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[187] 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[188] 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[189] 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[190] 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[191] 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[192] 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[193] 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[194] 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[195] 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.
