seeing them when they have happened, you will not be such an advocate
of Summer as of other, any other, seasons. For Summer is the one time
of year when practically nothing happens outdoors. From about the
middle of May--I speak of the south parts--to the middle of September
Nature sits with her hands in her lap and a pleasantly tired face.
There, my children, she says, I have done my job. I hope you like it.
Most of us, I own, do like it very much, and signify the same in the
usual manner by vigorous ball-exercise and liquid refreshment, much
of it of an explosive and delusive kind. When the Summer is over,
somewhere round about Michaelmas day, Nature rolls up her sleeves and
begins again. Properly speaking, there are only two seasons--Spring and
Summer. The people therefore who, like me, prefer the Spring to the
Summer, have more time in which to exhibit or dissemble their love--and
a good deal of it, I confess, uncommonly beastly in the matter of
weather.
The people who like everything are the people to envy. Children, for
example, love the Winter just as much as the Summer. They whistle as
they jump their feet, or flack their arms across their bodies; and
whistling is one of the sure signs of contented youth. I remember
that we used to think it rare sport to find the sponge a solid globe
of ice, or to be able to get off cleaning our teeth on the ground
that the tooth water was frozen in the bottle. I don’t believe I ever
had cold feet in bed, and am sure that if I did I had something much
more exciting to think about. There might be skating to-morrow, or we
could finish the snow-man, or go tobogganning with the tea-tray; or
it was Christmas; or we were going to the pantomime. All seasons were
alike to us; each had its delights. That of Summer, undoubtedly, was
going to the seaside. We always had a month of that, and then a month
in some country place or other which my father did not know. That was
done for his sake, because the seaside bored him so much that even
his children noticed it. It was nothing to us, of course, as we lived
in the country, and did not, as he did, poor man, spend most days of
the year in London; but equally of course we weren’t _bored_. I never
heard of a child being bored, and can imagine few things more tragic in
a small way. No: it was always interesting to live in someone else’s
house, learn something of their ways, chance upon a family photograph,
or a discarded toy, or a dog’s grave in the shrubbery; or to read their
books and guess what bits they had liked--any little things like that.
And, of course, it was comfortable to know that one’s father wasn’t
always smothering a gape, or trying to escape from nigger-minstrels. As
for the sea--a very different thing from the seaside--I don’t believe
he ever looked at it. I am certain that I never saw him on the sands.
The sands are no place for you unless you had rather be barefoot than
not. Now, it is a fact that I never saw my father’s feet.
At the same time, I don’t know where else one could be in August,
except at the seaside. Really, there is very little to say for the
country in that month. The trees are as near black as makes no matter,
the hills are dust-colour, the rivers are running dry. True, the
harvest is going on; but the harvest is not what it used to be. You
had, indeed, “a field full of folk” (in old Langland’s words) in
former days. All hands were at it, and the women following the men,
building the hiles, as we call them; and the children beside them,
twisting up the straw ties as fast as they could twist. And then the
bread and cheese and cider--or it might be home-brewed beer--in the
shade! But bless me--last year I saw the harvesting of a hundred acre
field--our fields run very big down here; and the whole thing was being
done by one man on a machine! The Solitary Reaper, forsooth! The man
was reaper, tyer and binder all in one; you never saw so desolate a
spectacle. So the harvest is not what it was. It may have attractions
for the farmer, but for nobody else that I can think of. Go north
for your Summer and you may do better. August is wet, generally, in
Scotland, but when you are in Scotland you won’t mind rain, or had
better not. You can catch trout in the rain in Scotland, and with a
fly too: that is the extraordinary part of it. And the Scottish summer
twilights are things to remember. They are overdone in Norway, where
they go on all night; where the sun may go behind the hill for five
minutes and begin the day before you have thought of going to bed. You
can’t keep that up--but it is exciting enough at first. The great
charm of the Norwegian Summer to me is that it includes what we call
Spring. The other season in that country is Winter, which begins in
September and ends with May. Then, immediately, Summer begins: the
grass grows and is ready for the scythe, the cherries flower and get
ripe and are eaten--all at once. You get those amazing contrasts there
which you only have in mountainous countries; which I remember most
vividly crossing the Cevennes from Le Puy to Alais. On the watershed I
was picking daffodils, only just ready to be picked; in the valley of
the Ardeche they were making hay, and roses were dusty in the hedges.
