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Title: The South Country

Author: Edward Thomas

Release date: November 22, 2019 [eBook #60760]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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Produced by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









THE SOUTH COUNTRY




THE HEART OF ENGLAND SERIES


This Series opens with a new work by Mr. EDWARD THOMAS, that curious
and enthusiastic explorer of the English Countryside, whose prose
style gives him a claim to be regarded as the successor, as he is the
biographer, of Richard Jefferies. The Series includes a new edition
of Mr. THOMAS’S other work, “The Heart of England,” and Mr. HILAIRE
BELLOC’S “The Historic Thames.” These two volumes were originally
issued in limited editions at one Guinea net per volume.


 THE SOUTH COUNTRY. By EDWARD THOMAS. Small crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

Mr. Thomas in this new book gives his impressions of a year’s
wanderings afoot as the seasons change through Kent, Sussex, Hampshire,
Wiltshire and Cornwall. It is a prose-poem of the most beautiful
counties in England.


 THE HEART OF ENGLAND. By EDWARD THOMAS. Small crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.


 THE HISTORIC THAMES. By HILAIRE BELLOC, M.P. 3s. 6d. net.

_Prospectus of above Books sent post free on application._

J. M. DENT & CO.

29-30, BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.




[Illustration]




  THE SOUTH
  COUNTRY

  [Illustration]

  _by Edward Thomas_

  [Illustration]

  LONDON
  _J. M. DENT & CO._
  _1909_




  RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
  BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
  BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.




 “As I can’t leap from cloud to cloud, I want to wander from road to
 road. That little path there by the clipped hedge goes up to the high
 road. I want to go up that path and to walk along the high road, and
 so on and on and on, and to know all kinds of people. Did you ever
 think that the roads are the only things that are endless; that one
 can walk on and on, and never be stopped by a gate or a wall? They are
 the serpent of eternity. I wonder they have never been worshipped.
 What are the stars beside them? They never meet one another. The roads
 are the only things that are infinite. They are all endless.”

  PAUL RUTTLEDGE in
  _Where there is Nothing_,
  by W. B. YEATS.




  TO

  EDWARD GARNETT




CONTENTS


  CHAP.                                                             PAGE
     I. THE SOUTH COUNTRY                                              1
    II. THE END OF WINTER--SUFFOLK--HAMPSHIRE                         15
   III. SPRING--HAMPSHIRE--KENT--SURREY                               40
    IV. AN ADVENTURER                                                 61
     V. SUSSEX                                                        68
    VI. A RETURN TO NATURE                                            73
   VII. A RAILWAY CARRIAGE--SURREY--SUSSEX                            95
  VIII. JUNE--HAMPSHIRE--THE GOLDEN AGE--TRAHERNE                    121
    IX. HISTORY AND THE PARISH--HAMPSHIRE--CORNWALL                  147
     X. SUMMER--SUSSEX                                               180
    XI. HAMPSHIRE--AN UMBRELLA MAN                                   186
   XII. CHILDREN OF EARTH--HAMPSHIRE AND SUSSEX                      196
  XIII. AUGUST--GOING WESTWARD--HAMPSHIRE AND WILTSHIRE              210
   XIV. AN OLD HOUSE AND A BOOK--WILTSHIRE                           235
    XV. AN OUTCAST--WILTSHIRE                                        245
   XVI. THE END OF SUMMER--KENT--BERKSHIRE--HAMPSHIRE--SUSSEX--THE
        FAIR                                                         255




Several short passages from this book have been printed in “The
Saturday Review,” “The Nation,” “The New Age,” “The Daily Chronicle,”
and “The Daily News,” and are reprinted by permission.




THE SOUTH COUNTRY




CHAPTER I

THE SOUTH COUNTRY


The name of “South Country” is taken from a poem by Mr. Hilaire Belloc,
beginning--

    “When I am living in the Midlands,
      They are sodden and unkind,
    I light my lamp in the evening,
      My work is left behind;
    And the great hills of the South Country
      Come back into my mind.”

The name is given to the south of England as distinguished from the
Midlands, “North England”, and “West England” by the Severn. The poet
is thinking particularly of Sussex and of the South Downs. In using
the term I am thinking of all that country which is dominated by the
Downs or by the English Channel, or by both; Cornwall and East Anglia
have been admitted only for the sake of contrast. Roughly speaking,
it is the country south of the Thames and Severn and east of Exmoor,
and it includes, therefore, the counties of Kent, Sussex, Surrey,
Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and part of Somerset. East and
west across it go ranges of chalk hills, their sides smoothly hollowed
by Nature and the marl-burner, or sharply scored by old roads. On
their lower slopes they carry the chief woods of the south country,
their coombes are often fully fledged with trees, and sometimes their
high places are crowned with beech or fir; but they are most admirably
themselves when they are bare of all but grass and a few bushes of
gorse and juniper and some yew, and their ridges make flowing but
infinitely variable clear lines against the sky. Sometimes they support
a plateau of flint and clay, which slopes gradually to the level of
the streams. Sometimes they fall away to the vales in well-defined
ledges--first a long curving slope, then a plain of cornland, and
below that a steep but lesser slope covered with wood, and then again
grassland or sandy heaths and rivers. Except on the plateau, the
summits have few houses and very small hamlets; the first terrace
has larger villages and even a town or two; but most of the towns
are beneath on the banks of the rivers, and chiefly where they are
broadest near the sea, or on the coast itself. The rivers flow mainly
north and south, and can have but a short course before they enter the
sea on the south or the Thames on the north. Those I remember best
are the Stours, the two Rothers, but especially the one which joins
the Arun, the Medway, the Len, the Eden, the Holling, the Teise, the
Ouse, the Itchen, the Meon, the Wey, the Mole, the Kennet, the Ray,
the Winterbournes, the Wiltshire Avon, the Wylye, the Ebble, and many
little waters running gold over New Forest gravel or crystal over the
chalk of Hampshire, and not least of all that unlucky rivulet, the
Wandle, once a nymph that walked among her sisters--

    So amiable, fair, so pure, so delicate,
    So plump, so full, so fresh, her eyes so wondrous clear:
    And first unto her lord, at _Wandsworth_ doth appear,
    That in the goodly court, of their great sovereign _Tames_,
    There might no other speech be had amongst the streams,
    But only of this Nymph, sweet Wandel, what she wore;
    Of her complexion, grace, and how herself she bore.

Nor can I omit the Wiltshire and Berkshire canal, as it was fifteen
years ago, between Swindon and Dauntsey, an unfrequented by-way through
a quiet dairy country, and full of pike and tench among the weeds and
under the tall water docks and willow herbs which even then threatened
to subdue it as they now have done.

The chief roads make south, south-east, south-west and west from
London; almost the only road going east and west and not touching
London is the old road known between Winchester and Canterbury as the
Pilgrims’ Way.

Most of the towns are small market towns, manufacturing chiefly beer;
or they are swollen, especially in the neighbourhood of London, as
residential quarters on lines of railway or as health and pleasure
resorts on the sea. But any man used to maps will be wiser on these
matters in an hour than I am. For what I have sought is quiet and as
complete a remoteness as possible from towns, whether of manufactures,
of markets or of cathedrals. I have used a good many maps in my
time, largely to avoid the towns; but I confess that I prefer to do
without them and to go, if I have some days before me, guided by the
hills or the sun or a stream--or, if I have one day only, in a rough
circle, trusting, by taking a series of turnings to the left or a
series to the right, to take much beauty by surprise and to return
at last to my starting-point. On a dull day or cloudy night I have
often no knowledge of the points of the compass. I never go out to
see anything. The signboards thus often astonish me. I wish, by the
way, that I had noted down more of the names on the signboards at the
cross-roads. There is a wealth of poetry in them, as in that which
points--by a ford, too--first, to Poulner and Ringwood; second, to
Gorley and Fordingbridge; third, to Linwood and Broomy: and another
pointing to Fordingbridge, to Ringwood, and to Cuckoo Hill and Furze
Hill: and another in the parish of Pentlow, pointing to Foxearth and
Sudbury, to Cavendish and Clare, and to Belchamps and Yeldham. Castles,
churches, old houses, of extraordinary beauty or interest, have never
worn out any of my shoe leather except by accident. I like to come
upon them--usually without knowing their names and legends--but do
not lament when chance takes me a hundred times out of their way. Nor
have I ever been to Marlow to think about Shelley, or to Winterslow
for Hazlitt’s sake; and I enter Buriton many times without remembering
Gibbon. They would move me no more than the statue of a man and a fat
horse (with beribboned tail), which a grateful countryside erected to
William III in the market square at Petersfield. I prefer any country
church or chapel to Winchester or Chichester or Canterbury Cathedral,
just as I prefer “All round my hat,” or “Somer is icumen in,” to
Beethoven. Not that I dislike the cathedrals, or that I do not find
many pleasures amongst them. But they are incomprehensible and not
restful. I feel when I am within them that I know why a dog bays at
the moon. They are much more difficult or, rather, I am more conscious
in them of my lack of comprehension, than the hills or the sea; and I
do not like the showmen, the smell and look of the museum, the feeling
that it is admiration or nothing, and all the well-dressed and flyblown
people round about. I sometimes think that religious architecture
is a dead language, majestic but dead, that it never was a popular
language. Have some of these buildings lived too long, been too well
preserved, so as to oppress our little days with too permanent an
expression of the passing things? The truth is that, though the past
allures me, and to discover a cathedral for myself would be an immense
pleasure, I have no historic sense and no curiosity. I mention these
trivial things because they may be important to those who read what I
am paid for writing. I have read a great deal of history--in fact, a
university gave me a degree out of respect for my apparent knowledge
of history--but I have forgotten it all, or it has got into my blood
and is present in me in a form which defies evocation or analysis. But
as far as I can tell I am pure of history. Consequently I prefer the
old brick houses round the cathedral, and that avenue of archaic bossy
limes to the cathedral itself with all its turbulent quiet and vague
antiquity. The old school also close at hand! I was there after the end
of the term once, and two boys were kicking a football in a half-walled
court; it was a bright, cold, windy April afternoon; and the ancient
brick was penetrated with their voices and the sound of the ball, and
I thought there could be nothing lovelier than that court, the pleasant
walls, and the broad playing fields in sight of a smooth noble hill and
a temple of dark firs on top. I was not thinking of Winchester or of
any one older than the fondest son of that “mother, more than mother,”
and little of him; but was merely caught up by and with the harmony of
man and his work, of two children playing, and of the green downs and
windy sky.

And so I travel, armed only with myself, an avaricious and often
libertine and fickle eye and ear, in pursuit, not of knowledge, not
of wisdom, but of one whom to pursue is never to capture. Politics,
the drama, science, racing, reforms and preservations, divorces, book
clubs--nearly everything which the average (oh! mysterious average man,
always to be met but never met) and the superior and the intelligent
man is thinking of, I cannot grasp; my mind refuses to deal with
them; and when they are discussed I am given to making answers like,
“In Kilve there is no weathercock.” I expect there are others as
unfortunate, superfluous men such as the sanitation, improved housing,
police, charities, medicine of our wonderful civilization saves from
the fate of the cuckoo’s foster-brothers. They will perhaps follow
my meanders and understand. The critics also will help. They will
misunderstand--it is their trade. How well they know what I ought, or
at least ought not, to do. I must, they have said, avoid “the manner
of the worst oleographs”; must not be “affected,” though the recipe is
not to be had; must beware of “over-excitation of the colour sense.”
In slow course of years we acquire a way of expression, hopelessly
inadequate, as we plainly see when looking at the methods of great
poets, of beautiful women, of athletes, of politicians, but still
gradually as fitted to the mind as an old walking-stick to the hand
that has worn and been worn by it, full of our weakness as of our
strength, of our blindness as of our vision--the man himself, the poor
man it may be. And I live by writing, since it is impossible to live by
not writing in an age not of gold but of brass.

Unlearned, incurious, but finding deepest ease and joy out of doors,
I have gone about the South Country these twenty years and more on
foot, especially in Kent between Maidstone and Ashford and round
Penshurst, in Surrey between London, Guildford and Horley, in Hampshire
round Petersfield, in Wiltshire between Wootton Bassett, Swindon and
Savernake. The people are almost foreign to me, the more so because
country people have not yet been thrown into quite the same confusion
as townspeople, and therefore look awkwardly upon those who are not in
trade--writing is an unskilled labour and not a trade--not on the land,
and not idle. But I have known something of two or three men and women,
and have met a few dozen more. Yet is this country, though I am mainly
Welsh, a kind of home, as I think it is more than any other to those
modern people who belong nowhere. Here they prefer to retire, here they
take their holidays in multitudes. For it is a good foster-mother,
ample-bosomed, mild and homely. The lands of wild coast, of mountains,
of myriad chimneys, offer no such welcome. They have their race, their
speech and ways, and are jealous. You must be a man of the sea or of
the hills to dwell there at ease. But the South is tender and will
harbour any one; her quiet people resent intrusion quietly, so that
many do not notice the resentment. These are the “home” counties. A man
can hide away in them. The people are not hospitable, but the land is.

Yet there are days and places which send us in search of another kind
of felicity than that which dwells under the Downs, when, for example,
the dark wild of Ashdown or of Woolmer, some parcel of heathery land,
with tufted pines and pale wandering roads, rises all dark and stormy
out of the gentle vale, or on such an evening as when the sky is solemn
blue save at the horizon where it is faint gold, and between the blue
and the gold, across the north-west, lies an ashen waste of level
cloud. This sky and its new moon and evening star below, is barred
by the boles of beeches; through them the undulations of deserted
ploughland are all but white with dewy grass and weed. Underfoot winds
a disused path amid almost overlapping dog’s mercury. The earth is like
an exhausted cinder, cold, silent, dead, compared with the great act in
the sky. Suddenly a dog-fox barks--with melancholy and malice in the
repeated hoarse yells--a sound that awakens the wildest past out of the
wood and the old path. He passes by me at a trot, pausing a little to
bark. He vanishes, but not his voice, into the wood, and he returns,
still barking, and passes me again, filling the wood and the coombe
below with a sound that has nothing to match it except that ashen waste
in the beech-barred, cold blue and golden sky, against which the fox
is carved in moving ebony. Or again, when a rude dark headland rises
out of the mist of the plain into the evening sky. The woods seem but
just freed from the horror of primeval sea, if that is not primeval
sea washing their bases. Capella hangs low, pale, large, moist and
trembling, almost engulfed between two horns of the wood upon the
headland, the frailest beacon of hope, still fluttering from the storm
out of which the land is emerging. Then, or at home looking at a map of
Britain, the West calls, out of Wiltshire and out of Cornwall and Devon
beyond, out of Monmouth and Glamorgan and Gower and Caermarthen, with
a voice of dead Townsends, Eastaways, Thomases, Phillipses, Treharnes,
Marendaz, sea men and mountain men.

Westward, for men of this island, lies the sea; westward are the great
hills. In a mere map the west of Britain is fascinating. The great
features of that map, which make it something more than a picture
to be imperfectly copied by laborious childish pens, are the great
promontories of Caernarvon, of Pembroke, of Gower and of Cornwall,
jutting out into the western sea, like the features of a grim large
face, such a face as is carved on a ship’s prow. These protruding
features, even on a small-scale map, thrill the mind with a sense of
purpose and spirit. They yearn, they peer out ever to the sea, as
if using eyes and nostrils to savour the utmost scent of it, as if
themselves calling back to the call of the waves. To the eyes of a
child they stand for adventure. They are lean and worn and scarred with
the strife and watching. Then gradually into the mind of the child
comes the story that justifies and, still more, inspires and seems
to explain those westward-pointing promontories. For, out towards
them continually have the conquered races of the world retreated,
and their settlements give those corners a strangeness and a charm to
our fantastic sympathies. Out from them conquerors in their turn have
gone to found a legend like the Welsh Madoc, an empire like the men
of Devon. The blood of conquered and conqueror is in our veins, and
it flushes the cheek at the sight or thought of the west. Each man of
us is as ancient and complicated, as lofty-spired and as deep-vaulted
as cathedrals and castles old, and in those lands our crypts and
dark foundations are dimly remembered. We look out towards them from
the high camps at Battlesbury and Barbury: the lines of the Downs
go trooping along to them at night. Even in the bosom of the South
Country, when the tranquil bells are calling over the corn at twilight,
the westward-going hills, where the sun has fallen, draw the heart
away and fill us with a desire to go on and on for ever, that same
way. When, in the clear windy dawn, thin clouds like traveller’s joy
are upon the high air, it seems that up there also, in those placid
spaces, they travel and know the joy of the road, and the sun--feeding
on the blue, as a child said yesterday, as Lucretius said before--goes
the desired way. London also calls, making the needle whirl in the
compass. For in London also a man may live as up “a great river wide
as any sea”; and over some of the fairest of the South Country hangs
the all-night glimmer of the city, warning, threatening, beckoning
anon. Some of this country has already perished, or is so ramparted
about that there is no stranger country in the world unless it be those
perpendicular valleys cloven among the Blue Mountains, their floors
level and of the purest grass, but accessible only at the end nearest
the plain, where the cleft is sometimes so narrow that not even a dog
can enter.

This, then, is my South Country. It covers the North Downs and
the South Downs, the Icknield Way and the Pilgrims’ Way, and the
cross-roads between them and the Thames and the sea, a land of hops,
fruit, corn, high pasture, meadow, woodland, heath and shore. But there
is no man of whose powers I stand more in awe than the topographical
writer, from Mr. A. G. Bradley or Mr. E. V. Lucas downwards. I shall
not attempt to compete with them. I should only be showing my ignorance
and carelessness were I to label every piece of country which I
chance to mention or describe. Any one can point out my omissions, my
blindness, my exaggeration. Nor can I bring myself to mention the names
of the places where I walked or sat down. In a sense this country is
all “carved out of the carver’s brain” and has not a name. This is not
the South Country which measures about two hundred miles from east to
west and fifty from north to south. In some ways it is incomparably
larger than any country that was ever mapped, since upon nothing less
than the infinite can the spirit disport itself. In other ways it is
far smaller--as when a mountain with tracts of sky and cloud and the
full moon glass themselves in a pond, a little pond.

It would need a more intellectual eye than mine to distinguish county
from county by its physical character, its architecture, its people,
its unique combination of common elements, and I shall not attempt
it. As often as not I have no doubt mingled parts of Kent with my
Wiltshire, and so on. And positively I cannot say to which belongs one
picture that occurs to me as characteristic of the South Country--

A crossing of roads encloses a waste place of no man’s land, of dwarf
oaks, hawthorn, bramble and fern, and the flowers of knapweed and
harebell, and golden tormentil embroidering the heather and the minute
seedling oaks. Follow one of these roads past straight avenues of elms
leading up to a farm (built square of stone, under a roof of thatch or
stone slate, and lying well back from the road across a level meadow
with some willows in the midst, elms round about, willow herb waving
rosy by the stream at the border), or merely to a cluster of ricks; and
presently the hedges open wide apart and the level white road cools
itself under the many trees of a green, wych elms, sycamores, limes
and horse-chestnuts, by a pool, and, on the other side, the sign of
the “White Hart,” its horns held back upon its haunches. A stone-built
farm and its barns and sheds lie close to the green on either side,
and another of more stateliness where the hedges once more run close
together alongside the road. This farmhouse has three dormers, two rows
of five shadowy windows below, and an ivied porch not quite in the
centre; a modest lawn divided by a straight path; dense, well-watered
borders of grey lavender, rosemary, ladslove, halberds of crimson
hollyhock, infinite blending stars of Michaelmas daisy; old apple
trees seeming to be pulled down almost to the grass by glossy-rinded
fruit: and, behind, the bended line of hills a league away, wedding the
lowly meadows, the house and the trees to the large heavens and their
white procession of clouds out of the south and the sea. The utmost
kindliness of earth is expressed in these three houses, the trees on
the flat green, the slightly curving road across it, the uneven posts
and rails leaning this way and that at the edge of the pond. The trees
are so arranged about the road that they weave a harmony of welcome,
of blessing, a viaticum for whosoever passes by and only for a moment
tastes their shade, acknowledges unconsciously their attitudes, hears
their dry summer murmuring, sees the house behind them. The wayfarer
knows nothing of those who built them and those who live therein, of
those who planted the trees just so and not otherwise, of the causes
that shaped the green, any more than of those who reaped and threshed
the barley, and picked and dried and packed the hops that made the
ale at the “White Hart.” He only knows that centuries of peace and
hard work and planning for the undreaded future have made it possible.
The spirit of the place, all this council of time and Nature and men,
enriches the air with a bloom deeper than summer’s blue of distance; it
drowses while it delights the responding mind with a magic such as once
upon a time men thought to express by gods of the hearth, by Faunus and
the flying nymphs, by fairies, angels, saints, a magic which none of
these things is too strange and “supernatural” to represent. For after
the longest inventory of what is here visible and open to analysis,
much remains over, imponderable but mighty. Often when the lark is
high he seems to be singing in some keyless chamber of the brain; so
here the house is built in shadowy replica. If only we could make a
graven image of this spirit instead of a muddy untruthful reflection of
words! I have sometimes thought that a statue, the statue of a human
or heroic or divine figure, might more fitly than in many another stand
in such a place. A figure, it should be, like that benign proud Demeter
in marble now banished to a recess in a cold gallery, before which a
man of any religion, or class, or race, or time might bow and lay down
something of his burden and take away what makes him other than he was.
She would be at home and blithe again, enshrined in the rain or in this
flowery sunlight of an English green, near the wych elm and sycamore
and the walls of stone, the mortar mixed, as in all true buildings,
with human blood.




CHAPTER II

THE END OF WINTER--SUFFOLK--HAMPSHIRE


SUFFOLK.

There are three sounds in the wood this morning--the sound of the waves
that has not died away since the sea carried off church and cottage and
cliff and the other half of what was once an inland wood; the sound
of trees, a multitudinous frenzied sound, of rustling dead oak-leaves
still on the bough, of others tripping along the path like mice, or
winding up in sudden spirals and falling again, of dead boughs grating
and grinding, of pliant young branches lashing, of finest twigs and
fir needles sighing, of leaf and branch and trunk booming like one;
and through these sounds, the song of a thrush. Rain falls and, for
a moment only, the dyked marshland below and beyond the wood is pale
and luminous with its flooded pools, the sails of windmills climb
and plunge, the pale sea is barred with swathes of foam, and on the
whistling sands the tall white waves vaunt, lean forward, topple and
lie quivering. But the rain increases: the sound and the mist of it
make a wall about the world, except the world in the brain and except
the thrush’s song which, so bright and clear, has a kind of humanity in
it by contrast with the huge bulk of the noises of sea and wood.

Rain and wind cease together, and here on the short grass at the
cliff’s edge is a strange birth--a gently convex fungus about two
inches broad, the central boss of it faintly indented, the surface
not perfectly regular but dimpled so as to break the light, and the
edge wavering away from the pure circular form; in hue a pale chestnut
paling to a transparent edge of honey colour; and the whole surface so
smooth and polished by rain as to seem coated in ice. What a thought
for the great earth on such a day! Out of the wood on to this grass the
thrushes steal, running with heads down and stopping with heads prouder
than stags’; out also into the short corn; and so glad are they that
they quarrel and sing on the ground without troubling to find a perch.

It is perfectly still; the sun splutters out of the thick grey and
white sky, the white sails shine on a sea of steel, and it is warm.
And now in the luxury of the first humid warmth and quiet of the year
the blackbird sings. The rain sets in at nightfall, but the wind does
not blow, and still the blackbird sings and the thrushes will hardly
leave the corn. That one song alone sweetens the wide vague country of
evening, the cloudy oak woods, the brown mixen under the elms and the
little white farm behind the unpruned limes, with its oblong windows
irregularly placed and of unequal size, its white door almost at a
corner, and the lawn coming right to the walls.

Day breaks and sun and wind dance together in the clouds and trees,
but without rain. Larks sing over the dark heavy cornland in which the
watery furrows shine. The dead drab grasses wave at the feet of the
hedgerows. Little pools at meadow corners bring down the sky to the
dark earth. Horses nod before the plough. A slight haze exhales from
the innumerable rich spongy clods, between the hedges of oak and ash.
Now and then shapeless rags of white or snow-grey clouds wander up from
the west and for a little while obscure the white mountains of cloud,
the blue sky, the silver sun; or the sweet smoke from the fires of
hedgers and ditchers rises up against the edge of a copse. The white
linen flaps and glows in cottage gardens; the dung cars go by crunching
the flints into the mud; and the boots and bells of pony traps make
a music forgotten since last February. It is only the twenty-second
day of February, yet these delights of the soul through the eyes and
ears are of spring. The children have begun to look for violets, and
the youngest, being the nearest to them in stature and in nature, has
found one. There she stands, four years old, with straight brown legs,
her face clear and soft but brown as a new hazel nut, her hair almost
of the same colour and paler where the sun has bleached it round her
temples and falling over her cheeks and neck; and through it shine
eyes of a deeper brown, the hue of the most exquisite flints. The eyes
shine, the teeth shine through the ever parted long red lips, the chin
shines, the brow shines most of all with a lustre that seems to come
from the joyous brain behind.

She is beautiful and straight as the July corn, as the ash tree
standing alone by the stream. She is fearless as fire, bold and
restless as wind, clear-hearted, simple, bright and gay as a mountain
water, in all her actions a daughter of the sun, the wind and the
earth. She has loving looks for all. From her fair broad naked foot to
her gleaming hair she is, to many, the dearest thing that lives.

Beside her plays a dog, with lifted ears, head on one side, rosy
tongue bright against his yellow fur, waiting upon her fancies. His
rest and his motion, like hers, are careless and beautiful, gifts of
the sun, the wind and the earth. As I look at them I think of such a
child and such a playmate that lived two thousand years ago in the sun,
and once as they played each set a foot upon the soft clay of a tile
that the tile maker had not yet burned hard and red. The tile fell in
the ruin of a Roman city in Britain, was buried hundreds of years in
ashes and flowering mould, and yesterday I saw the footprints in the
dark red tile, two thousand years old.

A day follows of rain and wind, and it is the robin that is most heard
among the dripping thorns, the robin and his autumnal voice. But the
sky clears for sunset and the blackbird’s hour, and, as twilight ends,
only the rear of the disappearing procession of day cloud is visible on
the western horizon, while the procession of night has but sent up two
or three dark forerunners. The sky is of palest blue, and Jupiter and
Sirius are bright over the sea, Venus over the land and Mercury just
over the far oaks. The sea is very dark except at the horizon which is
pale with the dissolving remnant of sunset gold in it; but two ranks of
breakers throw up a waving vapour of fairy foam against the dark waves
behind.

Again there are roaring wet mornings and sunlit mornings, but in them
all the pewits wheel over the marsh and their wild cries mingle with
the sweet whimper of dunlins, the songs of larks, the glitter of the
dykes, the wall of rain. All day the sky over heathery moorland is
like a reduplication of the moorland, except that at the horizon the
sky clears at intervals and fleets of pure white cloud sail over the
dark ploughland and green pines; and the gentle sea is white only where
the waves break on the sand like a line of children in white frocks
advancing with wavers in the game of “Here we come gathering nuts and
may.” Or the west is angry, thick and grey, the snow is horizontal
and fierce, and yet the south has a bay of blue sky and in it a vast
sunlit precipice of white cloud, and the missel thrushes roll out their
songs again and again at the edges of many woods. Or a sun appears
that brings out the songs of thrush and chaffinch and lark, and leaves
a chequer of snow on pine and ploughland and on the mole hills of the
meadows. Again the sun disappears and the swift heavy hail rebounds
on the grass with a dancing as of sand-hoppers, and there is no other
sound except a sudden hedgesparrow’s song to break in upon the beating
of the pellets on hard ivy and holly and tender grass. In the frosty
evening the first moth comes to the lamp.

Now the rain falls rejoicing in its power, and then the sky is sunny
and the white clouds are bubble-shaped in the blue, the wet roads are
azure with reflected sky, the trees are all of crystal, and the songs
of thrushes can be heard even through the snorting and rumbling of a
train.


HAMPSHIRE.

The beeches on the beech-covered hills roar and strain as if they
would fly off with the hill, and anon they are as meek as a great
horse leaning his head over a gate. If there is a misty day there is
one willow in a coombe lifting up a thousand silver catkins like a
thousand lamps, when there is no light elsewhere. Another day, a wide
and windy day, is the jackdaw’s, and he goes straight and swift and
high like a joyous rider crying aloud on an endless savannah, and,
underneath, the rippled pond is as bright as a peacock, and millions
of beech leaves drive across the open glades of the woods, rushing to
their Acheron. The bush harrow stripes the moist and shining grass;
the plough changes the pale stubble into a ridgy chocolate; they are
peeling the young ash sticks for hop poles and dipping them in tar. At
the dying of that windy day the wind is still; there is a bright pale
half-moon tangled in the pink whirl of after-sunset cloud, a sound of
blackbirds from pollard oaks against the silver sky, a sound of bells
from hamlets hidden among beeches.

Towards the end of March there are six nights of frost giving birth to
still mornings of weak sunlight, of an opaque yet not definitely misty
air. The sky is of a milky, uncertain pale blue without one cloud.
Eastward the hooded sun is warming the slope fields and melting the
sparkling frost. In many trees the woodpeckers laugh so often that
their cry is a song. A grassy ancient orchard has taken possession of
the visible sunbeams, and the green and gold of the mistletoe glows
on the silvered and mossy branches of apple trees. The pale stubble
is yellow and tenderly lit, and gives the low hills a hollow light
appearance as if they might presently dissolve. In a hundred tiers on
the steep hill, the uncounted perpendicular straight stems of beech,
and yet not all quite perpendicular or quite straight, are silver-grey
in the midst of a haze, here brown, there rosy, of branches and
swelling buds. Though but a quarter of a mile away in this faintly
clouded air they are very small, aërial in substance, infinitely remote
from the road on which I stand, and more like reflections in calm water
than real things.

At the lower margin of the wood the overhanging branches form blue
caves, and out of these emerge the songs of many hidden birds. I know
that there are bland melodious blackbirds of easy musing voices, robins
whose earnest song, though full of passion, is but a fragment that
has burst through a more passionate silence, hedgesparrows of liquid
confiding monotone, brisk acid wrens, chaffinches and yellowhammers
saying always the same thing (a dear but courtly praise of the coming
season), larks building spires above spires into the sky, thrushes
of infinite variety that talk and talk of a thousand things, never
thinking, always talking of the moment, exclaiming, scolding, cheering,
flattering, coaxing, challenging, with merry-hearted, bold voices that
must have been the same in the morning of the world when the forest
trees lay, or leaned, or hung, where they fell. Yet I can distinguish
neither blackbird, nor robin, nor hedgesparrow, nor any one voice. All
are blent into one seething stream of song. It is one song, not many.
It is one spirit that sings. Mixed with them is the myriad stir of
unborn things, of leaf and blade and flower, many silences at heart and
root of tree, voices of hope and growth, of love that will be satisfied
though it leap upon the swords of life. Yet not during all the day does
the earth truly awaken. Even in town and city the dream prevails, and
only dimly lighted their chalky towers and spires rise out of the sweet
mist and sing together beside the waters.

The earth lies blinking, turning over languidly and talking like a
half-awakened child that now and then lies still and sleeps though
with eyes wide open. The air is still full of the dreams of a night
which this mild sun cannot dispel. The dreams are prophetic as well as
reminiscent, and are visiting the woods, and that is why they will not
cast aside the veil. Who would rise if he could continue to dream?

It is not spring yet. Spring is being dreamed, and the dream is more
wonderful and more blessed than ever was spring. What the hour of
waking will bring forth is not known. Catch at the dreams as they hover
in the warm thick air. Up against the grey tiers of beech stems and
the mist of the buds and fallen leaves rise two columns of blue smoke
from two white cottages among trees; they rise perfectly straight and
then expand into a balanced cloud, and thus make and unmake continually
two trees of smoke. No sound comes from the cottages. The dreams are
over them, over the brows of the children and the babes, of the men and
the women, bringing great gifts, suggestions, shadowy satisfactions,
consolations, hopes. With inward voices of persuasion those dreams
hover and say that all is to be made new, that all is yet before us,
and the lots are not yet drawn out of the urn.

We shall presently set out and sail into the undiscovered seas and find
new islands of the free, the beautiful, the young. As is the dimly
glimmering changeless brook twittering over the pebbles, so is life. It
is but just leaving the fount. All things are possible in the windings
between fount and sea.

Never again shall we demand the cuckoo’s song from the August silence.
Never will July nip the spring and lengthen the lambs’ faces and
take away their piquancy, or June shut a gate between us and the
nightingale, or May deny the promise of April. Hark! before the end of
afternoon the owls hoot in their sleep in the ivied beeches. A dream
has flitted past them, more silent of wing than themselves. Now it is
between the wings of the first white butterfly, and it plants a smile
in the face of the infant that cannot speak: and again it is with the
brimstone butterfly, and the child who is gathering celandine and
cuckoo flower and violet starts back almost in fear at the dream.

The grandmother sitting in her daughter’s house, left all alone in
silence, her hands clasped upon her knees, forgets the courage without
hope that has carried her through eighty years, opens her eyes,
unclasps her hands from the knot as of stiff rope, distends them and
feels the air, and the dream is between her fingers and she too smiles,
she knows not why. A girl of sixteen, ill-dressed, not pretty, has seen
it also. She has tied up her black hair in a new crimson ribbon. She
laughs aloud with a companion at something they know in common and in
secret, and as she does so lifts her neck and is glad from the sole
of her foot to the crown of her head. She is lost in her laughter and
oblivious of its cause. She walks away, and her step is as firm as
that of a ewe defending her lamb. She was a poor and misused child,
and I can see her as a woman of fifty, sitting on a London bench,
grey-complexioned, in old black hat, black clothes, crouching over
a paper bag of fragments, in the beautiful August rain after heat.
But this is her hour. That future is not among the dreams in the air
to-day. She is at one with the world, and a deep music grows between
her and the stars. Her smile is one of those magical things, great and
small and all divine, that have the power to wield universal harmonies.
At sight or sound of them the infinite variety of appearances in
the world is made fairer than before, because it is shown to be a
many-coloured raiment of the one. The raiment trembles, and under leaf
and cloud and air a window is thrown open upon the unfathomable deep,
and at the window we are sitting, watching the flight of our souls
away, away to where they must be gathered into the music that is being
built. Often upon the vast and silent twilight, as now, is the soul
poured out as a rivulet into the sea and lost, not able even to stain
the boundless crystal of the air; and the body stands empty, waiting
for its return, and, poor thing, knows not what it receives back into
itself when the night is dark and it moves away. For we stand ever at
the edge of Eternity and fall in many times before we die. Yet even
such thoughts live not long this day. All shall be healed, says the
dream. All shall be made new. The day is a fairy birth, a foundling not
fathered nor mothered by any grey yesterdays. It has inherited nothing.
It makes of winter and of the old springs that wrought nothing fair a
stale creed, a senseless tale: they are naught: I do not wonder any
longer if the lark’s song has grown old with the ears that hear it or
if it be still unchanged.

What dreams are there for that aged child who goes tottering and
reeling up the lane at mid-day? He carries a basket of watercress on
his back. He has sold two-pennyworth, and he is tipsy, grinning through
the bruises of a tipsy fall, and shifting his cold pipe from one side
of his mouth to the other. Though hardly sixty he is very old, worn and
thin and wrinkled, and bent sideways and forward at the waist and the
shoulders. Yet he is very young. He is just what he was forty years
ago when the thatcher found him lying on his back in the sun instead
of combing out the straw and sprinkling it with water for his use. He
laid no plans as a youth; he had only a few transparent tricks and easy
lies. Never has he thought of the day after to-morrow. For a few years
in his prime he worked almost regularly for one or two masters, leaving
them only now and then upon long errands of his own and known only to
himself. It was then perhaps that he earned or received as a gift,
along with a broken nose, his one name, which is Jackalone. For years
he was the irresponsible jester to a smug townlet which was privately
amused and publicly scandalized, and rewarded him in a gaol, where,
unlike Tasso, he never complained. Since then he has lived by the sale
of a chance rabbit or two, of watercress, of greens gathered when the
frost is on them and nobody looking, by gifts of broken victuals,
by driving a few bullocks to a fair, by casual shelter in barns, in
roofless cottages, or under hedges.

He has never had father or mother or brother or sister or wife or
child. No dead leaf in autumn wind or branch in flooded brook seems
more helpless. He can deceive nobody. He is in prison two or three
times a year for little things: it seems a charity to put a roof over
his head and clip his hair. He has no wisdom; by nothing has he soiled
what gifts were given to him at his birth. The dreams will not pass him
by. They come to give him that confidence by which he lives in spite of
men’s and children’s contumely.

How little do we know of the business of the earth, not to speak of
the universe; of time, not to speak of eternity. It was not by taking
thought that man survived the mastodon. The acts and thoughts that will
serve the race, that will profit this commonwealth of things that live
in the sun, the air, the earth, the sea, now and through all time,
are not known and never will be known. The rumour of much toil and
scheming and triumph may never reach the stars, and what we value not
at all, are not conscious of, may break the surface of eternity with
endless ripples of good. We know not by what we survive. There is much
philosophy in that Irish tale of the poor blind woman who recovered
her sight at St. Brigit’s well. “Did I say more prayers than the rest?
Not a prayer. I was young in those days. I suppose she took a liking
to me, maybe because of my name being Brigit the same as her own.”[1]
Others went unrelieved away that day. We are as ignorant still. Hence
the batlike fears about immortality. We wish to prolong what we can see
and touch and talk of, and knowing that clothes and flesh and other
perishing things may not pass over the borders of death with us, we
give up all, as if forsooth the undertaker and the gravedigger had
archangelic functions. Along with the undertaker and the gravedigger
ranks the historian and others who seem to bestow immortality. Each
is like a child planting flowers severed from their stalks and roots,
expecting them to grow. I never heard that the butterfly loved the
chrysalis; but I am sure that the caterpillar looks forward to an
endless day of eating green leaves and of continually swelling until
it would despise a consummation of the size of a railway train. We can
do the work of the universe though we shed friends and country and
house and clothes and flesh, and become invisible to mortal eyes and
microscopes. We do it now invisibly, and it is not these things which
are us at all. That maid walking so proudly is about the business of
eternity.

[1] _A Book of Saints and Wonders_, by Lady Gregory.

And yet it would be vain to pretend not to care about the visible
many-coloured raiment of which our houses, our ships, our gardens, our
books are part, since they also have their immortal selves and their
everlasting place, else should we not love them with more than sight
and hearing and touch. For flesh loves flesh and soul loves soul.
Yet on this March day the supreme felicity is born of the two loves,
so closely interwoven that it is permitted to forget the boundaries
of the two, and for soul to love flesh and flesh to love soul. And
this ancient child is rid of his dishonours and flits through the
land floating on a thin reed of the immortal laughter. This is “not
altogether fool.” He is perchance playing some large necessary part
in the pattern woven by earth that draws the gods to lean forward out
of the heavens to watch the play and say of him, as of other men, of
birds, of flowers: “They also are of our company.”...

In the warm rain of the next day the chiffchaff sings among the rosy
blossoms of the leafless larches, a small voice that yet reaches from
the valley to the high hill. It is a double, many times repeated note
that foretells the cuckoo’s. In the evening the songs are bold and
full, but the stems of the beeches are faint as soft columns of smoke
and the columns of smoke from the cottages are like them in the still
air.

Yet another frost follows, and in the dim golden light just after
sunrise the shadows of all the beeches lie on the slopes, dark and more
tangible than the trees, as if they were the real and those standing
upright were the returned spirits above the dead.

Now rain falls and relents and falls again all day, and the earth is
hidden under it, and as from a land submerged the songs mount through
the veil. The mists waver out of the beeches like puffs of smoke or
hang upon them or in them like fleeces caught in thorns: in the just
penetrating sunlight the long boles of the beeches shine, and the
chaffinch, the yellowhammer and the cirl bunting sing songs of blissful
drowsiness. The Downs, not yet green, rise far off and look, through
the rain, like old thatched houses.

When a hot sun has dried the woods the wind beats a cloud of pollen
like grey smoke from the yews on the beechen coombes which are
characteristic of Hampshire. They are steep-sided bays, running and
narrowing far into and up the sides of the chalk hills, and especially
of those hills with which the high flinty plateau breaks down to the
greensand and the plain. These steep sides are clothed with beeches,
thousands of beeches interrupted by the black yews that resemble
caverns among the paler trees, or, in the spring, by the green haze of
a few larches and the white flames of the beam tree buds. Sometimes a
stream rises at the head of the coombe, and before its crystal is a
yard wide and ankle deep over the crumbling chalk it is full of trout;
the sunny ripples are meshed like honeycomb. If there is not a stream
there is a hop garden, or there is a grassy floor approached by neither
road nor path and crossed only by huntsman and hounds. All the year
round the coombes, dripping, green and still, are cauldrons for the
making and unmaking of mists, mists that lie like solid level snow or
float diaphanous and horizontal of airiest silk across the moon or the
morning sun. The coombes breed whole families, long genealogical trees,
of echoes which the child delights to call up from their light sleep;
so, too, do fox and owl at night, and the cow on a calm evening; and
as to the horn and the cry of hounds, the hangers entangle and repeat
them as if they would imprison them for ever, so that the phantom
exceeds the true. This is the home of the orchises and of the daintiest
snails. In spring, yellow and white and yellowish green flowers are
before all the rest under the beeches--the flowers of the golden green
saxifrage and delicate moschatel, the spurge and the spurge laurel, the
hellebore, the white violet and wood sorrel, and the saffron-hearted
primrose which becomes greenish in the light of its own leaves; to
these must be added the yellow green of young foliage and of moss.
Fairest of all the white flowers is the frost flower that grows about
some rotten fallen branch day after day in curls that are beyond silk,
or a child’s hair, or wool when it is first exposed to the sun by the
shearer’s hand. Most conspicuous of the early green is that of the
pale swords of sedge that bear purple brown feathers of flower at the
end of March. The crystal wavering water, the pale green stems and
ever so slightly curving blades, and the dark bloom, make the sense
smart with joy. Never was ivy more luxuriant under the beeches, nor
moss so powerful as where it arrays them from crown to pedestal. The
lichens, fine grey-green bushy lichens on the thorns, are as dense as
if a tide full of them had swept through the coombe. From the topmost
branches hangs the cordage of ivy and honeysuckle and clematis. The
missel thrush rolls out his clear song. The woodpecker laughs his loud
shaking laughter as he bounds in his flight. Among the golden green
mistletoe in the old shaggy apple tree at the entrance of the coombe
the blackbird sings, composing phrases all the sweeter for being
strangely like some in the songs that countrymen used to sing. Earth
has no dearer voice than his when it is among the chilly rain at the
end of the light. All day there have been blue skies and parading white
clouds, and no wind, with sudden invasions of violent wind and hail or
rain, followed by perfected calm and warmer sun--sun which lures the
earliest tortoise-shell butterfly to alight on the footworn flints in
the path up the coombe. At last the sky seems securely blue above the
hangers and a clear small star or two pricks through it. But, emerging
from the coombe, whose sides shut out half the heavens, you see that
the west has wonderfully ordered and dressed itself with pale sky and
precipitous, dark, modelled clouds and vague woods, and above them the
new moon. The blackbirds sing, the dim Downs proceed, and the last
shower’s drops glitter on the black boughs and pallid primroses. Why
should this ever change? At the time it seems that it can never change.
A wide harmony of the brain and the earth and the sky has begun, when
suddenly darker clouds are felt to have ascended out of the north-west
and to have covered the world. The beeches roar with rain. Moon and
Downs are lost. The road bubbles and glows underfoot. A distant
blackbird still sings hidden in the bosom of the rain like an enchanter
hidden by his spells....

It is April now, and when it is still dark in the woods and hedges the
birds all sing together and the maze of song is dominated by the owl’s
hoot--like a full moon of sound above myriad rippling noises. Every day
a new invader takes possession of the land. The wryneck is loud and
persistent, never in harmony with other birds, a complete foreigner,
and yet the ear is glad of his coming. He is heard first, not in the
early morning, along a grove of oaks; and the whole day is his.

Then on every hand the gentle willow wrens flit and sing in the purple
ash blossoms. The martins, the swallows, have each a day. One day,
too, is the magpie’s: for he sits low near his mate in a thicket and
chatters not aloud but low and tenderly, almost like the sedgewarbler,
adding a faint plaintive note like the bullfinch’s, and fragments as
of the linnet’s song, and chirrupings; disturbed, he flies away with
chatter as hoarse as ever.

The rooks reign several days. They have a colony in a compact small
oval beech wood that stands in a hollow amidst dry grey ploughland;
and from the foxy-red summits of the trees, in the most genial hot day,
their cawings are loud and mellow and warm as if they were the earth’s
own voice; and all the while the dew is sliding along the branches,
dropping into other drops or to the ground as the birds flutter at
their nests, and from time to time one triple drop catches the sun and
throbs where it hangs like Hesperus among the small stars.

And every tender eve is the blackbird’s. He sings out at the end of
the long bare ash bough. Beneath him the gloomy crystal water stirs
the bronze cresses, and on the banks the white anemones float above
the dark misty earth and under the hazel leaves yet drooping in their
infancy. The dark hollies catch the last light and shine like water.
Behind all, the Downs are clear and so near that I feel as well as see
the carving on their smooth and already green flanks. The blackbird
gathers up all the low-lit beauty into one carol.

The flowers also have days to themselves, as the minute green moschatel
when it is first found among the hedgerow roots, or the violets when,
white and pale purple, they are smelt and then seen bowed with dew in
the weedy sainfoin field which the chain harrow passed over but a few
days before. Another notable day is when the junipers are perfectly
coloured by their sloe-blue, or palest green, but chiefly grey, small
berries. Another, a very great day, belongs to the willows, when their
crowded fragrant catkins are yellow against the burning blue and all
murmurous with bees. And the briers have their day when their green is
a vivid flame in a gloomy air, against a dark immense wood and sepia
sky. There is, too, a solitary maimed sycamore in one of the coombes
that has a glorious hour when it stands yellow-green in separate
masses of half-opened leaf, motionless and languid in the first joy of
commerce with the blue air, yet glowing.

One morning, very early, when the moon has not set and all the fields
are cold and dewy and the woods are still massed and harbouring the
night, though a few thorns stand out from their edge in affrighted
virgin green, and dim starry thickets sigh a moment and are still,
suddenly the silence of the chalky lane is riven and changed into
a song. First, it is a fierce impetuous downfall of one clear note
repeated rapidly and ending wilfully in mid-burst. Then it is a
full-brimmed expectant silence passing into a long ascendant wail,
and almost without intervals another and another, which has hardly
ceased when it is dashed out of the memory by the downpour of those
rapidly repeated notes, their abrupt end and the succeeding silence.
The swift notes are each as rounded and as full of liquid sweetness
as a grape, and they are clustered like the grape. But they are wild
and pure as mountain water in the dawn. They are also like steel for
coldness and penetration. And their onset is like nothing else: it
is the nightingale’s. The long wail is like a shooting star: even as
that grows out of the darkness and draws a silver line and is no more,
so this glides out of the silence and curves and is no more. And yet
it does not die, nor does that liquid onset. They and their ghosts
people each hanging leaf in the hazel thicket so that the silence is
closely stored. Other notes are shut in the pink anemone, in the white
stitchwort under and about the hazels, and in the drops of dew that
begin to glitter in the dawn.

