Towards winter’s end on a high, big, bare down, in the south of
England, John Plowman was plowing. He was plowing the brown field at
the top of the hill, good soil of the clay; a few yards lower down was
nothing but chalk, with shallow flinty soil and steep to plow; so they
let briars grow there. For generations his forbears had plowed on the
top of that hill. John did not know how many. The hills were very old;
it might have been always.
He scarcely looked to see if his furrow was going straight. The work
he was doing was so much in his blood that he could almost feel if
furrows were straight or not. Year after year they moved on the same
old landmarks; thorn trees and briars mostly guided the plow, where
they stood on the untamed land beyond; the thorn trees grew old at
their guiding, and still the furrows varied not by the breadth of a
hoof-mark.
John, as he plowed, had leisure to meditate on much besides the crops;
he knew so much of the crops that his thoughts could easily run free
from them; he used to meditate on who they were that lived in briar
and thorn tree, and danced as folk said all through midsummer night,
and sometimes blessed and sometimes harmed the crops; for he knew that
in Old England were wonderful ancient things, odder and older things
than many folks knew. And his eyes had leisure to see much beside the
furrows, for he could almost feel the furrows going straight.
One day at his plowing, as he watched the thorn ahead, he saw the
whole big hill besides, looking south, and the lands below it; one day
he saw in the bright sun of late winter a horseman riding the road
through the wide lands below. The horseman shone as he rode, and wore
white linen over what was shining, and on the linen was a big red
cross. “One of them knights,” John Plowman said to himself or his
horse, “going to them crusades.” And he went on with his plowing all
that day satisfied, and remembered what he had seen for years, and
told his son.
For there is in England, and there always was, mixed with the needful
things that feed or shelter the race, the wanderer-feeling for
romantic causes that runs deep and strange through the other thoughts,
as the Gulf Stream runs through the sea. Sometimes generations of John
Plowman’s family would go by and no high romantic cause would come to
sate that feeling. They would work on just the same though a little
sombrely, as though some good thing had been grudged them. And then
the Crusades had come, and John Plowman had seen the Red Cross knight
go by, riding towards the sea in the morning, and Jon Plowman was
satisfied.
Some generations later a man of the same name was plowing the same
hill. They still plowed the brown clay at the top and left the slope
wild, though there were many changes. And the furrows were wonderfully
straight still. And half he watched a thorn tree ahead as he plowed
and half he took in the whole hill sloping south and the wide lands
below it, far beyond which was the sea. They had a railway now down in
the valley. The sunlight glittering near the end of winter shone on a
train that was marked with great white squares and red crosses on
them.
John Plowman stopped his horses and looked at the train. “An
ambulance train,” he said, “coming up from the coast.” He thought
of the lads he knew and wondered if any were there. He pitied the men
in that train and envied them. And then there came to him the thought
of England’s cause and of how those men had upheld it, at sea and in
crumbling cities. He thought of the battle whose echoes reached
sometimes to that field, whispering to furrows and thorn trees that
had never heard them before. He thought of the accursed tyrant’s cruel
might, and of the lads that had faced it. He saw the romantic
splendour of England’s cause. He was old but had seen the glamour for
which each generation looked. Satisfied in his heart and cheered with
a new content he went on with his age-old task in the business of man
with the hills.