THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
THE
THE
HEART OF THE COUNTRY
A SURVEY OF A MODERN LAND
BY
FORD MADOX
" KpaTioroi/ fiicf] TOUT' tav d<p(ifteva.
" OiJroff yap dvrjp ovr* ev 'Apy«otr p-cyas,
" oi/r' au 8oKT)<r€i SapaTatv a>yiea>/icvor»
" €!/ TOIS T6 TToXXot? WV, aplOTOS CVpf0TJ."
LONDON
ALSTON RIVERS, LTD., ARUNDEL ST., W.C.
MCMVI
BRADBURY, AONEW & CO., LD., PR1NPKBS, LONDON AND TONBR1DGB.
Io3o
Reserved.}
TO
HENRY JAMES.
CONTENTS
AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT . . Page xi
INTRODUCTORY. THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN.
The Restaurant. — The Islands of the Blest.— The man from the Heart of the Country. — The mirage. — The change incur language. — The permanence [of the idea. — Leaving town. — Each man's heart. — The great view. — The " note " of the country one of pain. — The empty room. — The belief in romance. — The watcher by the bedside. — The country in inverted commas. — The Antaeus town. — The scientists. — The townsman's difficulty in becoming a countryman. — He discovers his ignorance. — The stages of a country life.— The townsman's induction. —The landowner's point of view. — The child in the country. — The slum child. — The hopper. — The railway porter. — Going to a cricket match. — Views. — " What a lot a fellow could do if he owned all that " , Page i
CHAPTER I. BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS.
The individuality of roads. — Turnpikes. — The ghosts on them. — Solitary roads. — The real roads of the country. — What the country is. — The railway hedgerows — Quicksets. — The two points of view. — Different travellers. — Tramps. — Their castles in Spain. —
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CONTENTS
The tooth-comb tramp. — His fear of solitude. — Other tramps. — Their ideals. — The German poet. — The townsman and the tramp. —Travellers who might be rescued. — The Union. — Remarkable paupers. — The carrier's cart. — Its users. — Its route. — Gossip. — The countryman's memory. — A judgment on " Old F — ." — The cart in a river. — Rustic independence. — The townsman learns his place. — Cap-service. — The welcome home. — The return to the land. — The Covent Garden porter. — Moving. — Its costliness. — The farm waggon in the British Museum. — The captive waggoner. — Where there is an exchange. — By-roads. — Who uses them. — The squirrel on the high-road.— Market-day.— Country centres. . Page 33
CHAPTER II. ACROSS THE FIELDS.
Getting the lie of the land. — The man who loves his home. — The man who loves the footpaths. — The country in undress. — New Place.— The loafer gains dignity.— The Midland squire. — The squire abroad.— Trespassing. — The number of paths across England. — Pilgrim ways.— Pack tracks. — Cinder paths.— The student of nature. — Nature and the countryman. — The oil beetle. — To what end?— Linky. — White, ominous of death. — The townsman and nature books.— Hasty pudding.— The old looker. — The sunset. — Potato digging. — The countryman and the supernatural. — The sick nurse. — The inquest. — Bizarre beliefs.— The feeling of famili- arity.—Eefuge from one's self.— The hunting field.— Other field sports.— The naturalist. — The breakdown.— The invalid and the mirror. — *The vocation of the fields Page 71
CHAPTER III. IN THE COTTAGES.
The two-dwelling house.— Meary.— Her appearance.— Her philo- sophy.—Her biography.— Her folk-lore.— Her religious beliefs,— Her man.— She meets a ghost.— Her daily life.— Her death. --Her
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CONTENTS
money. — The belief in hoardings. — Its counter-part in France. — A conversation in the Cafe de 1'Esperance. — The peasant and retiring. — Improvidence. — Money spent on drink. — Children. — Old couples. — The informer's descendants. — Rest in the country. — The power of the peasant. — His want of corporate self-con- sciousness.— The peasant's print. — The absence of youths in the country. — The village maiden Page 107
CHAPTER IV. TOILERS OF THE FIELD.
Driven in by the weather. — The retired soldier. — The looker. — Sunshine. — Their views of men who wear black coats. — Cases in Chancery. — The countryman's reason for keeping a shut head. — Differences in dialect. — The countryman, a man of the world. — What you expect of a gentleman. — The carpenter and the Financier. — S. — His venerability. — He annexes a guinea. — W — n. — A comparatively honest man. — His industry. — His toleration of other people's thefts. — His biography. — His humble ambition. — His mates. — The influence of woodlands upon character. — A woodland Heart of the Country. — Bad villages. — The parson's power for good or evil. — The countryman and the Church. — The countryman and superstitions. — Ghosts. — Witches and White doctors. — The countryman and death. — N — and how he died. — The Yorkshire stone mason.— The raw material of the world.
Page 133
CHAPTER V. UTOPIAS.
