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 ourdoors; 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 ofwelcome. 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 buttercupsa 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! Icansee it!—lazily looping along, though you think he will fall to earth a cinder any moment at your feet. He islike 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 youlook 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. Wildand 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 halcyonsky, 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 lazycloud-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 sucha 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 thespringy 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 inherentfar-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.
Sometimesfor 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 adifferent 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 househave 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 incessantmonotonous 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 bottlesstand 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 thelandscape, 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 theirferny 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 thelittle 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 intolerablefor 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.’
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; forhe 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 theday 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, makingWhitsun 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 turnedupon 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 withpride 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 overwith 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 beesthat 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 thefragrant 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 thesinging 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 nearlydouble 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 aninch 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.
Thismorning, 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 eyeswith 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 andpleasure, 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 lookupon 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 ofdying 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 lowclamour 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 ofsheep, 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 honourat 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 briskactivity, 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.