps the last day for more than eight months that
his cry will be heard. A few barley-straws hang from the hazels; some
leaves are yellow. Autumn, in fact, seems possible to the mind that is
not perfectly content with these calm sweet airs and the sense of the
fulness of things.
At a crossing a small island is made amidst this and three other roads,
and on the island stands an oast house with two mellow cones and
white leaning cowls; and beside it a simple tiled cart-lodge, dimly
displaying massive wheels, curving bulwarks of waggons and straight
shafts behind its doorless pillars of rough-hewn wood. Making one group
with these, though separated from them by one road, is an old red
farmhouse, of barely distinguishable timber and brick, with white-edged
dormers and lower windows and doors, entrenched behind hollyhocks of
deepest red and the burning discs of everlasting sunflowers. Behind the
gates stand four haystacks brightly thatched, and one that is dark and
old and carved into huge stairs.
Notice the gate into the rickyard. It is of the usual five oak bars;
and across these is a diagonal bar from the lowest end nearest the
hinge to the upper end of the opposite side, and from top to bottom a
perpendicular cross-bar divides the gate. The top bar marks it as no
common gate made at a factory with a hundred others of the same kind,
though there are scores of them in Kent. It thickens gradually towards
the hinge end of the gate, and then much more decidedly so that it
resembles a gun-barrel and stock; and just where the stock begins it
is carved with something like a trigger-guard; the whole being well
proportioned, graceful but strong. In all the best gates of Kent,
Sussex and Surrey and the South Country there is an approach to this
form, usually without the trigger-guard, but sometimes having instead a
much more elaborate variation of it which takes away from the dignity
and simplicity of the gate. At the road’s edge crooked quince-trees
lean over a green pond and green but nearly yellow straight reeds;
and four cart-horses, three sorrels and a grey, are grouped under one
stately walnut.
These things mingle their power with that of the silence and the wooded
distance under the blue and rosy west. The slow dying of a train’s roar
beats upon the shores of the silence and the distance, and is swallowed
up in them like foam in sand, and adds one more trophy to the glory of
the twilight.
Night passes, and the white dawn is poured out over the dew from the
folds in low clouds of infinitely modulated grey. Autumn is clearly
hiding somewhere in the long warm alleys under the green and gold of
the hops. The very colours of the oast houses seem to wait for certain
harmonies with oaks in the meadows and beeches in the steep woods.
The songs, too, are those of the drowsy yellow-hammer, of the robin
moodily brooding in orchards yellow spotted and streaked, of the unseen
wandering willow-wren singing sweetly but in a broken voice of a matter
now forgotten, of the melancholy twit of the single bullfinch as he
flies. The sudden lyric of the wren can stir no corresponding energy
in the land which is bowed, still, comfortable, like a deep-uddered
cow fastened to the milking-stall and munching grains. Soon will the
milk and honey flow. The reaping-machine whirrs; the wheelwrights have
mended the waggons’ wheels and patched their sides; they stand outside
their lodges.
There is a quarter of a sloping wheat-field reaped; the shocks stand
out above the silvery stubble in the evening like rocks out of a
moonlight sea. The unreaped corn is like a tawny coast; and all is
calm, with the quiet of evening heavens fallen over the earth. This
beauty of the ripe Demeter standing in the August land is incomparable.
It reminds one of the poet who said that he had seen a maid who looked
like a fountain on a green lawn when the south wind blows in June; and
one whose smile was as memorable as the new moon in the first still
mild evening of the year, when it is seen for a moment only over the
dark hills; and one whose walking was more kindling to the blood than
good ale by a winter fire on an endless evening among friends; but that
now he has met another, and when he is with her or thinks of her he
becomes as one that is blind and deaf to all other things.
But a few days and the bryony leaves are palest yellow in the hedge.