D d. — Its glories. — Superlatives. — Its uninterestingness. —
The old story. — Great houses not based on the plough. — The use of ascertaining what is the best cowhouse. Cold storage.— The usual castle in Spain.— English country life and outdoor life. — Climate responsible for this. — Returning from hunting. — Parallel afforded by the sagas. — Thej country house in wet weather. — Lack
ix
CONTENTS
of intellectual interest in the country. — The real landowner.— His problems. — Landowning no longer pays. — The small landowner. — His love for his acres. — The tenant farmer large and small. — The small farmer the real stumbling-block. — A personal view. — A personal Utopia. — Scheme for a syndicate possessed of a million pounds sterling. — A career. — Town legislation for the country. — Cottages and^the truck-system. — A dream. — Conflicting Utopias. — The man from Lincolnshire.— The Northerners.— The Tory. — The advanced thinker. — The political economist. — Return to nature derided. — Another Utopia. — Babel. — The awakening . Page 165
L'ENVOI— "BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES/'
The field auction. — The sheep. — The buyers assemble. — The sale begins. — Why we never laugh at tools. — In the idiot's shed. — The auctioneer. — A public jester. — The country paper at Michael- mas.— The passing of farmers. — Change, the note of all country- sides.— Old Hooker. — His team of black oxen. — "It isn't the same place at all." — The invisible presence of the dead. — The odiousness of restorations. — The eventual acceptability of other changes.— A late October walk. — The unchanging valley. — Leaders of caravans Page 203
AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT.
THE present volume forms the second of three small projections of a View of Modern Life ; it is a natural sequel to a former work, the "Soul of London." Its author has attempted to do in this volume just as much as in the former one he attempted to do for a modern city. As the " Soul of London" was made up of a series of illustrations to a point of view, so the " Heart of the Country " is a series of illustrations to country moods. The subject of the " Country " being so vast a one the limits of the attempt must be obvious. Every man, in fact, has a sort of ideal countryside — perhaps it is a Utopian vision that he conjures up at will within his own brain, perhaps it is no more than as it were a mental " composite photograph " of all the country- sides that he knows more or less well. It is this latter vision of his own, this survey of several country- sides that he knows more or less intimately, and ol many countrysides that he has passed through or visited for longer or shorter periods — it is some such
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
mental "composite photograph " that the author of such a book must attempt to render upon paper. In this book the writer has followed implicitly the rule laid down for himself in the former volume, and the rule that he has laid down for himself for the forth- coming volume ot this trilogy ; that is to say, that though for many years he has read many works, returns, or pamphlets dealing with rural questions, and though these may have tinged his views and coloured his outlook, he has attempted here to do no more and no less than to depict — that is the exact word — his personal view of his personal country- side. This particular countryside limits itself strictly to that portion of the British Isles that is most psychologically English. It leaves out the greater portion of Yorkshire, which is, in most of its condi- tions, a part of Lowland Scotland ; on the west it runs no further north than Carlisle; it neglects Wales. Within these limits it gives, as well as the powers of depiction of its projector have allowed, a rendering of a rural cosmogony. If the attempt appear somewhat megalomaniac, it has been under- taken nevertheless in a spirit of true humility by a person who, having spent the greater number of his years in one or other Heart of the Country, has a very wholesome fear of awakening all the sleeping dogs of controversies most heated and most bewildering. At the same time it leaves unsaid
xii
AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT
nothing that its author wished dispassionately to record. It preaches no particular sermon ; it announces no particular message ; it is practically no more than a number of impressions arranged after a certain pattern and in a certain order. (What that order is may be seen if the reader who is interested in the matter will refer to the paragraph that occupies the greater part of page 22 and a small portion of page 23.)
F. M. H.
WINCH ELSE A, April t 1906.
NOTE. — A number of extracts, selected rom the completed book by the Editor, have appeared in the columns of the Tribune : the book itself was written without any eye to such a form of publication.
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THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
INTRODUCTORY. THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN.
IN the cigarette smoke, breathing the rich odours of ragouts that cloy the hunger, of verveine, of patchouli, beneath tall steely-blue mirrors, over crumpled napkins of an after-lunch in a French place of refection, an eloquent and persuasive friend with wide gestures was discoursing upon some plan that was to make for the rest of the company fame, fortune, rest, appetite, and the wherewithal to supply it — an engrossing plan that would render the Islands of the Blest territory habitable for them almost as soon as they could reach the " next street," which, in most of our minds, is the Future. Their heads came close together across the table ; outside in the narrow street carts rattled ; all round them was that atmo- sphere of luxuries of a sort, with an orchestral accompaniment of knives thrown down, of orders shouted in French, in Italian, in Spanish ; words in broken English, words in tones of command, of .anger, of cynical passion, of furtive enjoyment — a sort of surf-sound, continuous, rising and falling, but
3 B 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
utterly beyond analysis. And, as if it were a com- partment that shut them in from all the world, beneath the shelter of this Babel they discussed their Eldorado of the day after to-morrow — their dim Cyclades of the next street.