Beautiful as the notes are for their quality and order, it is their
inhumanity that gives them their utmost fascination, the mysterious
sense which they bear to us that earth is something more than a human
estate, that there are things not human yet of great honour and power
in the world. The very first rush and the following wail empty the
brain of what is merely human and leave only what is related to the
height and depth of the whole world. Here for this hour we are remote
from the parochialism of humanity. The bird has admitted a larger air.
We breathe deeply of it and are made free citizens of eternity. We hear
voices that were not dreamed of before, the voices of those spirits
that live in minute forms of life, the spirits that weave the frost
flower on the fallen branch, the gnomes of underground, those who care
for the fungus on the beech root, the lichen on the trunk, the algæ
on the gravestone. This hazel lane is a palace of strange pomp in an
empire of which we suddenly find ourselves guests, not wholly alien nor
ill at ease, though the language is new. Drink but a little draught of
this air and no need is there to fear the ways of men, their mockery,
their cruelty, their foreignness.

The song rules the cloudy dawn, the waiting ranges of hills and their
woods full of shadows yet crested with gold, their lawns of light,
the soft distended grey clouds all over the sky through which the
white sun looks on the world and is glad. But it has ceased when the
perpendicular shafts of rain divide the mists over the hillside woods
and the pewits tangle their flight through the air that is now alive
with the moist gleaming of myriads of leaves on bramble, thorn and
elder. Presently the rain is only a glittering of needles in the sun.
For the sky is all one pale grey cloud, darker at the lowest edge
where it trails upon the downs and veils their summits, except in the
south-east. There the edge is lifted up over a narrow pane of silver
across which fleet the long slender fringes of the clouds. Through
this pane the sun sends a broad cascade of light, and up into this the
fields and the Down beyond rise and are transfigured, the fields into
a lake of emerald, the Down--here crowned by trees in a cluster--into
a castle of pearl set upon the borders of the earth. Slowly this pane
is broadened; the clouds are plumped into shape, are illumined, are
distinguished from one another by blue vales of sky, until at length
the land is all one gleam of river and pool and grass and leaf and
polished bough, whether swollen into hills or folded into valleys or
smoothed into plain. The sky seems to belong to this land, the sky of
purest blue and clouds that are moulded like the Downs themselves but
of snow and sun.

In the clear air each flower stands out with separate and perfect
beauty, moist, soft and bright, a beauty than which I know nothing more
nearly capable of transferring the soul to the days and the pleasures
of infancy. The crust of half a lifetime falls away, and we can feel
what Blake expressed when he wrote those lines in _Milton_--

    Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours,
    And none can tell how from so small a centre comes such sweet,
    Forgetting that within that centre Eternity expands
    Its ever-during doors, that Og and Anax fiercely guard.
    First, ere the morning breaks, joy opens in the flowery bosoms,
    Joy even to tears, which the Sun rising dries; first the Wild Thyme
    And Meadow-sweet, downy and soft, waving among the reeds,
    Light springing in the air, lead the sweet Dance; they wake
    The Honeysuckle sleeping in the Oak, the flaunting beauty
    Revels along upon the wind; the white-thorn lovely May
    Opens her many lovely eyes; listening the Rose still sleeps.
    None dare to wake her. Soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bed
    And comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every Flower--
    The Pink, the Jessamine, the Wallflower, the Carnation,
    The Jonquil, the mild Lily opes her heavens; every Tree
    And Flower and Herb soon fill the air with an innumerable Dance,
    Yet all in order sweet and lovely....

Those words or such a morning--when the soul steps back many years;
or is it many centuries?--might have moved M. Maeterlinck to his
descriptions of certain great moments in the lives of plants. The terms
of these descriptions are so chosen as to imply an intelligence and
discriminating vital energy in plants. They prove and explain nothing,
but they take one step towards the truth by disturbing the conventional
scientific view and substituting that of a man who, passionately
looking at many forms of life, finds them to be of one family. After
this, it should be more and more difficult for men to think of
flowers as if they were fragile toys from an exceptionally brilliant
manufacturer.

And now there is a day of sun and high blue sky alternating with low,
grey-yellow sky and driving snow that chequers the northern sides of
the furrows and the beech boles. The sun melts the snow and all is
clear, bright and cold, and the sky blue again with white and lofty
clouds; many thrushes are singing; the broad vale is all one blue
moorland that has buried its houses, and the Downs at the far side are
close at hand. Towards evening the wind falls, and it is a glimpse of
another world that is given as the sun is warm for a moment on a low
curving slope of wet grass, with tall rookery beeches glowing on one
hand and on the other bulging white clouds just emerging from behind
the green edge into the blue, while very far away the Downs, both grass
and wood, are deep blue under a broad pane of yellowish light.

The north wind makes walking weather, and the earth is stretched out
below us and before us to be conquered. Just a little, perhaps, of
the warrior’s joy at seeing an enemy’s fair land from the hill-top
is mingled with the joy in the unfolding landscape. The ploughlands
brighten over twenty miles of country, pale and dry, among dark woods
and wooded hills; for the wind has crumbled the soil almost white, so
that a sudden local sunlight will make one field seem actually of snow.
The old road following a terrace of the hillside curves under yews
away from the flinty arable and the grey, dry desolation round about
the poultry-farmer’s iron house, to the side of a rich valley of oak
and ash and deepening pastures traversed by water in a glitter. The
green fire of the larch woods is yellow at the crest. There and in oak
and ash the missel thrush is an embodiment of the north wind, summing
it up in the boldness of his form and singing, as a coat of arms sums
up a history. Mounted on the plume of the top of the tall fir, and
waving with it, he sings of adventure, and puts a spirit into those
who pass under and adds a mile to their pace. The gorse is in flower.
In the hedges the goose-grass has already set its ladders against the
thorns, ladders that will soon have risen to the top of every hedge
like scaling ladders of an infinite army. Down from tall yew and ash
hang the abandoned ropes of last year’s traveller’s joy that have leapt
that height--who has caught them in the leap?--but the new are on their
way, and even the old show what can be done as they sway from the
topmost branches. At sunset an immense and bountiful land lies at our
feet and the wine-red sun is pouring out large cups of conquest. The
undulating ploughland is warm in the red light, and it is broken up by
some squares of old brown stubble and of misty young wheat, and lesser
green squares full of bleating and tinkling sheep. Out of these fields
the dense beech copses rise sheer. Beyond, in the west, are ridges of
many woods in misty conflagration; in the south-west, the line of the
Downs under the level white clouds of a spacious and luminous sky.
In the south, woods upon the hills are dissolving into a deep blue
smoke, without form except at their upper edges. And in the north and
north-west the high lands of Berkshire and Wiltshire are prostrate and
violet through thirty miles of witching air. That also is a call to go
on and on and over St. Catherine’s Hill and through Winchester until
the brain is drowsed with the colours of night and day.

The colour of the dawn is lead and white--white snow falling out of a
leaden sky to the white earth. The rose branches bend in sharper and
sharper curves to the ground, the loaded yew sprays sweep the snow
with white plumes. On the sedges the snow is in fleeces; the light
strands of clematis are without motion, and have gathered it in clots.
One thrush sings, but cannot long endure the sound of his unchallenged
note; the sparrows chirrup in the ricks; the blackbird is waiting for
the end of that low tingling noise of the snow falling straight in
windless air.

At mid-day the snow is finer and almost rain, and it begins to pour
down from its hives among the branches in short showers or in heavy
hovering lumps. The leaves of ivy and holly are gradually exposed in
all their gloomy polish, and out bursts the purple of the ash buds and
the yellow of new foliage. The beech stems seem in their wetness to be
made of a dark agate. Out from their tops blow rags of mist, and not
far above them clouds like old spiders’ webs go rapidly by.

The snow falls again and the voices of the little summer birds are
buried in the silence of the flakes that whirl this way and that
aimlessly, rising and falling and crossing or darting horizontally,
making the trees sway wearily and their light tops toss and their
numbers roar continually in the legions of the wind that whine and moan
and shriek their hearts out in the solitary house roofs and doors and
round about. The silence of snow co-exists with this roar. One wren
pierces it with a needle of song and is gone. The earth and sky are
drowning in night and snow.




CHAPTER III

SPRING--HAMPSHIRE--KENT--SURREY


Next day the wind has flown and the snow is again almost rain: there
is ever a hint of pale sky above, but it is not as luminous as the
earth. The trees over the road have a beauty of darkness and moistness.
Beyond them the earth is a sainted corpse, with a blue light over it
that is fast annihilating all matter and turning the landscape to
a spirit only. Night and the snow descend upon it, and at dawn the
nests are full of snow. The yews and junipers on a league of Downs
are chequered white upon white slopes, and the green larches support
cirrus clouds of snow. In the garden the daffodils bend criss-cross
under snow that cannot quite conceal the yellow flowers. But the snow
has ceased. The sky is at first pale without a cloud and tender as from
a long imprisonment; it deepens in hue as the sun climbs and gathers
force. The crooked paths up the Downs begin to glitter like streaks of
lightning. The thrushes sing. From the straight dark beeches the snow
cannot fall fast enough in great drops, in showers, in masses that
release the boughs with a quiver and a gleam. The green leaves close
to the ground creep out, and against them the snow is blue. A little
sighing wind rustles ivy and juniper and yew. The sun mounts, and from
his highest battlement of cloud blows a long blast of light over the
pure land. Once more the larch is wholly green, the beech rosy brown
with buds. A cart goes by all a-gleam with a load of crimson-sprouting
swedes and yellow-sprouting mangolds that seem to be burning through
the net of snow above them. Down each side of every white road runs
a stream that sings and glitters in ripples like innumerable crystal
flowers. Water drips and trickles and leaps and gushes and oozes
everywhere, and extracts the fragrance of earth and green and flowers
under the heat that hastens to undo the work of the snow. The air is
hot and wet. The snow is impatient to be water again. It still makes
a cape over the briers and brambles, and there is a constant drip and
steam and song of drops from the crossing branches in the cave below.
Loud sounds the voice of leaf and branch and imprisoned water in the
languor and joy of their escape. On every hand there is a drip and gush
and ooze of water, a crackle and rustle and moan of plants and trees
unfolding and unbending and greeting air and light; a close, humid,
many-perfumed host; wet gloom and a multitudinous glitter; a movement
of water and of the shadows like puffs of smoke that fleet over the
white fields under the clouds.

And over and through it a cuckoo is crying and crying, first overhead,
then afar, and gradually near and retreating again. He is soon gone,
but the ears are long afterwards able to extract the spirit of the
song, the exact interval of it, from among all the lasting sounds,
until we hear it as clearly as before, out of the blue sky, out of
the white cloud, out of the shining grey water. It is a word of
power--cuckoo! The melting of the snow is faster than ever, and at the
end of the day there is none left except in some hollows of the Downs
on the slopes behind the topmost of the beeches that darkly fringe the
violet sky. In the misty shutting of the light there are a thousand
songs laced by cuckoos’ cries and the first hooting of owls, and the
beeches have become merely straight lines of pearl in a mist of their
own boughs. Below them, in the high woods, goes on the fall of the
melting snow through the gloomy air, and the splash on the dead leaves.
This gloom and monotonous sound make an exquisite cloister, visited but
not disturbed by the sound of the blackbirds singing in the mist of the
vale underneath. Slowly the mist has deepened from the woods to the
vale and now the eye cannot see from tree to tree. Then the straight
heavy rain descends upon the songs and the clatterings of blackbirds,
and when they are silenced the moorhen’s watery hoot announces that the
world belongs to the beasts and the rainy dark until to-morrow.

Beautiful upon the waters, beautiful upon the mountains, is the
cuckoo’s song, and most rare over the snow. But of all places and hours
I should choose the crags of Land’s End in a dawn of June; and let it
be the end of that month and the wind be grey and cold, so that the
ships stagger in the foam and crag-like waves as they catch the early
light tenderly upon their sails. The cold beams, the high precipices
yet full of shadow and of the giddy calling of daw and gull, the black
but white-lipped water and the blacker cormorant flying straight across
it just over the foam, the sky golden yet still pallid and trembling
from the dungeon of night--through it floats that beloved voice
breaking, breaking, and the strong year at the summit of its career
has begun to decline. The song is memorable and fair also when the
drenched gardens toss and spread their petals in the grass. Many a one
hears it who will not hear it again, and many that once expected it
impatiently hears it no more because he is old and deaf or because his
heart is closed. There is not a broad and perfect day of heat and wind
and sunshine that is not haunted by that voice seeming to say the earth
is hollow under our feet and the sky hollow over our heads.

There are whole nights when the cuckoo will not sleep, and the woods
on either side of a road twenty miles long emit the cry of these
conquerors under the full moon and the white stars of love. If you
pause it will appear that it is not a silence that this song rules
over; for what was a silence was full of sounds, as many sounds as
there are leaves, sounds of creeping, gliding, pattering, rustling,
slow wormlike continuous noises and sudden sounds. And strangely at
length is the glorious day reared high upon the ruins of this night, of
which the survivors slink away into the old forgotten roads, the dense
woods, the chimneys of deserted houses.

It is a jolly note only when the bird is visible close at hand and
the power of his throat is felt. Often two or three will answer one
another, or for half a day will loiter about a coombe for the sake
of an echo. It is one of the richest sounds in nature when two sing
together, the second note of one being almost blended with the first
of the other; and so they continue as if themselves entranced by the
harmony, and the navvy leans upon his pick to listen.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the day after the great melting of the snow the white beam tree,
at the edges of high woods and in the midst of the beeches, has its
hour, when its thousands of large white buds point upward like a
multitudinous candelabrum. For me the white beam is always associated
with wayfaring. Its white buds are the traveller’s joy of spring. The
buds like blossoms or flames bewitch from afar off. They are always
upon sloping ground and usually upon hillsides in the chalk land. In
the autumn their leaves often shrivel before falling, and turn to a
colour that looks like pink almond blossom by contrast with juniper and
yew. When they have fallen, they are as much to be noticed. They lie
commonly with their white undersides uppermost, and though rain soaks
them and wind scatters them and they are trodden down, they preserve
their whiteness until the winter or the following spring. It is a
tree that belongs, above all others except the yew, to the Pilgrims’
Way, and it is impossible to forget these leaves lying white on the
untouched wayside sward, among the dewy purple and crimson and gold of
other leaves, sparkling in the sun and entering into all the thoughts
and fancies and recollections that come to one who goes in solitude
along that old road when the scent of the dying year is pungent as
smoke and sweet as flowers.


KENT, SURREY AND HAMPSHIRE.

The beam tree is bright on the soft hills all through the days of
rain following upon the snow and sun. There are days when earth is
absorbed in her delights of growth and multiplication. The rain is
a veil which she wraps about her that she may toil and sing low at
her myriad divine domesticities untroubled. Delicate snails climb the
young stalks of grass and flower, and their houses, pearly, chocolate,
tawny, pure or ringed or chequered, slide after them. The leaves,
with their indescribable charm of infinitely varied division, of wild
clematis, maple, brier, hawthorn, and many more, come forth into the
rain which hangs on their drooping points and on the thorns. The lichen
enjoys the enduring mist of the woods; the blackthorns are crusted
and bearded with lichens of fleshy green-silver and ochre which grow
even on the thorns themselves and round the new leaves and flowers.
The birch is now an arrested shower of green, but not enough to hide
the white limbs of the nymph in the midst of it. The beech trunk is
now most exquisitely coloured: it is stained and spotted and blotched
with grey and rough silver and yellow-green lichen, palest green
mould, all the greens of moss, and an elusive dappling and graining of
greys, of neutral tints and almost blacks in the wood itself, still
more diversified by the trickling rain and the changing night. The yew
bark is plated and scaled and stained with greens and reds and greys,
powdered with green mould, and polished in places to the colour of
mahogany. Even the long-deserted thistly cornfields are dim purple with
ground-ivy flowers and violets. The marsh, the pasture, the wood, the
hedge, has each its abundance of bloom and of scent; so, too, has the
still water and the running water. But this is the perfect hour of the
green of grass, so intense that it has an earthly light of its own in
the sunless mist. It is best seen in meadows bounded on two or three
sides by the sheer dark edges of woods; for in that contrast the grass
seems a new element, neither earth, nor water, nor sky--under our feet
like the earth, gleaming and even as water, remote and celestial as the
sky. And the voices of the green growing in the rain are innumerable.
The very ground has now one voice of its own, the gurgle of its soaking
hollow places.


HAMPSHIRE.

The fields where the green is now greenest, those bounded on two or
more sides by woods, are of a kind not peculiar to Hampshire. They are
usually on the greensand and lie in smooth, often winding, hollows
like the beds of rivers. Sometimes the banks of these beds are steep,
and they are clothed in woods or in hedges of hornbeam, hazel, ash and
thorn that have grown almost to woods. The meadows are green broad
rivers running up between the dark trees that bathe their roots in
primroses. Sometimes there is a stream of water running down the midst
of such a field, but as the stream, being a boundary, is often lined
with bushes, the particular charm is lost. In the perfect examples
there is the smoothness of the long hollowed meadow, the green, the
river-like form, the look of being a court or cloister between the
trees. Another kind of field of great charm is made by the convexity of
the land rising up from one side or both of such a hollow meadow. These
heaving fields, some of a regular domed shape, are favourites of the
sunset light, in spring when they are grassy, in August when they bear
corn: at noon when there are cattle grazing on the steep slope, their
shadows are an exact inversion of themselves, as in water.

       *       *       *       *       *

Out of the rain and mist spring has now risen full-grown, tender and
lusty, fragrant, many-coloured, many-voiced, fair to see, so that it
is beyond a lover’s power to make even an inventory of her lovely
ways. She is tall, she is fresh and bold, sweet in her motion and in
her tranquillity; and there is a soft down upon her lip as there is a
silken edge to the young leaves of the beeches.


KENT.

Even the motor road is pleasant now when the nightingales sing out of
the bluebell thickets under oak and sweet chestnut and hornbeam and
hazel. Presently it crosses a common, too small ever to draw a crowd, a
rough up-and-down expanse of gorse and thorn, pierced by grassy paths
and surrounded by turf that is rushy and mounded by old ant heaps; and
here, too, there are nightingales singing alone, the sweeter for the
contrast between their tangled silent bowers and the sharp, straight
white road. The common is typical of the lesser commons of the south.
Crouch’s Croft in Sussex is another, in sight of the three dusk
moorland breasts of Crowborough; gorse-grown, flat, possessing a pond,
and walled by tall hollies in a hedge. Piet Down, close by, is a fellow
to it--grass and gorse and irregular pine--a pond, too--rough, like
a fragment of Ashdown or Woolmer, and bringing a wild sharp flavour
into the mellow cultivated land. Yet another is at Stone Street, very
small, a few oaks up to their knees in blackthorn, gorse and bramble,
with dusty edge and the hum of the telegraph wire for a song.

After the little common and long meadows, oak and ash, an old stone
house with seven hundred years of history quiet within its walls
and dark tiles--its cedar and yew and pine, its daisied grass, its
dark water and swans--the four oast cones opposite, all taste more
exquisitely. How goodly are the names hereabout!--Dinas Dene, the
coombe in which the old house stands; Balk Shaw, Cream Crox, Dicky
May’s Field, Ivy Hatch, Lady Lands, Lady’s Wood, Upper and Lower
Robsacks, Obram Wood, Ruffats, Styant’s Mead, the Shode, and, of
course, a Starvecrow. Almost due west goes one of the best of footpaths
past hop garden, corn, currant plantations, rough copses, with glimpses
of the immense Weald to the east, its trees massed like thirty miles
of wood, having sky and cloud over its horizon as if over sea, and
southward the wild ridge of Ashdown. Then the path enters tall woods of
ash and oak, boulder-strewn among their anemone and primrose, bluebell
and dog’s mercury, and emerges in a steep lane at the top of which are
five cowled oast houses among cherry blossom and under black firs.
Beyond there is a hollow winding vale of meadow and corn, its sides
clothed in oak, hazel and thorn, revealing primroses between. Woods
shut it away from the road and from all houses but the farm above one
end. A few cattle graze there, and the sun comes through the sloping
woods and makes the grass golden or pale.

Then the North Downs come in sight, above a church tower amid
stateliest pale-foliaged beeches and vast undulations of meadow. They
are suffused in late sunshine, their trees misty and massed, under a
happy sky. Those beeches lie below the road, lining the edge of one
long meadow. The opposite sun pours almost horizontal beams down upon
the perfectly new leaves so as to give each one a yellow-green glow
and to some a silver shimmer about the shadowy boles. For the moment
the trees lose their anchor in the solid earth. They are floating,
wavering, shimmering, more aërial and pure and wild than birds or any
visible things, than aught except music and the fantasies of the brain.
The mind takes flight and hovers among the leaves with whatsoever
powers it has akin to dew and trembling lark’s song and rippling water;
it is throbbed away not only above the ponderous earth but below the
firmament in the middle world of footless fancies and half thoughts
that drift hither and thither and know neither a heaven nor a home.
It is a loss of a name and not of a belief that forbids us to say
to-day that sprites flutter and tempt there among the new leaves of the
beeches in the late May light.

Almost every group of oast houses here, seen either amongst autumn
fruit or spring blossom, is equal in its effect to a temple, though
different far, even when ivy-mantled as they occasionally are, from
the grey towered or spired churches standing near. The low round
brick tower of the oast house, surmounted by a tiled cone of about
equal height, and that again crested with a white cowl and vane, is a
pleasant form. There are groups of three which, in their age, mellow
hue, roundness, and rustic dignity, have suggested the triple mother
goddesses of old religions who were depicted as matrons, carrying
babes or fruit or flowers, to whom the peasant brought thank-offerings
when sun and rain had been kind. Those at Kemsing, for example, stand
worthily beside the perfect grey-shingled spire, among elm and damson,
against the bare cloudy Down. And there are many others near the
Pilgrims’ Way of the same charm.

That road, in its winding course from Winchester to Canterbury, through
Hampshire, Surrey and Kent, sums up all qualities of roads except
those of the straight highway. It is a cart-way from farm to farm; or
a footpath only, or a sheaf of half-a-dozen footpaths worn side by
side; or, no longer needed except by the curious, it is buried under
nettle and burdock and barricaded by thorns and traveller’s joy and
bryony bines; it has been converted into a white country road for a
few miles of its length, until an ascent over the Downs or a descent
into the valley has to be made, and then once more it is left to
footsteps upon grass and bird’s foot trefoil or to rude wheels over
flints. Sometimes it is hidden among untended hazels or among chalk
banks topped with beech and yew, and the kestrel plucks the chaffinch
there undisturbed. Or it goes free and hedgeless like a long balcony
half-way up the Downs, and unespied it beholds half the South Country
between ash tree boles. Church and inn and farm and cottage and tramp’s
fire it passes like a wandering wraith of road. Some one of the little
gods of the earth has kept it safe--one of those little and less than
omnipotent gods who, neglecting all but their own realms, enjoy the
earth in narrow ways, delighting to make small things fair, such as
a group of trees, a single field, a pure pool of sedge and bright
water, an arm of sea, a train of clouds, a road. I see their hands
in many a by-way of space and moment of time. One of them assuredly
harbours in a rude wet field I know of that lies neglected between two
large estates: three acres at most of roughly sloping pasture, bounded
above by the brambly edge of a wood and below by a wild stream. Here a
company of meadow-sweet invades the grass, there willow herb tall with
rosy summits of flowers, hoary lilac mint, dull golden fleabane, spiry
coltstails. The snake creeps careless through these thickets of bloom.
The sedge-warbler sings there. One old white horse is content with the
field, summer and winter, and has made a plot of it silver with his
hairs where he lies at night. The image of the god is in the grey riven
willow that leans leafless over the stream like a peasant sculpture
of old time. There is another of these godkins in a bare chalk hollow
where the dead thistles stick out through a yard of snow and give
strange thoughts of the sailless beautiful sea that once rippled over
the Downs: one also in the smell of hay and mixen and cow’s breath at
the first farm out of London where the country is unsoiled. There is
one in many a worthless waste by the roadside, such as that between
two roads that go almost parallel for a while--a long steep piece,
only a few feet broad, impenetrably overgrown by blackthorn and
blackberry, but unenclosed: and one in each of the wayside chalk-pits
with overhanging beech roots above and bramble below. One, too, perhaps
many, were abroad one August night on a high hillside when the hedge
crickets sang high up in the dogwood and clematis like small but
deafening sewing machines, and the glowworms shone in the thyme, and
the owl’s crying did not rend the breathless silence under the full
moon, and in the confused moonlit chequer of the wood, where tree
and shadow were equals, I walked on a grating of shadows with lights
between as if from under the earth; the hill was given over to a light
happiness through which I passed an unwilling but unfeared intruder.

In places these gods preside over some harmony of the earth with the
works of men. There is one such upon the Pilgrims’ Way, where I join
it, after passing the dark boughs and lightsome flowers of cherry
orchards, grass full of dandelions, a dark cluster of pines, elms in
groups and cavalcades, and wet willowy meadows that feed the Medway.
Just at the approach there is a two-storied farm with dormers in the
darkly mellowed roof, protected by sycamores and chestnuts, and before
it a weather-boarded barn with thatched roof, and then, but not at
right angles, another with ochre tiles, and other outbuildings of old
brick and tile, a waggon lodge of flint and thatch beside a pond, at
the edge of a broad unhedged field where random oaks shadow the grass.
Behind runs the Pilgrims’ Way, invisible but easily guessed under that
line of white beam and yew, with here and there an ash up which the
stout plaited stems of ivy are sculptured, for they seem of the same
material as the tree, and both of stone. Under the yew and white beam
the clematis clambers over dogwood and wayfaring trees. Corn grows up
to the road and sometimes hops; beyond, a league of orchard is a-froth
round farmhouses or islands of oak; and east and west sweeps the
crescent of the North Downs.

With the crescent goes the road, half-way up the sides of the hills but
nearly always at the foot of the steepest slopes where the chalk-pits
are carved white, like the concave of a scallop shell, out of the green
turf. Luxuriant hedges bar the view except at gateways and stiles. At
one place the upper hedge gives way to scattered thickets scrambling up
the hill, with chalky ruts and rabbit workings between. Neither sheep
nor crops cover the hill, nor yet is it common. Any one can possess
it--for an hour. It is given up to the rabbits until Londoners can be
persuaded to build houses on it. At intervals a road as old as the Way
itself descends precipitously in a deep chalk groove, overhung by yew
and beech, or hornbeam, or oak, and white clouds drifting in a river
of blue sky between the trees; and joins farther south the main road
which winds, parallel with the Pilgrims’ Way and usually south of it,
from Winchester, through Guildford, Dorking, Westerham, Maidstone,
Ashford, and Canterbury to Dover Strait. Not only chalk-pits and deep
roads hollow the hills. For miles there is a succession of small
smooth coombes, some grown with white thorn, some grassy, above the
road, alternating with corresponding smooth breasts of turf. Towers
and spires, but chiefly towers, lie beneath, and in the mile or so
between one and the next there are red farms or, very rarely, a greater
house at the end of a long wave of grass among trees. Above, the white
full-bosomed clouds lean upon the green rampart of the hills and look
across to the orchards, the woods beyond, the oaken Weald and its
lesser ridges still farther, and then the South Downs and a dream of
the south sea.

Rain falls, and in upright grey sheaves passes slowly before the
fresh beech leaves like ghosts in shadowy procession; and once again
the white clouds roll over the tops of the trees, and the green is
virginal, and out of the drip and glimmer of the miles of blissful
country rises the blackbird’s song and the cuckoo’s shout. The rain
seems not only to have brightened what is to be seen but the eye that
sees and the mind that knows, and suddenly we are aware of all the joy
in the grandeur and mastery of an oak’s balance, in those immobile
clouds revealed on the farthest horizon shaped like the mountains
which a child imagines, in the white candles of the beam tree, in the
black-eyed bird sitting in her nest in the hawthorn with uplifted
beak, and in the myriad luxuriant variety of shape and texture and
bright colour in the divided leaves of wood sanicle and moschatel and
parsley and cranesbill, in the pure outline of twayblade and violet
and garlic. Newly dressed in the crystal of the rain the landscape
recalls the earlier spring; the flowers of white wood-sorrel, the pink
and white anemone and cuckoo flower, the thick-clustered, long-stalked
primroses and darker cowslips with their scentless sweetness pure as an
infant’s breath; the solitary wild cherry trees flowering among still
leafless beech; the blackbirds of twilight and the flower-faced owls;
the pewits wheeling after dusk; the jonquil and daffodil and arabis and
leopard’s bane of cottage gardens; the white clouds plunged in blue
floating over the brown woods of the hills; the delicate thrushes with
speckled breasts paler than their backs, motionless on dewy turf; and
all the joys of life that come through the nostrils from the dark, not
understood world which is unbolted for us by the delicate and savage
fragrances of leaf and flower and grass and clod, of the plumage of
birds and fur of animals and breath and hair of women and children.

How can our thoughts, the movements of our bodies, our human
kindnesses, ever fit themselves with this blithe world? Is it but vain
remorse at what is lost, or is it not rather a token of what may yet
be achieved, that makes these images blind us as does the sight of
children dressed for a play, some solemn-thoughtful, some wholly gay,
suddenly revealed to us in brilliant light after the night wind and
rain?

But at morning twilight I see the moon low in the west like a broken
and dinted shield of silver hanging long forgotten outside the tent of
a great knight in a wood, and inside are the knight’s bones clean and
white about his rusted sword. In the east the sun rises, a red-faced
drover and a million sheep going before him silent over the blue
downs of the dawn: and I am ill-content and must watch for a while
the fraying, changeful edges of the lesser clouds drift past and into
the great white ones above, or hear rebellious music that puts for
one brief hour into our hands the reins of the world that we may sit
mightily behind the horses and drive to the goal of our dreams.

A footpath leads from the Pilgrims’ Way past the divine undulations and
beech glades of a park--a broad piece of the earth that flows hither
and thither in curves, sudden or slow but flawless and continuous, and
everywhere clothed in a seamless garment of grass. The path crosses
the white main road into a lesser one that traverses a common of
beech and oak and birch. The leaves make an unbroken roof over the
common: except the roads there is not a path in it. For it is a small
and narrow strip of but a few acres, without any open space, gloomy,
much overgrown by thickets. Last year’s leaves lie undisturbed and of
the colour of red deer under the silky green new foliage and round
the huge mossy pedestals of beech and in caves behind the serpentine
locked roots. No child’s shout is heard. No lover walks there. The
motor-car hurries the undesirable through and down into the Weald. And
so it is alone and for themselves that the beeches rise up in carven
living stone and expand in a green heaven for the song of the woodwren,
pouring out pearls like wine.

Southward, on either side of the steep road, the slope is, below
the beeches, given to corn and hops; at the foot are all the oaks
and pasture of the Weald, diversified by hop gardens on many of
the slanting fields that break up its surface. Looking back from
here the hills above are less finely modelled than the downs still
farther behind us in the north. But they also have their shallow
coombes, sometimes two tiers of them, and they are indented by deep,
wide-mouthed bays. One of them begins in copses of oak and hazel and
sallow, a little arable, a farm, three oast cones, and a little steep
orchard in a hollow of their own, which give way to hops, followed by
grass and then a tortuous ploughland among the oaks and firs of the
great woods that cover the more precipitous sides of the upper end of
the bay. Exquisitely cultivated, this bay is yet a possession of cuckoo
and nightingale, singing under the yellow-green and black-branched oaks
and above the floor of bluebell and dark dog’s mercury.

Out of the coombe a deep lane ascends through beech, hazel and beam to
another common of heather, and whinberry bathing the feet of scattered
birch, and squat oak and pine, interrupted by yellow gravel pits.

Beyond is a little town and a low grey spire, neighboured by sycamores
that stretch out horizontal boughs of broad leaves and new yellow-green
flower tassels over long grass. Past the town--rapidly and continually
resuming its sleep after the hooting of motor-cars--begins a wide and
stately domain. At its edge are cottages doddering with age, but trim
and flowery, and assuredly wearing the livery of the ripe, grave house
of brick that stands on the grassy ascent above them, among new-leaved
beech masses and isolated thorns dreaming over their shadows. That
grove of limes, fair and decorous, leading up to the house is the work
of Nature and the squire. His chestnut and pine plantations succeed.
And now a pollard beech, bossy-rooted on a mound of moss and crumbling
earth, its grotesque torso decorated as by childish hands with new
leaves hanging among mighty boughs that are themselves a mansion for
squirrel and jay and willow wren and many shadows, looks grimly down
at the edge of a wood and asks for the wayfarer’s passport--has he
lived well, does he love this world, is he bold and free and kind?--and
if he have it not seals him with melancholy as he enters among the
innumerable leaves of innumerable beeches beginning to respond to the
straight, still, after-sunset rain, while the last cuckoos cry and the
last footsteps and wheels of the world die away behind. The foliage
has a pale, almost white, light of its own among the darkly dripping
boughs, and when that is gone the rain and leaf under a spongy grey
sky have a myriad voices of contentedness. Below, invisible in the dark
rain but not unfelt, is the deep hollow land of the Weald. The owls
whimper and mew and croon and hoot and shriek their triumphs.


SURREY.

In the morning a storm comes up on bellying blue clouds above the pale
levels of young corn and round-topped trees black as night but gold
at their crests. The solid rain does away with all the hills, and
shows only the solitary thorns at the edge of an oak wood, or a row of
beeches above a hazel hedgerow and, beneath that, stars of stitchwort
in the drenched grass. But a little while and the sky is emptied and
in its infant blue there are white clouds with silver gloom in their
folds; and the light falls upon round hills, yew and beech thick upon
their humps, the coombes scalloped in their sides tenanted by oaks
beneath. By a grassy chalk pit and clustering black yew, white beam
and rampant clematis, is the Pilgrims’ Way. Once more the sky empties
heavy and dark rain upon the bright trees so that they pant and quiver
while they take it joyfully into their deep hearts. Before the eye
has done with watching the dance and glitter of rain and the sway of
branches, the blue is again clear and like a meadow sprinkled over with
blossoming cherry trees.

The decent vale consists of square green fields and park-like slopes,
dark pine and light beech: but beyond that the trees gather together in
low ridge after ridge so that the South Country seems a dense forest
from east to west. On one side of the hill road is a common of level
ash and oak woods, holly and thorn at their edges, and between them
and the dust a grassy tract, sometimes furzy; on the other, oaks and
beeches sacred to the pheasant but exposing countless cuckoo flowers
among the hazels of their underwood. Please trespass. The English game
preserve is a citadel of woodland charm, and however precious, it has
only one or two defenders easily eluded and, when met, most courteous
to all but children and not very well dressed women. The burglar’s
must be a bewitching trade if we may judge by the pleasures of the
trespasser’s unskilled labour.

In the middle of the wood is a four-went way, and the grassy or white
roads lead where you please among tall beeches or broad, crisp-leaved
shining thorns and brief open spaces given over to the mounds of ant
and mole, to gravel pits and heather. Is this the Pilgrims’ Way, in the
valley now, a frail path chiefly through oak and hazel, sometimes over
whin and whinberry and heather and sand, but looking up at the yews and
beeches of the chalk hills? It passes a village pierced by straight
clear waters--a woodland church--woods of the willow wren--and then,
upon a promontory, alone, within the greenest mead rippled up to its
walls by but few graves, another church, dark, squat, small-windowed,
old, and from its position above the world having the characters of
church and beacon and fortress, calling for all men’s reverence. Up
here in the rain it utters the pathos of the old roads behind, wiped
out as if writ in water, or worn deep and then deserted and surviving
only as tunnels under the hazels. I wish they could always be as
accessible as churches are, and not handed over to land-owners--like
Sandsbury Lane near Petersfield--because straight new roads have taken
their places for the purposes of tradesmen and carriage people, or
boarded up like that discarded fragment, deep-sunken and overgrown,
below Colman’s Hatch in Surrey. For centuries these roads seemed to
hundreds so necessary, and men set out upon them at dawn with hope
and followed after joy and were fain of their whiteness at evening:
few turned this way or that out of them except into others as well
worn (those who have turned aside for wantonness have left no trace at
all), and most have been well content to see the same things as those
who went before and as they themselves have seen a hundred times. And
now they, as the sound of their feet and the echoes, are dead, and the
roads are but pleasant folds in the grassy chalk. Stay, traveller, says
the dark tower on the hill, and tread softly because your way is over
men’s dreams; but not too long; and now descend to the west as fast as
feet can carry you, and follow your own dream, and that also shall in
course of time lie under men’s feet; for there is no going so sweet as
upon the old dreams of men.




CHAPTER IV

AN ADVENTURER


In one of the new cottages at the edge of the town beyond lives, or
tries to live, a man who fought for many years in one of the suburbs a
losing battle against London. His father had farmed land now covered by
streets. He himself was persuaded to sell all but his house and garden
to raise money for a business which promised his sons great wealth.
He retained barely enough to live upon; the business, an honest one,
failed; and in a short time misfortunes compelled him to open a shop.
He converted the house--that was once a farmhouse--into a shop, and not
five years ago it could still be seen at the end of a row of gaudy,
glittering windows, itself a village shop, having but a common house
window for the display of wares, the interior gloomy and approached
through a strip of garden where a lime-tree put on and shed its leaves
with the air of a princess of old romance. The back garden, half an
orchard, was bordered along a side street by a high wall, and over that
a broad cherry used to lean a gnarled branch and shower its blossoms
upon the asphalte; the foot-passengers complained of the tree which
had grown without foreknowledge of the fact that men would pass below
in silk hats, and the branch was lopped. In the shop itself everything
was for sale, everything that officious travellers could foist
upon the little weak-eyed half-farmer, half-gardener who kept the
shop--hosiery, leather bags, purses, cheap jewellery, fishing-tackle,
cricket-bats, umbrellas, walking-sticks. A staircase led out of the
shop to the bedrooms, just as it had done when the window on the narrow
landing looked over hay-fields to Banstead Downs. When the cat was
not lying upon the socks in the window, she had, very likely, been
kept away by a litter of kittens somewhere among the seldom disturbed
bundles of unfashionable ties, or she lay in the sun beneath the lime
and watched her kittens pursuing the spiral flight of the yellow leaves.

The owner made no concessions except such as he was forced to, as when
he bought the stock of jewellery because the traveller praised his cat;
or allowed the cherry tree to be mutilated because the new Borough
Council commanded. He dressed in breeches, gaiters and heavy boots, and
never wore a coat or took his pipe out of his mouth (except to play
with puss). Seldom did he leave the house, unless it was to go into
the garden or to take a walk down the emptied busy street at night,
when the only sound was the crickets’ song from the bakers’ shops. The
little old house rippled over by creeper was beautiful then--the lime
tree and the creeper trembling in the gusty moonlight, and the windows
and doorway hollow and dark and romantic as if a poet had made them to
sting men’s hearts with beauty and with regret.

No one can ever say what the old man thought as he slammed the door
after one of these walks and was alone with himself. Certainly he
regretted the big decorous high-gated houses that used to stand
opposite his, veiled by wistaria, passion flower and clematis; the
limes that used to run the whole length of his father’s land, but now
all gone, save this one (how lovely its fallen leaves looked in the as
yet untrodden streets in autumn mornings, lying flat and moistly golden
under the fog!); the balsam growing through the railings; the dark yew
tree that looked among bright lilac and laburnum like a negro among the
women in the _Arabian Nights_; the pathway through the churchyard, in
the days before they had to rail it in to preserve the decent turf--in
vain, for it was now littered with newspapers and tram-tickets among
the tombs of ---- Esquire, ---- Esquire, for they were all esquires. He
regretted the houses and gardens, but less than their people, the men
and women of some ease and state, of speech whose kindliness was thrice
kind through its careful dignity, so he thought. And then the children,
there were no such children now; and the young men and women, the men
a little alarming, the women strong and lovely and gentle enough to
supply him with incarnations at once of all those whom he read of in
the novels of Scott. They had gone long ago, except those who survived
vaguely in the novels. He remembered their houses better, for it was
not until after some years that they were pulled down, their orchards
grubbed up, and their rich mould carried away in sacks to the trumpery
villas round about--dragged along the road and spilt in a long black
trail. It was wonderful dark mould, and the thought of the apples, the
plums, the nectarines, the roses which had grown out of it made him
furious when it was taken to their gardens by people who would be gone
in a year or less, and would grow in it nothing but nasturtiums and
sunflowers.

There followed a period when, the old attitudes, the things that had
been handed down from the last revolution, having been broken up, the
gardens became a possession of nettles and docks, and fewer and fewer
were the crown-imperials and hollyhocks to survive the fall of the
houses. The scaffold-poles, the harsh blocks of stone, the rasping
piles of bricks, the scores of cold earthenware and iron articles
belonging to the rows of villas about to replace the old houses, looked
more like ruin than preparation as they lay stark and hideous among
the misty grass and still blue elms. There were days when the thrushes
still sang well among the rioting undisturbed shrubberies. But soon
men felled the elms and drove away their shadows for ever, and all
that dwelled or could be imagined therein. No more would the trees be
enchanted by the drunken early songs of blackbirds. The heavenly beauty
of earthly things went away upon the timber carriages and was stamped
with mud. The butts of the trees were used to decorate the gardens of
the new houses. Two, indeed, were spared by some one’s folly, and a
main bough fell in the night and crushed through a whole fortnight’s
brickwork.

Those elms had come unconsciously to be part of the real religion
of men in that neighbourhood, and certainly of that old man. Their
cool green voices as they swayed, their masses motionless against
the evening or the summer storms, created a sense of pomp and awe.
They gave mystic invitations that stirred his blood if not his slowly
working humble brain, and helped to build and to keep firm that
sanctuary of beauty to which we must be able to retire if we are to be
more than eaters and drinkers and newspaper readers. When they were
gone he wondered, still humbly, what would do their work in the minds
of the newcomers. Looking at the features of the younger people, held
in a vice of reserve or pallidly leering, and hearing the snarl of
their voices, he was not surprised. They had not been given a chance.
How could they have the ease, the state, the kindliness of the old
inhabitants? They had no gods, only a brand-new Gothic church. Often
they supported this or that new movement, or bought a brave new book,
but they continued to sneer timidly or brutally at everything else.
They were satisfied with a little safe departure from the common way,
some mental or spiritual equivalent to the door-knocker of imitation
hammered copper. They did not care very much for trees though they
planted them in every street, where the grammar-school boys and
errand-boys mutilated them one by one in the dark; they cut off the
heads of a score of tall poplars, lest perchance the west wind should
one day do the same thing when one of the million was passing below.

The new people were a mysterious, black-liveried host, the
grandchildren of peers, thieves, gutter-snipes, agricultural labourers,
artisans, shopkeepers, professional men, farmers, foreign financiers,
an unrelated multitude. They were an endless riddle to the old man. He
used to stare at their houses as one might stare at a corpse in the
hope of discovering that there was something alive there. They were as
impenetrable as their houses, when at night the blinds of the lighted
rooms were drawn and figures or parts of figures shot fantastically by.
He read of their bankruptcies, their appointments, their crimes, their
successes, unwittingly, in the newspapers. He could never take it as a
matter of course to pass, to be continually surrounded by, thousands of
whom he knew nothing, to whom he was nothing. Well did they keep their
secrets, this blank or shamefaced crowd of discreetly dressed people
who might be anywhere to-morrow.

He turned from them to his garden and cherry-tree, and thinking of
those who had walked there, and in the long garden on the other side
of the fence, he felt at home again, with his cat and her long line
of descendants. That long garden had survived the big house to which
it had belonged. A merchant had lived there with his family of four
daughters, dark, tall women, whose pride and tender speech the old
trees in their garden often recalled. All were beautiful, and they were
most beautiful together. They walked, they rode, they played and read
in the garden, and the old man could see them there. They were said
to be clever and their father was wealthy. They were nearly always
together, and as often as possible with him. They were a tribe apart,
of extraordinary perfection of strength and grace, holding their own
against the world. And yet, as the old man thought to himself, looking
at their garden in the rain, not one of them was ever married. They had
moved right into London after selling their house and land. They had
come to his shop once or twice after and made an excuse for going into
the garden: they looked into their own as if they had lost something
there. Thinking of them he went into his shop and opened a book. A
minute black insect, disturbed from among the leaves, crawled over
and over the white page as he pretended to read; it went in zigzags
half-an-inch long, lost in the black and white desert, sometimes
turning the sharp edge and going to the other side of the page; but as
a rule the edge alarmed it and it retreated; it was never still. It
reminded him of himself. They were both lost upon the vast surface of
the earth.

But, of course, that was not why he left. Nobody knew why he left. In
his seventieth year he ran away, bursting out of the crowd as one sheep
no braver than the rest will do sometimes, inexplicably. He has brought
his cats with him, and he has money enough to last until he is dead.
Being considered by his niece as of unsound mind, he is free to do as
he will and is happy when he is alone.




CHAPTER V

SUSSEX


A few miles south of that great presiding pollard beech is the boundary
line between Surrey and Kent on the north and Sussex on the south. A
few miles over the line the moorland organ roll of heather and birch
and pine succeeds the grassy undulations and the well-grown beech and
oak. The yellow roving lines of the paths cut through the heather
into the sand add to the wildness of the waste, by their suggestion
of mountain torrents and of channels worn in the soft rock or clay
by the sea. The same likeness in little is often to be seen upon a
high-pitched roof of thatch when the straw is earth-coloured and
tunnelled by birds and seamed by rain. Here the houses are of stone,
unadorned, heather-thatched. The maker of birch-heath brooms plies his
trade. There are stacks of heath and gorse in the yard. All the more
fair are the grooves in the moorland, below the region of pines, where
the tiled white-boarded mill stands by the sheen of a ford, and the
gorse is bright and white clothes are blowing over neat gardens and
the first rose. On a day of rain and gloom the answer of the gorse to
sudden lights and heats is delicious; all those dull grey and glaucous
and brown dry spines bursting into cool and fragrant fire is as great a
miracle as the turning of flames to roses round a martyr’s feet.

It is only too easy for the pheasant lords to plant larch in
parallelograms: to escape from them it is necessary to go in
amongst them. Yet there are parts of the forest large and dark and
primeval in look, with a few poor isolated houses and a thin file
of telegraph posts crossing it among the high gloomy pines and down
to the marshy hollows, to the strewn gold of dwarf willows, and up
again to the deserted wooden windmill, the empty boarded cottage,
the heather-thatched sheds at the southern edge of the moor. Looking
at this tract of wild land the mind seems to shed many centuries of
civilization and to taste something of the early man’s alarm in the
presence of the uncultured hills--an alarm which is in us tempered
so as to aid an impression of the sublime. Its influence lingers in
the small strips of roadside gorse beyond its proper boundary. Then,
southward, there are softly dipping meadows, fields of young corn,
and oaks thrown among the cowslips. The small farmhouses are neat and
good--one has a long stone wall in front, and, over the road, tall
Scotch firs above a green pond dappled by the water crowfoot’s white
blossoms and bordered by sallow and rush. Narrow copses of oak or wide
hedges of hazel and sallow line the road; and they are making cask
hoops under lodges of boughs at the woodsides. Bluebells and primroses
and cuckoo flowers are not to be counted under the trees. The long
moist meadows flow among the woods up and down from farm to farm and
spire to tower. Each farmhouse group is new--this one is roofed and
walled with tiles; and opposite is a tangle of grass and gorse, with
fowls and hen-coops amongst it, a sallowy pond, a pile of faggots, some
crooked knees of oak, some fresh-peeled timber: old grey hop poles lean
in a sheaf all round a great oak. The gates are of good unpainted
oak, and some few are of a kind not often seen elsewhere, lower than
a hurdle and composed of two stout parallel bars united by twenty
uprights and by two pieces meeting to form a V across these. The gates
deserve and would fill a book by themselves.

