Neighbourhood - A year's life in and about an English village

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Title: Neighbourhood - A year's life in and about an English village
Author: Edwardes, Tickner
Language: English
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[Picture: ‘Homeward Bound’]

NEIGHBOURHOOD

A YEAR’S LIFE IN AND ABOUT

AN ENGLISH VILLAGE

* * * * *

BY
TICKNER EDWARDES
AUTHOR OF ‘THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE’

* * * * *

WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS

* * * * *

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET

1912

* * * * *

CONTENTS

PAGE
INTRODUCTION xi
JANUARY 1
I. Hard Times—Wild Life and the
Frost—The Thaw at
Last—Solitude and a
Fireside—Cricket Music—Fiction
and Life—Wood versus Coal.
II. Truantry—Spring in
January—Wind and Sun on the
Downs—A Shepherd
Family—Brothers in
Arms—‘Rowster’—The
Folding-Call—Dew-Ponds and
their Making—The Sign in the
Sky.
III. The Starling Host.
FEBRUARY 27
I. The Village Green—Daybreak—The
Morning Dew.
II. Under the ‘Seven
Sisters’—Courting Days.
III. The Elm Blossom—A Wild
Night—By the River—The
Hazel-Wood—Meadow Life
IV. The Coming of the Lambs—Night
in the Lambing-Pens—The Luck
of Windlecombe—‘White Eye.’
MARCH 55
I. The Woodland Clearing—Rabbit
and Stoat—The Rain
Bird—‘Skugging’—The Lovers’
Tree—An Adventure in Forestry.
II. The ‘Sea-Blue Bird of
March’—The Old Ferryman.
III. Lion and Lamb—The Churchyard
Wall—Yew and
Almond-Tree—Evensong—A Prophet
of Evil.
IV. Wild March—Rejuvenation—On the
Downs—River and Brook—The Long
White Road—A Mystery of
Rubies—The Thrush.
APRIL 82
I. Sunday Morning—The Black
Sheep—A Song in the Wood.
II. Rain and Shine—The
Wryneck—Bees and Primroses.
III. Fulfilment—The Martins—The
First
Cuckoo—Bluebells—Swallows and
Nightingales.
IV. April on Windle Hill—Downland
Larks.
MAY 104
I. Busy Times—The Forge—Two
Ancient Families—The
Sweetstuff Shop—Silent
Company—The Three Thatchers.
II. The Long Back-Reach—In the
Willow Bower—A New Song and an
Old Story.
III. Whitsunday—God’s House
Beautiful—The Soul-Shepherd.
IV. Ringing the Bees—An
old-fashioned Bee-Garden.
V. Corpus Christi: an Impression.
JUNE 132
I. The Old Brier-Bush—Chaffinch
and Willow-Wren—The
Mowing-Grass—The First Wild
Rose.
II. The Sheep-Wash.
III. Rainy Days—Old Times and
New—The Reverend’s
Garden—Darkie and his Den.
IV. The Cotter’s Saturday
Night—The Cricket
Committee—Summer Gloaming.
JULY 161
I. Summertide—The Teasel
Traps—Bees in the
Tares—Poppies and Wheat—The
Oat-field—Swifts.
II. The Cricket Match.
III. Time and the Town—The
Beginning of Harvest-Sport and
Nature—In the Seed-hay—The
Storm.
AUGUST 189
I. The Tea-Garden—In Search of
Change—The Trippers—A
Mysterious Company.
II. The South-west Wind—Talk on
the Downs—In the Combe—A
Reconciliation.
III. Travellers’ Tales.
SEPTEMBER 210
I. Odd Man out—The Little
Tobacconist—A Talk by the
River.
II. The Waning Summer—Threshing.
III. Two Old Maids—The Minstrels.
IV. Autumn Dawn—The Cub
Hunt—Thistle-down.
OCTOBER 234
I. The Going of the
Martins—Spider-Webs.
II. A Legacy—The Caravan.
III. Gossamer—The Berry
Harvest—Autumn Changes—The
Brown Owl—Glowworms—Birds that
Pass in the Night.
NOVEMBER 257
I. The Colours of Autumn—The Ivy
Bloom—The Two Painters—A
November Nosegay.
II. Night in the Village—Tom
Clemmer—Dinner at the Farm.
III. Winter at Last—Capitulation.
DECEMBER 283
I. Gloom and Shine.
II. House-Bound—A Happy Village.
III. A Voyage down the Street—The
Beef Club Drawing.
IV. The Christmas-Tree—Voices in
the Night.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

HOMEWARD BOUND _Frontispiece_
OLD FRIENDS 28
SPRINGTIME 48
THE RINDERS 80
THE BEE-MASTER (_missing_) 122
THE SHEEP-WASH 146
SOUTHDOWN EWES 200
THE FERRYMAN’S COTTAGE 280

INTRODUCTION

IF you love the quiet of the country—the real quiet which is not silence
at all, but the blending of a myriad scarce-perceptible sounds—you will
get it in Windlecombe, heaped measure, pressed down, and running over,
year in and year out.

The village lies just where Arun river breaks the green rampart of the
Sussex Downs. To the west, the lowest cottages dwindle almost to the
water’s brink. Northward and eastward, the highest buildings stand afar
off, clear cut against the blue wall of the sky; while in between,
filling the deep, steep combe, church and inn and every kind of
dwelling-house, little or big, huddle together under their thatch and old
red tiles, with the village green in their midst, and a thread of white
road rippling through them all and up the steep combe-side till it is
lost in the sunny waste of the hills.

But there is no way through Windlecombe. From the market town four miles
off, the road is good enough; and good it remains until it reaches the
highest human outpost of the village. But there it suddenly changes to a
mere cart-track, soon to vanish altogether in the green sward of the
Down. And therein lies Windlecombe’s chiefest blessing. Far away on the
great main road, when the wind is southerly, we can hear the motor-bugles
calling, and see pale comet-beams careering through the night. But these
things come no nearer. At rare intervals, perhaps, a stray juggernaut
will descend upon us, and demand of some placid rustic the nearest way to
Land’s End or Aberdeen, returning disgusted on its tracks when it learns
that there is only one road from here to anywhere, and that the road it
came. But these ear-splitting, malodorous happenings are few and far
between. At all other times, Windlecombe wears the quiet of the hills
about it like a garment. The dust of the highway has no soaring ambition
to whiten the hedgerows, or fill the cottagers’ cabbages with grit. It
still keeps to its ancient, lowly work of smoothing the path for man and
beast; and our children can play in it unterrorised, our old dogs lie in
it at their slumberous ease.

How wild and quiet the place is, you can only realise by living in it
from year’s end to year’s end, as has been my own privilege for longer
than I care to compute. For how many ages a human settlement has existed
in this wooded, sun-flooded cleft of the Downs, it is impossible to
hazard a guess. Windlecombe is mentioned in _Domesday_, but the stones of
the old church proclaim it as belonging to times more distant still. Be
that as it may, its clustered roofs and grey church tower have long been
reckoned in the traditions of wild life as part and parcel of the eternal
hills. Birds frequent Windlecombe as they haunt the beech-woods that
hang upon the sides of the combe. They use the rick-yards and gardens,
the very streets even, as they use the glades in the woodlands or the
verges of the brooks. You may come out of a winter’s morning and see a
heron flapping slowly out of your paddock, or listen to a pheasant’s
trumpeting on the other side of the hedge. And in early summer you can
sit on the garden bench, and, looking up into the dim elm labyrinth
overhead, watch a green woodpecker at work, cutting the hole for his nest
straight and true into the heart of the wood. That the thrushes sing all
day long from Michaelmas to Midsummer Day, that in June you cannot sleep
for the nightingales, that there is never an hour of daylight all the
year round when a lark is not carolling against the blue or stormy grey
above the village—these things you take as part of your rightful daily
fare, and are content.

But life in an English village derives its charm only in part from its
intimacy with wild Nature and all her wonders and beauties, indispensable
as these are to the daily lives of most thinking, working men. There is
no error so disastrous, humanly speaking, as that which leads a man to
seek happiness or sublimity out of the beaten track of his fellows.
Neighbourhood, the daily interchange of thought and word and kindly deed,
is a necessity for all healthy human life, and the natural medium of all
true advancement. And nowhere will you find it of such sturdy growth,
rooted in such nourishing, yet temperate soil, than in the villages of
modern England.

Yet here it is necessary to discriminate, to mark conditions. If one’s
duty towards one’s neighbour assumes a real and prime world’s importance
in village life, it is equally true that all men are not alike fit to be
villagers, nor all villages to be accounted neighbourly. It is an
essential part of the life I would describe in these pages that both the
people and the place should depend for existence on the day’s work; work
done, as far as may be, on the soil from which all sprang, and to which
all some day must return. The show villages, the little lodging-letting
communities that are to be found here and there, must be excluded from
the argument. Nor can men of private means, however modest, find a
natural place in the true villager ranks. Where to all men life is a
series of laborious days, tired evenings, dreamless nights, you, lolling
in the sunshine, or playing at work, or more fatal still, working at
play, will be for ever a public anomaly. You will get civility, a
patient, dignified tolerance from all. But you will not have a neighbour:
though you live until your feet have graven their mark into every stone
of the place, you will be a stranger in a strange land.

For my part, such as my work is, I have done it, every stroke, in
Windlecombe for half a lifetime back, and may claim to have fairly won my
villagership. And what it is worth to me—how it is sweetened by daily
touch of kind hearts and grip of clean hands; what the country sunshine
means, filtering through the vine-leaves of my workroom window; and what
the song of the robin that sits on the ivied gate-post without, or, in
winter-time, comes fluttering and tapping at the old bull’s-eye panes for
crumbs; how the daily walk, in wood or meadow or by riverside, brings
ever its new marvel or revelation of unimagined beauty; and how, above
all, the lives of the quaint, courageous, clever folk, in whose midst
Destiny has thrown me, overbrim with all traits human, delectably mortal,
divinely out-of-place—these, and many other aspects of villagership, I
have here tried to set down in plain words and meaning, believing that
what has proved of interest and profit to one very human, always erring,
often doubting soul, may do the like for others, though journeying by
widely sundered tracks.

T. E.

JANUARY

I HAVE just been to the house-door, to take a look at the winter’s night.
A change is coming, the long frost nears its end—so the old ferryman has
told me every morning for a fortnight back, and his perseverance as a
prophet has been rewarded at last. As I flung the heavy oak door back, a
breath of air struck upon my face warm, it seemed, as summer. All about
me in the grey darkness there was an indescribable stir and awakening of
life. The moon no longer stared down out of the black sky, a wicked,
venomous-bright beauty on her full-fed, rather supercilious face: now she
wore a scarf of mist upon her brows, and looked nun-like, dim-eyed, and
mild. The stars had lost their cruel glitter. I stepped forth, and felt
the grass yield beneath my tread—the first time for near a month past.
And as I stood wondering and rejoicing at it all, some night-bird lanced
by overhead, a note of the same relief and gladness unmistakable in its
shrill, jangling cry.

Hard weather in the country has a thousand enjoyments and interests for
those who care to look for them; but when the frost holds relentlessly
week after week, as it has done this January, the grimmer side of things
comes obtrusively to the fore. There is too much shadow for the light. It
is as though you rejoiced in the beauty of sunset beams on a wall, and it
were the wall of a torture-house. You lie awake at night, and in the
death-quiet stillness, hear the measured footfall of death—a dull,
reiterated thud on the frozen ground beneath the holly-hedge, each sound
denoting that yet another roosting thrush or starling has given up the
unequal fight. Roaming through the lanes in your warm overcoat and
thick-soled boots, you note the loveliness of the hoar-frost, at one step
dazzling white, and at the next aglow with prismatic colour; and turning
the corner, you come upon the gipsy’s tent, and realise that, while you
lay snug and warm, nothing but that pitiful screen of old rent rags has
stood between human beings and the terror of a winter’s night.

On one of the hardest days I met the old vicar of Windlecombe, and
regaled him with the story of how I had just passed along the river-way
as the tide was falling; how, at full flood, at the pause of the waters,
the frost had sheathed the river with ice; and how, when the tide began
to go down, this crystal stratum had remained aloft, held up by the
myriad reed-stems; until at length, loosened by the sunbeams, it had
fallen sheet by sheet to the wildest, most ravishing music, each icy
tympanum, as it fell, ringing a different, dear, sweet note. And, in
return for my word-picturing, the old man gave me a story of the same
times to match it; how he had just learnt that certain ill-clad, ill-fed
children—whom the law compelled to tramp every morning from Redesdown, a
little farming hamlet miles away over the frozen hills, to the nearest
school at Windlecombe, and tramp back again every night—were given a
daily penny between the three of them for their midday meal; and how, as
often as not, the bread they needed went unbought from the village store,
because of the lure of the intervening sweetstuff shop. Later, in the red
light of sundown, I met those children going home, as I had often met
them, plodding one behind the other, heads down to the bitter blast. Each
wore a great new woollen muffler, and had his pockets stuffed. I knew who
had cared for them, and my heart smote me. Somehow the pure austerity of
the evening—the radiant light ahead, the white grace of the hills about
me, the star-gemmed azure above—no longer brought the old elation. The
jingle of my skates, as they hung from my arm, took on a disagreeable
sound of fetters. Though I carried them many a time after that, I never
put them away without the honest wish that I should use them no more.

But lucidly, these long spells of unremitting frost are rare in our
country. Ordinary give-and-take winter’s weather—the alternation of cold
and warmth, gloom and sunshine, wind and calm—brings little hardship to
any living thing. Country children have a wonderful way of thriving and
being happy, even though their diet is mainly bread-and-dripping and
separated milk. As for wild life, we need expend no commiseration on any
creature that can burrow; and while there are berries in the hedgerows,
and water in the brooks, no bird will come to harm.

It is curious to see how Nature ekes out her winter supplies, doling out
rations, as it were, from day to day. If the whole berry harvest came to
ripe maturity at the same season, or were of like attractiveness, it
would be squandered and exhausted by the spendthrift, happy-go-lucky
hordes of birds, long before the winter was through. But many things are
designed to prevent this. Under the threat of starvation, all birds will
eat berries; but a great proportion of them will do so only as a last
resource. At first it is the hawthorn fruit that goes. The soft flesh of
the may-berry will yield to the weakest bill, and the whole crop ripens
together in early winter. But even here Nature provides against the risk
of immediate waste, that will mean starvation hereafter. The
missel-thrushes have been given a bad name because each of them takes
possession of some well-loaded stretch of hedgerow, and spends the whole
day in driving off other birds. Yet, on this habit of the greedy missel,
depends not only his own future sustenance but that of all the rest. For
all his agility, he cannot prevent each bird snatching at least enough to
keep life going, and while he is so busy, he has himself no chance for
gluttony.

Other berry supplies, such as the privet and holly, seem to be preserved
to the last because they are universally distasteful, though nourishing
at a pinch. But it is the hips, or rose-berries, which provide the best
example of Nature’s way of conserving the lives of birds throughout hard
weather against their own foolish, squandering instinct. These berries do
not ripen all at once, whether late or early in the season. On every
bush, the scarlet hips soften in regular, long-drawn-out succession, some
being ready in early winter, and some not until well on in the new year.
When the hip is ripe, the tenderest beak can get at its viscid fruit; but
until it begins to soften, there is hardly a bird that can deal with it.
The rose-berries, with their scanty but never-failing stores, are really
the mainstay of all in hard times. It is doubtful, indeed, whether the
birds that die wholesale in prolonged frosty weather, are killed by
hunger at all. Probably their death is due rather to thirst. So long as
the brooks run, bird life can hold against the bitterest times. But once
silence has settled down over the country-side—the only real silence of
the year, when all the streams are locked up at their source—then begins
the steady footfall under the holly-hedge, and you must needs turn from
the crimson sunset light upon the wall.

I have shut the heavy old house-door, and got back to my table by the
workroom fire. The thaw has come in earnest now. I can hear the drip of
the melting rime in the garden, far and near. The warm west wind is
beginning to sigh down the chimney. The logs simmer and glow, but not
with the greedy brightness of frost-bound nights.

It is on these long winter evenings that Solitude comes into her kingdom.
Men are not all made alike, nor is solitude with all a voluntary
condition, at least a self-imposed necessity, as it is with me—a
something that I must fashion out of my own will and abnegation, weave
about me as the tunnel-spider weaves her lair. In this ancient house the
walls are thick, yet not so thick but that an ear-strain will just trip
the echo of far-off laughter. If I but drew that curtain and set the
door ajar, I could catch a murmur of voices like the sound of bee-hives
in summer dark; and a dozen strides along the stone-flagged passage would
yield me what I may not take for hours to come—tried and meet
companionship, the flint-and-steel play of bandied jest, my own to hold,
if I can, in brisk exchange of nerving, heartening thought. But these
things in their season. Mine now it is to dip the grey goose-quill, to
gird up for the long tramp over the foolscap-country before me—that
trackless white desert where I must lay a trail to be followed, whether
by many or few or none, or with what pleasure or weariness, I may never
certainly know. For the writer is like a sower, that is ever sowing and
passing on. He can seldom do more than take a hurried, fleeting
shoulder-glimpse at the harvest behind him, nor see who reaps, if haply
it be reaped at all.

Scratching away in the cosy fireside quiet of the old room, there comes
to me at length a sound from the chimney-corner, to which I must needs
listen, no matter what twist or quirk of syntax holds me in thrall. You
often hear aged country folk complain that the crickets no longer sing on
the hearth, as they used to do in their childhood. My own crickets have
always seemed to sing blithely enough, too blithely at times to help one
forward with a difficult task. But I had always been glad to accept the
statement as one more proof of the decadence of modern times. Hobnobbing
one winter’s evening, however, with the old ferryman in his riverside
den, and noting how merrily the crickets were chirping in his
chimney-corner, I wondered to hear him give way to this same lament.
Then, for the first time, I realised that not the crickets, but his old
ears, were at fault. Though the little smoke-blackened cabin rang with
their music, the old man, who would, on the loudest night, have heard a
ferry-call from the other side of the water instantly, failed now to grip
the high-pitched sound. And this set me to philosophising. When the
crickets cease to pipe in my own chimney-corner, then, and not till then,
I will admit I am growing old.

But though we speak of the chirp or pipe of the cricket and grasshopper,
it is well to remember that neither these, nor any other insects, possess
a true voice. It would be nearer the fact to call the cricket a fiddler
than a piper. For it is by sitting and drawing the corrugated rib of his
wing-case to and fro over the sharp edge of the wing beneath, that his
shrill note is developed. And it is only the male cricket who can chirp.
The female carries upon her no trace of any fiddling contrivance. When
all things were made, and made in couples, on the females of at least one
numerous species, it is pleasant to remark, a significant and commendable
silence was imposed.

Solitude by a fireside in an old country dwelling, the murmurous night
without, and, within, the steady clear glow of candles made by your own
hands out of wax from your own hives, it would be strange if the
evening’s work failed to get itself done cleverly and betimes. Pleasant
as it is to all penmen to be achieving, there is no depth of satisfaction
like that of leaving off. Then, not to return incontinently to the
sober, colour-fast world of fact, but to stay in your dream-country,
idling awhile by the roadside, is one of the great compensations of this
most exacting of lives.

Your tale is done. You have scrawled ‘The End’ at the bottom of the
sheet, and thrown it with the others. You have turned your chair to the
fire, put up your slippered feet on the andiron, and have filled your
most comfortable pipe. The end it is, in very truth, for all who will
read the tale; but for you there will never be an end, just as there
never was a beginning to it. Unbidden now, and not to be gainsaid even
if you had the mind, your dream-children live on in the town or country
nook you made for them; live on, increase and multiply, finish their peck
of dirt, add to the world’s store either of folly or sanctity, come to
their graves at last, each by his own inexorable road, and each leaving
the seed of another tale behind.

To the enviable reader, when, after much water-spilling and cracking of
crowns, Jack has got his Jill, and the wedding-bells are lin-lan-loning
behind the dropt curtain, there is the satisfaction of certainty that so
much love, and one pair of hearts at least, are safe from further chance
and change in the whirligig of life. But to the teller of the tale,
there is no such assurance. Just as his dream-children came out of an
immortality he did not devise, so will they persist through an eternity
not of his controlling; and for ever they will be subject to the same
odds of bliss or disaster as any stranger that may pass his door. Yet,
being only human, he will nevertheless go on with his tales in the secret
hope that Jove may be caught napping, and a little heaven be brought down
to earth before its allotted time. For living in a world of law and
order—where even Omnipotence may not deny to every cause its outcome—is
too realistically like camping under fire. The old fatalists had peace
of mind because they believed it availed nothing to crouch when the
bullets screamed overhead, nor even to dodge a spent shot. But to take
one’s stand in the face of the myriad cross-purposes and side-issues of
an orderly universe, needs a vastly different temper. Perhaps it is just
the secret longing in all hearts to have at least a little make-believe
of certitude—if nowhere else but in the pages of a story—by which the art
of fiction so hugely thrives.

I have put out the candles, each shining under its little red umbrella of
paper, the better to see the joyous colour of the fire. When drab
thoughts come—those night-birds of sombre feather—the pure untinctured
glow from well-kindled logs has a wonderful way of setting them to
flight. Let unassailable optimism make his fire of coals: for him of
questioning, craving, often craven heart, there is no warmth like that
from seasoned timber. Coals, with their dynamic energy, their
superfluity of smoke, their sudden incongruous jets of flame, seem to be
for ever insisting on facts you would fain forget a while, much as you
may admire them and depend on them—the progress and competition of outer
life. But wood fires serve to draw the mind away from modernism in all
its phases. So that you burn the right kind of wood, and this is
important, your fireside thoughts need never leave the realm of cheery
retrospect. Good, seasoned logs of beech or ash are the best. Oak has
no half moods; it must make either a furnace unapproachable, or smoulder
away in dead, dull embers. Elm gives poor comfort, and the slightest
damp appals it. Poplar is charity-fuel; burn it will, indeed, to good
purpose, but too explosively. There is no rest by a fire of poplar: one
must be for ever treading out or parrying the vagrant sparks.

A joyous colour it is—the wavering amber light that fills the old room
now from the piled-up beechen logs; joyous, yet having a sedate,
ruminative tinge about it, like old travellers’ tales of ancient times.
Nor does the colour appeal only to the eye: there seems to be a fragrance
in it. That this is no mere conceit but simple fact, I was strangely
reminded when I blew the candles out, and from the smouldering wicks two
long white ribbons of vapour were borne away on the draught. The
fragrance of the smoking wax brought up a picture of the summer nights
when the bees lay close to fashion it. Round about the cluster in the
pent-up hive were thousands of little vats of brewing honey, each giving
off a steam that was the life-spirit of clover-fields and blue borage,
and sainfoin which spreads the hills with rose-red light. All these
mingled scents had got into the nature of the wax, and now they were
given off again in sweet-smelling vapour, such a fragrance as you may
rarely chance upon in certain foreign churches, where the old ordinances
yet prevail, and the candles are still made from the pure product of the
hives.

And it is the same with burning logs. Each kind of wood has its own
essential odour, which pervades the room as though it were soul and body
with the light. You cannot separate the two; no riding down of fancy
will dissociate the flickering gipsy-gold of the embers and the perfume
of the simmering bark. If these do not fill your mind with memories of
the green twilight of woodlands, of hours spent in leafy shadows of
forest-glades, then—then you are not made for a country fireside, and
were happier hobnobbing with Modernity by his sooty, coal-fed hearth.

It is not difficult to understand why indoor work is at most times
tolerable in cities, fair weather or foul. For in cities earth and sky
have long been driven out of their ancient comradeship. Stifled by
pavements and masonry, the earth cannot feel the touch of the sunbeams,
nor the air enrich itself with the breath of the soil. The old glad
interchange is prevented at all points. There is no lure in the
sunshine, no siren voice in the gale. Summer rain does not call you out
into the open, to share the joy of it with the drinking grass and leaves.
Amidst your dead, impenetrable bricks-and-mortar, you can plod on with
your scribbling or figuring without a heart-stir; no vine-leaf will tap
at your window, no lily-of-the-field taunt your industry, nor song of
skylark dissipate your dreams.

But indoor work, carried on in a village deep in the green heart of some
beautiful country-side, is on an entirely different plane. At times,
perhaps, it becomes the hardest work in the world. With one lavish hand
life gives you the things most necessary for close, unremitting
application, and with the other she ruthlessly sets all manner of
obstacles in your path. On such a day as now dawned crystal-clear over
Windlecombe, with the first warm wind of the year blowing new life into
everything, there was no stopping indoors for me. I got down to my work
punctually enough, even a little before the wonted time. But good
resolutions could make no headway against such odds. The south-west wind
boomed merrily in the elm-tops. The sunbeams riddled my old house
through and through. Out in the garden robins and thrushes had formed
themselves into a grand orchestra; and when the breeze lulled for a
moment, I could hear the larks singing far overhead, as though it were a
summer’s day. An hour of half-hearted tinkering saw my fortitude break
like a milldam. Five minutes later I had shut the house-door behind me,
and was off up the village street, gulping down deep draughts of the
sweet morning air.

I chose the path that led to the Downs. Mounting the steep, chalky track
in the arms of the gale, with the misty green heights looming up before
me against the blue of the winter’s morning, one fact was borne in upon
me at every step. Though I must needs write winter—for January was but
three parts done—it was no longer winter, but spring. A few days’ sunny
warmth had worked what seemed like a miracle. In the hedges and trees
the buds were swelling. Birds were pairing. Young green spears of grass
showed underfoot. Across the path clouds of midges danced in the
sunshine. I heard the first low love-croon of a wood-dove; and, when I
stopped for breath in the lee of the hazel-copse, there drifted out upon
me a song never yet heard on winter days—the mellow voice of a blackbird
calling for a mate.

But the more we study Nature out of doors, the more we come to disbelieve
in winter altogether. Winter is in truth a myth. From the moment the
old year’s leaves are down, the earth is in vigorous preparation for the
new year’s life and growth. Nature lies by quietly enough during the
cold spells, but each awakening is a stronger and more joyous one. While
they last, the long frosts seem to hold all the life of things suspended.
Yet, with every return of the south-west wind, it is easy to see that
this is not really so. Though the visible sunbeams have had no power for
progress, those stored in the earth have been slowly and steadily at
work. And when the thaw comes, Nature seems to take up the slack of the
year in one tremendous forward pull.

I reached the crest of Windle Down, and made over the springy, dew-soaked
grass, content to go wheresoever the tearing wind should drive me. The
long, billowing curves of the hills stretched away on all sides until
they lost themselves in distant violet haze. Here and there flocks of
sheep made a grey patch in the sunlit solitude, and a low clamour of
bells was in the air blent with the unending song of the larks. On the
combe-sides the gorse spread its darker green, and, near at hand, I could
make out its gold buds already bursting under the touch of the sunbeams
The next hill before me was topped with a ring of fencing, near which
stood a solitary figure, clear cut against the tender blue of the north.

Shepherding on the South Downs is an hereditary family calling, and old
George Artlett, the shepherd at Windlecombe farm, had trained up two at
least of his four sons to follow in his own tranquil steps. In village
life, though the essence of neighbourliness is that it must be exercised
impartially to one and all, worthy or unworthy, there are ever some about
you with whom the daily traffic of genial word and deed comes more aptly
than with the rest. In all the years I had known the Artletts, there had
been scarce a day when I had not encountered one or other of that sturdy
clan, and generally to my profit. If it was not the old shepherd himself
placidly trailing along in the rear of his flock with his shining crook,
it was ‘young’ George, the fifty-year-old under-shepherd, his pocket
bulged out with a Bible; or Dewie, the shepherd’s boy; or John, the
sporting handy-man, tramping off to covert with his pack of mongrels; or
quaint ‘Mistus’ Artlett, carrying her household basket to and from the
shop. Of Tom Artlett—the ‘Singing Ploughman,’ as he was called in the
neighbouring market town—I got a glimpse sometimes in the early grey of
morning, or more often of late afternoon, as he journeyed between home
and farm. He ploughed his acre a day conscientiously, walking the usual
twelve miles in the doing of it; and all the while his rich, powerful
voice made the hills about him echo with the songs he loved.

Why he sang these songs, and why young George’s pocket always bulged,
would have been at once evident to you if you could have looked out of
window with me any Sunday morning about eight of the clock. Punctually
at that hour, the two brothers strode by in their scarlet guernseys and
blue, braided coats, on their way to the town; and there they passed a
seventh day more toilsome than all the other six, coming home at
nightfall hoarse and weary, yet plainly as happy as any men could be.

Young George Artlett stood on the hill-top, leaning upon his crook. The
wind fluttered his coat about him, and lashed his haversack to and fro.
He stood with his back in my direction, bare-headed, his grey hair
streaming in the breeze. It was not until I had almost come up with him
that I marked his uplifted face, his closed eyes, his moving lips; and
then I stopped irresolutely, ashamed of the blunder I had committed. But
before I could turn and retreat, the dog at his side had signalled my
presence. The old tarpaulin sou’wester hat was returned to its place.
Young George wheeled round, and looked at me with eyes of welcome.

‘I knowed by th’ bark o’ him, who ’twur,’ he said, in his slow, deep,
quiet voice. ‘Rowster, ’a has a name fer all o’ ye. That there little
happy shruck, ’tis yerself an’ nane other. When ’a perks up an’ bellers,
’tis th’ poodle-dorg an’ Miss Sweet. An’ when ’a grizzles, I an’t no
call to look around; there be a black coat no gurt ways off, sure as big
apples comes from little uns.’

He smiled to himself, as though the memory of some recent encounter with
the black coat had returned to him. Then he took a quick glance at the
sun.

‘Drinkin’-time!’ said he.

His sheep were all on the far hill-side, half a mile off perhaps,
feeding—as sheep always do on windy days—with their heads to the breeze;
and shouldering together in long, straight lines, roughly parallel—as,
again, sheep generally will, in spite of the prettily ordered groups on
painters’ canvases. It is only on days of perfect calm that grazing
sheep will head to all points of the compass, and on the South Downs such
days are rare indeed.

George Artlett put his hands to his mouth funnel-wise, and sent the
shepherd’s folding-call ringing on the breeze.

‘Coo-oo-oo-o-up! Coo-oo-oo-o-up! Coom along—coo-oo-up!’

The shrill, wild notes pealed out, drawing an echo from every hill far
and near. At once all the ewes on the distant sunny slope stopped their
nibbling, and looked round. Again the cry rang forth. This time the
foremost sheep moved a step or two in our direction, hesitated, then came
slowly on. A moment later the whole flock was under way, pouring
steadily up the hill-side and filling the air with a deep, clamorous
song.

But two or three of the younger sheep had stayed behind in a little bay
of grass beyond the furze-brake. Rowster looked inquiringly at his
master, got a consenting wave of the arm, and was off with the speed of
light. We watched him as he raced down the hill in a wide semicircle,
and, taking the malingerers in the rear, drove them helter-skelter after
the rest. Yelping and snapping behind them, he brought the whole flock
up to the dew-pond at what seemed an entirely unnecessary pace.

‘’Tis allers so wi’ dorgs,’ observed young George reflectively. ‘Ye can
never larn them as shepherd work ought to go slow as the sun i’ the sky.
All fer hurry an’ bustle they be, from birth-time to buryin’—get the hour
by, sez they, the day over, life done, an’ on wi’ the next thing!’

We turned our shoulders to the blustering wind, and leant over the rail
together, watching the sheep drink. These dew-ponds on the Sussex Downs
are always a mystery to strangers coming for the first time into the
sheep country; and they are never quite bereft of their miraculous
quality, even among the shepherds themselves. That in a land, where
there are neither springs nor natural pools of water, man should dig
hollows, not in the lowest sink-points of the valleys where one would
reasonably make such a work, but on the summits of the highest hills, and
then confidently expect Nature to fill them with water, keeping them so
filled year after year, in and out of season, no matter what call was
made on their resources—must appear little else than downright ineptitude
to one who has never had the feasibility of the plan demonstrated under
his very eyes. Yet the seeming wonder of the dew-pond has a very simple
explanation. It is nothing more than a cold spot on the earth, which
continually precipitates the moisture from the air passing over it; and
this cold spot is formed on the hill-top because there it encounters air
which has not been robbed of its vapour by previous contact with the
earth.

The best dew-pan makers are the men of Wiltshire, as all flockmasters
know. The pond, having been excavated to the right depth and shape, is
lined first with puddled clay or chalk, then with a thick layer of dry
straw; finally, upon this straw a further substantial coating of clay is
laid, and well beaten down. Nothing is needed then but to bring a few
cart-loads of water to start the pond, and to set a ring-fence about it
to keep off heavy stock. The action of the straw, in its waterproof
double-casing, is to intercept the heat-radiation of the earth at that
particular point, so that the pond-cavity and its contents remain colder
than the surrounding soil.

How the dew-pond came to be invented has often been the subject of
wondering speculation. No doubt there have been dew-pond makers for
untold centuries back, but at one time, however far distant, a first
discovery of the principle underlying the thing must have been made.
Probably the dew-pond, in some form or other, had its origin in those
remote times when all the high-lying chalk-lands of southern England were
overrun by a dense population. But then, as now, the region must have
been waterless; and the people, living there for security’s sake, must,
nevertheless, have been constrained to provide themselves with this first
daily necessity of all life. We read of the manna given in the
Wilderness, and the water struck from the Rock. These were miracles
worked, as miracles ever are, for children: they were grown men,
evidently, in mind and heart, to whom the dew-pond was given. For though
the thing, in essence, was set to shine about their feet wherever men
trod, so that none could forbear seeing, its adaptation to human need was
left to man’s own labour and thoughtful ingenuity. To-day, as in those
far-off ages, the dwarf plume-thistle studs the sward of the Downs, each
circle of thick, fleshy leaves, matted together and centrally depressed,
forming a perfect little dew-pond, that retains its garnered moisture
long after all other vegetation has grown dry in the heat of the mounting
sun. Even if there were no such thing as a dew-pond on all the Downs
to-day, and every flock must perforce be driven miles, perhaps, down into
the valley to be watered, it is inconceivable that no one of prime
intelligence, wandering the hills alive to the need of the thirsty
thousands around him, would mark the natural reservoirs of the thistles,
reason out the principles they embodied, and straightway set brain and
hand to work on the first dew-pond—using perchance, in earliest
experiment, the actual thistle-leaves for the indispensable
heat-retarding layer.

I had often talked the matter over with George Artlett, and now we
drifted into the old subject. But he was never to be cajoled out of his
belief in the miraculous nature of the affair.

‘Him as sent th’ fire down to th’ could altar,’ he said, his long arm
going up to heaven, and his voice taking on that deep, vibratory chime so
familiar to Sunday loiterers in Stavisham marketplace, ‘He knaws how to
send watter to faith an’ a dry pan. Ay! but I ha’ seed it comin’, many’s
the time. An’ th’ first time, I ’lowed as ’twur High Barn ricks burnin’.
We was goin’ hoame to fold, and there afore me, right agen th’ red
night-sky, I seed a gurt topplin’ cloud o’ summut as looked like smoke
ahent th’ hill. Sez I, ’tis High Barn ricks afire! But it warn’t. It
wur jest Gorramighty gatherin’ together His dew from the fower winds o’
heaven, an’ pourin’ it into Maast’ Coles’s pond.’

III

One afternoon, when the month was all but at its end, I came home through
the riverside meadows. The sun had just dipped below the misty
earth-line. Before me, in the east, the darkness was spreading up the
sky, and the larger stars already shone with something of their nightly
lustre. But behind me it was still day. From the horizon upward, and
far overhead, the sky was a pale, luminous turquoise, overflecked with
cloud of fiery amber—the two colours a perfect harmony of cold and heat.
As I trod the narrow field-path, facing the dusk, with all that glorious
enmity reconciled at my back, I became aware of a mysterious sound
somewhere in the chain of tree-girt meadows on ahead. A missel-thrush
had been singing hard by, but now his clarion had ceased, and this other
far-away note forced me suddenly out of my musing. It was not a single
song, but a deep, continuous outpouring, a medley of music like the
splashing and tumbling of mountain brooks. With every step forward it
grew in volume. At last, in a belt of elm-trees that bordered one of the
farthest fields, I came upon the cause of it; and though I had many times
seen vast congregations of starlings, I had never before encountered so
huge a company as now met my gaze.

The trees stretched across the entire field, and every twig on every
branch had its perching songster, the combined effect being as though the
trees had suddenly shot out a magic foliage, coal-black against the
deepening blue of the sky, heavy and thick as leaves in June. Now the
mountain brooks had swollen to Niagaras. The hubbub was literally
deafening. I shouted my loudest, hoping to set the gargantuan host to
flight, but I could scarce hear my own voice. For a full ten minutes I
stood in that great flood-tide of melody, and all the time fresh
detachments of birds were continually arriving to swell the multitude,
and add their voices to the chorus. At length I saw two birds break away
from the mass, and fly straight off side by side. Immediately the tumult
ceased, and there followed a sound like the long, rumbling roll of
thunder. The whole concourse had taken wing together, the tree-tops,
released from their weight, lashing back as though struck by a flaw of
wind. Now the army swept over my head, darkening the sky as it went.
The thunderous sound grew less and less as the flock made for the distant
woods. A moment more, and an uncanny silence had fallen on everything.
Then, half a mile away in the misty dark, I heard the rich, wild voice
peal out again, where the starling host had taken up their quarters for
the night.

Thus it happened every evening for a week after, when they passed on out
of the district and I saw them no more. Probably no single stretch of
country could support such incredible numbers for more than a few days
together, and they must be for ever trekking onward, leaving behind them
a famine-stricken land, and making life all the harder for our own native
birds. For there is little doubt that these vast hordes of starlings
that sweep the country-side in winter, are foreigners in the main.

FEBRUARY

FROM where my old house stands, behind its double row of lindens at the
top of the green, you can see well-nigh all that is happening in
Windlecombe. Sitting at the writing-table in the great bay-window, you
get an uninterrupted view down the length of the village street. From
the windows right and left—through a trellis of bare branches in winter,
and, in summer, through gaps in the greenery—you overlook the side-alleys
where dwell the less profoundly respectable, the more free-and-easy, of
Windlecombe folk. And in the rear, beyond my garden and little orchard,
there is the farm—rickyard and barn and dwelling-house all crowded
together on the green hill-side bestrewn with grazing cattle, cocks and
hens innumerable, all of the snow-white breed, gobbling turkeys, and
guinea-fowl that cry ‘Come back, come back!’ every waking moment of their
lives.

All the oldest houses in Windlecombe are gathered round the village
green. Here, amidst its thicket of live-oak and yew, the church tower
rears its bluff grey stones against the sky, its clock-face with the one
gilded hour-hand (minutes are of no account in Windlecombe) turned to
catch the last light of evening. The parsonage, the village shop, the
forge and wheelwright’s yard, a dozen or more of ivy-smothered tenements,
stand at easy intervals round the oblong of the green. There is the
little sweetstuff shop at the far corner, side by side with the cobbler’s
den; and, beyond them, the inn juts boldly out half across the roadway,
silhouetting its sign against the distant, bright patch of river which
flows at the foot of the hill.

I often wonder how other villages get on without a green. In Windlecombe
all the life of the place seems to culminate here. On summer evenings
every one drifts this way at some time or other for a quiet stroll, or a
chat with friends on the seats under the ‘Seven Sisters,’ a group of
gnarled Scotch pines almost in the centre of the green.

[Picture: ‘Old Friends’]

Even in winter I seldom look forth and see it entirely deserted. Except
in school-hours, there are always children playing upon it, and the old
men, whose work in the fields is done, hold here daily a sort of informal
club whenever the sun shines. But the old women I never see. All their
lives long, their activities and interests have been centred in the home,
and now they spend the dusk of their days consistently by the firesides.
On week-days, the fairest summer weather has no power to tempt them
abroad. Up to seventy or so, they can be seen creeping over the green
towards the church on Sunday mornings; but it is duty, not desire, that
has drawn them from their burrows. For the rest of the week they sit,
most of them, stitching tiny scraps of silk and cotton together. It
seems to be an indispensable condition of future bliss with all the old
women in Sussex, that each should finish a patchwork quilt before she
dies.

There comes a morning in the year, generally in early February, when the
fact that the days are getting longer is suddenly driven in upon your
consciousness, as though the change had come about in a single night at
the touch of some magician’s wand.

A long spell of gloomy weather ends in a crisp, bright dawn. Through the
chinks in the blind, the sun casts quivering spots of gold upon the wall.
You wake from your dreams, and immediately know that life has become a
different thing from that of yesterday. Throwing the casements back,
there comes in upon you a flood of new light, new air, new melody. It is
barely eight o’clock, and already the sun is high over Windle hill. The
thrushes have given up their winter piping, and have begun to sing in the
old glad way, linking half a dozen sweet notes in a phrase together, and
pouring it out over and over again. The air has the savour of warm earth
in it, the scent of green growth; and, looking down at the flower-borders
in the garden, you see sheaves of snowdrops breaking up through the soil,
and the first crocuses yielding their treasure to the first bees.

To-day, though it was only the first of February, just such another
morning startled me from sleep, and sent me out of doors tingling to the
finger-tips with this new spirit of wonder at a changed order of things.
Over Windlecombe, in the level sunlight, half a hundred violet plumes of
smoke rose into the calm air. From the smithy came the steady chime of
Tom Clemmer’s anvil. The pit-saw was droning in the wheelwright’s yard.
Up at High Barn they were threshing wheat, and the sound might have been
that from a great cathedral organ, so far off that nothing but the deep
tones of the pedal-pipes could reach the ear. But though all these
sounds denoted humanity astir, and busy at the day’s task, to the eye
there was no sign of any one abroad. I was as much alone as Crusoe on
his island, and just as free to wander where I would.

I skirted the green, and turned in at the churchyard gate. Everywhere
between the crowding stones, the grass was white with dew. Glittering
water-bells rimmed every leaf, and trembled at the tip of every twig.
The old yew dripped solemnly in its shadowed corner. Down the face of
each memorial-stone, tiny runnels coursed like tears.