Those names, those myths shining so graciously down the ages, have still for humanity a great fascination. In one or the other of them each soul of us finds his account. Dim Cyclades, Eldorados, Insulae Beatse, Happy Hunting Grounds, Lands flowing with Milk and Honey, Avalons, or mere Tom Tiddler's Grounds — somewhere, between the range of dim islands of a purple west, or that field where we shall pick up gold and silver — somewhere in that vast region is the spot that each of us hopes to reach, to which all our strivings tend, towards which all our roads lead. The more close and airless the chamber from which we set out the more glorious, no doubt, the mirage; the longer the road, the more, no doubt, we shall prize the inn at the end — the inn that we shall never reach; the inn that is our goal precisely because we never can reach it by any possible means. But in bands, in companies, in twos or threes or singly — in labourers' cottages, in omnibuses, in tall offices, we discuss each plan that shall bring us one step nearer, or in the dark silences of our own hearts we cherish a passion so fierce and so solitary that no single soul else in all the universe has a hint of our madness, our presumption, our glorious ambition, or our baseness.
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THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
Thus in that dubious place of refection the one friend could well enough discourse to his companions upon their common Eldorado that should, the gods being good, give them fame — and rest. It held them, the idea, among all the clatter ; it made glorious with its glamour the foul atmosphere. It was, as the slang phrase has it, a master idea. Suddenly, pushing out from behind the door, came a long, grey, bronzed man.
Bewilderment at being torn from their train ot thought, surprise, recognition, were the steps towards immense pleasure.
" You ! " slipped from all their lips at once. He dropped his great length into a small chair placed askew at the corner of the table, and began to talk about the country.
He had just come up from the Heart of the Country ! He was a man always very wonderful for them, as to most of us in our childhood the people are who have a command over beasts and birds, who live in the rustle of woodlands, and commune with ringdoves as with spiders. We credit them with powers not our own, with a subtle magic, a magnetism more delicate than that which gives power over crowds of men — with keener eyesight, quicker hearing, and a velvety touch that can caress small creatures. They have something faun-like, something primeval, something that lets us think that, in touch with them, we are carried back into touch with an earlier world before cities were, and before the nations of men had
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
boundaries. There are naturalists — but these men are not naturalists ; they come out of no studies ; in museums they shudder and are disquieted, just as gipsies are vaguely unrestful when you ask them to enter your house. In the towns these men will see things that we never see ; they will note the fall of sparrows, or, sailing through the air a mile above the cross of St. Paul's, a sea-hawk will be visible to them. Into the towns they will bring a touch of sweetness and of magic — because they come from the Heart of the Country.
He was all in grey, so that against an old stone wall you would hardly have seen him, or on a downside no bird would startle at passing him. It happened that he mentioned the precise green valley that for one of those men was the Heart of the Country. It nestles beneath a steep, low cliff, in the heart of an upland plain as vast and as purple, as wavering and as shadeless as the sea itself. But the green valley runs along a bottom, a little win- terbourne directing its snake's course ; trees fill it and overshadow old stone houses, and it is alive with birds driven to it for water from the plains above.
So that, green and sinuous, a mirage seemed to dazzle and hang in air in the middle of the cigarette smoke, making a pattern of its own, vivid and thirst- inspiring, across the steely-blue of the restaurant mirrors. It seemed to waver right above, and to extinguish the luminous idea — to extinguish the very
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THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
light of their Eldorado. They talked of place after place, pursuing the valley along its course, of a great beacon here, a monolith there, of millponds and villages that run one into another, boasting each one a name more pleasant in the ear, or a tuft of elms higher and more umbrageous. For if each man have (and each of us has) his own Heart of the Country, to each assuredly that typical nook, that green mirage that now and then shines between him and his workaday world, will be his particular Island of the Blest, his island of perpetual youth, his closed garden, which as the years go on will more and more appear to contain the Fountain of Youth. And as time goes on, too, life will assume more and more an air of contest between the two strains of idealism in the man — a contest between the Tom Tiddler's Ground of the Town and Islands of the Blest that lie somewhere in the Heart of the Country.
These metaphors, this ideal of an island smoothness in Hyperborean seas, are not the less true because they are not part of our present vernacular. Our necessities, our modes of travel, our very speech, have changed ; the necessity for that ideal remains. Whilst, indeed, our speech was forming itself, they wrote books with titles like " Joyful Newes from the West Over Seas," and still in the tangible unknown West, they could hope to find Happy Valleys. Now with a mapped-out world we can no longer have that hope. We travel still with that ideal, but the hope has grown intangible.
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
On the one hand the world has become very small, since we may have it all in a book, in pink, in green, in yellow squares. We can reach any portion of it so easily, we may have so easily pictures of it all, that it is hardly worth the seeking. Intellectually, we have learned that there is no Island of the Blest ; in our inmost selves, automatically, we never acknow- ledge it. We have brought our island nearer home ; it lies beyond the horizon, but only just beyond. In a sense we may even hope to reach it by the most commonplace of methods. For the mere taking of a pill there may be ours health, which is the fountain of youth ; for the mere pulling the ropes of a machine, for just waving our arms in certain magical postures before dressing in the morning, there shall — so the advertisements say — be ours a day of vigorous and unclouded brain, a day that shall see us, unhandi- capped by any bodily ill, descend to do our battles in the market-place — a day in the land of Eldorado. Thus do the clamant charlatans of the beyond in the pale columns of our journals attempt to play upon strings that three thousand or three hundred years ago were rendered sweet by the melodies of those other charlatans who were once living poets.