Green lucent calipers of flags shadow one another in little wayside
ponds, white-railed; for this is the Weald, the land of small clay
ponds. The hazels are the nightingale’s. In many of the oak woods the
timber carriages have carved a way through primroses and bluebells deep
into the brown clay. The larger views are of cloudy, oak woods, ridge
behind ridge, and green corn or grass and grey ploughland between; and
of the sun pouring a molten cataract out of dark machicolated clouds
on to one green field that glows a moment and is insignificant again:
the lesser are of little brambly precipitous sandpits by the road, of
a white mill at a crossing, of carved yews before black-timbered inns,
of a starling that has learned the curlew’s call perched on a cottage
roof, of abeles all rough silver with opening leaf shivering along
the grass-bordered evening road, of two or three big oaks in a meadow
corner and in their shadow unblemished parsley and grasses bowed as
if rushing in the wind. At an inn door stands a young labourer, tall
and straight but loosely made, his nose even and small, his eyes blue
and deep set, his lips like those of Antinous, his face ruddy and
rough-grained, his hair short and brown and crisp upon his fair round
head; his neck bound by a voluminous scarf (with alternate lozenges of
crimson and deep green divided by white lines) that is gathered beneath
his chin by a brass ring and thence flows down under his blue coat;
his trousers of grey cord, dirty and patched with drab to a weathered
stone colour, fitting almost tightly to his large thighs and calves and
reaching not too near to his small but heavily-shod feet. A prince--a
slave. He is twenty, unmarried, sober, honest, a noble animal. He goes
into a cottage that stands worn and old and without a right angle in
its timbers or its thatch any more than in its apple trees and solitary
quince which all but hide the lilac and massed honesty of the little
garden. This is a house--I had almost said this is a man--that looked
upon England when it could move men to such songs as, “Come, live with
me and be my love,” or--

    “Hey, down a down!” did Dian sing,
      Amongst her virgins sitting;
    “Than love there is no vainer thing,
      For maidens most unfitting.”
    And so think I, with a down, down derry.

For a moment or less as he goes under the porch I seem to see that
England, that swan’s nest, that island which a man’s heart was not
too big to love utterly. But now what with Great Britain, the British
Empire, Britons, Britishers, and the English-speaking world, the choice
offered to whomsoever would be patriotic is embarrassing, and he is
fortunate who can find an ideal England of the past, the present, and
the future to worship, and embody it in his native fields and waters or
his garden, as in a graven image.

The round unending Downs are close ahead, and upon the nearest hill
a windmill beside a huge scoop in the chalk, a troop of elms below,
and then low-hedged fields of grass and wheat. The farms are those of
the downland. One stands at the end of the elm troop that swerves
and clusters about its tiled roof, grey cliff of chimney-stack, and
many gables; the stables with newer tiles; the huge slope of the
barn; the low mossy cart-lodge and its wheels and grounded shafts;
the pale straw stacks and the dark hay ricks with leaning ladders. A
hundred sheep-bells rush by with a music of the hills in the wind.
The larks are singing as if they never could have done by nightfall.
It is now the hour of sunset, and windy. All the sky is soft and
dark-grey-clouded except where the sun, just visible and throbbing in
its own light, looks through a bright window in the west with a glow.
Exactly under the sun the grass and wheat is full both of the pure
effulgence and of the south-west wind, rippling and glittering: there
is no sun for anything else save the water. North of the sun and out of
its power lies a lush meadow, beyond it a flat marshland cut by several
curves of bright water, above that a dark church on a wooded mound, and
then three shadowy swoops of Down ending at a spire among trees.

South-west, the jagged ridgy cluster of a hillside town, a mill and a
castle, stand dark and lucid, and behind them the mere lines of still
more distant downs.




CHAPTER VI

A RETURN TO NATURE


I turn into my next inn with unusual hopes. For it was here some years
ago that I met for the first time a remarkable man. It was nine o’clock
on a late July evening, and the haymakers, only just set free, came
stamping into the bar. The last waggon-load stopped at the door while
the red-whiskered carter stood, one hand on the latch, and drank his
pint before leading his horses into the stall. After the haymakers,
in their pale corduroys and dirty white slops, came a tall, spare,
shock-headed man, not recently shaved, dressed in grey--grey coat, grey
breeches and stockings, and a tall, hard felt hat that was old and
grey. He called for sixpenny ale, and wiping the hay dust from his neck
sat down beside me.

No, he is not here to-day. Perhaps he will never get out of London
again.

I asked him the way to the nearest village, and whether a bed was to
be had there. He answered that it was some way off--paused, looked at
me, drank from his tankard--and added in a lower voice that he would be
glad if I would come and share his place. Such an unusual invitation
enforced assent.

A quarter of a mile down the next by-way he opened a little oaken gate
that slammed after us, and there, in a corner of a small, flat field,
was his sleeping place, under an oak. Would I care to join him in fried
bacon and broad beans and tea at six the next morning?

He lit a wisp of hay and soon had a fire burning, and brought over some
hay and sacks for the second bed. The lights of the farmhouse shone on
the other side of the little field behind lilac bushes. The farmhouse
pump gave out a cry like a guinea fowl for a few minutes. Then the
lights went out. I asked the name of the farm and he told me.

“I come here almost every summer for the haymaking,” he said, and
detecting my surprise that it was not his first year of haymaking, he
continued--

“It is my tenth summer, to be exact.”

He was a man of hardly over thirty, and I noticed that his hands,
though small and fine, were rough and warty and dark. Thoughtlessly I
remarked that he must find the winter hard if he travelled like this
all the year round.

“Yes,” he said, with a sigh, “it is, and that is why I go back in the
winter; at least partly why.”

“Go back----?”

“Yes, to London.”

I was still perplexed. He had the air of a town-bred man of the clerkly
class, but no accent, and I could not think what he did in London that
was compatible with his present life.

“Are you a Londoner, then?”

“Yes, and no. I was born at the village of ---- in Caermarthenshire.
My father was a clerk in a coal merchant’s office of the neighbouring
town. But he thought to better himself, worked hard in the evenings
and came to London, when I was seven, for a better-paid post. We lived
in Wandsworth in a small street newly built. I went to a middle-class
school close by until I was sixteen, and then I went into a silk
merchant’s office. My father died soon after. He had never been strong,
and from the first year’s work in the city, I have heard my mother say,
he was a doomed man. He made no friends. While I was young he gave up
all his spare time to me and was happy, wheeling me, my mother walking
alongside, out into the country on every Sunday that was not soaking
wet, and nearly every Saturday afternoon, too.

“It was on one of these excursions, when they had left me to myself a
little while to talk more gravely than they usually did when we were
out like that, that there was suddenly opened before me--like a yawning
pit, yet not only beneath me but on every side--infinity, endless time,
endless space; it was thrust upon me, I could not grasp it, I only
closed my eyes and shuddered and knew that not even my father could
save me from it, then in a minute it was gone. To a more blessed child
some fair or imposing vision might have risen up out of the deep and
given him a profounder if a sadder eye for life and the world. How
unlike it was to the mystic’s trance, feeling out with infinite soul
to earth and stars and sea and remote time and recognizing his oneness
with them. To me, but later than that, this occasionally recurring
experience was as an intimation of the endless pale road, before and
behind, which the soul has to travel: it was a terror that enrolled me
as one of the helpless, superfluous ones of the earth.

“I was their only child that lived, and my father’s joy in me was very
great, equalled only by his misery at the life which he had to lead
and which he foresaw for me. He used to read to me, waking me up for
the purpose sometimes when he reached home late, or if he did not do
that rousing me an hour before breakfast. His favourite books were
_The Compleat Angler_ and _Lavengro_, the poems of Wordsworth, the
diaries of Thoreau and the _Natural History of Selborne_. I remember
crying--when I was twelve--with despair of human nature’s fickleness to
think that White, even though he was an old man, could have it in his
heart to write that farewell to natural history at the end of his last
letter to Barrington. My father read these books to me several times in
a sad, hoarse voice--as it seemed to me, though when he paused he was
happy enough--which I had often great trouble to endure as I got older
and able and willing to read for myself. So full was I of a sense of
the real wild country which I had never seen--the Black Mountains of
Caermarthen I hardly recalled--that I became fanciful, and despised the
lavish creeper that hung like a costly dress over the fence between our
garden and the next, because the earth it grew in was not red earth but
a black pasty compound, full of cinders and mortar and decayed rags and
kittens. I used to like to go to the blacksmith’s to smell the singeing
hoof and to the tram-stables and smell the horses, and see the men
standing about in loose shirts, hanging braces, bare arms, clay pipes,
with a sort of free look that I could not see elsewhere. The navvies at
work in the road or on the railway line were a tremendous pleasure, and
I noticed that the clerks waiting for their trains in the morning loved
to watch these hulking free and easy men doing something that looked
as if it mattered, not like their own ledger work and so on. I had the
same sort of pleasure looking up the street that rose from east to west
and seeing the sun set between the two precipices of brick wall at the
top; it was as if a gate opened there and through it all the people and
things that saddened me had disappeared and left me to myself; it was
like the pit, too, that opened before me as a little child.

“My father died of consumption. I was then just able to earn my own
living, so I was left in lodgings and my mother returned to Wales. I
worked hard at figures; at least I went early and stayed late and never
stopped to talk to the others; yet I made frequent mistakes, and the
figures swam in a mist of American rivers and English waterfalls and
gipsy camps, so that it was a wonder I could ever see my Thoreau and
Wordsworth and Borrow without these figures. Fancy men adopting as a
cry the ‘right to work’! Apparently they are too broken-spirited to
think of a right to live, and would be content only to work. It is not
wonderful that with such a cry they do very little. Men cannot fight
hard for the ‘right to work’ as I did. My office was at the bottom
of a pit. The four sides of the pit were walls with many windows,
and I could hear voices speaking in the rooms behind and the click
of typewriters, but could not see into them. Only for two or three
days in June could I see the sun out of the pit. But in the hot days
blue-bottles buzzed on my panes and I took care of them until one by
one they lay dead upon the window ledge. There were no spiders and
they seemed to have a good life. Sparrows sometimes flew up and down
the pit, and once for a week I had the company of a black-and-white
pigeon. It sat day after day in a hole in the opposite wall until it
died and fell on to the paved yard below. The clouds sailed over the
top of the pit. Sea-gulls flew over, all golden-winged, in October
afternoons. I liked the fog when all the lights were lit, and though
we did not know one another in the pit we seemed to keep one another
company. But I liked the rain best of all. It used to splash down from
all sides and make a country noise, and I looked up and saw the quaint
cowls sitting like cats on the chimney-pots, and had ridiculous fancies
that took me far away for a second or two.

“The worst time of all was two or three years after my father’s death.
I spent most of my poor earnings on clothes; I took the trouble to talk
and smoke and think as much as possible like the other nine young men
in the railway carriage that took me into the city; I learned their
horrible, cowardly scorn for those who were poor or outlandish, and for
all things that were not like those in their own houses or in those of
the richer people of their acquaintance or envy. We were slaves, and we
gilded our collars.”

“But the journalist and hack writer,” said I, “is worse off. At least
your master only asked for your dregs. The hack writer is asked to give
everything that can be turned into words at short notice, and so the
collar round his neck is never taken off as yours was between six in
the afternoon and nine in the morning.”

“Ah, but it is open to you to do good or bad. We could only do bad.
All day we were doing things which we did not understand, which could
not in any way concern us, which had nothing to do with what we had
been taught at school, had read in books or had heard from our fathers
and mothers. When he was angry the head of the firm used to say we
had better take care or a machine would supersede us in ten years
instead of twenty. We had been driven out of life into a corner in an
underground passage where everything was unnecessary that did not help
us to be quick at figures, or taking down letters from dictation, or
neat in dress and obedient to the slaves who were set over us. When we
were out of the office we could do nothing which unfitted us for it.
The head of the firm used to say that we were each ‘playing a part,
however humble, in the sublime machine of modern civilization, that not
one of us was unnecessary, and that we must no more complain or grow
restive than does the earth because it is one of the least elements in
this majestic universe.’ We continued to be neat when we were away from
the office, we were disobedient to everything and everybody else that
was not armed with the power of taking away our bread--to the old, the
poor, the children, the women, the ideas which we had never dreamed of,
and that came among us as a white blackbird comes in the winter to a
barbarous parish where keeper and gardener and farmer go out with their
guns and stalk it from hedge to hedge until, starved and conspicuous
and rather apart from its companions, it falls to their beastly shot
and is sold to one of the gentry who puts it into a glass case.

“Sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday I broke away in a vague unrest,
and walked alone to the pretty places where my father and mother had
taken me as a little boy. Most of them I had not seen for five or six
years. My visits were often formal. I walked out and was glad to be
back to the lights of the street, the strong tea, the newspaper and the
novel. But one day I went farther than usual to a wood where we used
to go without interference and, after finding all the blackbirds’ and
thrushes’ and robins’ nests within reach, boil a kettle and have tea.
I had never in that wood seen any man or woman except my father and
mother; never heard a voice except theirs--my father perhaps reading
Wordsworth aloud--and the singing birds’ and the moorhens’ in the pond
at the edge; it used to shut out everything but what I had learned to
love most, sunshine and wind and flowers and their love. When I saw it
again I cried; I really could not help it. For a road had been made
alongside of it, and the builder’s workmen going to and fro had made
a dozen gaps in the hedge and trodden the wood backward and forward
and broken down the branches and made it noisome. Worse than all, the
field, the golden field where I used to lie among the buttercups and be
alone with the blue sky--where I first felt the largeness and dearness
and nearness of the blue sky as a child of eight and put up my hand in
my delight to draw it through the soft blue substance that seemed so
near--the field was enclosed, a chapel built; it was a cemetery for all
the unknown herd, strange to one another, strange to every one else,
that filled the new houses spreading over the land.

“At first I was for running away at once. But the sight made me
faint-hearted and my legs dragged, and it was all I could do to get
home--I mean, to my lodgings.

“However, I was quite different after that. I was ashamed of my ways,
and now spent all my spare time and money in going out into the country
as far as possible, and reading the old books and the new ones that I
could hear of in the same spirit. I lived for these things. It was now
that I knew my slavery. Everything reminded me of it. The return half
of my railway ticket to the country said plainly, ‘You have got to be
back at ---- not later than 10.39 p.m.’ Then I used to go a different
way back or even walk the whole way to avoid having this thing in my
pocket that proclaimed me a slave.

“It was now that I first accepted the invitation of a relation who
lived on the east coast very near the sea. The sea had a sandy shore
bounded by a perpendicular sandy cliff, to the edge of which came rough
moorland. The sea washed the foot of the cliff at high tide and swept
the yellow sand clean twice a day, wiping away all footprints and
leaving a fresh arrangement of blue pebbles glistering in the bitter
wind. It was impossible to be more alone than on this sand, and I was
contented again. The sea brought back the feelings I had when I lay in
the buttercup field--the cemetery--and looked into the sky. Walking
over the moor the undulations of the land hid and revealed the sea in
an always unexpected way, and often as I turned suddenly I seemed to
see the blue sky extended so as to reach nearly to my feet and half-way
up it went small brown or white clouds like birds--like ships--in fact
they were ships sailing on a sea that mingled with the sky. It seemed
a beautiful life, where clouds could not help being finely spun or
carved, or pebbles help being delicious to eye and touch. But out of
the extremity of my happiness came my worst grief. I fell in love. I
fell in love with one of my cousins, a girl of seventeen. She never
professed to return my love, but she was a most true friend, and for
a time I was intoxicated with the delight; I now envy even the brief
moment of pain and misery that I had in those days.

“She was clever and understanding so that I was always at my best
with her, and yet, too, she was as sweet as a child and strange as an
animal. The few moments of pain were when I saw her with the other
girls. When they were together, running on the sands or talking or
dancing they seemed all to be one, like the wind; and sometimes I
thought that like the wind they had no heart amongst them--except
mine that raced with the runners and sighed among the laughers. It
was lovely to see her with animals! with cows or horses, her implicit
motherhood going out to them in an animal kindness, a bluff tenderness
without thought. At times I looked carefully and solemnly into her
eyes until I was lost in a curious pleasure like that of walking in a
shadowy, still, cold place, a cathedral or wintry grove--she had the
largest of dark grey eyes; and she did not turn away or smile, but
looked fearlessly forward, careless and unashamed like a deep pool in
a wood unused to wayfarers. Then she seemed so much a child, and I
longed for the days (which I had never really had) when I could have
been as careless and bold and free as she was. No, I could never teach
those eyes and lips the ways of love: that was for some boy to do. And
I thought I will be content to love her and to have her friendliness.
I was old for my years, and my life without the influence of women
in office and lodgings, I thought, had made me unfit for her delicate
ways. I turned away and the sunny ships in the sea were mournful
because of my thoughts. But I could not wait. I told her my love. She
was not angry or indifferent. She did not reject it. She was afraid.
They sent her away to college. She overworked and overplayed, and they
have told me she is now a schoolmistress. I see her sad and firm with
folded hands. When I knew her she was tall and straight, with long
brown hair in two heavy plaits, a shining, rounded brow, dark-lashed,
grey eyes, and a smile of inexpressible sweetness in which I once or
twice surprised her, pleased with the happiness and beauty of her
thoughts and of Nature.

“When I had lost her, or thought I had--

                  Not comforted to live
    But that there is this jewel in the world
    Which I may see again----

I resolved that I would not be a slave any more. For a few weeks I used
to fancy it was only by a chance I had lost her, and every now and then
as I mused over it I got heated and my thoughts raced forward as if in
the hope of overtaking and averting that very evil chance which had
already befallen, and had in fact caused the train of thought.

“I saved every penny that I could from my salary. In six months I had
saved twenty pounds. Out of this I bought a new black suit, a pair of
boots and a hat, and gave them to my landlady and asked her to take
care of them until I returned, which might be at the end of October. It
was then April. I gave notice to my employers and left them. The next
day very early I left London, and walked all day and all night until
I reached the sea. There I bathed and ate a hearty meal, and walking
along the cliffs till I came to a small farmhouse I engaged a bedroom,
and there I slept and thought and slept undisturbed for twenty-four
hours. I was free. I was free to dream myself no longer one of the
mob-led mob. With care my money would last until mid-summer, even if I
did no work.

“It was a warm, wet May, and by the end of the month there was a
plentiful crop of weeds, and I had no difficulty in getting work at
hoeing. Strawberry picking and cherry picking followed. I was very
slow and earned little, but it was now warm enough to sleep out, and
I earned my food. By the end of July, as I liked the work, I was as
useful with my hayrake as any of the women and better than most of the
odd hands. I wore my fingers raw at tying up barley and oats and, later
on, at feeding the threshing machine. But before the end of October the
weather drove me back to London, with ten shillings in my pocket.

“I put on my new clothes and got as good a berth as my first one, and
in the hope of another spring and summer out of doors I passed the
winter cheerfully. To save more money I went to bed as soon as I got
back to my lodgings, and read myself to sleep.

“In May a spell of fine weather drove me to give notice again, and I
walked as far as Maidstone the first day. My second summer was like my
first. I was already known at half-a-dozen farms. When they could not
give me work at once they gave me leave to fish in the three or four
ponds to be found on all the farms in the Weald of Kent, and I had
many a large, if not always savoury, meal of tench and eels. At the end
of the summer I had three pounds in my pocket, and little less by the
end of October.

“The winter I passed as before. For five years I lived in this way.
Then, for the sake of going abroad on my savings, I worked for a whole
year at a desk, and spent four months along the Loire and down to
Bordeaux; from there I worked my passage to Newport. Since then I have
gone back to my old plan.”

Here he paused and mused. I asked him if he still found it easy to get
work in London.

“No, that’s it,” he replied; “my handwriting is worse and it is slow.
The first weeks in London seem to undo all the good of my summer
outing, especially as my salary is less than it used to be. They begin
to ask me if I am a married man when I apply for work. The November
rains remind me that I have rheumatism. It is my great fear that I may
need a doctor, and so spend my savings, and be unable to leave London
until field work is plentiful in June. But I have my freedom; I could,
if necessary, take an under-cowman’s place and live entirely on the
land. They begin to look at my hands when I apply for clerical work,
and I can’t wear gloves.”

“And ten years hence?”

“That is ten years too far ahead for me to look, though I am less
cheerful than I used to be. I realize that I belong to the suburbs
still. I belong to no class or race, and have no traditions. We of the
suburbs are a muddy, confused, hesitating mass, of small courage though
much endurance. As for myself, I am world-conscious, and hence suffer
unutterable loneliness. I know what bitterness it is to be lacking in
those strong tastes and impulses which, blinding men to what does not
concern them, enables them to live with a high heart. For example, I
have a sensitive palate and am glad of my food, yet whenever I taste
lamb--which I do when I can--my pleasure is spoilt by the sight of the
butcher carrying a lamb under his arm. There it is. I am sensitive on
all sides. Your true man would either forget the sight or he would be
moved to a crusade. I can do neither.

“I am weary of seeing things, the outsides of things, for I see nothing
else. It makes me wretched to think what swallows are to many children
and poets and other men, while to me they are nothing but inimitable,
compact dark weights tumbling I do not know how through the translucent
air--nothing more, and yet I know they are something more. I apprehend
their weight, buoyancy and velocity as they really are, but I have no
vision. Then it is that I remember those words of Sir Thomas Browne’s--

 “‘I am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet
 makes no part in us; and that it is the Spirit of God, the fire and
 scintillation of that noble and mighty essence, which is the life and
 radical heat of spirits.... This is that gentle heat that brooded on
 the waters and in six days hatched the world; this is that irradiation
 that dispels the mists of hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow,
 despair; and preserves the region of the mind in serenity. Whosoever
 feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though
 I feel his pulse) I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to
 me there is no heat under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwell in
 the body of the sun.’

“I dare not say I live. And yet the cows, the well-fed, quiet cows, in
this fine soft weather stare enviously at me through the gate, though
they know nothing of death, and I know it must come, and that even
though often desired, when it comes it will be unwelcome----Yet they
stare enviously at me, I am sure.

“I have no courage. I can at least endure. I can use my freedom to
become a slave again, and at least I know that I have lost nothing by
my way of living. Yes, I can endure, and if after my death I am asked
questions difficult to answer, I can ask one that is unanswerable
which I have many times asked myself--often in London, but not here.
Here I love my food and my work, my rest. My dreams are good. I am not
unkindly spoken to; I make no enemies.

“But yet I cannot look forward--there is nothing ahead--just as I
cannot look back. My people have not built; they were not settled on
the earth; they did nothing; they were oil or grit in a great machine;
they took their food and shelter modestly and not ungratefully from
powers above that were neither kind nor cruel. I hope I do no less; I
wish I could do more.

“Now again returns that old feeling of my childhood--I felt it when I
had left my cousin--I have felt it suddenly not only in London, but
on the top of the Downs and by the sea; the immense loneliness of
the world, as if the next moment I might be outside of all visible
things. You know how it is, on a still summer evening, so warm that
the ploughman and his wife have not sent their children to bed, and
they are playing, and their loud voices startle the thought of the
woods; my feeling is like that, space and quiet and my own littleness
stupendously exaggerated. I have wished I could lay down my thoughts
and desires and noises and stirrings and cease to trouble that great
peace. It was, perhaps, of this loneliness that the Psalmist spoke: ‘My
days are consumed like smoke.... I watch, and am as a sparrow alone
on the housetop.’ The world is wrong, but the night is fine; the dew
light and the moist air is full of the honeysuckle scent. I will smoke
another pipe of your tobacco and leave you for a while. I like to be
alone before I sleep.”

The next I saw of him was when he was frying bacon and boiling beans
for our meal. “Forget my night thoughts,” he said, “and be thankful
for the white dry road and the blue sky. We are not so young but that
we must be glad it is summer and fine. As for me, the dry weather is
so sweet that I like the smell of elder flower and the haycart horses’
dung and the dust that get into the throat of an evening. Good-bye.”

He went away to wash at the pump, as the cattle spread out from the
milking-stalls into the field and filled it with their sweet breath and
the sound of their biting the thick grass.

I saw him again a few years later.

London was hot and dry, and would have been parched, cracked and
shrivelled had it been alive instead of dead. The masonry was so dry
that the eye wearied of it before the feet wearied of the pavement,
and both desired the rain that makes the city at one with Nature.
The plane-trees were like so many captives along the streets,
shackled to the flagstones, pelted with dust, humiliated, all their
rusticity ravished though not forgotten. The very sky, lofty, blue,
white-clouded, was parched, the blue and the white being soiled by a
hot, yellowish-grey scum that harmonizes with gritty pavements and
stark towers and spires. The fairest thing to be seen--away from the
river--was the intense young green of the grass-blades trying to grow
up through the gratings which surround the trees of the streets. The
grass was a prophet muttering wild, ambiguous things, and since his
voice was very small and came from underground, it was hard to hear
him, even without understanding. Thousands tread down the grass, so
that except for a few hours at night it can never emerge from the
grating.

Some vast machinery plunged and thundered behind the walls, but though
they trembled and grew hot, it burst not through. Even so the multitude
in the streets, of men and horses and machines and carriages of all
kinds, roared and moved swiftly and continuously, encaged within walls
that are invisible; and they also never burst through. Both are free
to do what they are told. All of the crowd seem a little more securely
imprisoned than him who watches, because he is aware of his bars; but
they move on, or seem to do, on and on, round and round, as thoughtless
as the belt of an engine.

There was not one face I knew; not one smiled; not one relaxed or
contracted with a thought, an emotion, a fancy; but all were clear,
hard, and fixed in a vice, so that though they were infinite in their
variety--no two eyebrows set the same way, no two mouths in the same
relation to the eyes--the variety seemed the product of a senseless
ingenuity and immense leisure, as of a sublime philatelist. Hardly
one spoke; only the women moved from left to right instead of straight
on, and their voices were inaudible when their lips moved. The roar in
which all played a part developed into a kind of silence which not any
one of these millions could break; the sea does not absorb the little
rivers more completely than this silence the voices of men and women,
than this solitude their personalities. Now and then a face changed, an
eyebrow was cocked, or a mouth fell; but it meant less to me than the
flutter as of a bird when drop by drop the rain drips from the beeches
and gives a plash and a trembling to one leaf and then another in the
undergrowth. There is a more than human force in the movement of the
multitude, more than the sum of all the forces in the arched necks, the
grinding chest muscles, and the firm feet of the horses, the grace of
the bright women, the persistency of the tall men and thick men. They
cannot stop. They look stupid or callous or blank or even cruel. They
are going about another’s business; they conceal their own, hiding it
so that they forget (as a drunkard forgets where he has hidden his
gold) where they have hidden it, hiding their souls under something
stiffer and darker than the clothing of their bodies. It is hard to
understand why they do not sometimes stop one another, to demand where
the soul and the soul’s business is hid, to snatch away the masks.
It was intolerable that they were not known to me, that I was not
known to them, that we should go on like waves of the sea, obeying
whatever moon it is that sends us thundering on the unscalable shores
of night and day. Such force, such determination as moved us along the
burning streets might scale Olympus. Where was he who could lead the
storming-party?

Between a pack of cabs and a pack of ’buses there was a quiet space of
fifty yards in length; for a little while it seemed that the waves were
refusing their task. There was not one black coat, not one horse, not
one brightly loaded ’bus: no haste. It was a procession.

In front marched a tall son of man, with white black-bearded face, long
black hair, more like plumage than hair in its abundance and form,
and he wore no hat. He walked straight as a soldier, but with long,
slow steps, and his head hung so that his bare breast supported it,
for he had no coat and his shirt was half open. He had knee-breeches,
bare dark legs, and shoes on his feet. His hands were behind his back,
as if he were handcuffed. Two men walked beside him in other men’s
black clothes and black hats worn grey--two unnoticeable human beings,
snub-nosed, with small, rough beards, dull eyes, shuffling gait. Two
others followed them close, each carrying one of the poles of a small
white banner inscribed with the words: “The Unemployed.” These also
were unnoticeable, thin, grey, bent, but young, their clothes, their
faces, their hair, their hats almost the same dry colour as the road.
It was impossible to say what their features were, because their
heads hung down and their hats were drawn well on to their heads, and
their eyes were unseen. They could not keep step, nor walk side by
side, and their banner was always shaky and always awry. Next, in no
order, came three others of the same kind, shambling like the rest, of
middle height, moderately ill-dressed, moderately thin, their hands
in their pockets. In one of these I recognized the man who was born
in Caermarthenshire. A cart came close behind, drawn by a fat grey
donkey who needed no driving, for the one who rode in the cart had his
back to the shafts, and, leaning forward on a tub into which money was
expected to be thrown, he appeared to be talking to those who trailed
at the back, for he waved an arm and wagged his yellow beard. He was
fat, and dressed in a silk hat, frock-coat and striped trousers, almost
too ancient to be ridiculous had they not kept company with a jaunty
pair of yellow boots. He was midway between a seaside minstrel and a
minister, had not one gesture destroyed the resemblance by showing
that he wore no socks. Round about his coat also were the words: “The
Unemployed,” repeated or crudely varied. Those whom he addressed were
the fifteen or twenty who completed the procession but seemed not to
listen. They were all bent, young or middle-aged men, fair-haired, with
unintentional beards, road-coloured skins and slightly darker clothes.
Many wore overcoats, the collars turned up, and some had nothing under
them except a shirt, and one not that. All with hands in pockets, one
carrying a pipe, all silent and ashamed, struggled onward with bent
knees. No two walked together; there was no approach to a row or a
column in their arrangement, nor was there any pleasing irregularity
as of plants grown from chance-scattered seed; by no means could they
have been made to express more feebleness, more unbrotherliness, more
lack of principle, purpose or control. Each had the look of the meanest
thief between his captors. Two blue, benevolent, impersonal policemen,
large men, occasionally lifted their arms as if to help forward the
contemptible procession; sometimes, with a quick motion of the hand,
they caused the straggling rear to double their pace for a few yards
by running with knees yet more bent and coat-tails flapping and hands
still deep in pockets--only for a few yards, for their walking pace was
their best, all having the same strength, the same middle height, the
same stride, though no two could be seen keeping step.

The traffic thickened, and amidst the horses that nodded and trampled
and the motor-cars that fumed and fretted the procession was closed up
into a grey block behind the donkey-cart. On one side of the donkey
was the black-bearded man, his right arm now resting on the animal’s
neck; on the other side the policemen; in front the standard-bearers
hung down their heads and held up their poles. Often the only remnant
visible was the raven crest of the leader.

The multitude on the pavement continued to press straight onward, or
to flit in and out of coloured shops. None looked at the standard,
the dark man and his cloudy followers, except a few of the smallest
newspaper boys who had a few spare minutes and rushed over to march
with them in the hope of music or a speech or a conflict. The straight
flower-girl flashed her eyes as she stood on the kerb, her left arm
curving with divine grace round the shawl-hidden child at her bosom,
her left hand thrust out full of roses. The tender, well-dressed women
leaning on the arms of their men smiled faintly, a little pitiful, but
gladly conscious of their own security and pleasantness. Men with the
historic sense glanced and noted the fact that there was a procession.
One man, standing on the kerb, took a sovereign from his pocket,
looked at it and then at the unemployed, made a little gesture of
utter bewilderment, and dropping the coin down into the drain below,
continued to watch. Comfortable clerks and others of the servile
realized that here were the unemployed about whom the newspapers
had said this and that--(“a pressing question”--“a very complicated
question not to be decided in a hurry”--“it is receiving the attention
of some of the best intellects of the time”--“our special reporter is
making a full investigation”--“who are the genuine and who are the
impostors?”--“connected with Socialist intrigues”)--and they repeated
the word “Socialism” and smiled at the bare legs of the son of man
and the yellow boots of the orator. Next day they would smile again
with pride that they had seen the procession which ended in feeble,
violent speeches against the Army and the Rich, in four arrests and an
imprisonment. For they spoke in voices gentle with hunger. They were
angry and uttered curses. One waved an arm against a palace, an arm
that could scarcely hold out a revolver even were all the kings sitting
in a row to tempt him. In the crowd and disturbance the leader fell and
fainted. They propped him in their arms and cleared a space about him.
“Death of Nelson,” suggested an onlooker, laughing, as he observed the
attitude and the knee-breeches. “If he had only a crown of thorns ...”
said another, pleased by the group. “Wants a bit of skilly and real
hard work,” said a third.




CHAPTER VII

A RAILWAY CARRIAGE--SURREY--SUSSEX


I left London as quickly as possible. The railway carriage was
nearly full of men reading the same newspapers under three or four
different names, when a little grizzled and spectacled man of middle
age entered--a printer, perhaps--with a twisted face and simple
and puzzled expression that probably earned him many a laugh from
street-corner boys. As he sat down he recognized a sailor, a tall,
ponderous, kind-faced man made in three distinct storeys, who supported
his enormous red hands upon knees each fit to have been the mould of a
hero’s helmet.

“Well, I never did, and how are you, Harry?”

They looked at one another kindly but with a question piercing through
the kindness and an effort to divine the unknowable without betraying
curiosity. The kindness did, in fact, melt away the almost physical
obstacle of twenty years spent apart and in ignorance of one another.

“When did you leave the old place?” said the sailor.

“Soon after you did yourself, Harry; just after the shipwreck of the
_Wild Swan_; twenty-one, twenty-two--yes, twenty-two years ago.”

“Is it so long? I could have sworn you had that beard when I saw you
last,” and the sailor looked at him in a way that showed he had already
bridged the twenty-two years and knew the man.

“Yes, twenty-two years.”

“And do you ever go back to the old place? How’s Charlie Nash, and
young Woolford, and the shepherd?”

“Let me see----”

“But how is Maggie Looker?” broke in the sailor upon a genial answer in
the bud.

“Oh, didn’t you know? She took ill very soon after you went away, and
then they thought she was all right again; but they could not quite get
rid of the cough, and it got bad in the winter, and all through the
spring it was worse.”

“And so she died in the summer.”

“So she did.”

“Oh, Christ! but what times we had.”

And then, in reminiscences fast growing gay--the mere triumph of
memory, the being able to add each to the other’s store, was a
satisfaction--they told the story of a pretty country girl whom they
had quarrelled over until she grew too proud for both; how heavy was
her hair; how she could run, and nobody was like her for finding a
wasps’-nest. Her boldness and carelessness filled them with envy still.

“I reckon we old ones would call her a tomboy now,” said the sailor.

“I should say we would.”

“Now, I wonder what sort of a wife she would have made?”

“Hum, I don’t know....”

“Do you remember that day her and you and me got lost in the forest?”

“Yes, and we were there all night, and I got a hiding for it.”

“Not Maggie.”

“Not poor Maggie.”

“And when we couldn’t see our way any more we lifted her up into that
old beech where the green woodpecker’s nest was.”

“Yes, and you took off your coat and breeches to cover her up.”

“And so did you, though I reckon one would have been enough now I come
to think of it.”

“I don’t know about that. But how we did have to keep on the move all
night to keep warm.”

“And dared not go very far for fear of losing the tree.”

“And in the morning I wondered what we should do about getting back our
clothes.”

“You wanted me to go because my shirt hadn’t any holes in it.”

“But we both went together.”

“And, before we had made up our minds which should go first and call,
up she starts. Lord, how she did laugh!”

“Ay, she did.”

“And says, ‘Now, that’s all my eye and Betty Martin, boys’; and so did
we laugh, and I never felt a bit silly either. She was a good sort of
girl, she was. Man and woman, I never met the likes of her, never heard
tell of the equal of her,” said the sailor musingly.

“Married, Harry?”

“No, nor likely to be, I don’t think. And yourself?”

“Well, I was.... I married Maggie.... It was after the first baby....”

A small boy in a corner could not get on with his novelette: he stared
open-mouthed and open-eyed, now and then unconsciously imitating
their faces; or he would correct this mere wonderment and become shy
and uncomfortable at the frank ways of these men talking aloud in
a crowded carriage, and utterly regardless of others, about private
matters.

A trim shop assistant pretended to read about the cricket, but
listened, and could not conceal his cold contempt for men so sunken as
to give themselves away like this.

A dark, thin, genial, pale-faced puritan clerk looked pitifully--with
some twinkles of superiority that asked for recognition from his
fellow-passengers--these _children_, for as such he regarded them, and
would not wholly condemn.

Others occasionally jerked out a glance or rolled a leaderless eye
or rustled a newspaper without losing the dense veil over their
individuality that made them tombs, monuments, not men.

One sat gentle, kindly, stupidly envying these two their spirited free
talk, their gestures, the hearty draughts of life which they seemed to
have taken.

All were botanists who had heard and spoken words but had no sense
of the beauty and life of the flower because fate had refused, or
education destroyed, the gift of liberty and of joy.


SURREY.

Then I saw a huge silence of meadows, of woods, and beyond these, of
hills that raised two breasts of empurpled turf into the sky; and,
above the hills, one mountain of cloud that beamed as it reposed in the
blue as in a sea. The white cloud buried London with a _requiescat in
pace_.

I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed
the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her
worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up,
adding flowers--as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.
I like to see the preliminaries of this toil where Nature tries her
hand at mossing the factory roof, rusting the deserted railway metals,
sowing grass over the deserted platforms and flowers of rose-bay on
ruinous hearths and walls. It is a real satisfaction to see the long
narrowing wedge of irises that runs alongside and between the rails
of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway almost into the heart of
London. And there are many kinds of weather when the air is full of
voices prophesying desolation. The outer suburbs have almost a moorland
fascination when fog lies thick and orange-coloured over their huge
flat wastes of grass, expectant of the builder, but does not quite
conceal the stark outlines of a traction engine, some procumbent
timber, a bonfire and frantic figures darting about it, and aërial
scaffolding far away. Other fields, yet unravished but menaced, the
fog restores to a primeval state. And what a wild noise the wind makes
in the telegraph wires as in wintry heather and gorse! When the waste
open spaces give way to dense streets there is a common here and a
lawn there, where the poplar leaves, if it be November, lie taintless
on the grass, and the starlings talk sweet and shrill and cold in the
branches, and nobody cares to deviate from the asphalte path to the
dewy grass: the houses beyond the green mass themselves gigantic,
remote, dim, and the pulse of London beats low and inaudible, as if
she feared the irresistible enemy that is drawing its lines invisibly
and silently about her on every side. If a breeze arises it makes that
sound of the dry curled leaves chafing along the pavement; at night
they seem spies in the unguarded by-ways. But there are also days--and
spring and summer days, too--when a quiet horror thicks and stills the
air outside London.

The ridges of trees high in the mist are very grim. The isolated trees
stand cloaked in conspiracies here and there about the fields. The
houses, even whole villages, are translated into terms of unreality as
if they were carved in air and could not be touched; they are empty
and mournful as skulls or churches. There is no life visible; for the
ploughmen and the cattle are figures of light dream. All is soft and
grey. The land has drunken the opiate mist and is passing slowly and
unreluctantly into perpetual sleep. Trees and houses are drowsed beyond
awakening or farewell. The mind also is infected, and gains a sort of
ease from the thought that an eternal and universal rest is at hand
without any cry or any pain.


SUSSEX.

The road skirts the marshland, the stream and the town, and goes
through a gap in the Downs towards another range and more elms
and farms at its feet. Stately walks the carter’s boy with his
perpendicular brass-bound whip, alongside four waggon-horses, while the
carter rides. It is a pleasant thing to see them going to their work in
the early gold of the morning, fresh, silent, their horses jingling,
down the firm road. If they were leading their team to yoke them to the
chariot of the sun they could not be more noble. They are the first men
I have seen this morning, and truly they create for a little while the
illusion that they are going to guide the world and that all will be
well in the golden freshness under the blue.

The road now divides to go round the base of the Downs, but a farm
track sets out to climb them. There, at the corner, is a church, on
the very edge of the flat vale and its elms and ashes in the midst of
meadows; a plain towered church, but with a rough churchyard, half
graveyard and half orchard, its grass and parsley and nettle uncut
under the knotty apple trees, splashed with silver and dull gold-green,
dotted by silver buds among yellow-lichened branches that are matted
densely as a magpie’s nest. The dust from the high road powders the
nettles and perfects the arresting melancholy of the desolation, so
quiet, so austere, and withal as airy as a dream remembered. But above
are the Downs, green and sweet with uplifting grass, and beyond them
the sea, darkly gleaming under lustrous white cliffs and abrupt ledges
of turf, in the south; in the south-east a procession of tufted trees
going uphill in single file; in the south-west the dazzling slate
roofs of a distant town, two straight sea walls and two steamers and
their white wakes; northward the most beautiful minor range in all the
downland, isolated by a river valley at the edge of which it ends in a
gulf of white quarry, while on the other side it heaves and flows down
almost to the plain, but rises again into a lesser hill with woods,
and then slowly subsides. Within a few square miles it collects every
beauty of the chalk hill; its central height is a dome of flawless
grass only too tender to be majestic; and that is supported by lesser
rounds and wavering lines of approach in concavity and convexity,
playgrounds for the godlike shadows and lights, that prolong the
descent of the spent wave of earth into the plain.

An uncertain path keeps to the highest ridge. The sides of the Downs
are invaded by long stream-like gorse-sided coombes, of which the
narrow floor is palest green grass. The highest points command much of
earth, all of heaven. They are treeless, but occasionally the turf is
over-arched by the hoops of a brier thicket, the new foliage pierced by
upright dead grey grass. They are the haunt of the swift, the home of
wheatear and lark and of whatsoever in the mind survives or is born in
this pure kingdom of grass and sky. Ahead, they dip to a river and rise
again, their sweep notched by a white road.

At the inland end of this river valley is an antique red-tiled
large village or small town, a perfect group of human dwellings, as
inevitable as the Downs, dominated by a mound and on it a windmill
in ruin; mothered by a church at the river’s edge. Under the sign
of “Ye Olde ----” is a room newly wainscoted in shining matchboard.
Its altar--its little red sideboard--is symmetrically decorated by
tiers and rows of lemonade, cherry cider and ginger ale bottles,
many-coloured, and in the midst of these two syphons of soda-water. The
doorways and windows are draped in white muslin, the hearth filled by a
crinkled blue paper fan; the mantelpiece supports a dozen small vases.
The oilcloth is new and odorous and bright. There are pink geraniums in
salmon-coloured bowls on the table; a canary in a suspended cage; and
on the walls a picture of a girl teasing a dog with a toy mouse.

At the cross-roads is a group of old slated white farm buildings and a
tiled farmhouse of brick and flint; and above, at the top of a slope of
down, is a grey spire and two orange roofs of cottages amidst a round
cluster of trees; the sheep graze and their bells tittle-tattle. The
seaward-going road alongside but above the river dips then under steep
banks of blackthorn and parsley to a village of flint where another
spire rises out of the old roofs of a farmhouse and its family of barns
and lodges; a nightingale sings at hand, a wheeling pewit cries and
gleams over the blue ripples of the river. Across the water a shallow
scoop has been carved by Nature out of the side of the down; it is
traversed by two diverging paths which alone are green, for the rest
of the surface is of gorse and, full in the face of the sun, forms a
mossy cirrus over the mist of its own warm shade. The down beside the
road is now all cowslips among its scattered bramble and thorn, until
it is cloven by a tributary bay, a quarter of a mile in length, marshy
at first and half-filled by elms and willows, but at its higher end
occupied, behind ash trees and an orchard, by a farmhouse, a circular
domed building and a barn, all having roofs of ochre tile, except the
thatched barn, and grey stained walls; a straight road goes to the
house along the edge of the marsh and elms. Grey plover whistle singly
on the wet borders of the stream or make a concerted whimper of two or
three.

A little beyond is a larger bay of the same kind, bordered by a long
curving road entirely lined by elms dividing it from the broad meadow
that has an elm rookery in a corner under the steep clean slope of
down; at the end is a church singing to itself with all its bells in
the solitude. And the hedges are full of strong young thrushes which
there is no one to frighten--is there any prettier dress than the
speckled feathers of their breasts and the cape of brown over their
shoulders and backs, as they stir the dew in May?

Then the valley opens wide and the river doubles in gleaming azure
about a narrow spit of grass, in sight of a sharp white fall of chalk,
into the lucid quiet sea. At this bend a company of sycamores girds
and is one with a group of tiled and thatched and gabled buildings,
of ochre, brown and rose. The road crosses the river and a path leads
near the sea, between mustard flower, lucerne, beans, corn and grass,
in flint-walled fields, to a church and farm of flint, overtopped by
embowering chestnuts, ilex and the elms of rooks; and below there
is another valley and river, a green pathless marsh, at whose edge
five noisy belching chimneys stand out of a white pit. The path, over
turf, rises to the Downs, passing a lonely flint barn with rich dark
roof and a few sycamores for mates. This is the cornland, and the
corn bunting sings solitary and monotonous, and the linnets twitter
still in flocks. Above and around, the furzy coombes are the home of
blackbirds that have a wilder song in this world of infinite corn
below and grass above, and but one house. Violets and purple orchis
(and its white buds) cloud the turf. On the other side the Downs sink
to gently clustered and mounded woods and yet more corn surrounding a
thatched flint barn, a granary and cart-lodge, and, again, a farm under
sycamores.

The soft-ribbed grey sky of after-sunset is slowly moving, kindly and
promising rain. The air is still, the road dusty, but the hedges tender
green, and the grasshopper lark sings under the wild parsley of the
roadside and the sedge-warbler in the sallows.

Just beyond is the town by the beautiful domed hill, a town of steep
lanes and wallflowers on old walls and such a date as 1577 modestly
inscribed on a doorway; its long old street, sternly adapted to the
needs of shopkeepers and gentry, looks only old-fashioned, its age
being as much repressed as if it were a kind of sin or originality.
This is that spirit which would quarrel with the stars for not being
in straight lines like print, the spirit of one who, having been
disturbed while shaving by the sight of a favourite cat in the midst
of her lovers and behaving after the manner of her kind, gives orders
during the long mid-day meal that she shall be drowned forthwith,
or--no--to-morrow, which is Monday. This is that spirit which says--

 Nature is never stiff, and none recognizes this fact better than
 ---- & Son, and their now well-known and natural-looking rockeries
 have reclaimed many a dreary bit of landscape. At ---- they showed
 me photographs of various country seats where the natural-looking
 scenery has been evolved by their artistic taste and ingenuity out of
 the most ordinary efforts of Nature. Thus a dull old mill-stream has,
 with the aid of rockeries and appropriate vegetation, been converted
 into a wonderfully picturesque spot, an ordinary brook was transformed
 into a lovely woodland scene, with ferns, mosses, and lichens growing
 among the rockeries, and the shores of an uninteresting lake became
 undulating banks of beauty by the same means; while the beautiful
 rockeries in ---- Park were also the work of this firm. ---- & Son
 have other ways, too, of beautifying gardens and grounds by the
 judicious use of balustrades, fountains, quaint figures, etc., made
 of “---- terra-cotta,” or artificial stone, which is far more durable
 than real stone or marble, not so costly, and impervious to frost and
 all weathers, although it takes the vegetation in the same way, and
 after a year’s exposure it can scarcely be distinguished from antique
 stone. In it the great _spécialité_ here just now is “sundials,” the
 latest craze; for without a sundial no ancient or up-to-date garden is
 considered complete.

