perfectly with the floating herbage of the watery places he frequents.
The eye soon grows accustomed to his curves, till he is no more startling
than a frog among the water-crowfoot you are about to gather. To the
adder the mind never becomes habituated; he ever remains repellent. This
adder was close to a house and cowshed, and, indeed, they seem to like to
be near cows. Since then a large silvery slowworm was killed just
there--a great pity, for they are perfectly harmless. We saw, too, a very
large lizard under the heath. Three little effets (efts) ran into one
hole on the bank yesterday. Some of the men in spring went off into the
woods to 'flawing,' _i.e._ to barking the oak which is thrown in May--the
bark is often used now for decoration, like the Spanish cork bark. Some
were talking already of the 'grit' work and looking forward to it, that
is, to mowing and haymaking, which mean better wages. The farmers were
grumbling that their oats were cuckoo oats, not sown till the cuckoo
cried, and not likely to come to much. So, indeed, it fell out, for the
oats looked very thin and spindly when the nuts turned rosy again. At
work hoeing among the 'kelk' or 'kilk,' the bright yellow charlock, the
labourers stood up as the cuckoo flew over singing, and blew cuckoo back
to him in their hollow fists. This is a trick they have, something like
whistling in the fist, and so naturally done as to deceive any one. The
children had been round with the May garland, which takes the place of
the May-pole, and is carried slung on a stick, and covered with a white
cloth, between two little girls. The cloth is to keep the dust and sun
from spoiling the flowers--the rich golden kingcups and the pale anemones
trained about two hoops, one within the other. They take the cloth off to
show you the garland, and surely you must pay them a penny for thought of
old England. Yet there are some who would like to spoil this innocent
festival. I have heard of some wealthy people living in a village who do
their utmost to break up the old custom by giving presents of money to
all the poor children who will go to school on that day instead of
a-Maying. A very pitiful thing truly! Give them the money, and let them
go a-Maying as well. The same bribe they repeat at Christmas to stay the
boys from going round mumming. It is in spring that the folk make most
use of herbs, such as herb tea of gorse bloom. One cottage wife exclaimed
that she had no patience with women so ignorant they did not know how to
use herbs, as wood-sage or wood-betony. Most of the gardens have a few
plants of the milky-veined holy thistle--good, they say, against
inflammations, and in which they have much faith. Soon after the May
garlands the meadow orchis comes up, which is called 'dead men's hands,'
and after that the 'ram's-horn' orchis, which has a twisted petal; and in
the evening the bat, which they call flittermouse, appears again.
The light is never the same on a landscape many minutes together, as all
know who have tried, ever so crudely, to fix the fleeting expression of
the earth with pencil. It is ever changing, and in the same way as you
walk by the hedges day by day there is always some fresh circumstance of
nature, the interest of which in a measure blots out the past. This
morning we found a bramble leaf, something about which has for the moment
put the record of months aside. This bramble leaf was marked with a grey
streak, which coiled and turned and ran along beside the midrib, forming
a sort of thoughtless design, a design without an idea. The Greek fret
seems to our eyes in its regularity and its repetition to have a human
thought in it. The coils and turns upon this leaf, like many other
markings of nature, form a designless design, the idea of which is not
traceable back to a mind. They are the work of a leaf-boring larva which
has eaten its way between the two skins of the leaf, much like boring a
tunnel between the two surfaces of a sheet of paper. If you take a needle
you can insert the point in the burrow and pass it along wherever the
bore is straight, so that the needle lies between the to sides of the
leaf. Off-hand, if any one were asked if it were possible to split a
leaf, he would say no. This little creature, however, has worked along
inside it, and lived there. The upper surface of the leaf is a darker
green, and seems to the touch of firmer texture than the lower; there are
no marks on the under surface, which does not seem touched, so that what
the creature has really done is to split one surface. He has eaten along
underneath it, raising it no doubt a little by the thickness of his body,
as if you crept between the carpet and the floor. The softer under
surface representing the floor is untouched. The woodbine leaves are
often bored like this, and seem to have patterns traced upon them. There
is no particle of matter so small but that it seems to have a living
thing working at it and resolving it into still more minute atoms;
nothing so insignificant but that upon examination it will be found to be
of the utmost value to something alive. Upon almost every fir branch near
the end there are little fragments like cotton, so thick in places as to
quite hang the boughs with threads; these gossamer-like fragments appear
to be left by some insect, perhaps an aphis; and it is curious to note
how very very busy the little willow-wrens are in the fir boughs. They
are constantly at work there; they sing in the firs in the earliest
spring, they stay there all the summer, and now that the edge of autumn
approaches their tiny beaks are still picking up insects the whole day
long. The insects they devour must be as numerous as the fir needles that
lie inches thick on the ground in the copse.