Rooks are innumerable about the land, but their cawing, like all other
sounds, like all the early bronze and rose and gold of the leaves, is
muffled by the mist which endures right through the afternoon; and
all day falls the gentle rain. In the hillside hop garden two long
lines of women and children, red and white and black, are destroying
the golden green of the hops, and they are like two caterpillars
destroying a leaf. Pleasant it is now to see the white smoke from the
oast house pouring solidly like curving plumes into the still rain,
and to smell the smell, bitter and never to be too much sniffed and
enjoyed, that travels wide over the fields. For the hop drier has lit
his two fires of Welsh coal and brimstone and charcoal under the two
cones of the oast house, and has spread his couch of straw on the
floor where he can sleep his many little sleeps in the busy day and
night. The oast house consists of the pair of cones, white-vaned and
tiled, upon their two circular chambers in which the fires are lit.
Attached to these on one side is a brick building of two large rooms,
one upon the ground, where the hop drier sleeps and tends his fires,
lighted only by doors at either side and divided by the wooden pillars
which support the floor of the upper room. This, the oast chamber,
reached by a ladder, is a beautiful room, its oak boards polished by
careful use and now stained faintly by the green-gold of hops, its
roof raftered and high and dim. Light falls upon it on one side from
two low windows, on the opposite side from a door through which the
hops arrive from the garden. The waggon waits below the door, full of
the loose, stained hop-sacks which the carter and his boy lift up to
the drier. From the floor two short ladders lead to the doors in the
cones where the hops are suspended on canvas floors above the kilns.
The inside of the cone is full of coiling fumes which have killed the
young swallows in the nests under the cowl--the parents return again
and again, but dare no longer alight on their old perches on the vanes.
When dried the hops are poured out on the floor of the vast chamber in
a lisping scaly pile, and the drier is continually sweeping back those
which are scattered. Through a hole in the floor he forces them down
into a sack reaching to the floor of the room below. He is hard at
work making these sacks or “pokes,” which, when full and their necks
stitched up, are as hard as wood. Before the drying is over the full
sacks will take up half the room. The children tired of picking come
to admire and to visit all the corners of the room; of the granary
alongside and its old sheepbells, its traps, a crossbow and the like;
of the farmyard and barns, sacred except at this time. For a few
minutes the sun is visible as a shapeless crimson thing above the mist
and behind the elms. It is twilight; the wheels and hoofs of the last
waggon approach and arrive and die away. And so day after day the fires
glow with ruby and sapphire and emerald; the cone wears its plume of
smoke; and everything is yellow-green--the very scent of the drying
hops can hardly be otherwise described, in its mixture of sharpness
and mellowness. Then when the last sack is pressed benches are placed
round the chamber and a table at one end. The master, who is giving up
the farm, leans on the table and pays each picker and pole-puller and
measurer, with a special word for each and a jest for the women. Ale
and gin and cakes are brought in, and the farmer leaves the women and
one or two older men to eat and drink. The women in their shabby black
skirts and whitish blouses shuffle through a dance or two, all modern
and some American. One old man tipsily tottering recalls the olden time
with a step-dance down the room; some laugh at him, others turn up
their new roseate noses. Next year the hops are to be grubbed up; the
old man to be turned out of his cottage--for he has paid no rent these
seven years; but now it is cakes and ale, and the farmer has hiccupped
a lying promise that his successor will go on growing hops.
HAMPSHIRE.
To-day is fair day. The scene is a green, slightly undulating common,
grassy and rushy at its lower end where a large pond wets the margin of
the high road, and at the upper end sprinkled with the dwarf and the
common gorse out of which rise many tumuli, green or furzy mounds of
earth, often surmounted by a few funereal pines. The common is small;
it is bounded on every side by roads, and on one by a row of new mean
houses; there is a golf-house among the tumuli; in one place a large
square has been ploughed and fenced by a private owner. But the slope
of the sandy soil is pleasant; in one place it is broken into a low
cliff overhanging the water, and this with the presence of the gorse
give it a touch of the wildness by which it may still deserve its name
of “heath.” Most powerful of all in their effect upon the place are the
tumuli. They are low and smooth; one or two scarcely heave the turf;
some have been removed; and there is no legend attached to them. Yet
their presence gives an indescribable charm and state, and melancholy
too, and makes these few acres an expanse unequalled by any other of
the same size. Not too far off to be said to belong to the heath, from
which they are separated by three miles of cultivated land and a lesser
beechen hill, are the Downs; among them one that bears a thin white
road winding up at the edge of a dark wood. In the moist October air
the Downs are very grave and gentle and near, and are not lost to sight
until far beyond the turreted promontory of Chanctonbury.