Nevertheless the town smells heartily of cattle, sheep, and malt; a
rookery and white orchard confront the railway station, and in the
midst of the streets the long grass is rough and wet and full of
jonquils round ancient masonry: seen from a height the town shares the
sunlight equally with massy foliage and finds its place as a part of
Nature, and the peregrine takes it in its sweep.

The turtle-doves have come and the oaks are budding bronze in the
Weald. The steep roadside banks are cloaked in grass, violet, and
primrose still, and robin-run-in-the-hedge and stitchwort and cuckoo
flowers, and the white-throats talk in the hazel copses. A brooklet
runs in a hollow that would almost hold the Thames, and crossing the
road fills a rushy mill-pond deep below, and makes a field all golden
and shining with marigold. Just beyond, a gnarled lime avenue leads to
a grey many-windowed house of stone within a stately park. Opposite the
gate an old woman sits on the grass, her feet in the dust at the edge
of the road; motor-cars sprinkle her and turn her black to drab; she
sits by the wayside eternally, expecting nothing.

Turn out of this main road, and by-ways that tempt neither cyclists
nor motorists go almost as straight. Here is no famous house, not a
single inn or church, but only the unspoilt Weald, and far away, a long
viaduct that carries noiseless trains against the sky above hollow
meadows. Bluebell, primrose, anemone--anemone, primrose, bluebell--star
and cloud the lush banks and the roots of the blackthorns, hazels and
maples of the hedge. A stream washes the roots of many oaks, and flows
past flat fields of dusky grass, cuckoo flower and marigold,--black
pines at the verge. The light smoke of a roadside fire ascends into
the new leaves of the hazels where two tramps are drying their clothes.
Many oaks are down, and lie pale and gleaming like mammoth bones among
the bluebells in plantations roughened by old flint pits.

The faggots of oak tops and cords of twisted timber are being made up;
the woodmen light a fire and the chips fly from the axes. It is only to
these men that I am a stranger as I walk through the land. At first I
admire the hardihood and simplicity of their necessary toil among the
oaks, but they lift their dark eyes, and then--it is as strange as when
I pass a white embowered house, and the road is muffled with straw,
and I hear by chance that some one unknown is dying behind that open
window through which goes the thrush’s song and the children’s homeward
chatter. Neither townsman or countryman, I cannot know them. The
countryman knows their trades and their speech, and is of their kind;
the townsman’s curiosity wins him a greeting. But in May at least I am
content, in the steep little valley made by a tributary of the Medway,
its sides wooded with oak and the flowers glad of the sun among the
lately cleared undergrowth, and the cuckoo now in this oak and now in
that, and the turtle-doves whose voices, in the soft lulls after rain,
make the earth seem to lie out sleek in the sun, stretching itself to
purr with eyes closed. The cuckoo is gone before we know what his cry
is to tell us or to remind us of.

There are few things as pleasant as the thunder and lightning of May
that comes in the late afternoon, when the air is as solid as the earth
with stiff grey rain for an hour. There is no motion anywhere save of
this perpendicular river, of the swaying rain-hit bough and quivering
leaf. But through it all the thrushes sing, and jolly as their voices
are the roars and echoes of the busy thunder quarrying the cliffs of
heaven. And then the pleasure of being so wet that you may walk through
streams and push through thickets and be none the wetter for it.

Before it is full night the light of the young moon falls for a moment
out of a troubled but silent sky upon the young corn, and the tranquil
bells are calling over the woods.

Then in the early morning the air is still and warm, but so moist that
there is a soul of coolness in the heat, and never before were the
leaves of the sorrel and wood sanicle and woodruff, and the grey-green
foliage and pallid yellow flowers of the large celandine, so fair.
The sudden wren’s song is shrewd and sweet and banishes heaviness.
The huge chestnut tree is flowering and full of bees. The parsley
towers delicately in bloom. The beech boughs are encased in gliding
crystal. The nettles, the millions of nettles in a bed, begin to smell
of summer. In the calm and sweet air the turtle-doves murmur and the
blackbirds sing--as if time were no more--over the mere.

The roads, nearly dry again, are now at their best, cool and yet
luminous, and at their edges coloured rosy or golden brown by the
sheddings of the beeches, those gloves out of which the leaves have
forced their way, pinched and crumpled by the confinement. At the bend
of a broad road descending under beeches these parallel lines of ruddy
chaff give to two or three days in the year a special and exquisite
loveliness, if the weather be alternately wet and bright and the long
white roads and virgin beeches are a temptation. What quests they
propose! They take us away to the thin air of the future or to the
underworld of the past. This one takes us to the old English sweetness
and robustness of an estate of large meadows, sound oak trees not too
close together, and a noble house within an oak-paled park. A poet
and a man lives there, one who recalls those other poets--they are
not many--who please us over the gulf of time almost as much by the
personal vigour and courage which we know to have been theirs or is
suggested by their work, men like Chaucer, Sidney, Ben Jonson, Drayton,
Byron, William Morris, and among the living ---- and ---- and ----.
I think we should miss their poems more than some greater men’s if
they were destroyed. They stand for their time more clearly than the
greatest. For example, Chaucer’s language, ideas and temper make it
impossible for us to read his work, no matter in how remote a study
or garden, shut out from time and change, without feeling that he and
all those who rode, and talked and were young with him are skeletons
or less, though Catullus or Milton may be read with no such feeling.
Chaucer seems to remind us of what once we were. His seems a golden
age. He wrote before Villon had inaugurated modern literature with the
cry--

    _Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?_

before men appear to us to have learned how immense is the world and
time. But we, looking back, with the help of this knowledge, see in
the work of this man who filled a little nook of time and space with
gaiety, something apart from us, an England, a happy island which his
verses made. His gaiety bathes the land in the light of a golden age
and the freshness of all the May days we can never recover. He “led a
lusty life in May”: “in his lust present was all his thought.” And the
gaiety is no less in the sorrowful passages than in the joyful; when,
for example, he compares the subjection of the fierce, proud Troilus to
love, with the whipping of a spirited horse; when he uses the apparent
commonplace about age creeping in “always as still as stone” upon fresh
youth; when he exclaims to the false Jason--

    Have at thee, Jason! now thy horne is blowe;

or cries at the fate of Ugolino’s children--

    Allas, Fortune! it was greet crueltee
    Swiche briddes for to putte in swich a cage!

Even in Griselda’s piteous cry--

    O tendre, O deere, O yonge children myne,

there is an intimation that in those words her sorrow is being spent
and that, though it will be renewed, it will be broken up by joyfulness
many times before her death. For, as Chaucer’s laughter is assuredly
never completed by a sigh, so there is something hearty in his tears
that hints of laughter before and after. His was a sharp surprising
sorrow that came when he was forced to see the suffering of lovely
humanity. He is all gaiety; but it has two moods. Sorrow never changes
him more than shadow changes a merry brook. In both moods he seems to
speak of a day when men had not only not so far outstripped the lark
and nightingale as we have done, but had moments when their joy was
equal to the lark’s above the grey dew of May dawns. And thus, if we
only had to thank Chaucer for the gaiety which is left behind in his
poems, as the straw of a long-past harvest clings to the thorns of a
narrow lane, we could never be thankful enough.

I feel that Chaucer was the equal of those of whom he wrote, as Homer
was the equal of Achilles and Odysseus, just as Byron was the peer of
the noblest of the Doges and of the ruined Emperor whom he addressed
as--

    Vain froward child of Empire! say
    Are all thy playthings snatched away?

Byron is one of the few poets whose life it was ever necessary to
write. His acts were representative; from his Harrow meditations on
a tomb to his death on the superb pedestal of Missolonghi, they are
symbolic. His life explains nearly everything in his poetry. The life
and the poetry together make an incomparable whole. Most lives of
poets stand to their work as a block of unhewn marble stands to the
statue finished and unveiled; if the marble is not as much forgotten
as was Pygmalion’s when Galatea breathed and sighed. Byron’s poetry
without his life is not finished; but with it, it is like a statue
by Michael Angelo or Rodin that is actually seen to grow out of the
material. He was a man before he was a poet. Other poets may once have
been men; they are not so now. We read their lives after their poetry
and we forget them. It is by their poetry that they survive--blithe
or pathetic or glorious, but dim, ghosts who are become a part of
the silence of libraries and lovers’ hearts. They are dead but for
the mind that enjoys and the voice that utters their verse. I had
not the smallest curiosity about Mr. Swinburne when he was alive and
visible. When I think of him, I think of Rosamund speaking to Eleanor
or Tristram to Isoud; he has given up his life to them. But with Byron
it is different. If all record of him could be destroyed, more than
half of him would be lost. For I think that it is upon the life and the
portraits and the echoes that are still reverberating in Europe, that
we found our belief that he is a great man. Without them he would be
an interesting rhetorician, perhaps little more. There are finer poems
than his “Mazeppa,” but the poet is the equal of that wild lover and of
the great King who slept while the tale was told.

And Shelley, too, is an immortal sentiment. Men may forget to
repeat his verses; they can never be as if Shelley had never been.
He is present wherever love and rapture are. He is a part of all
high-spirited and pure audacity of the intellect and imagination, of
all clean-handed rebellion, of all infinite endeavour and hope. The
remembered splendour of his face is more to us than Parliaments; one
strophe of his odes is more nourishing than a rich man’s gold....

Under those oaks in May I could wish to see these men walking together,
to see their gestures and brave ways. It is the poet there who all but
creates them for me. But only one can I fairly see because I have seen
him alive and speaking. Others have sent up their branches higher among
the stars and plunged their roots deeper among the rocks and waters.
But he and Chaucer and Jonson and Byron have obviously much plain
humanity in their composition. They have a brawn and friendliness not
necessarily connected with poetry. We use no ceremony--as we do with
some other poets--with Morris when we read--

    The days have slain the days, and the seasons have gone by,
    And brought me the summer again; and here on the grass I lie,
    As erst I lay and was glad ere I meddled with right and with wrong.

Or the end of “Thunder in the Garden”--

    Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown:
    In the trees the wind westering moved;
    Till over the threshold back fluttered her gown,
    And in the dark house was I loved.

There is a humanity of this world and moment in Morris’s feeling for
Nature with which no other poet’s except Whitman’s can be compared.
Except in the greatest--the unaccomplished things--in “Leaves of Grass”
there is no earth-feeling in the literature of our language so majestic
and yet so tender as in “The Message of the March Wind.” With him
poetry was not, as it has tended more and more to be in recent times,
a matter as exclusive as a caste. He was not half-angel or half-bird,
but a man on close terms with life and toil, with the actual, troublous
life of every day, with toil of the hands and brain together; in short,
a many-sided citizen. He was one whom Skarphedin the son of Njal of
Bergthorsknoll would not have disdained, and when he spoke he seemed
indignant at the feebleness of words, one that should have used a sword
and might have lamented with the still later poet--

    The Spirit stands and looks on infamy,
    And unashamed the faces of the pit
      Snarl at their enemy;
    Finding him wield no insupportable light,
    And no whirled edge of blaze to hit
    Backward their impudence, and hammer them to flight;
      Although ready is he,
    Wearing the same righteous steel
    Upon his limbs, helmed as he was then
      When he made olden war;
    Yet cannot now with foulness fiercely deal.
    There is no indignation among men,
      The Spirit has no scimitar
    Wilt thou not come again, thou godly sword,
      Into the Spirit’s hands?
    That he may be a captain of the Lord
      Again, and mow out of our lands
        The crop of wicked men....
    O for that anger in the hands
    Of Spirit! To us, O righteous sword,
      Come thou and clear our lands,
    O fire, O indignation of the Lord![2]

[2] From _Poems and Interludes_, by Lascelles Abercrombie.

Bitter it is to think of that talk and laughter of shadows on the long
lawns under those oaks; for though their shadows are even yet better
than other men’s bone or blood, never yet did dead man lift up a hand
to strike a blow or lay a brick. In a churchyard behind I saw the
tombstone of one Robert Page, born in the year 1792 here in Sussex, and
dead in 1822--not in the Bay of Spezzia but in Sussex. He scared the
crows, ploughed the clay, fought at Waterloo and lost an arm there,
was well pleased with George the Fourth, and hoed the corn until he
was dead. That is plain sense, and I wish I could write the life of
this exact contemporary of Shelley. That is quite probably his great
granddaughter, black-haired, of ruddy complexion, full lips, large
white teeth, black speechless eyes, dressed in a white print dress and
stooping in the fresh wind to take clean white linen out of a basket,
and then rising straight as a hazel wand, on tiptoe, her head held back
and slightly on one side while she pegs the clothes to the line and
praises the weather to a passer-by. She is seventeen, and of such is
the kingdom of earth.

Now at the coming on of night the wind has carried away all the noises
of the world. The lucid air under the hazels of the lane is dark as if
with dream, and the roadway leads glimmering straight on to a crystal
planet low in the purple of the west. I cannot hear my footsteps, so
full charged is the silence. I am no more in this tranquillity than
one of the trees. The way seems paved that some fair spirit may pass
down in perfect beauty and bliss and ease. The leaves will hail it and
the blue sky lean down to bless, and the planet lend its beams for a
path. Suddenly, the name of Mary is called by some one invisible. Mary!
For a little while the cry is repeated more loudly but always sweetly;
then the caller is entranced by the name, by the sound of her own voice
and the silence into which it falls as into a well, and it grows less
and less and ceases and is dead except in the brain of the bearer.
I thought of all the music to ear and mind of that sound of “m.” I
suppose the depth of its appeal is due to its place at the beginning of
the word “mother,” or rather to the need of the soul which gave it that
place; and it is a sound as dear to the animals as to us, since the ewe
hears it first from her lamb and the cow from her calf as the woman
from her child. It is the main sound in “music,” “melody,” “harmony,”
“measure,” “metre,” “rhythm,” “minstrel,” “madrigal.” It endears even
sadness by its presence in “melancholy,” “moan” and “mourn.” It makes
melody on the lips of friends and lovers, in the names of “mistress,”
“comrade,” “mate,” “companion.” It murmurs autumnally in all mellow
sounds, in the music of wind and insect and instrument. To “me” and
“mine” it owes a meaning as deep as to “mother.” And this mild air
could bear no more melodious burden than the name that floated upon it
and sank into it, down, down, to reveal its infinite depth--Mary!

There are parks on both sides of the road, bounded by hedges or high
brick walls, and the public road has all the decorum of a drive. For a
mile the very ivy which is destined to adorn the goodly wall and spread
into forms as grand as those at Godstow Nunnery is protected by wire
netting. Doves croon in the oaks: underneath, hazel and birch flicker
their new leaves over the pools of bluebells. The swallows fly low over
every tuft of the roadside grass and glance into every bay of the wood,
and then out above the white road, from which they rebound suddenly
and turn, displaying the white rays of their tails. Now and then a
gateway reveals the park. The ground undulates, but is ever smooth. It
is of the mellow green of late afternoon. Bronzed oak woods bound the
undulations, and here and there a solitary tree stands out on the grass
and shows its poise and complexity with the added grace of new leaf.
The cattle graze as on a painted lawn. A woman in a white dress goes
indolent and stately towards the rhododendrons and rook-haunted elms.
The scene appears to have its own sun, mellow and serene, that knows
not moorland or craggy coast or city. Only a thousand years of settled
continuous government, of far-reaching laws, of armies and police, of
roadmaking, of bloody tyranny and tyranny that poisons quietly without
blows, could have wrought earth and sky into such a harmony. It is a
thing as remote from me here on the dusty road as is the green evening
sky and all its tranquillity of rose and white, and even more so
because the man in the manor house behind the oaks is a puzzle to me,
while the sky is always a mystery with which I am content. At such an
hour the house and lawns and trees are more wonderfully fortified by
the centuries of time than by the walls and gamekeepers. They weave
an atmosphere about it. We bow the head and reverence the labour of
time in smoothing the grass, mellowing the stone and the manners of the
inhabitants, and yet an inevitable conflict ensues in the mind between
this respect and the feeling that it is only a respect for surfaces,
that a thousand years is a heavy price to pay for the maturing of
park and house and gentleman, especially as he is most likely to be a
well-meaning parasite on those who are concerned twenty-four hours a
day about the difficulty of living and about what to do when they are
alive.

No, it is the alien remote appearance of the house and land serene in
the May evening light which creates this reverence in the mind. It is
not feudalism, or the old nobility and gentility, that we are bowing
down to, but only to Nature without us and the dream within us. It is
certainly not pure envy. Nor yet is it for the same reason as made
Borrow reflect when he saw the good house at the end of an avenue of
noble oaks near Llandovery--

 “... A plain but comfortable gentleman’s seat with wings. It looked
 south down the dale. ‘With what satisfaction I could live in that
 house,’ said I to myself, ‘if backed by a couple of thousand a year.
 With what gravity could I sign a warrant in its library, and with what
 dreamy comfort translate an ode of Lewis Glyn Cothi, my tankard of
 rich ale beside me. I wonder whether the proprietor is fond of the old
 bard and keeps good ale. Were I an Irishman instead of a Norfolk man I
 would go in and ask him.’”

Not if he were a Welshman, either. For I at least know that in no
other man’s house should I be better off than I am, and I lack the
confidence to think I could make any use of his income. I would as soon
envy a tramp because he has no possessions, or a navvy because he walks
like a hero as he pushes a heavy trolley before him, his loose jacket
fitting him as a mane fits a lion. To envy a man is to misunderstand
him or yourself.

Nor yet is it pure admiration. That is what I feel for something
external that can be described as right, as having absolute
individuality and inevitableness of form. For example, I admire certain
groups that are the result of what we call chance--an arrangement of
fishing boats going out to sea, first one, then at a long interval two
close together, a fourth a little behind, and then by ones and pairs
and clusters at different intervals; or the four or five oaks left in
a meadow that was once a copse; or the fruit fallen on autumn rime;
or sunset clouds that pause darkly along the north-west in a way that
will never be seen again; or of tragic figures at such a moment as when
Polyxena, among the Grecian youths, gave her throat to the dagger of
Neoptolemus, and fell beautiful in death.

No. Those houses are castles in Spain. They are fantastic architecture.
We have made them out of our spirit stuff and have set our souls to
roam their corridors and look out of their casements upon the sea or
the mountains or the clouds. It is because they are accessible only
to the everywhere wandering irresistible and immortal part of us that
they are beautiful. There is no need for them to be large or costly or
antique. The poorest house can do us a like service. In a town, for
example, and in a suburb, I have had the same yearning when, on a fine
still morning of May or June, in streets away from the traffic, I have
seen through the open windows a cool white-curtained shadowy room,
and in it a table with white cloths and gleaming metal and glass laid
thereon, and nobody has yet come down to open the letters. It all seems
to be the work of spirit hands. It is beautiful and calm and celestial,
and is a profound pleasure--tinged by melancholy--to see. It gives a
sense of fitness--for what? For something undivined, imperfectly known,
guessed at, or hoped for, in ourselves; for a wider and less tainted
beauty, for a greater grace. Or it may not be a house at all, but a
hill-top five miles off, up which winds a white road in two long loops
between a wood and the turf. The grass is smooth and warm and bright at
the summit in the blue noon; or in the horizontal sunbeams each stem
is lit so that the hill is transmuted into a glowing and insubstantial
thing; and then, at noon or evening, something in me flies at the
sight and desires to tread that holy ground. It is an odd world where
everything is fleeting yet the soul desires permanence even for fancies
so unprofitable as this.

And so these thoughts at the sight of the great houses mingle with
the thoughts that grow at twilight and fade gradually away in the
windless night when the sky is soft-ridged all over with white clouds
and in the dark vales between them are the stars. Then, for it is
Saturday, follows another pleasure of the umbrageous white country
roads at night--the high contented voices of children talking to father
and mother as they go home from the market town. The parents move
dark-clothed, silent, laden; the children flit about them with white
hats or pinafores. Their voices travel far and long after they are
invisible in the mist that washes over the fields in long white firths,
but die away as the misty night blots out the hills, the clouds, the
stars, the trees, and everything but the branches overhead and the
white parsley flowers floating along the hedge. There is no breath of
wind. The owls are quiet. The air is full of the scent of holly flower
and may and nettles and of the sound of a little stream among the
leaves.




CHAPTER VIII

JUNE--HAMPSHIRE--THE GOLDEN AGE--TRAHERNE


HAMPSHIRE.

Now day by day, indoors and out of doors, the conquest of spring
proceeds to the music of the conquerors. One evening the first chafer
comes to the lamp, and his booming makes the ears tremble with
dim apprehension. He climbs, six-legged and slow, up the curtain,
supporting himself now and then by unfurling his wings, or if not he
falls with a drunken moan, then begins to climb again, and at last
blunders about the room like a ball that must strike something, the
white ceiling, the white paper, the lamp, and when he falls he rests.
In his painful climbing he looks human, as perhaps a man looks angelic
to an angel; but there is nothing lovelier and more surprising than the
unfurling of his pinions like a magic wind-blown cloak out of that hard
mail.

Another day the far-off woods in a hot, moist air first attain their
rich velvet mossiness, and even near at hand the gorse-bushes all
smouldering with bloom are like clouds settled on the earth, having no
solidity, but just colour and warmth and pleasantness.

The broad-backed chestnuts bloom. On the old cart-lodge tiles the vast
carapace of the house-leek is green and rosy, and out of the midst of
it grow dandelions and grass, and the mass of black mould which it has
accumulated in a century bends down the roof.

The hawthorn-bloom is past before we are sure that it has reached its
fulness. Day after day its warm and fragrant snow clouded the earth
with light, and yet we waited, thinking surely to-morrow it will be
fairer still, and it was, and the next day we thought the same and we
were careless as in first love, and then one day it lay upon the grass,
an empty shell, the vest of departed loveliness, and another year was
over. The broad grass is full of buttercups’ gold or it is sullen
silvery under a burning afternoon sun, without wind, the horizon smoky,
the blue sky and its white, still clouds almost veiled by heat; the
red cattle are under the elms; the unrippled water slides under sullen
silvery willows.

The night-haze peels off the hills and lets the sun in upon small
tracts of wood--upon a group of walnuts in the bronze of their fine,
small leaf--upon downland grass, and exposes blue sky and white cloud,
but then returns and hides the land, except that the dewy ground-ash
and the ivy and holly gleam; and two cuckoos go over crying and crying
continually in the hollow vale.

Already the ash-keys hang in cool, thick bunches under the darker
leaves. The chestnut-bloom is falling. The oak-apples are large and
rosy. The wind is high, and the thunder is away somewhere behind the
pink mountains in the southern sky or in the dark drifts overhead. And
yet the blue of the massy hangers almost envelops the beechen green;
the coombes and the beeches above and around their grassy slopes of
juniper are soft and dim, and far withdrawn, and the nightjar’s voice
is heard as if the wind there were quiet. The rain will not come;
the plunging wind in the trees has a sound of waterfalls all night,
yet cannot trouble the sleep of the orange-tip butterfly on the
leopard’s-bane’s dead flower.

Now the pine blooms in the sandy lands, above the dark-fronded brake
and glaucous-fruited whortleberry, the foxgloves break into bell after
bell under the oaks and birches. The yellow broom is flowering and
scented, and the white lady’s bedstraw sweetens the earth’s breath.
The careless variety of abundance and freshness makes every lane a
bride. Suddenly, in the midst of the sand, deep meadows gleam, and the
kingfisher paints the air with azure and emerald and rose above the
massy water tumbling between aspens at the edge of a neat, shaven lawn,
and, behind that, a white mill and miller’s house with dark, alluring
windows where no one stirs.

June puts bronze and crimson on many of her leaves. The maple-leaves
and many of the leaves of thorn and bramble and dogwood are rosy; the
hazel-leaves are rosy-brown; the herb-robert and parsley are rose-red;
the leaves of ash and holly are dark lacquered. The copper beeches,
opulently sombre under a faintly yellowed sky, seem to be the sacred
trees of the thunder that broods above. Presently the colour of the
threat is changed to blue, which soiled white clouds pervade until
the whole sky is woolly white and grey and moving north. There is no
wind, but there is a roar as of a hurricane in the trees far off; soon
it is louder, in the trees not so remote; and in a minute the rain
has traversed half-a-mile of woods, and the distant combined roar is
swallowed up by the nearer pattering on roof and pane and leaf, the
dance of leaves, the sway of branches, the trembling of whole trees
under the flood. The rain falls straight upon the hard road, and each
drop seems to leap upward from it barbed. Great drops dive among the
motionless, dusty nettles. The thunder unloads its ponderous burden
upon the resonant floor of the sky; but the sounds of the myriad
leaves and grass-blades drinking all but drowns the boom, the splitting
roar, and the echo in the hills. When it is over it has put a final
sweetness into the blackbird’s voice and into the calm of the evening
garden when the voice of a singer does but lay another tribute at the
feet of the enormous silence. Frail is that voice as the ghost-moth
dancing above the grass so faithfully that it seems a flower attached
to a swaying stem, or as the one nettle-leaf that flutters in a
draught of the hedge like a signalling hand while all the rest of the
leaves are as if they could not move again, or as the full moon that
is foundering on a white surf in the infinite violet sky. More large
and more calm and emptier of familiar things grows the land as I pass
through it, under the hoverings of the low-flying but swiftly-turning
nightjar, until at midnight only a low white mist moves over the gentle
desolation and warm silence. The mist wavers, and discloses a sky all
strewn with white stars like the flowers of an immense jessamine. It
closes up again, and day is born unawares in its pale arms, and earth
is for the moment nothing but the tide of downs flowing west and the
branch of red roses that hangs heavily laden and drowsed with its
weight and beauty over my path, dipping its last spray in the dew of
the grass.

The day is a Sunday, and no one is on foot or on wheel in the broad
arable country that ripples in squares of green, or brown, or yellow,
or grey, to the green Downs and their dark, high-perched woods. As if
for some invisible beholder, the green elders and their yellow-green
flower-buds make their harmony with the yellow-lichened barns against
which they lean; the grass and the noble trees, the groups of wayside
aspen, the line of horse-chestnuts, the wych-elms on both sides of
the road, the one delicate sycamore before the inn and the company
of sycamores above the cross--the spacious thatch and tiles of the
farmyard quadrangle--the day newly painted in white and blue--the
green so green in the hedges, and the white and purple so pure in the
flowers--all seem to be meant for eyes that know nothing of Time and
of what “brought death into the world and all our woe.” And in this
solitude the young birds are very happy. They have taken possession
of the thick hedges, of the roadside grass, of the roads themselves.
They flutter and run and stumble there; they splash in the pools and in
the dust, which not a wheel nor a foot has marked. These at least are
admitted into the kingdom along with that strange wildfowl that lives
“to maintain the trade and mystery of typographers.”

Such a day, in the unblemished summer land, invariably calls up
thoughts of the Golden Age. As mankind has looked back to a golden age,
so the individual, repeating the history of the race, looks back and
finds one in his own past. Historians and archæologists have indeed
made it difficult for men of our time to look far back for a golden
age. We are shown a skull with supraciliary prominences and are told
that its owner, though able to survive the mammoth by means of tools of
flint, lived like the Tasmanian of modern times; and his was no Golden
Age. Then we look back to heroic ages which poetry and other arts
have magnified--to the Greece of Homer or Pheidias, to the Ireland of
Cuchulain, to the Wales of Arthur, to the England which built the great
cathedrals or produced Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, Izaak Walton.

In the same way, few men can now look back to their childhood like
Traherne and say that

 “All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and
 delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger which at my entrance
 into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys.
 My knowledge was Divine. I knew by intuition those things which
 since my Apostasy I collected again by the highest reason. My very
 ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one brought into the Estate
 of Innocence. All things were spotless and pure and glorious; yea,
 and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious. I knew not that there
 were any sins or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties,
 contentions or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine
 eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing
 of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for tribute or
 bread.... All Time was Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not
 strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world and see
 those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?”[3]

[3] _Centuries of Meditation_, by Thomas Traherne (Dobell).

We blink, deliberately or not, unpleasant facts in our own lives, as
in the social life of Greece or the Middle Ages. Some have no need to
do so; robustly or sensitively made, their childish surroundings have
been such as to meet their utmost needs or to draw out their finest
powers or to leave them free. Ambition, introspection, remorse had not
begun. The vastness and splendour and gloom of a world not understood,
but seen in its effects and hardly at all in its processes, made a
theatre for their happiness which--especially when seen through a mist
of years--glorify it exceedingly, and it becomes like a ridge of the
far-off downs transfigured in golden light, so that we in the valley
sigh at the thought that where we have often trod is heaven now. Such
beauties of the earth, seen at a distance and inaccessibly serene,
always recall the equally inaccessible happiness of childhood. Why have
we such a melting mood for what we cannot reach? Why, as we are whirled
past them in a train, does the sight of a man and child walking quietly
beside a reedy pond, the child stooping for a flower and its gossip
unheard--why should we tremble to reflect that we have never tasted
just that cloistered balm?

Perhaps the happiest childhoods are those which pass completely away
and leave whole tracts of years without a memory; those which are
remembered are fullest of keen joy as of keen pain, and it is such that
we desire for ourselves if we are capable of conceiving such fantastic
desires. I confess to remembering little joy, but to much drowsy
pleasure in the mere act of memory. I watch the past as I have seen
workless, homeless men leaning over a bridge to watch the labours of a
titanic crane and strange workers below in the ship running to and fro
and feeding the crane. I recall green fields, one or two whom I loved
in them, and though no trace of such happiness as I had remains, the
incorruptible tranquillity of it all breeds fancies of great happiness.
I recall many scenes: a church and churchyard and black pigs running
down from them towards me in a rocky lane--ladslove and tall, crimson,
bitter dahlias in a garden--the sweetness of large, moist yellow apples
eaten out of doors--children: I do not recall happiness in them, yet
the moment that I return to them in fancy I am happy. Something like
this is true also of much later self-conscious years. I cannot--I am
not tempted to--allow what then spoiled the mingling of the elements
of joy to reappear when I look back. The reason, perhaps, is that only
an inmost true self that desires and is in harmony with joy can perform
these long journeys, and when it has set out upon them it sheds those
gross incrustations which were our curse before.

Many are the scenes thus to be recalled without spot or stain. It is
a May morning, warm and slightly breezy after midnight rain. In the
beech-woods the trees are unloading the dew, which drops from leaf to
leaf and down on to the lemon-tinged leaves of dark dog’s-mercury. At
the edge of the wood the privet branches are bent down by the weight of
raindrops of the size of peas. The dewy white stitchwort stars and the
feathered grasses are curved over on the banks. The sainfoin is hoary
and sparkling as I move. Already the sun is hot and the sky blue, with
faint white clouds in whirls. And in the orchard-trees and drenched
luxuriant hedges the garden-warbler sings a subdued note of rushing,
bubbling liquidity as of some tiny brook that runs in quick pulsations
among the fleshy-leaved water-plants. The bird’s head is uplifted; its
throat is throbbing; it moves restlessly from branch to branch, but
always renews its song on the new perch; being leaf-like, it is not
easily seen. And sometimes through this continuous jargon the small,
wild song of the blackcap is heard, which is the utmost expression of
moist warm dawns in May thickets of hawthorn-bloom and earliest roses.
On such a dawn the very spirit bathes in the dew and nuzzles into the
fragrance with delight; but it is no sooner left behind with May than
it has developed within me into an hour and a scene of utmost grace and
bliss, save that I am in it myself.

It is curious, too, how many different kinds of Eden or Golden Age
Nature has in her gift, as if she silently recorded the backward dreams
of each generation and reproduced them for us unexpectedly. It is,
for instance, an early morning in July. The cows pour out from the
milking-stalls and blot out the smell of dust with their breath in the
white road between banks of hazel and thorn. The boy who is driving
them to the morning’s pasture calls to them monotonously, persuasively,
in turn, as each is tempted to crop the roadside sward: “Wo, Cherry!
Now, Dolly! Wo, Fancy! Strawberry!... Blanche!... Blossom!...
Cowslip!... Rosy! Smut!... Come along, Handsome!... Wo, Snowdrop!...
Lily!... Darky!... Roany!... Come along, Annie!” Here the road is
pillowed with white aspen-down, there more fragrant than pines with the
brown sheddings of yew, and here thick with the dry scent of nettle and
cow-parsnip, or glorious in perfect mingling of harebell and foxglove
among the bracken and popping gorse on the roadside. The cows turn into
the aftermath of the sainfoin, and the long valley echoes to their
lowing. After them, up the road, comes a gypsy-cart, and the boy hangs
on the gate to see the men and women walking, black-haired, upright,
bright-eyed, and on the name-board of the cart the words: “Naomi
Sherwood, Burley, Hampshire.” These things also propose to the roving,
unhistoric mind an Eden, one still with us, one that is passing, not,
let us hope, the very last.

Some of these scenes, whether often repeated or not, come to have a
rich symbolical significance; they return persistently and, as it
were, ceremoniously--on festal days--but meaning I know not what.
For example, I never see the flowers and scarlet-stained foliage of
herb-robert growing out of old stone-heaps by the wayside without a
feeling of satisfaction not explained by a long memory of the contrast
between the plant and the raw flint; so also with the drenched
lilac-bloom leaning out over high walls of unknown gardens; and inland
cliffs, covered with beech, jutting out westward into a bottomless
valley in the mist of winter twilights, in silence and frost. Something
in me belongs to these things, but I hardly think that the mere naming
of them will mean anything except to those--many, perhaps--who have
experienced the same. A great writer so uses the words of every day
that they become a code of his own which the world is bound to learn
and in the end take unto itself. But words are no longer symbols,
and to say “hill” or “beech” is not to call up images of a hill or a
beech-tree, since we have so long been in the habit of using the words
for beautiful and mighty and noble things very much as a book-keeper
uses figures without seeing gold and power. I can, therefore, only
try to suggest what I mean by the significance of the plant in the
stone-heap, the wet lilac, the misty cliff, by comparing it with that
of scenes in books where we recognize some power beyond the particular
and personal. All of Don Quixote’s acts have this significance; so
have the end of Mr. Conrad’s story of _Youth_ and the opening of Mr.
Hudson’s _El Ombu_--the old man sitting on a summer’s day under the
solitary tree to tell the history “of a house that had been.” Malory’s
_Morte d’Arthur_ is full of scenes like this. For ten centuries, from
the battle of Badon to the writing of _Morte d’Arthur_, these stories
were alive on the lips of many kinds of men and women in many lands,
from Connemara to Calabria. Many of these men and women survive only
in the turns which their passionate hearts gave to these ghostly,
everlastingly wandering tales. Artists have worked upon them. Bards
have sung them, and the sound of their harping is entangled in the
words that have reached us to-day. This blending of many bloods is
suggested by the Saracen in the _Morte d’Arthur_ who was descended
from Hector and Alexander and Joshua and Maccabæus; by Taliesin, whose
“original country is the region of the summer stars,” who was with
Noah and Alexander and at the birth of Christ. And thus has the tale
become so full in the ear of humanity, so rich in scenes designed to
serve only an immediate purpose, yet destined by this grace to move
all kinds of men in manifold ways. Such is the chess-playing in _The
Dream of Rhonabwy_; the madness of Tristram when he ran naked in the
wood many days, but was lured by the music of a damsel playing on his
own harp; the speech of Arthur at the scattering of his knights in the
Sangraal quest; Launcelot’s fighting with the black knights against
the white; Launcelot’s adventures ending at the castle of Carbonek,
where he put on all his arms and armour and went--“and the moon shone
clear”--between the lions at the gate and forced open the door, and saw
the “Holy Vessel, covered with red samite, and many angels about it”;
and Arthur and Guenevere watching the dead Elaine in the barge; and in
the wars of Arthur and Launcelot, the scene opening with the words:
“Then it befell upon a day in harvest-time, Sir Launcelot looked over
the walls, and spake on high unto King Arthur and Sir Gawaine....”

No English writer has expressed as well as Traherne the spiritual
glory of childhood, in which Wordsworth saw intimations of immortality.
He speaks of “that divine light wherewith I was born” and of his “pure
and virgin apprehensions,” and recommends his friend to pray earnestly
for these gifts: “They will make you angelical, and wholly celestial.”
It was by the “divine knowledge” that he saw all things in the peace of
Eden--

 “The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be
 reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting
 to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious
 as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green
 trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and
 ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap
 and almost mad with ecstasy; they were such strange and wonderful
 things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged
 seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling
 angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and
 girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew
 not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally
 as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the
 light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared,
 which tallied with my expectation and moved my desire....”

Yet was this light eclipsed. He was “with much ado” perverted by the
world, by the temptation of men and worldly things and by “opinion and
custom,” not any “inward corruption or depravation of Nature.”

For he tells us how he once entered a noble dining-room and was there
alone “to see the gold and state and carved imagery,” but wearied of
it because it was dead, and had no motion. A little afterwards he saw
it “full of lords and ladies and music and dancing,” and now pleasure
took the place of tediousness, and he perceived, long after, that “men
and women are, when well understood, a principal part of our true
felicity.” Once again, “in a lowering and sad evening, being alone in
the field, when all things were dead quiet,” he had the same weariness,
nay, even horror. “I was a weak and little child, and had forgotten
there was a man alive in the earth.” Nevertheless, hope and expectation
came to him and comforted him, and taught him “that he was concerned in
all the world.” That he was “concerned in all the world” was the great
source of comfort and joy which he found in life, and of that joy which
his book pours out for us. Not only did he see that he was concerned
in all the world, but that river and corn and herb and sand were so
concerned. God, he says, “knoweth infinite excellencies” in each of
these things; “He seeth how it relateth to angels and men.” In this
he anticipated Blake’s _Auguries of Innocence_. He seems to see the
patterns which all living things are for ever weaving. He would have
men strive after this divine knowledge of things and of their place in
the universe.

He came to believe that “all other creatures were such that God was
Himself in their creation, that is, Almighty Power wholly exerted; and
that every creature is indeed as it seemed in my infancy, not as it is
commonly apprehended.”

Yet he feels the superiority of man’s soul to the things which it
apprehends: “One soul in the immensity of its intelligence is greater
and more excellent than the whole world.” Even so Richard Jefferies
prayed that his soul “might be more than the cosmos of life.” The soul
is greater than the whole world because it is capable of apprehending
the whole world, because it is spiritual, and the spiritual nature is
infinite. Thus Traherne was led to the splendid error of making the sun
“a poor little dead thing.” Or perhaps it was a figure of speech used
to convince the multitude of his estimation of man’s soul as above all
visible things. In the same spirit he speaks of “this little Cottage
of Heaven and Earth as too small a gift, though fair,” for beings of
whom he says: “Infinity we know and feel by our souls; and feel it so
naturally as if it were the very essence and being of the soul”; and
again, with childlike simplicity and majesty--

“Man is a creature of such noble principles and severe expectations,
that could he perceive the least defect to be in the Deity, it would
infinitely displease him.”

He could not well have thought of man except loftily, since he was
himself one whom imagination never deserted--imagination the greatest
power of the mind by which not poets only live and have their being--

“For God,” says he, “hath made you able to create worlds in your own
mind which are more precious unto Him than those which He created; and
to give and offer up the world unto Him, which is very delightful in
flowing from Him, but made more in returning to Him.”

That power to create worlds in the mind is the imagination, and is
the proof that the creature liveth and is divine. “Things unknown,”
he says, “have a secret influence on the soul,” and “we love we know
not what.” The spirit can fill the whole world and the stars be your
jewels: “You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth
in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with
the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole
world.” And our inheritance is more than the world, “because men are
in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.” It is a social
mysticism. “The world,” he says in another place, “does serve you,
not only as it is the place and receptacle of all your joys, but as
it is a great obligation laid upon all mankind, and upon every person
in all ages, to love you as himself; as it also magnifieth all your
companions.” His is the true “public mind,” as he calls it. “There is
not,” he says in another place--“there is not a man in the whole world
that knows God, or himself, but he must honour you. Not only as an
Angel or as a Cherubim, but as one redeemed by the blood of Christ,
beloved by all Angels, Cherubims, and Men, the heir of the world, and
as much greater than the Universe, as he that possesseth the house
is greater than the house. O what a holy and blessed life would men
lead, what joys and treasures would they be to each other, in what a
sphere of excellency would every man move, how sublime and glorious
would their estate be, how full of peace and quiet would the world be,
yea, of joy and honour, order and beauty, did men perceive this of
themselves, and had they this esteem for one another!”

Here, as in other passages, he seems to advance to the position of
Whitman, whom some have blamed for making the word “divine” of no value
because he would apply it to all, whereas to do so is no more than to
lay down that rule of veneration for men--and the other animals--which
has produced and will produce the greatest revolutions.

This conception of universal divinity sprang from his doctrine of Love.
By love we can be at one with the divine power which he calls God.
“Love,” he says, “is the true means by which the world is enjoyed: our
love to others, and others’ love to us.” Why, even the love of riches
he excuses, since “we love to be rich ... that we thereby might be more
greatly delightful.” And just as Richard Jefferies says that Felise
loved before ever she loved a man, so Traherne says: “That violence
wherewith a man sometimes doteth upon one creature is but a little
spark of that love, even towards all, which lurketh in his nature....
When we dote upon the perfections and beauties of some one creature,
we do not love that too much, but other things too little.” It is
this love by which alone the commonwealth of all forms of life can be
truly known, and men are like God when they are “all life and mettle
and vigour and love to everything,” and “concerned and happy” in all
things. His feeling of the interdependence of all the world is thus
inseparable from his doctrine of love; love inspires it; by love alone
can it be real and endure. “He that is in all and with all can never
be desolate.” And, nevertheless, he cannot always be thinking of the
universe--he thought that the sun went round the earth--and just as he
regards man as superior to other forms of life, so, perhaps, he has a
filial love of “this cottage of Heaven and Earth,” the brown land and
blue sky, and one of the most beautiful of his meditations is where he
says--

 “When I came into the country, and being seated among silent trees,
 and meads, and hills, had all my time in mine own hands, I resolved
 to spend it all, whatever it cost me, in the search of happiness, and
 to satiate that burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from
 my youth. In which I was so resolute, that I chose rather to live upon
 ten pounds a year, and go in leather clothes, and feed upon bread
 and water, so that I might have all my time clearly to myself, than
 to keep many thousands per annum in an estate of life where my time
 would be devoured in care and labour. And God was so pleased to accept
 of that desire, that from that time to this, I have had all things
 plentifully provided for me, without any care at all, my very study
 of Felicity making me more to prosper, than all the care in the whole
 world. So that through His blessing I live a free and a kingly life as
 if the world were turned again into Eden, or much more, as it is at
 this day.”

Traherne is remarkable in many ways, but for nothing more than for
his mingling of man and nature in the celestial light of infancy. He
begins, indeed, with the corn--the “orient and immortal wheat”--but he
goes on to the dust and stones and gates of the town, and then to the
old men and the young men and the children. But it was only on “some
gilded cloud or flower” that Vaughan saw “some shadows of eternity”;
he longs to travel back to his childish time and to a city of the
soul, but a shady city of palm-trees. Wordsworth, though he says that
“every common spirit” was “apparell’d in celestial light” in his early
childhood, only mentions “meadow, grove and stream”; it is a tree,
a single field, a flower, that reminds him of his loss; it is the
fountains, meadows, hills and groves which he is anxious to assure of
his lasting love. Perhaps many people’s memories in this kind are of
Nature more than of men. Even the social Lamb is at his deepest in
recalling the child who was solitary in the great house and garden of
Blakesmoor. With some the reason for this priority of Nature is that
her solitudes are the most rich. The presence of other children and
of adults is comparatively commonplace, and in becoming, permanently
or temporarily, part of a community, the spirit makes some sacrifice.
Provided, then, that a child is happy and at ease in the solitude of
Nature, it is more open than in company to what is afterwards regarded
as spiritual intercourse. But above all, our memories of Nature are
seldom or never flawed by the seeming triviality, the dislikes, the
disgusts, the misunderstandings which give to memories of human society
something of dulness and the commonplace. Thinking of ourselves and
other children, we may also think of things which make idealization
impossible. Thinking of ourselves in a great wood or field of flowers
ever so long ago, it is hard not to exaggerate whatever give-and-take
there was between the spirit of the child and the vast pure forces of
the sun and the wind. In those days we did not see a tree as a column
of a dark stony substance supporting a number of green wafers that
live scarcely half a year, and grown for the manufacture of furniture,
gates, and many other things; but we saw something quite unlike
ourselves, large, gentle, of foreign tongue, without locomotion, yet
full of the life and movement and sound of the leaves themselves, and
also of the light, of the birds, and of the insects; and they were
givers of a clear, deep joy that cannot be expressed. The brooding
mind easily exalts this joy with the help of the disillusions and the
knowledge and the folly and the thought of later years. A little time
ago I heard of the death of one whom I had once seemed to know well,
had roamed and talked and been silent with him, and I should have gone
on doing so had he not gone far away and died. And when I heard of his
death I kept on recalling his face and figure to my mind under familiar
conditions, in the old rooms, by the same river, under the same elms.
As before, I saw him in the clothes which he used to wear, smiling or
laughing or perhaps grim. But wherever he was and whatever his look,
there was always something--the shadow of a shadow, but awful--in his
face which made me feel that had I only seen it (and I felt that I
ought to have seen it), in those days, I should have known he was to
die early, with ambitions unfulfilled, far away.

And in this same way will the brain work in musing of earlier times.
All that has come after deepens that candid brow of the child as a
legend will darken a bright brook.

I once saw a girl of seven or eight years walking alone down a long
grassy path in an old garden. On one hand rose a peaceful long slope
of down; on the other, beyond the filberts, a high hedge shut out all
but the pale blue sky, with white clouds resting on its lower mist like
water-lilies on a still pool. Turning her back to the gabled house
and its attendant beeches, she walked upon the narrow level path of
perfect grass. The late afternoon sun fell full upon her, upon her
brown head and her blue tunic, and upon the flowers of the borders at
either side, the lowly white arabis foaming wild, the pansy, the white
narcissus, the yellow jonquil and daffodil, the darker smouldering
wallflowers, the tall yellow leopard’s-bane, the tufts of honesty among
the still dewy leaves of larkspur and columbine. But here and there,
as she walked, the light was dimmed by the clusters of cool white
humming cherry-blossom hanging out of the hot sky. In front of her the
cherry-trees seemed to meet and make a corridor of dark stems on either
hand, paved green and white and gold, and roofed by milky white clouds
that embowered the clear, wild warble of black-caps. Farther on, the
flowers ceased and the grass was shadowed by new-leaved beeches, and at
length involved in an uncertain mist of trees and shadows of trees, and
there the cuckoo cried. For the child there was no end to the path.