Across a broad, dry, sandy path, worn firm, some thousands of ants
passing to and fro their nest had left a slight trail. They were hurrying
on in full work, when I drew the top of my walking-stick across their
road, obliterating about an inch of it. In an instant the work of the
nest was stopped, and thousands upon thousands of factory hands were
thrown out of employment. The walking-stick had left two little ridges of
sand like minute parallel earthworks drawn across their highway. Those
that came out of the nest on arriving at the little ridge on their side
immediately stopped, worked their antennae in astonishment, then went up
to the top of it, and seemed to try to look round. After a moment they
ran back and touched those that were coming on to communicate the
intelligence. Every ant that came did exactly the same thing; not one of
them passed the little ridge, but all returned. By-and-by the head of the
column began to spread out and search right and left for the lost track.
They scouted this way and they scouted that, they turned and doubled and
went through every possible evolution, hundreds of them, sometimes a
score at once, yet not one of them attempted to go straight forward,
which would have brought them into their old path. It was scarcely thrice
the length of an ant's body to where their path began again; they could
not see or scent, or in any way find out what was so short a distance in
front of them. The most extraordinary thing was that not one ventured to
explore straight forward; it was as if their world came to an end at that
little ridge, and they were afraid to step into chaos. The same actions
were going on behind the other ridge of sand just opposite, an inch away.
There the column of ants that had been out foraging was met with a like
difficulty, and could not find their way. There, too, hundreds of ants
were exploring right and left in every direction except straight forward,
in a perfect buzz of excitement. Once or twice an ant from either party
happened to mount on the parallel ridges at the same time, and if they
had strained forward and stretched out their antennae they could have
almost touched each other. Yet they seemed quite unconscious of each
other's presence. Unless in a well-worn groove a single ant appears
incapable of running in a straight line. At first their motions searching
about suggested the action of a pack of hounds making a cast; hounds,
however, would have very soon gone forward and so picked up the trail.