Early in the morning the beggars begin to arrive, the lame and the
blind, with or without a musical instrument. King of them all certainly
is he with no legs at all and seeming not to need them, so active is
he on a four-wheeled plank which suspends him only a foot above the
ground. Many a strong man earns less money. The children envy him
as he moves along, a wheeled animal, weather-beaten, white-haired,
white-bearded, with neat black hat and white slop, a living toy, but
with a deep voice, a concertina and a tin full of pence and halfpence.
These unashamed curiosities line the chief approaches, down which every
one is going to the fair except a few shabby fellows who offer blue
sheets full of music-hall ballads to the multitude and, with a whisper,
indecent songs to the select. Another not less energetic, but stout
and condescending, yellow-bearded, in a high hard felt hat, gives away
tracts. The sound of a hymn from one organ mingles with the sound of
“Put me among the girls” from another and the rattle of the legless
man’s offertory-tin.
The main part of the fair consists of a double row, a grove, of tents
and booths, roundabouts, caravans, traps and tethered ponies. A crowd
of dark-clad women goes up and down between the rows: there is a sound
of machine-made music, of firing at targets, of shouts and neighs and
brays and the hoot of engines. Here at the entrance to the grove is a
group of yellow vans; some children playing among the shafts and wheels
and musing horses; and a gypsy woman on a stool, her head on one side,
combing her black hair and talking to the children, while a puppy
catches at the end of her tresses when they come swishing down. Beyond
are cocoanut-shies, short-sighted cyclists performing, Aunt Sallies,
rows of goldfish bowls into which a light ball has to be pitched to
earn a prize, stalls full of toys, cheap jewellery and sweets like
bedded-out plants, and stout women pattering alongside--bold women,
with sleek black or yellow hair and the bearing and countenance of
women who have to make their way in the world. Behind these, women are
finishing their toilet and their children’s among the vans, preparing
meals over red crackling fires, and the horses rest their noses on the
stalls and watch the crowd; the long yellow dogs are curled up among
the wheels or nosing in the crowd.
There are men selling purses containing a sovereign for sixpence,
loud, fat cosmopolitans on a cockney basis with a ceaseless flow of
cajolery intermingled with sly indecency; the country policeman in
the background puzzling over his duty in the matter, but in the end
paralyzed by the showmen’s gift of words. One man has before him a
counter on which he asks you to cover a red-painted disc with five
smaller discs of zinc, charging twopence for the attempt and promising
a watch to the great man who succeeds. After a batch of failures he
himself, with good-natured but bored face, shows how easily it is
done, and raising his eyes in despair craves for more courage from the
audience. The crowd looks on, hesitating, until he singles out the most
bashful countryman at the back of the throng, saying: “I like your
face. You are a good sort. You have a cheerful face; it’s the rich have
the sad faces. So I’ll treat you to a go.” The hero steps forward and
succeeds, but as it was a free trial he receives no watch; trying again
for twopence he fails. Another tries: “By Jove! that was a near one.”
A woman tries, and just as she is finishing, “You’re a ’cute one,
missus,” he ejaculates, and she fails. Another tries, and the showman
has a watch ready to hand over, and only at the last moment says
excitedly (restoring the watch quietly to its place): “I thought you’d
got it that time.... Come along! It’s the best game in the world.” Once
more he repeats the trick himself without looking, and then exclaims
as he sweeps the discs together: “It’s a silly game, I call it!” He is
like the preachers who show the stupid world how virtue is won: he has
a large audience, a large paunch, and many go away disappointed. The
crowd stares, and has the one deep satisfaction of believing that the
woman who travels with him is not his wife.