I slid from March into June--in twenty minutes. You will not be so
piqued in England; yet if your taste lies in the way of strawberries
for instance, you can do pretty work even in England. You can begin in
Cornwall, or Scilly, and have your first dish in early May, or late
April, with clotted cream, of course. Then you can eat your way through
the western shires to Hampshire, and make yourself very ill somewhere
about Fareham, in June. When you are able to stand the journey, you can
go on to the Fens and find them ready for you in early July. In August
you will find them at their best in Cumberland, and in October, weather
permitting, you will have them on your table in Scotland. After that,
if you are alive, and really care for strawberries, you must leave this
kingdom, and perhaps go to California. I don’t know.
The Summer will give you better berries than the strawberry, in my
opinion. It will give you the _wild_ strawberry, which, if you can
find somebody to pick them for you, and then eat them with sugar and
white wine, is a dish for Olympians, ambrosial food. Then there is the
bilberry, which wants cream and a great deal of tooth-brush afterwards,
and the blaeberry, which grows in Cumberland above the 2,000 foot mark,
just where the Stagshorn moss begins; and the wild raspberry which here
is found on the tops of the hills, and in Scotland at the bottoms.
I declare the wild raspberry to be one of the most delicious fruits
God Almighty ever made. In Norway you will have the cranberry and the
saeter-berry; but in Norway you will want nothing so long as there are
cherries. I know Kent very well--but its cherries are not so good as
those of Norway.
I had no intention, when I began, to talk about eating all the time. It
is a bad sign when one begins that, though as a matter of fact we do
think a great deal of our food in the country--because we are hungry,
and it is so awfully good; and (as I daresay the Londoner thinks)
because we have nothing else to think about. That is a mistake, and
the Summer is the time to correct it, by spending it in the country
and trying to understand us. Let me be bold enough to suggest to the
Londoner who takes the prime of Summer to learn the ways of the country
in it, that he would prove a more teachable disciple if he did not
bring his own ways with him. He is rather apt to do that. He expects,
for example, his golf, and always has his toys with him for the
purpose. Well, he should not. Golf is a suburban game, handy for the
townsman in his off hours. Country people don’t play golf. They have
too much to do. The charabanc is another town-institution, to be used
like a stagecoach. Nothing of the country can be learned by streaming
over moor and mountain in one of them. The Oreads hide from them; Pan
and old Sylvanus treat them as natural process, scourges to be endured,
like snowstorms or foot-and-mouth disease. The country is veiled from
charabancs, partly in dust, partly in disgust. For we don’t understand
hunting in gangs. The herd-instinct which such things involve and imply
is not a country instinct. We are self-sufficient here, still, in spite
of all invitation, individuals.
THE LINGERING OF THE LIGHT
With the West wind blowing down the valley, wet and warm from the
Atlantic, men go home leisurely from their work in the fields, happy
in the last of the light, and enjoying, though they never say so, the
delicate melancholy of the hour. It is a gift you make no account of
when the East wind brings it you, for that Scythian scourge withers
what it touches, and under its whip the light itself seems like a husk
about the day. Old people tell us that it brings the blight, whatever
they mean by that. It brought locusts into Egypt once, and brings
influenza into England. Perhaps they put the two together. It brings
sick thinking too, a cold which has the property of drying up the
springs of the blood. There’s no escape from it. The air seems thinner
that comes from the East; brickwork will not keep it out, nor glazed
windows. One fancies in the black mood of it that the “channering worm”
at his work in the churchyard must feel it, and dive deeper into the
mould.
But now one can enjoy the sweet grave evening and turn the mind
hopefully to the prime of the year that is coming. The blackbird
whistles for it in the leafless elm; a belated white hen on the
hillside, very much at her ease, is still heeling up the turf and
inspecting the result. A cottage wife, having her fire alight and
kettle on the boil, stands for a moment at her open door. To mate the
gentle influence of the evening she has made herself trim in clean
white blouse and blue skirt, and looks what she was intended to be, a
pretty young woman with a pride in herself. A friend, going home, stops
her perambulator for a minute to exchange sentiments about the nights
“drawing out.” Almost as she speaks this one draws in--for at this time
of year twilight is a thing of moments. It will be dark before she is
home. No matter: the wind is warm and balmy; she can take her ease, and
her baby be none the worse. This is the weather that opens the human
buds as well as the snowdrops, and gems the gardens with aconites, and
the hearths with sprawling children. We do not heed Dr. Inge down here.