It was strange to see how the dewdrops obliterated all vestige of natural
colour in the grass, and yet lent it a thousand alien hues. As I moved
slowly along, sparks of vivid green and crimson, orange and blue, flashed
incessantly amidst the frosted silver. Turning my back to the sunshine,
all these colours vanished, and the glittering quality of the dew was
lost. Now it was just a dead-white field, crossed and re-crossed with
lines of emerald where the foraging birds had left their tracks. But all
round the head of my shadow, that stretched giant-like before me, there
was still a shining circle of light. I remembered to have read somewhere
of one of the religious painters in the Middle Age, who accounted himself
divinely set apart from his fellows, by reason of a halo which, he said,
appeared at certain seasons about him as he walked in the fields.
Probably he saw then what I saw this morning; but, being an artist, he
won inspiration, new freshets of saintly energy, from what, to the
ordinary unemotional sinner, would be no more than an interesting,
natural fact.

Towards afternoon, quite a little throng of ancient folk gathered on the
benches under the Seven Sisters, drawn thither by the sunny mildness of
the day. Sauntering about on the green hard by, I could hear the low hum
of their voices; and at last I took a place, almost unobserved, on one of
the outer seats a little distance from the group.

Eavesdropping, even in its most innocent form, hardly comes into the
category of virtues; but, in any serious attempt to study country life
and character, it must be reckoned almost a necessary vice. I confess,
in this respect, not only to having yielded to it as a lifelong,
irresistible habit, but to having cultivated it on many occasions as an
art. The English peasant under open observation is no more himself than
a wild bird in a cage; and these old folk, in particular, needed as much
wary stalking-down as any creature of the woodland. Settled myself
quietly now behind a newspaper in the corner, my presence, if it had been
marked at all, was soon forgotten; and the talk began again among the
group in the usual desultory, pondering style—talk in the ancient dialect
of Sussex, such as you will hear to-day only in the most out-of-the-way
villages, and then only among those with whose passing it also must pass
irrevocably away.

Daniel Dray, the old wheelwright, was tapping his stick reflectively on
his boot-toe, keeping time with the song of the pit-saw in the
neighbouring yard, where young Daniel was mightily at work. By his side
sat Tom Clemmer the elder, his bleak grey eyes far away in space. All
the rest of the company were studying the horizon in much the same
distraught, silent fashion. A very old, but still hearty man, in a wide
blue suit, was chipping at a plug of sailor’s tobacco with a jack-knife,
and smiling to himself. At length the smile developed into a rich
chuckle.

‘Dan’l,’ said he, ‘now you ha’ spoke a trew wured, if never afore! So
they be, Dan’l, so they be! Ay! an’ all round the wureld ’tis th’ same
wi’ ’em! Doan’t I know?’ He made a telling pause at the question, and
then—‘Not ’aaf!’ he added in solemn irony, as he struck a match on his
hindermost serge.

The old wheelwright stretched himself luxuriously in the sunshine.

‘I knows naun o’ Frenchies, an’ blackamoors, an’ sech-like,’ said he.
‘But a Sussex maid!—Ah!’

The exclamation, long drawn out, was echoed round the circle. Old Tom
Clemmer turned argumentatively in his seat.

‘Ay! real purty, Dan’l!—purty enough!’ he agreed. ‘Ye wur i’ luck’s way,
as I minds well wur said by all th’ folk, forebye ’tis so long ago. But,
Fegs! man! We han’t all had your fortun’ i’ bright eyes! What sez
Maast’ Grimble there?’

A thin high voice quavered out from the end of the bench. For full five
minutes it hovered in mid-air, like a long-drawn-out treble note on a
violin.

‘Ay! trew, Tom! Never a wured o’ a lee, Tom! But ’twur nane o’ my
doin’, as many’s th’ time I ha’ tould ye. Stavisham Fair, ’twur, i’
Fifty-three, as I first seed her, all i’ sky-blew an’ spangles; wi’ th’
lights flarin’, an’ th’ drooms bustin’, an’ th’ trumpets blowin’; an’
sech a crowd o’ gay folk as never got together afore, i’ th’ wureld.
Wunk, ’a did, at me; an’ I wunk back. Then ’a wunk agen, an’ ’twur all
ower, neighbours! We got church-bawled th’ follerin’ Sunday; an’ hoame I
fetched her all within th’ month. An’ then, Tom, ye knowed how’t fell
out. Six weeks o’ it, we had together; an’ then off ’a goos after ’a’s
ould carrawan agen, an’ I goos fer a souldger. An’ nane but th’ gurt
goodness knows whether I be married man or widder-man to-day.’

The faint, shrill voice ceased. A lean, old man, with a chubby face and
eyes of so pale a blue, that they seemed almost colourless in the rich,
yellow light of the afternoon, had been intently listening, a trembling
hand to each ear. He wore a spotless white round-frock, and was
punctiliously, unnaturally clean in all other respects. Now he brought
his finger-tips softly together, and stared at the sky in an ecstasy of
reminiscence.

‘Eighteen thousand happy days,’ said he triumphantly, ‘agen six weeks o’
rough an’ tumble—pore George! Ah! well-a-day! But ’tis so, neighbours.
Th’ Reverend, ’a figured it out fer Jane an’ me laast catterning-time.
Eighteen thou— Gorm! but I should ha’ lost ’em all, if she hadn’t up an’
spoke out! I ne’er had no thought on’t, trew as th’ sun goos round th’
sky. But Jane, ’a gie me a red neckercher wan Hock-Monday. Thinks I,
“Wat’s that fer?” An’ then ’a gie me a bag o’ pea-nuts, an’ sez I to
mysel’, “’Tis a queer maid surelye!” An’ then ’a cooms along at
harvest-time, an’ sez she, “’Enery Dawes, I ha’ jist heerd as ould Mistus
Fenny ’ull gie up th’ malthouse cottage at Milemas, an’ seein’ as how you
warnts me an’ I warnts you, ’twould be a pity to lose it; so let’s get
arsted i’ church directly-minute,” sez she. Wi’ that, ’a putt both arms
around th’ red neckercher, as I wore; an’ gie me wan, two, three—each
chop, an’ wan i’ th’ middle. Lor’ bless ye! I knowed then what ’a
meant, I did! I wur allers th’ sort as could see through a brick wall
fur as most folk: never warnted no more ’n an ’int.’

‘There agen!’ said old Tom Clemmer, after a pause. ‘Ye wur another o’
th’ lucky wans, ’Enery. Th’ best o’ wimmin plunked straight into your
eye, in a manner o’ speakin’. Ah! but courtin’ days warn’t all pea-nuts
an’ red handkerchers wi’ some o’ us, ’Enery! Dear! oh Lor’! what trouble
I did ha’, surelye!’

He stopped, and sat for a while smiling down into the bowl of his pipe,
and shaking his head.

‘But ye got her at laast, Tom!’ said Daniel Dray softly. He stole a
commiserate glance round at the other members of the company, and had a
silent, meaning nod from each. Old Tom Clemmer blushed, then laughed
outright.

‘Trew, Dan’l! An’ well I reckermembers th’ day as ’a first come to
Windlecombe—up to th’ farm-us yonder, though ’tis forty year ago. All o’
a heap, I wur, soon as I sot eyes on her. “Churn-maid?” sez I to mysel’,
“’twunt be long afore y’are summut better’n that, down at th’
forge-cottage ’long o’ me!” Come Sunday, I runs agen her on th’
litten-path. “Marnin’, Mary!” sez I, an’ gies her th’ marigolds I’d
picked fer her out o’ my own gay-ground; an’ down ’a throws ’em in th’
mud, an’ off wi’out so much as wured or look. Ah! a proud, fine maid ’a
wur!—to be sure an’ all!’

Tom Clemmer knocked out his pipe upon his crutch. Then he threw an
exultant glance about him.

‘What might a man do then, ye’d think? Well, as marigolds warn’t no
good, I tries laylocks. Not a bit on it! Jerrineums—wuss an’ wuss!
Roses—never so much as a sniff! Summut useful, thinks I; but they little
spring onions as I tied up in a bunch wi’ yaller ribbin, an’ hung on th’
dairy gate fer her, there they hung ’til they was yaller too. Then I has
a grand idee. Off I goos to Stavisham, an’ buys a gurt big hamber
brooch; an’ a silver necklace wot weighed down my pocket, carryin’ of it;
an’ a spanglorious goulden weddin’-ring. “Now, my gel, we’ll jest see!”
sez I all th’ way hoame. I bides quiet ’til Sunday, then I hides ahent
th’ gurt elver-tree, an’ pops out upon her suddentlike, as ’a cooms
along. I offers her th’ brooch. “Get out o’ my way!” sez she, “’tis
jest a common ha’penny fairin’— No, ’tis hamber, ’tis real purty!” ’a
sez, an’ brings up stock-still. Then out cooms th’ necklace, an’ down
went ’a’s good book slap i’ th’ dirt. “Oh! ’tis kind o’ ye, blacksmith!”
sez she, ketchin’ hould on’t. “Ah! but what thinks you o’ this here?”
sez I; “but I mount gie it ye yet awhile, ’cause ’tis unlucky fer a maid
to ha’ th’ ring afore th’ day.” Lor! what eyes ’a had, surelye! ’A
thought a bit, then sez she, “Thomas Clemmer, how much ha’ ye got laid
by?” An’ soon as I’d tould her, sez she, “I’ll ha’ ye, Tom, darlin’, fer
I never loved nane but you!” Ah! well, well! Most onaccountable, ’tis,
how th’ very wureds cooms back to ye, arter years an’ years!’

He fell into a brown study, out of which he presently came with a jerk.

‘Fower o’clock? Never! Gorm! how high th’ sun be! I must be getten
hoame-along!’

He rose upon his one serviceable foot, fitted the other foot, a shapeless
bundle of linen, into the sling that hung from his neck, seized his
crutches, and stumped placidly away. There was a direct path from the
Seven Sisters across the green to Tom Clemmer’s cottage, but he always
came and went by the roundabout route through the churchyard. For the
excellent, but frugal-minded Mrs. Clemmer had lain there, under a
home-made iron cross and a carefully tended bed of marigolds, these
twenty years back.

III

Living year after year in Windlecombe, I have come by old habit to
associate with each month that passes its own characteristic changes and
events. February always stands in my mind for three great ebullitions of
the year’s life, equally wonderful in their several ways—the coming of
the elm blossom, the earliest clamorous music from the lambing-pens, and
the first rich song of the awakening bees.

Through my study window, all this week of warm, glittering, showery
weather, I have watched the elm-trees about the churchyard gradually lose
their sharp, clear-cut outline of winter, and dissolve into the misty
softness of spring. Already the tree-tops are so dense that the blue sky
can barely penetrate them. This change is not caused by the expanding
leaf buds, but by the opening of the myriad blossoms, which come and go
before the leaf. Their colour is a magnificent, sombre purple; and the
whole tree stands up in the sunshine, clad in this gorgeous raiment from
its bole to its highest twig—an imperial garment reminding you in more
ways than one of ancient Rome and its Cæsars; for there is little doubt
that the elm is no British tree, but was brought to us by the Romans, all
those centuries ago, with so many other good things.

In the deep pockets of rich soil which have sifted down to the valleys,
and in the shallower soil of our chalk hills, almost every species of
forest tree makes generous growth. But perhaps nothing takes so kindly
to highland Sussex conditions as the elm. The village gardens are
fringed about with its beautiful, wide-spreading shapes, and, in summer,
griddled over with its long blue shadows. But no tree stands within a
distance of its own height from any dwelling. Hard experience has taught
men that the elm is undesirable as a near neighbour. Of all trees it is
the most comely, because it is never symmetrical, but it owes this
picturesque trait to a habit intolerable in a close acquaintance. Not
only does the elm cast its great branches to earth at all times and
without creak or groan of warning, but during the season of the
equinoctial gales, you never know when the whole tree may not come
toppling over in a moment, measuring its vast length on the ground with a
sound like the impact of the heaviest wave that ever thundered against
Beachy Head.

It was so that the King of Windlecombe, the oldest and mightiest elm
through half the county, came down one pitch-black, tempestuous night in
a September of long ago. None of the children, nor many of the younger
folk in the village, now remember the King, where he towered up beyond
the east wall of the churchyard, and every sunset threw his vast shadow
half way up the combe. But they are all familiar with the story of his
downfall. A wild night it was. Every window shook in its frame; every
chimney was an organ-pipe for the wind’s blowing; the sound of the rain
on roof and wall was like an incessant hail of musketry. Thatches were
stripped off. The inn-sign went clattering down the street. The gilt
weather-cock on the church tower took a list that it has kept to this
day. No one dared go abroad that night, but families sat close at home,
keeping shoulder to shoulder in timorous company, and dreadfully
wondering what it was like at sea. Had you need to speak, you must shout
your words, so great was the din of the hurricane. All night it raged
undiminished, and no one slept; some even would not venture to bed, not
knowing but the roof might be plucked off any moment as they lay, and let
the drenching torrent in upon them. Then, as the first grey tinge of
dawn blanched in the eastern sky, high above the voice of the storm came
one tremendous booming note, as though the earth had split asunder. And
with the light, people looked out and saw that the King of Windlecombe
was down.

To-day, as I settled myself to work with the lattices tight closed, to
shut out the lure of the songful morning, there came a patter of earth
upon the glass. At first I thought it was one of the martins’ nests
broken away from the eaves above, being stuffed too full of hay by
interloping sparrows. But the sharp volley sounded again, and looking
out, there on the path below I beheld the old vicar in wide-brimmed hat
and tartan shawl.

‘How now, old mole!’ cried he, shaking his stout oak cudgel at me. ‘The
sun shines, the west wind calls, all the brooks are laughing over their
beds! Yet there you hide in your burrow, grouting among dead words,
warming up stale, cold dreams a twelvemonth old! Shame on you! Come
out, and let the air and sunbeams riddle your dusty fur! Come and lend
me your eyes for a long morning. I have seen to Mrs. Dawes’ rheumatics.
I have done the school. Old Collup has had his bedside talk. I am free
for a ramble, and I want to go everywhere and hear tell of everything.
Come this moment, or I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house
down!’

With his jolly, wrinkled face turned upward, his long white beard
wagging, and his kind eyes steadily meeting mine, it was difficult to
believe that he could see only the faintest shadow of all before him;
that for years past he had lived and worked in a world of deepest dusk,
wherein the very noontide sun of summer was no more than a pale spot in
never-ending gloom. I got my thick boots, and was soon trudging down the
hill with him towards the riverside woods and meadows, every yard of
which had been familiar to him in his days of light.

Arun was running high, with three spring tides yet to come. Much rain
had fallen of late. It looked as though the floods would soon be upon
us, unless the wind changed, and drier, colder weather set in. We
skirted the river-bank, with the wind whipping light ripples almost to
our feet, and the sun making a broad path of gold along the waters.
Beyond the river stretched level green pastures intersected by deep
dykes, and beyond these again lay the misty blue sierra of wooded hills.
The old parson strode easily forward, his face turned up to the sky. His
step never faltered, but his stick hovered incessantly about the path as
he went.

‘Hark to the wind in the trees!’ he said. ‘That is a new voice: the elms
must be in full bloom, and I can guess what they look like. And the
sound is different in that clump of beeches there: the leaf-buds must be
getting long and green now. Only the ash and the oak keep their winter
voice in February.’

Thus it always was on our walks together. What he heard, he told me of;
and what I saw, I gave him as well as I was able.

‘Listen!’ he said presently. ‘Did you hear that? That is the first
chaffinch-song of the year. And there is the great-tit clashing his
silver cymbals together, and the bullfinches blowing over the tops of
their latchkeys, and a green woodpecker laughing—he never laughs in that
grim, scornful way until the year is well on the wing!’

Then I, not to be behind him:

‘I see grass—fresh new growth pushing up everywhere. Young nettles too:
they are coming up green amongst the old dead stems. But they cannot
sting yet—yes, they can! and badly! Stop here a moment, Reverend! The
celandines are out thick on the bank—you remember their shining, yellow,
five-rayed stars, set in dark green leaves like the spade-blades of
Hamlet’s diggers. Below on the bank, where it is too steep for anything
else to grow, there are coltsfoot flowers. The drab earth glows with
them—no leaves at all, but just long, curved, scaly stems, each ending in
a tuft of golden fleece. And then there is—’

‘I know, I know! I can look back a dozen springs, and see them all as
well as you. But listen to that thrush! That is his honeymooning note,
and the pair must be nesting not far away. I have found thrushes’ nests
in February many a time. See if you can find this one.’

‘Your singer has flown. And there goes the hen, out of the other side of
the bush; if the nest is anywhere, it will be here under this tangle of
clematis. Yes, two eggs already! I wish you could see their clear
greenish-blue, with the dapple-marks on it.’

I guided his hand to the nest, and his fingers wandered lightly over it.

‘Cold!’ said he. ‘She will not begin to sit yet. Perhaps never on this
clutch. There is frost and snow ahead of us still, though all of us
forget it this weather, bird, beast, and man.’

The path led us into the hazelwood; hazel below, and overhead soaring
columns of beech, whose branches touched finger-tips everywhere across
the white-flecked blue of the sky. As we went along, the sound of our
footsteps in the fallen leaves was like the sound of wading through
water. I must read off to him what I saw about me as though it were from
a book.

‘The hazel-catkins were never so fine, I think, as they are this spring.
The wood is full of them, like showers of gold-green rain falling.
Whenever we brush against them, clouds of pollen drift off in the wind.
It is the wind that makes the hazel-nuts which we gather by and by. What
millions upon millions of spores only to make a few bushels of nuts! I
struck a single bush with my stick just now, and, for yards ahead, the
sunshine was misty with the floating green dust. Then, here and there on
every branch—’

‘Yes! I can see it all! There are little green buds each with a torch
of bright crimson at its tip, flaming in the sun. Why should they be so
vividly coloured, if only to catch what the wind brings—floating pollen
as blind as I? No, no! The hazel-nut was made for the bees originally,
depend upon it. Nature never uses bright colour unless to attract winged
life.’

We came out of the wood on the south side. Stopping just within the
shade of the last trees, we had a view over a chain of sunny, sheltered
meadows that lay between the riverside willows and the first steep
escarpment of the Downs. Here the wind was only a song above our heads.
Scarce a breath stirred where we leaned upon the gate in the sunshine. I
must be at my living book again, yet knew not where to begin, so crowded
was the page.

‘March is still three weeks off, and yet the hares are already as mad as
can be. Over there under the Hanger, a mile away, I can see them racing
and tumbling about together. There are more celandines and coltsfoot
blossom everywhere. I can see daisies wherever I look, and there is a
disc of dandelion by the gate-post just where you stand. What clouds of
midges! Thousands are dancing in the air above our heads, and I can see
their wings making a hazy streak of light all down the hedgerow, where
the elders are in flourishing green leaf. Did you ever hear so many
birds all singing at the same time? And there goes an army of rooks and
jackdaws overhead! What a din!—the high, yelping treble of the daws, and
the deep-voiced rooks singing bass to it.’

The Reverend put a hand upon my arm to stop me.

‘I can hear something else,’ he said. ‘A dandelion, did you say? Then
she will come straight for it.’ And as he spoke, I heard the old
familiar sound too. It was a hive-bee, tempted abroad by the glad spring
sunlight. She came straight over the meadows. Passing all other
blossoms by, she settled on the single flower half-hidden in its whorl of
ragged green leaves close beside us, and forthwith began to smother
herself in its yellow pollen.

‘And there she goes again!’ said the old vicar, as the soft, rich sound
mingled once more with the myriad other notes about us. ‘High up into
the air—doesn’t she?—making ever a wider and wider circle until she gets
her first flying-mark, and then in the usual zigzag course, home to the
hive! A bee-line! People always make the words stand for something
absolutely straight and direct. But a true bee-line is the easiest way
between two points, not necessarily the shortest. To take a bee-line, if
folk only knew it, is just to fly through the calmest, or most favouring
airs, judge the quickest way between all obstacles, dodge the ravenous
tits and sparrows, and so get home safe and sound to the hive.’

This spring, the Artletts have built their lambing-pens on the sunny
slope of Windle Hill in full view of the village. When, at
threshing-time last autumn, the waggons toiled up the steep hillside with
their shuddering loads of yellow straw, and the ricks were fashioned end
to end in a curving line against the north, strangers wondered why a
farmer should carry his bedding-down material so far from its main
centres of consumption, the stables and cowsheds. But the reason for the
work is clear enough at last. Behind the solid rampart of straw, the
lambing-pens lie in cosy shelter, and every day now sees them more
populous; day and night, as the month wends on, there arises from them a
fuller and fuller melody.

Alone, perhaps, of all other rural occupations, shepherding remains
unaffected by the avalanche of machinery and chemistry which has
descended upon agriculture. Here and there may be found a flockmaster
who talks of shearing-machines, but it is rare to find anything but the
old hand-clippers in use by the old-fashioned, wandering gangs of
shearers. Flocks are larger, and so bring the modern shepherd more
anxious care; but in all essential ways, his year’s round of work is the
same as in that time of old when the shepherds watched their flocks by
night near Bethlehem.

[Picture: ‘Springtime’]

For the first time, in near upon fifty years, old Artlett has had no hand
in the pen-making. Rheumatism, the life-long foe of the shepherd, has
got him by the heels at last; and, if it turn out with him as with nearly
all his kind, he will never again leave the chimney-corner, until he is
carried thence and laid to sleep beside his long line of forbears up in
the churchyard. But young George is as good a shepherd as any of his
line, in this, as in all other branches of the craft. Wherever you go
among the neighbouring sheep-farms, you will hear tell of the amazing
good luck of Windlecombe at lambing-time. George Artlett views the
matter from a different standpoint.

We sat together in his cosy hut on the hillside, towards twelve o’clock
of a gusty, moonlit night. The coke-fire burned in the little stove with
a steady brightness, casting its red rays through the open door, and far
out into the resounding night. Overhead a lantern swung gently to and
fro, rocking our shadows on the walls. From the lambing-pens hard by
there rose a ceaseless yammering chorus, and from the outer folds a
confusion of tongues deeper still, mingled with the tolling of
innumerable bells. George Artlett sat on the straw mattress in the
corner, his knees drawn up to his chin.

‘Ah! luck!’ said he, a little scornfully, peering at me through the cloud
of tobacco-smoke—all from my own pipe—which hovered between us. ‘An’ how
be it then, as them as believes in luck, gets so onaccountable little
on’t? Gregory, over at Redesdown yonder—’a wunt so much as throw a
hurdle on a Friday, an’ ’a wears a bag o’ charm-stuff round’s neck, an’
’a wud walk a mile sooner ’n goo unner a laadder—well, how be it wi’ un?
Lambs dyin’ every day, folks say; ah! an’ yows too—seven on ’em gone
a’ready! “’Twill be thirteen,” ’a sez, “thirteen, th’ on-lucky number,
an’ then ’twill stop. ’Tis Redesdown’s luck!” sez he; “ye can do nought
agen it!” An’ next year, ’a’ll goo on feedin’ short an’ poor, jest as ’a
allers doos; an’ putten th’ yows to th’ ram too young; an’ lambin’ i’ th’
hoameyard agen, where ’tis so soggy an’ onhealthy, jest because ’tis near
to ’s bed. When a man doos his night-shepherdin’, swearin’ at th’ laads
through ’s windy, ’a may well look fer bad luck!’

He rose, and drew on his great blanket-coat, and pulled his sou’wester
over his eyes. Then he took down the lantern from its hook, and together
we plunged out into the buffeting wind to make the round of the folds for
the sixth time since my advent, although the night was but half over.

The moon was nearly at the full. In its flood of pure white light, the
lambing-yard, with its surrounding folds, looked like some extensive
fortification, so high and impregnable seemed the walls that hemmed it in
on every side. These walls were made of sheaves of straw, standing on
end, shoulder to shoulder, of such girth and density that not a breath of
the unruly wind could penetrate them. Within, the lambing-yard was
floored a foot deep with the same straw, and on all sides were the pens,
little separate bays flanked and topped by hurdles covered in with the
like material. The whole place was crowded with ewes and lambs; the
newest arrivals still in the pens with their mothers, the rest almost as
snugly berthed out in the mainway of the yard. Outside this elaborate
stockade were two great folds, the one containing the ewes still to be
reckoned with, the other thronged with those whose troubles were happily
over, and with whom already the cares and joys of motherhood were verging
on the trite.

Shepherd Artlett took no chances at any stage of his work. At the
entrance to the lambing-yard, he carefully covered up the lantern with
his coat, and thereafter allowed its light to fall only where he need
direct his scrutiny.

‘Nane o’ Gregory’s luck fer me!’ he said. ‘There bean’t no wolves on th’
Hill nowadays, but sheep, they be jest as much afeared o’ summat as ’twur
born in ’em to dread. ’Tis in their blood, I reckons. Now look ye! A
naked light carried i’ th’ haand, an’ let sudden in upon ’em—see how it
sets th’ shadders dancin’ an’ prancin’ all around! Like as not, ’tis so
th’ wolves came leapin’ round th’ folds ages an’ ages back; an’ so it
bides in th’ blood wi’ all sheep—a sort o’ natur’s bygone memory.
Froughten wan yow, an’ ye be like to froughten all. Set ’em stampedin’,
an’ that means slipped lambs, turned milk, an’ trouble wi’out
end—Gregory’s luck agen!’

On these rounds, every pen in the yard was visited, and its denizens
critically examined: not a sheep of the huddled, vociferating crowd
through which we threaded our difficult course, but had her share in
George Artlett’s swift-roving glance. Here and there we came upon a
newborn lamb, and then George took its four legs in one handful and
carried it head downwards through the throng to the nearest vacant pen,
its frantic mother bleating her expostulation close in our rear. There
were the feeding-cages to fill with hay, and mangold to be carried in and
scattered amongst the crouching sheep. Sometimes there was a sickly lamb
or ewe to doctor, when we went trudging back to rifle the medicine-chest
in the hut; and rarely a weakling, who refused its natural food, must be
taken under George’s coat, a silent shivering woolly atom, and restored
to life and voice by the warmth of our fire and the bottle.

In how great a measure the luck of Windlecombe or any sheep-farm depends
on the foresight and tender care of the shepherd, was well brought home
to me as, in the first ghostly light of morning, something like a crisis
came to vary the monotonous round of our task. I had dozed off as I sat
in my corner, and woke to find grey dawn picking out the tops of the
hills, and George away on his unending business. Presently, through the
little window at my side, I saw him coming back over the rimy grass, his
coat bulged out with the usual burden. He set the lamb down on the straw
by the fire. Limp and lifeless it looked, and past all aid; but George
fell patiently to work swabbing it. As he worked, he talked.

‘’Tis White-Eye agen—a fine yow, but a onaccountable bad mother, ’a be,
surelye. Purty nigh lost her lamb laast season, an’ now agen ’tis
ne’ersome-matter wi’ un. Wunt gie suck. Butts th’ little un away, ’a
do. That, an’ th’ could, ’tis. Terr’ble hard put to ’t, I wur, laast
time, to save un! An’ this—well: if ’a cooms round, ’twill be a
miracle—’

He stopped to fetch his breath, then set to more vigorously than ever.

‘Lorsh! I do b’lieve! . . . Ay! I’ll do ’t!—better ’n a score o’ dead
uns, ’a be, a’ready. Now, shaap wi’ th’ bottle!’

But the wretched mute morsel of woolliness was too weak to suck. And
then George Artlett did what I had never seen done before.

‘Well, well!’ he said confidently, ‘we must try th’ ould-fangled way wi’
un!’ He took a gulp of the warm milk, and bringing the lamb’s mouth to
his own, tenderly fed it. Again and again this was done, until life
began to flicker up strong once more in the little creature’s body.

‘But mind ye!’ said George, as presently he stood looking down on the
resuscitated lamb, and regaling himself with its pitiful bleating, ‘No
more o’ White-Eye! Off to Findon Fair ’a goos wi’ th’ draught-sheep next
May, sure as she’s alive!’

MARCH

THE charm of Sussex woods, though you may frequent them at all times in
and out of season, is that they are never the same woods from year to
year. The great trees, indeed, keep their old familiar forms and
stations, but the undergrowth of hazel, ash, larch, or silver-birch is
periodically cleared away. This year, a certain hillside or deep hollow
may be hidden under a thicket of growth impenetrable not only to the
casual wanderer, but to the very sunlight itself; and next year the
wood-cutters may have swept it clean, leaving only the forest trees to
cast their shadows over a sunny wilderness that your eyes, though you
have journeyed this way scores of times, have never yet beheld.
Clearings wherein the children gathered primroses by the thousand one
spring, are overgrown and all but impassable the next. The very paths
and waggon-ways change their direction, as the woodmen vary the scene of
their labours from year to year. And in the track of the copse-cutters,
arise all manner of new plants; new birds come to nest; new sights and
sounds throng about the way at every turn—so, in nearly all seasons, a
strange new land is brought to your very feet, in the midst of things
familiar, maybe, for a score of years.

In the dead deeps of winter, nothing seems so remote, so hopelessly
unattainable, as the March sunshine; yet here it is at last, and here I
am, sitting on a hazel-stole softly cushioned with ivy, alone and
deliciously idle, in a clearing I have just discovered in the heart of
Windle Woods.

All this part of the wood has lain untouched for a decade, perhaps, given
over to the jays and magpies, and other wildest of wild nesting things.
There is a green lane only a few hundred feet distant, and along it I
have journeyed many a time during the past year, never dreaming that the
clearing existed. And yet, no later than last April, the woodmen must
have been here with their bill-hooks, hacking and hewing, and letting in
the living sunlight where the earth had known no more than green gloaming
on the brightest day.

It is strange how quickly the fertile soil awakens from such a lethargy
of long, dark years. From where I sit, high upon the sunny slope, I can
see nothing but greenery. All that remains of the dense growth of hazel,
that covered this part of the wood, is gathered into great square piles,
looking like windowless houses set here and there on the sunny declivity.
Primroses shine everywhere; truly not in the abundance of April, but
still there is no yard of ground without their sulphur sheen. Red
deadnettle makes a rosy flush in the grass at my feet. There is
ground-ivy round the base of each hazel-stole, with its pale violet
flowers, so minute, yet making such a brave show by sheer strength of
numbers. And hovering everywhere over this still mere of sunshine, with
its sunken treasure of blossom, are butterflies—great sulphur-yellow
butterflies—flapping idly along, little tortoiseshells and peacocks that
have laid up through the winter, and one gorgeous red-admiral, also a
hibernator, veering about in the sunshine with outspread, motionless
wings.

To this secret nook of woodland I came but an hour ago, yet in that one
hour of still March sunshine, I have seen and heard more things than
could be chronicled, perhaps, in a day’s hard driving of the swiftest
pen. To set down only the things that dwell foremost in the memory is
not easy. I had been here only a few minutes when a rabbit came racing
across the clearing, dodging in and out of the hazel-stoles in tremendous
hurry and fear. On seeing me, he turned off at a sharp angle, then
scurried away into the wood. A full five minutes after came a stealthy
rustling from the same direction, and a ruddy-furred stoat drew into
view, his snake-like head alternately poised high in the sunshine and
lowered amidst the grass, as he carefully picked up the rabbit’s trail.
He was going at only a tithe of the rabbit’s pace, but going without an
instant’s hesitation. Where the rabbit had turned off at seeing me, the
stoat also veered sharply round. He went straight for the wood, entering
it, as far as I could judge, at exactly the same spot. So he would go
on, I knew, until at last his blood-thirsty cunning and pertinacity had
outworn the rabbit’s speed.

Then a woodpecker came over the clearing, his crimson cap and tarnished
jerkin of lincoln-green looking strangely tawdry and theatrical in the
brilliant sunshine. He flew heavily yet swiftly, arresting the motion of
his wings at every four or five beats, much as a finch flies. As he
passed over, he uttered his weird call-note, that sounds something like
‘Ploo-ee, ploo-ee!’ wherein, however, there is a tang of crafty cynicism
indescribable. Not far from where I sat was a beech-tree, and to this
tree I watched him go. He climbed up the smooth bark like a cat, taking
the trunk spiral-wise. Then, when almost at its summit, he stopped and
beat out of the hard wood, with his pick-axe of a bill, such a note as
can be likened to nothing else in nature. So fast fell the blows of his
beak, that between them no interval could be distinguished. They ran
together into one smooth, continuous volume of sound. Extraordinarily
musical it was, with a plaintive quality and a variableness of tone, now
loud, now soft, that could not fail to impress the dullest ear. The note
was prolonged for half a minute or so, and then the bird stopped to
listen. Far away over the wood-top I heard the answering sound. For
this woodpecker-music in springtime is a true love-call, and you will
hear it onward through the months until the last pair of birds is mated
in the wood.

This is the time when the queen-wasps come out of their winter
hiding-places, and the first bumble-bees appear. Of the hive-bees very
few seek out these isolated clearings; they have all gone to the
riverside where the sallows and willows are in bloom. But as I sat
listening to the medley of birds and insect-voices around me, trying to
pick out one after the other from the chaos of song, I heard the soft
note of a honey-bee down in the blue veronica close at hand. Yet she
touched none of the flowers. She passed all by, and went scrambling down
among the moss and dead leaves. Knowing that the honey-bee never wastes
time, and anxious to find out what she might be doing there, I watched
her as she painfully went over the moss-fronds one by one, sending forth
a shrill, fretful note at intervals, very like an interjection of
disappointment at not finding what she needed. At last her search came
to a successful end. It was a dew-drop she had been seeking, one of the
few that had escaped the thirsty glances of the sun. Silently she drank.
And then, as she rose into mid-air with her burden, there was no
mistaking the triumphant quality of her song. At this time, water is the
all-important factor in the prosperity of the hive; and the bee knew well
she was carrying home something of greater worth even than a load of the
purest honey.

Leaving the clearing at length, I went homeward by a roundabout way,
through the oldest part of the wood. Traversing one of the shadiest
paths, where the oaks grew thick together overhead, I came to a turn in
the way. Just beyond, there was a single spot of sunshine lying on the
moss-green path, and in it a squirrel gambolled, as though he were taking
a bath in the yellow pool of light. Often throughout the winter I had
come upon squirrels thus, tempted out of their warm winter-houses by some
day of exceptional mildness. For the squirrel is no true hibernator. He
sleeps through the cold spells, often for weeks at a stretch. But, like
the hive-bees, warm weather at once rouses him from his dray, and sends
him forth ravenous to his secret store of acorns or beech-mast.

Old Tom Clemmer once told me of a custom regarding the squirrel which, in
his boyhood, was rife in most Downland villages. On Saint Andrew’s Day,
towards the end of each November, most of the Windlecombe men and boys
used to foregather on the green, armed with short sticks, shod at one end
with some heavy piece of metal. The party would then go out into the
woods for this, the annual squirrel-hunt, or ‘skugging’ as it was called.
The weighted sticks were thrown at the squirrels as they leaped in the
branches overhead; and some of the folk, Tom Clemmer himself among the
number, were famous for their skill at this pastime. Skugging, however,
being essentially a poor man’s brutal sport, has been long ago
suppressed.

My squirrel in the pool of sunshine blocked the path, and there was no
way round. I must perforce disturb him. I watched him clamber upward
into the wilderness of budding oak-boughs, his glossy red-brown coat
gleaming in the sunshine as he went.

Presently, coming into a spacious valley of beeches, where the eye could
wander far and wide, between the grey-green trunks, over a bare,
undulating carpet of last year’s leaves—for scarcely anything will grow
under beech—I caught sight of an object which drew my steps over to the
near hillside. It was a spot of shining white painted about breast high
on the smooth bark of one of the trees. I knew what it meant. It was
the White Spot of Doom—the token of the woodreeve to his men that the
tree was to be felled; and this was the time, when the sap was beginning
to run strong and rinding would be easy, for the death sentence to be
carried out.

I looked at the white spot, and if I could have saved the tree by
obliterating it there and then, I would have done so gladly. Carved
deeply into its wood, and so long ago that the characters were all but
illegible, was a double set of initials, and, between them, two hearts at
once united and transfixed by the same arrow. Below these roughly-hewn
signs a date appeared. I had often come upon the legend in my walks, and
stopped to ruminate over it. Who had cut it I never knew, nor indeed
whether C. D. and L. E. W., if they were alive to-day, would have joined
with any enthusiasm in my desire for its preservation. But somehow it
came to me at the moment as an infinitely pathetic thing, that the tree
should be cut down after all those years, and the record destroyed—it had
been done so obviously for perpetuity. What kind of stony-hearted
villain must the woodreeve have been, I thought to myself, who could daub
that patch of white paint so callously near to the silent eloquence of
such an inscription?

Out of the far distance now, as I lingered over the carving in that mood
of moralising sentimentality, there came creeping up the hollow stillness
of the glade a murmur of voices, and, in a little, the tramp of heavy
feet. I recognised the gang of woodmen carrying the tools of their
craft; and behind them a little rabble of village-folk, mostly children.
I drew off some way up the hillside, and sat me down on a stump, to look
on at the now imminent, as well as inevitable spectacle.

To watch a great tree felled, especially when such a giant as this
lovers’ tree was in question, is one of the most exciting things to be
met with in country-life. There is ever growing suspense for the
onlooker from the moment when the first axe-blow sends its echo ringing
through the aisles of the wood, to that last stunned feeling after the
mighty tree is down. The speed and workmanlike dexterity with which the
gang now got to their task only served to intensify this sensation. One
buckled on a pair of climbing-irons and carried aloft two long ropes,
securing them to the trunk at its highest point of division. While he
was still up there, like a perching crow black against the sky, another
took a great glittering axe, and, stepping slowly round the tree, dealt
it a succession of downward and inward blows, cutting out a deep ring all
round the bole some six or eight inches above ground-level. On the side
towards which the tree was to fall, this cut was now widened and deepened
until it laid bare a good foot breadth of the solid heart of the wood.
And while the amber chips were still flying under the axe, the rest of
the gang were carrying the ropes away at two sharp angles, and binding
them securely to neighbouring trees.

And now began the crucial part of the business. The great wood-saw was
got to work, with four strong men at it. Cutting close to the ground on
the far side of the tree, the shining blade tore its way steadily into
the wood. Inch by inch it drove its ragged teeth forward, and at every
lunge it gave forth a savage gasping scream, and a spume of yellow
sawdust spirted from the cut, gathering in an ever-growing heap on either
side. No other sound broke the stillness of the glen for a full ten
minutes or more. No one among the mute, expectant crowd, nor any of the
woodmen, seemed to move hand or foot. All watched and waited, as it
appeared, breathlessly. There were just these four strong men labouring
to and fro, the flash of the hungry saw-blade in the sunlight, and the
harsh sudden screech of the direful thing every time it ripped at the
vitals of the tree. The gang of woodmen had divided at a sign from their
chief, and stood, three or four of them bearing on each rope. The leader
watched the saw, a hand on each hip. Once he raised a hand the saw
stopped; a row of steel wedges was driven in behind it; the saw began
once more its old rasping melody. At last the hand went up again. The
work was done. I could see the black line of the cut reaching within an
inch or so of the deep axe-cleft on the face of the tree.

Long ago, on shipboard, I had been present at the firing of one of the
heaviest guns that ever put to sea; and what followed now reminded me
strangely of that deafening experience. The leader marshalled his men,
and directed operations with short, sharp words of command, much as the
gun-lieutenant had done. There was the same busy preparation and
skurrying to and fro, the same moment of suspense, the same terrific
outcome. Every available man was now set to haul on the ropes, while the
leader of the gang himself took a mallet and, with mighty blows, drove
the wedges in. Thick and fast the blows fell, and their echoes went
chevying each other down the ravine. The vast-spreading tree quaked,
lashed its branches wildly about overhead. The crowd of waiting children
and old women were ordered farther back from the zone of danger. Now the
great mallet redoubled its blows, and the two gangs of men bore on the
ropes with all their might and main. Still, though the commotion
overhead increased to the force of a hurricane, no other sign of movement
other than a faint shudder, was visible in the trunk of the tree. One
last blow of the mallet, and one last pull all together, and then a sharp
crack sounded, as it were, from the bowels of the earth. The ropemen
leant back in one huge final effort, then dropped the ropes, and ran for
their lives. There came a slithering, tearing noise as the mighty beech
toppled forward, tearing itself from the clinging, cumbering embrace of
its age-long fellows, then down it came to earth with one long, rolling,
thunderous, crackling roar.

Where I stood, I felt the solid earth quake and shudder. Between the
moment when the uppermost branches of the great tree began to force their
way in a wide, descending arc through the thicket of intercepting
branches, and the moment of the last terrific boom, as the trunk struck
the earth, there seemed a strangely long interval of time. Another thing
struck me with all the force of unimaginable novelty. All the undermost
branches of the tree as it fell were splintered into a thousand
fragments, and these, flying upward and outward, in a great cloud, gave
an effect as if the mighty trunk had fallen into water.

And now I learned for the first time why all the poor folk had followed
the woodmen with their baskets. The tree was no sooner prone on the
ground, and the last soaring splinter come rattling out of the sky, than
a rush was made to the spot by all. Here was firewood in plenty for
every one, as much as each could gather or carry. And it was firewood
already chopped.

It was Tennyson who first set us looking for kingfishers in March,
though, indeed, the ‘sea-blue bird’ makes the riverside beautiful at all
seasons. There is a little creek here, winding away from the main
current of the river through a thicket of willow and alder, where, coming
stealthily along the shadowed footpath, you can always hear the shrill,
creaking pipe of the bird, and generally catch the glint of his gay
plumage as he darts down-stream, or sits on some branch overhanging the
clear, brown water.

But it was from the stern-seat of the old ferryman’s boat that I learnt
whatever I know about kingfishers and river life in general; and these
secret excursions seldom began until March was well under way. For me,
therefore, the kingfisher, as for all Tennyson lovers, is most clearly
associated with the still barren hedgerows and brakes, the song of the
thrush mounted high amidst leafless branches, and that wonderful array of
crimson tassels and brown bobbins, all set in a mist of pale green
needles, which at this time makes the larch one of the sights of the
country-side.

