JANUARY

I

I HAVE just been to the house-door, to take a look at the winter’s night.

A change is coming, the long frost nears its end—so the old ferryman has

told me every morning for a fortnight back, and his perseverance as a

prophet has been rewarded at last. As I flung the heavy oak door back, a

breath of air struck upon my face warm, it seemed, as summer. All about

me in the grey darkness there was an indescribable stir and awakening of

life. The moon no longer stared down out of the black sky, a wicked,

venomous-bright beauty on her full-fed, rather supercilious face: now she

wore a scarf of mist upon her brows, and looked nun-like, dim-eyed, and

mild. The stars had lost their cruel glitter. I stepped forth, and felt

the grass yield beneath my tread—the first time for near a month past.

And as I stood wondering and rejoicing at it all, some night-bird lanced

by overhead, a note of the same relief and gladness unmistakable in its

shrill, jangling cry.

Hard weather in the country has a thousand enjoyments and interests for

those who care to look for them; but when the frost holds relentlessly

week after week, as it has done this January, the grimmer side of things

comes obtrusively to the fore. There is too much shadow for the light. It

is as though you rejoiced in the beauty of sunset beams on a wall, and it

were the wall of a torture-house. You lie awake at night, and in the

death-quiet stillness, hear the measured footfall of death—a dull,

reiterated thud on the frozen ground beneath the holly-hedge, each sound

denoting that yet another roosting thrush or starling has given up the

unequal fight. Roaming through the lanes in your warm overcoat and

thick-soled boots, you note the loveliness of the hoar-frost, at one step

dazzling white, and at the next aglow with prismatic colour; and turning

the corner, you come upon the gipsy’s tent, and realise that, while you

lay snug and warm, nothing but that pitiful screen of old rent rags has

stood between human beings and the terror of a winter’s night.

On one of the hardest days I met the old vicar of Windlecombe, and

regaled him with the story of how I had just passed along the river-way

as the tide was falling; how, at full flood, at the pause of the waters,

the frost had sheathed the river with ice; and how, when the tide began

to go down, this crystal stratum had remained aloft, held up by the

myriad reed-stems; until at length, loosened by the sunbeams, it had

fallen sheet by sheet to the wildest, most ravishing music, each icy

tympanum, as it fell, ringing a different, dear, sweet note. And, in

return for my word-picturing, the old man gave me a story of the same

times to match it; how he had just learnt that certain ill-clad, ill-fed

children—whom the law compelled to tramp every morning from Redesdown, a

little farming hamlet miles away over the frozen hills, to the nearest

school at Windlecombe, and tramp back again every night—were given a

daily penny between the three of them for their midday meal; and how, as

often as not, the bread they needed went unbought from the village store,

because of the lure of the intervening sweetstuff shop. Later, in the red

light of sundown, I met those children going home, as I had often met

them, plodding one behind the other, heads down to the bitter blast. Each

wore a great new woollen muffler, and had his pockets stuffed. I knew who

had cared for them, and my heart smote me. Somehow the pure austerity of

the evening—the radiant light ahead, the white grace of the hills about

me, the star-gemmed azure above—no longer brought the old elation. The

jingle of my skates, as they hung from my arm, took on a disagreeable

sound of fetters. Though I carried them many a time after that, I never

put them away without the honest wish that I should use them no more.

But lucidly, these long spells of unremitting frost are rare in our

country. Ordinary give-and-take winter’s weather—the alternation of cold

and warmth, gloom and sunshine, wind and calm—brings little hardship to

any living thing. Country children have a wonderful way of thriving and

being happy, even though their diet is mainly bread-and-dripping and

separated milk. As for wild life, we need expend no commiseration on any

creature that can burrow; and while there are berries in the hedgerows,

and water in the brooks, no bird will come to harm.

It is curious to see how Nature ekes out her winter supplies, doling out

rations, as it were, from day to day. If the whole berry harvest came to

ripe maturity at the same season, or were of like attractiveness, it

would be squandered and exhausted by the spendthrift, happy-go-lucky

hordes of birds, long before the winter was through. But many things are

designed to prevent this. Under the threat of starvation, all birds will

eat berries; but a great proportion of them will do so only as a last

resource. At first it is the hawthorn fruit that goes. The soft flesh of

the may-berry will yield to the weakest bill, and the whole crop ripens

together in early winter. But even here Nature provides against the risk

of immediate waste, that will mean starvation hereafter. The

missel-thrushes have been given a bad name because each of them takes

possession of some well-loaded stretch of hedgerow, and spends the whole

day in driving off other birds. Yet, on this habit of the greedy missel,

depends not only his own future sustenance but that of all the rest. For

all his agility, he cannot prevent each bird snatching at least enough to

keep life going, and while he is so busy, he has himself no chance for

gluttony.

