The farmhouse with its outbuildings, all built of a mellowed limestone,
from a little distance could have been only an exposure of the bare
bones of the hillside. The group of grey structures were formless till
the sun was through the mist that morning and touched the lichened roof
of the house into a rectangle of orange light. That was the sign that
it was a human habitation, for weathered buttresses and grey hummocks
of rock are not infrequent on the slope above our walled garden by the
shingle. The gaunt ribs of the earth show through its thin turf and
shaggy tufts of furze and bracken. It surprises a visitor that England
should look so abandoned and desolate, yet so bright and tranquil.
But desolation is not the same as darkness. The life on those steep and
barren uplands is abundant; and, though useless, it evidently springs
from the original fount, which seems to be as full as at the beginning.
Nothing, we discovered, as we climbed to the moor, had been withheld
from the bracken because it is an unprofitable crop. It was a maze,
too, of the dry tracks of wild creatures, as though it were a busy
metropolis the citizens of which were all absent for the day. The day
now was radiant. The furze, which made vivid islands of new green and
gold in wide lakes of purple, for the heather was in bloom, suggested
that we have yet to learn the full meaning of profit. It was tough as
well as effulgent, and hinted of staple crops for uses beyond any that
figured in the news of the day. Those crops are not quoted. Perhaps we
know less about markets than we thought. The morning was so good that
one felt nonsensical.
Yet, as the visitor from London said to me: “What markets are you
talking about? Don’t be absurd. And what good would they be to us if
we knew them?” He wanted no transcendental nonsense, which was only
a lazy trick to escape from the facts. Bracken and furze, in modern
society, were enemies to be abolished. They were in the way. They
ought to be mutton and butter. He regarded any other view of them as a
fantasy, which had no validity except to the sentimental. “Of course,”
he said, pausing, as we reached the height, at the surprise of broad
valleys and hills beyond, “I enjoy this as much as you do. It’s a fine
day, so far--though something is working up in the southwest, by the
look of it.” He swept an arm of happy understanding over the peace and
splendour of the earth. “All that is lovely merely because we have
agreed to call it so. That’s its full title to loveliness. It does not
exist in its own right. When we choose to change it into something
different we shall. That right belongs to us. The dyes of those flowers
come of fortuitous chemistry, and the forms of those hills of the
chance of upheaval, the textures of the rocks, and the weather. We call
the colours lovely and the forms of the hills noble. That is only our
view of it. They are promoted to the titles we give them.” We strode
on, the gods of the earth to which we could give any shape we chose. It
certainly was a fine day.
He thought, indeed, this visitor, that the fact that we enjoyed a fine
day was its sole justification. As to the gold of the furze, those
bushes would as soon see us perish of exposure under their thorns
as exhilarate us with their new gold. And we could please ourselves
about it. It did not matter to the furze bushes whether we perished or
admired. And those cushions of rosy heath, pendant in half-circles over
a scar in the ground where white flints were set in buff-coloured earth
which seemed self-luminous, what were they but an aesthetic arrangement
of our own? In themselves they were nothing. They were not related to
anything, except to what was in our own minds. We made them rational
because we preferred them so. But the moor was not anything in reason
at all. Perhaps that lovely arrangement had never been noticed before,
and the chance brush-work of the next storm might obliterate the
beautiful irrelevancy for ever. Then where would it be?
I had no answer to make. There is no answer to be made that is valid
for all of us. The arrangement of rose, white and buff continued its
irrelevant appeal, without any additional emphasis to assist its dumb
case. The sun was warm. The air, when it stirred, smelt of herbs. The
critic’s little daughter, who might have been listening to her seniors
giving this world the reasons for its existence, she, too, made no
sign. She was merely unquestionably bright and good, like the rose and
gold, and smiled like the sun, without a word.
Possibly the critic was right. There was no sense in it all. Only our
own well-being assured us the moorland was good; the coincidence was
happy. “Wait and see what the place is like when the weather changes,”
he said.
It changed. A fog drifted in from the sea. One hill-slope would be
shining and its neighbour expunged. The time came when all the distant
view had dissolved. The light went out of the colours. As we tried to
find our way home in the growing murk it was noticeable that there
were more thorns than gold to the furze. The tracks confused us. They
were not made by creatures having our rational impulses. They lead
nowhere. As we came round an old tumulus an object moved ahead of us.
It vanished, unrecognised, in the mist. It left behind a dead rabbit.
We were sorry to have missed a sight of that fox.
Its victim had only just died. Its moist eye looked up at us,
apparently in bright understanding. We examined it, admired its soft,
warm fur, and then we left it, in an unattractive huddle, on the turf.
“We could continue our little discussion on nature,” he said, “with
that murdered rabbit as a text, couldn’t we? Not so pretty as the
purple heather?” He smiled while waiting for my answer.
I looked back at the victim. The critic’s little daughter was stooping
over it, tenderly setting bunny in comfort under the shelter of a bush.
Her compassionate figure was all I could see in the fog behind us.