She walked slowly, at first picking a narcissus or two, or stooping
to smell a flower and letting her hair fall over it to the ground;
but soon she was content only to brush the tips of the flowers with
her outstretched hands, or, rising on tiptoe, to force her head up
amongst the lowest branches of cherry-bloom. Then she did nothing
at all but gravely walk on into the shadow and into Eternity, dimly
foreknowing her life’s days. She looked forward as one day she would
look back over a broad sea of years, and in a drowsy, haunted gloom,
full of the cuckoo’s note, saw herself going always on and on among the
interlacing shadows of tree trunks and branches and joys and pleasures
and pains and sorrows that must have an end, she knew not how. She
stopped, not venturing into that strange future under the beeches. She
stared into the mist, where hovered the phantoms of the big girl, the
young woman, the lover ... which in turn she was to become. Under the
last cherry-tree something went out of her into the shadow, and those
phantoms fed upon her blood as she stood still. But presently in the
long beech corridors the gloom began to lighten and move and change to
a glinting blue that approached her. “Pee-oi,” shouted the peacock, now
close at hand; “pee-oi ... pee-oi,” as he passed her by, and turning,
she also shouted “pee-oi,” frightening the cuckoo from the beeches, as
she ran back among the flowers to the house.

What is to come of our Nature-teaching in schools? What does it aim at?
Whence does it arise? In part, no doubt, it is due to our desire to
implant information. It is all very well for the poet to laugh--

    When Science has discovered something more
    We shall be happier than we were before;

but that is the road we are on at a high rate of speed. If we are
fortunate we shall complete our inventory of the contents of heaven and
earth by the time when the last man or woman wearing the last pair of
spectacles has decided that, after all, it is a very good world and one
which it is quite possible to live in. That, however, is an end which
would not in itself be a sufficient inducement to push on towards it;
still less can such a vision have set us upon the road.

Three things, perhaps, have more particularly persuaded us to pay
our fare and mount for somewhere-- three things which are really not
to be sharply distinguished, though it is convenient to consider
them separately. First, the literary and philosophical movement
imperfectly described as the romantic revival and return to Nature
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Poets and philosophers
need private incomes, State porridge and what not, but literature and
philosophy is a force, and for a century it has followed a course which
was entered in the period of the French Revolution. This literature
shows man in something like his true position in an infinite universe,
and shows him particularly in his physical environment of sea, sky,
mountain, rivers, woods, and other animals. Second, the enormous,
astonishing, perhaps excessive, growth of towns, from which the only
immediate relief is the pure air and sun of the country, a relief which
is sought by the urban multitudes in large but insufficient numbers and
for too short a time. Third, the triumph of science, of systematized
observation. Helped, no doubt, by the force of industrialism--to which
it gave help in return--science has had a great triumph. At one time
it was supposed to have fatally undermined poetry, romance, religion,
because it had confused the minds of some poets and critics.

These three things considered, Nature-study is inevitable. Literature
sends us to Nature principally for joy, joy of the senses, of the
whole frame, of the contemplative mind, and of the soul, joy which if
it is found complete in these several ways might be called religious.
Science sends us to Nature for knowledge. Industrialism and the great
town sends us to Nature for health, that we may go on manufacturing
efficiently, or, if we think right and have the power, that we may
escape from it. But it would be absurd to separate joy, knowledge and
health, except as we separate for convenience those things which have
sent us out to seek for them; and Nature-teaching, if it is good,
will never overlook one of these three. Joy, through knowledge, on a
foundation of health, is what we appear to seek.

There is no longer any need to hesitate in speaking of joy in
connection with schools, yet might we not still complain, as Thomas
Traherne did two hundred and fifty years ago--

 “There was never a tutor that did professly teach Felicity, though
 that be the mistress of all other sciences. Nor did any of us study
 these things but as aliena, which we ought to have studied as our
 enjoyments. We studied to inform our Knowledge, but knew not for what
 end we so studied. And for lack of aiming at a certain end we erred in
 the manner.”

If we cannot somehow have a professor of Felicity we are undone.
Perhaps Nature herself will aid. Her presence will certainly make for
felicity by enlarging her pupil for a time from the cloistered life
which modern towns and their infinite conveniences and servitudes
encourage. Tolstoy has said that in the open air “new relations are
formed between pupil and teacher: freer, simpler and more trustful”;
and certainly his walk on a winter night with his pupils, chatting and
telling tales (see _The School at Yasnaya Polyana_, by Leo Tolstoy),
leaves an impression of electrical activity and felicity in the young
and old minds of that party which is hardly to be surpassed. And how
more than by Nature’s noble and uncontaminated forms can a sense of
beauty be nourished? Then, too, the reading of great poetry might well
be associated with the study of Nature, since there is no great poetry
which can be dissevered from Nature, while modern poets have all dipped
their pens in the sunlight and wind and great waters, and appeal most
to those who most resemble them in their loves. The great religious
books, handed down to us by people who lived in closer intercourse with
Nature than many of us, cannot be understood by indoor children and
adults. Whether connected with this or that form of religion or not,
whether taken as “intimations of immortality” or not, the most profound
and longest remembered feelings are often those derived from the
contact of Nature with the child’s mind.

Of health, though there are exactly as many physicians as patients,
it is unnecessary to say anything, except that one of the pieces of
knowledge--I do not speak of information--which science has left to us
is that movement and the working of the brain in pure air and sunlight
is good for body and soul, especially if joy is aiding.

Knowledge aids joy by discipline, by increasing the sphere of
enjoyment, by showing us in animals, in plants, for example, what
life is, how our own is related to theirs, showing us, in fact, our
position, responsibilities and debts among the other inhabitants of the
earth. Pursued out of doors where those creatures, moving and still,
have their life and their beauty, knowledge is real. The senses are
invited there to the subtlest and most delightful training, and have
before them an immeasurable fresh field, not a field like that of
books, full of old opinions, but one with which every eye and brain can
have new vital intercourse. It is open to all to make discoveries as to
the forms and habits of things, and care should be taken to preserve
the child from the most verbose part of modern literature, that which
repeats in multiplied ill-chosen words stale descriptions of birds and
flowers, etc., coupled with trivial fancies and insincere inventions.
Let us not take the study, the lamp and the ink out of doors, as we
used to take wild life--having killed it and placed it in spirits of
wine--indoors. Let us also be careful to have knowledge as well as
enthusiasm in our masters. Enthusiasm alone is not enthusiasm. There
must, at some stage, be some anatomy, classification, pure brain-work;
the teacher must be the equal in training of the mathematician, and he
must be alive, which I never heard was a necessity for mathematicians.
But not anatomy for all, perhaps; for some it might be impossible, and
a study of colours, curves, perfumes, voices--a thousand things--might
be substituted for it.

Yet Nature-study is not designed to produce naturalists, any more than
music is taught in order to make musicians. If you produce nothing but
naturalists you fail, and you will produce very few. The aim of study
is to widen the culture of child and man, to do systematically what
Mark Pattison tells us in his dry way he did for himself, by walking
and outdoor sports, then--at the late age of seventeen--by collecting
and reading such books as _The Natural History of Selborne_, and
finally by a slow process of transition from natural history into “the
more abstract poetic emotion ... a conscious and declared poetical
sentiment and a devoted reading of the poets.” Geology did not come for
another ten years, “to complete the cycle of thought, and to give that
intellectual foundation which is required to make the testimony of the
eye, roaming over an undulating surface, fruitful and satisfying. When
I came in after years to read _The Prelude_ I recognized, as if it were
my own history which was being told, the steps by which the love of the
country boy for his hills and moors grew into poetical susceptibility
for all imaginative presentations of beauty in every direction.” The
botany, etc., would naturally be related to the neighbourhood of school
or home; for there is no parish or district of which it might not be
said, as Jefferies and Thoreau each said of his own, that it is a
microcosm. By this means the natural history may easily be linked to
a preliminary study of hill and valley and stream, the positions of
houses, mills and villages, and the reasons for them, and the food
supply, and so on, and this in turn leads on to--nay, involves--all
that is most real in geography and history. The landscape retains the
most permanent marks of the past, and a wise examination of it should
evoke the beginnings of the majestic sentiment of our oneness with
the future and the past, just as natural history should help to give
the child a sense of oneness with all forms of life. To put it at its
lowest, some such cycle of knowledge is needed if a generation that
insists more and more on living in the country, or spending many weeks
there, is not to be bored or to be compelled to entrench itself behind
the imported amusements of the town.




CHAPTER IX

HISTORY AND THE PARISH--HAMPSHIRE--CORNWALL


Some day there will be a history of England written from the point of
view of one parish, or town, or great house. Not until there is such a
history will all our accumulations of information be justified. It will
begin with a geological picture, something large, clear, architectural,
not a mass of insignificant names. It must be imaginative: it might,
perhaps, lean sometimes upon Mr. Doughty’s _Dawn in Britain_. The
peculiar combination of soil and woodland and water determines the
direction and position and importance of the ancient trackways; it will
determine also the position and size of the human settlements. The
early marks of these--the old flint and metal implements, the tombs,
the signs of agriculture, the encampments, the dwellings--will have to
be clearly described and interpreted. Folk-lore, legend, place-names
must be learnedly, but bravely and humanly used, so that the historian
who has not the extensive sympathy and imagination of a great novelist
will have no chance of success. What endless opportunities will he have
for really giving life to past times in such matters as the line made
by the edge of an old wood with the cultivated land, the shapes of the
fields, with their borders of streams or hedge or copse or pond or wall
or road, the purpose and interweaving of the roads and footpaths that
suggest the great permanent thoughts and the lesser thoughts and dreams
of the brain.... As the historic centuries are reached, the action of
great events, battles, laws, roads, invasions, upon the parish--and of
the parish upon them--must be shown. Architecture, with many of its
local characteristics still to be traced, will speak as a voice out of
the stones of castle, church, manor, farm, barn and bridge. The birds
and beasts cannot be left out. The names of the local families--gentle
and simple--what histories are in them, in the curt parish registers,
in tombstones, in the names of fields and houses and woods. Better a
thousand errors so long as they are human than a thousand truths lying
like broken snail-shells round the anvil of a thrush. If only those
poems which are place-names could be translated at last, the pretty,
the odd, the romantic, the racy names of copse and field and lane and
house. What a flavour there is about the Bassetts, the Boughtons,
the Worthys, the Tarrants, Winterbournes, Deverills, Manningfords,
the Suttons: what goodly names of the South Country--Woodmansterne,
Hollingbourne, Horsmonden, Wolstanbury, Brockenhurst, Caburn, Lydiard
Tregoze, Lydiard Millicent, Clevancy, Amesbury, Amberley (I once tried
to make a beautiful name and in the end it was Amberley, in which Time
had forestalled me); what sweet names Penshurst, Frensham, Firle,
Nutley, Appleshaw, Hambledon, Cranbrook, Fordingbridge, Melksham,
Lambourn, Draycot, Buscot, Kelmscot, Yatton, Yalding, Downe, Cowden,
Iping, Cowfold, Ashe, Liss.... Then there are the histories of roads.
Every traveller in Hampshire remembers the road that sways with airy
motion and bird-like curves down from the high land of clay and
flint through the chalk to the sand and the river. It doubles round
the head of a coombe, and the whole descent is through beech woods
uninterrupted and all but impenetrable to the eye above or below except
where once or twice it looks through an arrow slit to the blue vale and
the castled promontory of Chanctonbury twenty miles south-east. As the
road is a mere ledge on the side of a very steep hill the woods below
it hurry down to a precipitous pit full of the glimmering, trembling
and murmuring of innumerable leaves and no sight or sound of men. It
is said to have been made more than half a century ago to take the
place of the rash straight coach road which now enters it near its
base. A deeply-worn, narrow and disused track joining it more than
half-way down suggests that the lower part was made by the widening of
an old road; but much of the upper half is new. Certainly the road as
it now is, broad and gently bending round the steep coombe, is new,
and it was made at the expense of the last of a family which had long
owned the manor house near the entrance of the coombe. His were all
the hanging beech woods--huge as the sky--upon the hill, and through
them the road-makers conducted this noble and pleasant way. But near
the top they deviated by a few yards into another estate. The owner
would not give way. A lawsuit was begun, and it was not over when the
day came for the road to be open for traffic according to the contract
or, if not, to pass out of the defaulter’s hands. The day passed; the
contract was broken; the speculation had failed, and the tolls would
never fill the pockets of the lord of the manor. He was ruined, and
left his long white house by the rivulet and its chain of pools, his
farms and cottages, his high fruit walls, his uncounted beeches, the
home of a hundred owls, his Spanish chestnuts above the rocky lane, his
horse-chestnut and sycamore stately in groups, his mighty wych elms,
his apple trees and all their mistletoe, his walnut trees, and the long
bay of sky that was framed by his tall woods east and north and west.

There are many places which nobody can look upon without being
consciously influenced by a sense of their history. It is a
battlefield, and the earth shows the scars of its old wounds; or a
castle or cathedral of distinct renown rises among the oaks; or a manor
house or cottage, or tomb or woodland walk that speaks of a dead poet
or soldier. Then, according to the extent or care of our reading and
the clearness of our imagination, we can pour into the groves or on the
turf tumultuous or silent armies, or solitary man or woman. It is a
deeply-worn coast; the spring tide gnaws the yellow cliff, and the wind
files it with unceasing hiss, and the relics of every age, skull and
weapon and shroudpin and coin and carven stone, are spread out upon the
clean, untrodden sand, and the learned, the imaginative, the fanciful,
the utterly unhistoric and merely human man exercises his spirit upon
them, and responds, if only for a moment. In some places history has
wrought like an earthquake, in others like an ant or mole; everywhere,
permanently; so that if we but knew or cared, every swelling of
the grass, every wavering line of hedge or path or road were an
inscription, brief as an epitaph, in many languages and characters.
But most of us know only a few of these unspoken languages of the
past, and only a few words in each. Wars and parliaments are but dim,
soundless, and formless happenings in the brain; toil and passion of
generations produce only an enriching of the light within the glades,
and a solemnizing of the shadows.

Out of a whole century or age we remember nothing vividly and in a
manner that appeals to the eye, except some such picture as that which
Gerald of Wales gives of a Welsh prince, Cyneuric, son of Rhys. He was
tall and handsome, fair-complexioned, his hair curled; his dress was
a thin cloak, and under that a shirt, his legs and feet being bare,
regardless of thistle and brier; a man to whom nature and not art had
given his beauty and comely bearing. Outside Wales, and in ages far
removed from the twelfth century, this figure of a man will follow us,
and help to animate any wild scene that is coloured by antiquity. It
is some such man, his fair hair perhaps exchanged for black, and his
nobility more animal and clothed in skins, that we see, if we see a
man at all, when we muse deeply upon the old road worn deep into the
chalk, among burial mound and encampment; we feel rather than see the
innumerable companies of men like this, following their small cattle to
the stream or the dew-pond, wearing out the hard earth with their naked
feet and trailing ash staves. Going up such a road, between steep banks
of chalk and the roots and projecting bases of beeches whose foliage
meets overhead--a road worn twenty feet deep, and now scarce ever used
as a footpath except by fox and hare--we may be half-conscious that we
have climbed that way before during the furrowing of the road, and we
move as in a dream between this age and that dim one which we vainly
strive to recover.

But because we are imperfectly versed in history, we are not therefore
blind to the past. The eye that sees the things of to-day, and the
ear that hears, the mind that contemplates or dreams, is itself an
instrument of an antiquity equal to whatever it is called upon to
apprehend. We are not merely twentieth-century Londoners or Kentish
men or Welshmen. We belong to the days of Wordsworth, of Elizabeth,
of Richard Plantagenet, of Harold, of the earliest bards. We, too,
like Taliesin, have borne a banner before Alexander, have been with
our Lord in the manger of the ass, have been in India, and with the
“remnant of Troia,” and with Noah in the ark, and our original country
is “the region of the summer stars.” And of these many folds in our
nature the face of the earth reminds us, and perhaps, even where there
are no more marks visible upon the land than there were in Eden, we
are aware of the passing of time in ways too difficult and strange for
the explanation of historian and zoologist and philosopher. It is this
manifold nature that responds with such indescribable depth and variety
to the appeals of many landscapes.

We come to a huge, flat-bottomed, grassy coombe, smooth as a
racecourse, that winds out of the cornland into the heart of the Downs.
It is like the bed of a river of great depth. At its entrance beeches
clothe either side; but presently they cease, and up the steep juniper
slopes go the paths of hares, of the herds and flocks of earliest
ages and of the men and women and children also, whose children’s
children’s children have forgotten them though not perhaps their
philosophy. The grass of the slope is mingled with small sweet herbage,
the salad burnet rosy-stemmed, the orange bird’s-foot trefoil, the
purple thyme, the fine white flax, the delicatest golden hawk-bit, and
basil and marjoram, and rosettes of crimson thistles, all sunny warm
and fragrant, glittering and glowing or melting into a simmering haze,
musical with grasshoppers and a-flutter with blue butterflies, so that
the earth seems to be a thick-furred, genial animal. At length the
windings shut out the plain, and the coombe is a green hall roofed by
the hot blue sky. Its walls are steeper than ever, and the burrowings
of the rabbits have streaked the grasses with long splashes--like
those made by sea-birds on rocks--of white chalk. The curves of these
walls are like those of the flight of the swifts that dive overhead.
Here there are no human paths, no sign of house, of grave, of herd, of
cultivation. It is the world’s end, and the rabbits race up and down as
in a dream of solitude.

Yet the mind is not discontented and unfed. This is no boundless
solitude of ocean where one may take a kind of pleasure

    To float for ever with a careless course
    And think himself the only being alive.

It is not an end but a beginning that we have reached. These are the
elements--pure earth and wind and sunlight--out of which beauty and joy
arise, original and ancient, for ever young. Their presence restores us
not to the Middle Ages, not to the days of Mr. Doughty’s heroic princes
and princesses of Britain,[4] not to any dim archæologist’s world of
reeking marsh and wood, of mammoth and brutish men, but to a region out
of space and out of time in which life and thought and physical health
are in harmony with sun and earth, fragrant as the flowers in the
grass, blithe as the grasshopper, swift as the hares, divine; and out
of it all arises a vision of the man who will embody this thought, a
man whom human infelicity, discontented with the past, has placed in a
golden age still farther back, for the sufficient reason that in every
age he has been a dream, and our dreaming is of the dawn or the night,
always disappointed but undaunted by the day that follows. And so no
storied valley or hillside is richer in humanity than this coombe. It
is one of the countless Edens where we are in contact not with the
soldier and ploughman and mason that change the surface of the earth,
but with prophet and poet who have ever lived to trace to Nature and
to the early ages the health and vigour of men. There is the greatest
antiquity of all, peace and purity and simplicity, and in the midst is
the mother Earth, the young mother of the world, with a face like Ceres
before she had lost Persephone in the underworld. In fact, so blessed
is this solitary hall that after climbing out it is mournful to see the
rabbit-worn tunnels and the Roman camp on the ridge.

[4] _The Dawn in Britain_, by Charles M. Doughty.


CORNWALL.

In Cornwall, where the wrinkles and angles of the earth’s age are
left to show, antiquity plays a giant’s part on every hand. What a
curious effect have those ruins, all but invisible among the sands, the
sea-blue scabious, the tamarisk and rush, though at night they seem
not inaudible when the wild air is full of crying! Some that are not
nearly as old are almost as magical. One there is that stands near a
great water, cut off from a little town and from the world by a round
green hill and touched by no road but only by a wandering path. At the
foot of this hill, among yellow mounds of sand, under blue sky, the
church is dark and alone. It is not very old--not five centuries--and
is of plainest masonry: its blunt short spire of slate slabs that leans
slightly to one side, with the smallest of perforated slate windows at
the base, has a look of age and rusticity. In the churchyard is a rough
grey cross of stone--a disc supported by a pillar. It is surrounded by
the waving noiseless tamarisk. It looks northward over the sandhills
at a blue bay, guarded on the west by tall grey cliffs which a white
column surmounts.

For a time the nearer sandhills have rested and clothed themselves in
bird’s-foot trefoil, thyme, eyebright and short turf: but once the
church was buried beneath them. Between the round hill and the church
a tiny stream sidles along through a level hiding-place of flags and
yellow flag flowers, of purple figwort and purple orchis and green
grass.

A cormorant flies low across the sky--that sable bird which seems to
belong to the old time, the time of badger and beaver, of ancient men
who rose up out of the crags of this coast. To them, when the cuckoo
first called one April, came over the blue sea a small brown ship,
followed by three seals, and out of it descended a Christian from
Ireland, black-haired, blue-eyed, with ready red lips and deep sweet
voice and spoke to them, all alone. He told them of a power that ruled
the blue waters and shifting sands, who could move the round green hill
to the rock of the white gulls; taller and grimmer than the cloven
headland yet sweet and gentle as the fennel above; deep-voiced as the
Atlantic storm, tender also as the sedgewarbler in the flags below the
hill; whose palace was loftier than the blue to which the lark was now
soaring, milder and richer than the meadows in May and everlasting; and
his attendants were more numerous and bright than the herring under a
moon of frost. The milkpails should be fuller and the grass deeper and
the corn heavier in the car if they believed in this; the pilchards
should be as water boiling in the bay; and they should have wings as
of the white birds that lounged about the precipices of the coast. And
all the time the three seals lay with their heads and backs above the
shallows and watched. Perhaps the men believed his word; perhaps they
dropped him over the precipice to see whether he also flew like a gull:
but here is the church named after him.

All along the coast (and especially where it is lofty and houseless,
and on the ledges of the crags the young grey gulls unable to fly bob
their heads seaward and try to scream like their parents who wheel far
and near with double yodeling cry), there are many rounded barrows
looking out to sea. And there are some amidst the sandhills, bare and
corrugated by the wind and heaved up like a feather-bed, their edges
golden against the blue sky or mangily covered by drab marram grass
that whistles wintrily; and near by the blue sea, slightly roughened
as by a barrow, sleeps calm but foamy among cinder-coloured isles;
donkeys graze on the brown turf, larks rise and fall and curlews go
by; a cuckoo sings among the deserted mines. But the barrows are most
noble on the high heather and grass. The lonely turf is full of lilac
scabious flowers and crimson knapweed among the solid mounds of gorse.
The brown-green-grey of the dry summer grass reveals myriads of the
flowers of thyme, of stonecrop yellow and white, of pearly eyebright,
of golden lady’s fingers, and the white or grey clover with its purest
and earthiest of all fragrances. Here and there steep tracks descend
slantwise among the thrift-grown crags to the sea, or promise to
descend but end abruptly in precipices. On the barrows themselves,
which are either isolated or in a group of two or three, grow thistle
and gorse. They command mile upon mile of cliff and sea. In their sight
the great headlands run out to sea and sinking seem to rise again a
few miles out in a sheer island, so that they resemble couchant beasts
with backs under water but heads and haunches upreared. The cliffs
are cleft many times by steep-sided coves, some with broad sand and
shallow water among purple rocks, the outlet of a rivulet; others
ending precipitously so that the stream suddenly plunges into the black
sea among a huddle of sunless boulders. Near such a stream there will
be a grey farm amid grey outbuildings--with a carved wooden eagle from
the wreckage of the cove, or a mermaid, once a figure-head with fair
long hair and round bosom, built into the wall of a barn. Or there
is a briny hamlet grouped steeply on either side of the stream which
gurgles among the pebbles down to the feet of the bearded fisherman and
the ships a-gleam. Or perhaps there is no stream at all, and bramble
and gorse come down dry and hot to the lips of the emerald and purple
pools. Deep roads from the sea to the cliff-top have been worn by
smuggler and fisherman and miner, climbing and descending. Inland shows
a solitary pinnacled church tower, rosy in the warm evening--a thin
line of trees, long bare stems and dark foliage matted--and farther
still the ridges of misty granite, rough as the back of a perch.

Of all the rocky land, of the sapphire sea white with quiet foam, the
barrows are masters. The breaking away of the rock has brought them
nearer to the sea as it has annihilated some and cut off the cliff-ways
in mid-career. They stand in the unenclosed waste and are removed from
all human uses and from most wayfaring. Thus they share the sublimity
of beacons and are about to show that tombs also have their deaths.
Linnet and stonechat and pipit seem to attend upon them, with pretty
voices and motions and a certain ghastliness, as of shadows, given
to their cheerful and sudden flittings by the solemn neighbourhood.
But most of their hold upon the spirit they owe to their powerful
suggestion that here upon the high sea border was once lived a bold
proud life, like that of Beowulf, whose words, when he was dying from
the wounds of his last victory, were: “Bid the warriors raise a funeral
mound to flash with fire on a promontory above the sea, that it may
stand high and be a memorial by which my people shall remember me, and
seafarers driving their tall ships through the mist of the sea shall
say: ‘Beowulf’s Mound.’”

In Cornwall as in Wales, these monuments are the more impressive,
because the earth, wasting with them and showing her bones, takes their
part. There are days when the age of the Downs, strewn with tumuli and
the remnants of camp and village, is incredible; or rather they seem
in the course of long time to have grown smooth and soft and kind,
and to be, like a rounded languid cloud, an expression of Earth’s
summer bliss of afternoon. But granite and slate and sandstone jut
out, and in whatsoever weather speak rather of the cold, drear, hard,
windy dawn. Nothing can soften the lines of Trendreen or Brown Willy
or Carn Galver against the sky. The small stone-hedged ploughlands
amidst brake and gorse do but accentuate the wildness of the land
from which they have been won. The deserted mines are frozen cries of
despair as if they had perished in conflict with the waste; and in a
few years their chimneys standing amidst rotted woodwork, the falling
masonry, the engine rusty, huge and still (the abode of rabbits, and
all overgrown with bedstraw, the stern thistle and wizard henbane) are
in keeping with the miles of barren land, littered with rough silvered
stones among heather and furze, whose many barrows are deep in fern and
bramble and foxglove. The cotton grass raises its pure nodding white.
The old roads dive among still more furze and bracken and bramble and
foxglove, and on every side the land grows no such crop as that of grey
stones. Even in the midst of occasional cornfield or weedless pasture
a long grey upright stone speaks of the past. In many places men have
set up these stones, roughly squaring some of them, in the form of a
circle or in groups of circles--and over them beats the buzzard in
slow hesitating and swerving flight. In one place the work of Nature
might be mistaken for that of man. On a natural hillock stands what
appears to be the ruin of an irregularly heaped wall of grey rock,
roughened by dark-grey lichen, built of enormous angular fragments like
the masonry of a giant’s child. Near at hand, bracken, pink stonecrop,
heather and bright gold tormentil soften it; but at a distance it
stands black against the summer sky, touched with the pathos of man’s
handiwork overthrown, yet certainly an accident of Nature. It commands
Cape Cornwall and the harsh sea, and St. Just with its horned church
tower. On every hand lie cromlech, camp, circle, hut and tumulus of
the unwritten years. They are confused and mingled with the natural
litter of a barren land. It is a silent Bedlam of history, a senseless
cemetery or museum, amidst which we walk as animals must do when they
see those valleys full of skeletons where their kind are said to go
punctually to die. There are enough of the dead; they outnumber the
living; and there those trite truths burst with life and drum upon the
tympanum with ambiguous fatal voices. At the end of this many-barrowed
moor, yet not in it, there is a solitary circle of grey stones, where
the cry of the past is less vociferous, less bewildering, than on the
moor itself, but more intense. Nineteen tall, grey stones stand round
a taller, pointed one that is heavily bowed, amidst long grass and
bracken and furze. A track passes close by, but does not enter the
circle; the grass is unbent except by the weight of its bloom. It bears
a name that connects it with the assembling and rivalry of the bards
of Britain. Here, under the sky, they met, leaning upon the stones,
tall, fair men of peace, but half-warriors, whose songs could change
ploughshare into sword. Here they met, and the growth of the grass, the
perfection of the stones (except that one stoops as with age), and the
silence, suggest that since the last bard left it, in robe of blue or
white or green--the colours of sky and cloud and grass upon this fair
day--the circle has been unmolested, and the law obeyed which forbade
any but a bard to enter it. Sky-blue was the colour of a chief bard’s
robe, emblematic of peace and heavenly calm, and of unchangeableness.
White, the colour of the Druid’s dress, was the emblem of light, and of
its correlatives, purity of conduct, wisdom, and piety. Green was the
colour of the youthful ovate’s robe, for it was the emblem of growth.
Their uniformity of colour signified perfect truth. And the inscription
upon the chair of the bards of Beisgawen was, “Nothing is that is not
for ever and ever.” Blue and white and green, peace and light and
growth--“Nothing is that is not for ever and ever”--these things and
the blue sky, the white, cloudy hall of the sun, and the green bough
and grass, hallowed the ancient stones, and clearer than any vision
of tall bards in the morning of the world was the tranquil delight of
being thus “teased out of time” in the presence of this ancientness.

It is strange to pass from these monumental moors straight to the
sea which records the moments, not the years or the centuries. In
fine weather especially its colour--when, for example, it is faintly
corrugated and of a blue that melts towards the horizon into such a
hue that it is indistinguishable from the violet wall of dawn--is a
perpetual astonishment on account of its unearthliness and evanescence.
The mind does not at once accept the fact that here underneath our eyes
is, as it were, another sky. The physical act of looking up induces
a special mood of solemnity and veneration, and during the act the
eyes meet with a fitting object in the stainless heavens. Looking
down we are used to seeing the earth, the road, the footpath, the
floor, the hearth; but when, instead, it is the sea and not any of
these things, although our feet are on firm land, the solemnity is of
another kind. In its anger the sea becomes humanized or animalized: we
see resemblances to familiar things. There is, for instance, an hour
sometimes after sunset, when the grey sky coldly lights the lines of
white plumes on a steely sea, and they have an inevitable likeness
to a trampling chivalry that charges upon a foe. But a calm sea is
incomparable except to moods of the mind. It is then as remote from the
earth and earthly things as the sky, and the remoteness is the more
astonishing because it is almost within our grasp. It is no wonder
that a great idea was expressed by the fortunate islands in the sea.
The youthfulness, the incorruptibility of the sea, continually renewing
itself, the same from generation to generation, prepares it as a fit
sanctuary of the immortal dead. So at least we are apt to think at
certain times, coming from the heavy, scarred, tormented earth to that
immense aëry plain of peacock blue. And yet at other times that same
unearthliness will suggest quite other thoughts. It has not changed
and shrunken and grown like the earth; it is not sun-warmed: it is a
monster that has lain unmoved by time, sleeping and moaning outside
the gates within which men and animals have become what they are.
Actually that cold fatal element and its myriad population without a
sound brings a wistfulness into the mind as if it could feel back and
dimly recall the dawn of time when the sea was incomprehensible and
impassable, when the earth had but lately risen out of the waters and
was yet again to descend beneath: it becomes a type of the waste where
everything is unknown or uncertain except death, pouring into the brain
the thoughts that men have had on looking out over untrodden mountain,
forest, swamp, in the drizzling dawn of the world. The sea is exactly
what it was when mountain, forest, swamp were imperturbable enemies,
and the sight of it restores the ancient fear. I remember one dawn
above all others when this restoration was complete. When it was yet
dark the wind rose gustily under a low grey sky and a lark sang amidst
the moan of gorse and the creak of gates and the deeply-taken breath
of the tide at the full. Nor was it yet light when the gulls began to
wheel and wind and float with a motion like foam on a whirlpool or
interwoven snow. They wheeled about the masts of fishing-boats that
nodded and kissed and crossed in a steep cove of crags whose black
edges were slavered by the foam of the dark sea; and there were no men
among the boats or about the grey houses that looked past the walls
of the cove to the grim staircase and sea-doors of a black headland,
whose perpendicular rocks stood up far out of the reach of the wings
fashioned in the likeness of gigantic idols. The higher crags were
bushy and scaly with lichen, and they were cushioned upon thrift and
bird’s-foot trefoil and white bladder campion. It was a bristling sea,
not in the least stormy, but bristling, dark and cold through the slow
colourless dawn, dark and cold and immense; and at the edge of it the
earth knelt, offering up the music of a small flitting bird and the
beauty of small flowers, white and gold, to those idols. They were
terrible enough. But the sea was more terrible; for it was the god of
whom those rocks were the poor childish images, and it seemed that
the god had just then disclosed his true nature and hence the pitiful
loveliness of the flowers, the pitiful sweetness of the bird that sang
among the rocks at the margin of the kind earth.

Now and then the sea will startle by some resemblance to the earth.
Thus I have come unexpectedly in sight of it on a strange coast
and have not known that it was the sea. A gale from the north-east
was blowing, and it was late afternoon in mid-winter. The land was
sandy moorland, treeless and dark with iron-coloured heather. A mile
away I saw rising up into the sky what seemed a peaty mountain in
Cardiganshire, as it would be in a tempest of rain, and it was only
when I was near the cliff and could see the three long walls of white
waves towards the shore that I knew it was the sea. More common is the
calm dark-blue sea in mid-summer, over which go criss-cross bands of
lighter hue, like pale moorland paths winding about a moor.

In a stern land like Cornwall that so often refuses the consolations of
grass and herb and tree, the relentings are the more gracious. These
are to be found in a whole valley where there are sloping fields of
corn and grass divided by green hedges, and woods rich and misty and
warm, and the bones of the land are buried away until it ends in a
bay where high and cavernous dark rocks stand on either side of blue
water and level sand. Often all the sweetness of the country round
seems to have run into one great roadside hedge as dewdrops collect in
the bosom of a leaf. The stones of the original wall are themselves
deeply hidden in turf, or from the crevices ferns descend and the pale
blooms of pennywort rise up; the lichen is furry and the yellow or
pink stonecrop is neat and dense; ivy climbs closely up and hangs down
in loose array. Up from the top of the wall or mound rise bramble and
gorse and woodbine over them, or brier and thorn and woodbine again;
and the tallest and massiest of foxgloves cleave through these with
their bells, half a hundred of them in rows five deep already open and
as many more yet in bud, dense as grapes, dewy, murmurous; and below
the foxgloves are slender parsleys, rough wood sage and poppies. At the
foot of the wall, between it and the road, is a grassy strip, where
the yarrow grows feathery with gilded cinquefoil and tormentil--or
above nettles as dense as corn rise large discs of white hog parsnip
flower, a coarse and often dirty flower that has a dry smell of
summer--or bramble and brier arch this way and that their green and
rosy and purple stems, bright leaves, flowers pink and white. Only
the shin-breaking Cornish stiles of stone, interrupting the hedge and
giving a view of barren hills or craggy-sided sea, destroy the illusion
created by this exuberance of herb and bush and the perfume of woodbine
and rose.

Nowhere is the stateliness or grace or privacy of trees more
conspicuous than about the Cornish towns and farms. The tall
round-topped elms above Padstow, for example, would be natural and
acceptable unconsciously elsewhere; but above those crossing lines of
roof they have an indescribable benevolence. The farmhouses are usually
square, dry and grey, being built of slate with grey-slated roofs
painted by lichen; some are whitewashed; in some, indeed, the stones
are of many greys and blues, with yellowish and reddish tinges, hard,
but warm in the sun and comforting to look at when close to the sea
and some ruinous promontory; few are screened by ivy or climbing rose.
The farm buildings are of the same kind, relieved by yellow straw, the
many hues of hay, the purple bracken stacks, the dark peat. The gates
are coarse and mean, of iron or of cheap or rough wood, lightly made,
patched, held together by string, and owing their only charm to the
chance use of the curved ribs of ships as gate-posts. But to many of
the buildings sycamore and ash and apple trees bent above tall grass
lend their beauty of line, of mass, of colour, of shade, of sound and
of many motions. I can never forget the rows of ash trees, the breezy
sycamores and the tamarisks by ancient Harlyn, with its barrows on the
hill, its ruins of chapel and church among rushes and poppies, its
little oak wood by the sandy river mouth where the men of old time
buried their dead, the poppied corn, the white gulls and their black
shadows wheeling over sunny turf. The file of lean woods seen between
Perranporth and St. Agnes inland. The sycamores above the farm near
Towan cross where the road dips and the deep furrow of a little valley
winds, with hay upon its slopes, out to sea. The green wood, long and
beautiful, below the gentle brown slopes of Hudder Down. The several
companies of trees in the valley by the Red River, and the white farm
of Reskajeage near by, under ash and elm, sycamore and wych-elm and
lime, a rough orchard of apples and a gnarled squat medlar to one
side--the trees grouped as human figures are when they begin to move
after some tense episode. The wych-elm, sycamore and ash round the
tower of Gwithian church and in amongst the few thatched cottages
alongside the yellow towans and violet sea. In a land of deserted
roofless houses with solid chimneys that no man wants, the narrow copse
of small spindly oaks upholding with bare crooked stems as of stone a
screen of leaves, above a brooklet that runs to the sea through dense
rush and foxglove and thistle where the sedge-warbler sings. The long
low mound of green wood nearest to Land’s End. Between Tregothal and
Bosfranken, the wet copse in a narrow valley, where red campion and
bracken and bramble are unpenetrated among flowery elders, sallows,
thorns and sycamores. A farm that has a water-mill and water gloomy
and crystal under sycamore and ash. The thin halting procession of
almost branchless trees on the ridge of the Beacon above Sancreed--a
procession that seems even at mid-day to move in another world, in the
world and in the age of the stone circles and cairns and cromlechs of
the moor beyond. The sycamore and elder that surround and tower above
Tregonebris near Boscawen Un. The avenue of ash and elm and wych-elm
and sycamore, very close together, leading from grey Nancothan mill,
where the dark-brown water mingles its noise with the rustling trees.
The wych-elms and golden-fruited sycamores about the roads near St.
Hilary, and the long avenue of ash up to the church itself, and the
elms through which the evening music floats, amidst the smell of hay,
in a misty mountained sunset.

Under the flaming fleeces of a precipitous sky, in a windless hush
and at low tide, I descended to a narrow distinct valley just where
a stream ran clear and slow through level sands to a bay, between
headlands of rocks and of caves among the rocks. The sides of the
valley near the sea were high and steep and of grass until their abrupt
end in a low but perpendicular wall of rock just above the river
sands. Inland the valley began to wind and at the bend trees came
darkly trooping down the slopes to the water. Immediately opposite the
ford--the wet sands being unscathed by any foot or hoof or wheel--a
tributary ran into the river through a gorge of its own. It was a
gorge not above a hundred feet across, and its floor was of sand save
where the brook was running down, and this floor was all in shadow
because the banks were clothed in thick underwood and in ash, sycamore,
wych-elm and oak meeting overhead. And in these sands also there was no
footprint save of the retreated sea. There was no house, nor wall, nor
road. And there was no sound in the caverns of foliage except one call
of a cuckoo as I entered and the warbling of a blackbird that mused in
the oaks and then laughed and was silent and mused again and filled
the mind with the fairest images of solitude--solitude where a maid,
thinking of naught, unthought of, unseen, combs out her yellow hair and
lets her spirit slip down into the tresses--where a man fearful of his
kind ascends out of the deeps of himself so that his eyes look bravely
and his face unstiffens and unwrinkles and his motion and gesture is
fast and free--where a child walks and stops and runs and sings in
careless joy that takes him winding far out into abysses of eternity
and makes him free of them, so that years afterward the hour and place
and sky return, and the eternity on which they opened as a casement,
but not the child, not the joy.

I like trees for the cool evening voices of their many leaves, for
their cloudy forms linked to earth by stately stems--for the pale
lifting of the sycamore leaves in breezes and also their drooping,
hushed and massed repose, for the myriad division of the light ash
leaves--for their straight pillars and for the twisted branch work,
for their still shade and their rippling or calm shimmering or dimly
glowing light, for the quicksilver drip of dawn, for their solemnity
and their dancing, for all their sounds and motions--their slow-heaved
sighs, their nocturnal murmurs, their fitful fingerings at thunder
time, their swishing and tossing and hissing in violent rain, the roar
of their congregations before the south-west wind when it seems that
they must lift up the land and fly away with it, for their rustlings
of welcome in harvest heat--for their kindliness and their serene
remoteness and inhumanity, and especially the massiest of the trees
that have also the glory of motion, the sycamores, which are the chief
tree of Cornwall, as the beeches and yews are of the Downs, the oaks
of the Weald, the elms of the Wiltshire vales.

Before I part from trees I should like to mention those of
mid-Somerset--and above all, the elms. I am thinking of them as they
are at noon on the hottest days of haymaking at the end of June. The
sky is hot, its pale blue without pity and changing to a yellow of mist
near the horizon. The land is level and all of grass, and where the hay
is not spread in swathes the grass is almost invisible for the daisies
on its motionless surface. Here and there the mower whirrs and seems
natural music, like the grasshopper’s, of the burning earth. Through
the levels wind the heavy-topped grey willows of a hidden stream.
In the hedges and in the wide fields and about the still, silent
farmhouses of stone there are many elms. They are tall and slender
despite their full mounded summits. They cast no shade. In the great
heat their green is all but grey, and their leaves are lost in the mist
which their mingling creates. Grey-hooded, grey-mantled, they seem to
be stealing away over the fields to the sanctuary of the dark-wooded
hills, low and round and lapped entirely in leaves, which stand in
the mist at the edge of the plain--to be leaving that plain to the
possession of the whirring mower and the sun of almighty summer.

Sycamores solemnized the Cornish farm in the twilight, where I asked
the farmer’s wife if she could let us have two beds for the night. She
stood in the doorway, hands on hips, watching her grandchildren’s last
excited minutes of play in the rickyard.

“He’s the master,” she replied, pointing to the farmer who was talking
to his carter, between the rickyard and the door, under the sycamores.

“Two beds?”

“That is what we should like,” said my friend and I.

“What do you want with two beds?” he asked with a tinge of scorn as
well as of pity in his frank amusement. “My missus and I have only had
one bed these forty years.”

Here he laughed so gaily that he could not have embarrassed the very
devil of puritanism, and turning to his man he called forth a deep
bass laughter and from his wife a peal that shook her arms so that she
raised them to the sides of the porch for better support; the children
also turned their laughter our way.

“But perhaps one of you kicks in his sleep?... We don’t.... Come
inside. I dare say you are tired.... Good-night, John. Now, children,
up with you.”

I think they were the most excellent pair of man and woman I ever
saw. Both were of a splendid physical type, she the more energetic,
black-haired, black-eyed, plump and tall and straight; he the more
enduring, fair-haired and bearded, blue-eyed, hardly her equal in
height, certainly not in words. In forty years neither had overpowered
the other. They had not even agreed to take separate paths, but like
two school-boys, new friends, they could afford to contend together
in opinions without fear of damage or of lazy truce. He had ploughed
and sowed and reaped: she had borne him seven children, had baked and
churned and stitched. They had loved sweet things together, and, with
curses at times, their children and the land. Physical strength and
purity--that were in them the whole of morality--seemed to have given
them that equality with the conditions of life which philosophy has
done nothing but talk about. They of all men and women had perhaps
jarred least upon the music of the spheres. They had the right and
power to live, and the end was laughter.

In all those years they had been separated but once. Until four years
ago she had not been out of Cornwall except to bury her mother, who had
suddenly died in London. Two hundred pounds fell to her share on that
death and the money arrived one morning after the harvest thanksgiving.
For a week she continued to go about her work in the old way save that
she sent rather hurriedly for a daughter who had just left her place
as cook in Exeter. At the end of the week, having stored the apples
and shown her daughter how to use the separator, she walked in to
Penzance in her best clothes but without even a handbag; her husband
was out with his gun. By the next day she was at Liverpool. She sent
off a picture postcard, with a little note written by the shopkeeper,
saying that she would be back by Christmas, and telling her husband
to sell the old bull. Then she sailed for New York. She saw Niagara;
she visited her nephew, John Davy, at Cincinnati; she spent two weeks
in railway travelling west and south, and saw the Indians. Four days
before Christmas she was back in the rickyard, driving before her a
young bull and carrying in her hand a bunch of maize.

“Well, Ann, you’re back before your time,” said her husband, after
praising the beast.

“Yes, Samuel, and I feel as if I could whitewash the dairy, that I do,”
said she.

“Suppose you wait till to-morrow,” proposed Sam Davy.

“I think I will, for I can hear that Mary is behind with the separator.”

“She’s a good girl, but she hasn’t got your patience, my dear.”

“Oh, here, Sam, here’s the change,” she said, giving him the bunch of
maize.

       *       *       *       *       *

In Cornwall many of the women looked less English than the men. The
noticeable men were fair-haired and, of fair complexion, blue-eyed and
rather small-headed, upright and of good bearing. The noticeable women
had black hair, pale, seldom swarthy, faces, very dark eyes. Perhaps
the eyes were more foreign than anything else in them: they were
singularly immobile and seldom changed in expression with their voices.
Several of the dark-eyed, black-haired women had a beauty of a fearless
character like gypsy women, in their movement and expression. But the
wives of small farmers and miners on piecework look old very soon and
are puckered and shadowy in the face. Some of these middle-aged and
old women suggested an early and barbarous generation. The eyes were
small and deep-set, and the face narrowed forward like an animal’s;
which gave the whole a peering expression of suspicion and even alarm.
The eyes of most human beings are causes of bewilderment and dismay
if curiously looked at; but the strangest I ever saw were in an old
Cornish woman. They were black and round as a child’s, with a cold
brightness that made them seem not of the substance of other eyes, but
like a stone. They were set in a narrow, bony face of parchment among
grey hair crisp and disarrayed. I saw them only for a few minutes
while I asked a few questions about the way, and it was as much as I
could do to keep up the conversation, so much did those motionless eyes
invite me to plunge into an abyss of human personality--such intense
loneliness and strangeness did they create, since they proclaimed
shrilly and clearly that beyond a desire to be fed and clothed we had
nothing in common. Had they peered up at me out of a cromlech or hut at
Bosporthennis I could not have been more puzzled and surprised.

Men and women were hospitable and ready to smile as the Welsh are; and
they have an alluring naïveté as well as some righteousness. One family
was excessively virtuous or had a wish to appear so: I do not know
which alternative to like the less, since it was in a matter of game.
They rented land on a large estate and had a right to the rabbits: the
hares were sacred to the great landowner. The farmer’s wife assured me
that one of her sons had lately brought in a lame hare and proposed to
put it out of its pain, but that she had said: “No, take it out and
let it die outside anywhere. The best thing is to be afraid in things
of this kind and then you won’t go wrong.” Doing much the same kind or
quantity of manual work as their husbands and being much out of doors,
the women’s manners were confident and free. Their speech was as a rule
fluent and grammatical and clearly delivered, with less accent than in
any part of England. Coming into a mining village one day and wanting
tea, I asked a woman who was drawing water from a farmyard well if she
could make me some, thinking she was the farmer’s wife. She said she
would, but took me to one of a small row of cottages over the way,
where her husband was half-naked in the midst of his Saturday wash.
Taking no notice of him she led me into the sitting-room and, with a
huge loaf held like a violin, began buttering and cutting thin slices
while she talked to me, to the little children and to her husband, from
the adjacent kitchen. She was tall, straight as a pillar, black-haired,
with clear untanned but slightly swarthy skin, black eyes, kindly
gleaming cheeks and red lips smiling above her broad breast and hips.
Her clothes were black but in rags that hardly clung to her shoulders
and waist. She was barely five and twenty, but had six young children
about her, one in a cradle by the hearth and another still crawling
at her feet. Her only embarrassment came when I asked to pay for my
tea--she began adding up the cost, a pennyworth of bread and butter, a
halfpennyworth of tea, etc.! The kitchen consisted simply of a large
grate and baking oven, plain tables and chairs on a flagged floor.
But the sitting-room was a museum--with photographs of a volunteer
corps, of friends and relations on the wall over the fire; foxgloves in
jam-pots surrounded by green crinkled paper in the fireplace; on the
mantelpiece, cheap little vases and scraps of ore and more photographs.
On the walls were three pictures: one of two well-dressed children
being timidly inspected by fallow deer; another of a grandmother
showing a book to a child whose attention is diverted by the frolics
of two kittens at her side; and a third of Jesus, bleeding and crowned
with thorns, high on a cross over a marble city beneath a romantic
forest ridge, behind which was the conflagration of a crimson sunset.