Other berry supplies, such as the privet and holly, seem to be preserved

to the last because they are universally distasteful, though nourishing

at a pinch. But it is the hips, or rose-berries, which provide the best

example of Nature’s way of conserving the lives of birds throughout hard

weather against their own foolish, squandering instinct. These berries do

not ripen all at once, whether late or early in the season. On every

bush, the scarlet hips soften in regular, long-drawn-out succession, some

being ready in early winter, and some not until well on in the new year.

When the hip is ripe, the tenderest beak can get at its viscid fruit; but

until it begins to soften, there is hardly a bird that can deal with it.

The rose-berries, with their scanty but never-failing stores, are really

the mainstay of all in hard times. It is doubtful, indeed, whether the

birds that die wholesale in prolonged frosty weather, are killed by

hunger at all. Probably their death is due rather to thirst. So long as

the brooks run, bird life can hold against the bitterest times. But once

silence has settled down over the country-side—the only real silence of

the year, when all the streams are locked up at their source—then begins

the steady footfall under the holly-hedge, and you must needs turn from

the crimson sunset light upon the wall.

I have shut the heavy old house-door, and got back to my table by the

workroom fire. The thaw has come in earnest now. I can hear the drip of

the melting rime in the garden, far and near. The warm west wind is

beginning to sigh down the chimney. The logs simmer and glow, but not

with the greedy brightness of frost-bound nights.

It is on these long winter evenings that Solitude comes into her kingdom.

Men are not all made alike, nor is solitude with all a voluntary

condition, at least a self-imposed necessity, as it is with me—a

something that I must fashion out of my own will and abnegation, weave

about me as the tunnel-spider weaves her lair. In this ancient house the

walls are thick, yet not so thick but that an ear-strain will just trip

the echo of far-off laughter. If I but drew that curtain and set the

door ajar, I could catch a murmur of voices like the sound of bee-hives

in summer dark; and a dozen strides along the stone-flagged passage would

yield me what I may not take for hours to come—tried and meet

companionship, the flint-and-steel play of bandied jest, my own to hold,

if I can, in brisk exchange of nerving, heartening thought. But these

things in their season. Mine now it is to dip the grey goose-quill, to

gird up for the long tramp over the foolscap-country before me—that

trackless white desert where I must lay a trail to be followed, whether

by many or few or none, or with what pleasure or weariness, I may never

certainly know. For the writer is like a sower, that is ever sowing and

passing on. He can seldom do more than take a hurried, fleeting

shoulder-glimpse at the harvest behind him, nor see who reaps, if haply

it be reaped at all.

Scratching away in the cosy fireside quiet of the old room, there comes

to me at length a sound from the chimney-corner, to which I must needs

listen, no matter what twist or quirk of syntax holds me in thrall. You

often hear aged country folk complain that the crickets no longer sing on

the hearth, as they used to do in their childhood. My own crickets have

always seemed to sing blithely enough, too blithely at times to help one

forward with a difficult task. But I had always been glad to accept the

statement as one more proof of the decadence of modern times. Hobnobbing

one winter’s evening, however, with the old ferryman in his riverside

den, and noting how merrily the crickets were chirping in his

chimney-corner, I wondered to hear him give way to this same lament.

Then, for the first time, I realised that not the crickets, but his old

ears, were at fault. Though the little smoke-blackened cabin rang with

their music, the old man, who would, on the loudest night, have heard a

ferry-call from the other side of the water instantly, failed now to grip

the high-pitched sound. And this set me to philosophising. When the

crickets cease to pipe in my own chimney-corner, then, and not till then,

I will admit I am growing old.

But though we speak of the chirp or pipe of the cricket and grasshopper,

it is well to remember that neither these, nor any other insects, possess

a true voice. It would be nearer the fact to call the cricket a fiddler

than a piper. For it is by sitting and drawing the corrugated rib of his

wing-case to and fro over the sharp edge of the wing beneath, that his

shrill note is developed. And it is only the male cricket who can chirp.

The female carries upon her no trace of any fiddling contrivance. When

all things were made, and made in couples, on the females of at least one

numerous species, it is pleasant to remark, a significant and commendable

silence was imposed.

Solitude by a fireside in an old country dwelling, the murmurous night

without, and, within, the steady clear glow of candles made by your own

hands out of wax from your own hives, it would be strange if the

evening’s work failed to get itself done cleverly and betimes. Pleasant

as it is to all penmen to be achieving, there is no depth of satisfaction

like that of leaving off. Then, not to return incontinently to the

sober, colour-fast world of fact, but to stay in your dream-country,

idling awhile by the roadside, is one of the great compensations of this

most exacting of lives.