I have said secret excursions; and, indeed, all my relations with old
Runridge during recent years have necessarily taken on this furtive
character. It was not always so. In happier days, when the old man was
a widower, I used to drift down to his cabin by the water-side for a
quiet pipe at all seasons of the day and openly, whenever the mood seized
me. Then, if tide and the weather served, we would take the little skiff
and go off for hours together exploring the shiest nooks of the river,
either with or without the ancient fowling-piece that hung over his
kitchen hearth. At these times the ferry was left to take care of
itself, which it did sufficiently well, there being often quite a little
collection of pennies on the thwart of the boat when the old man got back
from these unpremeditated truantries.

But, one fateful day, a distant cousin of Runridge’s arrived on a visit—a
sedate, ponderous woman, very black as to brows and eyes, and with a
hard, shiny face whose colour seemed all on the surface, like red paint.
She never went away again, for within the month she became Mrs. Runridge.
From that day, for peace and quiet’s sake, the old ferryman and I pursued
our ancient courses only by stealth. Fortunately Mrs. Runridge had a
genius for household economy, which led her to eschew the village shop,
and took her off with her basket at least once a week to Stavisham and
its cheaper wares. This was always our opportunity; and regularly on the
town market-days, when Mrs. Runridge and her basket had been safely
stowed into the carrier’s cart and it had turned the distant bend of the
lane, the little green wherry set forth over the shining tide with its
self-congratulatory crew, bent on visiting the ‘harns,’ or looking for
reed-warblers’ nests, or anything else that might fit the occasion.

To-day we went up on the full tide, and turned into the little creek
where the kingfishers have their nests. It has been one of those
dead-still, cloudless days, that so often come in mid-March just before
the gales of the equinox—a halcyon day, in very truth. As our little
craft sped up the glittering pathway of the waters, hardly a whisper
sounded in the dense jungle of reeds that flanks the river here on either
side. The treetops stood motionless against the sky—one clear, blue arch
except where just above the horizon a series of white clouds peered over
the hill-tops like a row of beckoning hands. The willows on the banks
were full of yellow blossom in which the bees crowded; their soft music
was with us wherever we went. Larks carolled overhead. Thrushes,
blackbirds, hedge-sparrows sang in every bush. There was a great cawing
and dawing from the rookeries, where the black companies had returned for
the season, and were busy furbishing up their nests. We drove our boat’s
prow through the willow branches that all but hid the entrance to the
creek, then let her drift idly down the narrow way until we gained the
broader basin near the footbridge, and moored her to an overhanging
branch.

Keeping quiet and still in our corner, we had only a few minutes to wait.
The familiar, high-pitched cry rang out from the sunny breadth of the
river. And then, into the cool, grey light, came what looked like a
flying spark of emerald fire. The bird pitched on a wand of sallow that
drooped nearly to the water just opposite our retreat. Here he sat
awhile carelessly preening his magnificent feathers. Below him the water
lay glassy-still and clear, reflecting his tawny breast and the rich
chequer-work of gold blossom and blue sky overhead. The kingfisher did
not watch the stream with that motionless vigilance that one reads of in
the nature books. He seemed to give the gliding water scarce a thought,
but to be intent only on the contemplation of his own finery, as he
twirled on his perch, reaching now and again over his shoulder to set
straight a feather that had gone awry.

But suddenly he stopped in this popinjay performance, pointed his bill
downward, and plunged like a stone. The glittering emerald vanished. On
the mirror of the waters there spread ring within ring of light. What
seemed like whole minutes passed in waiting and silence. And then all
the brilliant green and blue and amber burst into view again, as the bird
came up in a scatter of diamonds, and lanced straight back to his perch.
Now we could see he held a minnow, a little writhing atom of silver,
crosswise in his beak. He struck it to and fro on the hard wood until he
had killed it. Then, at a single gulp, it was down his throttle. Again
the kingfisher sat preening his gorgeous plumage, with the same
dilettante touch and light carelessness, as though the shining treasury
of the waters below concerned him not a jot.

III

I often wonder how it is that the old saying, about March and its leonine
or lamb-like incomings and outgoings, should have kept so sturdily its
place in popular credence. Looking through a pile of old note-books
ranging back over a couple of decades or so, I find that, in the majority
of years, March has both begun and ended in the lamb-like character. The
lion appears only in the rôle of an interloper, a go-between; for, almost
invariably, there has been a period of chilly, riotous weather sometime
after the middle of the month.

So it has come about this season. Yesterday was a day without a flaw;
and as the sun began at last to mellow and decline, dragging a net of
shining golden haze behind it over the western hills, I gave up a
day-long, though still unfinished task, and went to sit awhile on the
churchyard wall.

The north-west wall is the last rampart of Windlecombe. It is made of
flint, with an oval, red-brick coping of generous breadth: there is none
in the parish, as far as I know, but can be comfortable upon it. Sitting
thereon side-saddle-wise, you have a view, on the one hand, of the grey
stones and evergreenery of the churchyard, and, on the other, your glance
can wander unchecked straight down the combe to the river, then forward
over the brook-country to the far-off Stavisham woods. As yet the light
had abated scarce a jot of its dynamic brilliance. Shadows were long,
and the white house-fronts had taken on a leaven of rosy sweetness; but
in the most retiring nooks it was still broad day. I turned my back on
the serene prospect of level plain, where here and there the sunlight
picked out a glittering coil of river, and set myself to the
contemplation of a remarkable fellowship near at hand.

Close by the wall stood an almond-tree, its wide-spreading branches
covered to the tips with pink blossom, and behind it glowered and gloomed
a venerable yew. The one tree, as it were, reached out glad, welcoming
arms to the spring, squandering its all to make one hour of joyous
festival at the return of the prodigal light; the other turned but a
niggardly side-eye on all the inflowing radiance of the season. It
seemed to be trying to do its least and worst, to discount the
extravagant jubilation of its neighbour. For very shame it could not
wholly resist the call of the sunshine. Grudgingly it put forth, at the
tip of each sombre green frond, a sparse sprig of lighter green. And
because the almond-tree threw down its spent blossom in largesse of rosy
litter upon the grass below, this dour-natured vegetable, turning its
necessities to virtuous account, now shed the dead brown buds of the
foregoing year, sending this rubbish fluttering to earth with the same
hesitant, sidelong action with which the almond petals fell, as though in
a mockery of imitation.

As I sat on the wall with my back to the declining sun,—humouring this,
and many similar far-fetched, vain conceits as the best antidote I knew
against the day’s long overstrain of fancy,—high overhead in the church
tower hard by, the bell began its quiet summons for evensong. Through
gaps in the thicket of ilex and laurel, I saw, first, the tall, gaunt
figure of the Reverend go by on the litten-path with his vast, confident
stride, the pallid threadpaper of a curate flickering at his heels.
After them came Miss Sweet, the rich and lonely spinster up at the great
house, mincing along under a puce sunshade, with an extended handful of
ivory books; then Mrs. Coles from the farm, as ever, hot and out of
breath; finally, at a respectful interval carefully calculated, three or
four of the village women dribbled through, and disappeared into the
north porch after the rest.

The usual weekly congregation being now complete, the bell stopped. The
harmonium gave out one low, sonorous note, which on weekdays was the
beginning and end of its share in the service. For the next twenty
minutes, no other sound drifted over to me but the clucking and whistling
of the starlings on the chancel roof. And then, having become again
immersed in the affair of the yew and almond trees, both now alike
steeped by the setting sun in the same rose-red dye, I was startled by a
hand on my arm. The Reverend stood at my side, ruddy-faced, red-bearded,
the very blackness of his clothes changed mysteriously to the like
glowing hue. His kind eyes looked straight into mine, just as if he
could see them.

‘A fine evening, isn’t it?’ he said, ‘just one rich flood of crimson
without form—only a great light spreading up the sky from where the sun
has disappeared; spreading up and gradually paling and changing until
there is nothing but pure blue, with one silver peg of a star sticking in
it—is it not so?’

‘Why, no, it is not quite that,’ said I, considering, ‘the star is there
sure enough, and the great red light. But the red does not merge into
blue, it melts gradually into a wonderful, luminous, metallic green, with
the star, almost white, swimming in the midst of it. Far overhead the
sky is blue enough, and up there more stars are blinking out every
moment. But the green! If you could only see its—’

‘Snow!’ interrupted the old vicar placidly.

‘What!’

‘Snow. Wind first, a gale perhaps; and then the snow. You will see.
What says the almond-tree here?’

‘It says,’ I contended, ‘but one word. Spring!—abounding new life and
growth; sunshine kindling stronger and stronger every day; the winter
gone and already half forgotten. With every pink bloom it promises
nightingales, and white flannels and straw hats and—’

‘Ah! And you never will grow up now: you’re too old. The
almond-blossom?—it lies in my memory always side by side with the
snowdrop and the Christmas-rose. Snow-flowers, all three! Wait a
little, and be convinced. But now look, and tell me which way the
chimney-smoke is blowing.’

‘Blowing! There is not a breath of—’

There was more than a breath down there in the fair-way of the combe,
although here we could feel nothing of it. Under the deep red dusk I
could make out the smoke-plumes from the village chimneys all driving off
at a sharp right-angle to the south. Even as I looked, there came a
sudden flaw of wind overhead that set the yew boughs rocking, and its
voice was the old-remembered voice. The north wind again! Somewhere in
its black tangled depths the yew-tree creaked derisively. The Reverend
put his arm through mine.

‘But it is mercifully late,’ he said, as we turned homeward together.
‘Artlett need not fear for his lambs now, nor I for mine. Is the sky
already overcast? Or am I only blinder than usual?’

After that day I was house-bound for near upon a week. Later than its
wont by a good hour, the dawn broke every day; but as in darkness so with
the grey wan light, the wind never abated one iota of its whistling fury;
the soft thud-thud of the flying snow reverberated on the panes; the
white drifts at the street corners mounted steadily higher and higher; in
the fireplace, where I already thought soon to start my summer fernery, I
had the logs crackling and glowing with more than their old wintry might.
Poor almond-blossom! I thought to myself again and again, as I sat
industriously scratching away in the strange dumbness and the thin, queer
light that fills the room in snowy weather.

Yet this was not so ill a wind but that some good was blown my way. I
found myself overhauling arrears of work at a surprising rate. When the
wind fell at last, backing steadily to west, then to south-west, and
there came a night of drenching rain—rain that felt like hot tea to a
hand held out in it—I was ready for any sort of idleness and any
wandering company.

Two long days and nights the world lay under that simmering, steaming
cataract. And then such a morning—almost the last morning of the
month—rose over Windlecombe as made the mere awakening in one’s bed seem
like a sort of first act in a miracle play.

The sun had hardly breasted Windle Hill before I was out and clear of the
village: its last red tinge had faded into night when I turned my tired
steps homeward, and so to bed once more.

Lying there cosily, with the delicious ache of thirty miles in my bones,
and in my ears the lilt of a thousand melodies, all the glad day’s
journey projected itself like swiftly changing pictures thrown upon the
screen of the starry night. The Downs first—the green sea of hills that
seemed to heave and subside as the violet cloud-shadows lazily drove from
crest to crest; the unending sheep-bell music, and lark-song, and the
playing of the gulls high up in the blue, like scraps of white paper
fluttering in the breeze. Then down the steep hill-side to the sunny
flats, where the plovers were at their love-play—each pair rising and
falling, somersaulting together, crying continually, coming to rest a
moment, then up again at the old interminable gambols.

Here in the deep ditches the frogs croaked. There was a golden rim of
marsh-marigold to every strip of water, over which you must peer if you
would study the submerged life below. And what a life there was down in
each crystal deep! Queer water-beetles wove a bright pattern on the
surface of the slow-moving, almost stagnant stream; and their shadows
made just the same pattern on the sunlit weed of the bottom, though here
it was black instead of bright. Down there were mimic forests or jungles
of ferny, bronze-green growth, all in gentle undulating motion as the
water glided imperceptibly by. Shoals of minnows cruised about in the
sunny open, or lay in wait singly in the shadowy glades. These single
fish seemed to be for ever quarrelling; either making sudden raid on the
lairs of their neighbours, or being attacked in their turn. When they
banded themselves together, evidently making common peace the better to
rout a common enemy, and swam boldly in the sunshine, I could see that
each fish was faintly tinged with blue and green and orange-red, the
identical colours, although vague and subdued, of the kingfisher, their
traditional foe.

Then came up the vision of a long white road barred with tree-shadows,
flowing between thorn-hedges already full of a green promise of leafage,
and edged with butterfly-haunted flowers. Little cottages passed by,
ankle-deep in blue forget-me-nots, and aflare with blossoming creepers.
Deep pine-woods took the road and folded it in fragrant gloom, then set
it forth in the sunshine again to wander over gorse-clad heaths, or
amidst spangled meadows. I saw the inn, where I sat awhile in a company
of travelling ‘rinders’—men who strip the bark from the felled oaks for
the tanneries-who would now be camping, like Robin and his merry rascals,
a month long in the woods.

I dozed off, and woke again where, in the drowsy afternoon sunshine, I
had rested under a great pollard ash weighed down with ivy. Upon the
grass about my feet there shone an infinity of small, rounded objects,
much as if Aladdin had passed by and thrown down a handful of superfluous
rubies. Everywhere their soft carmine lustre gemmed the sward. Year by
year I have found the like on meadow-paths, wood-rides, by the church
tower, sometimes in the very streets of the village, and have never known
how they came into being. You may have broken asunder the ivy-berries a
hundred times, and noted the pale-hued seeds within, yet never guessed
that here was the mining-ground for your treasure. It is the sun and air
that make rubies of the fallen ivy seeds.

And, for a last vision, as I lay watching the starshine travelling across
the square of the window, I saw within it a picture, and heard again a
note of music, perhaps the most wonderful thing in the whole day’s idle
round. It was a keeper’s cottage at the entrance to a wood. On the
steep thatch, white pigeons hobbled amorously; and behind, in a green
bower of elder, a wild bird sang. I could see the bird; I knew it to be
a common song-thrush; but the song was the song of a nightingale—not the
loud, silver-toned warble that the poets love, but the low, slow,
sorrowful keening that always seems as if torn from the very heart of the
bird. And here is a pretty problem. If the nightingale were already
with us, singing in every brake, there would be nothing strange in the
thrush—prone as he is to imitation—borrowing a stanza from the new melody
here and there. But it is more than strange that he should do so at the
present time, seeing that, for eight or nine months back, there has been
no nightingale music in the land. Yet we, who are mute fowl, are all
thinking of April now, and what it has in store for us: can the thrush be
thinking of April too? And, as with us, can old memories of nightingales
be stirring in him?—in him that alone can sing his thoughts aloud?

[Picture: “The Rinders”]

APRIL

SUNDAY morning in Windlecombe, especially when the season is early April
and the weather fine, is, of all mornings, the one not to be spent
indoors.

To-day, until the church-bell had ceased its quiet tolling, and the last
belated worshipper had hurried up the street, I stood just within the
screen of box-hedge that divides my garden from the public way, so as not
to obtrude my old coat and pipe and week-day boots on those more
ecclesiastically minded. And then, bareheaded, hands thrust deep into
trouser-pockets, and pipe leaving a grey trail of smoke behind on the
tranquil air, I lounged out upon the green—deserted and still in the
sweet April sunshine—to study Windlecombe under one of its most inviting
aspects—its seventh-day spirit of earned sloth and unstrung, loitering
ease.

Though the old vicar has held his post here for nearly half a century,
and is better acquainted with the parish than almost any other, there is
just this one aspect of life in Windlecombe which must be to him for ever
a sealed book. When once he has got his little flock together for
morning service, with the church-door shut upon them, the village and all
its doings pass, for the time being, out of his ken. On wet Sundays, and
on the great church festivals, he knows that many accustomed corners—my
own included—will be as infallibly occupied as they are at other times
unvaryingly empty: and thereof he never makes either complaint or
question. He goes on his way, never doubting but there is some saving
good somewhere in the worst of us, and whole-heartedly loving us all;
while we, the black sheep, who would sacrifice for him our right hands,
our money, our very lives even, anything but our fine Sunday mornings, go
our ways too, satisfied—if there is meaning in looks—of his secret
sympathy. For there never was human man, whether lay or clerical, who,
of a fine Sunday morning, believed himself so nearly at one with his
Maker on his knees in a dusty pew, as abroad in the vast green church of
an English country-side.

I had gone no more than a dozen paces over the level, worn grass of the
green, when I stopped to look about me, knowing well what I should see.
Like rabbits coming out of their burrows after the gunner has passed on,
the non-churchgoing folk began to appear. I saw young Daniel Dray and
young Tom Clemmer go off with a bag of ferrets and their faithful
terriers at their heels. Dewie Artlett arrived at the well-head—the
traditional meeting-place for Windlecombe lovers—and stood waiting there
with a big nosegay of primroses in his hand and another in his cap. He
was joined a moment later by one of the girls from the farm, and off they
went together for a morning’s sweethearting in the lanes. At the far end
of the green, the inn-door came clattering open, and that genial
reprobate, the inn-keeper, appeared in his shirt-sleeves, blinking up at
the sky as though but lately out of his bed. Other doors here and there
were thrust back, each giving egress to some happy loiterer in his Sunday
best. Within five minutes, almost every garden-gate had a pair of brown
arms comfortably resting on it, and voices began to pass the time of day
to and fro in the whole sunny length of the street. By easy stages,
stopping for a word here and there by an open door, or a chat with some
old acquaintance sunning himself amidst his cabbages, I got to the foot
of the hill and so to the river. The ferryman sat in his boat, but as he
returned me for my greeting only a stare and a scarce-perceptible shake
of the head, I knew that our common enemy was in ambush close by. I made
off along the river-path, and turned into the woods.

There was a blackbird singing somewhere in the budding thicket, and I
managed to get quite close to his perch without being seen. To the songs
of birds like the thrush, the skylark, the robin, you may listen for five
minutes; and, beautiful as they are, in that short space of time you will
have learnt all that the song has to tell. But the blackbird’s song is
very different. It has an endless succession of changes in rhythm, power
and quality. You may listen to it for an hour, and never hear a phrase
repeated in its exact form. The difference between the blackbird’s song,
and that of nearly all other birds, is the difference between the singing
of a happy schoolgirl and that of a prima donna. While both have melody,
one alone has finished artistry. Until you have stayed in a wood with a
blackbird a whole sunny April morning through, and got from him the truth
of things as he alone can tell it, you do not really know that spring is
here.

Now, by the riverside copse, as I leaned on the old, lichen-gilded
timbers of the fence, listening to the pure, unhurried notes, the fact
that it was really April at last was suddenly borne in upon me. In the
daybreak and eventide choruses of birds, the thrushes, by dint of sheer
numbers and vehemence, easily overpower all other singers. Now and again
you can catch and isolate a matchless phrase of blackbird music; but to
hear the song in perfection, you must wait until the day is wearing on
towards noon, and he seeks solitude for his singing.

If bird-song is a language, then the blackbird must be the supreme orator
of the woods. Though you understand not a syllable of what he is pouring
forth, there is no doubt of its ever-varying meaning. In the midst of a
succession of quite simple phrases, each consisting of three or four
notes at the most, he suddenly gives you a passage whose melodious
complexity is almost bewildering. He constantly varies the pace of his
delivery. He embellishes his song with grace-notes—beautiful
silver-chiming triplets in the midst of his lowest, most leisurely
strains. There is emphasis, attack, a sort of blustering use of sheer
power of utterance; or he may run over a slow, quiet tune at his lightest
tongue-tip. At times, indeed, it is well-nigh impossible to believe that
you are not listening to two birds together, of totally different
qualities of voice, alternating their melodies.

How long I should have tarried there, furtively renewing this old
acquaintance, I know not; but it seems my cover was incomplete, and the
song came to its usual termination. It stopped short in the midst of one
of its brightest stanzas, and I knew my presence had been observed. The
blackbird made off. There was first the defiant, yet fearsome
cluck-cluck-cluck until he was clear of the bushes and free to fly, and
then away he went through the sunshine to the far bank of the river,
hurling over his shoulder as he went the usual mocking laughter-peal.

A week of April has gone by—a week of rain and shine, and the singing of
the south wind by day; and, at nights, an intense dark calm full of the
sound of purling brooks.

The river runs high. All the streams are swollen. The low-lying meadows
are half green grass overspread with a pink mist of lady’s-smock, and
half glittering pools of water that bring down the blue of the sky under
your feet as you go. You can never forget the rain for an instant. On
this page, as I sit writing at the open window, the morning sun was
streaming a minute ago: now a ragged grey rain-cloud has come tumbling
over the hills, and I cannot see across the green for the torrent. It is
by almost as quickly as I can set down the words; and now the sunbeams
are pouring in at the window again: the whole village lies before me
drenched and sparkling, the street one long river of blinding light.

Tom Artlett, going by early this morning to his work and spying me in the
garden, called out that he had heard the cuckoo twice already; and it may
well be so. The ringing note of the wryneck—the ‘cuckoo’s mate’—has been
sounding in the elm-tops all the morning through, and the cuckoo is
seldom far behind her messenger. Nightingale and swift, swallow and
martin, they are all on their way northward now, and any day may bring
them. But time spent at this season in looking forward to the things
that will be, is always time wasted. Every hour in early April has its
own new revelation, and common eyes and ears can do no more than mark the
things that are.

Yesterday, in a blink of sunny calm between the showers, I took my midday
walk through the hazel-woods. The young leaves already tempered the
sunlight to the primroses and anemones that covered the woodland floor,
giving all a greenish tinge. Though the whole wood was full of
primroses, it was only by the edges of the fields, where they grew in
full sunshine, that their rich yellow colour had any significance. Here
under the hazels this was so diluted and explained away by the white of
the anemones, and again by the leaf-filtered sunbeams from above, that
the primroses no longer seemed yellow. At a few yards distant, in the
dimmest spots, you could scarce tell one flower from another but for its
shape.

Wherever I went in the wood, the soft droning song of the bees went with
me. You could hardly put one foot before the other without dashing the
cup from the lip of one of these winged wanderers. But though the
anemones and primroses grew so thick, so inextricably mingled together,
the honey-bees kept to the one species of flower. They clambered in and
out of the star-like anemones, sometimes two and three at a blossom
together. But the primroses were always passed over, by hive-bee and
humble-bee alike. Here and there, I picked one of the sulphur blossoms,
and tearing it apart, made sure that there was nectar in plenty—its
presence was plain even to human eye. The truth was, of course, that the
sweets of the primrose were placed so far down the trumpet-tube of the
flower, that no bee had tongue long enough to gather them, even if they
were to her mind.

Yet though the bees might scorn the primrose for much the same reason as
the fox contemned the grapes in the fable, there was one creature
specially told off by Nature to do the necessary work of fertilisation.
Now and again in the general low murmur of voices about me, I could
distinguish an alien note. This came from a large fly, in a light-brown
fluffy jacket, with transparent wings fantastically scalloped in black.
He jerked himself to and fro in the air from one primrose to another,
hovering a moment over each before settling and thrusting a tongue of
amazing length down the yellow throttle of the flower. His name I have
never heard, but I know that, until recent times, he continued to
conceal, not only his means of livelihood, but his very existence from
the vigilance of naturalists: Darwin himself failed to identify this
primrose-sprite with his special mission in fertilising work.

It is strange how familiarity with the commonest natural objects may
exist side by side with a pitiful ignorance about them. I had gathered
primroses every spring for half a lifetime through before I realised that
I bore, not one, but two kinds of blossom in my hand. The discovery, I
remember, came with something like a shock of surprise. Yet there was no
blinking the fact: the wonder, indeed, was that in all the thousands I
had gathered, as boy and youth and man, the thing had never before
occurred to me. There was no difference in the sulphur-hued faces of the
flowers. But while the deep, central tube of some was closed with a
little whorl of pale buff feathers, in others this tube was open, and
there stood just within it a slender stem topped with a small green
globe—it seemed at first sight, then, that the sexual principle in the
primrose was divided, each plant bearing only male, or only female
flowers. But investigating farther, I found that this was not so. Each
flower was truly hermaphrodite, only in one the male feathery anthers
were uppermost, and in the other the green pistil of the female appeared
above.

Thirty years it took me to discover these simple, obvious facts about a
thing I had handled every spring since childhood: how many decades more,
I wonder, must pass ere I shall clear up the final mystery about them, a
matter now to me dark as ever—how, with the primrose alone, this came to
be so; and, above all, why?

III

If I tell the plain, honest truth about the day which has just ended, and
call it a day of adventure and excitement from its first grey gleam to
its tranquil golden close, I am not sure that there are many who will
understand me, save the one who shared it with me almost hour by hour.

For nothing really happened on this day, as the world estimates events.
Over an obscure Sussex village, a mid-April sun shone out of a cloudless
sky; certain migrant birds arrived in the neighbourhood; certain wild
flowers and insects were observed for the first time; there was nothing
more. No wandering stranger appeared in the street, to bring us all to
our doors; no big-gun practice was going on thirty miles away at
Portsmouth, outraging our blue sky with incongruous thunder; nor did even
the gilt arrow on the church-clock slip an hour at midday, as it often
does, and send us scurrying home to dinner before the time. To all save
two in Windlecombe, the day was just an ordinary working week-day; but,
to these, it was no less a day than the one on which the year comes
suddenly into its full young prime.

For me it began when the grey eastern sky took its first tint of morning
rose. There is no sweeter sound than the song of the house-martins, and
this it was that roused me now. In the darkness they had come, straight
to their old nesting-site under the eaves; and now they filled the room
with their quaint, voluble melody, and wove a mazy pattern against the
sky as they circled to and fro.

While I dressed, I watched them dipping and crying in the sunny air; and,
peering out through the window now and again, I could see them all along
under the eaves, clinging to the rough bricks of the wall, where they had
left their mud-houses last October. But of these none remained now. Not
to break down the martins’ nests in early spring, before the sparrows
begin to stuff them with grass, is to prepare for the little
black-and-white voyagers’ war instead of welcome. And they seem quite as
happy and content if, returning, they find nothing but a clay-mark on the
wall.

Later, by an hour at most, I had the Reverend by the arm, not so much to
guide, as to restrain him, for he went ever a little before me through
the meadow with the sure, swift stride of a mountain-goat. There was but
one thing that could betray his affliction to a close observer. While I
went blinking in the intolerable glory of the sunshine above us, and the
scarce lesser glory of the buttercups below, he strode onward, his calm
old face turned straight up to the sun, his blue eyes meeting it
unflinchingly from under their shaggy arches of white. He might be
Gabriel looking into the very focus of heaven, I thought, as I stole a
glance at him a little fearsomely. Indeed, I never quite limited his
vision to that of his poor, purblind, human eyes.

‘It will be down in the little birch-clump near the Conyers,’ he said.
‘That is where the first nightingale always comes. It will take us a
good five minutes, and why are you not talking to me? Come! do not keep
all the brave, beautiful things to yourself!’

How to tell him of all the things I saw in a single yard of meadow about
us! But I got to work with the will, if not the power.

‘We are walking,’ said I, ‘through buttercups a foot high; and almost
with every step we send a cloud of little blue-and-copper butterflies
chevying before us. Listen to the grasshoppers piping! The buttercups
make a sort of thick scum of gold as on the surface of a green lake.
Down below, like pebbles on the lake-bottom lie the daisies—their white
discs touch each other in all directions; nay, they overlap, they are
heaped upon one another. An insect might crawl over them from side to
side of the great meadow and never tread on anything but daisy-white.
And the dandelions! There are millions of them, I think, filling the air
with a perfume like choice old wine. And smell these, Reverend! Do you
know what they are?’

‘Cowslips! They must be in full bloom now: they were always fine
cowslips in this field. But you should pull them—never pick them. Then
you get all their beauty, the crimson at the base of the stem, and—
Hark!’

From the oak-clad hill-side to the northward, clear and slow on the
gentle air, came the cuckoo’s double chime. The old vicar faced about,
and took off his hat ceremoniously. I did the like. It was no
superstitious greeting of the bird on its first appearance. We were not
thinking even of the ancient Sussex legend—that an old witch goes to
Heathfield Fair every fourteenth day of April, with all the year’s
cuckoos in her bag, and there lets them fly. On our part, it was merely
a precautionary measure against a very ancient rustic pleasantry. Farmer
Coles of Windlecombe loved his joke, and that was Farmer Coles’s wood.
Though we had no real doubt that we were listening to our first cuckoo,
it was well to be on the safe side.

The path now left the full fair-way of the meadow, and meandered along by
the edge of the wood. I was bidden to go on with my chronicle.

‘The bluebells are out as thick as ever I saw them, Reverend. Under the
shadow of the trees they look like purple smoke stealing up the hillside;
and where a bar of sunshine pierces through, the colour seems to leap
into the dim air like a tongue of flame. How the rabbits play! Every
moment they break cover and dart across the open spaces, two or three
together. There goes a spotted woodpecker!—I saw his black-and-white
coat and crimson plume as he swung through the bar of light. They are
scarce here. Here comes something flitting along that I wish you could
see—you know how the orange-tip—’

‘The butterfly with his wings on fire? Don’t grizzle over me, man! I
_can_ see it!—lazily looping along, though you think he will fall to
earth a cinder any moment at your feet. He is like Nero fiddling, I
always think. There must be chervil growing close by.’

‘Yes, a great bank of it, and the butterfly has gone.’

‘Well: he is only settling there. Look how the mottled green and white
on the under side of his wings, now he has closed them, exactly match the
colours of the chervil. All his fire is quenched till you disturb him,
and then off he goes, burning himself up as unconcernedly as ever.’

We rounded the corner of the wood, and came upon a little open stretch of
heathland. The sulky sweet fragrance of the gorse so loaded the air as
to make one’s breath come hard. Over the gorse, linnets sang their
slender, tweeting melody. The blossom-laden bushes spread away before us
like great heaving waves of gold, flowing up to the hill-brow and over
out of sight. Where the crests of yellow bloom stood against the sky,
they made the sky a deeper blue. But between the gorse-brakes the
heather showed no sign. It crouched low upon the earth, looking black
and dreary and dead, as though a forest fire had lately swept by.

‘Dead!’ cried the Reverend scornfully. ‘Turn up a frond of it, and look
at the under side of the leaves. Each leaf is black above, but see how
green and sappy and full of life it really is, if you look at it aright.
One misses a lot in life by taking too lofty a standpoint. The heather
in April may be black to you, but it is green enough to the hiding mice.’

We went along in silence for a minute or two.

‘And what about the trees?’ he asked presently. ‘Is it death or life
there? The cuckoo never will wait for his green leaves, you know.’

‘Green leaves I see, but leafage nowhere. All the wood-top is chequered
into different clear zones of green, or grey, or russet, or soft sad
yellow—buds bursting and leaves just promising everywhere; but leaves, as
I want them, none. How slow it all is! I can understand the cuckoo’s
impatience. Flying all the way from Africa only to find—’

He had ceased to listen. He had turned swiftly towards the sun-bathed
meadows. He put up a thin hand—blue-veined, almost transparent—against
the light. He visibly started.

‘I heard the throb of a wing—a new sound. It must be—’

‘Yes, there it is! The first swallow! Wheeling and darting over the
buttercups yonder, like a bit of bright, blue-tempered steel!’

And as I uttered the words, there drifted out of the thorn-hedge hard by
us the note we had come to seek. All the ringing music of the woodland
seemed to grow mute at the sound. Wild and pure, with a force and a
lingering sweetness indescribable, the nightingale’s song poured out of
the thicket, dwelling upon the one silver, clarion note, moment after
moment, as though it would never cease. At my side two gaunt arms rose
tremblingly into the sunshine:

‘They are all here!’—the voice was husky, faltering—‘All! all! I have
heard them again, every one of them, the good God be praised! Though I
never hoped to— Yes, one by one, I bade them all a long farewell last
year!’

Down in the village, when I left it this morning, hardly a breath was
stirring under the warm April sun; but the wind is never still for more
than an hour or two, here on the top of Windle Hill. At first, there was
only a gentle wayward air out of the blue south-west. But already the
wind is freshening as the sun lifts; and, with the growing heat, it is
sure to strengthen. Midday may find half a gale singing in the long
grass-bents around me, the gold tassels of the cowslips lashing to and
fro in the grip of a madcap breeze.

To get the true spirit of the Sussex Downs, you must become a lover of
the wind, loving it in all its moods. There are rare moments, even on
Windle Hill, when the sun glows in a halcyon sky, and the blue air about
you lies as still and silent as a sheltered woodland mere. But this is
not true Downland weather. A calm day in the valleys may stand for
tranquillity, and be well enough; but here it savours rather of
stagnation. The very life of the Downs is in their flowing,
ever-changing atmosphere—the sweet pure current coming to you unwinnowed
over a visible course of twenty miles. When the wind is still, it is
good to keep to the lowlands, under their green canopies of whispering
leaves, within sound of their purling undertone of brooks; for the valley
has its own companionable voices of earth, even under silent skies. But
the Downs are as a strung harp, that will yield no music save to the
touch of the one gargantuan player. Their very essence of life is in the
careering air. You must learn to love the wind for its own sake, or you
will never come to be a true Sussex highlander—to know what the magic is
that brings Sussex men, meeting by chance in some far-off nook of the
world, to talk first of all of the Downs, when, in the stifling heat of a
tropic night, or by northern camp-fires, pipes are aglow, and tired
hearts wistfully homing.

Out of the blue south-west comes the gentle wind, bringing with it the
colour of the skies to every dell and shady woodland track in the
far-spreading vista. Violet-hued the lazy cloud-shadows creep over the
hills, or travel the lowland country to the south, dimming the green of
blunting corn and the rich brown of new tilth, with their own soft
scrumbling of azure. Where the village lies, far below at the foot of
the hill, the elm-tops seem full of green: but this is only the scale of
the bygone blossom. It will all fall to earth in tiny emerald discs,
each with its crimson centre, before the true abiding green of the leaf
appears. In the cottage gardens—looking, from the heights, like
patchwork in a quilt—the cherry-trees make snow-white wreaths and posies.
The lane that leads to the hill is flanked with ancient blackthorn hedges
whiter yet. Blackthorn and sloe, and bright festoons of marsh-marigold
weave a dwindling pattern over the low brook-country beyond, where the
grey-blue thread of Arun river winds in and out on its long journey
towards the sea. And, far beyond all, glistens the sea itself—one vivid
streak of blue, incredibly high in the heaven—a long broad band as though
made with a single sweep of a brush charged with pure sapphire, and
fretted here and there with a few scarce, dragging, crumbling touches of
gold.

Swallows go by overhead in the sun-steeped air chattering pleasantly.
Every bush and branch, it would seem, below in the combe, must have its
singer; for how else to account for such a bewildering, dim babel of
song? All the larks in the world, you think, must be congregated in the
blue region above the hill-top, and to be giving back to the sun a dozen
gay trills for every beam he squanders down. While there is daylight,
there will be this incessant lark-song, here on the green pinnacle of the
wind-washed hill. With the first light of dawn the merry round began: it
will hardly cease with the last red glimmer of the highland evening,
when, an hour before, the leaf-shrouded combe has grown silent in the
blackness of night. The stars will hear the last of it then, just as
they will hear again its earliest music before they are quenched by the
white of morrow. And if a drab, forbidding sky lowers over everything,
or the rain-clouds wrap the hills about with mist of water, still the
larks will sing. Nothing daunts the little grey highland minstrel. So
that there be light enough to guide him upward, he will soar and sing,
carrying his music indifferently up into the glory of this perfect April
morning, or the gloom of the winter torrent and whistling winter blast.

Human fret and worry have a habit of keeping to the lowlands, as all
lovers of the Downs know well. You cannot climb the hill-top, and bring
with you all the care that burdened your footsteps down in the dusty
shadow-locked vale. Somehow or other, every stride upward over the
springy turf seems to lighten the load; and once on the summit, you seem
to have lifted head and shoulders far above the strife. The hurrying
mountain freshet of a breeze singing in your ears, and the rippling
lark-music, have washed the heart clean of all but gladness; and you see
with awakened eyes. You have soared with the lark, and now must needs
sing with him. You cannot help looking over and onward, as he does, at
the brightness that is always pressing hard on the heels of human worry
and care.

It is the great wide expanses in Nature that have most effect on the
hearts and lives of men. The sea has its own intrinsic influence; but it
is too fraught with echoes of old wrath and unreasoning violence,
overpast yet still remembered, even in its quietest moods. You cannot
forget its grim levy on human lives, and the stout ships beaten to
splinters uselessly. The leviathan lies crooning, inert, under the hot
April noon, all lazy benevolent gentleness; yet you owe it many bitter
grudges rightfully, and see the silken treachery lurking deep down in its
placid depths. But the story of the Downs is one long tale of harmless
good. They have no record of strife and disaster. Their tale of the
ages is a whole philosophy of life without its terror:—Nature’s great
good gift to world-worn souls, the bringing of calm into human life, with
calm’s inherent far-seeing; reason working through worry towards hope and
trust for the best.

The blithe spring day wears on; the sun lifts higher and higher; and the
blue tree-shadows, that span the village down at the foot of the hill,
have shrunk to half their former length. With the ripe heat of midday,
the wind has freshened to a surging, roistering gale; but its rough touch
is full of kindly warmth and jollity. The cloud-shadows that, in the
serener mood of the morning, crept so stealthily over hill and dale, now
stride from peak to peak in a wild chevy-chase after the sunbeams;
leaping the valleys in their path, and filling them with rollicking grey
and gold. The sky, with its griddle of white cloud, has come strangely
near, and the Downs have risen suddenly to meet it. You seem buoyed up
on an ever-lifting tide of green hills, that rock and sway as the broad
bars of sun and shadow drive onward under the goad of the breeze. It is
all sheer exultation—the changing light, and the song of the gale, and
the lark’s unceasing challenge above you. Now, of all times, you must
learn how good a thing it is to be out and about on these Sussex
highlands, washed in the sun and the rain and the pure salt breath of the
sea.

MAY

SOMETIMES for days together, a whole week, perhaps, I may never set foot
outside the area of the village. These are generally times when the tide
of work runs high, and one must keep steadily pulling to make any real
headway against it. They are days, and nights too, of necessarily close
and constant application, varied, however, by odd half-hours of quiet
loafing hither and thither about the village—delicious moments pilfered
recklessly from the eternal grindstone of the study, to be remembered for
their pipes smoked and their talks with old acquaintance at street
corners, long after the labour which sweetened them has passed, maybe
fruitlessly, away.

So it has happened this last week, during which the season has journeyed
out of April into May. At one time or another in the chain of busy
hours, I have renewed acquaintance with all my favourite bits of old
Windlecombe, and the personalities from which they are inseparable.

Getting out into the sunshine, I usually find my steps turning, first of
all, towards the smithy. It stands just behind the Clemmers’ cottage,
its yawning black doorway wreathed about with elder branches full of
white blossom, and deep green spray reminding one of the foliage in old
paintings, which looks as if it were compounded of indigo and gamboge. I
never knew a smith who could beat out such ear-assuaging music from an
anvil as young Tom Clemmer. If you hear it in passing, you are bound to
turn aside, and stand for awhile looking in at the door, and fall
adreaming under the spell of its quiet melody. But standing out there,
with the sun across your eyes, you can see nothing at first save a
sputtering red spot of fire, and hear nothing but the chime of hammer and
anvil, to which the gruff, wheezy bellows add a sort of complaining
undertone. When you catch sight of young Tom Clemmer, it is to make him
out as one of great height, immensely broad in the shoulder and lean of
hip—a peg-top figure of a man. Through the smoke and flying sparks he
shows you a black face with a pair of grey eyes, deep-set, glittering,
mirthful, and a great head covered with crisp flaxen curls. He is of the
old South-Saxon blood through and through.

But at the wheelwright’s yard, a little farther along the green, you are
confronted with quite a different breed of Sussex peasant. The Drays are
thickset, of middle height; and dark, almost swarthy of feature. Up in
the churchyard, you come upon the two names at every step. You read
Clemmer, Dray, Dray and Clemmer, everywhere amidst the moss-grown stones,
in varying degrees of illegibility back for hundreds of years. The two
families are by far the oldest in Windlecombe. You note that the
Clemmers were nearly always Thomases, and the Drays for the most part
Daniels; while the females of both races were, and are still, either
Marthas or Janes. Looking over the ranks of this silent company, it is
impossible to think of any member of the former clan as other than
long-limbed, grey-eyed and fair; and a Dray, even though he were a serf
under Harold, who was not dark of glance and visage would be an anomaly
unthinkable. Young Daniel now—as you pass by and see him bending to and
fro over his cavern of a sawpit, with the red elm-dust spurting up
fountain-like in the sunshine between his gaitered legs—must be the very
counterpart of the Dray who, doubtless, fought at Hastings; or him of
older times who, daubed in blue war-paint, might have watched with wrath
and wonder from his seaside ambush the first Phoenician galley that came
adventuring after Cornish tin.

When it rains, though work and the house have for the nonce become alike
intolerable, I have several havens wherein I can be sure of finding just
that quiet anchorage that the moment needs. The little sweetstuff shop
is foremost among them. Over the long, low window, with its curious
lattice panes of bull’s-eye glass, there runs a legend, in one uniform
character and without stop or break:—‘BERLIN WOOLS TOYS SUSAN ANGEL ALL
KINDS OF SWEETS.’ And within at her fireside behind the little counter,
sits Miss Angel, always busily knitting, and always ready for a chat.

I reserve Miss Angel and her flute-like under-flow of small-talk, for
moments of placidity. But at unruly seasons of mind, I go to the
cobbler’s den, and getting my elbows upon the half-door, look in upon
him, often without spoken word on either side, for ten minutes at a
stretch. It is dark in there, with a penetrating smell of tanned leather
wonderfully soothing in certain states of the nerves. My own taciturnity
is real enough at these times; but that of the cobbler, a garrulous old
soul by nature, is usually forced upon him by circumstances. His mouth
seems to be permanently full of brass brads, which come automatically
through his closed lips one by one, and always miraculously head-first,
to be ready when his quick left hand needs them. With his right hand he
keeps up an incessant monotonous tattoo on the boot between his knees;
and to watch the shining brass pins flowing from his mouth into
symmetrical rows on the leather is pure balm for eyes tired of staring at
paper and ink. I know the cobbler means to talk directly he has finished
his mouthful. Now and again he looks up with premonitory gleams of
politics or ground-bait in his eye; or, worse still, with that slow
double-wink which I know presages a story ancient even in his
great-grandfather’s time. So I watch the flow of the brads, and when I
judge the supply to be nearly exhausted, I generally execute a stealthy
retreat.