Other sitting-rooms were similarly adorned, with the addition of a
picture of John Wesley as a child escaping from the window of a
burning house, with many anxious men holding up their hands from below.
The smell of flowers and of sun-warmed furniture and old upholstery
mingles in such rooms.

But the kitchens are often as charming as in Wales. I remember one
especially near Carn Galver. The farmhouse was of whitened stone under
a steep thatch. In front were fuchsia trees in the corner of a stony
yard; to one side, the haystacks and piles of furze and bracken and
peat. The farmer’s wife was carrying peat on an iron hook into the
kitchen and I followed her. A pan of yellow scalded cream stood inside.
The fireplace was a little room in itself, with seats at each side and
a little fire of wood and three upright turves in one corner of the
great stone hearth: over the fire the kettle boiled. Horse ornaments
of polished brass surmounted the fireplace. The wallpaper had given
up its pattern long since to a smoky uneven gold; nailed to it were
calendars and lists of fairs and sales; against it were two small
tables, one to support a Bible and an almanac, the other spread with a
white cloth on which was a plate and a bowl of cream. Behind the door
and between it and the fire was a high-backed settle of dark wood,
with elbow-rests. The floor was flagged and sanded. The light came in
through a little square window on to the Bible by the opposite wall,
and through the open door on to the figure of the housewife, a woman
of forty. A delicate white face shone beneath a broad untrimmed straw
hat that was tied tightly under her chin so as to hide her ears and
most of her black hair. Her black skirt was kilted up behind; a white
apron contrasted with black shoes, black stockings and black clothes.
At first her face was hardly seen, not only because but a part of
it emerged from the shell of her hat, but because the spirit that
emanated from it was more than the colour and features and so much in
harmony with the sea and crag and moor and dolmen of her land. It is
evading an insuperable difficulty to say that this spirit was not so
much human as fay. It was the spirit of which her milky complexion,
the bright black eyes, white teeth and fine red lips of her readily
smiling and naïvely watching fearless face, her slender form, her
light and rapid movements upon small feet, were only the more obvious
expressions. Her spirit danced before her--not quite visibly, not quite
audibly--as she moved or spoke or merely smiled; if it could have been
seen it would have been a little singing white flame changing to blue
and crimson in its perpetual flickering. It was a spirit of laughter,
of laughter unquenchable since the beginning of time, of laughter in
spite of and because of all things, the laughter of life like a jewel
in desolate places. It was a spirit most ancient and yet childlike,
birdlike: it belonged to a world outside any which other human beings
ever seemed to touch, but the laughter in it made it friendly, for
it was far deeper than humour, it was gaiety of heart. Her goings
to and fro on those light feet had the grace, quickness, suddenness
of a bird, of a wren that slips from twig to twig and jets out its
needle of song, of a moorhen flicking its tail and hooting sharply.
Her laugh startled and delighted like the laugh of the woodpecker as
it leaps across the glades--like the whistling of birds up amongst
the dark clouds and the moon. But most of all she called to mind the
meadow pipit of her own crags, that rises from green ledges out over
the sea and then, falling slantwise with body curved like a crescent,
utters his passionate pulsating song, so rapid and passionate that it
seems impossible and unfit that it should end except in death, yet
suddenly ceasing as it lands again upon the samphire or the thrift. The
spirit was as quicksilver in the corners of her eyes, as quicksilver
in the heart. Such a maid she must have been as the bard would have
thought to send out the thrush to woo for him, when he heard the bird
of ermine breast singing from the new-leaved hazel at dawn, on the
edge of a brook among the steep woods--singing artfully with a voice
like a silver bell--solemnly, too, so as to seem to be performing a
sacrifice--and amorously, bringing balm to lovers’ hearts and inspiring
the bard to send by him a message to the sun of all maidens that she,
white as the snow of the first winter night, should come out to the
green woods to him. She had lived for generations on the moor, for
generations upon generations, and this was what she had gained from
heather and furze and crag and seawind and sunshine tempered by no
trees--inextinguishable laughter. But she was inarticulate. She milked
the cows, made butter, baked bread, kept the peat fire burning and
tended her children. When she talked, I asked for more cream. Perhaps
after several more generations have passed she will be a poet and
astonish the world with a moorland laughter of words that endure.

       *       *       *       *       *

Everything in that house was old or smooth and bright with use, and
the hollowed threshold of the doorway in the sun put me in mind of
a hundred old things and of their goodliness to mortal eyes--the
wrecked ship’s ribs, their bolt-holes rusty, that stand among nettles
as gate-posts--the worn dark stones that rock to the tread among the
ripples of an umbrageous ford--many a polished stile and gate--the
group of rigid but still gracious bowery thorns dotted with crimson
haws in the middle of a meadow, their holes and lower branches rubbed
hard and smooth and ruddy like iron by the cows--the ash staff
beginning to bend like its master, the old man upon the roads who once
wore scarlet and wound the horn for Mr. ----’s hounds. Odd it is how
old use sanctifies a little thing. There was once a hut where a good
man, but a poor and a weak and unwise, stayed all one fair summer and
talked of English roads--he was a lord of the roads, at least of South
Country roads--and of ships, which he knew. Now on the first night of
his stay, needing a candlestick he kicked off the top of a pointed
wooden paling, so as to make a five-angled piece on which he stuck the
candle in its own grease. All through his stay he used the candlestick,
when he read the _Divina Commedia_ and _Pantagruel_ and _Henry Brocken_
and recollected airs of Italy and Spain, amidst the sound of nightjars
and two leafy streams: the light flickered out as he mused about the
open sea, calm but boundless and without known harbour, on which he was
drifting cheerfully, regardless of Time, pied with nights and days.
The hut was burnt and the man went--to drown a little afterwards with
a hundred unlike himself in the sea--but among nettle and dock the
candlestick was picked up safe. It had broken off straight and the
simple shape was pleasant; it was dark with age; along with the mound
and little pillar of wax remaining it had the shape of a natural thing;
and it was his.

Animate as well as inanimate things are open to this sanctification
by age or use. I am not here thinking of ceremonious use--for which
I have small natural respect, so that I have been denied the power
of appreciating either a great religious pomp or the dancing of
Mademoiselle Genée. But some men, particularly sailors and field
labourers, but also navvies and others who work heavily with their
hands, have this glory of use. Their faces, their clothes, their
natures all appear to act and speak harmoniously, so that they cause
a strong impression of personality which is to be deeply enjoyed in a
world of masks, especially of black clerical masks. One of the best
examples of this kind was a gamekeeper who daily preceded me by twenty
or thirty yards in a morning walk up through a steep wood of beeches.
He was a short, stiffly-built and stoutish man who wore a cap, thick
skirted coat and breeches, leather gaiters and heavy boots, all patched
and stained, all of nearly the same colour as his lightish-brown hair
and weathered skin, but not so dark as the gun over his shoulder. The
shades of this colour were countless and made up like the colour of a
field of ripe wheat, which they would have resembled had they not been
liberally dusted all over, just as his brown beard was grizzled. He
went slowly up, swinging slightly at the shoulders and always smoking a
pipe of strong shag tobacco of which the fumes hovered in the moist air
with inexpressible sweetness and a good brown savour: if I may say so,
the fit emanation of the brown woodland man who, when he stood still,
looked like the stump of a tree.




CHAPTER X

SUMMER--SUSSEX


Far up on the Downs the air of day and night is flavoured by
honeysuckle and new hay. It is good to walk, it is good to lie still;
the rain is good and so is the sun; and whether the windy or the quiet
air be the better let us leave to a December judgment to decide. One
day the rain falls and there is no wind, and all the movement is in
the chaos of the dark sky; and thus is made the celestial fairness of
an earth that is brighter than the heavens; for the green and lilac of
the grasses and the yellow of the goat’s-beard flowers glow, and the
ripening corn is airy light. But next day the sun is early hot. The wet
hay steams and is sweet. The beams pour into a southward coombe of the
hills and the dense yew is warm as a fruit-wall, so that the utmost
of fragrance is extracted from the marjoram and thyme and fanned by
the coming and going of butterflies; and in contrast with this gold
and purple heat on flower and wing, through the blue sky and along the
hill-top moist clouds are trooping, of the grey colour of melting snow.
The great shadows of the clouds brood long over the hay, and in the
darker hollows the wind rustles the dripping thickets until mid-day. On
another morning after night rain the blue sky is rippled and crimped
with high, thin white clouds by several opposing breezes. Vast forces
seem but now to have ceased their feud. The battle is over, and there
are all the signs of it plain to be seen; but they have laid down their
arms, and peace is broad and white in the sky, but of many colours
on the earth--for there is blue of harebell and purple of rose-bay
among the bracken and popping gorse, and heather and foxglove are
purple above the sand, and the mint is hoary lilac, the meadow-sweet
is foam, there is rose of willow-herb and yellow of fleabane at the
edge of the water, and purple of gentian and cistus yellow on the
Downs, and infinite greens in those little dense Edens which nettle and
cow-parsnip and bramble and elder make every summer on the banks of the
deep lanes. A thousand swifts wheel as if in a fierce wind over the
highest places of the hills, over the great seaward-looking camp and
its three graves and antique thorns, down to the chestnuts that stand
about the rickyards in the cornland below.

These are the hours that seem to entice and entrap the airy inhabitants
of some land beyond the cloud mountains that rise farther than the
farthest of downs. Legend has it that long ago strange children were
caught upon the earth, and being asked how they had come there, they
said that one day as they were herding their sheep in a far country
they chanced on a cave; and within they heard music as of heavenly
bells, which lured them on and on through the corridors of that cave
until they reached our earth; and here their eyes, used only to a
twilight between a sun that had set for ever and a night that had never
fallen, were dazed by the August glow, and lying bemused they were
caught before they could find the earthly entrance to their cave. Small
wonder would this adventure be from a region no matter how blessed,
when the earth is wearing the best white wild roses or when August is
at its height.

The last hay-waggon has hardly rolled between the elms before the
reaper and the reaping-machines begin to work. The oats and wheat
are in tents over all the land. Then, then it is hard not to walk
over the brown in the green of August grass. There is a roving spirit
everywhere. The very tents of the corn suggest a bivouac. The white
clouds coming up out of the yellow corn and journeying over the blue
have set their faces to some goal. The traveller’s-joy is tangled over
the hazels and over the faces of the small chalk-pits. The white beam
and the poplar and the sycamore fluttering show the silver sides of
their leaves and rustle farewells. The perfect road that goes without
hedges under elms and through the corn says, “Leave all and follow.”
How the bridges overleap the streams at one leap, or at three, in
arches like those of running hounds! The far-scattered, placid sunsets
pave the feet of the spirit with many a road to joy; the huge, vacant
halls of dawn give a sense of godlike power.

But it is hard to make anything like a truce between these two
incompatible desires, the one for going on and on over the earth, the
other that would settle for ever, in one place as in a grave and have
nothing to do with change. Suppose a man to receive notice of death, it
would be hard to decide whether to walk or sail until the end, seeing
no man, or none but strangers; or to sit--alone--and by thinking or
not thinking to make the change to come as little as is permitted. The
two desires will often painfully alternate. Even on these harvest days
there is a temptation to take root for ever in some corner of a field
or on some hill from which the world and the clouds can be seen at a
distance. For the wheat is as red as the most red sand, and up above it
tower the elms, dark prophets persuading to silence and a stillness
like their own. Away on the lesser Downs the fields of pale oats are
liquid within their border of dark woods; they also propose deep
draughts of oblivion and rest. Then, again, there is the field--the
many fields--where a regiment of shocks of oats are ranked under the
white moon between rows of elms on the level Sussex land not far from
the sea. The contrast of the airy matter underfoot and the thin moon
overhead, with the massy dark trees, as it were, suspended between;
the numbers and the order of the sheaves; their inviolability, though
protected but by the gateway through which they are seen--all satisfy
the soul as they can never satisfy the frame. Then there are the mists
before heat which make us think of autumn or not, according to our
tempers. All night the aspens have been shivering and the owls exulting
under a clear full moon and above the silver of a great dew. You
climb the steep chalk slope, through the privet and dog-wood coppice;
among the scattered junipers--in this thick haze as in darkness they
group themselves so as to make fantastic likenesses of mounted men,
animals, monsters; over the dead earth in the shade of the broad yews,
and thence suddenly under lightsome sprays of guelder-rose and their
cherry-coloured berries; over the tufted turf; and then through the
massed beeches, cold and dark as a church and silent; and so out to the
level waste cornland at the top, to the flints and the clay. There a
myriad oriflammes of ragwort are borne up on all stems of equal height,
straight and motionless, and near at hand quite clear, but farther away
forming a green mist until, farther yet, all but the flowery surface
is invisible, and that is but a glow. The stillness of the green and
golden multitudes under the grey mist, perfectly still though a wind
flutters the high tops of the beech, has an immortal beauty, and that
they should ever change does not enter the mind which is thus for the
moment lured happily into a strange confidence and ease. But the sun
gains power in the south-east. It changes the mist into a fleeting
garment, not of cold or of warm grey, but of diaphanous gold. There is
a sea-like moan of wind in the half-visible trees, a wavering of the
mist to and fro until it is dispersed far and wide as part of the very
light, of the blue shade, of the colour of cloud and wood and down.
As the mist is unwoven the ghostly moon is disclosed, and a bank of
dead white clouds where the Downs should be. Under the very eye of the
veiled sun a golden light and warmth begins to nestle among the mounds
of foliage at the surface of the low woods. The beeches close by have
got a new voice in their crisp, cool leaves, of which every one is
doing something--cool, though the air itself is warm. Wood-pigeons coo.
The white cloud-bank gives way to an immeasurable half-moon of Downs,
some bare, some saddle-backed with woods, and far away and below, out
of the ocean of countless trees in the southern veil, a spire. It is
a spire which at this hour is doubtless moving a thousand men with a
thousand thoughts and hopes and memories of men and causes, but moves
me with the thought alone that just a hundred years ago was buried
underneath it a child, a little child whose mother’s mother was at the
pains to inscribe a tablet saying to all who pass by that he was once
“an amiable and most endearing child.”

And what nights there are on the hills. The ash-sprays break up the
low full moon into a flower of many sparks. The Downs are heaved up
into the lighted sky--surely they heave in their tranquillity as with a
slowly taken breath. The moon is half-way up the sky and exactly over
the centre of the long curve of Downs; just above them lies a long
terrace of white cloud, and at their feet gleams a broad pond, the rest
of the valley being utterly dark and indistinguishable, save a few
scattered lamps and one near meadow that catches the moonlight so as to
be transmuted to a lake. But every rainy leaf upon the hill is brighter
than any of the few stars above, and from many leaves and blades hang
drops as large and bright as the glowworms in their recesses. Larger
by a little, but not brighter, are the threes and fours of lights
at windows in the valley. The wind has fallen, but a mile of woods
unlading the rain from their leaves make a sound of wind, while each
separate drop can be heard from the nearest branches, a noise of rapt
content, as if they were telling over again the kisses of the shower.
The air itself is heavy as mead with the scent of yew and juniper and
thyme.




CHAPTER XI

HAMPSHIRE--AN UMBRELLA MAN


A beggar is a rich man on some of these August days, especially one I
know, whom first I met some Augusts ago now. A fine Sunday afternoon
had sprinkled the quiet and thinly-peopled land with black-dressed men
and white-dressed women, the older married couples and their trains
of children keeping chiefly to the roads and most straightforward
paths, the younger, with one child or none, choosing rather the green
lanes, while the lovers and the boys found out tall hedge-sides and the
footpaths across which more than one year’s growth of hazel had spread,
so that the shortest of the maids must stoop. Many showers following a
dry season made miles of the country as clean and fragrant as a garden.
Honeysuckle and privet were in every hedge with flowers that bring a
thrill of summer bridals on their scent. The brisk wind was thymy from
the Downs. The ragwort was in its glory; it rose tall as a man in one
straight leap of dark-foliaged stem, and then crowned itself in the
boldest and most splendid yellows derived from a dark golden disc and
almost lemon rays; it was as if Apollo had come down to keep the flocks
of a farmer on these chalk hills and his pomp had followed him out of
the sky. A few birds still sang; one lark now and then, a cirl-bunting
among the topmost haws of a thorn, chiffchaffs in the bittersweet and
hazel of the little copses.

There was apparently comfort, abundance and quiet everywhere. They
were seen in the rickyards where grand haystacks, newly thatched, stood
around ancient walnut-trees. Even the beeches had a decorous look in
their smooth boles and perfect lavish foliage. The little patches of
flowery turf by the roadside and at corners were brighter and warmer
than ever, as the black bees and the tawny skipper butterflies flew
from bloom to bloom of the crimson knapweed. Amplest and most unctuous
of all in their expression of the ceremonious leisure of the day and
the maturity of the season were the cart-horses. They leaned their
large heads benignly over the rails or gates; their roan or chestnut
flanks were firm and polished; manes, tails and fetlocks spotless;
now and then they lifted up their feet and pressed their toes into
the ground, showing their enormous shoes that shone and were of girth
sufficient to make a girdle for the lightest of the maids passing by.

Sunday with not too strict a rod of black and white ruled the land and
made it all but tedious except in the longest of the green lanes, which
dipped steeply under oaks to a brook muffled in leaves and rose steeply
again, a track so wet in spring--and full of the modest golden green of
saxifrage flowers--that only the hottest Sunday ever saw it disturbed
except by carter and horses. In a hundred yards the oak-hidden windings
gave the traveller a feeling of reclusion as if he were coiled in a
spool; very soon a feeling of possession ripened into one of armed
tyranny if another’s steps clattered on the stones above. Sometimes in
a goodly garden a straight alley of shadows leads away from the bright
frequented borders to--we know not quite whither, and perhaps, too much
delighted with half-sad reverie, never learn, smother even the guesses
of fancy, lest they should bring some old unpleasant truth in their
train; but if the fancy will thread the alley and pass the last of the
shadows it is into some such lane as this that it would gladly emerge,
to come at last upon the pure wild. It seemed that I had come upon
the pure wild in this lane, for in a bay of turf alongside the track,
just large enough for a hut and thickly sheltered by an oak, though
the south-west sun crept in, was a camp. Under the oak and at the edge
of the tangled bramble and brier and bracken was a low purple light
from those woodside flowers, self-heal and wood-betony. A perambulator
with a cabbage in it stood at one corner; leaning against it was an
ebony-handled umbrella and two or three umbrella-frames; underneath
it an old postman’s bag containing a hammer and other tools. Close by
stood half a loaf on a newspaper, several bottles of bright water,
a black pot of potatoes ready for boiling, a tin of water steaming
against a small fire of hazel twigs. Out on the sunny grass two shirts
were drying. In the midst was the proprietor, his name revealed in
fresh chalk on the side of his perambulator: “John Clark, Hampshire.”

He had spent his last pence on potatoes and had been given the cabbage.
No one would give him work on a Sunday. He had no home, no relations.
Being deaf, he did not look for company. So he stood up, to get dry and
to think, think, think, his hands on his hips, while he puffed at an
empty pipe. During his meditation a snail had crawled half-way up his
trousers, and was now all but down again. He was of middle height and
build, the crookedest of men, yet upright, like a branch of oak which
comes straight with all its twistings. His head was small and round,
almost covered by bristly grey hair like lichen, through which peered
quiet blue eyes; the face was irregular, almost shapeless, like dough
being kneaded, worn by travel, passion, pain, and not a few blows;
where the skin was visible at all through the hair it was like red
sandstone; his teeth were white and strong and short like an old dog’s.
His rough neck descended into a striped half-open shirt, to which was
added a loose black waistcoat divided into thin perpendicular stripes
by ribs of faded gold; his trousers, loose and patched and short,
approached the colour of a hen pheasant; his bare feet were partly
hidden by old black boots. His voice was hoarse and, for one of his
enduring look, surprisingly small, and produced with an effort and a
slight jerk of the head.

He was a Sussex man, born in the year 1831, on June the twenty-first
(it seemed a foppery in him to remember the day, and it was impossible
to imagine with what ceremony he had remembered it year by year, during
half a century or near it, on the roads of Sussex, Kent, Surrey and
Hampshire). His mother was a Wild--there were several of them buried
not far away under the carved double-headed tombstones by the old
church with the lancet windows and the four yews. He was a labourer’s
son, and he had already had a long life of hoeing and reaping and
fagging when he enlisted at Chatham. He had kept his musket bright,
slept hard and wet, and starved on thirteenpence a day, moving from
camp to camp every two years. He had lost his youth in battle, for a
bullet went through his knee; he lay four months in hospital, and they
took eighteen pieces of bone out of his wound--he was still indignant
because he was described as only “slightly wounded” when he was
discharged after a “short service” of thirteen years. He showed his
gnarled knee to explain his crookedness. Little he could tell of the
battle except the sobbing of the soldier next to him--“a London chap
from Haggerston way. Lord! he called for his mother and his God and me
to save him, and the noise he made was worse than the firing and the
groaning of the horses, and I was just thinking how I could stop his
mouth for him when a bullet hits me, and down I goes like a baby.”

He had been on the road forty years. For a short time after his
discharge he worked on the land and lived in a cottage with his wife
and one child. The church bells were beginning to ring, and I asked him
if he was going to church. At first he said nothing, but looked down at
his striped waistcoat and patched trousers; then, with a quick violent
gesture of scorn, he lifted up his head and even threw it back before
he spoke. “Besides,” he said, “I remember how it was my little girl
died----My little girl, says I, but she would have been a big handsome
woman now, forty-eight years old on the first of May that is gone. She
was lying in bed with a little bit of a cough, and she was gone as
white as a lily, and I went in to her when I came home from reaping.
I saw she looked bad and quiet-like--like a fish in a hedge--and
something came over me, and I caught hold of both her hands in both of
mine and held them tight, and put my head close up to hers and said,
‘Now look here, Polly, you’ve got to get well. Your mother and me can’t
stand losing you. And you aren’t meant to die; such a one as you be
for a lark.’ And I squeezed her little hands, and all my nature seemed
to rise up and try to make her get well. Polly she looked whiter than
ever and afraid; I suppose I was a bit rough and dirty and sunburnt,
for ’twas a hot harvest and ’twas the end of the second week of it,
and I was that fierce I felt I ought to have had my way.... All that
night I thought I had done a wrong thing trying to keep her from dying
that way, and I tell you I cried in case I had done any harm by it....
That very night she died without our knowing it. She was a bonny maid,
that fond of flowers. The night she was taken ill she was coming home
with me from the Thirteen Acre, where I’d been hoeing the mangolds, and
she had picked a rose for her mother. All of a sudden she looks at it
and says, ‘It’s gone, it’s broke, it’s gone, it’s gone, gone, gone,’
and she kept on, ‘It’s broke, it’s gone, it’s gone,’ and when she got
home she ran up to her mother, crying, ‘The wild rose is broke, mother;
broke, gone, gone,’ she says, just like that,” said the old man, in a
high finical voice more like that of a bird than a child....

“Then my old woman--well, she was only a bit of a wench too; seventeen
when we were married--she took ill and died within a week after....
There was a purpose in it.... It was then the end of harvest. I spent
all my wages down at the Fighting Cocks, and then I set out to walk
to Mildenhall in Wiltshire, where my wife came from. On the way I met
a chap I had quarrelled with in Egypt, and he says to me, ‘Hullo,
Scrammy-handed Jack,’ with a sort of look, and I, not thinking what I
did, I set about him, and before I knew it he was lying there as might
be dead, and I went and gave myself up, and I don’t mind saying that I
wished I might be hanged for it. However, I did six months. That was
how I came to be in the umbrella line. I took up with a chap who did a
bit of tinkering and umbrella-mending and grinding in the roving way,
and a job of hoeing or mowing now and then. He died not so very long
after in the year of the siege of Paris, and I have been alone ever
since. Nor I haven’t been to church since, any more than a blackbird
would go and perch on the shoulder of one of those ladies with feathers
and wings and a bit of a fox in their hats.”

Labourer, soldier, labourer, tinker, umbrella man, he had always
wandered, and knew the South Country between Fordingbridge and Dover
as a man knows his garden. Every village, almost every farmhouse,
especially if there were hops on the land, he knew, and could see with
his blue eyes as he remembered them and spoke their names. I never
met a man who knew England as he did. As he talked of places his eyes
were alight and turned in their direction, and his arm stretched out
to point, moving as he went through his itinerary, so that verily,
wherever he was, he seemed to carry in his head the relative positions
of all the other places where he had laboured and drunk and lit his
solitary fire. “Was you ever at H----?” he said, pointing to the Downs,
through which he seemed to see H---- itself. “General ----, that
commanded us, lived there. He died there three years ago at the age of
eighty-eight, and till he died I was always sure of a half-crown if I
called there on a Christmas Eve, as I generally managed to do.” Of any
place mentioned he could presently remember something significant--the
words of a farmer, a song, a signboard, a wonderful crop, the good
ale--the fact that forty-nine years ago the squire used to go to church
in a smock frock. All the time his face was moved with free and broad
expressions as he thought and remembered, like an animal’s face. Living
alone and never having to fit himself into human society, he had not
learnt to keep his face in a vice. He was returning--if the grave was
not too near at the age of seventy-seven--to a primeval wildness and
simplicity. It was a pleasure to see him smoke--to note how it eased
his chest--to see him spit and be the better for it. The outdoor life
had brought him rheumatism, but a clear brain also and a wild purity, a
physical cleanliness too, and it was like being with a well-kept horse
to stand beside him; and this his house was full of the scent of the
bracken growing under the oaks. Earth had not been a kind but a stern
mother, like some brawny full-bosomed housewife with many children,
who spends all her long days baking and washing, and making clothes,
and tending the sick one, and cutting bread and pouring out tea, and
cuffing one and cuddling another and listening to one’s tale, and
hushing their unanimous chatter with a shout or a bang of her enormous
elbow on the table. The blows of such a one are shrewd, but they are
not as the sweetness of her nursing voice for enduring in the memory of
bearded men and many-childed women.

Once or twice again I met him in later summers near the same place. The
last time he had been in the infirmary, and was much older. His fire
was under the dense shelf of a spruce bough in a green deserted road
worn deep in the chalk, blocked at both ends, and trodden by few mortal
feet. Only a few yards away, under another spruce, lay a most ancient
sheep who had apparently been turned into the lane to browse at peace.
She was lame in one leg, and often fed as she knelt. Her head was dark
grey and wise, her eyes pearly green and iridescent with an oblong
pupil of blackish-blue, quiet, yet full of fear; her wool was dense
but short and of a cinder grey; her dark horny feet were overgrown
from lack of use. She would not budge even when a dog sniffed at her,
but only bowed her head and threatened vainly to butt. She was huge
and heavy and content, though always all alone. As she lay there, her
wool glistening with rain, I had often wondered what those eyes were
aware of, what part she played in the summer harmonies of night and
day, the full night heavens and cloudless noon, storm and dawn, and the
long moist heat of dewy mornings. She was now shorn, and the old man
watched her as he drank the liquor in which a cabbage and a piece of
bacon had been boiled. “I often thinks,” he said, “that I be something
like that sheep ... ‘slightly wounded’ ... but not ‘short service’ now
... haha! ... left alone in this here lane to browse a bit while the
weather’s fine and folks are kind.... But I don’t know but what she is
better off. Look there,” he said, pointing to a wound which the shearer
had made in one of her nipples, where flies clustered like a hideous
flower of crape, “I have been spending this hour and more flicking
the flies off her.... Nobody won’t do that for me--unless I come in
for five shillings a week Old Age Pension. But I reckon that won’t be
for a roving body like me without a letter-box.” In the neighbouring
field a cart-horse shook herself with a noise of far-off thunder and
laughed shrilly and threw up her heels and raced along the hedge. A
bee could be seen going in and out of the transparent white flowers
of convolvulus. The horse had her youth and strength and a workless
day before her; the bee its business, in which was its life, among
sunbeams and flowers; and they were glad. The old man smacked his lips
as he drained the salty broth, tried three times to light his empty
pipe and then knocked out the ashes and spat vigorously, and took a
turn up the lane alone in the scent of the bracken.




CHAPTER XII

CHILDREN OF EARTH--HAMPSHIRE AND SUSSEX


At the end of the lane, at the head of one of the beechen chalky
coombes, just where the beeches cease and the flinty clay begins,
stands a thatched cottage under five tall ash-trees. A grassy lane runs
by, but on three sides the place is surrounded by huge naked concave
sweeps of grey ploughland which take the February sunshine and cloud
shadow as delicately as beaten silver. The walls are of grey-white
soft stone, but only a little of them is visible, because the steep
thatch sweeps almost to the ground and overhangs the gables, in each of
which is a small window and under one a door. In hot summer or windy
winter, if the field happens to be without a crop, the earth is of the
same colour as the thatch, and the cottage looks as if it were the
work--like a mole-hill--of some creature that has worked underground
and risen up just there and rested, peering out of the two dark windows
upon the world. It is impossible to find any point of view from which
any house can be seen along with this, except one--the ash-trees, the
tall hazels of the lane, or the swelling fields hide them away. But the
pewits loop their flight every spring over and round about the cottage,
and the dark eyes under the thatch can always see a hare, and often
half-a-dozen. Whether the ashes are purple in spring, yellow in autumn
or grey in winter, whether the surrounding fields are bare, or green
with turnips, or yellow with charlock, or empurpled gold with ripe
wheat, the cottage is always the same stubborn, dull, simple mound
raised up out of the earth. The one other house is not so high; nor has
it eyes; nor do an old man and a girl and two children go in and out of
it; it is, in fact, not a house of the living, but of the dead, a round
tumulus at the edge of the hill.

The grey mound of the dead and the grey house of the living are at
their best in the midst of winter and in the midst of summer. Standing
upon the tumulus in the north-west wind, the cottage could be seen
huddled under the lashing trees. Many a thousand beech-trees on the
steep slopes below gave out a roar, and it was a majestic position
to be up there, seeing and feeling that the strong wind was scouring
the world with a stream miles deep and miles wide. Far underneath,
two beechen promontories with bald white brows projected into the
vast valley; not really much lower than the hill of the tumulus, but
seeming so in that more than Amazonian stream of air. Beyond these
promontories the broad land was washed bright and clear. Nearer at hand
the thrice cleaned traveller’s-joy was as silken foam surging upon the
surface of black yews and olive hazels. The kestrel swayed and lunged
in his flight. Branches gleamed, hard and nervously moving. Rain-pools
glittered, and each brittle stem and flower of a dead plant, each
grass-blade and brown lock of beech or oak-leaf, gave out its little
noise to join the oceanic murmur of the earth. Now and then a dead
leaf took flight, rose high and went out over the valley till it was
invisible, never descending, in search of the moon. Near the horizon
a loose white drift went rapidly just over the summits of the highest
woods; but in the upper air were the finest flowers of the wind--hard
white flowers of cloud, flowers and mad tresses and heaven-wide
drapery of gods, and some small and white like traveller’s-joy, as
if up there also they travelled and knew the houseless joy along the
undulating highway of the deep wind. And the little house was as
a watch-tower planted in the middle swirl of the current that was
scouring valley and wood and sky and water and, as far as it could, the
dull eyes and duller brains of men.

In summer I saw it at the end of one of those days of sun and wind and
perfectly clear air when the earth appears immensely heavy and great
and strong--so that for a moment it is possible to know the majesty of
its course in space--and the sheep very light, like mere down, as they
crawl in a flock over the grass. Swathes and wisps of white cloud were
strewn over the high blue sky as if by haymakers. But the lanes were
deep, and for miles at a time nearly shut out the sky, and all the day
the lanes were empty and wholly mine. Here the high banks were thickly
grown with wild parsnip, and its umbels of small yellow-green flowers,
fragrant and a little over-sweet, were alive and, as it were, boiling
over with bees and the sunniest flies. There the hazel was laced with
white bryony, whose leaves and pale tendrils went hovering and swimming
and floating over the hedge. In one place an elder-tree stood out of
the hedge, stiff, with few branches, and every leaf upon them red as
a rose. Wherever there was a waste strip beside the road the tall
yellow ragwort grew densely, each of the nearer flowers as hard and
clear as brass, the farther ones dimly glowing and half lost in the
green mist of their leaves and the haze of the brightness of their
multitudes. Where the road changed into an unused lane the grass was
tall, and under the hazels, yet fully seen, were the wild basil and
marjoram and centaury and knapweed and wood-betony, and over them hung
moths of green crimson-spotted silk. There, too, were the plants that
smell most of the dry summer--the white parsleys and the white or rosy
cow-parsnip, the bedstraws white and yellow, the yellow mugwort. Now
and then the hedges gave way and on either hand was open turf; sloping
steep and rough on one side, grooved by ancient paths of men and
cattle, dotted by thorns, with the freshly flowering traveller’s-joy
over them, ash-trees at the top; on the other side, level, skirted by
cloudy wych-elms and having at one corner a white inn half shadowed by
a walnut, and two sycamores and cattle below them; and at another, a
stately autumnal house veiled by the cedars and straight yews on its
darkly glowing lawn.

All these things I saw as if they had been my own, as if I were going
again slowly through old treasures long hidden away, so that they were
memoried and yet unexpected. Nothing was too small to be seen, and
ascending the chalk hill among the beeches every white flint was clear
on the sward, each in its different shape--many chipped as the most
cunning chisel would be proud to chip them; one, for example, carved
by the loss of, two exquisitely curved and balanced flakes into the
likeness of a moth’s expanded upper wings.

A dark beech alley, paved with the gold and green of moss and walled by
crumbling chalk, brought me to the tumulus. There lay the old house in
shadow, its ash crests lighted yellow by horizontal beams that caught
here the summit of a wood, and there the polished grass stems on a
rising field. It was the one house, and at that hour it gathered to
itself all that can be connected with a home. It was alone, but its
high cool thatch was full of protection and privacy, sufficient against
sun or rain or wind or frost, yet impregnated with free air and light.
Its ash-trees communed with the heavens and the setting sun. The wheat
glowed at its gates. The dark masses of the lower woods enhanced by a
touch of primeval gloom and savagery the welcoming expression of the
house. Slowly the light died out of the ash-tops and the wheat turned
to a mist. The wood seemed to creep up close and lay its shadows over
the house. But, stronger than the wood and the oncoming tide of night
that enveloped it, the spirits of roof and wall and hearth were weaving
a spell about the house to guard it, so that it looked a living,
breathing, dreaming thing. Nimble, elvish, half-human but wholly kind
small spirits I fancied them, creeping from corners in stone and thatch
and rafter, at war with those that dwelt in lonely and dark places,
that knew not fire and lamp and human voices save as invaders. For a
little while there was a pause, a suspense, a hesitation--Could the
small spirits win?--Were not the woods older and more mighty?--Was not
that long black bar of cloud across the cold west something sinister,
already engulfing the frail white moon? But suddenly, as if the life of
the house had found a powerful voice, one eye in the nearer gable was
lit by a small lamp and a figure could be guessed behind it. The first
Promethean spark of fire stolen from the gods was hardly a more signal
victory than that at which the house and I rejoiced when the white
light glimmered across the corn. It seemed the birth of light.

       *       *       *       *       *

The man who lives under that roof and was born there seventy years ago
is like his house. He is short and immensely broad, black-haired, with
shaved but never clean-shaven face creased by a wide mouth and long,
narrow black eyes--black with a blackness as of cold, deep water that
had never known the sun but only the candle-light of discoverers. His
once grey corduroys and once white slop are stained and patched to
something like the colour of the moist, channelled thatch and crumbling
“clunch” of the stone walls. He wears a soft felt hat with hanging
broad brim of darker earthy hues; it might have been drawn over his
face and ears in his emergence from his native clay and flint. Only
rarely does his eye--one eye at a time--gloom out from underneath,
always accompanied by a smile that slowly puckers the wrinkled oak-bark
of his stiff cheeks. His fingers, his limbs, his face, his silence,
suggest crooked oak timber or the gnarled stoles of the many times
polled ash. It is barely credible that he grew out of a child, the son
of a woman, and not out of the earth itself, like the great flints that
work upwards and out on to the surface of the fields. Doubtless he did,
but like many a ruined castle, like his own house, he has been worn to
a part of the earth itself. That house he will never give up except by
force, to go to workhouse or grave. They want him to go out for a few
days that it may be made more weather-tight; but he fears the chances
and prefers a rickety floor and draughty wall. He is half cowman, half
odd-job man--at eight shillings a week--in his last days, mending
hedges, cleaning ditches, and carrying a sack of wheat down the steep
hill on a back that cannot be bent any farther. Up to his knees in the
February ditch, or cutting ash-poles in the copse, he is clearly half
converted into the element to which he must return.

When the underwood is for sale it is a pleasure to read the notices
fixed to the doors of barn and shed, with the names of the copses and
woods. At Penshurst lately, for example, I saw these names--

  Black Hoath Wood.
  Heronry Pond.
  Marlpit Field.
  Tapner’s Wood.
  Ashour Farm.
  Sidney’s Coppice.
  Weir Field.
  Well Place.

I was back in Sidney’s time, remembering that genial poem of Ben
Jonson’s, “To Penshurst,” and especially the lines--

    “Thy copse too, named of Gamage, thou hast there,
    That never fails to serve thee season’d deer,
    When thou wouldst feed or exercise thy friends.
    The lower land, that to the river bends,
    Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed;
    The middle grounds thy mares and horses breed.
    Each bank doth yield thee conies; and the tops
    Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sidney’s copps,
    To crown thy open table, doth provide
    The purple pheasant with the speckled side, ...”

and so onward to that opulence and ease three centuries old--

    “Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,
    Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours.
    The early cherry, with the later plum,
    Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come;
    The blushing apricot and woolly peach
    Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.
    And though thy walls be of the country stone,
    They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan;
    There’s none, that dwell about them, wish them down;
    But all come in, the farmer and the clown;
    And no one empty handed, to salute
    Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit.
    Some bring a capon, some a rural cake,
    Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make
    The better cheeses, bring them; or else send
    By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend
    This way to husbands; and whose baskets bear
    An emblem of themselves, in plum or pear....”

Almost to such a time as that does the old man carry back the thoughts.
His old master was the fifth in the direct line to work one farm in the
vale; he left money in his will to pay for new smocks, all of the best
linen, to be worn by the labourers who should carry him to the grave.

The old man has three companions under that roof. The hand that lit
the lamp is his daughter’s, the youngest by the second wife, whom he
married when he was fifty. The other two are her children, and she is
unmarried. She earns no money except by keeping a few fowls and bees.
When the younger child was born--the old man having to go six miles
out at midnight for the parish doctor--the married women commented:
“There’s forgiveness for the first, but not for the second; no”:
for the first showed indiscretion, carelessness, youth; the second,
helplessness. The old man can hardly leave the children, and though he
is deaf he will, when he is told that the baby is crying, go to the
room and listen carefully for the pleasure of the infant voice. That
voice means colder winter nights for him and less cheer of meat and
ale. But for all young life he has a passion equal to a mother’s, so
he laces up his boots and does not grieve. See him in the dim outlying
barn with the sick heifer which is sure to die. The wet killed several
in the open field; this one is to die on dry hay. She lies with stiff,
high-ridged back, patient and motionless, except that her ears move
now and then like birds--they alone seem alive. There is a deep blue
gleam in her eyes. Her head is stretched forward upon the ground. She
is alone. Through the open door the sunlight falls, and the swallows
fly in and out or hang twittering at the dark beams over her head.
Twice a day the cowman comes to the door and salutes her with deep,
slow voice, hearty and blithe: “Hoho! Cowslip; how’s Cowslip?” He pulls
away the foul hay from under her and puts in fresh, talking now in a
high falsetto voice as to a child; he raises her head that she may lap
the bucket of gruel, still talking unintelligible baby talk interlarded
with her pretty name. She holds up her head for a minute or two,
heartened by her moist lips and full stomach and that friend’s voice.
He stands in the doorway watching and silent now, as her head slowly
sinks down, and she sighs while her limbs find their position of least
pain. “She’s going to die,” he mutters in the deep voice as he goes.

A very different earth child, an artist, used to live in a cottage at
the foot of the opposite Downs. The village itself, whether you saw
it from its own street or from the higher land, was wrought into such
a rightness of form as few other artists than Time ever achieve; it
made a music to which the hands unconsciously beat time. But though
apparently complete in itself, it was as part of a huge and gentle
harmony of sky, down and forest that the village was most fascinating.
Like all beautiful things in their great moments the whole scene was
symbolic, not only in the larger sense by expressing in an outward
and visible way an inward grace, but in the sense that it gathered up
into itself the meanings which many other scenes only partly and in a
scattered way expressed.

Two roads of a serpentining form that was perpetually alluring from
afar climbed the Down from the village and, skirting the forest, ended
in the white mountains of the moon. At the tail of one of these roads
the artist lived. His work still further enlarged the harmony of sky
and down and village. For a short time I used to wonder why it was that
when I entered his studio the harmony was prolonged into something
even more huge and gentle than seemed to have been designed. How came
it that he could safely hang his pictures on the wall of the Down, as
practically they were hung?

It is not enough to say merely that it was because they did not, as
some landscapes seem to do, enter into competition with Nature. The
spirit that raised and sculptured the Downs, that entered the beech and
made a melody of its silent towering and branching, that kept the sky
above alive and beautiful with the massiveness of mountains and the
evanescence of foam, was also in this man’s fingers. He was a great
lover of these things, and in his love for them combined the ecstasy
of courtship with the understanding of marriage. But he loved them too
well to draw and paint them. He was not of those who tear themselves
from a mistress to write a sonnet on her face. No. He painted the
images which they implanted--such was their love of him and his of
them--in his brain. There many a metamorphosis as wonderful as Ovid’s
was made. The beech-trees mingled with the fantasies of the brain and
brought forth holes that are almost human forms, branches that are
thoughts and roots that are more than wood. Often, I think, he hardly
looked at Nature as he walked, except to take a careless pleasure in
the thymy winds, in the drama of light and shade on the woods and
hills, in the sound of leaves and birds and water. Within him these
things lived a new life until they reached forms as different from
their beginnings as we are from Palæolithic man. They attained to that
beauty of which, as I have said, Nature was so little jealous, by
this evolution. Some of his pictures of the leaf-dappled branch-work
of beeches always remind me of the efflorescence of frost on a
window-pane, and the comparison is not purely fantastic but has a real
significance.

And yet the landscapes of this metamorphosis are not, as might have
been expected, decorations that have lost all smell of earth and light
of sun and breath of breeze. Decorative they certainly are, and I know
few pictures which are less open to the accusation of being scraps from
Nature, which it is more impossible to think of extending beyond the
limits of the frame. But such is the personality of the artist that
all this refinement only made more powerful than ever the spirit of
the motionless things, the trees, the pools, the hills, the clouds.
Frankly, there is a deep fund of what must narrowly, and for the moment
only, be called inhumanity in the artist, or he could not thus have
reinforced or intensified the inhumanity of Nature. Consider, for
example, his “Song of the Nightingale.” Those woods are untrodden woods
as lonely as the sky. They are made for the nightingale’s song to rule
in solitude under the crescent moon. No lovers walk there. Mortal who
enters there must either a poet or a madman be.

Look again at his “Castle in Spain,” how it is perched up above that
might of forest, like a child that has climbed whence it can never
descend. And the little house at the edge of the high, dark wood--in
“The Farm under the Hill”--is as frail and timid as if it heard the
roaring of wild beasts, and the little white road winds into the
darkness as to death. So, too, with the children who make a pretence
of playing hoops at the edge of just such another wood, though mortal
has never come out of it since the beginning of the world. The ship in
the “Fall of the Leaf” is subdued to the spirit of autumn as is the
poet subdued to the immense scenes of “Alastor.” To introduce an elvish
figure, as he has done, in “Will o’ the Wisp” was an unnecessary aid
to the elvishness of the scene itself. Indeed, his human or fantastic
figures seem to be sometimes as much out of place as a Yankee at the
court of King Arthur, though there are two notable exceptions--“The
Sower” and “The Weed Burner”--both figures towards which idolatry might
be excusable, so nobly do they represent labour in the field. And even
in “The Weed Burner” the boy seems bemused by the motion and savour
of the smoke that curdles up through the autumn air. The picture of a
forest pool is magical, but it repudiates the fairy altogether. Nothing
would be more out of place here than the kind of sucking harlequin or
columbine which is commonly foisted upon us as a fairy; for here is
something more desirable, the very forces which begot the fairies upon
a different age from ours. Even when he draws a house it is, I think,
for the house’s sake, for the sake of whatever soul it has acquired,
which men cannot take away. Was there ever such an inn as “The
Wispers”? The landlord is dead, the casks are dry, a rat has littered
on the top stair of the cellar, and the landlord says--

    “’Tis late and cold, stir up the fire:
    Sit close, and draw the table nigher;
    Be merry, and drink wine that’s old,
    A hearty medicine ’gainst a cold:
    Your beds of wanton down the best,
    Where you shall tumble to your rest;
    I could wish you wenches too,
    But I am dead, and cannot do.
    Call for the best the house may ring,
    Sack, white, and claret let them bring,
    And drink apace, while breath you have;
    You’ll find but cold drink in the grave:
    Plover, partridge, for your dinner,
    And a capon for the sinner,
    You shall find ready when you’re up,
    And your horse shall have his sup:
    Welcome, welcome, shall fly round,
    And I shall smile, though underground.”

I like the inn, but the spider loves it, and his webs bar the door
against all but ghostly travellers. The barn, again, with its doorway
opening upon the summer night, has a life of its own. The two figures
at the door are utterly dwarfed by its ancientness, its space, and the
infinite silence without.

The picture in which there is most humanity is that of a high wall,
ruinous and overgrown. The deep gap in it is tragical. But even here I
am not sure that it is a wall that was raised by hand of mason, and as
to the inhabitants who left it desolate I feel more doubtful still, I
believe it was built in a dream, long ago lost in some victory gained
by the forest over men, and quite forgotten until this artist thought
it would be a happy lair for a faun. He has not shown us the faun--I
wish he had; he ought to know what it was like--but that gap is its
gateway out from the forest into the dew of the river lawns.

It induces an awful sense of the infinite variety of human character to
think of the love of earth first in this man and then in that cowman
old. I wonder tolerance is not deeper as well as wider than it is.