If I may make a guess at the cause of this singular confusion, I think I
should attribute it to some peculiarity in the brain of the ant, or else
to some consideration of which we are ignorant, but which weighs with
ants, and not to any absence of the physical senses. Because they do not
do as we should do under similar circumstances is no proof that they do
not possess the power to hear and see. Experiments, for instance, have
been made with bees to find out if they have any sense of hearing, by
shouting close to a bee, drawing discordant notes on the violin, striking
pieces of metal together, and so on, to all of which the bee remained
indifferent. What else could she do? Neither of these sounds hurt if she
heard them, nor seemed to threaten danger; they simply conveyed no
impression at all to her mind. Observe your favourite pussy curled up in
the arm-chair at such time as she knows the dishes have been cleared
away, and there is no more chance of wheedling a titbit from you. You may
play the piano, or the violin, or knock with a hammer, or shout your
loudest, she will take no notice, no more than if she actually had no
ears at all. Are you, therefore, to conclude she does not hear you? As
well conclude that people do not hear the thunder because they do not
shout in answer to it. Such noises simply do not concern her, and she
takes no notice. Now, though her eyes be closed, let a strange dog run
in, and at the light pad pad of his feet, scarcely audible on the carpet,
she is up in a moment, blazing with wrath. That is a sound that interests
her. So, too, perhaps, it may be with ants and bees, who may hear and
see, and yet take no apparent notice because the circumstances are not
interesting, and the experiment is to them unintelligible. Fishes in
particular have been often, I think, erroneously judged in this way, and
have been considered deaf, and to have little intelligence, while in
truth the fact is we have not discovered a way of communicating with them
any more than they have found a way of talking with us. Fishes, I know,
are keener of sight than I am when they are interested, and I believe
they can hear equally well, and are not by any means without mind. These
ants that acted so foolishly to appearance may have been influenced by
some former experience of which we know nothing; there may be something
in the past history of the ant which may lead them to profoundly suspect
interference with their path as indicative of extreme danger. Once,
perhaps, many ant-generations ago, there was some creature which acted
thus in order to destroy them. This, of course, is merely an illustration
put forward to suggest the idea that there may be a reason in the brain
of the ant of which we know nothing. I do not know that I myself am any
more rational, for looking back along the path of life I can see now how
I turned and twisted and went to the right and the left in the most
crooked manner, putting myself to endless trouble, when by taking one
single step straight forward in the right direction, if I had only known,
I might have arrived at once at the goal. Can any of us look beyond the
little ridge of one day and see what will happen the day after? Some
hours afterwards, towards evening, I found the ants were beginning to get
over their difficulty. On one side an ant would go forward in a
half-circle, on the other another ant would advance sideways, and meeting
together they would touch their antennae, and then the first would travel
back with the second, and so the line was reestablished. It was very much
as if two batsmen at opposite wickets should run forward each halfway,
and after shaking hands and conversing, one of them should lead the other
safely over.
WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS.
I.
If you will look at a grain of wheat you will see that it seems folded
up: it has crossed its arms and rolled itself up in a cloak, a fold of
which forms a groove, and so gone to sleep. If you look at it some time,
as people in the old enchanted days used to look into a mirror, or the
magic ink, until they saw living figures therein, you can almost trace a
miniature human being in the oval of the grain. It is narrow at the top,
where the head would be, and broad across the shoulders, and narrow again
down towards the feet; a tiny man or woman has wrapped itself round about
with a garment and settled to slumber. Up in the far north, where the
dead ice reigns, our arctic explorers used to roll themselves in a
sleeping-bag like this, to keep the warmth in their bodies against the
chilliness of the night. Down in the south, where the heated sands of
Egypt never cool, there in the rock-hewn tombs lie the mummies wrapped
and lapped and wound about with a hundred yards of linen, in the hope, it
may be, that spices and balm might retain within the sarcophagus some
small fragment of human organism through endless ages, till at last the
gift of life revisited it. Like a grain of wheat the mummy is folded in
its cloth. And I do not know really whether I might not say that these
little grains of English corn do not hold within them the actual flesh
and blood of man. Transubstantiation is a fact there.