The parlour of the Three Thatchers Inn is, I know of old, an unrivalled
place for the rejuvenation of a jaded faith in the reality of life, at
times of idleness and dismal weather. It is not the talk of the old
landlord behind his bar—talk at once serenely simple and shrewdly
worldly-wise; nor the unending volley of song from the three canaries,
each in its crinoline-like cage overhead; nor even the quality of the
liquor, that draws me to this cosy, sawdust-carpeted, crimson-curtained
nook. It is the furniture of the bar itself, all that stands upon its
shelves and hangs upon its old wainscoted walls, that attracts me at
these odd, unemployable moments—a collection of articles never to be got
together, I think, in less than four generations of like-minded men.

All the woodwork is of oak, planted, grown, and felled, no doubt, within
an arrow-flight of the village. On the walls of the parlour hang various
framed and coloured prints, disreputable by tradition, yet so embrowned
with varnish as to be long ago relegated into harmless indecipherability.
There is a picture of a bird of dubious species, from whose open beak
issue the words—‘_As a bird is known by his song, so is a man by his
conversation_.’ Opposite the door, where all entering must immediately
observe it, hangs another picture, this time of a dog lying upon its back
with all four legs rigidly pointing upwards, and a very long red tongue
lolling out of its mouth; and, underneath, the inscription—‘_Poor Trust
is dead_: _bad pay killed him_.’

Behind the bar, the walls are lined with shelves, backed up by scrolled
looking-glass, wherein all the treasures that crowd before it have their
blurred and distorted counterparts. On the uppermost shelves, hard
against the smoke-blackened ceiling, stand rows of pewter-pots, kept
scrupulously clean and bright, but never taken down for use within living
memory. Below these is a regiment of cut-glass bottles in different rich
colours, quaintly fluted, each with a gilt vine-leaf upon it; and between
the bottles stand inverted wine-glasses, every one upon a little mat of
gaudy wool, and balancing a lemon upon its upturned foot. Other shelves
are taken up with toby-jugs, curious old snuff-boxes and tobacco-jars,
row upon row of earthenware mugs, ringed with brown and blue, and stamped
with a mysterious ornament like black seaweed. There are three large
wooden kegs with brass taps, marked respectively with the letters—O.T.,
J.R., and C.B. The local pleasantry has it that these are needed to
store the special liquor of three devoted patrons of the inn. The
ferryman and Bleak the cobbler reject the insinuation with contumely; but
O.T., as I have the best of all reasons for knowing, regards it as a
compliment of subtle hue.

But perhaps the most fascinating item in the whole collection is a
certain ancient puzzle-mug of blue crockery-ware, with a suspiciously
heavy handle and an elaborately perforated lip. A stranger is invited to
drink from this, but, by reason of the open lattice-work all round the
rim, it appears an impossible feat. The trick, however, is easy to one
in the secret. The handle of the cup is hollow, and communicates with
the interior at its lowest extremity. By setting the mouth to a small
hole in the handle-top, the liquor can be slowly sucked through.

It being the day of the fortnightly market at Stavisham, and the weather
fair, Runridge and I took the little green punt from its moorings this
afternoon, and set out to explore the Long Back-Reach.

The Reach is just a winding side-alley of the river, overgrown with
willows and reeds—a mere crevice of glimmering water hiding itself in the
heart of the wood. Coming into it from the dazzling sunlight of the main
river, it strikes at first almost chill and gloomy, for all it is an
afternoon in May. But this is only an illusion that soon passes. After
a minute or two you get its quiet keynote; the green dusk becomes
deliciously tempered sunlight, the cool air something finer and more
delicate than the sun-scorched breath of the open river-way.

Runridge pulls a long clean stroke, and dips his oar-blades with a
perfect rhythm. He is silent company, as far as words go; but he has an
eloquence of look and gesture which more than takes the place of speech.
And there is something about his mute system of comradeship that
irresistibly impels itself on others. With his tanned, wrinkled face
sedately smiling under the brim of his battered old felt hat, and his
thoughtful eyes for ever roaming over the landscape, you feel that the
ordinary human method of conveying ideas by sounds is somehow out of
place in the little green wherry. Over and over again to-day, when a
scarce bird or uncommon flower showed itself on the river bank, and I
would direct his notice thither, I found myself insensibly adopting his
silent way of a waved hand or an inclination of the head, when, in other
company, my tongue would have been set agoing on the instant with less
sufficing words.

Out on the broad water-way the tide was still running up, but here in the
Long Back-Reach the drift of the current was hardly perceptible. The old
ferryman had laid by his oars, and now sat filling an ancient pipe with
tobacco that looked like chips of ebony. As for me, I lay back in the
boat, head pillowed on clasped hands, dimly recalling a dream I had had,
ages and ages back, of a world without green leaves or nightingales—a
weirdly impossible world of nipping frost and firesides, the sob of the
winter wind, and the dreary deluge of winter rain.

The reeds stood high on either hand: above, the old yellow reeds, with
their nodding mauve-grey plumes, and below, the fresh green growth,
wherein the reed-warblers would soon be building—a living emerald
thronging up amidst the old dead stems. Over the solid rampart of the
reeds the willows reached down, trailing their ferny branches in the
water. And beyond these, the great forest trees hemmed us in, oak and
elm and beech in two vast cliffs of verdure towering above us, and
interlocking their laden boughs against the far blue sky.

The little sugar-scoop of a boat drifted on. Everywhere about us the
martins were skimming over the clear water, chattering as they went. The
seeding willows sent down tiny flecks of white, that hovered and dwelt in
the dim air, like snow-flakes; and from the beeches overhead there was a
constant rain of light fine atoms, the discarded sheaths of the
leaf-buds, that fell upon the waters and gathered into all the little
nooks and bays among the reeds like pale, dun foam.

Somewhere far in the distance a cuckoo sang. Runridge took his pipe from
his mouth, and gave it a rocking motion. Never a word he said, but his
thought passed to me just as if he had spoken it: a see-saw melody it
was, and will be until the hay is down. There were willow-wrens singing
far above in the tree-tops. A chiff-chaff went looping by with his soft,
broken note. To count the nightingales that we heard as the boat stemmed
onward were almost to count the white-budded hawthorns that shone out
through every gap in the reeds. And now the old ferryman put out an oar,
and turned the little craft towards the bank, where a great willow-tree
drooped half across the stream. The boat-prow clove its way into the
heart of this leafy shelter, and we came to rest. The pipe went up
warningly. In the dense reed thicket hard by there was a new maytide
song.

Of all utterances of wild birds, perhaps none attains to a human-like
quality more nearly than that of the sedge-warbler. It is not so much a
song as a continuous complaint, and that of a characteristically feminine
kind. To me the little sedge-bird, restlessly flitting from stem to stem
through the waving jungle of reeds, and singing as she goes, inevitably
suggests a type of dutiful, laborious womanhood, all affection and
unselfishness, but ever ready alike with sharp words and an aggressive
tearfulness that disarms as completely as it maddens. And the sweetness,
the occasional sudden bright abandon of the song only serves to
strengthen the comparison. You can picture the bird stopping in the
midst of her most fretful, self-commiserate strain, bravely to estimate
her compensations. The sun shines, the nest is well-built and furnished,
the larder easy to be filled. Material good is unlacking; but— And then
the singer goes hopelessly under again. Now the song is nothing but
sweetly lachrymose expostulation, voiced grief all the more intolerable
for its tunefulness,—an epic of melodious woe.

Turning over in my mind this fantasy about the sedge-bird, as we lingered
under the willow bower, I found the old ferryman looking at me with a
strangely reminiscent eye. It flashed across me that long ago, when all
days were as good as market days to us, I had put before him just these
thoughts, and had received his silent, amused concurrence in them. Then
there had been no chance of inconvenient application; but now—I sat bolt
upright and looked closer at him. I was beaten at this talk of eyes. I
harked back to the old safe path with which I was familiar. He had
turned away now, and did not revert his glance though my hand was upon
his arm.

‘Why, why did you do it, Runridge?’ I blurted out, almost as forlornly as
the sedge-bird. ‘You never minded living alone! You were happy enough!
And I—I—’

He was looking at me straightly enough now.

‘Do it?’ His breath whistled in through his set teeth. ‘Do it—did ye
say? I do it?—never! ’A did it hersel’! Kind o’ mesmerised, I wur.
Never rightly knowed as ’twur done, till ’twur all ower. But there ’tis
i’ th’ book, an’ no gettin’ ower it now. Ah! well, well! purty near time
we was skorkin’ hoame-along, bean’t it? Gie tired women-folk a could
kettle for welcome, an’ ’tis trouble wi’out end.’

III

Whitsuntide has fallen early this year, and that seems to me always the
fittest thing. It should come, as it has come now, at the full fair tide
of the spring, when the apple-blossom, last ebullition of the year’s
youth, is at the zenith of its glory, and summer is still only a promise
yet to be fulfilled.

Whitsunday in Windlecombe, to all average folk, at least, excels in
importance every other day in the year, Christmas Day alone excepted.
There is neither man, woman, nor child in the parish, with the ability to
get to church, but arrives there somehow and sometime during the day.
For the old vicar, from his early communion service to the time he gives
the benediction at close of evensong, it is a day of ceaseless action and
exaltation. Every Whitsunday—when, in fulfilment of an ancient compact
between us, I go to the vicarage to share the last light of day with him
alone—I find him sitting in the little summer-house at the foot of the
garden, radiantly happy, yet tired as a navigator, and hoarse as a crow.
What befalls the curate at the end of this arduous day no one knows; for
he is never visible after the final service. But Miss Sweet is said to
pervade the neighbourhood of his lodging like an unquiet ghost far into
the twilight, waylaying his housekeeper with offers of night-socks and
eau-de-cologne.

On this fine Whitsunday morning I got to my corner in the grey old church
earlier than my wont, before, indeed, the bell began its measured
tolling. The school children were in their places in the south aisle, a
whispering, nudging crew. The curate flitted about the chancel in his
long black cassock like a bat disturbed from its dreams. The little
organist sat at her harmonium. No one else as yet had come to church.

It was good to sit thus in the cool and quiet before the service began,
letting the heart go back over all the other Whitsuntides I had spent in
Windlecombe, and letting the eye rove here and there through the hollow,
sun-barred twilight of the old place, comparing the garlands that
beautified it now with those that, in former years, had registered the
attained prosperity of the season. For though, wherever you looked, from
the window-ledges of the sanctuary to the multi-centred arch of the west
door, there were flowers and greenery in profusion, no garden blossom
shone amongst them. They were all wildflowers. Every child, most of the
women, and many of the men, who could spare an hour from work the day
before, had been busy in the woods and fields to make this House
Beautiful. The old vicar’s ambition was known to all—that in the church
to-day every wild Maytide blossom should have its place. I looked hither
and thither, but could think of none that was missing. The altar was
golden with cowslips, primroses, buttercups, every flower that bore the
colour of gold. Bluebells hid the old oak carving of the pulpit, and
with them others that were blue or purple, violet and veronica,
forget-me-not and pimpernel. On all the window-ledges, not to vie with
the richness of the painted glass, white flowers alone were
assembled—chervil and elder, daisies that are snow-white in the mass,
sprays of silver stitchwort, wreaths of hawthorn entwining all. The
chancel screen was hung with festoons of pink herb-robert and deadnettle;
and the steps beneath it flanked with those wild growths that bear
greenish flowers as well as green leaves—the woodspurge and the paler
green of arum and bryony. No colour was crowded unthinkingly upon
another. Each blossom held by its kinsfolk of a like complexion, and a
hundred forms and shades of verdure underflowed them all. Gladly I
marked that there were no roses anywhere, and this it was that gave the
day its special meaning. Last year I remembered how the wild dog-roses
lorded it over everything, making Whitsun a summer feast, which it never
should be. But this year we are weeks in front of the roses and the may
is scarce half-blown.

Now the bell commenced its slow rhythmic chime, and in the south porch,
where the surplices hung, the choir boys began to assemble. The west
door stood open, and, mingling with the songs of the birds and the joyous
note of the wind in the trees, footsteps sounded on the churchyard path.
At first they came singly, then in twos and threes. After awhile their
shuffling note became continuous, and the church began to fill on all
sides. I could no longer look about me, but must sit straight in my pew,
contenting myself with rare side glances. I heard the stump of old Tom
Clemmer’s crutches afar off in the street, heard it grow gradually louder
and nearer, until it ceased on the floor of the pew behind me, and
Clemmer set himself to subdue the hurricane of his breath. Mrs. Runridge
fluttered up the aisle, with the tall old ferryman so close behind her,
and his head so decorously lowered, that he seemed to be regaling himself
with the smell of the roses in her new bonnet as they went. Farmer Coles
and his retinue arrived, blocking the aisle for a full minute, until hot
and flurried Mrs. Coles, by much pointing and nudging, and a hubbub of
whispered directions, had succeeded in packing all her family into the
two great pews. With astonishing suddenness the erstwhile empty church
had become a crowded building. All Windlecombe was there, every woman or
girl in her new Whitsuntide bonnet and gay new cotton frock.

And now the bell stopped; a few late stragglers came hurrying up the
path, and into the rustling silence of the church with but
half-restrained momentum; a sonorous Amen came from the south porch; the
little harmonium uplifted its voice afar off in the chancel; the
white-robed choristers began to pour up the nave, singing as they went;
the curate followed, and last of all the old vicar, as upright as any,
with his sure, unfaltering stride. No stranger, seeing him keep the true
centre of the way, and pass unhesitatingly to his desk in the chancel,
would have dreamed that he walked in almost utter darkness; nor when he
faced about, and began the service with that deep-toned serene voice of
his, did any one of us believe it, though we had known him all our lives.
Not a word halted, not a word went awry. Only when the time for the
Bible lessons came did he give place to his helper; and even at these
times we were not always delivered over to the sad-voiced, diffident
curate. How much of the Bible he knew by heart not even he himself could
say; but often he would come down to the lectern, and with a face of
inspiration turned upon us, recite the whole lesson as though he who
wrote it ages back stood whispering at his side. Many a time, as he
ceased, and turned back to his chancel seat with unerring step, and every
man fetched his breath in the silence, I have marvelled at the force of
habit that, when all hearts were inwardly exclaiming, could hold us mute
of voice.

The same thought came to me when, a little later, he stood in the pulpit,
his deep tones rumbling in the rafters over our heads; and most of all it
pressed itself upon me when, at close of the long service, I beheld him
afar off in the radiant flower-garden of the sanctuary, a towering white
figure, with arm uplifted, nebulous, uncertain, in the multitudinous
lights. But, with the thought, came always a kind of fear, a sensation
that we were all living recklessly outside our defences, going our ways
like children sheltered, aided, and irresponsible:—what would happen to
Windlecombe, and to us all, when the strong arm failed and the voice no
longer guided? At these times my comfort was always in a word of Susan
Angel’s, spoken with a cheery, quiet conviction from behind her rows of
sweetstuff bottles and knick-knack trays. With her young, almost girlish
eyes shining out of her crabbed, ancient face, she pointed a
knitting-needle at me for emphasis.

‘Depend on ’t, my dear,’ said she, ‘’a wunt goo far, when th’ call comes.
Him as has christened, an’ married, ay! an’ buried well-nigh all i’ th’
place, an’ been more ’n a faather to us, what ’ud ’a be doin’ aloane up
there i’ the skies? Na, na! Man or sperit, ’a belongs to Windlecombe.
Here ’a’s treasure be, an’ here ’a’ll bide.’

I heard a weird, tom-toming somewhere in the village to-day, and going
forth, soon tracked the sound down to cobbler Bleak’s garden that lay at
the far end of the green.

The old man was ringing his bees. Through a gap in the hawthorn hedge, I
could see him standing under his apple-trees surrounded by the hives, and
beating on a saucepan with a door-key, while the air above was alive with
flashing wings, and resonant with the high shrill music of the swarm.
This was the first swarm of the season, although it was well on in May.
Most of the Windlecombe folk kept a few hives in some odd nook or other
of the garden, and these were nearly all of the ancient straw pattern.
He who could get the earliest swarm was accounted at once the luckiest
and most astute of beemen; and the old cobbler’s face glowed with pride
through its encircling fringe of ragged white hair and whisker, as he
pounded away with his key, never doubting for a moment that the noise
would soon induce the swarm to settle.

But the bees were in no hurry to end this one mad frolic of their
laborious lives. They rose higher and higher into the blue air and
sunshine, drifting to all parts of the compass in turn. They veered out
far over the roadway; swept back towards the cottage, hovering awhile
like a grey cloud over the chimney-tops; took an indecisive turn round
the next garden; reappeared in their old station above the orchard, as
little inclined as ever, apparently, to make a permanent halt. And all
the time their high tremulous music burdened the air, every dog in the
village barked, and every goose quacked its sympathy, and the old cobbler
beat steadily on his pan.

I got my elbows comfortably into the gap in the hedgerow, the better to
enjoy the scene. The garden was completely surrounded by the
hawthorn-hedge, a glowing wreath of white, against which shone masses of
blooming lilac and laburnum and red garden-may. The little cottage at
the back of the shop stood up to its window-sills in bright colour, every
old-fashioned flower crowding about it. The winding red-tiled paths ran
between borders of the same rich living hues. And beyond in the orchard,
splashed over with blue-grey shadows and quivering gold, as the sunshine
filtered through the leaves, were innumerable hives, old-fashioned skeps
of straw, each with its little chanting company of bees.

The old cobbler spied me in the hedgerow gap, and beckoned me to join
him. He was without hat or coat, and wore his leather apron. A
half-mended boot thrown down on the path showed how hastily he had been
summoned from work. As I came up, he managed somehow to extract from the
saucepan an exultant, almost jeering tune.

‘Ah, ha!’ cried he, blinking up at his whirligig property, ‘can ye show
th’ like o’ that ’n?—you as keeps bees in patent machines? Naun like
straw, there be; as I allers telled ye! These yere new-fangled
boxes!—ye’ll ha’ ne’er a swarm this side o’ Corp Christian, I’ll lay a
pot o’ six!’

It wanted still four or five days to the date of the great Roman festival
of Corpus Christi in Stavisham, which annually drew all village
sightseers from far and near. I reflected sadly, and rather
shamefacedly, that not only was a swarm from my modern, roomy frame-hives
little to be expected during that interval, but that it was the last
thing I had hitherto desired. Working at home among my trim, up-to-date
hives, with all the latest scientific methods in apiculture at my
finger-tips, it seemed a fine thing to possess bees that had almost
forgotten how to swarm, and that could bring me in a double or treble
harvest of honey. But here in the beautiful old bee-garden, I began
dimly to perceive another side to the argument. Whether courage or
ignorance had led him to resist the tide of progress in beekeeping that
has all but engulfed this gentlest, most picturesque of village crafts,
the old cobbler might be right after all. My honey was better and more
abundant than his; but it might well be dear at the price.

The swarm was coming lower now, and the wildly flying bees closing their
ranks. Above our heads the air grew dark with them. It was plain that
they would soon be settling. Of a sudden the clanging key-music ceased.
Bleak pointed triumphantly to a bough in a tree hard by. A little knot
of bees had fastened there, no bigger than a clenched fist. But as I
looked it doubled its size with every moment. From all the regions of
sunny air above us the bees thronged towards the cluster. In a short
five minutes hardly one remained on the wing; and in place of the wild
trek-song, a dull, uncanny silence held the air. From the drooping
apple-bough the whole multitude hung together in a dark brown mass,
looking strangely like a huge cigar, as it swayed idly to and fro in the
gentle breeze.

And now the old cobbler went about the work of hiving the swarm in the
old way, punctiliously observing all the traditional rites of the craft.
A jar of ale was brought out, from which we must both drink, to sweeten
our breath for the coming ceremony. Then, having washed his hands, Bleak
set about the dressing of the hive. It was a new skep, one of many he
had himself made during the long winter evenings bygone. He gathered
first a handful of mint and balm and lavender, and with this he carefully
scrubbed out the skep. Then he made a syrup of brown sugar and beer,
wherewith he gave the hive a second thorough dressing. Finally, having
cut two or three leafy boughs of elder, he took the skep with its
baseboard under his arm, and approached the swarm on tiptoe and with
bated breath.

The bees hung in the sunshine, as silent, as inert as ever; except that a
dozen or so were hovering about the cluster, humming a drowsy song. The
note contrasted oddly with the wild merry music of the flying swarm, when
all had seemed mad with excitement, as though they were setting forth on
some fierce neck-or-nothing adventure, instead of the rather tame
business in which they were at present absorbed.

The old beeman stepped warily towards them, and holding the skep mouth
upwards beneath the cluster, gave the branch a vigorous shake. Like so
many blackcurrants, the entire mass of bees rattled down into the hive,
when the baseboard was swiftly clapped over them, and the whole inverted
and placed upon the ground. Waiting a minute or two, the old man then
gently raised one edge of the skep, and propped it up with a stone. A
few hundred bees came tumbling out with a sound like the boiling-over of
a cauldron; but the greater part of the swarm remained within the hive.
Before half an hour had passed, they had completely accepted the
situation, and the worker-bees were lancing busily off in all directions
in search of provender for the new home.

The old cobbler’s prediction that I should have no swarm by Corpus
Christi, fell true enough. Every day I watched until the hours for
swarming had passed by eventlessly. And then, on the great Stavisham
feast-day, in the sunny calm of afternoon, I followed the straggling line
of sightseers by the river-way to the town.

A hush is over the little precipitous market-town. The hot May sun beats
down on the waiting lines of people, on the fragrant linden-trees shading
the quiet street, on the fluttering banners and pennants everywhere.

The air is full of dim sound; wild drift of far-off bell-music, the deep
hum and stir of the expectant people, the voice of the wind, sweet and
low, in the green lime labyrinth overhead. Every glance is turned up the
street, where the church of Saint Francis of Assisi lifts its bluff
sandstone tower against the blue. The great west door stands open.
Straining the eye, the nearest watchers can just make out a glint of
altar lights through the cavernous dark within—the rich uncertain glow of
candles given back from a thousand gleaming points of silver chalice and
golden cross and glittering filigree.

And now the last rumbling harmony of the organ dies away. For a moment a
deeper silence than ever fills the Gothic gloom. Then the thin fine note
of a clarinet lifts up its trembling signal in the darkness. The brazen
trombones join in with their passionate, deep-voiced music. The lights
begin to move and dance, growing nearer and stronger. ‘They are
coming!’—to the remotest end of the waiting line the whisper spreads.

Slowly the procession winds its way through the great church door, and
down the precipitous street. First the gilded, jewel-encumbered cross,
borne aloft by a young priest in a black cassock and snowy, deep-laced
surplice. Then the singing multitude of schoolgirls, all in white, with
wreath-crowned veils like so many Lilliputian brides. Now the boys from
the convent seminary in crimson shoulder-sashes, with their fussing
marshals; and the elder women after, in their doleful, decorous black.
Banners swaying; rainbow streamers flying; the shrill child-voices blent
with the sound of the wind in the glad green leaves overhead.

Now the trumpets and clarinets have turned the bend of the street. The
singing gives way to deeper music. More banners come flinging and
flaunting into the sunny vista. The gay procession takes on a darker
tinge. Sisters in black, sisters in brown, sisters in grey; weary faces,
sad faces, comely faces; winter and glowing spring and ripe calm autumn,
all in the same cold livery of sorrow, all with the like abandonment to
destiny so plainly fettering the innate unrule of will.

The musicians pass on: the deep blurring melody fades: the pageant
changes.

Monks and friars now. An old Capuchin father totters by in his rough
brown frock, carrying a candle on a brazen stick. After him a score of
his own degree, all bearing lights that glimmer and blink superfluously
in the sunshine, and all chanting a long slow antiphon in a minor key.
Old men reeking of the cloister, bent nearly double with their weight of
years; sturdy young friars, ruddy-jowled, tonsured, with only half an eye
to their book; suave-faced, grey-headed superiors, eyes in the sky, calm,
transfigured, the vanquished world behind every man’s broad back.

And now a weird, dirge-like note creeps down the sun-bathed street, and a
murmur follows it through the craning, nudging crowd. The end, the
crown, of the pageant is suddenly in view. It is all shining celestial
white now, as the choristers sweep slowly by in their spotless lawn and
lace, chanting their pseudo-requiem as they move. Behind them a bevy of
major priests, of comfortable figure, gorgeously caparisoned. Little
scarlet-robed acolytes walking backwards and strewing the way with
rich-hued flowers; swinging censers vouchsafing their hallow of dim smoke
upon the common air. And then at last—under the great square
baldacchino—the old Roman bishop himself, holding aloft the precious
monstrance, like a glittering captive star.

A vision now of billowing white and gold; and the low, sad chant
swelling, falling; and the languorous fragrance of the incense and the
trampled flowers. Wrapped to the eyes in his heavy, gilt-encrusted cope,
the old priest grasps his cherished burden with all the little might of
his trembling blue-veined hands. His eyes are on the gold-rayed
treasure-casket, held but an inch or two beyond his flushed, illuminated
face. A trance-like stupor seems to be upon him as he moves, guided on
either side by those other two, almost as splendidly robed as himself,
who keep a grip on the fringe of his silken coat, and lead him onward in
his passionate ecstasy, treading thin air, enrapt, magnificent with
other-worldly light.

It is over now. The great canopy has moved on, its bearers keeping
ceremonious step and step. More richly accoutred priests follow in a
holy rear-guard. Then the crowd closes up eagerly behind, and surges
after them, bare-headed, jostling together; catching now and again a
phrase of the mournful melody, and giving it an echo that sobs away into
silence far in the sunny length of the street.

As I stand apart, here in the deep shadow of the convent wall, the
thronging multitude sweeps by, growing thinner with every moment. The
gleaming star of the monstrance sends back a last clear flash of sunlight
as it turns the distant foot of the hill. Soon the straggling human
fringe of the procession vanishes after it. A debris of blossom litters
the long deserted way. Flags and streamers wave their bright hues over
the dusty solitude. The street is forsaken, quiet again; save for the
bells in the upper air, and the wind in the trees.

JUNE

THIS morning, for the first time in the year, I found myself
unconsciously taking the shady side of the way. It was a small thing,
truly; but it stood as an index of something great, perhaps the most
portentous thing that happens annually in the life of him who is a
countryman at heart and not merely by name. Summer had come in. It was
not only that the calendar told me the month was June. I felt it in the
sunbeams, saw it in the hedgerows and trees, read it in the pure azure of
the summer sky. I took the shady side of the lane unthinkingly, and
laughed because I did it;—not that I laughed for that alone, but because
gladness was welling up within me unbidden, irresistible: I laughed for
the same reason that the nightingale sang in the green brier-thicket hard
by.

I stopped to listen to the song. It was June, and the nightingales would
not be singing much longer. Perhaps in a week’s time, at the worst,
their music would be done. I silenced my footfall in the long grass by
the wayside, and crept up close to the nightingale’s bower.

Every year a nightingale came to this brier-bush, and sang there as she
was singing now. The hedge was a very old one, lifting its dense green
barrier ten feet or more against the sunny southern sky; and, in all the
years I could recall, the brier-bush had never been without its
nightingale. This one must have her nest close by, where all her
ancestors must have built their nests, for how many generations back, who
can say? The life of this old hedge, towering far above me, and nearly
as broad as it was high, could not be compassed by a man’s life. It was
thick and tall when the oldest in the village was but a child. At long
irregular intervals of years it had been trimmed, cut back; but the
growth of the gnarled old stems, where they sprang from the ground, had
not been checked. There its age stood recorded; and it would be little
wide of the truth to think of it as already thick and tall, already the
traditional singing-place of this race of nightingales, a full hundred
years ago.

The brier-bush stood on the shady side of the way. The nightingale had
her perch in the sunshine beyond, so that the song filtered down to me
through the tangle of intervening leaves. And yet it was not so much a
song as a detached, occasional reverie on the summer’s morning. There is
always this about the music of the summer migrant birds. They are
creatures of eternal sunshine. Their life is no give-and-take of good
and evil, like that of the birds who stay with us all the year through.
They have no need to hearten themselves with memories of bygone sunbeams,
to bring brightness from within when all without is lowering and grey.
Wisely following the sun about the world from season to season, they
ensure for themselves that the joy they sing of is never a memory, but
always the expression of the moment’s living fact: they have but to turn
the vision, the aspect of the hour, into its equivalent of music.

More than all, you see this truth exemplified in the songs of chaffinch
and willow-wren, which are so much alike in form, yet so strangely
different in the spirit. The hardy chaffinch began his bubbling,
rollicking song with the first warm day in March, and it was more than
half a fiction: to-day it has the same hard, set quality, like a
petrified laugh in the woods. But the little willow-wren is the slave of
no long habit of pretences. She has followed the sun from the south,
keeping up with his youth; and now, from the glowing wood-top, she sends
down her slender echo of chaffinch music, as if, though she would fain be
silent, she must sing for very joy of the light. There is in it all the
verve and gaiety of the chaffinch, yet infinitely softened and
etherealised. And the long bowling phrase is never finished: it falls
away and fails in the end, as if the singer suddenly realised her
impotence to convey in melody one fraction of the morning’s loveliness
and light.

Invisible through the dense tangle of the brier-bush, to me a voice and
nothing more, the nightingale sat in her nook on the sunny side of the
hedgerow, pouring out her song on the already song-burdened morning as a
gilder lays gold upon gold. All its sweetness, its wild purity, its
slow, sorrowful strength, and its sudden overtripping, overmastering joy,
drifted out upon the sunshine of the meadow, the varied phrases coming
turn and turn about with long intervening silences, as though the singer
ruminated on all the beauty before her, and unconsciously sang her
thoughts aloud. It was good to stand there in the cool shade, and
listen, and take the facts of the thronging meadow life and colour beyond
the hedgerow at such tuneful second-hand. But at length the nightingale
put such a call, such an insistence into her music, as sent me to the
meadow-gate a little way down the lane, just to see with my own eyes what
manner of beauty could be to her so great an inspiration. Shading my
eyes with my hands, I looked out over the mowing-grass, and thanked God
it was June.

Knee-deep, almost, the grass stood under the morning sun; intensely green
below, and above, white with the white of countless marguerites; and,
higher still, rich rose-red with myriads of tremulous sorrel-plumes. A
little way over the meadow, the green of the grass-blades was lost, and
the eye saw only the white of the great moon-daisies, and the sorrel-red.
Farther still, these two merged into one surface of formless pink, upon
which the breath of the slow western air drew a rippling pattern like
watered silk.

I passed through the gate, and waded into the grass to the farthest limit
of the oak-shadow. All round the meadow these shadows lay upon the
mowing-grass, blue and cool in the universal glare. It mattered nothing
which way the sunshine fell. The green oak-boughs stretched out so far
and so low that there was shadow beneath them everywhere. Just where I
stood there was a patch of poor and stony soil. The tall-growing plants
had shunned it, leaving it a little haven where the unconsidered trifles
could see sunshine and flourish in their little might. Faced with the
rich bewilderment of summer growth, a spot like this offers irresistible
attraction. To look for long on great magnificence unwearied is a power
not given to all. I know with what relief and pleasure, in other times,
I have turned my back on snow-pinnacled mountains and soothed dazed eyes
with a spot of grey-green lichen on a common stone. And now I turned
from the boundless meadow radiance before me as from glory intolerable,
and knelt to look awhile at the tiny, creviced beauties that lay among
the clods.

There were scarlet pimpernel and lily-bind, gold-eyed cinquefoil and blue
veronica—a score of nameless atoms starring the drab bare soil. Stooping
lower, I noticed what I had never marked before—how the red of the
pimpernel was centred with a crimson heart; crimson and scarlet—the
military colours that I had always thought execrable, because unnaturally
blended—here they were brought together, justified by the infallible
artistry of the sun. The veronica seemed all pure cobalt blue as I stood
gazing down upon it; but, looked at closely, each minute flower revealed
a complication of colour. The blue of its petals was not a simple tint
throughout, but was striped with a darker blue down in the cup. From its
centre of sulphur-yellow three spires uprose, the one rich purple, the
other two of a pale mauve. And, as if this were not enough beauty for so
small a thing, the slender stalk upon which each blossom trembled was a
shaft of delicate, translucent crimson, feathered over with white.

The cinquefoil was just as minutely wonderful in its way. Studded with
little flat golden blossoms, its ferny growth mingled everywhere with the
other rich-hued things, but it held itself aloof from them all. Even
under the full noontide sun it preserved its chilly, star-like quality.
Its pale silvery fronds seemed to quench the very sunbeams as they fell,
and to make a cold spot on the earth in the midst of all the glowing
soaring meadow-colour, like frost in fire. Many a time, in former years,
I had looked at the cinquefoil thus, and marvelled at the ice-cold virtue
of a thing that could so repel the fierce Tarquin of a summer sun.
Nursing the fancy, I would grant it nothing at length but a senseless
chastity done up in silver paper; as zealously guarded as little worth.
But now I took the pains to pluck a few of its flowers, and discovered
something new about it, something that raised its value to me a
hundredfold. In all the meadow there was scarce another blossom with so
sweet a scent; it was like the may, but at once more poignant and
delicate. And, thinking of the may, I straightway forgot all about the
cinquefoil, and turned to wander along the hedge.

The time had gone by when the hawthorn overran all the country-side with
its billows of white blossom. These blinding masses of white—snow-white
and cold as snow—are wonderful to look upon for a moment or two; but to
me the hawthorn is always more lovely at the beginning, and, most of all,
towards the end of its flowering life. At neither of these times is it
really white. The new-opened blossom of the may is full of pink anthers
that, in the aggregate, colour the whole bush. At this hour, for it is
no more than an hour, the hawthorn-hedge is besieged by hordes of
honey-sippers; hive-bees for the most part, but also every insect that
can fly. Each flower keeps its rosy blush only so long as it remains
unfertilised; and then colour and song forsake it together. The
full-blown hedges of hawthorn have nothing for the ear, as they have
little abiding solace to the eye.

But now again, as I roved along the narrow green way between the hedgerow
and the tall grass of the meadow, the may, as of old, was beautiful to
look upon. The pink anthers were dead, brown, shrivelled in their
drained chalices; but the petals themselves, as they faded, had taken
upon themselves a rich flush—the hectic of decay. Everywhere the
hedgerow was wreathed and posied with this soft tint, the colour of
old-rose. It was the colour of death, and that was often gay and bright
enough, I knew. It seemed an ill thing wherein to delight on such a
brave June morning. But the truth stuck fast in the mind, for all that:
these festoons of dying may were nearly as beautiful as the best that
youth and life could show.

Nearly—yet as I wandered on, creeping from bay to bay of green shadow,
and edging round the great jutting promontories of hedgerow-growth, I
came at once upon a sight and a sound that brought me to a more wondering
halt than ever. It was my brier-bush again, and the nightingale was
still singing, as I had heard her from the lane an hour ago. But now I
no longer stood outside her concert-hall. I was here with her on the
meadow side of her bower, and understood at last the full import of her
singing. While on the shaded northern flank of the hedge there was
nothing but greenery, here, on the sunny side, the brier-sprays were
putting forth antlered buds, and one of them, close to my hand, had
opened into the perfect flower. It was the first wild rose. If I had
been Rip van Winkle, there and then waking from an age-long sleep, I
should have known the day of the month, almost the very hour. Rarely,
six days of June may pass in southern England, but never a seventh,
without this master-sign of summer. Though storm and chill hold back the
music of the migrant birds, they cannot daunt the English roses.

A stranger observant of trifles, coming into Windlecombe any time during
early summer, might note one common feature of the place, not remarkable
at other seasons. All the garden-gates were kept carefully closed; and
all houses abutting on the street had their doors either shut altogether,
or replaced by low boards or fence-bars. Even the gate of the
churchyard, open day and night at other times, was now closed as
heedfully as any; and, more curious still, the entrance to the inn, where
there were no children to come wandering out and none dare intrude, was
as cautiously barriered as the rest.

Plainly these obstructions were not set up against absconding babies, for
the tiniest of them was invariably out-of-doors playing in the dust of
the street. And yet there was no other visible explanation of the
phenomenon. It was a puzzle of a mildly interesting kind, giving just
that gentle spur needed by the tired brain of a citizen holiday-maker,
escaped into villagedom for awhile, and lolling there, genially, yet
rather contemptuously, agape at the silence and sloth of country things.

But if tide and weather served, any moment of the day might bring the
desired solution of the mystery. From afar over the hills, a deep low
clamour would begin to invade the songful village quiet. Then, on the
crest of the nearest hilltop, a column of white dust would suddenly spurt
up against the blue, and spread slowly downwards, marking the winding
course of the lane as with smoke from a travelling fire. Now by degrees
the tumult would grow louder and deeper, revealing itself at last as the
hoarse medley of voices from a flock of sheep; a flock so vast that,
while the first ewes were already charging into the village, the last
ones had not yet breasted the top of the hill.

There would be no doubt now of the wisdom of the gate-shutting policy.
Any of these that by chance had remained open, would be hastily clapped
to; and all about him the stranger would see the children scramble into
corners, and mount upon doorsteps out of the way of the tornading host.
He himself, indeed, would be glad to take shelter in the nearest doorway,
where he could look on at a spectacle, stirring even to a nature dulled
by the din of a town.

Now the hoarse note has swelled to a veritable hurricane of sound. The
whole village bids fair to be submerged and swept away by an avalanche of
wool. In the forefront marches a shepherd-boy, straw knapsack on back
and blue cotton umbrella under arm. Behind him the street is packed with
the jostling, vociferating crowd of sheep, a solid mass of woolly life
extending as far as eye can penetrate the cloud of dust. At intervals in
the throng walk the under shepherds, each with his dog, all—dogs and
men—adding their voices to the general uproar. And at the end of the
procession, when at length it has stormed its way past, comes the
master-shepherd, a figure shadowy, indistinct in the dust-laden air;
nothing certain about him but the glint of the sun on his crook, and his
easy, hearty replies to the shouted greetings of old acquaintance by the
way.

Every day in June, while the tides last, and there is water enough in the
river for the work of sheep-washing, these great flocks pour through
Windlecombe, some of them coming from lonely farmsteads miles away over
the Downs. Today it was the Ambledown wash, one of the largest of the
year; and when the sheep had gone through, and the dust had cleared from
the sunshine, I set off myself, in oldest garb and thickest boots, to
join the string of onlookers drifting from all parts of the village
towards the washing-creek. But on these sheep-wash days, there is much
more to do than look on at one of the most fascinating and exhilarating
sights in all the round of farm work. A helping hand from every man used
to the task is alike expected and freely given as a point of honour at
these times. Each of us has his favourite wash, in which, as a matter of
old custom, he takes his share of the heat and burden of the day; and to
me, when Ambledown’s turn comes round, is given, now by old-established
and hard-won right, the long crook by the plunge.

As life journeys on, we tend to make ever less and less of our rare
moments of swelling pride and self-satisfaction, or even to abrogate them
altogether. But on this one day of the year, when I exchange a less
noble tool for the long crook at Ambledown sheep-wash, and feel the cares
of my office gathering upon me, I go back nearer to the child’s pure joy
in a paper cocked-hat and tin epaulettes than at any other moment of my
life. If you have never stood wide-legged, like a ship-captain in a
gale, on a rickety hurdle six feet above a chaos of swirling, glittering
water, crowded with the bobbing heads of sheep, your charge being not
only to keep each ewe swimming down the wash to the tubmen, but to
sustain a constant watch on the weaklings and prevent them drowning—you
have never known responsibility’s true zest. Picture to yourself an old
chalk-quarry on the river’s brink, long disused and abandoned to every
form of wild life—a shy, green place overgrown with brier and bramble,
merged at all other times of the year in eternal quiet, but now the scene
of brisk activity, crowded with busy folk and innumerable sheep, and
echoing with voices and laughter. The washing-creek is a sort of bay of
the river, a long strip of water caged in by lofty fences, topped by a
platform of hurdles, whence the crookmen manœuvre the struggling, gasping
sheep in the water below. At one end of the creek is the plunge, where
the sheep are thrown in; midway down the wash two tubs are sunk to within
a foot of the water’s level, wherein stand the washers; and at the far
end appears a gradually rising slope up which the dripping, water-logged
ewes struggle inch by inch towards safety and the green feed awaiting
them beyond.

It is nearing the top of the tide, but the work has not begun yet, nor
will it begin until the flock has rested and cooled from its long journey
over the Downs. As I come down the zigzag path into the chalk-quarry,
the place seems almost as shy and still as ever. There is the multitude
of sheep, a thousand or more, quietly nibbling in the great pen. The
shepherds, the washing-gang, the little crowd of onlookers, are lounging
on the green river-bank, chatting idly together as if there were no more
weighty business in hand than to enjoy the summer morning. The dogs are
mostly asleep on their chains. Only the old captain of the wash is
astir. He roves about, here tightening up a girth in his tackle, and
there straightening a crooked hurdle; and every minute or two he goes and
looks over the plunge, measuring the depth of water with his eye. At
last he gives the signal, every man goes to his post, and the silence of
the old quarry breaks as with the crash of a sudden storm.

For it is nearly impossible to convey a real idea of the hubbub and
turmoil of the scene under any less decided simile. From the moment the
first sheep is thrown in, until the last terrified, bedraggled ewe
staggers up the slippery incline at the other end of the creek, there is
one long, unceasing babel of sound. Often a score of sheep are in the
water at the same time, each one rending the air with her piteous
calling. Those that have passed through the ordeal crowd together on the
bank above, still lifting to the skies their mingled note of indignation
and alarm; and those as yet dry in the great pen anticipate their
sufferings with a like deafening tumult. The yapping chorus of the dogs
punctuates the entire symphony; and every man engaged in the work joins
in a general running fire of comment and mutual encouragement, although
hardly any sound less forceful than the bellow of a bull can be heard
above the din.