These things we only half believe in, even in this England, which for the rest of the world is the <' Land of Pills." But observe the face of your inter- locutor when you tell him that you are going into the country. Observe the half envy, half yearning, the mixture of reminiscence and of forecasting plans that
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THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
will waver across his face, and mark all the shades of expression in his " Lucky you ! "
Round the flat, dark, toilsome town there is the vast green ring, the remembrance of which so many men carry nowadays in their hearts. Put it, if you will, that its attraction is simply that of the reverse of the medal, that it is a thing they love merely because it is not theirs'.
Its real pull is felt, the rope is cast off, when, in his club, on his mantelpiece at home or at his suburban post-office, the townsman leaves directions for his letters to be forwarded. At that blessed moment he loses touch with the world, casts off his identity, heaves a sigh as if a great weight had fallen from his shoulders, or even moves his limbs purposelessly in order to realise to the fullest how a free man feels. He has shaken off his identity. For as long as the mood lasts he cannot be traced, he cannot be re- called to earth. And supposing he never went to the spot to which his letters are to be addressed — sup- posing that, instead of taking train to that fly-fisher's inn, to that moorland farm, or to that friend's manor house, he went afoot to the shore of a Devonshire sea, he might never be found again. He might shake off all responsibilities; he might form ties lighter to bear than the lightest snaffle that ever horse sub- mitted to. He might find a threshold over which, when he stepped in the morning, his feet would go lightly, his eyes glance confidently over fields, seas, and skies of a fabulous brightness.
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
He never does it — at least he has never done it since here the townsman is and here, in whatever particular town of life he has an abiding place — here he is likely to remain. Some no doubt break the chain. It has been asked, as we know well enough, " What's become of Waring since he gave us all the slip ? " But they never know, they who form the " us all " of the line. Waring has disappeared — gone ; he no longer exists ; the Heart of the Country has swallowed him up. He was a weak man who broke; those remaining are the strong, who shiver a little sometimes at the thought that they may do as Waring did.
The mood may last him for an hour or two ; it obsesses him a little as he leans back in his train — the fact is still there ; his letters are being forwarded to a place that he has not yet reached. For a little time he is still in the grey of the town; its magazines, its papers, its advertisements hold his eyes imme- diately. Gradually through the glass that encages us he sees the green flicker through the grey of the outskirts, as through the ragged drab skirts of a child you may catch the flash of her knee when she runs. The cloak spread over the ground becomes a covering less and less efficient; then it is all green, and amongst a geometrical whirl of corded posts turning slowly right away to the horizon he shall see the figures of women with blue handkerchiefs over their heads kneeling down and tying the hops.
But that is still all remote, all shadowy. His
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THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
lungs are quite literally filled with the air of his town. It is only when he steps out at his junction where he " changes " that he is conscious of some strange and subtle difference. On his forehead he feels a sudden coolness, his foot falls more lightly, he draws a deeper breath. It is because he is breathing the breath of a free wind.
So he crosses the platform, and in the gloaming gets into the smaller, dirtier, stuffier and darker, and how infinitely more romantic, boxes that will carry him through a fast darkening land into his par- ticular Heart of the Country.
Each man of us has his own particular Heart, even as each one has his own particular woman. And the allegiance that he pays to it is very similar. He has his time of passionate longing, of enjoyment, of palling perhaps, or of a continually growing passion that is a fervour of jealousy much such as a man may feel for his wife. He has his love of the past, or he has been whirled past places that later he will hope to make his ; he has, and always, his ideal.
This he will never attain to. Put him upon a great hill. Below him there will stretch plains almost infinite; down into them the slopes on which he stands' wave and modulate indefinitely. Above his head is the real blue infinity ; on his left hand the purple sea, with just a touch of the pink shore of another land that may carry the mind to distances
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
yet more vast. At his back there are grey silences ; before his face, miles and miles away in the heart of the sunset, there are dim purplish hills, like a lion couchant, stretched out in a measureless ease. .To this height he may have attained with great labour ; until he reached it it had represented his ideal. But after the first intaking of free air into the lungs he will see those dim and glamorous hills. And just beyond them once more his ideal will lie hidden. A moment later, too, he will remember that in the valley that he crossed to reach this height there were an old mill with a great pond in which swallows dipped, an old wheel revolving in a dripping tracery of green weeds, a stream running down a valley all aflame with kingcups. This old mill that he passed nonchalantly enough may, he remembers when he stands upon the height, contain his ideal chamber ; or if he had followed the slow stream through the marsh marigolds that would brush against his knees he might find the particular Herb Oblivion that he seeks ; or, lying down within sound of that old wheel, he might by its incessant plash be lulled into slumbers how easy !
Thus along with him he will carry always those two small fardels, regret for neglected loves, longing for the unattainable. No doubt at times he will drop them. We differ much in these things. Some men will feel all burdens drop from them for a time when they buffet an immense wind; others, again, are lulled into a pleasant doze in the immense heat and
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THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
haze of sheep-downs at noon ; upon some an immense placidity is shed when in the late twilight they step across the threshold of their inn into the mistiness of a village street, when they hang over the stones of a bridge and see waving in the eddies of a trout- stream the reflection of rosy cottage windows.