At the upper end of the grove is the gaudy green and gold and
scarlet-painted and embossed entrance to the bioscope, raised a few
feet above the crowd. On the platform before the door stand two painted
men and a girl. The girl has a large nose, loose mouth and a ready,
but uneasy, discontented smile as if she knows that her paint is an
imperfect refuge from the gaze of the crowd; as if she knows that her
eyes are badly darkened, and her white stockings soiled, and her legs
too thin under her short skirt, and her yellow hair too stiff. She
lounges wearily with a glib clown who wears a bristly fringe of sandy
hair round his face, which tickles her and causes roars of laughter
when he aims at a kiss. The other performer is a contortionist, a small
slender man in dirty, ill-fitting scarlet jacket with many small brass
buttons, dirty brown trousers criss-crossed by yellow stripes; his
hands in his pockets; his snub nose deep pink, and his lean face made
yet leaner and more dismal by a thin streak of red paint on either
cheek. His melancholy seems natural, yet adds to his vulgarity because
he forsakes it so quickly when he smirks and turns away if the girl
exposes her legs too much. For she turns a somersault with the clown
at intervals; or doubles herself back to touch the ground first with
her yellow hair and at last with her head; or is lifted up by the clown
and, supported on the palm of one of his hands, hangs dangling in a
limp bow, her face yet gaunter and sadder upside down with senseless
eyes and helpless legs. The crowd watch--looking sideways at one
another to get their cue--some with unconscious smiles entranced, but
most of them grimly controlling the emotions roused by the girl or the
contortionist or the clown and the thought of their unstable life. A
few squirt water languidly or toss confetti. Others look from time to
time to see whether any one in the county dare in broad daylight enter
the booth for “gentlemen only,” at the door of which stands a shabby
gaudy woman of forty-five grinning contemptuously.
Up and down moves the crowd--stiffly dressed children carrying gay toys
or bowls of goldfish or cocoanuts--gypsy children with scarves, blue
or green or red--lean, tanned, rough-necked labourers caged in their
best clothes, except one, a labourer of well past middle age, a tall
straight man with a proud grizzled head, good black hat of soft felt
low in the crown, white scarf, white jacket, dark-brown corduroys above
gleaming black boots.
On the open heath behind the stalls they are selling horses by auction.
Enormous cart-horses plunge out of the groups of men and animals and
carry a little man suspended from their necks; stout men in grey
gaiters and black hats bobble after. Or more decorously the animals
are trotted up and down between rows of men away from the auctioneer
and back again, their price in guineas mingling with the statement that
they are real workers, while a small boy hustles them with whip and
shout from behind, and a big stiff man leads them and, to turn them at
the end of the run, shoves his broad back into their withers. The Irish
dealers traffic apart and try to sell without auction. Their horses
and ponies, braided with primrose and scarlet, stand in a quiet row.
Suddenly a boy leads out one on a halter, a hard, plump, small-headed
beast bucking madly, and makes it circle rapidly about him, stopping it
abruptly and starting it again, with a stiff pink flag which he flaps
in its face or pokes into its ribs; if the beast refuses he raises a
high loud “whoo-hoop” and curses or growls like an animal. For perhaps
five minutes this goes on, the boy never abating his oaths and growls
and whoops and flirtings of the pink flag. The horse is led back; a
muttering calm follows; another horse is led out. Here and there are
groups of cart-mares with huge pedestalled feet and their colts, or
of men bending forward over long ash-sticks and talking in low tones.