Not the least onerous and responsible part in a great sheep-wash is the
element of danger to the sheep—the risk of drowning always present when a
large number have to be put through the creek at a swinging pace. The
head shepherd, and often the flock-master himself, stands at the plunge
and keeps a vigilant eye on the whole proceedings. Yet, even with the
greatest care, sheep are sometimes drowned. It is a lucky day, for
washers and shepherds alike, if the flock gets back to the farm without a
single casualty.

[Picture: “The Sheepwash”]

But there is a humorous as well as a tragic side to sheep-washing. The
continual splashing of the water soon drenches all the approaches to the
creek, making them as slippery as ice. The platform of hurdles running
the whole length of the wash is a particularly hazardous place from which
to look on at the fun; and many a spectator, venturing too near, has
received an impromptu ducking. This is an accident to which the
throwers-in, as well as all the crook-men, are specially liable; and the
day is hardly complete unless some one has succeeded in dipping himself
as well as the sheep. The time-honoured joke then is to force him down
the creek with his woolly companions in misfortune, and send him under
the bar with all the rest.

III

For days past now the rain has been steadily falling, hour after hour,
from dark to dark. Rain and wind together are always disconcerting, and
often melancholy in the last degree; but still, soft summer rain like
this, not heavy enough to obscure an outlook, yet sufficient to serve as
an excuse for stopping indoors, has all sorts of commendable qualities.
Much of the time, both in daylight and darkness, I have spent lolling out
of a little dormer-window high up in the roof of this old house, and I
have got to know many small things about life and work in Windlecombe
that I have never known before.

It would seem that the cat and I are almost the only able-bodied
creatures, feathered, four-footed, or human, that are not out and about
in the rain, and I alone because the indoor mood happens to possess me.
If I shed that craze before the weeping weather is done, I may be
squelching about with the rest all day long in the sodden lanes; or
slithering joyfully over the green turf of the Downs miles away, barefoot
and bareheaded, absent-mindedly whistling the first halves of innumerable
tunes as I go. But of that in its season. The cat and I are of a mind
now. The comforts of a dry coat appeal to each of us for the moment
irresistibly; and we lean out over the window-sill no farther than will
afford me a view of the village doings, and her an eye-feast on the
martins chattering about the roof-eaves below.

* * * * *

I saw Farmer Coles go by in his gig to-day, and heard him call out to his
bailiff on the footway, ‘If ’tis fine, George, i’ th’ marnin’, get all
th’ tackle down to th’ Hoe-field, an’ make a start first thing.’ The
word brought my heart into my mouth. The Hoe-field is the field where
the first wild rose opened to the spell of the nightingale’s music; and
it meant that haying-time had come round at last. To-morrow there might
be a new sound in Windlecombe, the high ringing note of the
mowing-machines; and I knew then there would be no hour of daylight free
from it, until the last meadow lay shorn and desolate under the summer
sun.

In modern village life, the lot of the sentimentalist is no easy one,
especially if he love his neighbour. Though he may secretly repine for
the old days, when the grass came down to the rhythmic song of the
scythe, and the corn to the tune of the sickle, he cannot blink the fact
that, in farm life, prosperity and machinery go hand-in-hand together.
The true, indeed the only, way for him now is to realise that not all the
beauty of country things belongs to old times, and not all the hard, ugly
utilitarianism of nowadays has come in with machinery. Honestly
considered, there is no mechanical farm-implement of to-day essentially
at variance with the spirit of beauty. A threshing-mill or a
reaper-and-binder owes its form and parts to the same designer that made
the sickle. The lines of a sailing-ship are unvaryingly lines of grace,
because they are dictated by wind and water. And the unchanging needs of
earth that made sickle, scythe, and ploughshare what they are, are as
unchanging and imperious as ever.

It was hard to conceive the nightingale’s song without the loveliness of
the mowing-grass—the green dragon-flies cruising over its sea of blossom,
the shadows of the swallows’ wings upon it, and the grumbling bees like
pearl-divers at fault down in its emerald depths. But now, listening to
the songs of the birds in the village gardens round about, songs that
seemed all the more joyous for the grey light and the unceasing patter of
the rain, the truth fell cold upon me that the nightingale’s was no
longer among them. But a few days past, she was keening as sorrowfully
as ever. In the one glimpse of soused moonshine last night I had thought
to hear her plaint far down by the river; but I could not be sure of it,
and the sound had not returned. Maybe her song is done at last, and I
could wish it so, now that the grass is to fall.

With a little neck-craning, I can contrive a view of the Reverend’s
garden, or as much of it as is discernible through the crowding trees.
On the smooth fair lawn I can see his white doves strutting, but they are
there alone to-day. Generally, when I look forth, there is the gaunt
black figure pacing to and fro, with these snow-white atoms fluttering
about its feet. At the end of the lawn an arm goes out, and the figure
pulls up at the first touch on the rose-covered trellis. There is the
bank of mignonette at the other end, and here he halts and turns, warned
by the music of the bees. But I have never been able to guess what
guides him unerringly between the rippled edges of the flower-beds; nor
why, when walking under the wall, hung from end to end with blue racemes
of wistaria, he goes no farther each way than the limit of the blossoms’
reach. The gleaming white turrets of syringa, of acacia, of guelder
rose, these I know are just visible to him; and his doves lighten the
darkness a little about his feet. But there are whole stretches of the
garden given over to deep-hued things—rhododendrons and peonies,
canterbury-bells and flaming tiger-lilies; amidst these he must pass with
eyes as little aware of their passionate colour as I of the tiger-moth’s
scarlet when he burrs in my ear at night. Yet is glowing colour of a
truth a thing that reaches us through one sense alone? I have doubted it
ever since—

An angry shout struck up to me just now from a side alley below the
green, where some of the poorest and prettiest of the cottages are
jumbled together. It is strange how far sounds carry on these still,
rainy mornings. The shout was followed by the shrill tones of a woman,
and the thud of something being hurled into the street. Presently,
through the alley-mouth, appeared a man with a basket on his back. He
came up the street through the rain, bent and lurching, his black beard
wagging with imprecations he was at no pains to subdue. It was Darkie,
the tramp, fern-seller, ne’er-do-well; a familiar figure in Windlecombe.
As usual, he was pretty far gone in liquor. He took the middle of the
way, addressing himself to all passers-by indiscriminately.

‘Wimmin,’ he cried, in his fine deep voice with the violoncello quality
in it, ‘wimmin? ye may live ’til crack o’ Doom, sir, and then never larn
how to take ’em! “I’ll ha’ two!” sez she, only laast Saddaday, ma’am,
“an’ bring another brace, Darkie,” she sez, “when ye happens along
agen,”—all as nice as nice could be, sir. An’ now, soon as ’a sot eyes
o’ me, ’a hups wir futt, an’—’

He turned the corner of the house, and I heard no more.

I wonder, now, how Darkie fares this weather in his Downland eyrie. It
has always been a mystery in Windlecombe as to where he passes his
nights. At all times, winter or summer, he is to be met with, tramping
up the lane towards the Downs; using the last light of day apparently in
putting himself as far as may be from the chance of a night’s lodging;
and, in the early mornings, you meet him trudging down again from the
heights, his basket full of odd hedgeside garnerings for sale in the
town. The mystery is a mystery to me no longer, although it was quite by
chance I lit upon him in his secret nook.

Coming over the Downs one winter’s morning, I saw a thin blue spiral of
smoke rising from the very centre of a great patch of gorse on a
hill-side; and threading my way through the wilderness, bent on
elucidating this phenomenon, I came at length upon a queer little scene.
At the mouth of a sort of cave cut deep into the solid green heart of the
gorse thicket, burned a little fire of sticks; and over it hung a pot
that gave forth a savoury steam. Behind the fire lay Darkie on a snug
couch of hay and old sacking, fast asleep, with a pipe in his mouth.
Evidently he had dozed off in the midst of his preparations for a meal.
I took one swift look round his castle, noting various old tins, old
coats, and the like hanging over his head; several sugar-boxes filled
with odd lumber behind him; and a shepherd’s folding-bar—a deadly weapon,
twenty pounds or so of solid iron—lying conveniently to his hand; and
then I crept away, as silently as I had come. Not that I feared any
violence from him. In all the years we had been acquainted, I had never
known him harm a mouse. But many was the time I had turned him away from
my own door, unceremoniously enough; sometimes with hard words, once or
twice, indeed, with threatenings of his natural enemy, the constable.
And I feared now reprisals of a kind that would hurt almost as much as
the folding-bar heftily wielded—I feared to see Darkie stagger to his
feet and pull off to me one of my own long-discarded caps, hear him give
me generous and courtly words of welcome, and a kind look out of his
mastiff’s eyes, making me as free of his snug, green-roofed dwelling as I
had so often made him free of the street.

Towards the hour of sunset I went up to the little attic window again,
and looked out over the drenched housetops for any sign of a break in the
weather. The rain had ceased, and the western sky had lightened
somewhat, taking on an indefinable warmth of hue. There was no sunshine,
nor any hope of sunshine; but there was a light abroad that picked out
all the browns and reds and yellows in the landscape, wondrously
intensifying them, while leaving all other hues as grey and cold as ever.

Past eleven o’clock, and a cloudless night of stars, with the wood-larks
singing high over the village, and the cuckoos calling in the hills as
though it were broad day. Yes—the change has come: Farmer Coles is never
far out in his prognostications. It will be cutting weather to-morrow;
and to-morrow I must be up with the earliest of them, and away to the
Hoe-field.

Of summer evenings in Windlecombe, all through haying and harvest time,
you see men lounging about the village, one and all obsessed by the same
trance-like, serenely dilatory mood. All have pipes well alight, leaving
a trail of smoke behind them on the dusky golden air. All have hands
thrust deep in trouser-pockets, carry their unshaven chins high, are
tired as dogs, and look as somnolently happy as noontide owls. And of
all the days of the week, there are more of these placid optimists
abroad, and these characteristics are most to be noted in them, on the
evening of the last working day.

To-night I went up and down the green—the most uncertain of a
deliberately irresolute company—half a dozen times, perhaps, before, by
common but unvoiced consent, we turned our lagging footsteps towards the
inn. All the while I was rejoicing in a possession, priceless indeed,
yet hard-won as might be—a heart and mind filled with the spirit of the
_Cottar’s Saturday Night_. You cannot get this chief of all country
pleasures in exchange for money. It is to be had in only one way, at the
cost of long laborious days in the fields; and every tired muscle, every
aching joint in my body, stood then as witness that I had done my best to
earn what I had of it, if it might be earned at all. The old oak
window-seat, in the parlour of the Three Thatchers, was as softly welcome
as the Chancellor’s woolsack: I would not have exchanged that mug of
home-brewed ale for a draught of ambrosia at the feet of the gods.

The crimson sunset light streamed hot upon me, as I sat on the
window-ledge half among the parlour company, and half among those
congregated on the benches under the virginia creeper outside. Every
moment or two some other tired haymaker strolled up, and added his solid
breadth and his tobacco smoke to the throng. But we were not all
field-workers in the Three Thatchers to-night, nor had only the common
causes of tired limbs and sun-parched throats brought us together. Young
Daniel Dray was knitting his dark brows over some papers and
account-books at the trestle-table; and young Tom Clemmer sat close by,
thoughtfully swinging a cricket-bat pendulum-fashion between his
outstretched legs. A silence fell upon the company.

‘Well,’ said Tom Clemmer at last, ‘I dunno. ’Tis ne’ersome-matter
awk’ard fer Windlecombe. Wi’ young Maast’ Coles hayin’, an’ Tim Searle
hayin’; an’ George Locker, an’ Tom an’ George Wright, an’ Bill here all
hayin’, how i’ fortun’ be us to make up a team?’

You could pick out the members of the cricket-club committee amidst the
crowd by reason of their grave, troubled faces; whereas all other faces
wore the easy contented smile of the village Saturday night. We had
weighty business to consider. The annual challenge had arrived from the
Stavisham club. They were a cocksure, overweening lot, the town-eleven;
and we had set our hearts on beating them at next Saturday’s match. But
there was the hay to carry, if the weather held. Many of our best
players would be in the fields. It looked as though the town were to add
Windlecombe again to their long list of village victories. Secretary
Dray gnawed savagely at the butt of his pen.

‘I knows how ’twill be,’ he said. ‘Five men an’ a tail o’ boys—the ould
story! Tom here ’ull knock up his couple o’ score; and then ’twill be
hout, hout, hout, fer th’ rest o’ us i’ two hovers. An’ I can jest hear
they chalk-headed town chaps larfin’!’

It was a dismal picture. The fragrance went out of our tobacco, and no
man thought of his ale. The three canaries carolled so joyously in their
cages overhead, that I could have wrung their necks with all the pleasure
in life. Young Daniel stared straight into the eye of the setting sun
with the very face of disaster.

‘But ’tis th’ bawlin’,’ he went on. ‘Ne’er a change o’ bawlers, there’ll
be; an’ me an’ George Havers caan’t go on fer ever. Na, na! ’tis all
over agen, I tell ye! The boys ull ha’ their fun, an’ Windlecombe
another smashin’!’

He swept the club papers into his pocket, and rose to fill a pipe.

‘But mind ye!’ he added, looking grimly round on the company, ‘I’ll ha’
that there flitter-mouse grocer-chap’s wicket this time, or I’ll be— Ah!
you see if I doan’t, if I ha’ to throw at his ’ed!’

* * * * *

Long after night had fallen, and all the village was quiet under the dim
half-moon, I came out again upon the green, to wander and ruminate over
the week that had gone by. I bared my arm to the biceps, and even in
that disguising light I could see the sunburn dark upon it. Yawning and
stretching involuntarily, a delicious ache spread over me from top to
toe. The Seven Sisters loomed hard by, and I went and lay down at full
length on one of the seats, looking up through the black wilderness of
boughs at the flinching starshine, and watching the nightjars as they
wheeled and whirred above me through the scented dark.

They are a merry company, the nightjars. Perhaps there is no other sound
in Nature that comes nearer to pure mirth and jollity than this rhythmic,
spinning-wheel chorus of theirs. Up there, where the dense pine foliage
made a sort of black coast to the dark blue ocean of the summer night, a
whole nation of them was astir. They did not utter their peculiar note
when on the wing; but every moment or two one of the concourse came to
rest on a branch with a sudden snap, and forthwith set his spinning-jenny
blithely going.

There is another sound which you hear of summer evenings, often far into
the night, and which is nearly akin to that of the nightjar. I heard it
only a minute ago in one of the garden hedges as I came across the green.
But when the two songs occur together, there is no confusing them. They
are both continuous, mechanical sounds, and each is curiously varied in
tone, speed, and intensity. But while the nightjar’s music is a rich
full tremolo, uttered from some high point, generally the branch of a
tree, the grasshopper-warbler sings always close to earth. His note is
thinner, shriller, faster. If your fingers were as deft as his slender
throat, you could imitate the sound exactly by the rapid chinking
together of two threepenny-bits.

JULY

IN the spring of the year, July seems as far off as middle-age seems to
youth, and almost as undesirable. But when midsummer-day is past and
gone, whether in human life or the year’s progress, we look at things
with clearer, more widely ranging eyes. The man in his prime strength,
the season at the summit of its beauty—these are fairer things than the
childhood and the springtime that have gone to make them. For the
greater must be all the greater and more wonderful, because it contains
the wondrous less.

Here is the first day of July come, and ever since sunrise I have been
straying about the field-paths and lanes, wending home, indeed, only when
the fierce noontide heat and a ravening hunger combined to drive me
thither. There was this fierce, tropic quality in the sunlight from the
very first. Though the gilt arrow on the church dial pointed barely to
four o’clock, the level sunbeams struck hot and bright on the face; and
the dew in the grass by the laneside was shrinking visibly with every
moment. In an hour the last water-bell was gone from the shadiest nook
in the wood. Only the teasels could defy the thirsty sun, and these kept
their water-traps over-brimming, as if fed from a magic source, far into
the heat of the day.

There are many common things of the country-side—small facts to be
learned for the trouble of a glance—which are little known because the
glance is seldom given. As I passed along the hedge where the teasels
stood up straight as a row of church spires, the glitter of the water in
their leaf-cups caught my eye, and I stopped to look at them. I had
always thought of the teasels as natural drinking-places for the bees,
and other flying or creeping things; but now I saw that their use was
very different. Studying the plant carefully, the whole meaning of the
thing dawned on me at last. The teasel must be a flesh-eater, more
greedy and destructive than any spider in the land. In the cups a host
of creatures lay drowned; and upon the green, translucent leaves and
stems there crawled multitudes of others, all destined for the same fate.
There were in the water not only small insects, but bumble-bees, large
caterpillars and slugs, even broad-winged night-moths that had fallen to
the teasel’s snare. I saw also that the pools of water insulating every
stem served not as traps alone, but actually as digestive cells, wherein
the carcases of the teasel’s prey were gradually resolved into the slime
that lay at the bottom of each cup. Somehow, I conjectured, this must be
absorbed into the tissue of the plant; and cutting one of the stems
asunder, just where the water-holding leaves embraced it, I came upon
what seemed proof of this—a ring of apertures at the base of each
cup—sink holes, in fact—leading into the substance of the stem.

The path wound up a hill-side over a field of tares, rippling away before
me through the sea of purple blossom until it ended abruptly against the
blue sky far above. And here another minute wonder brought me to a halt.
Though it was so early, the hive-bees were out and about in their
thousands. The great field was besieged by them. The air throbbed with
their music. A madness for honey-making seemed upon them all; and yet,
of all the busy thousands upon thousands set loose amidst what seemed
illimitable forage-ground, nowhere could I see a hive-bee upon a flower.
I went down on hands and knees for a closer view, believing at first that
my eyes were playing false with me. But there was no doubt about it.
Though on every side the great furry bumble-bees were seizing upon, and
dragging open the purple blooms of the tares, the hive-bees never touched
these, for all they were in so huge a heat and flurry of work.

Now I knew that, while every other insect under heaven has its times of
relaxation, deeming moments given over to dancing in a sunbeam or basking
on a wall as moments not ill-spent, the honey-bee allows herself no such
wasteful delights. If she were here in this tare-field in her thousands,
and here she was, she came for no other purpose than a useful one.
Clearly, therefore, the hive-bees were getting nectar in abundance: yet
how, if they were not seeking it in the flowers?

Another minute’s careful watch resolved the mystery. The tare-plant can
almost rank with the slug-devouring teasel as a curiosity of the
country-side. Knowing well that the hive-bee’s tongue is not long enough
to reach the sweets at the bottom of its flower-cup, the tare provides a
special feast outside. At the base of each leaf-and flower-stalk, just
where these join on to the main stem, will be found a little green flap
or fin. In the centre of this fin is a valve, from which exudes a thick
sweet liquid. If you are quicker than the bee, you may see the tiny
globule shining in the sun as you turn the plant up. But even as you
look, a bee fusses in between your fingers, drinks up the liquid in a
moment, and hums off to the next stalk. If we can extend no more
sympathy to the bee in her folly of never-ending labours than to a
lily-of-the-field at toil, we must at least concede something for her
fearlessness. A peep into her own looking-glass is not always all of
virtue’s reward.

Over the field of purple tares, and on through the cornfields—wheat
waving high and green, with the scarlet poppies flushing midway down in
its murmuring depths. Who would have hawthorn and buttercups, the bridal
white and gold of spring, when he can have poppies by the million, and
roses, a wagon-load to be gathered from every hedgerow, if he will?
Where I stood, breast-high in the wheat-field, the poppies crowded thick
together among the green stems, making one unbroken sheet of colour that
I could hardly look upon in the full light of the summer sun. A little
way onward, and this blood-red flare was softened instantly: a dozen
yards away there was nothing but the rustling green of the wheat. Every
moment a lark rose out of the corn, singing, or dropped into it like a
stone silently out of the blue. The hedgerow on the far side of the
field shone with the roses, tremulous, uncertain, in the heated air.
Beyond, in the blue mist of woodlands, a blackbird chanted his joy of the
morning; and all round me in the distant ring of hills, there were
cuckoos chiming, each note clear but double, some of the songs perfect
still.

From the wheat, the path led me presently into the oat-fields, green too,
but of a cooler, greyer tinge; and full of a stealthy motion and the
sound of wind, though scarce a breath was moving overhead. There is
something eerie, mysterious, about a field of oats on a hot summer’s
morning. It is as though the ears bent together and whispered to each
other, passing the word on unceasingly from plant to plant. Looking over
the plane of grey-green awns, stretching away under the still sunshine,
you see low wavelets rise and fall, furrows come and go; the light
changes; or, suddenly, the whole expanse grows mute and still. A gentle,
inconstant breeze would produce exactly this effect; but you see it when
not a leaf moves in the highest treetops, when even the aspens have
hushed their quivering music under the noontide glare. No doubt, in a
minor degree, all plants show this movement, whether it be caused by the
travelling heat of the sun, or be simply due to the varying impetus of
growth. In a great field of corn closely drilled, there are always the
separate individualities of the plants comprising it to be reckoned with.
That these exist in fact, as well as in fancy, is difficult to
demonstrate. But that each field has a communal spirit—often different
from, or wholly antagonistic to, that of its near neighbour—is evident.
For how else to explain why all the ears of corn in one field lean
eastward, and all the ears in the next field may incline normally to the
west?

Coming homeward at last, surfeited of sunshine, eyes and ears outwearied
with the brilliance and the melody of the day, I stopped awhile in the
shadow of the church tower to consider an old familiar, yet perennially
interesting thing. Just as I, at fiercest noon, was returning to the
shelter of my own cool, ivy-mantled nest, the swifts that built in the
tower were lancing back to their homes in the gloom of the belfry.
Singly, in twos and threes together, every moment saw them arriving and
disappearing through the jalousies; but now none went forth again, though
they had been coming and going all the morning long. There they would
remain, I knew, quiet in the temperate dark of the old tower, until the
sun had got out of its furnace-like mood. And then they would be out and
about again, yet filled with a wholly different spirit. And towards
sunset they would be tearing round the sky in a madcap chevy-chase,
screaming like black imps let out of Inferno.

Windlecombe Mead, where the village cricket matches have been played from
time immemorial, lies on the gently sloping ground between Arun river and
the hills. It was the day of the great annual match with Stavisham, and
most of the older villagers had congregated on the benches round the
scoring-tent, when, in the sweltering heat of early afternoon, I hurried
down to the field with pencil and book. The townsmen, it seemed, had won
the toss, and had elected to put the home-team in. Young Tom Clemmer and
young Daniel Dray were already at the wickets, taking middle. I looked
round at the glum, set faces of the spectators, and felt tragedy in the
air.

‘Fower men an’ a parson,’ whispered the old cobbler to me behind his
hand, ’a ould rickety chap as caan’t run, an’ five bits o’ lads! Drat
that there hay! Heough! Now they’re aff!’

The umpire had called Play. The fast Stavisham bowler—we knew him of
old—retired into open country, wheeled, and bore down on the crease like
a bull at a gate. Young Daniel ducked, then turned up a face of
indignant scarlet. But the ball had gone by for two, and a chuckle of
relief spread through the crowd. The bowler prepared to try again.

‘Dan’l’s got th’ sun in ’s eyes,’ said old Dray anxiously, as he watched.
‘’A never can bide that top wicket! Steady now, Dannie, an’ keep a
straight bat!’

He roared out the last words. And then, in a moment, we were all on our
feet in consternation. The ball had never left the bowler’s hand—that
much we were sure of. Daniel stood at his wicket safe and sound, but Tom
Clemmer was coming back to the tent, followed by a derisive chorus from
the whole field.

‘Hout, Tom? Never hout!’

‘What i’ th’ wureld houted ye, lad?’

‘Hout! Never!—’tis a swindle, Tom!’

Amidst the eager exclamations of his friends, Tom Clemmer strode into the
tent, and began slowly to unbuckle his pads. All the time he stared
fixedly into space.

‘I could ha’ hup wi’ my fist,’ he said, after a moment’s wrathful
silence, addressing no one in particular, ’an’ I could ha’ gi’en that
there grocer-chap sech a— But there! ’tis no sense yammerin’! Doan’t ye
run out, sir, or ’a ’ll ha’ ye, same as ’a had me!’

He spoke now to the curate, who was preparing to go to the wicket, and
the truth dawned upon us at last. The bowler had played Tom a very
ancient and very mean-spirited trick. Old Clemmer, regardless of the
agony it caused him, stamped his swaddled foot upon the ground.

‘An’ to think, Tom!’ he groaned, ‘as ye lit up th’ forge-fire special for
’un only laast Sunday, ’cause his ould mare—’

But we had no thought for anything but the disaster that had befallen us,
and all that was now imminent. With Tom Clemmer, the one hope of
Windlecombe, out of the fight, what might happen to the rest? With bated
breath we watched for the third ball. Young Daniel drove it over the
bowler’s head, and with a trembling pencil I put down two to his name.
Playing with desperate care, he added two more before the end of the
over, and we began to pluck up heart again. Young Tom came and stood
behind me. His big thumb travelled down the list of names on the
scoring-book.

‘’Tis not lost yet!’ he said with reviving cheerfulness. ‘Dan’l may do
well, wanst ’a gets set. An’ belike Mr. Weaverly ’ull bide out a bit.
Then there be Huggins wi’ his luck; an’ who knaws but what the boys ’ull
account fer a dozen or so atween ’em?’

I had now time, as the fielders were accommodating themselves to the
left-handed batting of the curate, to glance down the list. The last
name came upon me as an utter surprise.

‘What? Never old Stallwood! Why, he must be seventy, if he’s a—’

‘Ay! Cap’n Stall’ard sure enow! ’Tis a joke, more ’n anything. But
ne’er another livin’ sowl there wur, as cud— Oh, Jupitty! Mr.
Weaverly’s hout leg-afore!’

But it was not Mr. Weaverly’s leg. With a white face, his body bent to
the shape of an inverted letter L, and both arms clasped about his
middle, the curate came tip-toeing back to the tent. He sat down
silently in a corner. Huggins—a lean, red-whiskered giant in
moleskins—burst out into the sunshine and made for the wicket, waving his
bat like a war-club and murmuring imprecations as he went.

‘Now ’tis jest touch-an’-go,’ said young Tom in my ear. ‘If ’a hits ’em,
they’ll travel, you mark me! ’Twill be eether th’ river, th’ town, or
Windle Hill.’

Huggins stood at the wicket, legs wide apart, and bat held high over his
head. The bowling now was swift, stealthy, underhand. The ball sped
down the pitch, never leaving the grass for an inch. A crack rang out in
the dazzling July sunshine. Daniel Dray started to run, but the batsman
waved him back. Huggins stood watching the skied ball until it came to
ground in the next field. He laughed uproariously.

‘What d’ye think o’ ee?’

It was another four, and that made eleven in all. Huggins swung up his
bat, and spread his great hob-nailed boots for a still mightier effort.
The ball hissed down the pitch. Huggins caught it as it hopped from a
tussock. Like a lark it soared up into the blue, and we heard a clear
musical plunk as it dropped into the river. A roar of delight burst from
the crowd.

‘Lost ball!’ shouted Tom behind me. ‘Hooroar! Seventeen!’

Huggins spat upon his hands, took a reef in his leather belt, and lifted
his bat again. The little underhand bowler came crouching up to the
crease, and launched the new ball almost from his knees. Wide and wild
it flew this time. But there was a sound of crashing timber; Huggins’s
wicket scattered into space, stumps and bails whirling together half-way
up the pitch. He had hit the wrong thing.

‘An’ now,’ wailed poor Tom Clemmer, ‘’tis as good as finished. Dan’l
wunt ha’ no chaance. Jest as well declare, an’ ha’ done wi’ it. Th’
boys?—they’ll be all done in a hover, an’—’

‘Well, an’ what about th’ Cap’n, Tom?’

It was the voice of the Captain himself, and we all turned to look. He
was leaning comfortably against the tent pole, the very picture of an
old, superannuated forecastle-hand. He wore his usual vast faded blue
suit. A seaman’s cap with hard shiny peak gripped his bald head from the
rear. His red face swam in joviality and perspiration. Tom regarded him
with mingled respect and doubt.

‘Ye caan’t run, Maast’ Stall’ard.’

‘Trew, Tom!’

‘An’ ye ha’ant touched a crickut bat fer thirty year.’

‘Trew agen,’ returned the Captain serenely.

‘Ha, hum! well! a good plucked-un ye be, anyways. Now then, Dickie!’

The first small boy set forth over the sunny stretch of grass that lay
between the tent and the waiting team. Very small and insignificant he
looked in his school-corduroys, and leg-pads that reached well-nigh up to
his waist. His advent was greeted with ribaldry from all parts of the
field. We heard Daniel Dray admonishing the boy as he came smiling up to
the pitch.

‘Now, Dickie, doan’t ye dare run ’til I shouts to ye, an’ then run as if
_He_ wur after ye. Hould your bat straight, ye young varmint! Now then,
look hout! There! what did I tell ye?’

Dickie’s wicket was down, and Dickie himself was running back to the tent
vastly relieved.

‘Out wi’ ye, Georgie Huggins! An’ do as well as your faather!’ cried Tom
Clemmer encouragingly. ‘’Tis hover, an’ Dan’l’s got th’ play now. Oh,
Dan’l, Dan’l! if only ’twur you an’ me!’

But, playing with the ingenuity as well as the courage of despair, young
Daniel Dray now began to show his true mettle. Odd runs he refused,
taking only even numbers, so that each time the bowling fell to his lot
again. At the end of the over, he stole a desperate single with the same
object in view. He reached home safe enough, but Georgie was run out.
Boy Number Two had been disposed of at the cost of a gallant six.

Following the same tactics, young Daniel eked out the remaining three
boys with still more crafty skill. When at length old Stallwood, the
last man, launched out into the sunlight to show the town what he
remembered of cricket, the score had risen to forty-nine, and our spirits
with it. We cheered him lustily as he went.

‘Wan more,’ quoth Tom Clemmer, ‘jest wan, an’ I’ll light me pipe. There
be allers a chaance wi’ fifty. Lorsh! Look at th’ Cap’n!’

Three times on his way to the pitch he had stopped, turned, and waved his
cap in acknowledgment of the ovation given him. And now he was greeting
the Stavishamites each by name, and shaking hands with the wicket-keeper.
He got to the crease at last and grounded his bat. The next moment the
whole field had left their places and run for the tent, leaving the
Captain standing alone and amazed at his wicket.

‘’A doan’t knaw ’a be hout,’ said Tom. ‘D’ ye onnerstand? ’A never
heerd th’ bawler shout, an’ never seed th’ ball acomin’. Belike ’a
thinks they be all gone fer a drink, to hearten ’em at the sight o’ sech
a crickutter!’

And being free for a time, I took upon myself the task of walking out to
the Captain, and breaking the news to him as gently as I could.

It was now Windlecombe’s turn to take the field, and Tom Clemmer led out
his team with a good heart, in spite of its tail of juveniles. Daniel
Dray and the Rev. Mr. Weaverly were our first, indeed our only bowlers.
One of the first batsmen for Stavisham was Daniel’s ancient foe, the
grocer; and we watched the beginning of play with breathless interest,
for we knew Daniel would aim to kill. He grubbed savagely in the
sawdust, then sent the first ball hurtling down the pitch.

The old men were still upon the benches outside, and in that quarter
sympathy with Windlecombe was as staunch as ever. But in the scoring
tent I sat amidst enemies now. The townsmen crowded behind me, a
humorously sarcastic crew.

‘Fifty to beat? My ould Aunt Mary! D’ ye reckon we’ll do it, Bill?’

‘Dunno. ’Tis ser’ous fer Stavisham. Only eleven on us, there be.
Likely March wunt do ’t off his own bat—no, not ’arf!’

‘That there tinker-cove’s agoin’ to bowl fust. There ’ee goos! Wot a —’

The rest was drowned in a thunderclap of shouting. There was a general
stampede among the spectators. For the grocer had driven Daniel’s first
ball clean into the tent.

It was a bad beginning for Windlecombe, and bad rapidly changed to worse.
Young Daniel bowled steadily and coolly for the first over, in spite of
continuous punishment; but thereafter he lost first his temper, and then
his head. The smiling grocer played him to all points of the compass;
and the more the grocer smiled, the more wildly erratic Daniel’s bowling
grew. As for the Rev. Mr. Weaverly, he could do no more than send meek,
ingenuous balls trundling diffidently up the pitch; and he was skied with
heartrending regularity. The batsmen kept continually running. The
little tent seemed to belly out on all sides with the cheering, as a sail
with wind.

‘Thirty up!’

‘Thirty fer nauthin’!’

‘Thirty-one! And another’! Thirty-two! Garn, March! Wot a wazegoose!
Thirty—’

‘Five! ’Ooray!’

The shout went off in my ear like a punt gun. And then there fell a
sudden silence about me, as all strained eyes and ears out to the field.
Some altercation was going on, but not between members of the opposing
sides. ‘Drop ut, ye ould fule!’ I heard Tom Clemmer roar; and, peering
over the crowd, I saw Captain Stallwood, ball in hand, walking up to the
pitch. He rolled up his sleeves as he came.

‘Drop ut, I tell ye!’ cried Tom once more, ‘’tis crickut we be playin’,
not maarbles, man! Gimme that ball, Stall’ard, or I’ll— Lorsh! what be
come to th’ ould—’

The rest was a confused wrangle amongst the whole team. Presently, to
our amazement, we saw all drift back to their posts, and old Stallwood
take his place triumphantly at the bowling-crease. In the dead quiet
that followed, I heard the grocer chuckle richly, as he got ready to
smite the Captain all over the field.

The old man stood stock still on the crease, eyeing the batsman solemnly,
the ball held low down between his knees. So long he remained in this
posture, that at length impatient exclamations began to break out on all
sides.

‘Well! now ye ha’ got un, Stall’ard, let ’n goo, mate!’

‘’Tain’t i’ church ye be, Cap’n. ’Tis crickut!’

‘Bawl up, gaffer! We warnts to get hoame afore daark!’

And from the grocer, leaning with exaggerated weariness on his bat:

‘Doan’t ye be i’ no sorter hurry, ould bluebottle! But when y’ are
ready, just send us a postcard, will ye?’

The Captain’s hand went slowly up, the ball held curiously against his
wrist. He launched it with a sudden sidelong twist. As it rose high
into the air, I could see that it went wide and off, even from my
position in the tent. With a laugh the batsman strode out half a dozen
yards to meet it. A moment later he was gazing back aghast at his
splayed wicket. The Captain’s rich husky voice pealed out above the din:

‘There be a poun’ o’ butter fer ’ee!’

And now we were the frantic spectators of a drama that gained in
thrilling interest with every moment. The new batsman arrived at the
wicket, and again old Stallwood sent the ball sailing down the pitch,
wide as ever, but this time to leg. I watched it more carefully now.
Though it made a high curve, it rose not a hair’s-breadth after touching
ground, but shot straight in. Again we saw the glint of a falling bail
behind the wicket. The Captain thrust both bare arms deep in his
trousers-flap, and silently grinned. The third man did little better.
He succeeded in blocking a couple of the balls; but the next, more
crooked than any, sent him dumbfounded back to the tent.

There was no more ribaldry about me now. The fourth batsman sallied out
amidst a rustle of whispered apprehension and hard-drawn breaths, and
returned almost immediately to the same tense atmosphere. Outside on the
benches, the old men were rocking on their seats with delight, like trees
in a wind. Bleak, the cobbler, was careering up and down, beside himself
with joy.

‘Fower in a hover!’ he shouted. ‘I reckons I knaws summat about leather,
but I ne’er seed it do the like o’ that! ’Tain’t bawlin’, I tell ye:
’tis magic!’

And now young Daniel Dray was bowling again, and bowling with renewed
courage and skill. All his old command of length and break had returned
to him. By the end of his over, another wicket had fallen, and the score
had risen no higher than forty-three. The Captain took the ball once
more, this time without any opposition. At once the fearsome whispering
in the tent grew still. Almost we forgot to breathe, as the great dark
hairy fist came slowly up into the sunlight.

But the Captain had changed his tactics. Instead of the leisurely,
high-curving delivery with which he had done such execution hitherto, the
ball left his hand straight and low and as quick as light. It pitched no
more than an inch or two in front of the waiting bat, then struck
vertically upward. A crack resounded through the field. The batsman
staggered—clapped a hand to his head. A moment more and he was picking
an uneven course towards the tent, thoroughly satiated with the Captain’s
magic.

Very slowly the next man set out for the pitch. He stopped on the way to
tighten a strap of his leg-guard, and again unconscionably long to adjust
his batting-glove. Once he turned back a tallowy face, and seemed to be
in two minds about something. But at length he got to the wicket and
grounded his bat. The long arm uprose again, and the ball sped. It
proved to be the last bowled that day. For once more that terrible
upward break ended with a thud and a yell, echoed from nine
panic-stricken men about me. The luckless batsman fled with as gory a
visage as his companion had done, and none would take his place, though
the grocer charmed and stormed never so wisely. Windlecombe had won by
six.

Later by an hour the victorious eleven gathered in the parlour of the
Three Thatchers Inn, old Stallwood grimly smiling in their midst. Tom
Clemmer shook his fist at him, delight in his eyes.

‘But ’twarn’t crickut, Stall’ard!’ he said reproachfully.

‘Noa,’ returned the old man, ‘not crickut, leastways not all on’t. That
there sing-chin-summat or other—Red Hot Ball, I calls un—that wur a trick
as I larned in Chaney.’

III

How fast time flies you can never truly estimate until you go step and
step with it through the summer woods and fields. In a sense,
town-life—where there is so much of permanence in environment—puts a drag
on time, and not seldom pulls it up altogether. Moreover, in towns time
is estimated by events, by experiences. You hear a great musician, see a
great play, look on at some magnificent pageant, or are shocked by some
catastrophe; and straightway there is half a lifetime of emotion thrust
between two strokes of the clock. By so much in very truth your life has
been lengthened; for it is the intensity of living that counts in the
civic tale of years. If you find an old man not only declaring that he
has lived long, but believing it, it is a great chance but he tells you
so in the close-clipped cockney tongue of the town.

And yet it is better to live in some far-away country nook like
Windlecombe, and be reminded with every gliding summer hour that time
flies and life is short, if only because of the undoubted fact that such
a frame of mind carries a belief in eternal youth as a necessary
implication. Between life’s dawn and the dusk of its western sky, there
is literally no time to grow old in a natural, aboriginal environment.
So inextricably interwoven are the threads of human existence and that of
the green world round about, that the annual rejuvenation of the one
infallibly communicates itself to the other. With every spring we start
life afresh. Though we may live to threescore years and ten, we are
children still; and come upon death at last like an unexpected gust at a
corner, old age unrealised to the very end.

In the weeks that are closing now, I have heard and seen more of the
galloping hoofs of this swift, high-stepping jade, summer, than is good
for entire peace of mind. Years ago I made a vow that I would never
again eke out the fleeting golden days, like a miser to whom spending is
not pleasure but only pain. I vowed that I would always squander time at
this season; let it drift by unthinkingly; get my fill of sunshine, and
fill and fill again to my heart’s content; yet do it as a strayed heifer
in the corn, wantoning over an acre to each mouthful. But this time, as
ever, the good resolution has been forgotten. The old parsimony has
dogged the way at every step. I must be up with the sun in the small
hours of each morning, fearful of losing a single beam from the millions.
To waste in sleep the blue, spangled summer nights, when all the
country-side is resonant of life and fragrant with the scent that comes
only with the darkness, has seemed like sacrilege. Yet, for all my
industry, July is nearing its end, and I know that I have drunk but a
drop or two out of its vast ocean. And already I have renewed the old
vow, to be disregarded as ever, doubtless, when July again comes round.

On all the high-lying corn lands now, harvest has begun; and the fields
in the valley are fast taking on that deep tinge of gipsy-gold which is
the sign of full maturity. Scarce had the shrill note of the
mowing-machine stilled in the meadows, when the deeper voice of the
reaper-and-binder began on the hill. All day long I sat in this cool
quiet nook of a study, and the steady jarring sound came over to me from
the hillside, filling the little room. I saw the machine with its pair
of grey horses, waiting at the field-gate, while the scythe-men cut a way
for it into the amber wall of the grain. Steadily hour after hour it
worked round the field, until at last, looking forth towards noon, I saw
that only a small triangular piece remained uncut in the middle of the
field.

Now there were a score or so of the farm folk waiting hard by, each armed
with a cudgel; and with them seemingly every dog in the village. As the
machine went round, every time making the patch of standing corn smaller,
I could see rabbits bolting in all directions from the diminishing cover;
and there uprose continually a hubbub of voices from dogs and men.
Towards the end, the stubble became alive with the little dark scurrying
forms, fleeing to the surrounding fields, the most of them escaping
harmlessly for want of pursuers. But even then, as I afterwards learned,
some eight or nine dozen were killed.

I have always kept away from these harvest battues, as indeed from all
scenes of sport and congregations of sportsmen. I am willing enough to
profit by these activities, and receive and enjoy my full share of the
furred and feathered spoil admittedly without one humanitarian qualm.
But this much confessed, I would gladly welcome the day when everywhere,
save in the rabbit warrens, the sound of the sporting gun should cease
throughout this southern land. Rabbits must be kept down to the end of
time; but, for the creatures that require preservation, too great a price
is paid, and paid by the wrong class. It is not the owner of
game-preserves who bears the main cost of his thunderous pleasuring. It
is the lover of wild life, who sees the hawks and owls and small deer of
the woodlands growing scarcer with every year; and the children who, in
the springtime, are cheated out of their right to wander through the
primrose glades.

To many this may seem a wearisomely trite point of view, affecting a
grievance as old as the hills, and even less likely of obliteration. But
though the point of view is ancient enough, the grievance is no longer
so. Of late years the ranks of village dwellers have been very largely
reinforced from the classes who care little for sport and a great deal
for all other allurements of the country-side. Rural England is no
longer peopled by sportsmen and the dependents of sportsmen; but, slowly
and surely, a majority is creeping up in the villages, composed of men
and women both knowing and loving Nature, and to whom the old-time local
policy of endurance under deprivation of rights for expediency’s sake, is
an incomprehensible, as well as an intolerable thing. All the
vast-winged, beautiful marauders of the air that I love to watch, are
ruthlessly shot down by the gamekeepers on a suspicion presumptive and
unproved; but the fox that, in a single night, massacres every bird in
the villager’s hen-roost, must go scatheless because poor profit may not
be set before rich pastime.

