I have hung the scythe up in the barn and now I am going to sing its
praises. And if you doubt my competence to sing on so noble a theme,
come with me into the orchard, smell the new-mown hay, mark the swathes
where they lie and note the workmanship. Yes, I admit that over there
by the damson trees and down by the fence there is a sort of unkempt,
dishevelled appearance about the grass as though it had been stabbed
and tortured by some insane animal armed with an axe. It is true. It
has been stabbed and tortured by an insane animal. It was there that I
began. It was there that I hacked and hewed, perspired and suffered.
It was there that I said things of which in my calmer moments I should
disapprove. It was there that I served my apprenticeship to the
scythe. But let your eye scan gently that stricken pasture and pause
here where the orchard slopes to the paddock. I do not care who looks
at this bit. I am prepared to stand or fall by it. It speaks for
itself. The signature of the master hand is here. It is my signature.
And having written that signature I feel like the wounded soldier
spoken of by the "Wayfarer" in the _Nation_. He was returning to
England, and as he looked from the train upon the cheerful Kentish
landscape and saw the hay-makers in the fields he said, "I feel as
though I should like to cut grass all the rest of my life." I do not
know whether it was the craftsman in him that spoke. Perhaps it was
only the beautiful sanity and peace of the scene, contrasted with the
squalid nightmare he had left behind, that wrung the words from him.
But they were words that anyone who has used a scythe would echo. I
echo them. I feel that I could look forward joyfully to an eternity of
sunny days and illimitable fields of waving grass and just go on mowing
and mowing and mowing for ever. I am chilled by the thought that you
can only play the barber to nature once, or at most twice a year. I
look back over the summers of the past, and lament my wasted
opportunities. What meadows I might have mown had I only known the joy
of it!
For mowing is the most delightful disguise that work can wear. When
once you have got the trick of it, it goes with a rhythm that is
intoxicating. The scythe, which looked so ungainly and unmanageable a
tool, gradually changes its character. It becomes an instrument of
infinite flexibility and delicacy. The lines that seemed so uncouth
and clownish are discovered to be the refinement of time. What
centuries of accumulated experience under the suns of what diverse
lands have gone to the perfecting of this most ancient tool of the
fields, shaping the blade so cunningly, adjusting it to the handle at
so artful an angle, disposing the nebs with such true relationship to
the action of the body, so that, skilfully used, the instrument loses
the sense of weight and seems to carry you forward by its own smooth,
almost instinctive motion. It is like an extension of yourself, with a
touch as fine as the brush of a butterfly's wing and a stroke as bold
and resistless as the sweep of a cataract. It is no longer a clumsy,
blundering, dead thing, but as obedient as your hand and as conscious
as your touch. You seem to have developed a new member, far-reaching,
with the edge of a scimitar, that will flick off a daisy or fell a
forest of stalwart grasses.
And as the intimacy grows you note how the action simplifies itself.
The violent stabbings and discords are resolved into a harmony as
serene as a pastoral symphony. You feel the rhythm taking shape, and
as it develops the body becomes captive to its own task. You are no
longer manipulating a tool. You and the tool have become magically
one, fused in a common intelligence, so that you hardly know whether
you swing the scythe or the scythe bears you forward on its own strong,
swimming stroke. The mind, released, stands aloof in a sort of
delighted calm, rejoicing in a spectacle in which it has ceased to have
a conscious part, noting the bold swing of the body backwards for the
stroke (the blade lightly skimming the ground, as the oar gently
flatters the water in its return), the delicate play of the wrist as
the scythe comes into action, the "swish" that tells that the stroke is
true and clean, the thrust from the waist upwards that carries it
clear, the dip of the blade that leaves the swathe behind, the
moderate, timely, exact movement of the feet preparatory to the next
stroke, the low, musical hum of the vibrating steel. A frog hops out
in alarm at the sudden invasion of his secrecy among the deep grasses.
You hope he won't get in the way of that terrible finger, but you are
drunk with the rhythm of the scythe and are swept along on its
imperious current. You are no longer a man, but a motion. The frog
must take his chance. Swish--swish--swish----
Not that the rhythm is unrelieved. It has its "accidentals." You
repeat a stroke that has not pleased you, with a curious sense of
pleasure at the interrupted movement which has yet not changed the
theme; you nip off a tuft here or there as the singer throws in a stray
flourish to garland the measure; you trim round the trees with the
pleasant feeling that you can make this big thing do a little thing so
deftly; you pause to whet the blade with the hone. But all the time
the song of the scythe goes on. It fills your mind and courses through
your blood. Your pulse beats to the rhythmic swish--swish--swish, and
to that measure you pass into a waking sleep in which the hum of bees
and the song of lark and cuckoo seem to belong to a dream world through
which you are floating, bound to a magic oar.
The sun climbs the heavens above the eastward hills, goes regally
overhead, and slopes to his setting beyond the plain. You mark the
shadows shorten and lengthen as they steal round the trees. A thrush
sings ceaselessly through the morning from a beech tree on the other
side of the lane, falls silent during the heat of the afternoon and
begins again as the shadows lengthen and a cool wind comes out of the
west. Overhead the swifts are hawking in the high air for their
evening meal. Presently they descend and chase each other over the
orchard with the curious sound of an indrawn whistle that belongs to
the symphony of late summer evenings. You are pleasantly conscious of
these pleasant things as you swing to the measured beat of the scythe,
and your thoughts play lightly with kindred fancies, snatches of old
song, legends of long ago, Ruth in the fields of Boaz, and Horace on
his Sabine farm, the sonorous imagery of Israel linking up the waving
grasses with the life of man and the scythe with the reaper of a more
august harvest.... The plain darkens, and the last sounds of day fall
on the ear, the distant bark of a dog, the lowing of cattle in the
valley, the intimate gurglings of the thrush settling for the night in
the nest, the drone of a winged beetle blundering through the dusk, one
final note of the white-throat.... There is still light for this last
slope to the paddock. Swish--swish--swish....