Horses race or walk or are backed into the crowd. Droves of bullocks
are driven through the furze. Rows of bulls, sweating but silent and
quiet, bow their heads and wait as on a frieze. Again the pink flags
are flourished, and the dealer catches a horsy stranger by the arm and
whispers and shows him the mare’s teeth. This dealer is a big Irishman
with flattened face and snaky nose, his voice deep and laughing. He
smiles continually, but when he sees a possible buyer he puts on an
artful expression so transparent that his merry face shines clearly
underneath and remains the same in triumph or rebuke--is the same
at the end of the day when he leads off his horses and stopping at a
wayside inn drinks on the kerb, but first gives the one nearest him a
gulp from the tankard.
* * * * *
All night--for a week--it rains, and at last there is a still morning
of mist. A fire of weeds and hedge-clippings in a little flat field is
smouldering. The ashes are crimson, and the bluish-white smoke flows
in a divine cloudy garment round the boy who rakes over the ashes.
The heat is great, and the boy, straight and well made, wearing close
gaiters of leather that reach above the knees, is languid at his
task, and often leans upon his rake to watch the smoke coiling away
from him like a monster reluctantly fettered and sometimes bursting
into an anger of sprinkled sparks. He adds some wet hay, and the
smoke pours out of it like milky fleeces when the shearer reveals the
inmost wool with his shears. Above and beyond him the pale blue sky is
dimly white-clouded over beech woods, whose many greens and yellows
and yellow-greens are softly touched by the early light which cannot
penetrate to the blue caverns of shade underneath. Athwart the woods
rises a fount of cottage-smoke from among mellow and dim roofs. Under
the smoke and partly scarfed at times by a drift from it is the yellow
of sunflower and dahlia, the white of anemone, the tenderest green and
palest purple of a thick cluster of autumn crocuses that have broken
out of the dark earth and stand surprised, amidst their own weak light
as of the underworld from which they have come. Robins sing among the
fallen apples, and the cooing of wood-pigeons is attuned to the soft
light and the colours of the bowers. The yellow apples gleam. It is
the gleam of melting frost. Under all the dulcet warmth of the face of
things lurks the bitter spirit of the cold. Stand still for more than
a few moments and the cold creeps with a warning and then a menace
into the breast. That is the bitterness that makes this morning of all
others in the year so mournful in its beauty. The colour and the grace
invite to still contemplation and long draughts of dream; the frost
compels to motion. The scent is that of wood-smoke, of fruit and of
some fallen leaves. This is the beginning of the pageant of autumn,
of that gradual pompous dying which has no parallel in human life yet
draws us to it, with sure bonds. It is a dying of the flesh, and we
see it pass through a kind of beauty which we can only call spiritual,
of so high and inaccessible a strangeness is it. The sight of such
perfection as is many times achieved before the end awakens the never
more than lightly sleeping human desire of permanence. Now, now is the
hour; let things be thus; thus for ever; there is nothing further to be
thought of; let these remain. And yet we have a premonition that remain
they must not for more than a little while. The motion of the autumn
is a fall, a surrender, requiring no effort, and therefore the mind
cannot long be blind to the cycle of things as in the spring it can
when the effort and delight of ascension veils the goal and the decline
beyond. A few frosts now, a storm of wind and rain, a few brooding
mists, and the woods that lately hung dark and massive and strong upon
the steep hills are transfigured and have become cloudily light and
full of change and ghostly fair; the crowing of a cock in the still
misty morning echoes up in the many-coloured trees like a challenge to
the spirits of them to come out and be seen, but in vain. For months
the woods have been homely and kind, companions and backgrounds to our
actions and thoughts, the wide walls of a mansion utterly our own.