One day, almost the hottest so far, I was out in the meadows, and came
upon a curious thing. The path, or rather green lane, ran between high
hedges. On either hand there was a great field of flowering crops, the
one red clover, the other sainfoin. There must have been twenty or
thirty acres of each stretching away under the tense still air and light,
much of a colour, but the sainfoin of a softer, purer pink. Both fields
seemed alike attractive to the bees; but while, to the right, the
sainfoin gave out a mighty note of organ music, the red clover on my left
was utterly silent. Looking through a gap in the foliage, I could not
see there a single butterfly or bee. The truth, of course, was that the
nectar in the trumpet-petals of the clover was too far down for the
honey-bee to reach; nor would even the bumble-bees trouble about it, with
a whole province of sainfoin hard by, over-brimming with choicer, more
attainable sweets.

As I wandered along, between these great zones of sound and silence, the
air seemed to grow hotter and more oppressive with every moment. There
was something uncanny in the stillness of all around me. The green
sprays in the tops of the highest elms lay against the blue sky sharp and
clear, as though enamelled upon it. Not a bird sang in the woodland.
Save for the deep throbbing melody from the sainfoin, all the world lay
dumb and stupefied under the noontide glare. And then, chancing to turn
and look southward, I saw the cause of it. A storm was coming up. Close
down on the horizon lay a bank of cloud like a solid billow of ink. It
was driving up at incredible speed. Though not a leaf or grass blade
stirred around me, the cloud seemed tossed and torn in a whirlwind’s
grip. Every moment it lifted higher towards the sun, changing its shape
incessantly, black fold upon fold rolling together, colliding, giving
place to others blacker still. And flying in advance of all this, borne
by a still swifter air-current, were long sombre streamers of cloud rent
into every conceivable shape of torn and tattered rags.

And now, as the dense cloud-pack got up, the brilliant light was blotted
out at a stroke, and this startling thing happened. Every bee,
apparently, at work in the vast field of sainfoin, spread her wings at
the ominous signal, and raced for home. They swept over my head in
numbers that literally darkened the sky. Again, literally, the sound of
their going was like a continuous deep syren-note, striking point-blank
in the ear. For a minute at most it endured, and then died away almost
as suddenly as it came. A bleak ghostly light paled on everything around
me. Little cat’s paws of wind flung through the torpid air. Afar the
harsh voice of the oncoming tempest sounded. Slow hot gouts of water
began to fall, and every moment the inky pall of cloud lit up with an
internal fire.

At first, as I made off homeward in the track of the vanished bee-army, I
tried to emulate their speed. But the torrent came surging and crying up
in my rear, and in a dozen yards I was waterlogged. Thereafter, going
leisurely, I came at last into the village, and so to the house. And
here, in spite of the deluge, I must stop and look on at more wonders.
It seemed almost impossible for any bird to sustain itself on wings under
such a cataract. But there above me the martins were at their old
incessant gambols, circling and darting about, hither and thither, high
and low, in a whirling madcap crew; and higher still, right in the throat
of the tempest, I could make out the swifts, hundreds strong, weaving
their old mazy pattern on the sky, as though in the pearl and opal dusk
of a summer’s evening.

THE TEA-GARDEN
AUGUST

OLD Runridge’s misadventure in wedlock has proved a trouble to more
people than one in Windlecombe. In former years, though boating parties
from the town were continually to be seen on the river, when the August
holiday season began, they seldom pulled up at our ferry stairs. From
the waterside the village had a somewhat inhospitable look, while a mile
farther on there were the North Woods, Stavisham’s traditional picnicking
ground, where, at the gamekeeper’s cottage, all were sure of a welcome.
Such wandering holiday-makers as found their way into Windlecombe came
usually by road, and were of the tranquil, undemonstrative breed, like
pedestrians all the world over. There would seem to be something about
sitting long hours in a rowing-boat which is detrimental, even debasing,
to a certain common variety of human nature. The tendency to run and
shout and skylark on reaching dry ground again appears to be irresistible
to this numerous class. And it is at Mrs. Runridge’s door that we must
lay the blame of submitting Windlecombe to a pestilent innovation.

‘Look ye!’ said the old ferryman from his seat in the boat, waving a
scornful hand towards his garden, as I chanced along the river bank one
fine Saturday afternoon. ‘’Twur me as painted un, an’ me as putt un up,
jest fer peace’s sake; but I’d ha’ taken an’ chucked un in th’ river if
I’d only ha’ knowed what sort o’ peace ’ud come on ’t!’

A great white board reared itself on ungainly legs above the elder-hedge
of the garden, and on it, in huge irregular characters, appeared the
single word, ‘TEAS.’ By the side of the ferry-punt half a dozen town
rowing-boats lay moored. And from the green depths of the garden there
arose a confusion of voices, shrill laughter, and an incessant clatter of
crockery. I had hardly realised what it all meant, when Mrs. Runridge
showed a vast white apron and a hot perspiring face in the gateway. She
bore down upon us with upraised hand, as though she intended bodily harm
to one or both.

‘Here, Joe!’ cried she, giving the old ferryman a coin. ‘Change fer half
a suvverrin, an’ shaarp ’s th’ wured! Try th’ Thatchers, or Mist.
Weaverly, or belike— Doan’t sit starin’ there, looney! Dear, oh Lor!
was there ever sech a man! An’ us all run purty nigh off our legses, we
be!’

‘Th’ seventh time,’ gasped Runridge, as we hurried together up the steep
street, ‘or like as not th’ eighth—I dunno! An’ ut bean’t as though ’a
warnted money. Money?—th’ bed bean’t fit fer Christian folk to sleep on,
wi’ th’ lumps in ’t! An’ to-morrer ull be wuss, if ’tis fine. Lor’ send
a hearthquake, or Noah’s flood, or summat!’

When a naturally silent man attempts self-commiseration in words, his
case is sure to be a desperate one. But we are all fated to share in his
trouble now. On any fine Saturday or Sunday in the month, Runridge will
be a familiar figure, hunting down from door to door the change that, in
villages, is so scanty and so hard to discover. On Mondays we shall all
suffer from our foolish kindness in allowing this reckless exportation of
bullion. Only Susan Angel at the sweetstuff shop, and her small
customers, will be unincommoded; for the handful of battered farthings
that has served them as currency during whole decades past will be
necessarily saved by its insignificance, and will remain, no doubt, in
the village for service amidst generations yet unborn.

But disturbing visitors to Windlecombe do not all come by the river.
There is an iniquitous job-master in Stavisham who has long had the
village in his evil eye; and at intervals, fortunately rare, he descends
upon us with charabancs drawn by three horses, and filled with
heterogeneous human gleanings—the flotsam and jetsam of holiday-land
strayed for the day into Stavisham from contiguous seaside towns.

They come in families, in amorous couples, in collective friendships of
each sex and every number and age. They bring baskets of provisions,
cameras, balls wherewith to play rounders on the green; and of musical
instruments many weird kinds—concertinas, mouth-organs, babies, and often
yapping terriers that set all our own dogs frantic on their chains. An
altruist, whose convictions have grown up amidst the quiet slow
neighbourliness of the country, never finds his principles less easy of
application than when he must atune himself to the holiday moods of
people escaped from the town. There is no harm in all the shouting and
laughter and fatuous horseplay. Inebriety is practically extinct among
those who make summer the season, and the country the scene, of their
year’s brief merry-making. And yet it all seems mistaken, reprehensible,
on the same principle that a blunder is worse than a crime. It is futile
to tell him so, unless he already knows it, and then it is equally
unnecessary; but when the day-tripper learns to enjoy himself on the
green country-side in the true spirit for which the sun was made to shine
and the flowers to grow, he will have found the Philosopher’s Stone that
is to change, not mere lead and iron, but Time and Life themselves into
gold.

On most mornings in August the more careful of us will go about thrusting
greasy paper-scraps out of sight under bushes, flicking the incongruous
yellow of banana-peel into obscure corners, lamenting stripped boughs,
and marvelling at nosegays thrown heedlessly away, as if the joy of them
had lain in the mere plucking. But all the strange folk that use the
village for their pleasuring at this time, do not leave these unlovely
tokens behind them. Only yesterday, as I sat on the edge of the old
worked-out, riverside chalk-pit here—whence you have a view north and
south of the glittering water for miles—there came a new sound in the
air, and I must throw aside my sheaf of galley-proofs to listen. The
sound came from the river, and was still afar off. Many voices were
joined in singing one of the old catch-songs, which go round a circle of
three or four phrases, and to which there is never an end until you make
an end of its beginning in slow time.

The sweet medley grew louder and clearer, and presently there was united
to it the rhythmic plash of oars. A great tarry old sea-boat came round
the water’s bend, holding a party of a dozen or so. At last the
labouring craft and the music came to a halt together, and the singers
clambered ashore. I should have forgotten all about them now, for they
soon passed out of sight amid the waterside foliage. But as I was coming
homeward up the village street, I heard the voices again; and there,
under the Seven Sisters on the green, the little company were standing
together, singing apparently for their own solace and delight. It was a
strange thing, here in unemotional England, and many of the village folk
had been drawn wonderingly to their doors. Yet the singers did not seem
to remark this, nor to regard their action as anything out of the common.
For, the song finished, they broke into several parties and sauntered on,
talking quietly amongst themselves as if to make music were part of the
daily conversation of their lives.

All that afternoon, from the quiet of my garden, I heard the voices at
intervals, and from different points about the village, near and far.
Once I saw the party right on the top of Windle Hill, strolling about in
twos and threes, looking like foraging crows on the heights. After a
while I saw them get together in a little circle; and then, right at the
ear’s-tip, I could just catch the higher notes of their singing—a strange
wild song, much like the song of the larks that must be contending with
them up there against the blue sky.

The last I saw of this mysterious company was at sunset, from my perch
over the chalk-pit again. They had already embarked when I arrived, and
had got their little ship well under way. The oars were dipping steadily
to the same old catch-song that had brought them hither: there was still
a faint throbbing echo of ‘White Sand and Grey Sand’ upon the air long
after the sun had plunged, and the pale half-moon was beginning to enter
a timid silver protest against the lingering crimson in the sky.

Near upon half a century I have lived in the world, and cannot yet say of
the wind whether I hate it or love it most.

It is a dilemma that comes only to the dweller in the country, for in a
town no sane man can be in two minds on the matter. With a careering,
mephitic dust choking up all organs of perception, and the risk of being
cloven to the chine by a roof slate or lassoed by a loose electric wire,
no one can think of wind, hot or cold, without heartily wishing it gone.
But in the country, though for my old enemy, the northeast wind, I have
nothing but fear and detestation at all seasons, warm gales, whether in
winter or summer, come as often in friendly as in inimical guise. Like
certain of the Hindu gods, the wind must be content to be treated
according to the outcome of its activities, and receive laudation or
revilement as this prove fair or foul.

All through to-day the south-west wind has been volleying up the combe,
and everywhere in the village there has been a hubbub of slamming doors
and rattling casements, and the flack and clutter of linen drying on the
garden lines. People fought their way step by step down the hill against
the wind, and tripped lightly up it, the oldest and feeblest forced into
a smart jog-trot. Aprons were blown over faces, and hats snatched off at
corners. The trees overshadowing the village have been lashing together,
and roaring out a deep continuous song. The three thatchers on the inn
sign, each with a gilded hod of straw, have been flashing signals up to
my window every time the sun broke through the flying storm-wrack; and a
hundred times in the long day some riding witch of a rain-cloud has tried
to drench us, but each time the south-west gale has seized it by the
tattered skirts and chevied it away over the hills before it could shed a
dozen drops.

But it has been a good wind all through, and fine heartening weather; and
I have been glad to be abroad in it whenever I could spare or steal an
hour. Said the old vicar, as we climbed up Windle Hill together this
morning, his long white beard flowing out before him as he lay back on
the blast:

‘I know what you would have done, if I had let you choose the way. You
would have struck deep into the woods, like the butterflies, and missed
all the healthy buffeting of it. But there is only one place for a man
to-day, and that is on the open Down. It never pays in the long-run in
life to study how to keep out of the way of hard knocks.’

The sunshine raced ahead of us, vaulted the hilltop, and was gone. A
scatter of warm rain drove out of the grey heaven. I turned up my
coat-collar just in time to intercept the returning sun.

‘True,’ said I, ‘but the good of hard knocks depends not on their
frequency, but on the profit you extract from them. I get and keep
designedly as much of this as I can, so a little goes a long way with me.
And I love the quiet and stillness of the deep wood, when the wind is
roaring out in the open. If we had gone there to-day, we should have
found the rosebay willowherbs in full bloom, and more butterflies upon
them than you could find in a week elsewhere. Besides, the ups in life
are just as good for one as the downs. I can admire the old Scotch pine
that clings to the bare hill-top through a century of winter storms, but
I must not be inconsiderate of the lilies.’

The old Windlecombe vicar has a way of dealing with notions of this kind
which is good for his hearer, whether he allow himself convinced, or
consider his dignity affronted. He ventilates such ideas as he would let
light into a room, by dashing a rough hand through the dust-grimed
window. It is a method unpicturesque and often brutal, but effective and
salutary in the main. I owe him gratefully many a pretty rainbow bubble
of conceit exploded.

‘Pluck your head out of the sand,’ quoth he, ‘for your ragged
hinder-parts are visible to all the world of honest eyes. The pine and
the lily are not choosing creatures. To them is their environment
allotted, but to you is given the wilful fashioning of it. A man may be
either gold or iron—made either for beauty or for use. But the one will
not decorate, nor the other uphold the world, if he shirk the fires that
must first refine or temper him. So away with your foolish Sahara
tricks, and get on with the work the moment brings you.’

By this he meant I was to look about me, and tell him what I saw as we
went along, a duty in which I was too often an unintentional malingerer.

‘Yesterday a Londoner was in the village,’ I told him, for a start, ‘and
he was scoffing at our Downs. “Where,” said he, “are the green highlands
of Sussex I have read so much about? Why, the hills are not green, but
brown!” And it was quite true at this season, and from his standpoint
down in the valley. Up here we can see what gives the Downs their rich
bronze colour in summer-time. From below they looked parched and
sunburnt, as though nothing could grow for the heat and drought. But now
I can see that the general brown tone is really a mingling of a thousand
living hues. Looking straight down as you walk, the turf is as green as
ever it was; but a dozen paces onward all this fresh verdure is lost
under the greys and drabs of the seeding grass-heads. Then again, the
brown colour is due just as much to the blending of all other colours
that the eye separates at a close view, but confuses from afar. We are
walking on a carpet of flowers; we cannot avoid trampling them, if we are
to set foot to the ground at all. Yellow goatsbeard and vetchling, and
the little trefoil with the blood-red tips to its petals, and golden
hawkweed everywhere; for blues, there are millions of plantains, and
sheepsbit, and harebells; and the wild thyme purples half the hillside,
making the bright carmine of the orchids brighter still wherever it
blows. But I have not reckoned in half the flowers that—’

‘Hold, enough! I am sick of your Londoner, and of every human being for
the moment. Listen to the free, glorious wind! Down in the valley there
we always think of the wind as a creature with a voice—something striding
through the sky and calling as it goes. But up here we know that it is
the earth that calls. Hark to it swishing, and surging, and sighing for
miles round! The sound is never overhead on these treeless wastes, but
always underfoot. You keep head and shoulders up in the soundless
sunshine, and walk in a maelstrom. Did you ever think that the larks
always sing in the midst of silence, no matter how hard the wind blows?
Those are George Artlett’s sheep we are coming to, are they not? I ought
to know the old dog’s talk!’

I scanned the hills about me, but could see no sign of sheep, shepherd,
or dog. But as we drew to the edge of the wide plateau we were
traversing, and got a view down into the steep combe beyond, there sure
enough were all three. The sheep, just growing artistically presentable
after their June shearing, were scattered over the deep bottom, quietly
nibbling at the turf. Far below, in the shadow of a single stunted
hawthorn, sat young George Artlett scribbling on his knee. No doubt
Rowster had been lying by his master’s side, until our shadows struck
sheer down upon him from the brink of the hill. But now he was up and
pricking his ears sharply in our direction, growling menaces and wagging
a welcome at one and the same time. I gave the Reverend what I saw in
few words. To my surprise he began to descend the steep hill-side.

[Picture: “Southdown Ewes”]

‘After all,’ said he, ‘George Artlett and I never really fell out. But
we agreed to differ, and that is the most fatal, most lasting
disagreement of all. I should have known better. I think I will risk a
hand to him again.’

As we clambered down the precipitous slope, into the shelter of the
combe, the wind suddenly stopped its music in our ears. There fell a
dead calm about us. At the bottom, we seemed to be walking between two
widely separated, yet almost perpendicular cliffs of green, with a great
span of blue sky far above, across which the heavy cumuli raged
unceasingly. George Artlett got to his feet at our approach, thrust his
paper into his pocket, and gravely clawed off his old tarpaulin hat. He
took the hand held out to him with wonder, and a little hesitation.

‘And how fares the good work, George?’

Artlett was silent a moment. He tried to read the sightless eyes.

‘Shepherdin’, sir? ’Tis allers slow goin’, but goin’ all th’ time. We
did famous with th’ wool, an’—’

‘George, leave the wool alone. You know what I mean.’

George Artlett swung round on his heel, and swung back again. He counted
the fingers on his gnarled hand slowly one by one.

‘Be ut priest to lost runagate, or be ut man to man?’ he asked, looking
up suddenly.

‘It is just one child in the dark way putting forth hand to another.
For, to the best of us, George, comradeship can be no more than a
heartening touch and sound of a footstep going a common road, and the
voice of a friend. Do you see a light at the end of your path?’

‘Ay! I do that!’

‘Look closer. Is not the light just the shine of a Beautiful Face, very
grave and sorrowful, but with a great joy beginning to spread over it,
and—’

Though the deep voice stemmed on in the sunny quiet of the combe, I could
distinguish the words no longer; for something, that was by no means part
of me but of a more delicate nurture, had set my feet going against my
will. I was halfway down the long alley of the combe before I stopped to
wait for the old vicar. And then, looking backward, I fell to staring
with all my eyes.

‘Reverend,’ said I, after he had rejoined me, and we had walked on
together in silence for a minute or two, ‘I wish you could see what is
before me now.’

I had brought him out of his reverie with a jerk. ‘Well: on with it!’

‘I see a green sunlit space, with the shadow of an old hawthorn upon it.
And in the shadow I see two men kneeling, bareheaded, their faces turned
up to the sky. And with all my heart I wish there were a third with
them; but there is not another fit for such company, to my certain
knowledge, within ten thousand miles.’

He seemed to weigh his reply before he uttered it. But:—

‘You’re a good fool,’ said he, ‘and I love you. And there were three
there, nay! a Fourth,—all the time.’

III

In winter-time, ‘when nights are dark and ways be foul,’ I can conceive
of no pleasanter aspect of village life at any season than the indoor,
fireside one; but when the long radiant August evenings are here, there
is equally no other time for me. More and more, with every year that
glides by, life in Windlecombe at this season seems to focus itself round
the Seven Sisters’ trees upon the green. All the summer day through, the
old folk gather there; and always a low murmur of voices comes drifting
up to my window from their garrulous company. But it is after the day’s
work is done, and all, able or disable, are free for recreation, that the
true life of the place begins.

There is something about the ease-taking of men physically tired after a
long day’s work in fresh air and sunshine, that fascinates one who is
only mind-weary, and that alone from much chaffering with pen and ink.
Though you have but cramped limbs to stretch out over the green sward,
and, by comparison, but a torpid, attenuated flow in your veins, somewhat
of your neighbour’s healthful, dog-tired humour over-brims upon you; and
after a pipe or two, and an hour’s slow desultory chat, you can almost
forget the tang of the study, the reek of old leather burdening
imprisoned air, and congratulate yourself on a man’s work manfully done,
albeit vicariously—the day-long tussle with the good earth, mammoth
‘nunches’ and ‘eleveners’ devoured under hedgerows, a shirt a score of
times soused with honest sweat, and as many dried by the thirsty harvest
sun.

All the old Windlecombe faces were there to-night under the drooping pine
boughs, and most of the middle-aged ones. The younger men and boys were
down on the Mead at cricket practice, and there they would stay as long
as a glimmer of daylight remained in the sky. But the sun had still a
fathom to go before it would lie, red and lusty, caught in the toils of
the far-off Stavisham hills. I evaded with what grace I could the cake
of ship’s tobacco held out to me by Captain Stallwood, accepting as fair
compromise a charge from the tin box of old Tom Clemmer, his dearest
friend. Gradually the talk got back to the point where my coming had
intersected it.

‘’Tis trew,’ said the Captain now, ‘trew as I sets here on a plank o’ th’
ould _King_, as ye cut an’ shaped yersel’, Dan’l.’

I followed his glance round the circle of benches. There was not a head
among the company but was wagging dubiously. Old Daniel Dray’s face was
an incredulous, a horrified blank.

‘What!’ said he, ‘a human critter swaller seventeen live—’

‘I seed it,’ interrupted the Captain, pointing his pipe-stem solemnly at
us for emphasis, ‘I seed it wi’ my own pair o’ eyes. Little lirrupy
green chaps, they was, all hoppin’ an’ somersettin’ i’ th’ baasket. An’
th’ blackamoor, ’a putts ’a’s mouth to th’ lip o’ it, an’ “hap! hap!” sez
he, an’ every time ’a sez it, wan o’ ’em jumps in. An’ when they was all
down, ’a gies a sort o’ gruggle, an’ skews ’a’s head ower th’ baasket,
an’ “hap! hap!” sez he agen, an’ every time ’a sez it, out pops— But
there! ’tis no sense tellin’ ye! Folks sees naun o’ th’ wureld i’ little
small village places, an’ an’t got no believes.’

He was silent a while, then brought out a tobacco-box like a brass
halfpenny bun, and held it up to the common view. It was old and
battered, and had certain initials scratched on the lid. The Captain
fingered it in mournful reminiscence.

‘Lookee now,’ he said, ‘I doan’t rightly know as I ever telled ye.
“G.B.” That bean’t Tom Stall’ard, be ut? Ah! No, sez all on ye, ready
enow. ’Twur George’s, ould George Budgen as— Dan’l, what year war’t as
I went aff to sea?’

Daniel Dray’s lips moved in silent calculation.

‘Seventy-three belike, or maybe seventy-four, ’cause ye’d been gone, Joe,
a year afore Harker’s coo slipped the five-legged heifer, an’ that wur—’

‘Ay! trew, Dan’l. An’ George Budgen, ’a wur shipmate along o’ me purty
soon arter I gooed away. Well: an’ this here baccy-box—th’ least time as
I seed ut i’ George’s haand, ’a took a fill out av ut, jest afore ’a went
on watch. An’ ut come on to blaw that night—Gorm! how ’t did blaw! An’
_rain_, not aarf! An’ i’ th’ marnin’ never a sign o’ pore George Budgen
to be seen! Well now, full a fortnit arter that, what ’ud we do but
ketch a gurt thresher on a trail-line, an’ inside o’ th’ crittur what ’ud
we find but a halibut, big as a tay-tray, all alive an’ lippin’, ’a wur.
Sez th’ cappen—I wur ship’s-boy then—“Joe,” sez he, “git an’ clane un,
an’ I’ll ha’ un fer me supper,” ’a sez. Now then, Dan’l, ye’ll never
believe ut, but trew as ye sets there, clink goes my knife agen summut
inside o’ th’ halibut, an’—’

‘Goo on, Stallard!’

‘He, he! We all knaws what be acomin’, cap’n!’

‘An’ there wur—ah! but ye’ll ne’er believe ut, not if ye was Jonah
hisself—there, inside o’ th’ halibut wur a gurt rusty hook as— What-say,
Dan’l?’

‘Doan’t ’ee say ut agen, Dan’l! You a reg’lar prayers-gooer, too!’

The Captain filled his pipe from the box, tragically ruminating in the
silence that followed.

‘Ah! pore George Budgen! ’A little knowed as ’twould be th’ laast time
as ’a ’d pass his tobaccer-box to a friend!’

The sun had long set, and the dusk was creeping up apace. Here and there
in the shadowy length of the street, lights were beginning to break out.

Where we sat under the dense canopy of pine-boughs, night had already
asserted itself, and to one another we were little more than an arc of
glowing pipe-bowls. Old Stallwood chuckled richly from his corner. A
sort of inspiration of mendacity seemed to have come over him to-night.

‘But Lor’ bless ye!’ he went on, ‘that bean’t nauthin’!—not when ye’ve
been five-an’-thirty year at sea. I knowed a man wanst as worked in a
steam sawmill way over in Amurricky somewheres; an’ what did ’a do wan
fine marnin’ but get hisself sawed i’ two pieces; an’ wan piece died—th’
doctor cud do nought to save ut. But t’other piece kep’ alive for ten
year arterwards—ah! an’ did a man’s work every day!’

Old Daniel bounced to his feet. He breathed hard for a full half-minute.

‘Joe Stall’ard!’ he said at last, severely, ‘shame on ye fer a reg’lar,
hout-an’-hout, ould leear! A man cut in two? An’ lived ten year
arter—leastways th’ wan part o’ him? Fer shame, Joe! ’Tis traipsin’
about i’ all they heathen countries, I reckons, as has spiled ye! Ah,
well, well-a-day! There they be, lightin’ up at th’ Thatchers! Coom
along, Tom Clemmer!’

Three squares of red shone out amidst the twinkling dust of the street,
denoting the curtained windows of the inn. It was the signal for which
all had been waiting, and a general stir took place in the assembly. At
length none remained about me but the old seaman. He had said nothing
while the dismemberment of the group was in progress, but had sat shaking
in silent merriment. Now he, too, got slowly to his feet.

‘’Tis wunnerful,’ he observed, moving away, ‘real onaccountable, th’
little simple things as some folks wunt b’lieve. There be a thing now,
as—’

But this story of partitioned, yet still living humanity, even though it
came from America, was too much also for me; and I told him so. He
stopped in his easy saunter towards the inn.

‘’Tis trew!’ he averred as stoutly as ever. His rich, oily chuckle came
over to me through the darkness. ‘Mind ye! I didn’t say as th’ man wur
sawed into two ekal parts: ’twur but th’ thumb av him as wur taken off.
Belike I’ll jest step acrost to th’ Thatchers now, an’ tell that to
Dan’l.’

SEPTEMBER

AUGUST holiday-makers in Windlecombe are mainly of the normal, obvious
kind, the people for whom guide-books and picture postcards are produced,
and by whom the job-masters and the boat proprietors gain a livelihood.
But September brings to the village a wandering crew of an altogether
different complexion. There is something about the temperate sunshine
and general slowing up and sweetening of life during this month, that
draws from their hiding-nooks in the city suburbs a class of man and
woman for whom I have long entertained the profoundest respect. With
every year, as soon as September comes round, I find myself looking out
for these stray, for the most part solitary, folk, and, in quite a
humble, unpretentious spirit, taking them beneath my avuncular wing.

That they seek the quiet of an inland village in September, and not the
feverish, belated distractions of the seaside town, is an initial point
in their favour. But almost invariably they bring with them a much more
subtle recommendation. They are down for a holiday, but they have come
entirely without premeditation. Suddenly yielding to a sort of migratory
impulse, they have locked up dusty chambers, or left small shops to the
care of wives, or begged a few precious days from niggardly employers;
and come away on a spate of emotional longing for country quiet and
greenery, irresistible this time, though generally the impulse has been
felt and resisted every autumn for twenty years back. Indeed, there must
be some specially fatal quality about this period of time, for I
constantly hear the same story—no holiday taken for twenty years.

At noon to-day, after a long tramp through the fields, I came up the
village street, and paused irresolutely outside the Three Thatchers Inn.
The morning had been hot, and the walk tiring; moreover, it was the first
of September, and the guns had been popping distressfully in all the
coverts by the way. I knew that before sundown a brace or two of
partridges would be certain to find their road to my door; but this did
not prove, and never has proved, compensation for the flurry and
disturbance carried by the noise of the guns into all my favourite
conning-places, or arenas for quiet thought. The whole world of wild
life was in a panic, and I with it.

The red-ochred doorstep of the inn glowed in the sunshine at my feet, and
from the cool darkness beyond came a chink of glasses and murmur of many
tongues. It all seemed eminently consolatory for the moment’s mood.
Within there, no one would fire a gun off at my ear, nor stalk past me
with a shoulder-load of limp, sanguinary spoil, nor warn me out of my
favourite coppices with a finger to the lip, as though a nation of babies
slumbered within. I was a lost man even before I began to hesitate. I
stood my stout furze walking-stick in the porch beside a drover’s staff,
a shepherd’s crook, and three or four undenominational cudgels; and
plunged down the two steps into the bar.

Now, before my eyes had accustomed themselves to the subdued light, and I
could see what company was about me, I had become aware of a strange
odour in the air. It was the scent of a tobacco, happily unknown in
Windlecombe: neither wholly Latakia nor Turkish, not honeydew alone nor
red Virginia, cavendish nor returns, but a curious internecine blend of
all these. I knew it at once to be something for which I have a
constitutional loathing—one of the new town mixtures, wherein are
confused and mutually stultified all the good smoking-weeds in the world.

Looking more narrowly about me, after the usual greetings, I discovered a
vast and elaborate meerschaum pipe in the corner, and behind it a little
diffident smiling man. But this could not entirely account for the
overpowering exotic reek in the room. I missed the familiar smell of our
own good Windlecombe shag, although there were half a dozen other pipes
in full blast round me. And then I realised the situation. The stranger
had seduced all the company to his pestilent combination; and now, as I
lowered at him through the haze, he was holding out his pouch even to me,
who would not have touched his garbage if it had been the last pipe-fill
left on earth. But he took my curt, almost surly refusal as if it were
an intended kindness.

‘Ah! you do not smoke? Well: it does seem a kind of insult to the pure
country air. But in towns, you know, what with the din and the dust, and
the strain on one’s nerves, everybody— And of course I must not quarrel
with my bread-and-butter!’

I produced my own pipe and pouch, and filled brutally under his very
nose. Serenely he watched the operation, and without a trace of offence.

‘I am in the trade, as I was telling these gentlemen here when you came
in. Do you know the Walworth Road, in London? My shop is just behind
the Elephant, and any day you are passing, I— But wasn’t I glad to get
away, if only for the few hours! And I do assure you, sir, I haven’t
been out of London for nearly—nearly—’

‘Twenty years, I suppose?’

He looked at me in placid surprise.

‘Lor’, how did you know that now? But it is quite true. Being
single-handed, you see, it isn’t easy to— But I was glad, I tell you!
And I had never seen a real country village in my life, until I got out
of the train at Stavisham and walked on here. Isn’t it quiet! And how
funny it seems—no asphalt-paving, and no wires running all ways over the
house-tops, and the singing-birds all loose in the trees! And flowers!
I suppose there is a law to prevent people picking ’em: there were no end
along by the road I came.’

Somehow my heart warmed to this inconsiderable by-product of civilisation
that had strayed amongst us; and presently, as much to my own surprise as
his, I found myself loitering down the hill again, with him at my elbow,
having promised to show him that there were other flowers in the country
beside the dust-throttled daisies and dandelions of the roadside.

We took the path that runs between the river and the wood. He soon let
his pipe go out, for he moved in open-mouthed wonder all the way, which
rendered smoking impracticable. At last we came to a bend in the river,
where the bank sloped gently down to the water-side covered with all the
rich-hued September growths, and we sat down to rest. I did not plague
him with the names of things, nor with any talk at all; but lay, for the
most part silently, watching the effect of the place upon him, as one
might study the demeanour of a dormouse let loose amidst the like
surroundings, straight from Ratcliff Highway.

He took off coat and hat, and sat quite still for awhile with legs drawn
up, and his chin upon his knees. But presently he fell to wandering
about like a child, ducking his pallid bald head over each flower as he
came to it, but keeping his itching fingers resolutely clasped behind his
back. It was a brave show, even for this brave time of year. Though
other months afford perhaps a greater variety in colour and kind, Nature
in early autumn seems more forceful and impressive because she
concentrates her energies into the dealing of the one blow, the urging of
the one appeal upon the colour sense. It was the Purple Month. Look
where we would, the same royal colour filled the sunshine. Purple
loosestrife edged the river, and purple knapweed, thistles, heather,
purple thyme and willowherb and climbing vetch hemmed us in on every
side. Paler of hue, yet still of the same regal dye, the wild mint and
cranesbill, marjoram and calamint, crowded upon one another; and close to
the water’s edge, the Michaelmas daisies were already in full
flower—under both banks the soil was tinged with their pure cool lilac,
mirrored again yet more faintly in the drowsy water below.

For half an hour, perhaps, the little tobacconist wandered up and down
this enchanted place; and then he came back to me, treading on tiptoe,
hushed, and solemn-eyed, as if he were in church.

‘You live hereabouts?’ he asked, in a voice little above a whisper, ‘all
the year round, don’t you? And nothing to do but just put on a hat
whenever you want to come here, and in ten minutes here you are! Nothing
to pay, and no trouble. Oh, my stars!’

‘And it is not always the same, you know. I pass this way nearly every
week, and there is always something different. The flowers change with
every month. You hear different birds singing, according to the season.
The leaves on the trees come and go, and the sky shows you a new picture
every time you look at it. Even the river changes. It is the top of the
tide now: that log, floating out there, has not moved a dozen feet in the
last five minutes. But in an hour’s time the water will be driving down
swift and strong, and all the reeds and rushes, that now stand up quite
straight and still in the sunshine, will bending and trembling in the
flow.’

‘Ah!’ He crowded a perfectly bewildering variety of emotions into the
breathed monosyllable. ‘Is that a nightingale singing over there?’

‘No; you are too late for nightingales: they have done singing these two
months and more. That is a robin. The robins have just begun to sing
again after their summer silence; and when that happens, you know the
summer is almost done.’

He sat now mute at my side for so long, that at last I must steal a
glance at him. I saw him brush a hand hastily across his eyes.

‘I—I am glad I came, of course,’ said he, musing, ‘but—but I have been
the worst kind of fool all the same. Just think of going back there
to-night! Lor’! just think of it! Yesterday morning I watered the
geraniums in the window-boxes, and gave the canary his seed; and, says I,
“Here’s singing-birds and flowers, as good as any you’ll get in the
country!” Then I went to the shop door, and saw a cart full of straw
going by, and another of green cabbages for Boro’ Market. “Lor’!” I
says, “the country comes on wheels to your very door in London! London
for me!” And now I’ll never get that feeling back again, no, never! The
very worst kind of fool, I _don’t_ think!’

Close by us there grew a great tuft of valerian. As he sat staring
tragically at its disc of deep red blossom, butterflies came to it with
every moment, sipped awhile, then passed on. Painted ladies, red
admirals, little tortoiseshells always in twos or threes; finally a
peacock butterfly sailed over to the valerian and settled there, her rich
colours aflare in the sunshine. She spread out her great vanes, the
upper covering the lower. Then she gently slid her upper wings forward,
and gradually the wonderful spots on the lower wings appeared, like a
pair of slowly opening, drowsy, violet eyes. The little tobacconist
breathed hard.

‘I can see it all clear enough,’ he said tremulously. ‘A man gets a real
chance here. Come worry, come sickness, come bad luck, come anything you
like—all you have got to do is to open your eyes and ears, and off it
goes like the bundle of sins in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ book. But in
London—’ He stopped short; then, in a tone of deep, despairing disgust,
‘Geraniums!—Canaries!—Cartloads of cabbages! bah!’

I had not found myself confronted by so difficult a proposition for many
a long day. If only the Reverend had been there! But there was nothing
for it but to try a joust with the situation alone.

‘Depend upon it,’ said I, ‘if coming amongst the beautiful natural things
of the world has made you despise the mean, ugly, necessary parts of your
life, then you have been a fool indeed—one of the worst kind. But are
you really the sort of fool you think? And have you not overstated both
cases alike? In neither town nor country is there all of good, or all of
evil. There are plenty of geraniums and cabbages in Windlecombe,
and—alas!—canaries. And in London there is plenty of beauty, if you look
for it with the right eyes.’

‘Beauty?—in London?’ he repeated incredulously.

‘Yes, truly; and the people who see it, and enjoy it most, are just those
people who have the deepest knowledge of, and love for, the natural
things of the country-side. Now, shall I tell you what sort of a fool
you really are?’

He thought a moment, eyeing me in some perplexity. ‘Well—yes,’ said he
at last, ‘if it isn’t too much trouble.’

‘It is a lot of trouble, and I am not sure I can do it. But I will try.
Did you ever hear of the saying, “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to
be wise?”’

‘No: I can’t say that I ever—’

‘Well, you have fallen right into that trap. You have given yourself
twenty years of that kind of bliss, and now you have got to pay for it.
But what was it made you start off this morning in such a hurry to get to
the country, when only yesterday you were quite content with your
window-boxes and your screeching yellow gewgaw?’

He considered a little, then blushed to his eyes.

‘It was an old book,’ he said mysteriously, looking round apparently to
make certain we were alone, ‘nothing but an old book on a bookstall. I
picked it up just out of curiosity as I went by last night, and there
were some dried flowers in it—dog-roses, I think. And then I looked up
and saw the moon shining very small and bright high up in the sky; and it
came over me that though she kept one eye dutifully on the Walworth Road,
with the other eye she might well be looking down on the country lane
where those roses grew years ago. And thinks I, all of a creep, like,
Why can’t a man look two ways at once; and if he must give one eye to
business, why can’t he give the other to just what he likes? And then
I—’

‘And then you certainly left off being the kind of fool I mean—left off
for ever. Well: that saves us both a lot of trouble, for we are both
wrong about your case, it seems. You need not fear to go home to-night.
You will find those geraniums as fresh and sweet as the valerian there,
and just as populous of butterflies. And the canary—you will hear in his
song every morning the notes of all the wild birds that have sung to you
to-day. And when next a wagonload of straw goes by your shop, it will
not be mere straw, but a field of wheat under the country sunshine: the
sound of the wind in the Walworth telephone wires will be for you only
the rustle of wind in the corn. That is what I meant by London beauty.’

That summer is drawing to its end, and autumn close at hand, one need not
look at the calendar to know. Throughout a morning’s walk, signs of
imminent change crop up now at every turn. The wild arums that you have
forgotten since last you saw them turning their pale green cowls from the
light, give out a bold glitter of scarlet in the shady deeps under every
hedgerow. Each day sees the hips and haws growing ruddier. Though
September is scarce half gone, the green bracken-fronds in the woods are
already alight at the tips with crimson and gold; and the heather on the
combe-side has lost its clear rose-red. The song of the bees in it seems
as loud as ever, but for every tuft of living blossom there are two that
are faded and brown. The good times are nearly over for the
honey-makers, and each day the gathering of a full load of nectar means
travelling farther afield.

I wonder why it is I always look forward to the renewal of the year’s
life with so much eagerness and impatience, and yet meet its decline with
such surpassing equanimity. Am I—I have often asked myself lately—the
same being who industriously searched the river bank for a whole bleak
February morning in quest of the first coltsfoot, greeting it with an
unconscionable extravagance of rejoicing: I who now tread the same way in
nowise perturbed, nor even unelated, at the obvious fact of each day’s
lessened ardour? The truth that the year is already on the long downward
road, riding for its winter fall, awakens in me not a pang of regret.
Indeed, I neither remember the departed magnificence of June as something
lost, nor regard the ever-diminishing September days as portent of
penurious times to come. With autumn, as with advancing age, when once
each is assured, irrevocable, the natural tendency seems to be towards a
looking neither backward nor forward, but towards a joyful acceptance of
the things that are. And so, at these times, whatever our declared
principles, we one and all develop, or degenerate, into optimists.

But, of a truth, it needs very little of this mental condiment to be
happy in a Sussex Downland village in September. Perhaps none but the
very old can, at any time, sincerely avow a repugnance towards machinery
in farming: certainly, at this season of the year, the whole spirit of
village life receives benefit from it. They have been threshing up at
the farm to-day, and from sunrise to sunset, all through the still,
quiet, golden hours, the voice of the threshing mill has permeated
everything, blent itself with the song of the robins in the garden, with
the chime from the smithy, with all the other sounds of labour that go to
make up the silence of country dwelling-places. I have come to look upon
this sound as the veritable keynote of autumn, and to believe that it has
an influence on all hearts at this season, entirely underrated by those
whose business it is to study rural affairs.

It is the fashion to contemn the old melodramatic trick of still-music;
but, for my own part, I have never been able to resist the low sobbing
and sighing of the violins when the stage-story is being cleared up, all
wrongs righted, and the villain given his due. The speech itself is
nothing to me. It is seldom regarded, and remembered never. I should be
just as deeply moved if all that leashed, melodious passion went as
setting to ‘Old Mother Hubbard’ or ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ And
on the same principle, when this beautiful, solemn voice of the threshing
mill dwells in the autumnal air, I find myself doing the commonest things
with a sense of high Fate and speeding of the world’s progress. But,
indeed, Nature works throughout largely on this still-music plan, and
therein lies one inestimable advantage of living in the country. Bird
song, to all intents and purposes, unceasing throughout the year—the
songs of stream, river, and sea—the songs of the four winds—all work
together for good on the hearts of those men and women who, by their own
design, or by external destiny, have been led to keep their thread of
life running by green woods and fields.

As the sun went down behind the hills, and left the world afloat in
wine-coloured mist, every sound of work ceased in the village, save this
rich throbbing voice of the threshing mill up at the farm. I went out
into the dreaming light to listen to it. From where I sat on the
churchyard wall, I could make out that they were prolonging the work into
the dusk, so that the last rick might be finished now, and the threshing
gang move on to-night to the next farm. There was the deep sound of the
mill itself, one tremendous baritone note succeeding another, each held
for a moment, and then suddenly changing to one higher or lower in the
sonorous clef. Apart from this, I could distinguish the fuss and fume of
the engine, as it drove its white breath in little unsteady gusts up
against the violet calm of the sky. And there was another sound—the
flapping song of the driving-belt—a note that punctuated everything, as
though some invisible conductor were beating time to the general
symphony. But the combined effect of all was infinitely harmonious and
restful.

