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[256] 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.

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[257] 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[258] 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 vertebr? 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[259] 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[260] 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,[261] 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[262] 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[263] 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.[264] 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.