We could have gone on living with them for ever. We had given up the
ardours, the extreme ecstasy of our first bridal affection, but we had
not forgotten them. We could not become indifferent to the Spanish
chestnut-trees that grow at the top of the steep rocky banks on either
side of the road and mingle their foliage overhead. Of all trees
well-grown chestnuts are among the most pleasant to look up at. For the
foliage is not dense and it is for the most part close to the large
boughs, so that the light comes easily down through all the horizontal
leaves, and the shape of each separate one is not lost in the
multitude, while at the same time the bold twists of the branches are
undraped or easily seen through such translucent green. The trunks are
crooked, and the handsome deep furrowing of the bark is often spirally
cut. The limbs are few and wide apart so as to frame huge delicately
lighted and shadowed chambers of silence or of birds’ song. The leaves
turn all together to a leathern hue, and when they fall stiffen and
display their shape on the ground and long refuse to be merged in the
dismal trodden hosts. But when the first one floats past the eye and is
blown like a canoe over the pond we recover once more our knowledge and
fear of Time. All those ladders of goose-grass that scaled the hedges
of spring are dead grey; they are still in their places, but they
clamber no longer. The chief flower is the yellow bloom set in the dark
ivy round the trunks of the ash-trees; and where it climbs over the
holly and makes a solid sunny wall, and in the hedges, a whole people
of wasps and wasp-like flies are always at the bloom with crystal
wings, except when a passing shadow disperses them for a moment with
one buzz. But these cannot long detain the eye from the crumbling woods
in the haze or under the large white clouds--from the amber and orange
bracken about our knees and the blue recesses among the distant golden
beeches when the sky is blue but beginning to be laden with loose
rain-clouds, from the line of leaf-tipped poplars that bend against the
twilight sky; and there is no scent of flowers to hide that of dead
leaves and rotting fruit. We must watch it until the end, and gain
slowly the philosophy or the memory or the forgetfulness that fits us
for accepting winter’s boon. Pauses there are, of course, or what seem
pauses in the declining of this pomp; afternoons when the rooks waver
and caw over their beechen town and the pigeons coo content; dawns
when the white mist is packed like snow over the vale and the high
woods take the level beams and a hundred globes of dew glitter on every
thread of the spiders’ hammocks or loose perpendicular nets among the
thorns, and through the mist rings the anvil a mile away with a music
as merry as that of the daws that soar and dive between the beeches and
the spun white cloud; mornings full of the sweetness of mushrooms and
blackberries from the short turf among the blue scabious bloom and the
gorgeous brier; empurpled evenings before frost when the robin sings
passionate and shrill and from the garden earth float the smells of a
hundred roots with messages of the dark world; and hours full of the
thrush’s soft November music. The end should come in heavy and lasting
rain. At all times I love rain, the early momentous thunderdrops,
the perpendicular cataract shining, or at night the little showers,
the spongy mists, the tempestuous mountain rain. I like to see it
possessing the whole earth at evening, smothering civilization, taking
away from me myself everything except the power to walk under the dark
trees and to enjoy as humbly as the hissing grass, while some twinkling
house-light or song sung by a lonely man gives a foil to the immense
dark force. I like to see the rain making the streets, the railway
station, a pure desert, whether bright with lamps or not. It foams all
the roofs and trees and bubbles into the water-butts. It gives the grey
rivers a demonic majesty. It scours the roads, sets the flints moving,
and exposes the glossy chalk in the tracks through the woods. It does
work that will last as long as the earth. It is about eternal business.
In its noise and myriad aspect I feel the mortal beauty of immortal
things. And then after many days the rain ceases at midnight with the
wind, and in the silence of dawn and frost the last rose of the world
is dropping her petals down to the glistering whiteness, and there they
rest blood-red on the winter’s desolate coast.