Your tale is done. You have scrawled ‘The End’ at the bottom of the

sheet, and thrown it with the others. You have turned your chair to the

fire, put up your slippered feet on the andiron, and have filled your

most comfortable pipe. The end it is, in very truth, for all who will

read the tale; but for you there will never be an end, just as there

never was a beginning to it. Unbidden now, and not to be gainsaid even

if you had the mind, your dream-children live on in the town or country

nook you made for them; live on, increase and multiply, finish their peck

of dirt, add to the world’s store either of folly or sanctity, come to

their graves at last, each by his own inexorable road, and each leaving

the seed of another tale behind.

To the enviable reader, when, after much water-spilling and cracking of

crowns, Jack has got his Jill, and the wedding-bells are lin-lan-loning

behind the dropt curtain, there is the satisfaction of certainty that so

much love, and one pair of hearts at least, are safe from further chance

and change in the whirligig of life. But to the teller of the tale,

there is no such assurance. Just as his dream-children came out of an

immortality he did not devise, so will they persist through an eternity

not of his controlling; and for ever they will be subject to the same

odds of bliss or disaster as any stranger that may pass his door. Yet,

being only human, he will nevertheless go on with his tales in the secret

hope that Jove may be caught napping, and a little heaven be brought down

to earth before its allotted time. For living in a world of law and

order—where even Omnipotence may not deny to every cause its outcome—is

too realistically like camping under fire. The old fatalists had peace

of mind because they believed it availed nothing to crouch when the

bullets screamed overhead, nor even to dodge a spent shot. But to take

one’s stand in the face of the myriad cross-purposes and side-issues of

an orderly universe, needs a vastly different temper. Perhaps it is just

the secret longing in all hearts to have at least a little make-believe

of certitude—if nowhere else but in the pages of a story—by which the art

of fiction so hugely thrives.

I have put out the candles, each shining under its little red umbrella of

paper, the better to see the joyous colour of the fire. When drab

thoughts come—those night-birds of sombre feather—the pure untinctured

glow from well-kindled logs has a wonderful way of setting them to

flight. Let unassailable optimism make his fire of coals: for him of

questioning, craving, often craven heart, there is no warmth like that

from seasoned timber. Coals, with their dynamic energy, their

superfluity of smoke, their sudden incongruous jets of flame, seem to be

for ever insisting on facts you would fain forget a while, much as you

may admire them and depend on them—the progress and competition of outer

life. But wood fires serve to draw the mind away from modernism in all

its phases. So that you burn the right kind of wood, and this is

important, your fireside thoughts need never leave the realm of cheery

retrospect. Good, seasoned logs of beech or ash are the best. Oak has

no half moods; it must make either a furnace unapproachable, or smoulder

away in dead, dull embers. Elm gives poor comfort, and the slightest

damp appals it. Poplar is charity-fuel; burn it will, indeed, to good

purpose, but too explosively. There is no rest by a fire of poplar: one

must be for ever treading out or parrying the vagrant sparks.

A joyous colour it is—the wavering amber light that fills the old room

now from the piled-up beechen logs; joyous, yet having a sedate,

ruminative tinge about it, like old travellers’ tales of ancient times.

Nor does the colour appeal only to the eye: there seems to be a fragrance

in it. That this is no mere conceit but simple fact, I was strangely

reminded when I blew the candles out, and from the smouldering wicks two

long white ribbons of vapour were borne away on the draught. The

fragrance of the smoking wax brought up a picture of the summer nights

when the bees lay close to fashion it. Round about the cluster in the

pent-up hive were thousands of little vats of brewing honey, each giving

off a steam that was the life-spirit of clover-fields and blue borage,

and sainfoin which spreads the hills with rose-red light. All these

mingled scents had got into the nature of the wax, and now they were

given off again in sweet-smelling vapour, such a fragrance as you may

rarely chance upon in certain foreign churches, where the old ordinances

yet prevail, and the candles are still made from the pure product of the

hives.

And it is the same with burning logs. Each kind of wood has its own

essential odour, which pervades the room as though it were soul and body

with the light. You cannot separate the two; no riding down of fancy

will dissociate the flickering gipsy-gold of the embers and the perfume

of the simmering bark. If these do not fill your mind with memories of

the green twilight of woodlands, of hours spent in leafy shadows of

forest-glades, then—then you are not made for a country fireside, and

were happier hobnobbing with Modernity by his sooty, coal-fed hearth.