Here’s the end of January, and the winter, by our calendar, over in
three weeks’ time. Since that calendar was written up we have invented
a new winter. It is more difficult to get through April with safety, at
least to garden buds, than any January we have known for forty years;
but as far as we are concerned ourselves we can stand anything in
April, with May to follow; whereas January can still intimidate, and
a cold spell then will cause twice the sickness of the Spring-winter.
January is to April as Till to Tweed:
“Till said to Tweed,
’Though ye rin wi’ speed,
An’ I rin slaw,
Where ye drown ae mon
I drown twa.”
If you look at the graves in a country churchyard, of the two outside
generations, that is, of old people and young children, nearly all
will have found their “bane” in December and January.
With us in the West, the thing which kills the plants in our gardens
also kills the villagers, very old or very young: excessive wet,
namely, followed by hard frost or murderous wind. The other day we had
a day of warm drenches, drifting sheets of rain, a whole day of them,
the wind in the West. About midnight, the weathercock chopped round to
meet a whirl-blast from the East: the sky cleared, and it froze like
mad. I went round my borders in the morning, quaking at the heart. The
garden was like a battle-field. Nothing can cope with that. The babies
get pneumonia, the veterans bronchitis, the sexton is busy; every
day you hear the passing bell. Yet whether it is because we observe
punctually the Laws of Being, or (as the Dean will have it) in spite
of it, the facts are that the supply of babies never fails, and that
we live to a great age. The oldest gardener I know--I shouldn’t wonder
if he were the oldest gardener in the world--lives in this village.
Eighty-nine.
“I know a girl--she’s eighty-five”--
That was Lord Houghton’s way of beginning a poem on Mrs. Grote. My
gardener beats her by four years. To and fro, four times a day, he
walks his half-mile--to work and back. I saw him the other day half-way
up a cherry-tree, sawing off a dead branch. Mrs. Grote again:
“She lived to the age of a hundred and ten,
And died of a fall from a cherry-tree then.”
To look at his sapless limbs, you might think he could saw off one of
them and take no hurt. But not at all. Life is high in him still. His
eye is bright, his step is brisk. We have many octagenarians, but I
believe he is the patriarch of our village. Mr. Frederic Harrison, in
Bath, beats him by a year.
We are stoics, without knowing what that means down here. Whatever our
years tell us we make no account of them, or of ailments, or physical
discomfort; and as for Death, the Antick, however close he stand to
us--the Grizzly One, we call him--we take no notice of him, so long
as we can move about. The end is not long in coming when a man must
keep the house, or his bed. Then, so sure as fate, he will stiffen at
the joints and come out no more to enjoy the lingering of the light.
The chalk, which he has been inhaling and absorbing all his life, will
harden in him, and, he will tell you, “time’s up.” Want of imagination,
that fine indifference to fate, perhaps--but I don’t know. I have never
been able to deny imagination to our country folk. The faculty takes
various forms, and is not to be refused to a man because it finds a
harsh vent and issues contorted. I prefer to put it that tradition,
which is our religion, has put obedience to the Laws of Life above
everything else. One of those laws says, Work. And work we do, until
we drop. There is a noble creature lying now, I fear, under a stroke
which will prevent her doing another hand’s turn of work. Her children
are all about her bed; I saw one of them this morning before she went
there. She confessed, with tears, the anguish it would be to see her
mother lying idle. Sixty-three, she was, and had never been a day
without work in her children’s recollection. She had never been in
bed after six in the morning, never stayed at home or abed except, of
course, for child-bed. She had had eight children, brought up six of
them to marry and prosper in the world. And now she lies stricken,
and they, those prosperous young women, all about her bed. How well
Shakespeare knew that world:
“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the stormy winter’s rages;
Thou thy earthly course hast run,
Home hast gone, and ta’en thy wages.”
Nothing for tears, or knocking of the breast. The words ring as
solemnly as the bell. I cannot conceive of earthly thing more beautiful
than such faithful, patient, diligent, ordered lives, rounded off by
such mute and uncomplaining death-bed scenes. The fact that so they
have been lived, so rounded off, for two thousand years makes them
sacred, for me. How often has the good soul whose end I am awaiting now
stood at her cottage door to mark the lingering of the light? May her
passing be as gentle as this day’s has been!
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