Sometimes the grains are dry and shrivelled and hard as shot, sometimes
they are large and full and have a juiciness about them, sometimes they
are a little bit red, others are golden, many white. The sack stands open
in the market--you can thrust your arm in it a foot deep, or take up a
handful and let it run back like a liquid stream, or hold it in your palm
and balance it, feeling the weight. They are not very heavy as they lie
in the palm, yet these little grains are a ponderous weight that rules
man's world. Wherever they are there is empire. Could imperial Rome have
only grown sufficient wheat in Italy to have fed her legions Caesar would
still be master of three-fourths of the earth. Rome thought more in her
latter days of grapes and oysters and mullets, that change colour as they
die, and singing girls and flute-playing, and cynic verse of
Horace--anything rather than corn. Rome is no more, and the lords of the
world are they who have mastership of wheat. We have the mastership at
this hour by dint of our gold and our hundred-ton guns, but they are
telling our farmers to cast aside their corn, and to grow tobacco and
fruit and anything else that can be thought of in preference. The gold is
slipping away. These sacks in the market open to all to thrust their
hands in are not sacks of corn but of golden sovereigns, half-sovereigns,
new George and the dragon, old George and the dragon, Sydney mint
sovereigns, Napoleons, half-Napoleons, Belgian gold, German gold, Italian
gold; gold scraped and scratched and gathered together like old rags from
door to door. Sacks full of gold, verily I may say that all the gold
poured out from the Australian fields, every pennyweight of it, hundreds
of tons, all shipped over the sea to India, Australia, South Africa,
Egypt, and, above all, America, to buy wheat. It was said that Pompey and
his sons covered the great earth with their bones, for each one died in a
different quarter of the world; but now he would want two more sons for
Australia and America, the two new quarters which are now at work
ploughing, sowing, reaping, without a month's intermission, growing corn
for us. When you buy a bag of flour at the baker's you pay fivepence over
the counter, a very simple transaction. Still you do not expect to get
even that little bag of flour for nothing, your fivepence goes over the
counter in somebody else's till. Consider now the broad ocean as the
counter and yourself to represent thirty-five millions of English people
buying sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen million quarters of wheat from the
nations opposite, and paying for it shiploads of gold.
So that these sacks of corn in the market are truly filled with gold
dust; and how strange it seems at first that our farmers, who are for
ever dabbling with their hands in these golden sands, should be for ever
grumbling at their poverty! 'The nearer the church the farther from God'
is an old country proverb; the nearer to wheat the farther from mammon, I
may construct as an addendum. Quite lately a gentleman told me that while
he grew wheat on his thousand acres he lost just a pound an acre per
annum, _i.e._ a thousand a year out of capital, so that if he had not
happily given up this amusement he would now have been in the workhouse
munching the putty there supplied for bread.
The rag and bone men go from door to door filling an old bag with scraps
of linen, and so innumerable agents of bankers and financiers, vampires
that suck gold, are for ever prowling about collecting every golden coin
they can scent out and shipping it over sea. And what does not go abroad
is in consequence of this great drain sharply locked up in the London
safes as reserves against paper, and cannot be utilised in enterprises or
manufacture. Therefore trade stands still, and factories are closed, and
ship-yards are idle, and beautiful vessels are stored up doing nothing by
hundreds in dock; coal mines left to be filled with water, and furnaces
blown out. Therefore there is bitter distress and starvation, and cries
for relief works, and one meal a day for Board school children, and the
red flag of Socialism is unfurled. All because of these little grains of
wheat.
They talked of bringing artillery, with fevered lips, to roar forth
shrapnel in Trafalgar Square; why not Gatling guns? The artillery did not
come for very shame, but the Guards did, and there were regiments of
infantry in the rear, with glittering bayonets to prod folk into moving
on. All about these little grains of wheat.
These thoughts came into my mind in the winter afternoon at the edge of a
level corn-field, with the copper-sheathed spire of the village church on
my right, the sun going down on the left. The copper did not gleam, it
was dull and brown, no better than discoloured wood, patched with pieces
of later date and another shade of dulness. I wish they would glitter,
some of these steeples or some of our roofs, and so light up the reddish
brown of the elms and the grey lichened oaks. The very rooks are black,
and the starlings and the wintry fieldfares and redwings have no colour
at a distance. They say the metal roofs and domes gleam in Russia, and
even in France, and why not in our rare sunshine? Once now and then you
see a gilded weathercock shine like a day-star as the sun goes down three
miles away, over the dark brown field, where the plough has been going to
and fro through the slow hours. I can see the plough and the horses very
well at three miles, and know what they are doing.