CHAPTER XIII

AUGUST--GOING WEST--HAMPSHIRE AND WILTSHIRE


Rain begins as I set out and mount under the beeches. The sky is dark
as a ploughed field, but the leaves overhead are full of light like
precious stones. The rain keeps the eyes down so that they see one by
one the little things of the wayside, the strings of the grey-green and
of the scarlet bryony berries, the stony bark of the young ash unveiled
by the moving leaves, the million tall straight shoots which the strong
nature of ash and hazel has soared into since the spring. Then follows
field after field of corn, of sheep among hurdled squares, of mustard
in flower, of grass, interrupted now and then by the massed laurels
and rhododendrons and the avenues of monkey puzzles that announce the
pleasure grounds of the rich. It is a high land of too level clay,
chiefly blest in that it beholds the Downs, their saddles of woodland,
and, through the deepest passes, the sea and an island rising out of it
like an iceberg; and that it is traversed by the Pilgrims’ Way, which
gathers to itself Canterbury-bells and marjoram under its hazels, and
pours traveller’s-joy cloudily over the ash and brier that overhang
the side of an old chalk pit, long, straight and even like a wall.
Just here are many grassy lanes between hazel and blackthorn hedges.
An old farmhouse with ivied chimneys and ten blind windows in front
stands bereaved with weedy garden, but for miles the air sounds with
poultry and the building of bungalows in deal and iron for strangers.
It is not a stranger that rides by. I think his fathers must have been
in this land when Wolf Hanger was not a strange name for the beeches
over the hill. He is a tall straight man with long narrow face, clear,
not too irregular features, sallow complexion, black hair and black
drooping moustache, and flashing eyes as dark as privet berries in
autumn dews.

Now it is a woodland country, of broad wooded common and low undulating
Downs crowned or fringed by woods: this is “Swineherd’s County”
according to the gypsies. Houses are few and stand either well off the
road or with scarcely a dividing line between their gardens and the
commons from which they have been filched. Their linen and red flannel
flap under enormous beeches where an old track makes its way betwixt
them. The children living here, the generations of them who have been
bred in the little flint house, are children of the woods, their minds
half made by the majestic but dark and deep-voiced trees that stand
over them day and night and by the echoes--you may hear them summoning
the echoes at evening out of the glades and see them pause as if dazed
by the wild reply. Opposite the door is a close untrodden tangle of
brier and thorn and bramble under oaks where the dead leaves of many
autumns lie untouched even by the wind--so dense is the underwood--that
sighs continually in the topmost boughs: at the edge nettles with
translucent leaves waver and nod above mossy banks. Not far off is a
Woodland Farm, a group of houses and barns and sheds built of flint
and wood and thatched, aloof. A man enters one of the cavernous sheds
with a pail; a thick, bent, knotty man, with bushy dark hair and beard
and bright black eyes, a farmer, the son’s son of one who rebuilt the
house when the woods were darker and huger still. Life is a dark simple
matter for him; three-quarters of his living is done for him by the
dead; merely to look at him is to see a man live generations thick, so
to speak, and neither Nature nor the trumpery modern man can easily
disturb a human character of that density. As I watch him going to and
fro I lose sight of everything away from his rude house and the tall
woods, because they and he are so powerful--he has the trees as well
as his ancestors at his back--and it is no flight of fancy to see him
actually cut off from all the world except the house and woods, and
yet holding his own, able to keep his fire burning, his larder full,
his back covered and his house dry. I feel but a wraith as I pass by.
I wonder what there is worth knowing that he does not know, with his
bright eyes, bright long teeth, stiff limbs capable of unceasing toil,
and that look of harmony with day and night. I see him looking on as
the wounded trooper--two hundred and fifty years, a trifle, ago--drains
the water just lifted from the well; look at his gallant face, his
delicate ardour as of another race, bright dress, restless blue eyes,
his helplessness after the defeat in a cavalry fight about nothing at
all. The cornet rides away and the woodland fellow puts all his nature
into the felling of a beech as into an object worthy of cold steel,
and as he plies his axe he smiles at the thought of that brave, that
silly face and sleek hair. He smiles to-day as he sees a youth go by
with proud looks of command, incapable, as he well understands, of
commanding anything except perhaps a wife or a groom or a regiment of
townsmen--yet his landlord.

Rough grass and scattered thorns and lofty groups of mossy-pedestalled
beeches lie on either side of the road, and grassy tracks lead to
thatched cottages in the woods. A grey-clouded silver sky moves
overhead. Along the road the telegraph wires go humming the one shrill
note in this great harmony of men and woods and sky. Beyond, a broad
champaign of corn and grey grass heaves from the woodland edge. The
road is gay with red polished fruit and equally red soft leaves, with
darkest purple and bronze and wine-red and green berries and leaves,
and beam foliage still pure green and white. So high now are the
unkempt hedges that the land is hid and only the sky appears above
the coloured trees: except at a meeting of ways when a triangular
patch of turf is sacred to burdock, ragwort and thistle and--touching
the dust of the road--the lowly silverweed; an oak overhangs, yet
the little open space admits a vision of the elephantine Downs going
west in the rain. In a moment the world is once again this narrow
one of the high-hedged lane, where I see and touch with the eye and
enjoy the shapes of each bole and branch in turn, their bone-like
shapes, their many colours of the wood itself, wrinkled and grooved,
or overlaid by pale green mould, silver lichen or dark green moss.
Each bend in the road is different. At one all the leaves are yellow
but green-veined, the bramble, the hazel, the elder; and there is a
little chalk pit below, fresh white and overhung by yew and the dark
purple elder berries, small but distinct: at another there is a maple
of exquisite small leaves and numerous accordingly, a fair-built tree
in a lovely attitude and surmounted by a plume, only a small plume, of
traveller’s-joy. In Swineherd’s County they call it “Angel’s hair.”

Suddenly there is a village of thatched roofs, phlox in the gardens,
good spaces of green and of sycamore-trees between one house and the
next, and a green-weeded crystal river pervading all with its flash
and sound. The anvil rings and the fire glows in the black smithy.
The wheel-wright’s timber leans outside his thatched shed against an
ancient elder, etherealized by lucent yellow leaves. Before the inn a
jolly ostler with bow legs and purple neck washes the wheels of a cart,
ever and anon filling his pail from the stream and swishing the bright
water over the wheels as they spin. A decent white-haired old man
stands and watches, leaning on his stick held almost at arm’s length so
as to make an archway underneath which a spaniel sprawls in the sun.
The men are all at the corn and he does not know what to do. Can he
read? asks the ostler, knowing the answer very well. No! We all read
now, chuckles the ostler as he flings a pailful over the wheel. The
old man is proud at least to have lived into such a notable day: “Yes,
man reads now almost as well as master--quite as well. They used to be
dummies, the working class people, yes, that they was. You can’t tell
what will happen now.” Meantime the ostler fills his pail and the old
man having too many thoughts to say any more, lays his blackthorn on
the bench and calls for his glass of fourpenny ale.

Close by there is an entrance to the more open Downs. The uncut hedges
are so thick that the lane seems a cutting through a wood, and soon
it becomes a grassy track of great breadth under ash-trees and amidst
purple dogwood and crimson-hearted traveller’s-joy, and finally it is
a long broad field full of wild carrot and scabious through which many
paths meander side by side until the last gate gives a view, under oak
and hazel sprays, on to the green undulations of hill and coombe, their
sides studded with juniper and thorn, with something of oceanic breadth
in the whole, as far as the utmost bound, leagues away, where a line of
small trees stands against the sky in the manner of ships. The hedges
in this downland are low or broken. A few ricks stand at the borders
of stubble and grass. Sheep munch together in square pens. There is no
house, and the rain has wiped out everything that moved save its own
perpendicular fringes waving along the hills. This solitude of grey
and brown is completed by the owner’s notice, on a frail and tottering
post: “Trespassers will be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the
law.” Towards the farther verge compact copses of beech begin to saddle
the ridges and invade the hollows so as to form cliffy dark sides to
the friths of pale stubble or turf amongst them. And then the green way
runs into a Roman road, and in the twilight and rain I can see many
other narrow ancient tracks winding into the white road as straight as
a sword, losing themselves in it like children in a dragon’s mouth.
The turf alongside is mounded by tumuli; and against the hedge a gypsy
family pretend to shelter from the windy rain; the man stands moody,
holding the pony, the women crouch with chins upon knees, the children
laugh and will not be still. They belong to the little roads that are
dying out: they hate the sword-like shelterless road, the booming cars
that go straight to the city in the vale below. They are less at home
there than the swallows that haunt the leeward sides of the sycamores,
ever rushing up towards the trees and ever beaten back, like children
playing “I’m the king of the castle,” at the verge of the city. There,
by the inn piano, soldiers and their friends and women sing with vague
pathos songs about “Mother” and “Dear Love” and “Farewell” and “Love is
all” and “The girls,” while the streets glitter and gurgle with rain.
Just before night the sky clears. It is littered with small dark clouds
upon rose, like rocks on a wild and solitary coast of after-tempest
calm, and it is infinitely remote and infinitely alluring. Those clouds
are the Islands of the Blest. Even so alluring might be this life
itself, this world, if I were out of it. For a moment I fancy how I
might lean and watch it all, being dead. For a moment only, since the
poverty of death is such that we cannot hope from it such a gift of
contemplation from afar, cannot hope even that once out of the world we
may turn round and look at it and feel that we are not of it any more,
nor hope that we shall know ourselves to be dead and be satisfied. Rain
shrouds the islands of the sky: the singers find them in their song.

In the morning the ground is beautiful with blue light from one
white-clouded pane of sky that will not be hidden by the tumultuous
rain. Outside the city the new thatch of the ricks shines pale in the
sodden land, which presently gives way to a great water with leaning
masts and a majestic shadowy sweep of trees down to the flat shore, to
level green marsh and bridges crossing the streams that are announced
by ripples in the sun, by swishing sedge, by willows blenching. Beyond
is forest again. First, scattered cottages and little yellow apples
beaming pale on crooked trees; then solitudes of heather and bracken,
traversed and lighted by blue waters, ponds and streams among flats
of rushes; and beyond, at either hand, woods on low and high land
endlessly changing from brightness to gloom under windy clouds. The
roads are yellow, and oaks and beeches hang over them in whispering
companies. The wind reigns, in the high magnificent onset of the
clouds, in the surging trees, in the wings of rooks and daws, in bowing
sedges and cotton grass, in quivering heather and grass, in rippling
water, in wildly flying linen; yet in the open there is a strange
silence because the roar in my ears as I walk deafens me to all sound.

White ponies graze by dark waters and stir the fragrance of the bog
myrtle. The rises of the heathery moor are scarred yellow where the
gravel is exposed. Sometimes great beeches, plated with green lichen
and grey, wave their stiffening foliage overhead; or there is a group
of old hollies encircled by coeval ivy whose embraces make them one,
and both seem of stone. Sometimes the yellow road runs green-edged
among heather and gorse, shadowed by pines that shake and plunge in
the wind but are mute. A white fungus shines damp in the purple moor.
There are a myriad berried hawthorns here, more gorse, more heather and
bracken. The tiny pools beneath are blown into ripples like a swarming
of bees, but the infuriate streams cannot trouble the dark water and
broad lily leaves in their bays. Other pools again are tranquil and
lucid brown over submerged moss and pennywort and fallen leaves, worlds
to themselves with a spirit indwelling in the pure element. Presently,
denser trees hold back the wind save in their tempestuous crests,
and now the road is carpeted with pine needles and nothing can be
seen or felt but the engulfing sound of wind and rain. The pines are
interrupted by tall bracken, hollies and thorns, by necks of turf and
isolated hawthorns thereon; and far away the light after rain billows
grandly over the mounded forest. Many a golden stream pours through
the dark trees. Oaks succeed, closing in lichened multitudes about a
grassy-rutted ferny road, but suddenly giving way to beeches pallid
and huge. One lies prone across the road, still green of leaf, having
torn up a mound of earth and bracken and bramble as large as a house in
its upheaval. Others have lost great branches, and the mossy earth is
ploughed by their fall. They seem to have fought in the night and to be
slumbering with dreams of battle to come; and their titanic passions
keep far away the influence of the blue sky and silver clouds that
laugh out unconcerned after the rain.

After them birches and birchlings grow out of the heather backed by
a solid wall of oaks. And again there are many beeches over mossy
golden turf, and one tree of symmetrical rounded foliage makes a
circle of shade where nothing grows, but all about it a crowd of
dwarf brackens twinkle and look like listeners at an oracle. Beyond,
countless pillars of dark pines tower above green grass. Then the road
forks; a shapely oak, still holding up dead arms through clouds of
greenery, stands at one side; at the other a green road wanders away
under beeches in stately attitudes and at ceremonious distance from
one another: straight ahead, open low meadows surround a reedy water
where coot and moorhen cry to each other among willow islets and the
reflex of a bright and windy heaven. And yet once more the road pierces
the dense woodland roar, form and colour buried as it were in sound,
except where a space of smoothest turf expands from the road, and out
of the crimson berries of an old thorn comes the voice of a robin
singing persistently; and past that, inevitably, is a cottage among
the beeches. More cottages are set in the moorland that rolls to an
horizon of ridgy oak away from small green meadows behind the cottages.
These give way to treeless undulations like gigantic long barrows,
coloured by sand, by burnt gorse and by bracken; farther away a wooded
hump all dark under threatenings of storm; and farthest of all, the
Downs, serene and pale. The plough begins to invade the forest. The
undulations sink to rest in a land of corn and cloud, of dark green
levels, of windy whitened abeles, and a shining flood gilded by a lofty
western sky of gold and grey. Beside the darkling waters couches an
old town with many windows looking under thatch and tile upon grave
streets, ending in a spread of the river where great horses wading
lift their knees high as they splash under a long avenue of aspens and
alarm the moorhens. Beautiful looks the running river under the night’s
hunting of the clouds and the few bright stars, and beautiful again,
broad blue, or streaked, or shadowy, or glittering, or reed-reflecting,
beside a white mill or company of willows, under the breezes and pearl
of dawn; and I wish there were a form for saluting a new country’s gods
and the _adhuc ignota ... flumina_.

Two roads go northward against the stream; the main road straight or in
long curves on one side of the river, the other on the opposite bank
in a string of fragments zigzagging east and west and north. These
fragments connect houses or groups of houses with one another, and it
looks as if only by accident they had made the whole which now connects
two towns. Their chief business is to serve the wheels and feet of
those bound upon domestic or hamlet but not urban business. Seen upon
the map the road sets out straight for a town far north; but in two
miles the hospitality of a great house seems to draw it aside, then of
“The Plough”; emerging again it wanders awhile before returning to its
northward line; and this it does time after time, and as often as it
pauses a lesser road runs out of it to the great road across the river.
There are scores of such parallel roads--sometimes the lesser is in
part, or entirely, a footpath--in England, and in avoiding the dust,
the smell, the noise, the insolence of the new traffic, the lesser are
an invaluable aid. This one proceeds without rise or fall through the
green river levels, but looks up to a ridge of white-scarred purple
moor away from the stream, with oak and thatched cottages below the
heather. It creeps in and out like an old cottage woman at a fair
and sees everything. It sees all the farms and barns. It sees the
portly brick house and its gardens bounded by high fruit walls and
its walnut-trees in front, on the bank of a golden brook that sings
under elms and sallows; the twenty-four long white windows, the decent
white porch, the large lawns, the pond and its waterfowl sounding in
the reeds, the oaks and acacias, the horse mowing the lawn lazily, the
dogs barking behind the Elizabethan stables. It sees the broad grassy
borders--for this is not a road cut by a skimping tailor--and the woods
of oak and ash and hazel which the squirrel owns, chiding, clucking
and angrily flirting his tail at those who would like to share his
nuts. At every crossing road these grassy borders, which are in places
as broad as meadows so that cattle graze under their elms, spread out
into a green; and round about are yellow thatched cottages with gardens
full of scarlet bean flowers and yellow dahlias; and a pond reflects
the blue and white sky, wagtails flutter at the edge and geese launch
themselves as if for a voyage. The only sound upon the road is made by
the baker’s cart carrying a fragrant load.

After ten miles the road crosses the river and wanders even farther
from the highway. Here there are more woods of hazel and oak, and
borders where sloe and blackberry shine, polished by rain, among
herbage of yellow ragwort and flea-bane, purple knapweed, yellowing
leaves. The gateways show steep meadows between the woods. One shows
two lovers of sixteen years old gathering nuts in the warm sun, the
silence, the solitude. The boy bends down and she steps quickly and
carelessly upon his back to reach a cluster of six, and then descending
looks away for a little while and turns her left cheek to him, softly
smiling wordless things to herself, so that her lover could not but
lean forward and kiss her golden skin where it is most beautiful
beneath her ear and her looped black hair. There is a maid whose ways
are so wonderful and desirable that it would not be more wonderful and
desirable if Helen had never grown old and Demeter had kept Persephone.
For a day white-throated convolvulus hides all the nettles of life.
Of all the delicate passing things I have seen and heard--the slow,
languid, gracious closing and unclosing of a pewit’s rounded wings as
it chooses a clod to alight on; the sound of poplar leaves striving
with the sound of rain in a windy summer shower; the glow of elms where
an autumn rainbow sets a foot amongst them; the first fire of September
lighted among men and books and flowers--not one survives to compare
with this gateway vision of a moment on a road I shall never travel
again. To rescue such scenes from time is one of the most blessed
offices of books, and it is a book that I remember now as I think of
that maiden smiling, a book[5] which says--

[5] _The Heifer of the Dawn_, by F. W. Bain.

 And I could tell thee stories that would make thee laugh at all thy
 trouble, and take thee to a land of which thou hast never dreamed.
 Where the trees have ever blossoms, and are noisy with the humming
 of intoxicated bees. Where by day the suns are never burning,
 and by night the moon-stones ooze with nectar in the rays of the
 camphor-laden moon. Where the blue lakes are filled with rows of
 silver swans, and where, on steps of lapis-lazuli, the peacocks dance
 in agitation at the murmur of the thunder in the hills. Where the
 lightning flashes without harming, to light the way to women, stealing
 in the darkness to meetings with their lovers, and the rainbow hangs
 for ever like an opal on the dark blue curtain of the clouds. Where,
 on the moonlit roofs of crystal palaces, pairs of lovers laugh at the
 reflection of each other’s lovesick faces in goblets of red wine,
 breathing as they drink air heavy with the fragrance of the sandal,
 wafted from the mountain of the south. Where they play and pelt each
 other with emeralds and rubies, fetched at the churning of the ocean
 from the bottom of the sea. Where rivers, whose sands are always
 golden, flow slowly past long lines of silent cranes that hunt for
 silver fishes in the rushes on their banks. Where men are true, and
 maidens love for ever, and the lotus never fades....

The great old books do the same a hundred times. Take _The Arabian
Nights_ for example. They are full of persons, places and events
depicted with so strong an appeal to our eyes and to that part of our
intelligence which by its swiftness and simplicity corresponds to
our eyes, that no conceivable malversation by a translator can matter
much. They are proof against it, just as our tables and chairs and
walking-sticks are proof against the man who tears our books and cracks
our glass cases of artificial grapes or stuffed kingfishers when we
move to a new house. This group of women is beyond the reach of time or
an indifferent style--

 Ten female slaves approached with a graceful and conceited gait,
 resembling moons, dazzling the sight, and confounding the imagination.
 They stood in ranks, looking like the black-eyed damsels of Paradise;
 and after them came ten other female slaves, with lutes in their
 hands, and other instruments of diversion and mirth; and they saluted
 the two guests, and played upon the lutes, and sang verses; and every
 one of them was a temptation to the servants of God....

A hundred others flock to my mind, competing for mention like a company
of doves for a mere pinch of seed--Rose-in-Bloom sitting at a lattice
to watch the young men playing at ball, and throwing an apple to
Ansal Wajoud, “bright in countenance, with laughing teeth, generous,
wide-shouldered”; or that same girl letting herself down from her
prison and escaping over the desert in her most magnificent apparel
and a necklace of jewels on her neck; Sindbad returning home rich
from every voyage, and as often, in the midst of the luxuries of his
rest, going down to the river by Bagdad and seeing a fair new ship and
embarking for the sake of profit and of beholding the countries and
islands of the world.

These clear appeals come into the tales like white statues suddenly
carven to our sight among green branches. But they are also something
more than a satisfaction to our love of what is large, bright,
coloured, in high relief. Every one knows how, at a passage like that
in the _Æneid_, when the exiled Æneas sees upon the new walls of the
remote city of Carthage pictures of that strife about Troy in which he
was a great part, or at a verse in a ballad like--

    “It was na in the ha’, the ha’;
      It was na in the painted bower;
    But it was in the good greenwood,
      Amang the lily flower.”

--how the cheek flushes and the heart leaps up with a pleasure which
the incidents themselves hardly justify. We seem to recognize in them
symbols or images of ideas which are important to mortal minds. They
are of a significance beyond allegories. They are as powerful, and
usually as mysterious in their power, as the landscape at sight of
which the gazer sighs in his joy, he knows not why. In such passages
the _Nights_ abound.

One of the finest is in _Seifelmolouk and Bedia Eljemal_. The hero
and his memlooks were captured by a gigantic Ethiopian king. Some
were eaten. The survivors so pleased the king by the sweetness of
their voices while they were crying and lamenting that they were hung
up in cages for the king to hear them. Seifelmolouk and three of his
companions the king gave to his daughter, and when the youth sat
thinking of the happy past, and crying over it, she was overjoyed at
the singing of her little captive. Perhaps more pleasing still is the
door in the grass which has only to be removed to discover a splendid
subterranean palace and a “woman whose aspect banished from the heart
all anxiety and grief and affliction,” even when the finder is the son
of a king cutting wood in a forest, far from his lost home and from
those who know him as the son of a king. The incognito appearances of
the great Caliph make scenes of the same class. A young man sits with
his mistress, and the sound of her lovely singing draws four darwishes
to the door; he descends and lets them in; they promise to do him an
immense and undreamed-of service--

“Now these darwishes,” says the tale, “were the Khalifeh Harun
Er-Rashid, and the Wezir Ja’far El-Barmeki, and Abu-Nuwas El-Hasan, the
son of Hani, and Mesrur the Executioner.”

Then there is that page where Nimeh and the Persian sage open a shop in
Damascus, and stock it with costly things, and the sage sits with the
astrolabe before him, “in the apparel of sages and physicians”--to wait
for Nimeh’s lover, or some one who has news of her, to appear. Of a
more subtly appealing charm is a sentence in the story of “Ala-ed-din,”
where a man tells the father of one who is supposed to have been
executed that another was actually slain in his stead, “for I ransomed
him, by substituting another, from among such as deserved to be put to
death.” A good book might be made of the stories of such poor unknown
men in famous books as this prisoner who was of those that deserved to
die.

Lofty, strange, and infinite in its suggestiveness is the tale of
Kamar-ez-Zeman and the Princess Budur. Two demons, an Efrit and an
Efritch, contend as to the superiority in beauty of a youth and a girl
whom they watch asleep in widely remote parts of the earth; and they
carry them through the midnight sky and lay the two side by side to
judge. On the morrow, the youth longs for the girl and the girl for
the youth. Of their dreams, the King, the father of the youth, says:
“Probably it was a confused dream that thou sawest in sleep,” and the
father of the girl chains her up as mad. But in the end, after many
wanderings and impediments, they transcend the separation of space and
are married. Noblest of all, perhaps, is one of the short “Anecdotes”
about the discovery of a terrestrial paradise.

Abd-allah went out to seek a straying camel, and chanced upon a superb
and high-walled city lying silent in the desert. And when the Caliph
inquired about that city, a learned man told him that it was built by
Sheddad, the King. This prince was fond of ancient books, and took
delight in nothing so much as in descriptions of Paradise, so that
his heart enticed him to make one like it on the earth. Under him
were a hundred thousand kings, and under each of them were a hundred
thousand soldiers, and he furnished them with the measurements and
set them to collect the materials of gold and silver and ruby and
pearl and chrysolite. For twenty years they collected. Then he sought
a fit place among rivers on a vast open plain. In twenty years they
built the city and finished its impregnable fortifications. For twenty
years he laboured in equipping himself, his viziers, his harem and his
troops for the occupation of this Paradise. Then when he was rejoicing
on his way, “God sent down upon him and upon the obstinate infidels
who accompanied him a loud cry from the heaven of his power, and it
destroyed them all by the vehemence of its sound. Neither Sheddad nor
any of those who were with him arrived at the city or came in sight
of it, and God obliterated the traces of the road that led to it;
but the city remaineth as it was in its place until the hour of the
judgment.”...

Beyond the gateway the Downland and the corn begins, and with it the
rain, so that the great yellow-banded bee hangs long pensive on the
lilac flower of the scabious. Hereby is a farm with a wise look in its
narrow window on either side of the white door under the porch; the
walls of the garden and the farmyard are topped with thatch; opposite
rises up a medlar tree, russet-fruited: and those two eyes of the
little farm peep out at the stranger. From the next hill-top the land
spreads out suddenly--an immense grey hedgeless land of pasture and
ploughland and stubble with broadcast shadows of clouds and lines,
and clumps of dark-blue trees a league apart. These woods are of pine
and thorn and elder and beam, and some yew and juniper, haunted by
the hare and the kestrel, by white butterflies going in and out, by
the dandelion’s down. Sometimes under the pines a tumulus whispers
a gentle _siste viator_ and the robin sings beside. Far away, white
rounds of cloud bursting with sunlight are lifted up out of the ground;
born of earth they pause a little upon the ridge and then take flight
into the blue profound, their trains of shadow moving over the corn
sheaves, over the ploughs working along brown bands of soil, the furzy
spaces, the deeply cloven grassy undulations, the lines of yews and of
corn-stacks. Slowly a spire like a lance-head is thrust up through the
Downs into the sky.

Beyond the spire a huge woody mound rises up from the low flowing land,
huge and carved all round by an entrenchment as if by the weight of a
crown that it had worn for ages. Certainly it wears no crown to-day.
Not a human being lives there; they have all fled to the riverside
and the spire, leaving their ancient home to the triumphs of the
wide-flowering traveller’s-joy, to the play of children on the sward
within its walls, and to the archæologist: and very sad and very noble
it looks at night when it and the surrounding Downs lift up their dark
domes of wood among the mountains of the sky, and the great silence
hammers upon the ears.

Then a hedgeless road traverses without interrupting the long Downs.
One after another, lines of trees thin and dark and old come out
against the pale bright sky of late afternoon and file away, beyond
the green turf and roots and the grey or yellow stubble. As the sun
sets, dull crimson, at the foot of a muslin of grey and gold which his
course has crimsoned, the low clouds on the horizon in the north become
a deathly blue white belonging neither to day nor to night, while
overhead the light-combed cloudlets are touched faintly with flame. Now
the glory and the power of the colour in the west, and now the pallid
north, fill the brain to overflowing with the mingling of distance,
of sublime motion, and of hue, and intoxicate it and give it wings,
until at last when the west is crossed by long sloping strata as of
lava long cooled they seem the bars of a cage impassable. But even they
are at last worn away and the sky is as nothing compared with earth.
For there, as I move, the infinite greys and yellows of the crops, the
grass, the bare earth, the clumps of firs, the lines of beeches and
oaks, play together in the twilight, and the hills meet and lose their
lines and flow into one another and build up beautiful lines anew, the
outward and visible signs of a great thought. Out of the darkness in
which they are submerged starts a crying of pewits and partridges; and
overhead and close together the wild duck fly west into the cold gilded
blue.

At dawn a shallow crystal river runs over stones and waves green hair
past ancient walls of flint, tall towers and many windows, with vines
about the mullions, past desolate grass of old elmy meads, high-gated,
and umbrageous roads winding white by carven gateways, under sycamore
and elm and ash and many alders and haughty avenues of limes, past
an old great church, past a park where elms and oaks and bushy limes
hide a ruin among nettles and almost hide a large stone house from
which peacocks shout, past a white farm, red-tiled, that stands with a
village of its own thatched barns, cart-lodges and sheds under walnut
and elm, enclosed within a circuit of old brick with a tower that looks
along the waters. It is a place where man has known how to aid his own
stateliness by that of Nature. The trees are grand and innumerable, but
they stand about in aristocratic ways; the bright young water does not
flout the old walls but takes the shadow of antiquity from them and
lends them dew-dropping verdure in return. The pebbles under the waves
are half of them fallen from the walls; the curves round which they
bend are of masonry; so that it is unapparent and indifferent whether
the masonry has been made to fit the stream or the stream persuaded to
admit the masonry. As I look, I think of it as Statius thought of the
Surrentine villa when he prayed that Earth would be kind to it and not
throw off that ennobling yoke. Everywhere the river rushes and shines,
or roars unseen behind trees. The sun is warm and the golden light
hangs as if it were fruit among the leaves over the ripples.

Above the stream the elms open apart and disclose a wandering grey land
and clumps of beeches, a grey windy land and a grey windy sky in which
the dark clumps are islanded. Flocks of sheep move to and fro, and with
them the swallows. Two shepherds, their heavy grey overcoats slung
about their shoulders and the sleeves dangling, their flat rush baskets
on their backs, stand twenty yards apart to talk, leaning on their
sticks, while their swallow-haunted flocks go more slowly and their two
dogs converse and walk round one another.

The oats have been trampled by rain, and two men are reaping it by
hand. They are not men of the farm, but rovers who take their chance
and have done other things than reaping in their time. One is a
Hampshire man, but fought with the Wiltshires against “Johnny Boer”--he
liked the Boers ... “they were very much like a lot of working men....
We never beat ’em.... No, we never beat ’em.” He is a man of heroic
build; tall, lean, rather deep-chested than broad-shouldered, narrow in
the loins, with goodly calves which his old riding breeches perfectly
display; his head is small, his hair short and crisp and fair, his
cheeks and neck darkly tanned, his eye bright blue and quick-moving,
his features strong and good, except his mouth, which is over large
and loose; very ready to talk, which he does continually in a great
proud male voice, however hard he is working. A man as lean and hard
and bright as his reaping hook. First he snicks off a dozen straws
and lays them on the ground for a bond, then he slashes fast along
the edge of the corn for two or three yards, gathers up what is cut
into his hook and lays it across the straws: when a dozen sheaves are
prepared in the same way he binds them with the bonds and builds them
into a stook of two rows leaning together. It is impossible to work
faster and harder than he does in cutting and binding; only at the
end of each dozen sheaves does he stand at his full height, straight
as an ash, and laugh, and round off what he has been saying even more
vigorously than he began it. Then crouching again he slays twelve other
sheaves. Then he goes over to the four-and-a-half-gallon cask in the
hedge: it is a “fuel” that he likes, and he pays for it himself. In
his walk and attitude and talk--except in his accent--there is little
of the countryman. He is a citizen of the world, without wife or home
or any tie except to toil--and after that pleasure--and toil again. A
loose bold liver--and lover--there can be no doubt. The spirit of life
is strong in him, in limbs and chest and eyes and brain, the spirit
which compels one man to paint a picture, one to sacrifice his life
for another, one to endure poverty for an idea, another to commit a
murder. What is there for him--to be the mark for a bullet, to contract
a ravenous disease, to bend slowly under the increasing pile of years,
of work, of pleasures? He does not care. He is always seeing “a bit of
life” from town to town, from county to county, a peerless fleshly man
casting himself away as carelessly as Nature cast him forth into the
world. His father before him was the same, ploughboy, circus rider,
brickmaker, and day labourer again on the land, one who always “looked
for a policeman when he had had a quart.” He set out on his travels
again and disappeared. His wife went another way, and she is still to
be met with in the summer weather, not looking as if she had ever borne
such a son as this reaper. As she grows older she seems to stretch out
a connecting hand to long-vanished generations, to the men and women
who raised the huge earthen walls of the camps on these hills. She
has a trembling small face, wrinkled and yellow like old newspaper,
above a windy bunch of rags, chiefly black rags. A Welshwoman who has
been in England fifty years, she remembers or thinks of chiefly those
Welsh years when, as a girl, she rode a pony into Neath market. She
hums a Welsh tune and still laughs at it because she heard it first in
those days from one then poor and old and abject--she herself tall and
wilful--and the words of it were: “O, my dear boy, don’t get married.”
She would like once again to lie in her warm bed and hear the steady
rain falling in the black night upon the mountain. She feels the sharp
flint against the sole of her foot and appears not to be annoyed or
indignant or resolved to be rid of the pain, but only puzzled by the
flintiness of God as she travels, in the long pageant of those who go
on living, the lonely downland road among the gorse and the foxgloves,
in the hot but still misty morning when the grey and the chestnut
horses, patient and huge and shining among the sheaves, wait for the
reaping machine to be uncovered and the day’s work to begin.

Through the grey land goes a narrow and flat vale of grass and of
thatched cottages. The river winds among willows and makes a green
world, out of which the Downs rise suddenly with their wheat. Here
stands a farm with dormers in its high yellow roof and a square
of beeches round about. There a village, even its walls thatched,
flutters white linen and blue smoke against a huge chalk scoop in the
Downs behind. For miles only the cherry-coloured clusters of the
guelder-rose break through the rain and the gently changing grey of the
cornland and green of the valley, until several farms of thatched brick
gather together under elms and mellowing chestnuts and make a crooked
hamlet. Or at a bend in the road a barn like a diminutive down stands
among ricks and under elms; behind is a red farm and church tower
embowered; in front, the threshing machine booms and smokes and an old
drenched woman stands bent aloft receiving the sheaves in her blue
stiff claws. Close by, a man leads a horse away from a field and its
companion looks over the gate with longing, and turns away and again
returning almost jumps it, but failing through fearfulness at seeing
the other so near the bend in the road, races down the hedge and back
and stands listening to the other’s whinny, and then scattering the
turf dashes into an orchard beyond and whinnies as he gallops.

In majesty, rigid and black, the steam ploughs are working up against
the treeless sky; and, just seen in the rain, the white horse carved
upon the hill seems a living thing, but of mist.

Now, as if for the sake of the evening bells and the gleaners, the
rain withholds itself, and over the drenching stubble the women and
children, in black and grey and dirty white, crawl, doubled up,
careless of the bells and of the soft moist gold of the sun that
envelops them, as of the rain and wind that after a little while cover
up the gold upon the field and the green and rose of the sky.

And so to the inn. Why do not inns have a regular tariff for the
poorish man without a motor-car? Let inn-keepers bleed the rich, by all
means, but why should they charge me one shilling and ninepence for a
cod steak or a chop or the uneatable cold roast beef of new England,
and then charge the same sum for the best part of a duckling and
cheese and a pint of ale? I once asked the most enterprising publisher
in London whether he would print a book that should tell the sober
truth about some of our English inns, and he said that he dared not
do anything so horrible. For fear of ruining my publisher I will not
mention names, but simply say that at nine inns out of ten the charges
are incalculable and excessive unless the traveller makes a point of
asking beforehand what they are going to be, a course that provokes
discomfort in his relation to the host outweighing what is saved. The
tea room, on the other hand, is inexpensive. It lies behind a shop and
there is a slaughter-house adjacent--even now the butcher can be heard
parting the warm hide from the flesh. Inside, the room is green and the
little light and the rain also come sickly through windows of stained
glass and fall upon a piano, a bicycle, an embroidered deck chair,
vases of dead grass on a marble-topped table, a screen pasted over with
scraps from the newspapers, and, upon the walls, a calendar from the
butcher depicting a well-dressed love scene, a text or two, pictures of
well-dressed children and their animals, and upon the floor, oilcloth
odorous and wet. Here, as at the inns, the adornments are dictated by
a taste begotten by the union of peasant taste and town taste, and are
entirely pretentious and unrelated to the needs of the host or of the
guests.




CHAPTER XIV

AN OLD HOUSE AND A BOOK--WILTSHIRE


The country is deserted in the rain, and I have the world to myself,
a world of frenzied rain among the elms of the lowland, an avenue of
elms up to a great house, hidden sheep tinkling and bleating, shepherds
muffled, huge slopes of grass and pearled clover above a coombe where a
grey heron sails and clanks alone, a farm desolate among elder and ash
at the highest part of the hills, and then miles of pathless pasture
and stubble descending past an old camp and a tumulus to the submerged
vale, where yellow elms tremble about a church tower, a cluster of
red cottages and bowed yellow dahlias and chrysanthemums, and a house
standing aloof. This house is some way from the Downs themselves, but
just at the foot of a lesser slope, a fair golden hill--golden with
cowslips in May--that rises on one side with a swift, short ascent and
then shoots forward, as if with the impetus, almost level until, after
crowning itself with beeches, it descends in a lazy curve to a field,
roughened by the foundations of a vanished house, at one corner of
which the chimneys join with another group of elms in the haze of rain.

Hanging from the wall in rags, too wet even to flap, are the remains
of an auctioneer’s announcement of a sale at the house behind.
Mahogany--oak chests--certain ounces of silver--two thousand
books--portraits and landscapes and pictures of horses and game--of all
these and how much else has the red house been disembowelled? It is
all shadowy within, behind the windows, like the eyes of a corpse, and
without sound, or form, or light, and it is for no one that the creeper
magnificently arrays itself in bediamonded crimson and gold that throbs
and wavers in the downpour. The martins are still there, and their play
up and down before the twenty windows is a senseless thing, like the
play of children outside a chamber of agony or grief. They seem to be
machines going on and on when their master and purpose are dead. But
then, too, there is gradually a consolation, a restfulness, a deceit,
a forgetting, in the continuity of their movement and their unchanged
voices. The two hundred autumns perpetuated in the tones of the bricks
are in vain. Strangers will come, no doubt--I hope they will not--and
be pleased, actually proud, at this mellowness, which ought to have
died with the last of the family that built the house.

The tall horse-chestnuts throw down their fruit out of the crisp,
rusty foliage and it rolls darkly burnished out of the pods white
as mushrooms in the rain, and where it falls it lies, and no child
gathers it, and the harvest waggons have crushed a thousand under
their wheels. The moss is beginning to encrust the gravel for the
soft feet of the ghosts, of the old men and the mothers and the maids
and the school-boys and tottering babes that have trodden it once.
Now that they are all gone, every one, they seem always to have been
ghosts, with loud, happy voices and wails of sorrow, with smiles, dark
looks, passionate splendours, bright hair, the bright brown hair as
of red deer in the men, the long, heavy coils of living odorous gold
in the women, but flitting to and fro, footless, unconfined, like the
swallows, returning and wandering up and down, as if they had left
something behind in their home.

When I first entered the house by an accident in passing that way,
a great-grandfather, a granddaughter and her son were alone in the
house, with two servants. The mother, early widowed, had come with her
child to minister to the last days of the ancient man. The house was
by then full of the reports of death. In almost every room there had
been a deathbed. For it had always been full of life; there was never
such a house for calling back its children; the sons of it brought
their wives, and the daughters their husbands, and often an excuse
was made for one pair to stay on indefinitely; and thus it came to be
full also of death. This granddaughter, however, had stayed, as she
wished to believe, against her will, because the old man was so fond
of his great-grandchild. She was a beautiful, strong woman, with the
dark, lustrous skin, gold hair, perfect clear features, proud step and
prouder voice, of all the family; she had shone before a thousand eyes;
and yet she stayed on and on, obsessed by the multitudinous memories of
the house alone under the Downs.

Her grandfather would talk of nothing but his father and his
grandfather, the lawyers, the captains, the scholars, whose bones were
under the churchyard elms, and his sons and their sons, all of them
also now dead. He had their childish ways by heart, the childish ways
of men who were white-haired at his birth as well as of those who went
golden-haired but yesterday into the grave; and all their names, their
stately, their out-of-the-way names, and those which recorded the
maiden names of their mothers; their nicknames, too, a whole book of
them; the legends about the most conspicuous, their memorable speeches
and acts, down to the names of their very dolls, and their legends
also, which, of course, recurred again and again in the family fantasy.
Every tree and field and gate and room was connected with some one of
the dear and beauteous or brave dead, with their birth, their deeds,
their ends.

The portraits of many of them, at least one to every generation, hung
on the walls, and it was curious to notice, what never any one of them
could see, except the granddaughter, the progress and the decline
from generation to generation. The earliest of all had sailed and
buccaneered with Henry Morgan, a great lover and destroyer of life. It
was from him that the expression and air of them all had descended.
Love and battle had carved his face. Out from behind his bold but easy
face peered a prophetic pitifulness, just as behind the loaded brown
clouds of drifting storm peers the innocence of blue, and upon it white
clouds that are thin and waved like an infant’s hair. Upon this model
his descendants’ faces had been carved, not by love and battle, but
by his might alone. Even the tender women flaunted it. It nestled, an
eagle, among the old man’s snows; it possessed the little child, and he
had nothing but the face of the buccaneer, like an eaglet in a cage.

A house is a perdurable garment, giving and taking of life. If it
only fit, straightway it begins to chronicle our days. It beholds our
sorrows and our joys; its untale-bearing walls know all our thoughts,
and if it be such a house as grows after the builders are gone, our
thoughts presently owe much to it; we have but to glance at a certain
shadow or a curve in the wall-paper pattern to recall them, softened
as by an echo, and that corner or that gable starts many a fancy that
reaches beyond the stars, many a fancy gay or enriched with regrets.
It is aware of birth, marriage and death; and who dares say that there
is not kneaded into the stones a record more pleasing than brass? With
what meanings the vesperal beam slips through a staircase window in
autumn! The moon has an expression proper to us alone, nested among
our limes, or heaving an ivory shoulder above the neighbour roofs.
As we enter a room in our house we are conscious of a fitness in its
configuration that defies mathematics. Rightly used, such a space will
inspire a stately ordering of our lives; it is, in another respect, the
amplest canvas for the art of life. It becomes so much a part of us
that we exclaim--

    “This beautiful house in sand and stone:
    What will it be in heaven?”

This beautiful house under the Downs was already more than “sand and
stone.” It was a giant, very gentle but very powerful, and adding to
its power the lore of the family it was irresistible. This young mother
had all the lore by heart and loved it, yet had fought against it. She
had been happy when her child had grown at first unlike her own family
and much like her husband’s; but no! his hair grew lighter, his nose
was as those of her brothers’ in bud, and now that he was five he was
not a child so much as an incarnation of the family, a sort of graven
image to which the old man bowed down, and with all the more fervour
because of that weakness in the boy which others thought imbecility.
The old man, too, had been not only a man but a family; now that the
child was there he waited, garrulously contented, for his release from
the post. So contented was he that when the granddaughter left her
child with him, and after delays and excuses and delays disappeared
into the blank, indifferent abyss of the multitude far away who knew
not the house and the family, he was not only contented but glad at
heart, for it was a rebel that was gone.

For several years the white beard and the poor child lived together
happily, turning over old memories, old books, old toys, taking the old
walks through the long garden, past, but not into, the beech wood that
a whim of the old man’s had closed against even himself, against all
save the birds and the squirrels; over the high downs and back into the
deep vale which had produced that delicate physical beauty and those
gracious lusty ways beyond which it seemed that men and women could
hardly go in earthly life. Very happy were those two, and very placid;
but within a week their tragic peace was perfected. The boy fell out
of one of the apple-trees and was killed. The old man could not but
stumble over that small grave into his own, and here is the end, the
unnoted, the common end, and the epitaph written by the auctioneer and
the rain.

Much as I love rain, heavy or light, freakish or continuous, I am glad
to be out of it for a little while and to open a book of ballads by a
solitary fire at “The White Horse,” and soon to close it after reading
again the lines--

    “O then bespake her daughter dear,
      She was baith jimp and sma’:
    ‘O row me in a pair o’ sheets,
      And tow me owre the wa’!’

    They row’d her in a pair o’ sheets,
      And tow’d her owre the wa’;
    But on the point o’ Gordon’s spear
      She gat a deadly fa’.

    O bonnie, bonnie was her mouth,
      And cherry were her cheeks,
    And clear, clear was her yellow hair,
      Whereon the red blood dreeps.

    Then wi’ his spear he turn’d her owre;
      O gin her face was wan!
    He said, ‘Ye are the first that e’er
      I wish’d alive again.’

    He cam’ and lookit again at her;
      O gin her skin was white!
    ‘I might hae spared that bonnie face
      To hae been some man’s delight.

    ‘Busk and boon, my merry men a’,
      For ill dooms I do guess;
    I cannot look on that bonnie face
      As it lies on the grass.’

    ‘Wha looks to freits, my master dear,
      Its freits will follow them;
    Let it ne’er be said that Edom o’ Gordon
      Was daunted by a dame....’”

I cannot help wondering whether the great work done in the last century
and a half towards the recovery of old ballads in their integrity will
have any effect beyond the entertainment of a few scientific men and
lovers of what is ancient, now that the first effects upon Wordsworth
and his contemporaries have died away. Can it possibly give a vigorous
impulse to a new school of poetry that shall treat the life of our time
and what in past times has most meaning for us as freshly as those
ballads did the life of their time? It is possible; and it is surely
impossible that such examples of simple, realistic narrative shall be
quite in vain. Certainly the more they are read the more they will be
respected, and not only because they often deal with heroic matters
heroically, but because their style is commonly so beautiful, their
pathos so natural, their observation of life so fresh, so fond of
particular detail--its very lists of names being at times real poetry.

Sometimes the style is equal and like to that of the most accomplished
poetry, as in the stanza--

    “The Ynglyshe men let ther boys (bows) be,
      And pulde owt brandes that were brighte;
    It was a hevy syght to se
      Bryght swordes on basnites lyght.”

Or in--

    “God send the land deliverance
      Frae every reaving, riding Scot!
    We’ll sune hae neither cow nor ewe,
      We’ll sune hae neither staig nor stot.”

It is equally good in passages where the poet simply expresses his
hearty delight in something which his own eyes have seen among his
neighbours, as in--

    “He had horse and harness for them all,
      Goodly steeds were all milke-white:
    O the golden bands an about their necks,
      And their weapons, they were all alike....”

And, by the way, do not touches like these often reveal the stamp of
individuals upon pieces which are loosely said to have been “composed
by the folk”? They quite do away with the notion that ballads were
composed by a number of people, after the fashion of a story in the
game of “Consequences.” In fact, it is one of the pleasures of reading
ballads to watch for those things which show us the heart of one man
who stands out by himself. Such a one was the man who said--

    “I dreamt I pu’d the heather green
      Wi’ my true love on Yarrow.”

And who was that unhappy one who served a king for seven years and only
once saw the king’s daughter, and that was through a gimlet-hole? Two
were putting on her gown, two putting on her shoes, five were combing
down her hair--

    “Her neck and breast was like the snow--
      Then from the bore I was forced to go.”

Was he the man who made it a common thing to speak in ballads of
“combing her yellow hair”?

What a poet, too, was he who put that touch into “Bewick and Grahame,”
where the father throws down his glove as a challenge to his son and
the son stoops to pick it up, and says--

    “O father, put on your glove again,
      The wind hath blown it from your hand.”

It is one of the most delicate things, and with it the stanza in the
same ballad where the father praises the son for his victory over a
friend, but the son, hating the battle which would not have been fought
if the fathers had not quarrelled in their wine, says--

    “Father, could ye not drink your wine at home
      And letten me and my brother be?”

And the mind of a poet is to be seen in the whole of some ballads and
in every detail, as for example in the three perfect verses--

    “O lang, lang may their ladies sit
      Wi’ their fans into their hand,
    Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens
      Come sailing to the land.

    O lang, lang may the ladies stand,
      Wi’ their gold combs in their hair,
    Wailing for their ain dear lords,
      For they’ll see them na mair.

    Half-owre, half-owre to Aberdour,
      It’s fiftie fadom deep,
    And there lies guid Sir Patrick Spens,
      Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.”

This ballad is one peculiar to our island, and no one can seriously
deny that some one of its authors was one of the greatest writers of
narrative poetry that ever lived.




