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.[211] 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[212] 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[213] 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.”
[214]
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[215] 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[216] 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[217] 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[218] 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 persist[219]ently; 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[220] 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[221] 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[222] 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—
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[223] 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[224] 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 ?neid, when the exiled ?neas 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[225] 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[226] 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[227] 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[228] 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 arch?ologist: 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[229] 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[230] 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[231] 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[232] 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[233] 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[234] 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.