I wish the trees, the elms, would grow tall enough and thick enough to
hide the steeples and towers which stand up so stiff and stark, and bare
and cold, some of them blunted and squab, some of them sharp enough to
impale, with no more shape than a walking-stick, ferrule upwards--every
one of them out of proportion and jarring to the eye. If by good fortune
you can find a spot where you cannot see a steeple or a church tower,
where you can see only fields and woods, you will find it so much more
beautiful, for nature has made it of its kind perfect. The dim sea is
always so beautiful a view because it is not disfigured by these
buildings. In the ships men live; in the houses among the trees they
live; these steeples and towers are empty, and no spirit can dwell in
that which is out of proportion. Scarcely any one can paint a picture of
the country without sticking in one of these repellent structures. The
oast-houses, whose red cones are so plentiful in Kent and Sussex, have
quite a different effect; they have some colour, and by a curious
felicity the builders have hit upon a good proportion, so that the shape
is pleasant; these, too, have some use in the world.
Westward the sun was going down over the sea, and a wild west wind, which
the glow of the sun as it touched the waves seemed to heat into fury,
brought up the distant sound of the billows from the beach. A line of
dark Spanish oaks from which the sharp pointed acorns were dropping,
darkest green oaks, shut out the shore. A thousand starlings were flung
up into the air out of these oaks, as if an impatient hand had cast them
into the sky; then down they fell again, with a ceaseless whistling and
clucking; up they went and down they came, lost in the deep green foliage
as if they had dropped in the sea. The long level of the wheat-field
plain stretched out from my feet towards the far-away Downs, so level
that the first hedge shut off the fields beyond; and every now and then
over these hedges there rose up the white forms of sea-gulls drifting to
and fro among the elms. White sea-gulls--birds of divination, you might
say--a good symbol of the times, for now we plough the ocean. The barren
sea! In the Greek poets you may find constant reference to it as that
which could not be reaped or sowed. Ulysses, to betoken his madness, took
his plough down to the shore and drew furrows in the sand--the sea that
even Demeter, great goddess, could not sow nor bring to any fruition. Yet
now the ocean is our wheat-field and ships are our barns. The sea-gull
should be painted on the village tavern sign instead of the golden
wheatsheaf.
There could be no more flat and uninteresting surface than this field, a
damp wet brown, water slowly draining out of the furrows, not a bird that
I can see. No hare certainly, or partridge, or even a rabbit--nothing to
sit or crouch--on that cold surface, tame and level as the brown cover of
a book. They like something more human and comfortable; just as we creep
into nooks and corners of rooms and into cosy arm-chairs, so they like
tufts or some growth of shelter, or mounds that are dry, between hedges
where there is a bite for them. I can trace nothing on this surface, so
heavily washed by late rain. Let now the harriers come, and instantly the
hounds' second sense of smell picks up the invisible sign of the hare
that has crossed it in the night or early dawn, and runs it as swiftly as
if he were lifting a clue of thread. The dull surface is all written over
with hieroglyphics to the hound, he can read and translate to us in
joyous tongue. Or the foxhounds carry a bee-line straight from hedge to
hedge, and after them come the hoofs, prospecting deeply into the earth,
dashing down fibre and blade, crunching up the tender wheat and battering
it to pieces. It will rise again all the fresher and stronger, for there
is something human in wheat, and the more it is trampled on the better it
grows. Despots grind half the human race, and despots stronger than
man--plague, pestilence, and famine--grind the whole; and yet the world
increases, and the green wheat of the human heart is not to be trampled
out.
The starlings grew busier and busier in the dark green Spanish oaks,
thrown up as if a shell had burst among them; suddenly their clucking and
whistling ceased, the speeches of contention were over, a vote of
confidence had been passed in their Government, and the House was silent.
The pheasants in the park shook their wings and crowed 'kuck, kuck--kow,'
and went to roost; the water in the furrows ceased to reflect; the dark
earth grew darker and damper; the elms lost their reddish brown; the sky
became leaden behind the ridge of the Downs; and the shadow of night fell
over the field.