These moods are rare enough ; yet they give for us the " note " of the country, and certain of them stand out for us through all our lives. Thus I remember, years ago, running down through veiled moonlight, between hedges that were a shimmering blaze ot cow-parsley, upon a bicycle that by some miracle ot chance ran so smoothly that I was unconscious ot it as of myself. And the gentle slope was five miles long. It was one of those sensations that are never forgotten ; it was one that may hardly be recaptured, unless, indeed, the hereafter be one long lying on the tides of the winds.
For many — perhaps, if one knew the secrets of all hearts, one would say for all humanity that is really tied to the towns — the " note " of the country is one of pain. This not because the country herself is sad — she is only passionless — but because she is the confidante of so many sorrows. The townsmen tear themselves to pieces among the spines that abound where men dwell. Their friends, their vocations, their taxes, their rail service, their mistresses, their children, their homes, all the creaking doors and monotonous wall-papers — all these things grow weari- some, grow nauseous, grow at last terrible even, and
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
so they take to the country for consolation. Some- times they find it. Sometimes the country, like a jealous wife, will say, " No, you bring yourself to me only in your worst moods. Find another con- soler." That, however, happens seldom, and, as a rule, we discover eventually that she has acted for the best in one way or another.
I know, for instance, a man whose Heart of the Country is a certain empty room in a labourer's stone cottage in the backwater of a tiny inland village. He remembers it always as it was at night, with all the doors and windows open in a breathless June, and two candles burning motionlessly above white paper. The peculiar whimper of sheep bells comes always down the hill through the myriad little noises of the night. In the rare moments when the bells cease there comes the mournful and burdensome cry of the peewits on the uplands. If this too is silent there is the metallic little tinkle of a brook on pebbles, the flutter of night moths beating against the walls and ceiling of the lit room. The room itself contains nothing save a table, a chair, a shaving-glass and a razor, a pen and a little ink in an egg-cup ; and the black night, magical and gleaming, peers through the open windows and the open door. It was like, so my friend tells me, being hidden in a little lighted chamber of an immense cavern — a place deep down in the eternal blackness of the earth's centre.
And, according to his view, no man in the world
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
was ever more terribly burdened with griefs of a hundred kinds. The inflictions that Fate can bestow upon a man are ingenious and endless ; he may have, say, the temperament of a poet, a hopeless passion, a neglected genius, the disclosure of hidden basenesses in himself, the consciousness of personal failure, the ingratitude of friends ; or at given mo- ments the whole circle of his life may seem to y^ crumble away and leave him naked beneath the pitiless stars. Let us say that all these calamities had overwhelmed this particular Waring. In that solitude and blackness he fought, unavailingly enough, against these devils ; he tried to people that room with figures of his own imagination, so that still in remembrance he seems to see a whole galanty-show of kings and queens in mediaeval garnitures passing dimly from door to door. At times the razor that lay on the shelf behind his back had the fascination of a lodestone, and on a hot, blazing moonlight night he would rush out from his room and wander, appalled and shaken, to the middle of the white silent village, with the thatches on the wall-tops silver, and the shadows vertical beneath the moon. And then from the little village bakery there came always the constant and unchanging thrill of a single cricket — a monotonous sound that seems to be shaken out upon the air as a powder may be shaken from a box with a pierced lid.
Thus that cave-like, cool room, those hot nights
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
and that thrill of the cricket, those shadows and that fascination of an instrument that should bring a swift and utter change, the slumbrous cottage faces, the imagined and shadowy pageants, the creaking cry of the peewits and the clamorous whimper of sheep- bells — all these things, fusing together and forming a little fold in space and time, go to make what remains for my friend his Heart of the Country. He did not in that solitude find any alleviation, but, perhaps because his particular cross drew him away from the real contemplation of material objects, that spot remains to him something glamorous, some- thing mysterious. Probably on account of those woeful associations he will never go back to that spot, and so it will remain for him to all time remote and wonderful.
Thus that glamour and mystery are what he gained from that stay ; and that subtle witch, the Country, if she gave with one hand neither composure nor good health, those illusions that are our daily bread, gave with the other hand that other illusion, blessed in its way — the belief that the earth holds valleys filled with romance and mystery.
The powers of the country, its powers over our moods, are not illimitable. At times hills, great skies, bright hedgerows, or barns the thatch of which is a network of mosses and flowers — at times all these things are mockeries upon whose surface the very sunlight lies like a blight. But at times, again, she achieves the impossible, and serene twilights, the
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THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
chorus of birds at dawn, the sound of children's voices from deep woods or the blue floors of coppices in May, some immensely vivid sight or some in- definitely complicated sound, some overwhelming odour or the feel of the wind on the forehead, some blessed touch from the material world will pierce through the cloud of gloom that besets poor humanity at its lower ebbs. And it is these things that are unforgettable, it is these things that keep us going.
