Women of the Country
THE ROADMENDER SERIES
_Uniform with this Volume_
The Roadmender. By MICHAEL FAIRLESS.
The Gathering of Brother Hilarius. By MICHAEL FAIRLESS.
The Grey Brethren. By MICHAEL FAIRLESS.
A Modern Mystic's Way. (Dedicated to Michael Fairless.)
Magic Casements. By ARTHUR S. CRIPPS.
Thoughts of Leonardo da Vinci,
as recorded in his Note-Books. Edited by EDWARD MCCURDY.
The Sea Charm of Venice. By STOPFORD A. BROOKE.
Longings. By W.D. MCKAY.
From the Forest. By W. SCOTT PALMER.
Pilgrim Man. By W. SCOTT PALMER.
Winter and Spring. By W. SCOTT PALMER.
Michael Fairless: Life and Writings.
By W. SCOTT PALMER and A.M. HAGGARD.
Vagrom Men. By A.T. STORY.
Light and Twilight. By EDWARD THOMAS.
Rest and Unrest. By EDWARD THOMAS.
Rose Acre Papers: including Horæ Solitaræ. By EDWARD THOMAS.
[Illustration]
Women of the Country
By
Gertrude Bone
With Frontispiece by Muirhead Bone
London
Duckworth & Co.
Henrietta Street, W.C.
_Published 1913_
WOMEN OF THE COUNTRY
CHAPTER I
When I was a child I lived in a small sea-coast town, with wide, flat
sands. The only beautiful thing in the place--a town of no
distinction--were the sunsets over this vast, level expanse. I remember
them at intervals, as one recalls things seen passing in a train through
a solitary landscape. I seem to see myself, a child with a child's
imagination, standing on those wet sands, looking out over their purple
immensity to the glittering line of the tide on the horizon, and to see
again the sun in such a wide heaven that it seemed to have the world to
itself, and to watch the changes in the sky as it sank, drawing with it
the light. These great sands were dangerous at times, shifting in
whirling and irresistible rushes of water, and changing the course of
the channel, which was unaltered by the tide and which always lay out a
gleaming artery from the almost invisible sea.
It was Sunday morning--a day observed with such precision in that little
town that I was almost alone out of doors. A string of cart-horses,
their day of rest well-earned, were being led across the sands from the
level tide. The sand, uncovered by the sea for weeks, was bleached to an
intolerable whiteness, but there was no wind to lift it, and the sea was
tranquil, its little waves all hastening in one direction, like a shoal
of fish making for a haven. The sun was already changing its early glory
to heat. All the erections for amusement on the shore looked a little
foolish in that solitude. I returned to the town along the empty asphalt
roads and went with my companions to church. It was a church whose
pretensions were high and genteel. Nothing of a personal nature was ever
heard from its well-bred pulpit. The hymns were discreetly chosen to
avoid excitement, and a conversion would have given offence. The
minister for that day was a young man from the poorer end of the town,
and I remember, even as a child, being disturbed by the announcement of
his first hymn, "Rock of Ages." Even the organ blundered as it played so
common a tune as Rousseau's Dream, and I, who learning counterpoint,
feared to be seen singing so ordinary a melody, lest it should set me
down as unmusical for ever. But soon my concern was with the unfortunate
young man, for he was, I felt sure, quite ignorant of the habits of such
congregations as ours, and would certainly offend our best people. For
after that we read the parable of the Prodigal Son and sang, "The Sands
of Time are Sinking." Then I forgot even this curious lapse from our
Sunday custom, so clearly did the tale now begun by the preacher bring
again before my eyes those inhuman sands, that lonely sky, and the
unstayed power of the sea.
He had chosen, so he said, for his service this morning the favourite
hymns, Scripture, and text of an obscure member of the congregation
taken from earth in a strange manner the day before. For more years than
he could remember, there had come and gone in that congregation an old
blind man. He had heard him spoken of from time to time in a kindly
contemptuous, way as "Old Born Again," and it was by that nickname he
would speak of him this morning, but he could find no place in his
intelligence for contempt, for Old Born Again now saw and knew the
things which prophets and kings desire to look into.
He had lived for many years thus. He was a widower living with a married
daughter, whose husband was a fisherman. She herself kept a
greengrocer's shop of the poorer kind. She had five children, the
eldest, a boy of thirteen, earning his living with her in the shop. He
and his blind grandfather went round the district every day with a small
cart and horse, selling their vegetables from house to house and thus
enlarging their custom. The boy guided the horse and his grandfather
helped with the selling and the money. In the early morning at the end
of each week they drove the horse and cart to the sea's edge to wash
them, making always for the steady channel which ran unaltering through
the empty sand, when the tide was down. This morning they had gone as
usual, and when they reached the water (the old man was blind you will
remember, and his companion a child), they knew no difference in its
appearance. A man who was gathering cockles at a distance knew and
called to them, running towards them, but the old man did not see and
the boy was intent upon guiding the horse and cart into the water.
That night the sand, so unstable, had moved beneath the pressure of an
unusual tide. The course of the channel had changed, and when the horse,
treading confidently, had approached the edge, it stepped straight into
deep water and, losing its balance, being also impeded by the cart,
dragged with it the vehicle, the old blind man and the child to
unavoidable death. Their bodies had been recovered but too late. "Let us
pray," added the minister, "for the mourners."
To a child the fact of death is not very terrible, because the fact of
life is not yet understood; but I never see in imagination the level and
sad-coloured country of my childhood, stretching out of sight to the sea
across an expanse of sand, a country whose pomp was in the heavens,
whose hills were the clouds, without seeing also, journeying across it,
an old blind man, a child, and a dumb creature, to disappear for ever
under the wide sky, beneath the sun, within that great waste of waters.
The life of the poor, coloured outwardly with the same passivity and
acceptance of their lot as the rest of visible nature, disciplined by
the same forces which break the floods and the earth, remains for most
of us querulous, ignoble, disappointing. What can be said suggestive or
profound of the life that is born, that labours its full day with its
face to the ground, from which it looks for its sustenance, and at last
is carried, spent, to the square ground which holds the memory and
remains of the dead.
Yet one day the sun which has risen, stirring the only emotion in the
landscape, will rise upon a tragic, significant, or patient human group,
for whom sun and seasons and the wide heavens are small, whose emotion
is yet contained within the room of a mean dwelling and whose destiny is
accomplished within a tilled field.
Under a sky that is infinite and a heaven accessible to all, the poor
"work for their living," bowed always a little towards tragedy yet
understanding joy, from the bitterness of life and death and the added
anguish of ignorance drinking often their safety.