CHAPTER XV

AN OUTCAST--WILTSHIRE


Not far from “The White Horse” is a little town upon a stream that
waves myriads of reeds and tall purple flowers of hemp agrimony. These
are the last shops I am likely to pass in Wiltshire, and it occurs
to me that I should like to taste lardy cakes--which I last bought
in Wroughton fifteen years ago--before I leave the county. Richard
Jefferies’ grandfather was “My Lord Lardy Cake” in old Swindon sixty
years ago, and his memory is kept alive by those tough, sweet slabs
of larded pastry which, in his generous ovens, gathered all the
best essences of the other cakes, pies, tarts and joints which were
permitted to be baked with them. In “Amaryllis at the Fair” they are
mentioned with some indignity as a ploughboy’s delicacy. My lips water
for them, and at the first bakery in ---- I ask for some. The baker
tells me he has sold the last one. He is a small, white-haired and
white-bearded man with an expression of unctuous repose, assuredly
a pillar of his chapel and possibly its treasurer, and though he
himself will, by his own telling, have no more lardy cakes until
the next morning, he stiffly tries to persuade me that none of his
fellow-townsmen bakes them. I disbelieve the man of dough for all his
conscious look of sagacity and virtue, and am rewarded for my disbelief
by four lardy cakes for threepence-halfpenny not many yards from his
accursed threshold. Lardy cakes, I now discover for the first time,
have this merit besides their excellent taste and provision of much
pleasant but not finical labour for the teeth, that one is enough at a
time, and that four will, therefore, take a man quite a long way upon
the roads of England.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the next inn three labourers and the landlord are heated in
conversation about some one not present.

“Quite right,” says one, a sober carter whose whip leans against the
counter, “’tis the third time this week that a tramp has been to his
door, and by the looks of them they didn’t call for naught.”

“One of them didn’t, I know,” says the landlord. “He came in here once
and asked for a job and left without a drink, but after he’d been to
Stegbert’s Cottage he came straight here and ordered a pint of mild.
And I heard as he let a chap and a woman sleep two nights running in
that rough patch behind the house. Don’t you think the parson ought to
hear of that? And what does he do for a living? He looks poor enough
himself.”

“I don’t know. Mr. Jones is a kind-hearted fellow. He stopped my
youngest in the street the other day and gave her a penny and measured
her hair, and told her she’d have a yard of it some day. They tell me
he hasn’t a carpet on the floor anywhere, and no parlour, and not even
a chest of drawers; and the postman says he hasn’t a watch or a clock.
What does he do with himself?”

“I reckon he’s mad,” says the third, chuckling, “and I don’t mind if he
is. My old dog doesn’t need feeding at home since he’s been here. He
doesn’t eat no meat himself neither. The widow Nash was reckoning it
up, and she says he spends four shillings a week----”

“And a shilling here regular,” interjects the landlord.

“On groceries, including one-and-six for tobacco. He has four loaves,
and I know ‘Kruger’ must have more than half of them.”

“And every other week he buys a postal order for two shillings and a
penny stamp----”

“Pint of mild, mister,” says a tall blear-eyed man who comes in, meekly
followed by a small woman, dusty and in rags but neat, to whom he
offers the tankard after nearly draining it himself.

“Nice weather,” he ventures, smacking his lips.

“Yes,” says the landlord discouragingly, and the carter leaves.

“Everybody seems to be gone to the flower show,” continues the
intruder, “and that’s where I’m going” (here he looks at his boots),
“but the best way for sore feet is three days in a tap-room in some
good sawdust.”

The wife sighs.

“The fat woman that weighs twenty-three stone,” says her husband to
the company, “is a cousin of mine twice removed, and I have done a bit
in the show line myself. It’s a rum business. Better than working in a
brewery stables, though. Me and my mate had to go because we got up so
early that we burnt too many candles.”

The mention of the fat woman rouses the labourers, and one says--

“They say them fat women eats hardly anything at all.”

“Very small eater is Daisy. But you see her food does her good. None of
it’s wasted.”

“That’s it. Her food agrees with her.”

The wife sighs.

“Now there’s my missus here,” says the husband. “She was one of these
pretty gallus dancing-girls who get their fifteen shillings a week. Her
food don’t nourish her. Now my brother used to laugh in publics for a
pint and he would laugh till they gave him a pint to stop.”

“Oh, I can laugh _after_ a pint,” says the wife, “but then I could just
as easy cry, I worries so. There’s many a aching heart goes up and down
that Great Western Railway in the express trains.”

“I never worries, missus,” says a labourer with pursy mouth, short
pipe, and head straight up behind from his neck.

“Quite right,” says the husband. “My old girl here lives on the fat of
the land and is always thin. Her food don’t nourish her. There’s more
harm done in the world by a discontented gut than anything else. I
think of asking her to try living on her pipe by itself.”

“Like Mr. Jones over there,” says one of the labourers.

“Mr. Jones? What, my friend Mr. William Jones?” asks the tall man.

“Is he a friend of yours?” asks the landlord, curiosity overpowering
his natural caution with a man who is selling spectacles at a shilling
a pair.

“He is, and I don’t mind letting any one know it. I’m very glad to see
him settled down. He’s the only one along the road who hasn’t gone to
the flower show to-day.” Here the tall man calls for another tankard,
which, as he is doing all the talking, he does not pass to the small
neat woman behind him. Pleased to be civilly used, and warmed by the
liquor, he tells the story of his friend, the little woman helping him
out, and landlord and labourers adding some touches; and Mr. Jones
himself completed the picture during my few days in the village.

The man who fed his neighbour’s dog, and sent the beggar satisfied
away, and made presents to the children, and lived on six ounces of
tobacco a week, is a native of Zennor in Cornwall. “Wonderful place
for pedlars is Cornwall. The towns are so few and far between that
the people along the road aren’t used to pedlars, and when you do
call you are sure of the best of treatment.” He was apprenticed to a
shoemaker in a town in South Devon, and for a time practised his trade
there as an assistant. He was very clever at boxing and wrestling,
and a hard fighter, too, though unwilling to make a quarrel. But he
was a queer youth and took violent likes and dislikes to men, and one
day he dropped a boot and went out into the street and took a young
gentleman by the arm and said to him: “Excuse me, sir, you have passed
this shop for five years nearly every day and I can’t stand it any
longer.” Whereupon he gave that young gentleman a beating. He was sent
to prison; he lost his employment and went to sea. And at sea or else
in foreign countries he stayed six years. He left the sea only because
he broke an arm which had at length to be amputated above the elbow.
He was a changed man and many thought then that he was mad. When he
left the hospital it was December and bitter weather: he had only five
shillings and it was notorious how he spent it. Every day for a week
he bought three loaves of bread and went out and fed the birds with
them. When that week was over he had to go into the workhouse, and
there he stayed until the spring. It was there that he fell in with
the tall man who helped to tell his tale. They left together and
for some time he almost kept the two by begging, his lack of an arm
ensuring his success. But he was not altogether to his companion’s
taste, nevertheless. He would stop and smoke a pipe and admire the view
when he was miles from anywhere and their object was to reach a town
and find enough money to pay for lodgings. He would stand by a hedge,
content for an hour to disentangle the bryony strands that were in
danger of straying to the road, and to restore them to the hazel and
thorn where their fellows ramped. He was willing to be foster-father to
half the helpless fledglings that he found on the roadside. Sleeping
one night in a barn he could not be persuaded to leave until he had
decided whether it was better to kill a spider who had a great appetite
for flies or to leave it to Fate. Several he rescued from the web
and then out of pity for the spider brought it flies already dead;
but finding that these were not to its taste he left the difficulty
unsolved and went sadly on his way. Almost equal to his pitifulness was
his dislike of work and his moral cowardice. Nothing could persuade him
to do any work, and such a coward was he that if he failed at the first
house where he offered his laces for sale he would not try again in
that village or town. Yet he did not scruple to steal--even with a hint
of physical violence--if he needed anything which chance presented to
him in another man’s possession: but he stole only necessaries, having
none of the acquisitiveness which is more common in their victims than
in thieves. Few men use leisure as well as he; perhaps no man was ever
idle with less harm to his fellows. The rich could have learned many
lessons at his feet: they must always be shooting or driving furiously
or meddling with politics or stopping footpaths; they cannot be kept
out of harm, however rich. How well this man would have employed money:
he would have given it away!

By and by his pity for goaded cattle and his frequent gazings into
their brown eyes as they stared at him by a stile still further reduced
his necessities--he would touch no meat; so that his companion, finding
him no longer of much use in spite of his possession of but one arm,
left him and only crossed his path at increasing intervals of time. It
was now that Jones remembered with horror a scene which had slumbered
in his mind with the fear which it originally roused in youth. He and
other boys were in the habit of peeping through a hole in the wall
of a slaughter-house and watching the slaughter, the skinning and
the cutting up, until their ears became familiar with the groans,
the screams, the gurglings, the squelchings in the half-darkness of
candle-light, the blood and white faces and the knife. But one day
there was led into the slaughter-house a white heifer fresh from the
May pasture, clean and bright from her gleaming rosy hoofs to the tips
of the horns that swayed as she walked. Her breath made, as it were, a
sacred space about her as the light of a human face will do. She stood
quiet but uncertain and musingly in the dark, soaked, half-ruinous
place, into which light only came in bars through a cobwebbed lattice
and fell that day upon her white face, leaving in darkness the tall
butcher and the imbecile assistant who held the rope by which the
animal’s head was drawn down to the right level for a blow. The men
were in no hurry and as the heifer was not restive they finished their
talk about Home Rule. Then the idiot tried to put her into the right
position, but for a time could not get her to see that her head must
be drawn tight and somewhat askew against the oaken pillar. He only
succeeded by patting her flanks and saying gently as if to a girl:
“Come along, Daisy!” She lowed soft and bowed her head; the blow fell;
she rolled to the ground and the butcher once more let loose the heavy
scent of blood. The wholesome pretty beast, the familiar “Come along,
Daisy!” and the blow and the scent came often into Jones’ mind. He
ate no meat, but made no attempt to proselytize; he simply retreated
deeper and deeper into his childlike love of Nature. The birds and
the flowers and the creeping and running things he seemed to regard
as little happy, charming, undeveloped human beings, looking down on
them with infinite tenderness and a little amusement; with them alone
was he quite at home. Nature, as she presented herself to his simple
senses, was but a fragrant, many-coloured, exuberant, chiefly joyous
community, with which most men were not in harmony. Silent for days and
thinking only “green thoughts” under the branches of the wood, he came
to demand, unconsciously, that there should be such a harmony. But he
loved Nature also because she had no ambiguity, told no lies, uttered
no irony. Sitting among flowers by running water he wore an expression
of blessed satisfaction with his company which is not often seen at
the friendliest table. He drew no philosophy from Nature, no opinions,
ideas, proposals for reform, but only the wisdom to live, happily and
healthily and simply, himself.

I dare say modernity was in his blood, but no man seemed to belong less
to our time. Of history and science he knew nothing, of literature
nothing; he had to make out the earth with his own eyes and heart. He
had not words for it, but he felt that whatever he touched was God.
No myth or religion had any value to him. There were no symbols for
him to use. The deities he surmised or smelt or tasted in the air or
upon the earth had neither name nor shape. Had he been able to think,
he was the man to put our generation on the way to a new mythology.
For all I know, he had the vision, the power of the seer, without
the power of the prophet. A little more and perhaps he would have
invaded Christendom as St. Paul invaded Heathendom. Yet I think he
was not wholly the loser by being unable to think. The eye untroubled
by thought sees things like a mirror newly burnished; at night, for
example, the musing man can see nothing before him but a mist, but
if he stops thinking quickly the roads, the walls, the trees become
visible. So this man saw with a clearness as of Angelico, and in his
memory violets and roses, trees and faces were as clear as if within
his brain were another sun to light them. He had but to close his
eyes to see these things, an innumerable procession of days and their
flowers and their birds in the sky or on the bough. And this he had at
no cost. He employed only such labour as was needed to make his bread
and occasionally clothes and a pipe. Nor did he merely ask alms of
Nature and Civilization. He paid back countless charities to flower
and bird and child and poorer men, and there was nothing against him
of pain or sorrow or death inflicted. And as he was without religion
so he was without patriotism. He had no country, knew nothing of men
and events. Asked by a person who saw him idle and did not observe his
defect, whether he would not like to do something for his country, he
replied: “I have no country like you, sir. I own nothing; my people
never did, that I know. I admire those that do, for I have been in many
a country when I was a sailor, but never a one to beat England, let
alone the West Country when it’s haymaking time.”

He continued to beg with a free conscience, and was always willing to
give away all that he had to one in more need. And now chance found
him out and gave him ten shillings a week. He rented a cottage in this
village, weeded his flower-borders, but let his vegetable-plots turn
into poppy-beds. Sometimes he wearied of his monotonous meals; he would
then fast for a day or two, giving his food to the birds and mice,
until his hearty appetite returned....

He did not stay long in the village. He was shy and suspicious of men,
and except by the younger children he was not liked. He set out on his
travels again, and is still on the road or--unlike most tramps--on the
paths and green lanes, the simplest, kindest, and perhaps the wisest
of men, indifferent to mobs, to laws, to all of us who are led aside,
scattered and confused by hollow goods, one whom the last day of his
full life will not find in a whirlpool of affairs, but ready to go--an
outcast.




CHAPTER XVI

THE END OF SUMMER--KENT--BERKSHIRE--HAMPSHIRE--SUSSEX--THE FAIR


The road mounts the low Downs again. The boundless stubble is streaked
by long bands of purple-brown, the work of seven ploughs to which the
teams and their carters, riding or walking, are now slowly descending
by different ways over the slopes and jingling in the rain. Above is
a Druid moor bounded by beech-clumps, and crossed by old sunken ways
and broad grassy tracks. It is a land of moles and sheep. At the end
of a shattered line of firs a shepherd leans, bunched under his cape
of sacking, to watch his black-faced flock dull-tinkling in the short
furze and among the tumuli under the constant white rain. Those old
roads, being over hilly and open land, are as they were before the
making of modern roads, and little changed from what they were before
the Roman. But it is a pity to see some of the old roads that have been
left to the sole protection of the little gods. One man is stronger
than they, as may be known by any one who has seen the bones, crockery,
tin and paper thrown by Shere and Cocking into the old roads near by
as into a dust-bin; or seen the gashes in the young trees planted down
Gorst Road, Wandsworth Common; or the saucy “Private” at the entrance
to a lane worn by a hundred generations through the sand a little
north of Petersfield; or the barbed wire fastened into the living
trees alongside the footpath over a neighbouring hill that has lately
been sold. What is the value of every one’s right to use a footpath
if a single anti-social exclusive landowning citizen has the right to
make it intolerable except to such as consider it a place only for
the soles of the feet? The builder of a house acquires the right to
admit the sunlight through his window. Cannot the users of a footpath
acquire a right, during the course of half-a-dozen dynasties or less,
to the sight of the trees and the sky which that footpath gives them
in its own separate way? At least I hope that footpaths will soon
cease to be defined as a line--length without breadth--connecting one
point with another. In days when they are used as much for the sake
of the scenes historic or beautiful through which they pass as of the
villages or houses on this hand or that, something more than the mere
right to tread upon a certain ribbon of grass or mud will have to be
preserved if the preservation is to be of much use, and the right of
way must become the right of view and of very ancient lights as well.
By enforcing these rights some of the mountains of the land might even
yet be saved, as Mr. Henry S. Salt wishes to save them.[6] In the
meantime it is to be hoped that his criticisms will not be ignored by
the tourists who leave the Needle Gully a cascade of luncheon wrappings
and the like; for it is not from a body of men capable of such manners
that a really effective appeal against the sacrifice of “our mountains”
to commercial and other selfishness is like to spring.

[6] See his valuable _On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills_ (Fifield).

And those lone wayside greens, no man’s gardens, measuring a few feet
wide but many miles in length--why should they be used either as
receptacles for the dust of motor-cars or as additions to the property
of the landowner who happens to be renewing his fence? They used to
be as beautiful and cool and fresh as rivers, these green sisters of
the white roads--illuminated borders of many a weary tale. But now,
lest there should be no room for the dust, they are turning away from
them the gypsies who used to camp there for a night. The indolent
District Council that is anxious to get rid of its difficulties--for
the moment--at the expense of a neighbouring district--it cares
not--will send out its policemen to drive away the weary horses and
sleeping children from the acre of common land which had hitherto been
sacred--to what?--to an altar, a statue, a fountain, a seat?--No! to a
stately notice-board; half-a-century ago the common of which this is a
useless patch passed on easy terms to the pheasant lords. The gypsies
have to go. Give them a pitch for the night and you are regarded as
an enemy of the community or perhaps even as a Socialist. The gypsies
shall be driven from parish to parish, and finally settle down as
squalid degenerate nomads in a town where they lose what beauty and
courage they had, in adding to the difficulties of another council.
Yet if they were in a cage or a compound which it cost money to see,
hundreds would pay for a stare at their brown faces and bright eyes,
their hooped tents, their horses, their carelessness of the crowd, and
in a few years an imitation of these things will be applauded in a
“pageant” of the town which has destroyed the reality.

The grassy way ends with the moor at a pool beside a road, on one side
of it six thatched cottages fenced by sycamore and ash and elm, on the
other a grey farm and immense brown barn, within a long wall roofed
with mossy thatch; and the swallows fly low and slowly about the trees.

First beeches line the rising and descending road--past a church whose
ivied tombstones commemorate men of Cornish name--as far as an inn
and a sycamore nobly balanced upon a pedestal of matted roots. Then
there are ash-trees on either side and ricks of straw wetted to an
orange hue, and beyond them the open cornland, and rising out of it an
all-day-long procession in the south, the great company of the Downs
again, some tipped with wood, some bare; in the north, a broken chain
of woods upon low but undulating land seem the vertebræ of a forest
of old time stretching from east to west like the Downs. Hither and
thither the drunken pewits cry over the furrows, and thousands of
rocks and daws wheel over the stubble. As the day grows old it grows
sweet and golden and the rain ceases, and the beauty of the Downs in
the humid clearness does not long allow the eyes to wander away from
them. At first, when the sun breaks through, all silver bright and
acclaimed by miles of clouds in his own livery, the Downs below are
violet, and have no form except where they carve the sky with their
long arches. It is the woods northward that are chiefly glorified by
the light and warmth, and the glades penetrating them and the shining
stubble and the hedges, and the flying wood-pigeons and the cows of
richest brown and milky white; the road also gleams blue and wet. But
as the sun descends the light falls on the Downs out of a bright cave
in the gloomy forest of sky, and their flanks are olive and their
outlines intensely clear. From one summit to another runs a string of
trees like cavalry connecting one beech clump with another, so that
they seem actually to be moving and adding themselves to the clumps.
Above all is the abstract beauty of pure line--coupled with the beauty
of the serene and the uninhabited and remote--that holds the eye until
at length the hills are humbled and dispread as part of the ceremony
of sunset in a tranquil, ensanguined, quietly travelling sky. The blue
swallows go slowly along the silent road beside me, and the last rays
bless a grooved common grazed upon by cows and surrounded by ranges
of low white buildings and a row of lichened grotesque limes, dark of
bole, golden-leaved, where children are playing and an anvil rings.

Frost follows after the blue silence and chill of twilight, and the
dawn is dimmest violet in a haze that reveals the candied grass, the
soaking blue dark elms painted yellow only in one place, the red roofs,
all in a world of the unborn, and the waters steaming around invisible
crying coots. Gradually round white clouds--so dim that the sky seems
but to dream of round white clouds--appear imbedded in the haze; the
beams grow hot, and a breeze joins with them in sucking and scattering
all the sweet of the first fallen leaves, the weed fires and the late
honeysuckle.

Why are there no swifts to race and scream? We fret over these stages
of the descending year; we dream on such a day as this that there is no
need of farther descent. We would preserve those days of the reaping;
we have lost them; but we recall them now when the steam-plough has
furrowed the sheeny stubble, and long for the day when the gentle
north wind can only just stir the clusters of aspen-leaves, and the
branches are motionless. The nut bushes hang dreamily, heavily, over
the white cool roads. The wood-pigeon’s is the sole voice in the oak
woods of the low hills, except that once or twice a swift screams as
he pursues that martial flight of his--as of one who swings a sword as
he goes--towards the beeches and hop gardens of the higher hills in
the north; it is perhaps the last day for more than eight months that
his cry will be heard. A few barley-straws hang from the hazels; some
leaves are yellow. Autumn, in fact, seems possible to the mind that is
not perfectly content with these calm sweet airs and the sense of the
fulness of things.

At a crossing a small island is made amidst this and three other roads,
and on the island stands an oast house with two mellow cones and
white leaning cowls; and beside it a simple tiled cart-lodge, dimly
displaying massive wheels, curving bulwarks of waggons and straight
shafts behind its doorless pillars of rough-hewn wood. Making one group
with these, though separated from them by one road, is an old red
farmhouse, of barely distinguishable timber and brick, with white-edged
dormers and lower windows and doors, entrenched behind hollyhocks of
deepest red and the burning discs of everlasting sunflowers. Behind the
gates stand four haystacks brightly thatched, and one that is dark and
old and carved into huge stairs.

Notice the gate into the rickyard. It is of the usual five oak bars;
and across these is a diagonal bar from the lowest end nearest the
hinge to the upper end of the opposite side, and from top to bottom a
perpendicular cross-bar divides the gate. The top bar marks it as no
common gate made at a factory with a hundred others of the same kind,
though there are scores of them in Kent. It thickens gradually towards
the hinge end of the gate, and then much more decidedly so that it
resembles a gun-barrel and stock; and just where the stock begins it
is carved with something like a trigger-guard; the whole being well
proportioned, graceful but strong. In all the best gates of Kent,
Sussex and Surrey and the South Country there is an approach to this
form, usually without the trigger-guard, but sometimes having instead a
much more elaborate variation of it which takes away from the dignity
and simplicity of the gate. At the road’s edge crooked quince-trees
lean over a green pond and green but nearly yellow straight reeds;
and four cart-horses, three sorrels and a grey, are grouped under one
stately walnut.

These things mingle their power with that of the silence and the wooded
distance under the blue and rosy west. The slow dying of a train’s roar
beats upon the shores of the silence and the distance, and is swallowed
up in them like foam in sand, and adds one more trophy to the glory of
the twilight.

Night passes, and the white dawn is poured out over the dew from the
folds in low clouds of infinitely modulated grey. Autumn is clearly
hiding somewhere in the long warm alleys under the green and gold of
the hops. The very colours of the oast houses seem to wait for certain
harmonies with oaks in the meadows and beeches in the steep woods.
The songs, too, are those of the drowsy yellow-hammer, of the robin
moodily brooding in orchards yellow spotted and streaked, of the unseen
wandering willow-wren singing sweetly but in a broken voice of a matter
now forgotten, of the melancholy twit of the single bullfinch as he
flies. The sudden lyric of the wren can stir no corresponding energy
in the land which is bowed, still, comfortable, like a deep-uddered
cow fastened to the milking-stall and munching grains. Soon will the
milk and honey flow. The reaping-machine whirrs; the wheelwrights have
mended the waggons’ wheels and patched their sides; they stand outside
their lodges.

There is a quarter of a sloping wheat-field reaped; the shocks stand
out above the silvery stubble in the evening like rocks out of a
moonlight sea. The unreaped corn is like a tawny coast; and all is
calm, with the quiet of evening heavens fallen over the earth. This
beauty of the ripe Demeter standing in the August land is incomparable.
It reminds one of the poet who said that he had seen a maid who looked
like a fountain on a green lawn when the south wind blows in June; and
one whose smile was as memorable as the new moon in the first still
mild evening of the year, when it is seen for a moment only over the
dark hills; and one whose walking was more kindling to the blood than
good ale by a winter fire on an endless evening among friends; but that
now he has met another, and when he is with her or thinks of her he
becomes as one that is blind and deaf to all other things.

But a few days and the bryony leaves are palest yellow in the hedge.
Rooks are innumerable about the land, but their cawing, like all other
sounds, like all the early bronze and rose and gold of the leaves, is
muffled by the mist which endures right through the afternoon; and
all day falls the gentle rain. In the hillside hop garden two long
lines of women and children, red and white and black, are destroying
the golden green of the hops, and they are like two caterpillars
destroying a leaf. Pleasant it is now to see the white smoke from the
oast house pouring solidly like curving plumes into the still rain,
and to smell the smell, bitter and never to be too much sniffed and
enjoyed, that travels wide over the fields. For the hop drier has lit
his two fires of Welsh coal and brimstone and charcoal under the two
cones of the oast house, and has spread his couch of straw on the
floor where he can sleep his many little sleeps in the busy day and
night. The oast house consists of the pair of cones, white-vaned and
tiled, upon their two circular chambers in which the fires are lit.
Attached to these on one side is a brick building of two large rooms,
one upon the ground, where the hop drier sleeps and tends his fires,
lighted only by doors at either side and divided by the wooden pillars
which support the floor of the upper room. This, the oast chamber,
reached by a ladder, is a beautiful room, its oak boards polished by
careful use and now stained faintly by the green-gold of hops, its
roof raftered and high and dim. Light falls upon it on one side from
two low windows, on the opposite side from a door through which the
hops arrive from the garden. The waggon waits below the door, full of
the loose, stained hop-sacks which the carter and his boy lift up to
the drier. From the floor two short ladders lead to the doors in the
cones where the hops are suspended on canvas floors above the kilns.
The inside of the cone is full of coiling fumes which have killed the
young swallows in the nests under the cowl--the parents return again
and again, but dare no longer alight on their old perches on the vanes.
When dried the hops are poured out on the floor of the vast chamber in
a lisping scaly pile, and the drier is continually sweeping back those
which are scattered. Through a hole in the floor he forces them down
into a sack reaching to the floor of the room below. He is hard at
work making these sacks or “pokes,” which, when full and their necks
stitched up, are as hard as wood. Before the drying is over the full
sacks will take up half the room. The children tired of picking come
to admire and to visit all the corners of the room; of the granary
alongside and its old sheepbells, its traps, a crossbow and the like;
of the farmyard and barns, sacred except at this time. For a few
minutes the sun is visible as a shapeless crimson thing above the mist
and behind the elms. It is twilight; the wheels and hoofs of the last
waggon approach and arrive and die away. And so day after day the fires
glow with ruby and sapphire and emerald; the cone wears its plume of
smoke; and everything is yellow-green--the very scent of the drying
hops can hardly be otherwise described, in its mixture of sharpness
and mellowness. Then when the last sack is pressed benches are placed
round the chamber and a table at one end. The master, who is giving up
the farm, leans on the table and pays each picker and pole-puller and
measurer, with a special word for each and a jest for the women. Ale
and gin and cakes are brought in, and the farmer leaves the women and
one or two older men to eat and drink. The women in their shabby black
skirts and whitish blouses shuffle through a dance or two, all modern
and some American. One old man tipsily tottering recalls the olden time
with a step-dance down the room; some laugh at him, others turn up
their new roseate noses. Next year the hops are to be grubbed up; the
old man to be turned out of his cottage--for he has paid no rent these
seven years; but now it is cakes and ale, and the farmer has hiccupped
a lying promise that his successor will go on growing hops.


HAMPSHIRE.

To-day is fair day. The scene is a green, slightly undulating common,
grassy and rushy at its lower end where a large pond wets the margin of
the high road, and at the upper end sprinkled with the dwarf and the
common gorse out of which rise many tumuli, green or furzy mounds of
earth, often surmounted by a few funereal pines. The common is small;
it is bounded on every side by roads, and on one by a row of new mean
houses; there is a golf-house among the tumuli; in one place a large
square has been ploughed and fenced by a private owner. But the slope
of the sandy soil is pleasant; in one place it is broken into a low
cliff overhanging the water, and this with the presence of the gorse
give it a touch of the wildness by which it may still deserve its name
of “heath.” Most powerful of all in their effect upon the place are the
tumuli. They are low and smooth; one or two scarcely heave the turf;
some have been removed; and there is no legend attached to them. Yet
their presence gives an indescribable charm and state, and melancholy
too, and makes these few acres an expanse unequalled by any other of
the same size. Not too far off to be said to belong to the heath, from
which they are separated by three miles of cultivated land and a lesser
beechen hill, are the Downs; among them one that bears a thin white
road winding up at the edge of a dark wood. In the moist October air
the Downs are very grave and gentle and near, and are not lost to sight
until far beyond the turreted promontory of Chanctonbury.

Early in the morning the beggars begin to arrive, the lame and the
blind, with or without a musical instrument. King of them all certainly
is he with no legs at all and seeming not to need them, so active is
he on a four-wheeled plank which suspends him only a foot above the
ground. Many a strong man earns less money. The children envy him
as he moves along, a wheeled animal, weather-beaten, white-haired,
white-bearded, with neat black hat and white slop, a living toy, but
with a deep voice, a concertina and a tin full of pence and halfpence.

These unashamed curiosities line the chief approaches, down which every
one is going to the fair except a few shabby fellows who offer blue
sheets full of music-hall ballads to the multitude and, with a whisper,
indecent songs to the select. Another not less energetic, but stout
and condescending, yellow-bearded, in a high hard felt hat, gives away
tracts. The sound of a hymn from one organ mingles with the sound of
“Put me among the girls” from another and the rattle of the legless
man’s offertory-tin.

The main part of the fair consists of a double row, a grove, of tents
and booths, roundabouts, caravans, traps and tethered ponies. A crowd
of dark-clad women goes up and down between the rows: there is a sound
of machine-made music, of firing at targets, of shouts and neighs and
brays and the hoot of engines. Here at the entrance to the grove is a
group of yellow vans; some children playing among the shafts and wheels
and musing horses; and a gypsy woman on a stool, her head on one side,
combing her black hair and talking to the children, while a puppy
catches at the end of her tresses when they come swishing down. Beyond
are cocoanut-shies, short-sighted cyclists performing, Aunt Sallies,
rows of goldfish bowls into which a light ball has to be pitched to
earn a prize, stalls full of toys, cheap jewellery and sweets like
bedded-out plants, and stout women pattering alongside--bold women,
with sleek black or yellow hair and the bearing and countenance of
women who have to make their way in the world. Behind these, women are
finishing their toilet and their children’s among the vans, preparing
meals over red crackling fires, and the horses rest their noses on the
stalls and watch the crowd; the long yellow dogs are curled up among
the wheels or nosing in the crowd.

There are men selling purses containing a sovereign for sixpence,
loud, fat cosmopolitans on a cockney basis with a ceaseless flow of
cajolery intermingled with sly indecency; the country policeman in
the background puzzling over his duty in the matter, but in the end
paralyzed by the showmen’s gift of words. One man has before him a
counter on which he asks you to cover a red-painted disc with five
smaller discs of zinc, charging twopence for the attempt and promising
a watch to the great man who succeeds. After a batch of failures he
himself, with good-natured but bored face, shows how easily it is
done, and raising his eyes in despair craves for more courage from the
audience. The crowd looks on, hesitating, until he singles out the most
bashful countryman at the back of the throng, saying: “I like your
face. You are a good sort. You have a cheerful face; it’s the rich have
the sad faces. So I’ll treat you to a go.” The hero steps forward and
succeeds, but as it was a free trial he receives no watch; trying again
for twopence he fails. Another tries: “By Jove! that was a near one.”
A woman tries, and just as she is finishing, “You’re a ’cute one,
missus,” he ejaculates, and she fails. Another tries, and the showman
has a watch ready to hand over, and only at the last moment says
excitedly (restoring the watch quietly to its place): “I thought you’d
got it that time.... Come along! It’s the best game in the world.” Once
more he repeats the trick himself without looking, and then exclaims
as he sweeps the discs together: “It’s a silly game, I call it!” He is
like the preachers who show the stupid world how virtue is won: he has
a large audience, a large paunch, and many go away disappointed. The
crowd stares, and has the one deep satisfaction of believing that the
woman who travels with him is not his wife.

At the upper end of the grove is the gaudy green and gold and
scarlet-painted and embossed entrance to the bioscope, raised a few
feet above the crowd. On the platform before the door stand two painted
men and a girl. The girl has a large nose, loose mouth and a ready,
but uneasy, discontented smile as if she knows that her paint is an
imperfect refuge from the gaze of the crowd; as if she knows that her
eyes are badly darkened, and her white stockings soiled, and her legs
too thin under her short skirt, and her yellow hair too stiff. She
lounges wearily with a glib clown who wears a bristly fringe of sandy
hair round his face, which tickles her and causes roars of laughter
when he aims at a kiss. The other performer is a contortionist, a small
slender man in dirty, ill-fitting scarlet jacket with many small brass
buttons, dirty brown trousers criss-crossed by yellow stripes; his
hands in his pockets; his snub nose deep pink, and his lean face made
yet leaner and more dismal by a thin streak of red paint on either
cheek. His melancholy seems natural, yet adds to his vulgarity because
he forsakes it so quickly when he smirks and turns away if the girl
exposes her legs too much. For she turns a somersault with the clown
at intervals; or doubles herself back to touch the ground first with
her yellow hair and at last with her head; or is lifted up by the clown
and, supported on the palm of one of his hands, hangs dangling in a
limp bow, her face yet gaunter and sadder upside down with senseless
eyes and helpless legs. The crowd watch--looking sideways at one
another to get their cue--some with unconscious smiles entranced, but
most of them grimly controlling the emotions roused by the girl or the
contortionist or the clown and the thought of their unstable life. A
few squirt water languidly or toss confetti. Others look from time to
time to see whether any one in the county dare in broad daylight enter
the booth for “gentlemen only,” at the door of which stands a shabby
gaudy woman of forty-five grinning contemptuously.

Up and down moves the crowd--stiffly dressed children carrying gay toys
or bowls of goldfish or cocoanuts--gypsy children with scarves, blue
or green or red--lean, tanned, rough-necked labourers caged in their
best clothes, except one, a labourer of well past middle age, a tall
straight man with a proud grizzled head, good black hat of soft felt
low in the crown, white scarf, white jacket, dark-brown corduroys above
gleaming black boots.

On the open heath behind the stalls they are selling horses by auction.
Enormous cart-horses plunge out of the groups of men and animals and
carry a little man suspended from their necks; stout men in grey
gaiters and black hats bobble after. Or more decorously the animals
are trotted up and down between rows of men away from the auctioneer
and back again, their price in guineas mingling with the statement that
they are real workers, while a small boy hustles them with whip and
shout from behind, and a big stiff man leads them and, to turn them at
the end of the run, shoves his broad back into their withers. The Irish
dealers traffic apart and try to sell without auction. Their horses
and ponies, braided with primrose and scarlet, stand in a quiet row.
Suddenly a boy leads out one on a halter, a hard, plump, small-headed
beast bucking madly, and makes it circle rapidly about him, stopping it
abruptly and starting it again, with a stiff pink flag which he flaps
in its face or pokes into its ribs; if the beast refuses he raises a
high loud “whoo-hoop” and curses or growls like an animal. For perhaps
five minutes this goes on, the boy never abating his oaths and growls
and whoops and flirtings of the pink flag. The horse is led back; a
muttering calm follows; another horse is led out. Here and there are
groups of cart-mares with huge pedestalled feet and their colts, or
of men bending forward over long ash-sticks and talking in low tones.
Horses race or walk or are backed into the crowd. Droves of bullocks
are driven through the furze. Rows of bulls, sweating but silent and
quiet, bow their heads and wait as on a frieze. Again the pink flags
are flourished, and the dealer catches a horsy stranger by the arm and
whispers and shows him the mare’s teeth. This dealer is a big Irishman
with flattened face and snaky nose, his voice deep and laughing. He
smiles continually, but when he sees a possible buyer he puts on an
artful expression so transparent that his merry face shines clearly
underneath and remains the same in triumph or rebuke--is the same
at the end of the day when he leads off his horses and stopping at a
wayside inn drinks on the kerb, but first gives the one nearest him a
gulp from the tankard.

       *       *       *       *       *

All night--for a week--it rains, and at last there is a still morning
of mist. A fire of weeds and hedge-clippings in a little flat field is
smouldering. The ashes are crimson, and the bluish-white smoke flows
in a divine cloudy garment round the boy who rakes over the ashes.
The heat is great, and the boy, straight and well made, wearing close
gaiters of leather that reach above the knees, is languid at his
task, and often leans upon his rake to watch the smoke coiling away
from him like a monster reluctantly fettered and sometimes bursting
into an anger of sprinkled sparks. He adds some wet hay, and the
smoke pours out of it like milky fleeces when the shearer reveals the
inmost wool with his shears. Above and beyond him the pale blue sky is
dimly white-clouded over beech woods, whose many greens and yellows
and yellow-greens are softly touched by the early light which cannot
penetrate to the blue caverns of shade underneath. Athwart the woods
rises a fount of cottage-smoke from among mellow and dim roofs. Under
the smoke and partly scarfed at times by a drift from it is the yellow
of sunflower and dahlia, the white of anemone, the tenderest green and
palest purple of a thick cluster of autumn crocuses that have broken
out of the dark earth and stand surprised, amidst their own weak light
as of the underworld from which they have come. Robins sing among the
fallen apples, and the cooing of wood-pigeons is attuned to the soft
light and the colours of the bowers. The yellow apples gleam. It is
the gleam of melting frost. Under all the dulcet warmth of the face of
things lurks the bitter spirit of the cold. Stand still for more than
a few moments and the cold creeps with a warning and then a menace
into the breast. That is the bitterness that makes this morning of all
others in the year so mournful in its beauty. The colour and the grace
invite to still contemplation and long draughts of dream; the frost
compels to motion. The scent is that of wood-smoke, of fruit and of
some fallen leaves. This is the beginning of the pageant of autumn,
of that gradual pompous dying which has no parallel in human life yet
draws us to it, with sure bonds. It is a dying of the flesh, and we
see it pass through a kind of beauty which we can only call spiritual,
of so high and inaccessible a strangeness is it. The sight of such
perfection as is many times achieved before the end awakens the never
more than lightly sleeping human desire of permanence. Now, now is the
hour; let things be thus; thus for ever; there is nothing further to be
thought of; let these remain. And yet we have a premonition that remain
they must not for more than a little while. The motion of the autumn
is a fall, a surrender, requiring no effort, and therefore the mind
cannot long be blind to the cycle of things as in the spring it can
when the effort and delight of ascension veils the goal and the decline
beyond. A few frosts now, a storm of wind and rain, a few brooding
mists, and the woods that lately hung dark and massive and strong upon
the steep hills are transfigured and have become cloudily light and
full of change and ghostly fair; the crowing of a cock in the still
misty morning echoes up in the many-coloured trees like a challenge to
the spirits of them to come out and be seen, but in vain. For months
the woods have been homely and kind, companions and backgrounds to our
actions and thoughts, the wide walls of a mansion utterly our own.
We could have gone on living with them for ever. We had given up the
ardours, the extreme ecstasy of our first bridal affection, but we had
not forgotten them. We could not become indifferent to the Spanish
chestnut-trees that grow at the top of the steep rocky banks on either
side of the road and mingle their foliage overhead. Of all trees
well-grown chestnuts are among the most pleasant to look up at. For the
foliage is not dense and it is for the most part close to the large
boughs, so that the light comes easily down through all the horizontal
leaves, and the shape of each separate one is not lost in the
multitude, while at the same time the bold twists of the branches are
undraped or easily seen through such translucent green. The trunks are
crooked, and the handsome deep furrowing of the bark is often spirally
cut. The limbs are few and wide apart so as to frame huge delicately
lighted and shadowed chambers of silence or of birds’ song. The leaves
turn all together to a leathern hue, and when they fall stiffen and
display their shape on the ground and long refuse to be merged in the
dismal trodden hosts. But when the first one floats past the eye and is
blown like a canoe over the pond we recover once more our knowledge and
fear of Time. All those ladders of goose-grass that scaled the hedges
of spring are dead grey; they are still in their places, but they
clamber no longer. The chief flower is the yellow bloom set in the dark
ivy round the trunks of the ash-trees; and where it climbs over the
holly and makes a solid sunny wall, and in the hedges, a whole people
of wasps and wasp-like flies are always at the bloom with crystal
wings, except when a passing shadow disperses them for a moment with
one buzz. But these cannot long detain the eye from the crumbling woods
in the haze or under the large white clouds--from the amber and orange
bracken about our knees and the blue recesses among the distant golden
beeches when the sky is blue but beginning to be laden with loose
rain-clouds, from the line of leaf-tipped poplars that bend against the
twilight sky; and there is no scent of flowers to hide that of dead
leaves and rotting fruit. We must watch it until the end, and gain
slowly the philosophy or the memory or the forgetfulness that fits us
for accepting winter’s boon. Pauses there are, of course, or what seem
pauses in the declining of this pomp; afternoons when the rooks waver
and caw over their beechen town and the pigeons coo content; dawns
when the white mist is packed like snow over the vale and the high
woods take the level beams and a hundred globes of dew glitter on every
thread of the spiders’ hammocks or loose perpendicular nets among the
thorns, and through the mist rings the anvil a mile away with a music
as merry as that of the daws that soar and dive between the beeches and
the spun white cloud; mornings full of the sweetness of mushrooms and
blackberries from the short turf among the blue scabious bloom and the
gorgeous brier; empurpled evenings before frost when the robin sings
passionate and shrill and from the garden earth float the smells of a
hundred roots with messages of the dark world; and hours full of the
thrush’s soft November music. The end should come in heavy and lasting
rain. At all times I love rain, the early momentous thunderdrops,
the perpendicular cataract shining, or at night the little showers,
the spongy mists, the tempestuous mountain rain. I like to see it
possessing the whole earth at evening, smothering civilization, taking
away from me myself everything except the power to walk under the dark
trees and to enjoy as humbly as the hissing grass, while some twinkling
house-light or song sung by a lonely man gives a foil to the immense
dark force. I like to see the rain making the streets, the railway
station, a pure desert, whether bright with lamps or not. It foams all
the roofs and trees and bubbles into the water-butts. It gives the grey
rivers a demonic majesty. It scours the roads, sets the flints moving,
and exposes the glossy chalk in the tracks through the woods. It does
work that will last as long as the earth. It is about eternal business.
In its noise and myriad aspect I feel the mortal beauty of immortal
things. And then after many days the rain ceases at midnight with the
wind, and in the silence of dawn and frost the last rose of the world
is dropping her petals down to the glistering whiteness, and there they
rest blood-red on the winter’s desolate coast.




INDEX


  Angelico, Fra, 253

  April, 31, 155

  _Arabian Nights_, 63, 222

  Ashdown, 8, 47, 48

  August, 51, 181, 186, 210, 262


  Bain, F. W., 222

  Ballads, 224, 240

  Belloc, Hilaire, 1

  Beowulf, 158

  Berkshire, 255

  Blake, 35, 133

  Books, 26, 109, 130, 131, 178

  Borrow, 77, 117

  Bradley, A. G., 11

  _Brocken, Henry_, 178

  Browne, Thomas, 86

  Byron, 111


  Canal, Wilts. and Berks., 3

  Cathedrals, 4

  Catullus, 109

  _Centuries of Meditation_, 126

  Chaucer, 109, 110, 125

  Colman’s Hatch, 60

  Conrad, Joseph, 130

  Cornwall, 154, 249

  Cows, 129, 204, 252

  Crouch’s Croft, 47

  Crowborough, 47

  Cuckoo, 41


  Doughty, Charles M., 147, 153

  Downs, 1, 2, 8, 10, 28, 31, 35, 38, 40, 48, 50, 53, 71, 87, 101,
        104, 152, 169, 183, 205, 210, 227, 237, 255, 258

  Drayton, Michael, 109


  Fair, A South Country, 266

  February, 17


  Game, 59, 68

  Genée, Mademoiselle, 179

  Gerald of Wales, 150

  Golden Age, 125

  Gypsies, 129, 257, 266


  Hampshire, 19, 28, 46, 121, 129, 186, 188, 196, 210, 230, 255, 265

  History, 5, 147

  Hops, 262

  Houses, 12, 57, 116, 117, 118, 196, 201, 220, 227, 229, 235

  Hudson, W. H., 130


  Inns, 12, 72, 102, 192, 208, 214, 216, 233, 240


  Jefferies, Richard, 136, 145, 245

  Jonson, Ben, 109, 202

  Journalist, 7, 78, 125

  June, 121


  Kent, 11, 44, 47, 260


  Lamb, Charles, 138

  Land’s End, 42, 166

  London, 3, 10, 51, 60, 74, 87, 95, 98, 171, 190

  Lucas, E. V., 11


  M, 115

  Maeterlinck, 36

  Malory, 130

  March, 20, 30

  May, 49, 84, 103, 107, 109, 112, 117, 128

  Milton, John, 109

  Morris, William, 109, 113


  Names of places, 148

  Nature-teaching, 141

  Nightingale, 33, 206

  November, 99


  Oasts, 49, 260

  October, 80, 265


  _Pantagruel_, 178

  Pattison, Mark, 145

  Penshurst, 202

  Piet Down, 47

  Pilgrim’s Way, 3, 11, 44, 50, 52, 55, 58, 59, 210


  Railway, 95, 199

  Rivers of the South Country, 2, 3, 52, 107, 219, 229, 232

  Roads, 101, 108, 124, 193, 215, 219, 228, 246, 255


  Salt, Henry S., 256

  Sandsbury Lane, 60

  Scott, 63

  Sea, 15, 157

  Shelley, 112, 114

  Sidney, Sir Philip, 109, 125, 202

  Signboards, 4

  Socialism, 94

  Socialist, 257

  Spring, 22 _et passim_

  Statius, 229

  Suburbs, 61

  Suffolk, 15

  Sunday, 124, 186

  Surrey, 41, 58, 98

  Sussex, 68, 100, 114, 181, 189, 196, 255

  Swinburne, A. C., 111

  “Swineherds County,” 211


  Thoreau, 76, 77, 145

  Tolstoy, 143

  Traherne, Thomas, 126, 131, 134, 142

  Trespassers, 59, 215


  Vagrants, 25, 188, 249

  Vaughan, Thomas, 137

  Villon, 109


  Wales, 7, 9, 10, 76, 77, 125, 150, 153, 163, 175, 232

  Walton, Izaak, 125

  Wandsworth, 74, 255

  Weald, 53, 56, 58, 70, 85, 106, 169

  West, the, 9, 254

  White, Gilbert, 76, 145

  Whitman, Walt, 113, 135

  Wiltshire, 11, 191, 210, 235, 245

  Winchester, 6, 7, 38

  Woolmer, 8, 47

  Wordsworth, 6, 77, 132, 137, 241


THE END




  RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
  BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
  BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.




Transcriber's Note


The following apparent errors have been corrected:

p. 19 "HAMPSHIRE" changed to "HAMPSHIRE."

p. 34 "gnomes of undergound" changed to "gnomes of underground"

p. 62 "hoisery" changed to "hosiery"

p. 154 "CORNWALL" changed to "CORNWALL."

p. 222 (note) "F W. Bain" changed to "F. W. Bain"

p. 256 (note) "(Fifield)" changed to "(Fifield)."

p. 277 "210 262" changed to "210, 262"

p. 277 "Wilts. and Berks" changed to "Wilts. and Berks."

Inconsistent or archaic spelling and punctuation have otherwise been
left as printed.









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