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 presentwhen 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.
“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.
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 areaper-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 dovesstrutting, 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 thepoorest 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 passeshis 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 convenientlyto 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 ofstars, 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 whileI was rejoicing in a possession, priceless indeed, yet hard-won as might be—a heart and mind filled with the spirit of theCottar’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’ twohovers. 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 deliciousache 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 somehigh 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.
Inthe 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 theface; 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 thepools 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, anddragging 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 amoment, 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 cuckooschiming, 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 differentfrom, 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 Drayanxiously, 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 greathob-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 andperspiration. 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 ifHewur 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 thecourage 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’ yeonnerstand? ’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 struckvertically 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.’
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 beliefin 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 singlebeam 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 highhedges. 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.
OldRunridge’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 atMrs. 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 aman! 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 iniquitousjob-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 thenit 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, andpresently 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 skirtsand 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 rosebaywillowherbs 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, thereare 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 deepbottom, 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.