|It's just like summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have
forgotten to say it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it
from the orchard with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery.
There are some people of penurious emotions and speech, like the
Drumtochty farmer in Ian Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of
this iteration. They would find it wasteful and frivolous. They do not
understand that we go on saying it over and over again, like the birds,
for the sheer joy of saying it. Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice.
There he goes skipping from branch to branch and twig to twig, and
after each skip he pauses to say, “It's just like summer,” and from a
neighbouring tree his mate twitters confirmation in perfect time. I've
listened to them for half an hour and they've talked about nothing else.
In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great
baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the
paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully
and tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well
aired before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows
his score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has
only one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the
world, but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer,
and not a conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who
seems never to forget the listening world.
In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer.
There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along
the turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football
match, I fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the
cheerful outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens
and the fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of
hammering; from the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor
voice that comes up from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I
have not heard it for four years or more; but it has been heard in many
lands and by many rivers from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would
rather be singing in the allotment with his young brother Sam (the
leader of the trebles in the village choir) than anywhere else in the
vide world. “Yes, I've been to Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the
'Oly Land,” he says. “I don't care if I never see the 'Oly Land again.
Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far as I'm concerned. This is good
enough for me--that is, if there's a place for a chap that wants to get
married to live in.”
Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at
her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. “Well, this is all
right, ain't it, mother?”
“Yes,” says the old lady, “it's just like summer.”
“And to think,” continues the voice, “that there was a thick layer o'
snow a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't wonder if there's more to
come yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring according to the calendar,
and it stands to reason summer ain't really come yet, you know, though
it do seem like it, don't it?”
“Yes, it's just like summer,” repeats the old lady tranquilly.
There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the
sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just
like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we
are here. Weather in town is only an incident--a pleasurable incident
or a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella,
whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a
mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or
outside. It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your
visit to the theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for
this reason the incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as
an acquaintance of a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he
is in a good humour and locked out when he is in a bad humour.
But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven.
It is politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual
diversion. You study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and
watch the change of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the
mood of the public. When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a
fine day, or has been a cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a
conventional civility. It is the formal opening of the discussion of
weighty matters. It involves the prospects of potatoes and the sowing of
onions, the blossoms on the trees, the effects of weather on the poultry
and the state of the hives. I do not suppose that there is a moment of
his life when Jim is unconscious of the weather or indifferent to
it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not care what happens to
the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands and secular
interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is a stem
Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the chapel
in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always
trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold wi'
work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to
dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. “I don't hold wi'
work on Sundays,” he would repeat inflexibly.
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And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the other
end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with the
weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to call
her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward.
It is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she wants
hens. If the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by an
unerring instinct to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene ruin
of feathers. The hard frost last winter destroyed her store of potatoes
when everybody else's escaped, and it was her hive that brought the
“Isle of Wight” into our midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh, holds
that the last was a visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had a
death in the family--true, it was only a second cousin, but it was “in
the family”--and had neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the hive.
And of course they died. What else could they do, poor things? Widow
Walsh has no patience with people who fly in the face of Providence in
this way.
But of all Poor Miss Tonks' afflictions the weather is the most
unremittingly malevolent. It is either “smarty hot” or “smarty cold.” If
it isn't giving her a touch of “brownchitis,” or “a blowy feeling all up
the back,” or making her feel “blubbed all over,” it is dripping through
her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with smoke,
or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her solitary
life. I think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts the
hill-side like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he even
smiles, but his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At the
bottom he is a terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor country
woman no end of work, and makes her life a burden.
But to-day warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy.
When she brings a basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that “it is
a bit better to-day.” This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays
to the weather. And we translate it for her into “Yes, it's just like
summer.”
In the orchard a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the
damson trees there is the authentic note of high summer. For the most
part the trees are still as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees
are white with blossom, and offer the first real feast for the bees
which fill the branches with the hum of innumerable wings, like the note
of an aerial violin infinitely prolonged. A bumble bee adds the boom of
his double bass to the melody as he goes in his heavy, blustering way
from blossom to blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow, but he is
as full of the gossip of summer as the peacock butterfly that comes
flitting back across the orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as Old
Benjy, who saluted me over the hedge just now with the remark that
he didn't recall the like of this for a matter o' seventy year. Yes,
seventy year if 'twas a day.
Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of something about seventy
years ago, for his special vanity is his years, and he rarely talks
about anything in the memory of this generation. “I be nearer a
'underd,” he says, “than seventy,” by which I think he means that he is
eighty-six. He longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I see
no reason why he shouldn't live to do it, for he is an active old boy,
still does a good day's gardening and has come up the lane on this hot
day at a nimble speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known to
have made his coffin and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not from
any morbid yearning for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of warding
him off, just as the rest of us “touch wood” lest evil befall. “It's
just like summer,” he says.
“I remember when I was a boy in the year eighteen-underd-and-varty....”
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