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.
[266]
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,[267] 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[268] 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[269] 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[270] 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[271] 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[272] 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[273] 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[274] 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[275] 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.
the end