Other men will remember having watched by a sick bed for several days and nights in succession, in a house full of sickness, waiting all the time for a temperature to fall. The drag of such nights and days becomes terrible towards four in the morning. A man sits in a twilight too dim to read by, he fears to move lest the tinkle of medicine bottles awaken the sleeper. He dare not sleep, he dare hardly think for fear that sleep will overcome him. He re- members, on the third or fourth of these nights, a feeling like breaking, a tightening of the screw until it seems that something must burst, so that without more deliberation it is a necessity to be out of doors for a second, for a minute, for however tiny a space of change.
Out of doors there is coolness, the merest shimmer of grey above the distant sea, the slow shaking out of rays from a lighthouse that seems to be lessening its pace out of weariness and because the dawn is at hand; flowers and leaves appear indistinct and visionary, the air is absolutely motionless. And
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
suddenly there comes a waft of light right across the sky; a rook caws from the trees high overhead — then the voices of the whole colony, soothing and multitudinous ; a breeze stirs a spray of hops. The corner is turned, the night is over.
It does, perhaps, consecrate the memory that, going back to the close room, one may find that at last the temperature of the sufferer has fallen, but the unforgettable psychological relief comes with that stir of the dawn breeze, and that sudden motion of the hop tendrils is the acknowledgment that we
are no longer alone in a dead world.
#•#*•##•
All this is no doubt about "the country," in inverted commas — about the land from the out- side. It is one of the anomalies of our present civilisation that the majority of self- conscious humanity — the majority, at least, of those who read books — should regard unbuilt-upon land from that outside. It is a fact physically more remarkable in its way than the earliest systems of cosmogonies. That the earth should contain the universe was thinkable enough. That the cities should contain " the country " is one of those unthinkable things that have passed into the subconsciousness of a great section of mankind.
Hitherto, through the course of history the country has seemed to triumph inevitably. The image of the struggle has been not so much a moving of the pendulum between town and country, but a kind of
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THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
Antaeus-town giant has gained its strength only by touching the ground ; or, if you will, the image is that of a bird that may soar but must come back to earth. The country has " had the pull " because in their origins all foods and all the necessaries of life came from seeds of one kind or another, the chain going always through the carnivora and the cotton mills to end eventually in vegetation.
But modern scientific thinkers proclaim that this chain is broken. Foods exquisite and nourish- ing are to be made from mineral oils and acids ; raiment of glorious dye and skin-caressing texture is to be had from all sorts of coal-tar products. The necessity for the Nature of green fields is at an end, according to the New Millennialists. These scientists adopt towards that particular Mother Nature an angry and querulous tone; they accuse her of producing a slow-witted race of men, of hindering social progress, of fostering an anti-human malady, the desire for solitude. And indeed to-day I read in an organ of advanced thought that " the country stock, which some reformers have been demanding as an invigorating and necessary renewal of the city race, is likely to prove positively harmful, as adding an element not adjusted to city conditions." The city, in fact, is said to have bred its own type.
And once outside the country habit of mind the townsman finds a considerable difficulty in getting back to a more psychological possession of a country life. He may buy land, he may even take to rearing
19 C 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
stock, which is supposed to be the surest passport to some sort of social standing in the country ; his face may become bronzed, his raiment approximate to that of the half-golfer, half-horse-coper, which is nowadays the country's undress livery; but he will not, save thus externally, get very much nearer to being a countryman.
It may appear paradoxical, but it is as a matter of fact a truism that country life is in all its branches a singularly complicated matter. In a month or so a man may get to know a town sufficiently for all practical purposes. Generalised, all bricks and mortar are much the same ; all town streets fall under wide headings, and town societies are easily classed within comfortable limits.
But your clever man of the world set down in the country is, as soon as he opens his eyes, confronted with an ignorance of his own that will at first render him infuriated with the ignorance that he meets all round him.
It will end, if his eyes remain open, in a modest disbelief in his own mental powers. He will discover the bewildering idiosyncrasies of each component factor of the social life of villages and small towns ;. he will discover that it is possible to make Montague- Capulet quarrels out of grounds incredibly unim- portant in his point of view ; he will discover that,, broad-minded and aloof as he may be, he himself, if in any sense he " lives " in the place, will become involved over head and ears in these small feuds ;
20
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
and a little later he will discover himself— himselt as an entity cast inward upon itself for intellectual support, for interest, for employment, and for life.
It is, perhaps, then only that he will discover that he knows nothing and probably never will know anything appreciable of what in the cant of the day is called Nature ; and to the measure of his humanity and of his thirst for knowledge he will be irritated or saddened by the amount of time that he will think he has lost in the cities. The amassing of his fortune such as it is will seem a small thing compared with the fact that in amassing it he has so spoilt his quickness of apprehension that he can never hope to distinguish the flight of a redshank from that of a sandpiper. And the longer he lives, or the longer his interest remains alive, the deeper will his thoughts penetrate He will discover that he knows nothing about wild flowers, nothing about ploughed fields. He will be startled by such questions as, " How many sheep will an acre of marsh-land carry all the year round r " and that most bewildering of problems, "In the profit and loss balance-sheet of a fatted bullock what should a farmer charge himself for the straw off his own farm ; and what should he pay himself when in the form of manure that straw is put upon his own fields ? "
The farmer as an entity or as a problem will begin to exist for him, and the farm labourer as a " problem " perhaps still more than as an entity ; and all the problems of the country — of game pre-
21
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
serving, of wild bird protection, of the introduction of new crops, of the proper form for education, of small holdings, of the amenities of life and scenery, of the question of small houses, of the influence of surface drainage upon trout streams, and of the destinies of the country child — all these things will give to his broad green horizon hundreds of new significances, so that it will teem with a life more complicated in its interworkings than any of which he had before conceived.