Yet I had come out, in the main, to hear, not this familiar part of the
music, but something about it that I loved to hear most of all; and this
was the stopping of the machine. It was almost dark before the last
sheaf went to the mill, and steam was shut off. And then the wonderful
note began. The machine took an appreciable time to run down. But now
there was no upward inflection in its voice. Note by note, each note
more drawn out and quieter, the rich tones fell through every stage of an
octave, until at last they died away in the profoundest, softest bass.
Even then I fancied I could feel the solid earth still shuddering with a
music too deep for human ear.

III

I think the last of the summer boating parties to Windlecombe has come
and gone; at least for a week I have seen and heard nothing of revelry.
But the thin stream of odd folk still dribbles into the village from road
or Down.

There were two elderly ladies, obviously sisters, wandering about the
place one day, who afforded material for commentary to most curious
tongues. Severely and sparely clad in grey tweeds, wearing black felt
hats each wrapped about with a wisp of grey gauze, and gold spectacles,
over the shining hafts of which little tight glossy-white ringlets
depended, pink serene faces inclined to be downy, and voices low and
gentle yet extraordinarily penetrating and clear—they crept about the
village all day long in an ecstasy of enjoyment, peering into cottage
doorways, looking over garden fences, watching the children at play on
the green and the mothers hanging out their linen, gazing with timorous
delight down into the wheelwright’s sawpit, and into the black deeps of
Tom Clemmer’s forge. And all the while, though they kept up an incessant
low interchange between themselves, they accosted no one. Apparently
Windlecombe was to them a sort of spectacle, half peep-show and half
menagerie, where everything might be looked at, but nothing touched. The
last I saw of them, they were standing at the far end of the green,
looking towards the seats under the Seven Sisters where two old rustics
slumbered peacefully in the sun. The pair were in earnest consultation,
and obvious, though wholly affectionate difference on some point. At
length one, apparently the more ancient by a year or two, raised her
hands with a gesture of reluctant consent. And then the other timidly
approached the old men, presented each with what, at a distance, appeared
to be a surplus sandwich drawn from a reticule, and returned to her
companion, giving her—before they made off down the street together—a
grateful, childish little hug.

On another day a very different pair dropped down from the skies amongst
us. They were two men scarcely of middle age, the one with a swirl of
coppery hair topping a high forehead, the other sombre-locked, low-browed
and swarthy; both alike shabby, unshaven and unkempt. They came swinging
down the hill-path together, hatless and barefooted, laden up with
certain dusty travelling-gear, the one of them carrying in addition a
leather-cased violin. As they strode through the village street they
made the place resound with their laughter, jovially greeted all and
sundry that chanced in their way, and finally disappeared through the
door of the Three Thatchers Inn.

Thereafter, sitting at work by the window, I forgot all about them, until
a far-off strain of music gradually forced itself upon my ear. I could
make out the violin, played as though it were three instruments at least,
and above it such a voice as I had heard only once in my life before. I
saw that passers-by were halting in the roadway to listen. Some were
crowded round the inn window, craning over one another’s heads. Then the
music stopped, the pair of harmonious vagabonds reappeared, and made
straight for the Seven Sisters, all the folk jostling at their heels. A
moment later, the violin struck into an air that sent my pen clattering
to the paper, and my feet speeding towards the house-door. It was the
‘X—,’ the tenor song from ‘Q—,’ played by a master hand. Before I
reached the fringe of the little crowd—taking the old vicar by the arm as
I went—the copper-haired man had mounted upon the seat and had begun to
sing the incomparable melody, hurling it over the heads of the crowd with
a passion, a force, yet with a surpassingly delicate sweetness of tone,
that drew the people spellbound closer and closer with every moment round
him. The old parson’s grip tightened on my sleeve.

‘What is he like?’ he whispered. And when I had told him—‘Strange that
he should come here and— But there can be few with a voice like that: it
must be— Ah! listen! Don’t you know now?’

For the song had changed. The violin had slowed down into a simple quiet
undertone. And then there pealed out upon us an air that a year ago had
been made famous by one man alone, and he almost the greatest in his art.
As he sang, his great chest heaving in the sunshine, I watched him, and
once he looked swiftly in our direction. He gave us the whole piece,
that finishes on a note incredibly high, yet is not really an end to the
song, for the note is one picked out, as it were, at random in the scale.
Then, to my amazement, he got down from the bench, took the hat from the
head of the nearest boy, and went gravely about among the folk,
collecting pennies. From me he levied toll as from the rest, but instead
of holding out the hat to the Reverend, he placed it, money and all, into
his hands, adding to the goodly store a shining piece from his own
pocket. ‘You will know what to do with it,’ said he, his grey eyes
twinkling merrily.

A minute later the pair were trudging off together down the street, as
they had come, with their dusty, travel-stained satchels swinging behind
them, and their long hair blowing in the breeze.

Yes, the summer is gone, in very truth. With every day now, and every
hour of the day, the writing on the wall shows plainer. While the
hushed, hot times endured, it was still possible to believe red autumn as
far away as ever; for not a leaf in oak or elm has changed, nor will
change, perhaps, for weeks to come. But the tell-tale winds of the
equinox are upon us, bringing the very voice of autumn with them; and the
acorns are falling by the river, and the thistle-down drifting white upon
the hills.

I began this day badly—badly, that is to say, from my own private point
of view; which is a point, it may well be, like Euclid’s, having position
but no dimensions, yet a point nevertheless. Chancing to wake with the
dawn, I saw that the day was beginning with a beautiful smoke-pearl
trellis in the east, behind which welled up an ever-strengthening
fountain of silver white. Coming presently out upon the green under this
pure pale glow of morning, I was startled by a cry that came echoing from
the misty twilight of the hills.

‘Hi-up! Hi-up! Voller, voller, voller!’

Hoarse, harsh, undeniably brutal it sounded in the sweet, snow-white
lustre of the virgin light. And then came the shrill blare of the
huntsman’s horn, the confused yelping and baying of the pack, and the
dull thunder of beating hoofs, as the hunt drove over the hill-top, and
fell to drawing Windle coverts.

At once the silent village awoke. Windows were thrown open and heads
appeared. Dark figures burst from cottage doors and went pounding up the
lane that led to the hills. Round the covert the horsemen gathered in a
motionless ring, while the huntsman drove his pack through the
undergrowth, for ever urging them forward with that fierce guttural note,
which was more like the cry of a wolf than a man. At length a fine cub
fox broke cover, and led the whole company a ding-dong chase over the
hills, and out of sight and hearing for good.

Some hours later, I met Farmer Coles and his two sons returning from the
sport, the youngest, a mere schoolboy, mounted on a pony, his head, as he
rode, reaching scarce to his father’s saddle-peak. He was in huge high
spirits, displaying the brush, his share of the spoil, to all
acquaintance as he passed. And the face of this yellow-haired, chubby
child was bedaubed with blood, thick zebra-like streaks of it smudged
across his smooth forehead and rosy baby cheeks. He was going home
delighted, to show to an admiring mother how he had been ‘blooded’ at his
first cub-hunt; and in all that country-side, I thought to myself as I
passed on, there was scarce a man or woman of station and breeding who
would not have applauded son of theirs returning home in such a plight.

Nor, though at the time the thing filled me personally with genuine
horror and loathing, did I condemn it, nor wish to see its like made
impossible in the land. For the sybaritish, lotus-eating danger is too
imminent in our midst for any such fabian trifling: it will be a woeful
day for England when we have bred out of our young manhood the last
instincts of the healthy brute.

I got into Runridge’s skiff, in the absence of its owner, and pushed off
into mid-stream, letting the little craft drift whither it would. Wind
and tide together were setting strongly up-country. Swiftly the reedy
banks glided by, as we bore through the meadows that lie at the foot of
the hills. The summer was gone, indeed; and gone with it that sense of
striving towards achievement. The year seemed to be resting upon its
oars, as I was doing. All its fruit was set: there remained nothing now
but to wait and let it ripen. It was just this waiting and resting that
made up autumn’s greatest charm.

I set my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands, and let the little
boat choose a destiny for the idle pair of us. The bank was high to
windward. We drifted in an almost unruffled calm, while overhead there
sailed by an unending cloud of thistle-down, tiny verticals of sunlit
silver, each gleaming star-like against the morning blue. Most of them
took the broad river at a stride, disappearing over the opposite bank,
but many fell upon the water. Thousands of them floated around me, and
as far as eye could reach the water was grey and misty with them. And
this was only one nook of earth in innumerable miles. How was it, I
asked of the wind above me, that with such inexhaustible store of
thistle-seed, she could not sow the whole land thick with thistles in a
single season, and drive all other things from the fields? The answer
was to be obtained for the mere raising of a hand. For it is not the
thistle-seed that flies, but only the harmless thistle-down. Moreover,
among the millions of air-ships that each thistle-patch sends off upon
the wind throughout a breezy autumn day, not one in fifty ever bore a
seed, or, if bearing it, contrived to carry its burden more than a yard
or two. The curved seed-pod of the thistle is attached to its feathery
volute only by the slenderest thread, and is brushed off by the lightest
touch of the first grass-blade as it sails low over the sward. But the
thistle-down, lightened of its counterpoise, bowls on for ever.

OCTOBER

WITH each October in every year for a long time past, I have watched for
the going of the martins, but have never yet contrived to witness the
moment of their flight. It has always happened in the same way. One day
they have been as busy as ever about the roof-eaves, their chattering
song pervading the house unceasingly from dark to dark. And then a
morning comes, generally towards the end of the first week in the month,
when I awaken to a curious sense of strangeness and loss. First I mark
the unwonted silence outside the windows, and then I guess what has come
about. Looking forth, I see that the little mud-houses, huddled together
in a long row under the eaves, are deserted and silent at last.

But to-day, though I missed the departure of the martins as usual, I was
not wholly disappointed. Getting up in the new silence and throwing the
windows back, I looked along the roof-edge. Save for the chippering and
fluttering of a few sparrows, there was nothing to be seen or heard in
the dim grey light. But it seemed the little army could have been away
only a few minutes before me, for while I looked, I saw the last of them
depart. One single note of the remembered song broke out overhead; there
was a whir of wings, and the little black-and-white bird lanced straight
off, going due south unhesitatingly, as though the vanished throng of her
companions was yet visible far away in the skies.

It was a still, grey, warm morning. There had been no dew. Everything,
as presently I went along by the wood-side, was quite dry; and though it
was barely eight o’clock, all the spiders in the bushes were hard at work
weaving their snares. It was almost perfect spinning weather. On windy
mornings, though the webs must be made, the task is difficult and the
work seldom properly carried out. But to-day there was only a vague air
moving from the south-west, and all the spiders had got to work betimes,
and with light hearts.

The great charm in all nature study is to find out the truth for yourself
at first hand. There are few things in my life I regret so keenly as the
reading of nature books. This has robbed me of many a moment of
pleasurable surprise; for to recognise a commonly accepted fact is poor
substitute for its original discovery, although this discovery may have
been made by others a thousand times before. Looking back over twenty
years’ poking and prying in the woods and fields round about Windlecombe,
I rejoice not so much at the many things I have found out, but at the
fact of so many things still unread of, and still remaining to be
discovered. This morning, as I went along by the bushes in the lee of
the wood, and saw the spiders at work, it suddenly occurred to me that I
knew little or nothing about them; and the recognition of this ignorance
came to me as truest bliss. I fell to looking on at the ingenious,
complicated work with almost as much anxiety and interest as the male
spiders themselves.

For it appears to be only the female who spins a web. The big-bodied
spider, so industriously occupied in every gap of the thicket, is always
the female, though the male is never far off. You are sure to find him
peering out from under one of the adjacent leaves, or treading timidly on
the circumference of the web, trying to attract the attention, and
thereafter, perhaps, the regard of its maker.

Spider nets and their weavers have, I think, never been given quite their
place in the world of wonders. As far as human profit is concerned,
spiders are useless things; and have therefore missed, because, from that
standpoint, they have not merited, popular favour. But no doubt their
ingenuity as craftswomen stands very nearly on a level with that of the
worker honey-bee. The waxen comb of the bee, whose perfection is due to
the combined arts of engineer, mason, and geometrician, is very little
superior in design and carrying-out to the spider’s web.

On these still, grey autumn mornings, the tendency of the eye is not to
wander far afield, but to concern itself with the little things of the
wayside close at hand; and so, more than at any other time of year,
perhaps, the spiders and their ways come in for narrow scrutiny. And
here is something, in the first loving investigation of which the
uninformed, unread observer is much to be envied.

He notices in the outset that these fine silken snares, hung by the
spiders in the hedgerows, are of two kinds—the one placed vertically
across a gap in the surface of the thicket; the other placed
horizontally, closing up some shaft or upward passage-way in the heart of
the green bush. The vertical net is seen to be composed of a number of
threads radiating from a common centre, and upon these threads an
ever-increasing spiral line has been laid, forming a regular, meshed net.
But the horizontal web has none of this geometric neatness. It is a mere
expanse of fine tissue irregularly woven into a sort of crazy pattern,
and slung hammock fashion, completely closing the chimney-like hollow
wherein it has been made. From a view of the finished webs, two other
facts will be noted—the vertical net is supported only by lines springing
from its circumference, and the spider sits at its centre in front; the
horizontal net is suspended by numberless fine lines attached at all
points in its upper surface, while the spider clings to the under side as
she lies in wait for her prey.

But it is in the actual weaving of the nets that the interest of the
onlooker will be chiefly centred. The maker of the vertical, or
cartwheel, pattern of web begins operations in various ways, according to
the conditions imposed upon her by the weather and the spot she has
selected. Webs made in calm seasons, or when only light airs are
stirring, will have few mainstays, and these may be of considerable
length; but in windy times the spider will stretch her snare on only
short hawsers, using as many as may be necessary to make assurance doubly
sure. But in either case she will commence the work in much the same
way.

First she goes to the highest point on the windward side of her gap, and
turning her head to the current, begins to pay out a line behind her. As
this floats out, she continually tries it with her leg until she knows
that the end of the line has caught in the opposite twigs. Then she runs
to the middle of this horizontal line, dragging after her another thread
which she has previously attached to her original starting-point. From
the centre of the first line she lowers herself vertically, always
dragging the second line in her rear, until she reaches a twig below.
Here she draws her second line tight and fastens it, after which she
climbs to the horizontal line and repeats the manœuvre, only this time
from its leeward end. Thus the triangle of mainstays—the first essential
in all spider-web making—is complete.

The weaving of the net within this triangular frame is the next work
undertaken. The spider, when she first dropped from the centre of her
uppermost thread, made a vertical line in descending. Some point on this
line marks the centre of the future cartwheel pattern of web, and this
central point the spider now finds unerringly, and begins to put in one
by one the radiating spokes of the wheel. When all these spokes are in
place, she returns to the centre, and revolving her body quickly, she
forms upon it a close spiral of four or five turns. This is to be her
seat and watch-tower, whence she will keep the whole web under
observation. Having done this, she now—if the morning is at all
breezy—carries temporary stay-lines from spoke to spoke all round the
web, these isolated circles of thread occurring at intervals of an inch
or so between centre and circumference. But on still mornings this part
of her work is omitted as unnecessary, and she proceeds at once to the
main spinning of the net.

The construction of the cross-threads between the spokes of the web is
always commenced at the extreme outer edges of the space to be filled;
and the spider works inwardly, carrying the thread round and round from
spoke to spoke until she arrives within half an inch or so of the central
small spiral. But the two are never joined: an interval is always left
where the web consists of nothing but bare radiating lines. The snare is
now finished. The spider takes up her station in the middle of the net,
with no more to do for the rest of the day but take what fair chance, and
her own crafty ingenuity, may provide.

Yet, having thus watched the making of a spider-web from start to finish,
and having noted all the details of construction here set down, there is
something more about the matter which, if it escape the observer, will
leave him in the rather disgraceful plight of having missed the most
wonderful thing of all.

The spider’s snare is not woven throughout of the same kind of thread.
Two kinds are used, and the difference between them is apparent even to
eyes of very moderate power. While the triangle and the radiating lines
are made of plain silk, the cross-threads are corrugated, and look like
strings of tiny, transparent beads. A touch of the finger will prove
that these beads are really adhering drops of some glutinous fluid, whose
use is not difficult to guess. But how do the beads get on the line,
seeing that this, when first drawn from the spider’s body, is visibly
nothing but a plain filament of silk, like the rest of the web?

The question has been asked many times, and the answer commonly given is,
I have come to believe, an entirely erroneous one. We are told that the
thread used for the cross-bars in a spider’s web, when it first emerges
from the creature’s body, is only smeared, not beaded with the gluten;
but that after attaching each segment of the spiral to the spokes, the
spider gives it a twang with her foot, thus causing the gluten to
separate into beads. Here then is a fact such as one would read in the
nature books, and unquestionably accept. But a little independent
experiment with various kinds of strings, elastic or non-elastic, and
smeared with different glutinous substances, reveals the fact that no
amount of twanging will induce the latter to divide into beads, such as
one sees in the spider line. In every case, the tendency of the gluten
in the experiment is to fly off altogether, or to gather to one side of
the string.

But to any that desires to know the truth of the thing, the spider
herself will speedily resolve the difficulty. Watch her at work, and it
will soon be seen that the beads are formed on the line not by twanging,
but by stretching. At the moment each length of sticky thread is drawn
from the spider’s spinnerets, it is destitute of beads. But the spider
quickly stretches it out to nearly double its original length, and then
as quickly slackens it; whereupon, before she has well had time to fasten
the thread in its place, the beads will be seen to have formed themselves
throughout its entire length.

Said Miss Susan Angel this evening, as I leant over the counter of her
little dark shop, studying the rows of sweetstuff bottles beyond: ‘Th’
chillern here, ’tis real astonishin’ how changeable they be. One time
’tis all lickrich wi ’em, an’ next ’tis all sherbet-suckers, an’ then
maybe ’tis nought but toffee-balls for weeks on end. But you!’—she
turned me a glance full of smiling, proud approbation—‘You!—come winter
or summer, come rain or shine, I allers knaws ’twill be nobbut
black-fours!’

She reached down the ancient glass jar, and stabbed at its contents
ruminatively with an iron fork.

‘Black-fours—ah!’ she mused, as the shining magpie lumps rattled into the
brass scale-pan. ‘An’ I never smells ’em but I thinks o’ my ould missus
as— Lorey me! how many long year ago! Fond on ’em, wur she? Ah! an’
scrunch ’em up, ’a could, quicker ’n e’er wan wi’ a nateral jaw!’

‘What kind of jaw, then, had she, Susan?’

‘Ah! I believe ye! My dear! th’ money as ut costed! All gold, an’ ivory
like, an’ red stuff! An’ when ’a died— Did never I show ’em to ye?’

She disappeared into the little kitchen behind the shop. I heard a
drawer unlocked; there was a sound of rummaging, accompanied by asthmatic
interjections; Miss Susan Angel came forth again bearing a bulky parcel.
This, as she removed various coverings, became smaller and smaller until,
from a final wrapping of tissue-paper, there appeared a beautiful double
set of false teeth. Miss Angel held them up to my gaze admiringly.

‘Left ’em to me, ’a did! ’Twur all writ in her will—“To my faithful
servant an’ friend, Susan Angel, I give an’ bequeath”—an’ all th’ rest on
’t. Ah! bless her an’ rest her sowl!’

It seemed rather an appropriate legacy, for Miss Angel had possessed not
a single tooth of her own in all the years I had known her. But the
display of the treasure provoked a very natural commentary.

‘How long have you had these put by, Susan?’

‘Nigh upon thirty year, my dear.’

‘And never used them yourself all that time, although you—’

‘What!’ The old lady drew herself up, the youthful blue eyes in her
wrinkled face flashing indignation. ‘What d’ ye say!—me use ’em? _Me_?
Th’ very same as my dear ould missus chawed wi’? Shame on ye! Not if
there was nought to eat but cracking-nuts left i’ th’ wureld fer us all!’

I took the rebuke in penitent silence. When she had restored the revered
relics to their locker in the back room, she resumed her knitting in the
great wicker chair behind the counter. In a minute or two she had alike
forgiven me and forgotten the cause of her displeasure, as I knew from
her tone.

‘How the evenin’s do draw in, to be sure!’ she observed, laying down her
work. ‘A’most dark, ut be, though ’tis no more ’n six o’clock.’

The ancient timepiece in the corner promptly droned out eleven. Miss
Angel clapped her hands.

‘What did I tell ye?’ she said triumphantly. ‘Wunnerful good time ’a
keeps, when I recollects to putt un back reg’lar.’

She rose and reversed the hands for a circle or two.

‘That’ll do till mornin’,’ said she placidly. ‘Ye warnts to be a little
particler i’ country places: ut bean’t like i’ towns where—Gipsies! I do
believe! An’ this time o’ night, to be sure!’

I followed her sudden glance to the doorway. A heavy grinding of wheels
had sounded outside, and across our field of view, silhouetted against
the deep turquoise blue of the night, there passed what looked like a
gipsies’ caravan. A bony horse toiled in the shafts, and a long lean man
walked in front, dragging at the animal’s bridle with almost as much
apparent effort. Lights shone from the windows of the vehicle, and its
chimney smoked voluminously against the stars. As it went by, we could
see another man sitting upon the steps in its rear, his squat bulky form
entirely blocking the open door-place. The caravan pulled up about
midway over the green.

‘Now, that wunt do!’ observed Miss Angel decisively. ‘We warnts nane o’
they sort traipsing about Windlecombe after dark, leastways not them as
keeps chicken. ’Tis on your road hoame: jest gie ’em a wured as you goos
by, my dear. Tell ’em as you warnts to save trouble fer th’ policeman.’

In nowise intending to disturb the gipsies, I nevertheless took the short
cut over the green, passing in the darkness close by their queer,
spindle-spanked, top-heavy dwelling. As I cut through the beam of light
that poured from the doorway, a suave voice hailed me.

‘Hi! my man! Just a moment! Now, Grewes, your difficulty is at an end.
I have intercepted one of the inhabitants, and doubtless he will— Yes:
inquire of him—very politely now—where we may obtain water.’

The long lean man had blundered into the light beside me, carrying two
pails. He was clothed in little better than rags from head to foot. A
massive gold watch-chain glittered across his buttonless waistcoat. He
turned upon me two gaunt, diffident eyes.

‘Water,’ he hesitated, holding out the pails helplessly before him.
‘Water, you know! Could you be so kind as to—’

The suave, flute-like voice sounded again from the depths of the caravan.

‘Now, Grewes! if I am to carry out the little supper scheme I explained
to you, no time must be lost. When once they are peeled, potatoes should
never—’ The owner of the voice appeared in the doorway. ‘Dear, dear!
My good fellow! there you are, still standing there; and I fully
impressed it upon you that if rabbit is permitted to bake one moment
longer than— Grewes! give me those pails!’

But the long lean man had drawn me precipitately away. As we hurried
across the green together in the direction of the well-house, he seemed
to consider himself under some necessity of explanation.

‘It is his caravan,’ he said, ‘Spelthorne’s, you know. And I am
travelling with him for a bit, because I was run down, and—and other
things. One of the best fellows breathing, he is, though you mightn’t—I
mean I so often forget what I— Of course, I really don’t wonder that
sometimes he— Why! I have forgotten to unharness the horse! Do remind
me—will you?—when we get back; but quietly, you understand? Spelthorne,
he is the best fellow breathing, but— Oh, is this the well? It is most
kind of you, I’m sure!’

He seemed in so strained and nervous a mood that I did not trust him to
handle the heavy bucket and chain, nor to return unaided to the caravan
with his burden. When we drew into the beam of light again, I could see
Spelthorne inside, stooping over the little cooking-stove in his
shirt-sleeves and a great sombrero. If anything, his clothes were even
more tattered and soiled than his companion’s. At sound of our clanking
pails he turned, stared, then swept me a low bow with the sombrero.

‘Thoughtless, very thoughtless!—indeed, most selfish of Grewes!’ he said
confidentially, for the long lean man had hurried away to attend to the
horse. ‘A good fellow, such a good fellow, you cannot think! But he has
this little failing of sometimes taking advantage of any kindness that—
But excuse me: I must get the potatoes on!’

I had hardly gone a dozen paces towards home, when I heard him pounding
after me.

‘What is—the name,’ he asked breathlessly, ‘of—of this village?’ And
when I had told him: ‘There are beautiful old cottages here, are there
not? And quaint people? And charming country round about? Such a
spot—isn’t it?—where two artists could find incessant inspiration,
and—and—’

But the question had been put to me before, and too often.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said I discouragingly. ‘The place is very quiet
and humdrum, and most inconvenient—no railway and no roads to anywhere
and—’

‘The very place!’ he broke in delightedly. ‘I shall persuade poor Grewes
to remain here with me a month.’

And when I took a last look at the night some hours after, I beheld the
faint glow, from the windows of the caravan upon the green, with dismal
foreboding. A month of that prospect! And not only that, but something
worse; for, upon the wings of the slow night wind, there drifted over to
me the mournful thrumming of a guitar.

III

As it has turned out, the caravanners have proved very little trouble to
any, and to myself least of all. In a day or two, they moved down to the
riverside, choosing one of the wildest and leafiest corners of the old
abandoned chalk-quarry; and for a week past I have seen nothing of them
but a wisp of blue smoke from afar.

And, indeed, October in the country, if your design is to keep step and
step with the month through all its bewildering changes, leaves you but
scanty leisure for social traffic with your kind. Every day now there is
something new to wonder at, and ponder over.

To-day the gossamer was flying. If you stood in one of the low-lying
sheltered meadows, and turned your back to the light, the air seemed full
of these ashen-grey flecks, some only the merest threads, others of the
breadth of a finger and several inches long. I have always believed that
the gossamer spiders sit in the hedgerows spinning these fairy draperies,
and letting them go upon the breeze to little more use and purpose than
when a child blows soap-bubbles for the mere delight of watching them
soar. At least, what end could possibly be served by them, other than
the sufficient and obvious one of bringing a note of austere, chilly
delicacy into the riotous colour of an October day? But idling along
this morning with literally thousands of these grey filaments tempering
the rich gold of the sunshine far and near, I chanced to stretch forth a
hand and capture one of them. Between my fingers there hung a shred of
fabric infinitely finer than anything that ever came from loom devised by
man; and within it sat the gossamer spider herself, a shining black atom,
evidently vastly surprised and alarmed at the sudden termination of her
flight. After that I pulled down a score or so of these gossamer
air-ships, and although a few were tenantless, the most of them bore a
passenger embarked on, who shall say how long and how hazardous a voyage?
Yet, while none fell to earth as I watched, but seemed to have the power
of rising ever higher and higher, it is certain that the gossamer
spider’s flight must end with each day’s sun. The heavy autumn dews must
sweep the air clear of them at first tinge of dusk.

If there is anything in the old saying that a plentiful berry harvest
foretells a hard winter, then have we bitter times in store. The hedges
are loaded with scarlet wherever you go, and yet in all this flaunting
brilliance there seems to be no two shades of red alike The holly-berries
approach more nearly than any to pure vermilion. Then come the hips, the
rose-berries, with their tawny red; and the haws that are richer of hue
than all others, perhaps, yet of a sombreness that quietens the eye for
all its glow. Ruddy are the bryonies and the bittersweet. The rowans
love to hold aloft their masses of pure flame, the rich rowan-colour that
is always seen against the sky. Along the edge of the hazel copse, where
the butcher’s broom grows, its curious oblong fruit gives another note of
red. But they are all essentially different colours. Nature often
duplicates herself in blues, yellows, and particularly in a certain shade
of pale purple, of which the mallow is a common type. But among red
flowers, red berries, finding one, you shall not find its exact
counterpart in hue in all the country-side.

In southern England, the general lurid effect due to change of leafage in
the forest trees belongs of right to November, but already there are
abundant signs of what is coming. Though the woods, on a distant view,
still look gloriously green, a nearer prospect reveals a touch of autumn
in almost every tree. In the beech-woods nearly all the branches are
tipped with brown. The elms have bright yellow patches oddly dispersed
amidst foliage still of almost summer-like freshness. The willows by the
river are full of golden pencillings. Only the oaks remain as yet
uninfluenced by the changing times. The temperate autumn nights, that
have checked the sap-flow of less hardy things, have had no influence on
the oak-woods. They wait for the first real frosts—the knock-down blow.

And strangely, though October is nearing its end, the frosts do not come.
The nights are still, moist, dark; and full of the twanging note of
dorbeetles, and now and again the steady whir of passing wings. This is
the sound made by the hosts of migrant birds, all journeying southward,
travelling in silence and by stealth of night.

Coming out into the darkness, and hearing this mighty rushing note high
overhead, you get a queer sense of underhand activity and concealed
purpose in the world, as though scenery were being swiftly changed, a new
piece hurriedly staged, under cover of the blinked lights. It tends
towards a feeling that is rather foreign, not to say humbling, to your
desires—that of being made a spectator rather than a participant in the
great earth play. Or it may have another and a stranger effect. The
sound of all that strenuous motion, the deep travel-note high in the
darkness, may come to you with all the urging inspiration of a summons:
you may restrain only with difficulty, and much assembling of prudence,
the impulse to gird up and be off southward in the track of the flying
host. The old nomadic instinct is not dead in humanity, as he well knows
who keeps his feet to the green places of earth, and his heart tiding
with the sun.

Now, too, the brown owl begins his hollow plaint in the woodlands.
‘Woo-hoo-hoo, woohoo!’ comes to you through the fast-falling dusk, the
direction and intensity of the cry varying with astonishing swiftness, as
you stop to listen on your homeward way. This is conceivably the
‘to-whoo’ that Shakespeare heard; and there is another note, which seems
to be an answer to it, and which sounds something like ‘Ker-wick,’ and
might by a stretch be allowed to stand for the ‘to-whit’ in the song.
But ‘to-whit, to-whoo!’ in a single phrase, from a single throat—that
seems to be a piece of owl language that has become obsolete with the
centuries.

There is a stretch of lane here, running between high grassy banks
densely overshadowed by trees, which is always dark on the clearest
nights of any season, but of a Cimmerian blackness on these moonless
evenings in late October. As if they knew their opportunity for service,
the glowworms often light up the place from end to end, so that it is
possible, steering by their tiny lamps alone, to keep out of the ditch
that yawns invisibly on either hand. I came through the lane this
evening, and counted near upon a score of these vague blotches of
greenish radiance hovering amidst the dew soaked grass, each bright
enough to show the time by a watch held near. As long as I can remember,
glowworms have been plentiful in this stretch of dark, overshadowed lane,
and very scarce in all other quarters of the village. New colonies of
glowworms seem difficult to establish, although single lights do appear
in places where they have not been seen before, and in ensuing year
appear again and again, generally in slowly increasing numbers. It is
not wonderful that glowworms should keep to the same grassy bank season
after season, because, as all countrymen know, it is only the lampless
male that flies. The female, who bears the light, and on whom the
persistence of the race depends, lives and dies probably within no more
than the same few square yards of tangled herbage. What seems really
wonderful is that single glowworms of the female sex should occur in
places far removed from old resorts of their kind, seeing how feeble are
their means, and how slow their rate of travel.

I have said that the flocks of birds that can sometimes be heard in the
quiet of October nights, passing seaward over the village, are generally
silent, save for the dull, pulsating roar of their wings. As I lifted
the latch of the garden-gate to-night, and stood a moment listening in
the darkness, the old sound grew out of the silence of the hills, and
there went swiftly by what seemed only a small flock; but now and again,
as they passed, I could hear a note bandied to and fro in the company, a
chuckling, voluble note, which I recognised instantly. They were
fieldfares, the first-comers of their species. From now onward, I knew,
their queer outlandish cry would mingle with the common sounds of the
fields; and not only theirs, but the notes of all other foreign birds
that winter here; for the field-fare is generally the last to come.

This cry in the darkness above me, however, was strange in a double
sense; because, while the silent hosts were emigrants, only at the
commencement of their long, perilous journey, this chattering company had
safely arrived at its bourne, all the hazards of the voyage happily past.
And it seemed only in the way of Nature, for bird or man, to set forth
mute of voice upon a difficult and dangerous enterprise; while to win
through safe and sound must provoke each alike to self-congratulation.
My fieldfares were halloaing because they were out of the wood.

NOVEMBER

‘No mirth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member;
No warmth, no shine, no butterflies, no bees—
November!’

IT was the old vicar of Windlecombe who ironically quoted the lines, as
we went along our favourite path together—the path that runs between Arun
river and the woods.

The first frosts had come and gone, and left us in the midst of the usual
revolutions and surprises. In a single day, the ash-trees had cast their
whole weight of foliage to earth, green as in summer prime. Though as
yet not a single leaf had fallen from the other forest trees, all had
changed miraculously. The beech-woods looked like vast smouldering
fires. Every elm stood up clothed to its finger-tips in shreds of
gold-leaf. Here and there in the wood a dash of vivid scarlet showed
where a sycamore had been found and struck by the frost. Larch, willow,
maple, birch, each added to the glowing prospect its individual shade of
tawny brown, or drab, or yellow. We walked in a land where, for once,
the sunshine seemed a superfluous thing. To turn the eye away for a
little while from all that intolerable radiance, and rest it on the
oak-woods where alone a vestige of summer greenery endured, or on the
cool grey stems of the stripped ash-trees, was a pleasure I found myself
furtively snatching as we went along, although I left the sentiment
discreetly unexpressed. The old vicar stopped, removed his great white
panama, and mopped his forehead luxuriously.

‘No warmth, no shine!’ he repeated. ‘Now where in the world could the
poor soul have lived who wrote that? And no bees! Why, I can hear them
now—thousands of them!’

It was true enough, and with the bees were the November butterflies too,
if he could only have seen them. In a sunny corner by the path-side
stood an old pollard ash, its trunk rearing up out of the thicket high
over our heads, like a huge doubled fist thrust into a green gauntlet of
ivy. It was only one tree among innumerable others in the wood, and the
same stirring scene was enacting round each of them. Though with
everything else the season was autumn, for the ivy it was the heyday of
spring. The great tree above us was smothered in golden blossom, the
nectar glistening in the sunshine, a rich honey scent burdening the still
air. There were not only hive-bees and butterflies rioting at this, the
last outdoor feast of the year, but bumble-bees, wasps, drone-flies,
every other creature that could fly and had escaped the chills of the
November nights. The air was misty with the glint of their wings, and
full of a deep sweet song. As we passed along by the wood, we were
always either drawing into the zone of this ivy music or leaving it
behind us, and never once did it forsake our path all the morning
through.

We came at last to a spot where the woods fell back from the waterside,
and a stretch of wild, hillocky grassland, overgrown with brier and
bramble, bordered the stream. Between the willows that stood upon the
bank dipping their yellow autumn tresses in the flood, I could see the
placid breadth of the river, with its topsy-turvy vision of the glowing
hills beyond—hills that, by reason of the interlacing boughs above, were
directly invisible. A lark broke up almost from under our feet, and went
slanting aloft into the blue sky, singing as though it were April. The
Reverend put a hand upon my arm.

‘Well: what do you see?’ he asked. ‘Everything must be changed since we
were here last, and—’

‘I see,’ said I, rather disturbed, ‘a painter’s easel straddled in front
of your favourite creek—an easel with a three-legged stool before it, but
no painter. I see also, a little farther on, a big white umbrella, with
the top of a sombrero just showing above it, and a great cloud of tobacco
smoke drifting out of it, but here again no other sign of painter or man.
Shall we go back?’

But he was for pushing on. As we approached the umbrella, a throaty
tenor voice was uplifted to a weird foreign strain:—

‘En passant par Square Montholon,
La digue-digue donc! la digue-digue donc!
Je rencontre une jeune tendron!
La digue-digue—

‘Superb! _Su_-perb! If only I could excite myself to— Ah! if only that
tumultuous thrill, which I know always presages—

‘la digue-digue donc!
J’offre tout de suite ma main—ye
La brigue-donc-dain-ye—’

Or at least so the gibberish sounded. But now it suddenly left off. A
palette went rattling to the ground. The short squat figure of the owner
of the caravan burst into view.

‘Grewes! I cannot do it, I really cannot! I am not sufficiently inspired
to-day! I am not great enough! I— Oh! I beg your pardon! I thought it
was my friend’s step. Why! the water-bearer, to be sure! How do you
do?’

It was my first glimpse of Spelthorne by light of day, and I owned to
myself frankly that the night had been kind to him. A fringe of
yellow-grey hair escaped in all directions beyond the brim of his hat.
He had a florid, puffy, indeterminate face, eyes at once selfish and
sentimental, and a week-old beard still further ostracised a chin already
too retiring. Like his companion, he wore a gold watch-chain of heavy
calibre, with a bunch of seals and trinkets upon it; but his clothes,
that in the darkness had seemed much tattered and torn, now appeared
entirely disreputable. They were, moreover, covered with finger-marks of
paint, to which he was now adding, as he ceremoniously welcomed us.

‘Art—what is it?’ he cried, removing his hat, and running his fingers
through his hair, when presently, at his earnest invitation, the Reverend
had sat himself down before the easel, and was making a grave show of
inspecting the canvas on it. ‘And the artist—where is he?’ He made a
dramatic pause.

‘Where indeed?’ quoth the Reverend, grimly staring before him.

‘You see this picture?’—wagging a chrome-yellow thumb over the
canvas—‘nine-tenths of it are the work of one exalted day: the rest the
unilluminated toil of a week! Strange that we should be made so! At one
moment, like Prometheus, stealing the very fire from heaven, and at the
next— Ah! but only an artist can really comprehend!’

He filled his pipe, with a resigned, quiet sadness.

‘Now Grewes—that is my friend who is travelling with me—’ he went on;
‘Grewes, poor fellow, he never realises the difficulties in his path
because—because— Let me put it in the kindest way. Because—well, the
truth is, poor Grewes has mistaken his calling. No better fellow in the
world, you know! A hard plodder: always trying, always doing his best;
but—but— You see, that brings us back to what I said just now: art and
the artist—where will you find them? and what are they?’

A slight cough sounded in our rear. Looking round, I saw that the long
lean man had returned to his easel unmarked by any of us. The Reverend
got abruptly to his feet.

‘Well,’ said he, ‘you have a great responsibility. Supreme gifts in a
man mean that much will be required of him. So bend your back to it.
Good day!’

As we passed by the other easel, its owner looked up pleasantly, but his
brush kept busily to work.

‘Don’t go yet,’ he entreated, ‘I am so glad to— But you won’t mind, will
you, if I go on with— You see, I have not had very long at it this
morning. Spelthorne, he was getting so anxious about the stew, that I—I
had to run back to the caravan and— Or else he would have— It wouldn’t
have done, of course, to let him go himself. When once he has got into
the mood, the slightest little thing—’

He rambled on thus, scarcely ever finishing a sentence, and all the while
dabbing away industriously at his sketch. He, too, I had never yet
beheld in daylight; but, unlike his friend, sunshine rather improved his
appearance than otherwise. It could not fill up the gaps in his coat,
nor had it a lustrating effect upon his linen; yet it revealed in his
long, cadaverous face, and in his mild, sad eyes, a delicacy, a
sensibility, that I had not remarked in them before. As he talked, the
old vicar studied his voice attentively.

‘Spelthorne,’ he went on, in his curious, disjointed, breathless way,
‘Spelthorne, his work is so immeasurably— He has such a demand for it
that— And I am always so glad, of course, to do any little thing to save
him trouble. I—I really think no man in the world ever had a better
friend.’

The Reverend was standing close behind him now. He laid a hand gently on
Grewes’s dilapidated shoulder.

‘Don’t hurry,’ he said, ‘at least don’t hurry with your mind. Above all,
don’t worry: it is all coming beautifully. When did you see your doctor
last?’

The question, unexpected as it was by myself, seemed to surprise Grewes
infinitely more. The blood got up into two bright points in his cheeks.
His brushes rattled against his palette. He looked round at the old
vicar tremulously.

‘Doctor? Why, do you— What makes you think I— Oh! I am very well
indeed; never better.’

He stopped, looking up into the sightless, kindly blue eyes that appeared
to be as steadily gazing down into his. There was a moment’s silence.
And then, if I ever saw real untrammelled joy spring into a human face, I
saw it in his.

‘Do you really think so?’ he cried. ‘You think I— Well, sometimes
lately I have thought myself that—’

Spelthorne’s voice grumbled out from behind the umbrella.

‘Now, my dear Grewes, have I not frequently told you that, though I am
willing to lend you anything I have, I always expect—’

Grewes sprang to his feet.

‘It is his cadmium,’ he whispered, horrified. ‘I borrowed it, and never—
How very annoying for him!’

‘Now there is a strange thing,’ said the Reverend musingly, as we trudged
on our way together. ‘A man well on in a rapid decline, and neither
knowing nor caring about it; as glad, indeed, to hear the thing confirmed
as if some one had left him a legacy! A month, did you say? Then he may
never go out of Windlecombe by the road.’

We made a long day’s round, taking meadow, riverside, wood, and downland
in our walk, and reaching home again only when the lights were beginning
to star the misty combe; for we had a special object in our journey. To
the townsman it may well seem as fruitless a task to seek wild flowers in
November, as to go ‘gathering nuts in May.’ Well, here is a list of what
we found in one November day’s ramble about a single village in highland
Sussex—fifty-seven distinct species, and of many we could have gathered,
not single flowers, but whole handfuls, had we willed. Nor is the list
an exhaustive one either for the district or the time of year. Bringing
more eyesight, leisure, and diligence to the task, no doubt a fuller
inventory could be made in any mild season.—

Dandelion. Hawkweed. Strawberry.

Furze. Penny Cress. Teasel.

Red Dead-nettle. Hedge Mustard. Sun Spurge.