INDEX
Angelico, Fra, 253
April, 31, 155
_Arabian Nights_, 63, 222
Ashdown, 8, 47, 48
August, 51, 181, 186, 210, 262
Bain, F. W., 222
Ballads, 224, 240
Belloc, Hilaire, 1
Beowulf, 158
Berkshire, 255
Blake, 35, 133
Books, 26, 109, 130, 131, 178
Borrow, 77, 117
Bradley, A. G., 11
_Brocken, Henry_, 178
Browne, Thomas, 86
Byron, 111
Canal, Wilts. and Berks., 3
Cathedrals, 4
Catullus, 109
_Centuries of Meditation_, 126
Chaucer, 109, 110, 125
Colman’s Hatch, 60
Conrad, Joseph, 130
Cornwall, 154, 249
Cows, 129, 204, 252
Crouch’s Croft, 47
Crowborough, 47
Cuckoo, 41
Doughty, Charles M., 147, 153
Downs, 1, 2, 8, 10, 28, 31, 35, 38, 40, 48, 50, 53, 71, 87, 101,
104, 152, 169, 183, 205, 210, 227, 237, 255, 258
Drayton, Michael, 109
Fair, A South Country, 266
February, 17
Game, 59, 68
Genée, Mademoiselle, 179
Gerald of Wales, 150
Golden Age, 125
Gypsies, 129, 257, 266
Hampshire, 19, 28, 46, 121, 129, 186, 188, 196, 210, 230, 255, 265
History, 5, 147
Hops, 262
Houses, 12, 57, 116, 117, 118, 196, 201, 220, 227, 229, 235
Hudson, W. H., 130
Inns, 12, 72, 102, 192, 208, 214, 216, 233, 240
Jefferies, Richard, 136, 145, 245
Jonson, Ben, 109, 202
Journalist, 7, 78, 125
June, 121
Kent, 11, 44, 47, 260
Lamb, Charles, 138
Land’s End, 42, 166
London, 3, 10, 51, 60, 74, 87, 95, 98, 171, 190
Lucas, E. V., 11
M, 115
Maeterlinck, 36
Malory, 130
March, 20, 30
May, 49, 84, 103, 107, 109, 112, 117, 128
Milton, John, 109
Morris, William, 109, 113
Names of places, 148
Nature-teaching, 141
Nightingale, 33, 206
November, 99
Oasts, 49, 260
October, 80, 265
_Pantagruel_, 178
Pattison, Mark, 145
Penshurst, 202
Piet Down, 47
Pilgrim’s Way, 3, 11, 44, 50, 52, 55, 58, 59, 210
Railway, 95, 199
Rivers of the South Country, 2, 3, 52, 107, 219, 229, 232
Roads, 101, 108, 124, 193, 215, 219, 228, 246, 255
Salt, Henry S., 256
Sandsbury Lane, 60
Scott, 63
Sea, 15, 157
Shelley, 112, 114
Sidney, Sir Philip, 109, 125, 202
Signboards, 4
Socialism, 94
Socialist, 257
Spring, 22 _et passim_
Statius, 229
Suburbs, 61
Suffolk, 15
Sunday, 124, 186
Surrey, 41, 58, 98
Sussex, 68, 100, 114, 181, 189, 196, 255
Swinburne, A. C., 111
“Swineherds County,” 211
Thoreau, 76, 77, 145
Tolstoy, 143
Traherne, Thomas, 126, 131, 134, 142
Trespassers, 59, 215
Vagrants, 25, 188, 249
Vaughan, Thomas, 137
Villon, 109
Wales, 7, 9, 10, 76, 77, 125, 150, 153, 163, 175, 232
Walton, Izaak, 125
Wandsworth, 74, 255
Weald, 53, 56, 58, 70, 85, 106, 169
West, the, 9, 254
White, Gilbert, 76, 145
Whitman, Walt, 113, 135
Wiltshire, 11, 191, 210, 235, 245
Winchester, 6, 7, 38
Woolmer, 8, 47
Wordsworth, 6, 77, 132, 137, 241
THE END
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
Transcriber's Note
The following apparent errors have been corrected:
p. 19 "HAMPSHIRE" changed to "HAMPSHIRE."
p. 34 "gnomes of undergound" changed to "gnomes of underground"
p. 62 "hoisery" changed to "hosiery"
p. 154 "CORNWALL" changed to "CORNWALL."
p. 222 (note) "F W. Bain" changed to "F. W. Bain"
p. 256 (note) "(Fifield)" changed to "(Fifield)."
p. 277 "210 262" changed to "210, 262"
p. 277 "Wilts. and Berks" changed to "Wilts. and Berks."
Inconsistent or archaic spelling and punctuation have otherwise been
left as printed.