These things differ very much in different men, but as a broad general plan the induction of a man into a countryside runs upon these lines, and by these steps he seems to descend further and further into the bowels of the country. He views the country from a distance ; coming into it he studies the means of communication, and makes nodding acquaintance with the men he meets between the hedgerows ; next, crossing the fields by short cuts that he has discovered, passing through little lanes and coppices, or hopping laboriously from ridge to ridge of a ploughed-up footpath, he comes across wild birds, or watches yellow sheep gasping in the washing- troughs ; he hears, pattering like a little shower or rain, the sound of the turnip-flea at its devastations ; he penetrates next into the farms and cottages and makes acquaintance with all sorts of slow, browned creatures of his own species. Then he will begin, to the measure of the light vouchsafed him, to speculate upon how the lots of these men maybe ameliorated,
22
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
and, after he has speculated as long as time is granted to him, after he has essayed his own seedings and garnered his own crops, he will die, and his " things " will be sold, another pressing to occupy his accus- tomed place. It is then, under these main headings, with a hope of attaining to such a gradual deepening of interest, that I have undertaken this projection of the rustic cosmogony as it presents itself to me.
Speaking very broadly — and to a writer of gene- ralisations a very great latitude of speech may be allowed — this "Country" in inverted commas, this peculiar Island of the Blest may be said to exist only for a more or less lettered, more or less educated, more or less easily circumstanced town class. Owing to the social convention of land-holding the most easily circumstanced of our body politic belong to the landed class, and such attractions as the green earth possesses for them is very much part of their daily life. They are born among green fields ; they went bird's-nesting, they rode their ponies over spring wheat, they were, however artificially, part of the landscape itself. For them, the associations of the country will be the associations of youth and of high spirits, accidental matters personal to themselves. The peculiar decorative line of a pollard-willow-tree will appeal to them in after-life, not because willow- trees were things of which their youth was starved, but because in the small hole of the pollard top of one particular willow-tree they used, say, to leave small packets of chocolates for a particular keeper's
23
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
daughter, or because in another hole of another tree they made, in company with a good-humoured red- haired boy, their first gunpowder mine. Thus in after years willow-trees will have romantic associations for them as they sit over the table full of correspondence of a room in the Foreign Office.
And the poorer town classes do not, as a rule, regard the country as a place in which they shall regain health, or as a place of glamorous asso- ciations; for, on the one hand, their purses, their whole arrangement of a yearly budget will not allow them to contemplate as part of the year's programme a definite month in a farmhouse or beside the sea. And as a general rule, if the industrial or shop assistant townsman began life in the country, his particular beginning of life was neither romantic nor glamorous. He felt himself too near the earth, he was too conscious of the social obligation to touch his hat to people in more shining raiment, while he himself was ungraciously clad, as a rule insufficiently fed, and almost invariably miserably lacking in the more poignant interests of life.
For it is undoubtedly one of the great defects of life in the country that really contagious occu- pations for the leisure times of any one not a child are wanting, and the hobbledehoy must pass his unoccupied moments in long, aching hours at the corners of village streets. Up to a certain age there are many pleasures to be had ; bird's-nesting, with its peering into cracks and crannies of old masonry and
24
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
into the mysterious half-lights and distances of thorn bushes, offers at once a sport and a collector's hobby ; whilst to the ordinary seasonal games, to the marbles, tip-cat, hoop-driving and leg- wicket of the town child, the country child can add the slightly perilous delights of trout-tickling, tree-climbing, and the robbing of apple orchards.
Thus upon the whole the child of whatever degree does prefer a real country life to the life of the streets. He does not, of course, attach romantic values to natural objects, but he finds in them enough of interest to " keep him going," to tide him over the periods of terrible monotony that fall upon the lives of all children. I have questioned and closely observed a number of children who had the opportunities of an amphibious existence, who had practically only to ask to be allowed to go either from town to country or from country to town. Once the pleasures of gazing into shop windows had been exhausted for the year — and this passion is as natural in children as is that for marbles and bull's-eye lanthorns — once this passion had been exhausted for the year, the children invariably preferred to be in the country; they loved it for the freedom to be out-of-doors roughly dressed, for the roads that they can run across without being confined to the rigidly straight line of destination; and they loved it above all for its profusion.
To the real slum child, the child brought up in a grey atmosphere, the sole window into any sort of
25
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
delight is an infinitesimal copper coin ; without an unattainable number of half-pennies this child can never really handle any number of any kind of objects ; and only those who can remember their own childhood can realise what that means. For in stone-paved courts and asphalted streets there are not even little stones to be picked up ; there is nothing to be made believe with, and sharp-eyed rag-pickers seize upon even the old tins that with a bit of string a child might turn into a representation of a railway train. So that almost the only things that the slum child sees in any numbers are trouser buttons that he gets from Heaven knows where, by Heaven knows what process of gambling. The only other profusion which he ever sees is sealed from him by glass windows or barred to him by the invisible barrier of Property that erects itself even before the greengrocer's stalls on the pavements.