White Dead-nettle. Dwarf Spurge. Hedge Parsley.
Knapweed.
Mallow. Rock-rose.
Marguerite.
Harebell. Crane’s-bill.
Poppy.
Daisy. Heather.
Musk Thistle.
Hogweed. Betony.
Charlock.
Yarrow. Viper’s Bugloss.
Buttercup.
Sheepsbit. Burnet Saxifrage.
Red Clover.
Marjoram. Sow-thistle.
White Clover.
Cudweed. Wild Pansy.
Pimpernel.
Groundsel. Shepherd’s Purse.
Calamint.
Nipplewort. Nonsuch.
Blackberry.
Small Bindweed. Ivy.
Mayweed. Herb-Robert.
Chickweed.
Field Madder. Ragwort.
Veronica.
Sandwort. Silverweed.

White Campion. Persicary.

Red Campion. Mouse-ear.

There has come a spell of chilly, overcast weather, and the long dark
evenings have settled upon us at a stroke. At twilight to-day, as I came
into this silent-floored, comfortable room, and lit the candles on my
work-table, it seemed strange that I should do so, and yet the ordinary
life and traffic of the village be still going on outside. Hitherto, so
it appeared, the village quiet had fallen always before the need for
candlelight. I had looked out before drawing the curtains close, and
heard not a step stirring, seen the windows dark in the lower storeys of
the cottages, and here and there a pale light glimmering behind the drawn
blinds of upper rooms, for your true Sussex villager hates to sleep in
the dark. But to-night some new order of things seemed to have been
suddenly ordained. Footsteps hurried or leisurely, voices old and young,
the rumble of wheels, even the distant chime of Tom Clemmer’s hammer—all
the sounds that go to make up the common rumour of work-a-day life in a
village, were abroad in the air; though already the hills were lost in
the gloaming: the white chrysanthemums by the garden-gate were nothing
but a dim blotch on the murky autumn night.

I lit the candles—home-made candles of yellow beeswax—and set them on
their little mats of plaited green leather. I got out a new quire of
foolscap, sobering in its empty whiteness, its word-hungry look. I
arranged the ruler, the old cut-glass inkpot, the painted leaden frog
that serves for paperweight, the elephant that carries a penwiper as
houdah, ash-tray and tobacco-jar and sheaf of favourite pipes, all in
their proper stations. I drew the old oak elbow-chair sideways to the
table—sideways because that was non-committal: too squarely business-like
an approach in the outset, as I know of old time and cost, often scatters
the fairies into the next county, and you may chew to shreds a whole
quiverful of goose-quills before they again come crowding and whispering
curiously about your ears.

But having made all these exact preparations, I chanced to turn to the
open window for a final look down the street, and knew at once that I was
lost. It was the steady far-off song from Tom Clemmer’s anvil that
overcame me more than anything, and the red glow amidst the elder-boughs
that overhung the forge. But all else conspired in one basilisk-like
lure to get me forth. The busy wending to and fro, and the cheery
commerce of tongues in the darkness, footsteps and voices that I knew as
well as I knew my own; twinkling lights in cottages, the illumined
windows of the little sweetstuff shop, the cobbler’s den, the inn, the
village store; the church lit up for evensong, and the bell quietly
tolling, as it seemed, somewhere far up in the black void of the sky;
again, the smell of the night, that moist, earthy fragrance of decaying
leaves, and tang of frost, and pungent scent of simmering fire-logs from
stacks new-broached on these first chilly evenings in November—it all
ranged itself together before me as something, ever present and constant
in my life, that I too often disregarded, took for granted—the jumble of
thatch and red-tiled roof and grey flint wall, sheep and lowing kine and
cackling poultry, bevy of kindly human hearts, sharp tongues and willing
hands, all wedged up together in one green crevice of the hills, and
calling themselves collectively by the old South-Saxon name of
Windlecombe.

I went first of all a few strides out over the green and looked backward,
rightly to estimate, if I could, my own part in the little communal
symphony. The bluff bulk of the house, with its coven roof and many
gables, stood dark against the greyer darkness of the hills, and behind
it rose sable elm plumes fast thinning under the recent autumn chills.
From its windows shone lights of varying significance. There were my own
red-shaded candles with a corner of a crammed bookcase dimly visible
above them; there were naked kitchen lights with ware of polished pewter
and copper glinting behind, and a pleasant clatter of crockery; there was
a window where the light burnt red and low and wavering as from a spent
hearth, and a quiet ripple of music from a piano keeping it congenial
company; there was the window high up in the great gable, whose
flickering light cast a bunch of head-shadows on the ceiling, suggestive
of nursery bedtime, and fairy-tales round the fire. It was all very
reassuring and enheartening. Yes: the old White House had its integral
part to play in this good English game of Neighbourhood, and played it
passing well.

Round Tom Clemmer’s forge a group of village lads was gathered, all
looking on at the work with an interest that amounted well-nigh to
fascination. As I came up, and stood unobserved in the shadow of the
elder-tree, there was before me a picture in which two colours only were
represented glowing crimson and deep velvety black. Young Tom stood,
pincers in hand, watching the iron in the fire. Behind him his
apprentice laboured at the bellows. With every wheezy puff, the furnace
roared out an imprecation, and spat hot cinders upon the floor.

It was a large piece of metal that Tom had in work, something out of the
ordinary run of his business, it seemed, and he turned it and shifted it
with an anxious eye. No one spoke a word, for somehow we all knew that a
crisis was coming, and we were expected to hold our tongues until it was
victoriously past. At length the moment came. Tom thrust the pincers
into the blaze and drew the white-hot iron out upon the anvil.
Immediately the apprentice left the bellows, seized a great hammer, and
swinging it over his head, began to let fall on the metal an unceasing
rain of mighty blows. As Tom twisted and manoeuvred the glowing mass
about with all the strength of his wiry arms, it lengthened, squared
itself in the middle, flattened out at each end, bent into complicated
curves, then turned upon itself and was united miraculously head to tail.
Still gripping the writhing thing with one hand, Tom took a punch in the
other, and pointed it to various parts of the work; and wherever he
pointed, the hammer drove a bolt-hole clean and true through the rose-red
iron. Finally Tom lifted the finished piece above his head, and came
striding to the door with it. The crowd of onlookers scattered right and
left. Out into the darkness he plunged, and straight to the pool by the
roadside. We saw the thing poised for a moment like a mammoth fire-fly
over the water; and then, with a roar and an angry splutter, it vanished
into the pond.

It was scarcely six o’clock, and already the night was pitch-black, with
a creeping, chilly air from the north. It was not loitering weather.
People were moving briskly on their several ways. Cottage doors were
shut, and windows diamonded with moisture. Roving about with no settled
purpose but to humour the neighbourly fancy, and to identify myself with
the evening life of the place, I presently came full tilt at a corner
upon Farmer Coles.

‘The very man!’ said he, barring the way jovially with his stout oak
stick. ‘Didn’t ye promise me that when I killed that four-year-old
wether, ye’d come and take a bite along o’ us? Well, ’tis a saddle
to-night, and I was on the road to fetch ye. Round about, man, and
straight for the faarm!’

Now, when a South-Down flock-master—whose pedigree sheep are famous
throughout the county—bids you to his table, with the announcement that
the principal dish is to be mutton, there is only one thing to do, that
is, if you are human, and of sane mind. I turned and went along with him
without demur.

‘Jane’s sister and her man be with us,’ said Farmer Coles, as we left the
village behind and mounted the steep lane that led to the farmhouse.
‘And Weaverly ’ull be there; and the gells be home, so we wunt lack for
company. I don’t know as ye ever met Jane’s sister’s man?—Parrett by
name. No? Wunnerful well-eddicated man, though, he be.’

We found the Rev. Mr. Weaverly, a shining gem of purest water, set in the
ring of hearty country faces that surrounded the drawing-room fire. The
broad-shouldered, broad-faced man, with a mat of sandy beard and a very
bald head, who occupied the great armchair in the corner, I judged to be
Mr. Parrett. Mrs. Coles and her sister, both comfortable of mien and
rigidly ceremonious of visage, sat side by side in flowing black silk
gowns, knitting as for a wager. The younger members of the household,
who filled the interspaces of the circle, fidgeted in a constraint of
merry silence, exchanging covert glances of boredom, and all obviously
pricking ears for the first sound of the dinner-gong. This clanged out
behind us almost at the moment of our entry into the room, providentially
cutting short the first amenities of greeting; and before my fingers had
done aching from Mr. Parrett’s grip, I found myself sitting at the loaded
board with Mrs. Parrett’s voluminous drapery overflowing me on the one
side, and, on the other, her husband’s great brown barricade of an elbow
securely fencing me in.

‘Mutton,’ observed Mr. Weaverly presently, by way of filling up a pause
in the conversation due to our all watching with secret anxiety Farmer
Coles’s attack on the joint, ‘mutton, and on a Monday! You remember the
little game of alliteration we played at the school treat, Mrs. Coles?
Really, we could make an admirable sequence here! Mutton, and Monday,
and Miss Matilda sitting by my side, and—and—if it were only March
instead of—’

‘And we’ll soon all be munchin’ of it, sir!’ cried Farmer Coles. ‘Ha,
ha, ha! That’s the best Hem o’ all! Gravy, George?’

At the inclusion of her name in the sequence, the eldest Miss Coles had
blushed, then let her glance demurely droop upon her
chrysanthemum-wreathed bosom. It was a moment of exceeding pride and
satisfaction to her, for here was Mr. Weaverly beside her—an
incontestable, a beautiful fact—while Miss Sweet for once was half a mile
away. Now she looked up coyly.

‘I think,’ she hesitated, ‘I could suggest a— Oh! I know a lovely one!’

Mr. Weaverly laid down knife and fork, to rub his hands delightedly.

‘Do tell us!’ he murmured. ‘I am positively longing to—’

The eldest Miss Coles turned him glamorous eyes.

‘Marmaduke!’ she said.

And I think I was the only one present to realise the whole ingenuity of
the manœuvre. For she had contrived here, in the open family circle,
before a dozen people, yet with entire meetness and propriety, to address
Mr. Weaverly by his Christian name.

As the meal progressed, and tongues became generally loosened, Mr.
Parrett—whose silence, except as regarded his hearty application to his
food, had so far remained unbroken—now essayed to contribute his share of
the talk. His first effort was a startling one.

‘D-d-d’ he began, smiling over his shoulder at me, ‘d-do you l-l-l—’ He
stopped, and gazed helplessly towards his wife.

‘Like, dear?’ suggested Mrs. Parrett, softly.

‘N-no! I was agoing t-t-to ask ye if ye l-l-l—’

‘Lend, then?’

‘Hur, hur! Emma, I don’t want to b-b-borrow nauthin’ o’ the gentleman!
It was just to ask if he l-l-lived—there y’ are!—in W-w-w— Whatsay,
Jane?’

‘’Tis apple-pie, George. Or maybe ye’d sooner try the—’

‘Pie, Jane! Pie, my d-dear! Pie, if _you_ please, mum! An’ a double
dose o’ sh-sh-shuggar. They allers says—don’t they, sir?—as if a man has
a sweet-t-t-t—’

‘Sweetheart, dear?’

‘Oo, ay!’ laughed Mr. Parrett, suddenly inspired. He looked across the
table roguishly at Mr. Weaverly and Matilda, and all glances followed
his. ‘Ah, well: n-n-never mind! We was all young once, and—’

Mrs. Coles deftly drew the fire of attention away from the absorbed,
unconscious pair.

‘William, dear; Emma has nothing in her glass. And there you sit,
staring at the cheese as if—as if it were only for show, and as wooden as
you are! And do pray pass the old ale to Mr.—’

‘Oh, deplorably, deplorably so!’ sighed Mr. Weaverly to the rapt Matilda.
‘Over and over again I have remonstrated with her, but all in vain, I
fear. Each time I have said, “Mrs. Gates, if you will feed little
children on new hot bread, and red herrings, and”—only think of
it!—“beer, you will find not only their physical but their moral nature
entirely—”’

It is strange how, in a room full of heterogeneous talk, the attention of
a quiet listener flits uncontrollably from one quarter to another. Much
as I was interested in Mrs. Gates’s domestic policy, I lost it here, to
find myself in the rick-yard, taking part, against my will, in some
complicated sporting affray.

‘And there were three of them, father, in the trough; and I crept up and
got the gun-barrel through a hole in the side of the sty, and just as the
old buck-rat—’

And then it was Mr. Parrett again.

‘Emma ’ull tell ye b-b-better ’n me, Jane. It came hoot-tooting round
the corner, and afore I could s-s-s—’

‘Stop, George?’

‘N-n-nonsense!—afore I could s-s-s—’

‘Seize hold o’ the—?’

‘Emma, do bide quiet!—afore I could s-s-say Jack Robinson, the ould mare,
she b-b-backed upon her harnches, and she—’

And from Miss Matilda:

‘Oh! I should so love to, Mr. Weaverly! Is there a very beautiful view?
And could we walk there and back in an afternoon, do you think?’

And from Farmer Coles, folding up his napkin: ‘Well, if no one wunt have
no more—’

The rest was lost in the rustle of Mrs. Coles’s skirts, as she uprose.

‘And now, William dear, I think we ladies will leave you to your smoke.
And when you are quite ready, we will have a rubber and a little music.’

In the drawing-room presently, the farmer and his wife, and Mr. and Mrs.
Parrett, sat down to a solemn, silent game of whist. A ‘Happy Family’
party made a vortex of merriment in a far corner. At the piano stood Mr.
Weaverly, translating into soft melodious trifles such songs as ‘The
Wolf’ and ‘Hearts of Oak.’ As for me, I was happy in the great chair
with the family portrait album, full of early Victorian photographs,
which I sincerely believe to be amongst the most fascinating and
informing productions of all that fertile reign. But after an hour of
this inspiring occupation, I was suddenly roused to the contemplation of
a still greater wonder. One of the card-players had spoken, and that
sharply.

‘Emma! Emma, my dear!’

I strolled over, and watched the play. Something had happened to disturb
Mr. Parrett, for though his face was turned from me, I could see that his
bald head had taken on a purple hue. And gradually, as the game
progressed, the mystery became clear.

‘Emma, my d-d-_dear_! Emma!’

It was Mr. Parrett’s voice again, and this time with a sharper ring of
warning and remonstrance. Two or three times in the next half-hour he
spoke thus, and each time now I was able to detect the cause. Mrs.
Parrett was cheating. Continually her neck craned for a sidelong view of
her opponents’ cards. She revoked unblushingly. Once I could have sworn
I saw a card-corner sticking out of a fold in her silken lap. The aces
she seemed to be trying to mark with her thumb-nail. And all the time,
though Mr. Parrett got momentarily redder and more wrathful, Farmer Coles
and his wife sat serenely smiling, evidently well used to dear Emma and
her little harmless, eccentric ways.

III

Here is a winter’s day already, and still November. As I looked forth at
sunrise this morning, the whole village was white with frost. I could
hear the ice in the wheel-ruts crackling under the tread of passers-by.
A single thrush piped forlornly somewhere in the dense thicket of the
churchyard. And as I leaned out into the nipping blast, a word came up
to me, bandied between a trudging labourer and his friend, a word that
brought with it an entire new sheaf of thoughts and memories. ‘More ’n
’aaf like Christmas, bean’t ut, Bill?’ It was said but in jest, and that
unthinkingly. Yet, by the calendar, as a glance now told me, Christmas
was scarce a month away.

While the sun was yet no more than a white spot in the faint gold mists
of morning, I took the lane that led to the Downs. It was strange to see
how the frost had missed all the bright-hued berries in the hedgerows,
and how the ivy-leaves were only rimmed with white. It was the same with
the prickly holly foliage. The spines were thickly encrusted, while the
dark green membranes of the leaves had given no fingerhold to the frost.
But the colour of the grass, and dead dry herbage, by the wayside was
completely blotted out. Every blade and twig stood up stark and white
against its fellow; and here it was easy to see which way the frozen air
had been drifting all night long, because on the windward side the pale
accretion was thicker: in the more exposed places it more than doubled
the natural girth of the stems.

Where the dew-pond lay, at the top of the hill, far above the swimming
lowland mists, there must have been bright sunshine from the very first;
for here the veneer of frost had melted into dewdrops, that flashed back
a thousand prismatic rays amidst the emerald of the grass at every step.
But behind each upstanding tussock, the frost still held as white and
thick as ever. The water, too, in the pond was still frozen over. As I
came up to the rail, a flock of starlings rose whirring over my head.
They had been waiting there on the sunny side of the bank for the ice to
melt round the pond edges, and thither they would return to slake their
morning thirst, as soon as I passed on.

Keen and unkindly blew the blast, so that one must keep ever moving to
withstand the chill of it. Looking round me on the waste of hills, I
could see that the northern slopes still retained their wintry hue,
though all those facing to the sun were intensely green. Below in the
valley only the oak-woods kept their bronze stain of autumn. Every other
tree, the hedges that divided ploughlands and meadows, the winding line
of thicket marking the course of the river, all looked bare and dark in
the glistening pallor of the sun. The river itself, between the broad
water-meadows, seemed like a river of ink.

[Picture: “The Ferryman’s Cottage”]

As I took in all the cheerless, void purity of what lay below me,
thinking to myself that this indeed was winter, there came a sudden
cawing and dawing high up in the frosty steel-blue dome of the sky; and
here again was confirmation of that unenlivening fact. A great company
of rooks and jackdaws was streaming by, but with none of its summer zest
and purpose. The throng made a general progress towards the south, yet
it was obviously doing little more than killing time, spinning out the
business of a doubtful journey into the semblance of a morning’s task.
Instead of going straight forward in one steady strong tide, the birds
were incessantly veering back in wide circles, crossing and re-crossing
each other’s paths aimlessly, and weaving a mazy dark pattern on the sky.

I watched this dubious host from the hill-top until it vanished in the
eye of the sun; and then, fairly beaten at last by the razor-edged north
wind, turned and went back to the village. It was winter again, in very
truth; and there was little sense or profit in blinking it. I would
strike my flag now, as I had struck it often before. And the flag with
me was the little staging of fernery that still concealed the yawning
blackness of my study hearth. I pulled it all down and stowed it away;
and by and by, when the ash logs were sizzling and glowing, and the
sparks were volleying up the flue, and a living warmth pervading the
room, I plucked up new heart and courage:

‘No mirth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member;
No warmth, no shine—’

It was all as false now as it must ever have been. And as for
butterflies and bees, what but a sick fancy could crave for such
delicacies out of season?

DECEMBER

WE sat on the churchyard wall, the Reverend and I, debating many things.

It was one of those silent, gloomy afternoons that would be cold but for
their exceeding stillness. A heavy grey pall of sky lowered overhead. A
multitude of noisy sparrows was going to bed in the thicket of ilex and
yew, denoting that the time was nearing sunset, although not a tinge of
sunset colour showed in the shrouded west. The same impulse, it seemed,
had brought us both out of doors, which, elementally, was nothing more
than a sudden realisation of the impossibility of remaining within. In
the whole year’s round, perhaps, there come only two or three days like
this. You become the prey of a conviction that something cataclysmic is
going to happen. There is a sense of the world slowing down in its
age-long, giddy race through the pathless ether; a feeling that its
momentum is almost spent, and that any instant it may come to a final
stop, to be followed by the Last Trump and dissolution of all things.
The mute house seems alive about you, and full of a sort of terror and
foreboding. You are seized with an apprehension that the ceilings and
roof are falling in; and, hurrying forth, a like doubt comes upon you as
to the stability of the sky: it looks so overburdened and unsafe. In
this easeless, impotent frame of mind, I came up into the churchyard as
being the most reassuring place I could think of, and found the Reverend
wandering there for a like reason and in much the same mood.

‘Wind and dirty weather coming,’ said he, ‘the sort of times to make
people think of home and fireside, the need for human peace on earth, and
good-will towards men—the very weather for me.’

As we sat on the wall, silent awhile, the bells in far-off Stavisham
began their chime, every note drifting over to us sharp and clear through
the miles of torpid air.

‘Winter coming,’ he went on; ‘the winter we all need once a year to knit
us closer together. Listen to Saint Barnabas practising his Christmas
carillons!—forging his link in the chain of bell-ringing that in a week
or two will stretch all round the world. It is my time coming, my own
time. For did you ever think how little eyesight matters at Christmas?
Blindness is nothing to a man then. Christmas is all glad sound; warm
heart-beats; faithful words. And, please God, when the day dawns, there
shall not be a cottage-nest in Windlecombe that does not overflow with
these.’

To see him so deeply moved, and hear him run on presently about his many
schemes of comfort and relief, the furtherance of joy and merriment,
good-will and good cheer, to be sown broadcast throughout his little
domain, was yourself to take the infection irresistibly. Whatever
Christmas has become in the great outer world, in Windlecombe he held us
year by year to all the old ideals and traditions. As I harkened to him,
the black sky, the sullen, miasmic air, lost their significance. I found
myself thinking only of the golden light and undimmed azure that must
eternally lie beyond and above it all. And now—though I might have heard
it long ago, if I had had but the heart to look up and listen—there, high
against the drab heaven, a lark soared and sang.

The dirty weather has come indeed. For many days I have not seen the
tops of the hills. They have been hidden in the rain-clouds that have
been dragging ceaselessly over the combe. The rain has not seemed to
fall, but to flow horizontally from west to east, a gliding white curtain
of water-drops, hiding all but the nearest houses from the view. And
yet, for all the deluge and the sobbing wind, the gloom, the cold, the
miry ways, I would not change this solitary, inaccessible spot in England
for the best of foreign sunshine, ease, and gaiety to be found by the
Tideless Sea.

Perhaps, if winter is to be given a place at all in the calendar, it must
come in these few weeks leading on to Christmas. It is true that, so far
as the natural outdoor world is concerned, there is no winter, in the
human conception of a season of decay and death. In an hour, when the
sky lightened a little and the rain ceased its rattle on the window, I
went out and found next year’s corn greening the hill-side; and in all
the bare dark woodland there was not a twig without its new buds ripe and
ready for another spring. The year’s miracle-play was beginning all over
again before its last lines were said.

Yet because, as the old vicar maintains, winter is a human necessity by
reason of its heart-welding, neighbour-making qualities, winter we must
all have; and so at this time I am glad to hoodwink myself into the
belief that the rough-voiced, harrying weather is the very negation of
life, bringing us all together for mutual comfort, like children in the
dark.

The rain is over now, seemingly for good. Last night at sundown the wind
fell, and the grey cloud canopy lifted off to the northward, like the
opening lid of a box. As the dense cloud pack broke away from the
western horizon, the sun burst through, and poured a sudden stream of
red-gold light up the combe. Before this light had paled, the whole sky
was crystal clear; and in the east, just above the earth-line, shone the
moon—a perfect human face, full-jowled, low-foreheaded, gazing down upon
us all with a puzzled, quizzical smile upon her comfortable chops. I
came up the street apostrophising her, and ran into a basket, and behind
the basket was Grewes. He laid a bunch of lean bony fingers in my hand.

‘This is life again,’ he said feelingly. ‘To be weatherbound in a
caravan, you know— Well, it is a little trying even for common people,
but for a genius—Spelthorne, you see, cannot bear any constraint. At
home he has a studio as big as a church, and when it rains he walks up
and down it. But when he tries that in a caravan— Really, I have been
very sorry for him, though of course I kept outside as much as I could.’

I had turned and strolled back with him under the pale December twilight.
The new quiet of things, the frosty glimmer of the moon, here and there a
star beginning to show, the renovated life of the village about us—all
made for peace and content. Grewes suddenly stopped and laid his basket
down.

‘Spelthorne wants to move on now,’ he told me; ‘he says we have painted
the place out, and I haven’t tried to persuade him, you know, but—but—I
don’t want to go, and that’s a fact.’

He looked at me distressfully, his stubbly lantern jaw in his lean hand.

‘What has happened to change the place so?’ he asked. ‘Everybody you
meet looks as if bound for a wedding. You are all humming carol tunes
wherever you go. I haven’t seen a dirty-faced child for a week. And how
the people joke and laugh with each other! It can’t be all because
Christmas—’

‘Yes, it is,’ said I, ‘it is all because one old man we love insists on
having it so, year by year. He has been into every home in the village,
great and small, and fired each man, woman, and child with his own
rejoicing spirit. If you stop for the next ten days, you will see things
change more thoroughly still. Wait till you see them bringing the
Christmas-tree up the hill for the children’s treat! And the committee
going round on Boxing-Day to award the prizes for the home decorations!
And if you have never heard real old-fashioned carols, nor listened to a
real Christmas sermon preached by a holy angel in a white beard—’

He took up his basket hurriedly.

‘If—if I must go,’ he said, as we trudged on towards the quarry where the
caravan had made its pitch, ‘I shall think of you all wherever I— It
seems rather selfish to press him, don’t you think? But perhaps— Oh!
here we are! Do come in and talk to Spelthorne for a bit, will you? He
sees so little company, and—’

‘Is that you at last, Grewes? My good fellow, what an unconscionable
time to take in procuring no more than one pennyworth of pepper and just
a pound of gravy beef! To say that I am excessively annoyed is wholly to
understate my— Of course all my carefully-thought-out plans for the meal
are entirely upset!’

I drew back into the darkness.

‘No, not to-night. There are times when you cannot stand—I mean, when a
call is not convenient, and— Why on earth don’t you tell the selfish old
brute to go to smithereens?’

III

This has been a week of undeniably hard work for us all, and one, at
least, is by no means sorry that to-morrow is Christmas Eve.

Most of the time I seem to have spent on the top of a rickety step-ladder
in the school-room, having tin-tacks and boughs of holly and
gaily-coloured flags passed up to me by Mr. Weaverly and the mutually
distrustful Miss Sweet and Miss Matilda Coles. Tom Clemmer, helped by
half a dozen others, brought the great tree up from Windle Woods, and it
stands now in its tub of spangled cotton-wool, a gorgeous sight, every
branch weighed down with toy-shop treasures, the queen-doll at its apex
brandishing her gilt-starred sceptre high up among the oaken beams of the
ceiling. Every available chair or bench in the village has been
confiscated, and ranged round the room. The tables at the far end fairly
creak and groan under their burden of infantile good cheer. It is all
ready for to-morrow. We put in the finishing touches with the last gleam
of daylight this evening, Weaverly and I alone together. Then he locked
the door, speechlessly tired and happy, and faded away—a black but
benevolent ghost in goloshes—down the length of the darkening street.

As for me, I followed at a respectful distance with no object definitely
in view but to smoke a quiet pipe after the day’s work, and enjoy the
unwonted life and bustle of the village.

Thinking it over discriminately, it seemed to be a great thing, a real
advance on the true line of social progress, to be strolling about there,
taking unfeigned pleasure in the sight of two small shops doubtfully
illuminated with oil-lamps and candles, and in the sound made by perhaps
fifty people all told, as they clattered and chattered to and fro in a
single, narrow village street. There were folk, I knew, wandering just
as aimlessly in the crowded thoroughfares of great cities miles away,
whose ears were deafened with a prodigious uproar, and eyes blinded by a
myriad superfluous lights, but who were not half so entertained, so
thoroughly instilled with the sense of being one in a hustling, happy
Christmas multitude, as I. Then again, of all the thousands that the
city promenader meets in the crush of a London street between one
electric standard and the next, how many can he rightfully greet as
neighbour, or even remember to have seen before? While here was I, after
a good half-hour’s loitering up and down, who had encountered none but
old familiar faces, nor let one go by without the kind word or friendly
glance exchanged. Truly the scale, the mere arithmetic of life goes for
nothing: it is the proportional, the relative, that counts. There was
not so much folly as we imagine in the grave debate of the old
philosophers as to how many angels could stand upon a pin’s point.

I tarried awhile in the broad beam of light that fell from the window of
the village store, and, in the company of a dozen other loiterers,
feasted eyes on its Yule-tide splendour. From where I stood on the
opposite side of the way, it seemed no less than a palace of glittering
beauty. Candles of all colours in little tinselled sconces shone amidst
the wares of everyday—bacon and worsted stockings, loaves of bread and
tin saucepans, butter, neckties, bars of mottled soap, and trousers in
moleskin or corduroy. The ceiling of the shop, which at ordinary times
is hidden by hanging festoons of boots, basket-ware, hedging-gloves,
coils of rope, was intersected now by chains of coloured paper and
threadled holly-leaves. There was a suspended roasting-jack in a corner
slowly twirling round a grand set-piece of Christmas knick-knacks; and
there were two copper coalscuttles, the one filled with oranges, the
other heaped high with bunches of green grapes that made the mouth water
a dozen yards away. All these I gazed upon, and at the jostling throng
of housewives, at least half a score, within, and at the red-faced,
perspiring shopkeeper overdone with business; and from the bottom of my
heart, I rejoiced that they sufficed for me, that I should go to bed that
night with as complete a sense of having looked on at the great world’s
Yuletide gladness as if I had tired out feet and eyes and nerves in the
roaring maelstrom at the Elephant, or the Messina Strait of the Strand.
For indeed life and its disciplines, its experiences, its outcomes, can
be no mere matters of dimension: when we come at last to find eternity
and the angels, they are as like to be on a pin’s point as out-thronging
all the labyrinth of the Milky Way.

From the village store I moved on presently to the little sweetstuff
shop, and stood awhile looking in through the holly-garlanded door.
Susan sat in a wilderness of scalloped silver paper, presiding over a
lucky tub. There was no getting near her to-night for the mob of
children that surrounded her, and overflowed into the street; but she
bawled me an affectionate Christmas greeting, and passed me, by half a
dozen intervening hands—in exchange for a thrown halfpenny—a packet from
the lucky-dip, which proved to contain a cherubim modelled out of pink
scented soap. With this symbolic testimony to our old-time friendship
bulging my pocket, I went rambling on again, and in course of time
arrived at the Three Thatchers Inn. A tilt-cart was just driving away
from the door. A numerous company was gathered outside, speeding the
vehicle on its way with laugh and jest.

‘Ye’ve not fared so bad,’ roared old Daniel Dray, as he spied me in the
darkness, ‘though ye didn’t come to th’ drawin’. Ye’ve got a topside,
an’ a hand o’ pig-meat. Stall’ard here, he’s got wan o’ th’ turkeys, an’
young George Artlett th’ tother. A good club it ha’ been, considerin’.
An’ now the lot o’ us ha’ got to bide here ’til Dan’l gets hoame from
Stavisham wi’ th’ tack.’

This annual prize-drawing, and division of the Christmas Club funds, with
the subsequent wait in the cosy inn parlour while the things were fetched
from the town, was a great event in Windlecombe. On this one night in
the year, we cultivated as a fine art the pleasure of anticipation, and
each did his best to make the time go with mirth and neighbourly
good-will. The occasion was also, in some degree, a kind of benefit for
the landlord, to which all might contribute as a duty, if by any chance
the inclination lacked. Looking round the crowded room, I could think of
hardly one of the well-known faces that was missing. The old ferryman
was there—how he got there was a mystery; but there he was, in the corner
of the settle whence he had been absent so long. Even George Artlett had
stayed to await the arrival of his turkey, and now sat at my side
quaffing lemonade, his face as grave and thoughtful as ever, but his eyes
twinkling with a jollity I had never seen in them before.

Young Daniel knew that no one would desire to curtail this part of the
prize-drawing ceremony, and there was little fear of his wheels being
heard in the sloppy street for a good two hours to come. We stretched
out our legs to the cheery blaze, and felt that for once we had succeeded
in wing-clipping old Father Time.

‘Beef-club drawin’ agen, Dan’l!’

‘Ay! beef-club drawin’ agen, Tom.’

In a break in the general clamour, the two veterans exchanged the thought
slowly and pensively, looking down their long pipe-stems into the fire.

‘An’ no one gone, Dan’l.’

‘Ne’er a wan, Tom, thank God.’

‘How quirk ’a do hould hisself, to be sure,’ said old Tom Clemmer after a
pause, and none doubted who he meant. ‘Ah! an’ how ’a do brisk along
still! Another year o’ him by—’tis another blessin’. Here’s to un, wi’
all our love an’ dooty!’

It was a silent toast, but drunk deep. George Artlett’s glass was
lighter than any when he set it down.

‘But ’tain’t been allers so,’ old Clemmer went on ruminatively. ‘How
many drawin’s ha’ ye seen, Dan’l, boy an’ man?—threescore belike, and I
bean’t fur ahent ye. An’ many’s th’ time as summun’s money ha’ laid on
th’ table wi’ only widder or poor-box to claim it; an’ he, poor soul,
quiet i’ th’ litten-yard up there. Ay! ’tis a lucky drawin’ wi’ nane but
livin’ hands to draw.’

Daniel Dray took up the prize-list and scanned it curiously, his white
head thrown back, his spectacles straddling the extreme tip of his nose.

‘An’ what,’ said he, ‘will a single man, onmarried, do wi’ a whole gurt
turkey-burd? An’ him wi’ never a wife! ’Tis wicked waste, neighbours!
Him an’ th’ parrot, they’ll ha’ nought but turkey-meat i’ th’ house from
now to Lady-time.’

Stallwood’s beady black eyes disappeared in a wide smile.

‘I knowed a man once,’ he said, ‘out in Utah State in Murriky, ’twur—as
got a brace o’ ostriches at a Christmas drawin’; an’ when it come to
carvin’ at dinner-time, th’ pore feller, he got no more ’n half a bite
fer hisself because—’ He stopped, suddenly recollecting George Artlett’s
lustrating presence, ‘Ah! he wur married, I tell ye, an’ never a wured o’
a lie!’

‘What’ll ’a do wi’ it, Dan’!?’ The old ferryman leant from his corner
eagerly, staring at the wall as though he saw there the picture that rose
in his mind. ‘What’ll ’a do wi’ it? Jest think on ’t! Nobbut hisself
in a quiet kitchen o’ Christmas morning—his boots on, an’ nane to rate un
for spannellin’ about—click-clack from the roastin’ jack, an’ tick-tack
from th’ clock, an’ a good cuss now an’ agen from th’ ould parrot, but
never a wured o’ wimmin’s wrath. Ah, life!—’tis all jest a gurt
beef-club drawin’! Some on us draws peace an’ quiet an’ turkey-burds,
an’ some draws—’

His lips closed on his pipe-stem with a snap. A commiserate shake of the
head went round the company.

‘An’ here,’ went on old Daniel, still conning the prize-list, ‘here be
Jack Farley wi’ bare money an’ fower ounces o’ tobacker—him as doan’t
smoke, an’ has sixteen i’ family. Lor’, Jack! how that there deuce-ace
do foller ye i’ life!’

Jack Farley sat in the draughtiest seat by the door, his invariable
modest choice of station. No one had ever seen him without a smile on
his emaciated, sun-blackened face; and now he was smiling more
determinedly than ever.

‘I dunno’, Dan’1,’ he expostulated gently. ‘’Twur a real double-six when
’er an’ me come together all they years ago. An’ th’ chillern, they be
good throws, every wan. An’ that there noo little ’un, Dan’l—nauthin’ o’
th’ deuce-ace about him, I tell ye! But them as putts to sea, Dan’l,
they must look fer rough weather, time and agen.’

He squared himself and gazed about him as though his weekly carter-wage
of fourteen shillings were as many pounds. Then he beat his mug upon the
table jovially. ‘An’ now,’ said he, ‘I’ll sing ye “Th’ Mistletoe
Bough!”’

It was the beginning of the real entertainment of the evening. Vocal
music in the Three Thatchers at ordinary times was accounted a rather
disreputable thing—a mere tap-room vulgarism—by the habitual parlour
company; but on certain rare nights in the year, of which this was one,
every man present was expected to sing. One by one now, in Jack Farley’s
wake, followed the rest of the assembly, and every song had a chorus that
shook the very roof-beams of the house. No man thought of looking at the
clock until, in the midst of a doleful melody from the landlord, old Tom
Clemmer suddenly sprang to his one available foot.

‘’Tis th’ cart!’ he cried, and made for the door. In the general
stampede after him, I heard Captain Stallwood’s grumbling voice:

‘Ut bean’t right nohow fer people as caan’t use tobacker to draw un away
from them as can. I means to ha’ that there fower ounces, Dan’l. An’
Jack Farley—th’ ould swab!—’a must make out as best ’a can wi’ th’
turkey-burd.’

‘Yes, I can see it,’ said the Reverend, ‘plainer than the sun in a midday
sky.’

With a taper at the end of a long cane, I had just ignited the last of
the candles, and the great Christmas-tree stood up before us, clad, from
its bole to its highest twig, in a shimmering garment of light. We two
were alone in the schoolroom, but beyond the closed door, we knew, was
Mr. Weaverly; and, beyond him again, a sea of expectant faces filling the
wide porch, and stretching out half across the street under the still,
frost-bound night. Every child that was not whispering excitedly to its
neighbour, was crooning to itself with irrepressible joy; and the sound
came to us through the solid timber like the sound of a bee-hive just
going to swarm.

‘Now open the door,’ said the Reverend, getting into his corner. ‘And if
you miss a single thing, I’ll haunt you when I am gone to the end of your
miserable life.’

I turned the key in the lock, and retreated hastily. The door flung
open. I saw the black form of Mr. Weaverly flicker aside, and expected
the whole room to be invaded in a minute by an avalanche of scrambling,
vociferating mites. But it did not happen so.

‘Not one has come in yet,’ said I, over the Reverend’s shoulder. ‘They
are just peering in at the door. I can see thirty faces, perhaps, with
thirty mouths, and twice as many eyes, opened wide; but never a smile
among the lot. How quiet they keep! But now trembling fingers are
coming round the doorposts, and a boot or two has got beyond the
threshold. The reluctant vanguard is being pressed forward by those
behind. They are creeping in now at last. The crowd has divided, and
they are edging up the room right and left, keeping their shoulders
against the walls. And all the time every wide-open eye remains fixed
upon the tree in awestruck delight. You hear that low whispering note?
They are beginning to find their voices again, and the girls are at last
venturing to let go one another’s hands. They are all in now, I think.
At least the room could hardly hold another—’

And just as a failing mill-dam begins to ooze, then to trickle and spurt,
and finally, in a moment gives way before the pressing tide, so the
silence now broke down under the flood of child voices. Shouts and
hurrahs, shrill peals of laughter, a hubbub of delighted commentary, made
the rafters vibrate above us, and the window-glass tremble in its
quarries. Before the din had so far moderated that I could get my tongue
to work again in the old vicar’s service, Weaverly and his satellites
were forging ahead with the first joyful business of the night.

It all comes back to me now—as I sit alone and late by my workroom
fire—clearer perhaps than when I was in the vortex of it all, with the
happy voices ringing about me, and the toy-drums and trumpets, the
mouth-organs and the whistle-pipes, each going to swell the already
deafening chorus the moment it was cut from the tree and put into some
eager, uplifted hand. I can see the great glittering pyramid of the tree
slowly giving up its treasures, until it bears nothing but the queen-doll
waving her star-tipped wand up among the flags and paper chains and holly
garlands of the ceiling. I see Weaverly, poised on the top of the
rickety ladder, gingerly dislodging her from her perch, while two
overdressed and over-perfumed ladies hold the ladder firm below, and gaze
up at him with fond and anxious eyes.

Now at last I see the Christmas-tree deserted, forgotten, while the
tables at the end of the room are unloading themselves of their cakes and
oranges and the score of other items appertaining to the feast. This is
a silent time, save for the exploding crackers and occasional shrieks of
fearsome delight; but it is over at last. The games begin, and with them
reawakens all the old turmoil in redoubled fury. Though each of us has
eaten more than is credible in any but a Downland-bred child, this in no
way impairs our agility. We hunt the slipper; we sing ourselves hoarse
with ‘Green Gravel’; we play ‘Blind Man’s Buff,’ and the Reverend, being
caught, is allowed to go through the part of Blind Man, at his own jovial
suggestion, without the handkerchief over his eyes.

And now two things come back to me more significant than all. But for
this busy quarter of an hour—when he is staggering to and fro, clutching
at pinafores and shock heads of hair—the Reverend has been rather a
silent and deliberate figure in the midst of all the madcap business,
more detached and quiet than I have known him at other Christmas gaieties
bygone. He has hovered about on the fringe of the merrymaking,
happy-faced as ever, yet with a certain slowness, a languor, that I have
never marked in him before. This is the one thing. The other is a
random glance I take over my shoulder at the Christmas-tree, when the fun
and frolic are at their highest. Pathetically forlorn and deserted it
looks, with bits of string clinging here and there to its drooping green
fronds, a single shining trinket hanging forgotten on one of its lower
branches, and half its glory already quenched. As I look at it, every
moment sees another candle gutter out and die. A few minutes more, I
think, and it will be nothing but a sombre and solemn fir-tree again,
ready to be carted down and set once more amidst the silent glooms of the
wood. Somehow, in spite of myself, the two things, the two thoughts,
blend themselves indivisibly together. I am glad now that, while through
the long evening I poured into the Reverend’s patient ear much idle
chatter and many feather-brained conceits, I said no word to him about
the dying Christmas-tree.

While I have been sitting here, turning over these thoughts, my own
candles have burned low: the wood-fire has sunk to a few waning embers:
it must be growing late, how late I do not guess until I turn to look at
the clock. Almost midnight! Another minute or two, and then—Christmas
morning! Perhaps, as the night is so clear and still, I shall be able to
hear the hour chime in far-off Stavisham. I go to the window, throw back
the casement against the rustling ivy, and look forth.

There is the glimmer of a lantern over by the Seven Sisters on the green,
and a sound of people talking quietly together. I think I can
distinguish George Artlett’s deep tones, and his brother Tom’s—the
Singing Plowman’s—higher, clearer speech, and an admonitory word or two
that might be Weaverly’s. The clock is striking now. Before its last
droning note dies on the frosty air, the darkness beneath me fills with a
living, joyous music:

‘Hark! the herald angels sing
Glory to the new-born King,
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled.
Joyful all ye nations, rise,
Join the triumph of the skies;
With the angelic host proclaim,
“Christ is born in Bethlehem.”
Hark! the herald angels sing
Glory to the new-born King!’

* * * * *

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Neighbourhood - A year's life in and about an English village" ***

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