A county inquiry took me, one day last summer, deeply into the Plain,
up and over a rutty track which my driver will have cause to remember.
An uncommonly large hawk soaring over his prey, and so near the ground
that I could see the light through his ragged plumes, a hare limping
through the bents, further off a crawling flock bustling after
shepherd and dog, were all the living things I saw. The ground was
iron, the colour of what had once been herbage a glaring brown. Of the
flowers none but the hardiest had outlived the visitation of the sun.
I saw rest-harrow which has a root like whipcord, and the flat thistle
which thrives in dust. The harebells floated no more, the discs of the
scabious were shrivelled husks; ladies' bedstraw was straw indeed, but
not for ladies' uses. Three miles away from anywhere we came upon a
clump of dusty sycamores whose leaves were spotted and beginning to
fall; beyond them was a squat row of flint and brick bungalows, the
goal of our quest. There were three tenements, of which two were
empty. In the third lives the shepherd who had called me up to
consider his circumstances.
There was thunder about, though not visibly; a day both airless and
pitiless; one of those days when you feel that the unseen powers are
conspiring against your peace. A naked sun from a naked sky stared
down upon a naked earth. It seemed to me that the hawk had been a
figure of more than himself and his purpose; I saw him as Homer's
people saw their eagles. Just as he hung aloft so hung the sun, intent
upon the life of our cowering ball. Not elsewhere in England have I
seen so shadeless a place, or one so unfitted for human intercourse,
so lacking in the comfort, which human sensibilities need. We live in
nature as hunted things, beasts of chase. Every eye is upon us in fear
or dislike; but in our turn, cursed as well as blessed by imagination,
we people the wild with dreadful shapes of menace. The heat, the cold,
the wind and the rain work as much against us as for us. We endow them
with minds like our own, but magnified by our dismay to be the minds
of gods maleficent. Without shelter of our own provision we are
comfortless, and without comfort our souls perish, then our bodies.
Salisbury Plain, swooning in the heat, is a paradise for insects. In
those desolate dwellings both flies and (I am sure) fleas abounded,
dreadfully healthy and alive. I only guess at the fleas, but the flies
I can answer for. They swarmed on the baking walls and wove webs in
the air above us. The rooms were black with them, and their humming
filled them up with noise.
Here lived the shepherd, too heavily taxed as he thought for his
hermitage; here lived his family of half a dozen swarthy and beautiful
children; and here we discussed the state of affairs, since the
shepherd was abroad, with his daughter, a flower of the field. She
came out of this stivy tenement at the sound of our boiling radiator,
and stood framed in the doorway, shading her eyes against the sun, a
tall and graceful, very pretty girl, dressed in cool white which might
have been fresh from its cardboard box, as she herself might have
stepped from her typewriter and Government office at Whitehall.
Gentle-voiced, quiet and self-possessed, she showed us the conditions
of her lot. One living-room, two bedrooms, and a washhouse in a shed:
three miles over the grass to shop, church, post-office, and doctor;
half a mile to call up a neighbour in case of need. A rain-water tank,
less than a quarter full of last winter's rain, must keep clean her
house and her, and for drinking she was served by a galvanised tank in
full sun, which she was lucky to get filled once a week.
I tasted of it. The water was warm, flat, and not too clean. "Where
does this come from?" "It is fetched in a barrel from over the hill."
"Who brings it?" "The farmer--but he makes a fuss whenever we ask for
it." "He must water the stock, surely?" "Oh yes, and the sheep, too,
but--" A pregnant aposiopesis. I wondered if that tank could not be
put in the shade; but it seemed that it could not. The water had to be
drawn from the barrel, the barrel was on wheels; time was short, life
was tough; and so--you see! We did justice to the shepherd.
It is shocking that a man should live so, held of less account than
the sheep which he rears; but it is admirable that this man should
live as he does. The house, to call it so, was as clean as a dairy;
the children were neat, washed and brushed; the girl was one for
Herrick to have sung of. I wish that I could have seen the shepherd,
though it may well be that his wife, if she is alive, would reveal
more. Something told me that he was a widower, and that this fair
young woman mothered his brood for him. What she had of the nest-lore
can only have come from a shrewd mistress of it. I did not see a book
in the place, nor a newspaper.
Life out there, on such terms, is more solitary than in
Northumberland, where the farms are isolated and self-sufficient,
but all the hinds' dwellings are clustered, and society may be had.
I don't believe you can set up for a successful hermit without a
long education; and although a shepherd himself may be one by a stern
schooling in solitude, you should not expect it of his daughter. Here
was a girl made for social amenity, who would want to be danced
with, flirted with, courted with flowers, sweets and other delicate
observance. She deserved admiration both to receive and impart. It is
useless to talk about nature; the love of that is both sophisticated
and acquired. Nothing to her the great blue spaces of the Plain, the
brooded mystery of Stonehenge, the companionship of her long-dead
ancestry, dust in their barrows. No solace for her, after the burden
of the day, in the large solemnity of evening out there, which to
some of us would call a message almost vocal. To me, for instance, a
summer's dusk, a moonrise on the Plain, are poems without words. Heard
melodies are sweet, but those unheard--!
For whom, then, had she adorned herself in white raiment, for whom
dressed her dark hair? Not for us, that's certain. She had had no
notice of our coming. That she should do such things for their own
sake, _elegantiâ quadam prope divinum_, was original virtue in her.
Solomon in all his glory had been no goodlier sight; and if she toiled
or spun to achieve it, her state, I should say, is by so much the
more gracious. And what the devil does she do with herself in the long
winter nights, when you light the lamp at four and see nothing of the
sun till eight the next morning--and she arrayed like a lily of the
field? There's mending, but you have the afternoon for that; a letter
to a brother in Canada; let us hope there's one to a sweetheart not so
far away. And then--what? To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.