So that, set down in front of the tremendous waste of plant life, the ownerless blades of grass, the enormous spread of fields, the scampering pro- fusion of wild rabbits, or the innumerable and uncontrolled sheep, the slum child, the poor town child is rendered absolutely breathless. He is for the time being like a lifelong prisoner to whom has been given the key of an unneeded street.
I came last hopping season upon a London child raptly contemplating a little brook that ran close to the golden straw wigwam in which her mother was cooking bacon over a chip fire. They had arrived only
26
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
that afternoon, and their untidy bundles of sackcloth gave a dilapidated look even to a very radiant corner of a valley. The child, in a misty black skirt that did not close at the back and wearing a battered sailor- hat below which her curls hung limply, turned a sharp little face suddenly to me and remarked, as if it were a profound truth that had shaken her whole world —
" There don't appear to be no turncocks here ! And there's more water than when the main burst opposite Mrs. Taylor's." The nut-trees arched over her head and, standing rubbing one foot upon the instep of the other, she pulled a leaf that she let drop into the water. It appeared to bring into her mind another profound and wonderful truth — the fact that here, in an every-day world, was a region in which there were almost no " coppers " to cut and run from. She had " often heered tell of the country," she said
I was never able to trace what further mental revolutions took place in her, for almost immedi- ately afterwards typhoid fever broke out in that kraal of hoppers and it grew expedient to avoid their corner of the long sunny hop valley ; but that "note" of the country has been the dominant one for any slum child with whom I have ever spoken, and if, sooner or later/the " copper " does become manifest vaguely, and laws of property, even in hazel twigs, do finally assert themselves, profusion remains for most of the poorer townsmen the master " note." I
27
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
drove yesterday nine or ten miles along a hog's-back ridge to a cricket match in company with a railway porter who was just one of those slum children grown up. He had entered the service of the railway in a London suburban station (he had been born in one of the worst rookeries in Hammersmith), and he had to be " shifted " on account of his health to one of the smallest of wayside stations. Here for several years he led a curious existence, in, but not of, the country, passing his daylight hours in the station, but having his home in the nearest large town — one of those towns which are practically slices of London arranged along the face of the sea.
We drove for some time down the valley, broad, vividly green and tumultuous with thorn bushes in flower. The railway man talked of the morning's frost which had filled all that bottom land. " Warm
the night was in H ," he said ; " but when I came
out here first train — cor " he paused. "White "
He paused again, seeking for a simile, but finding none he repeated, "All white." The rest of the eleven who came from up the hill had nothing to say. "Farmers say in the papers that there hasn't been no such frost since '92. Bad for the station-master's 'taters,' I hear. Fruit too. Say, Jimmy, what does frost do to French beans?" "Kills 'em, reckon," a farmer muttered.
So the Cockney went on repeating " Cor ! " and " White ! You should 'a' seen ! " and gaining horti- cultural information with a swiftness of speech and
28
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
intentness that compared with the taciturn accept- ance of nature by the farmers as the eagerness of a terrier before a rat-hole compares with the stoicism of a great dane. We jogged between the hedgerows till, just as the road began to mount, the fisherman who was driving the waggonette pulled the pipe out of his mouth, and remarked that he was born in Martello Tower No. 42 in the year '57. The Cockney suddenly burst on us with —
"I hear we sh'll see views from the top of this hill!" The farmers said, "Ay, views! The finest views in England." Their voices were phlegmatic and nonchalant by comparison, as if they had a local pride in the view, but carried the enthusiasm no further than that. But the Cockney said again, " Views ! I've often wanted to see them views. I've often thought of walking sup the hill to see them views." And he repeated with an interminable variety of accentuation the fact that he had often thought of " them views."
We reached the top of the hill, and from far below the crepitation of a train met his ear. He pulled out his watch, exclaimed, "The 1.27 not more'n ten minutes late," then turned and caught the trail of smoke that appeared like a plume being blown swiftly across immensity. It was as if the whole of the world opened out to him between the gaps of the hedgerows. There were plains, woods, fields like pieces of a pattern, two glimpses of sea between shoulders of purple hill, innumerable churches,
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
innumerable villages, all the foreground an immense valley, bright with vivid sunlight, dotted with white thorn trees, like solid and soft substances moulded by ) careless fingers, casting shadows vivid and sparkling, and all the background fading into those almost incredible mysteries of haze that give to our distances so pathetic and so romantic a beauty, that so wonder- fully allure the eye to travel deeper and deeper, or to rest itself in shades always more and more soft.
As he turned his head to speak his words were stopped by the other broader view that swept up to the horizon on the northern side of the ridge. Here there were fields smaller, hillocks more abrupt, and always more and more and more woodlands of every shadow and shade of colour, until at last the whole surface was like an unbroken carpet, a purple lawn with swelling cushions to the indistinguishable distances.
We drove for many miles between these two views, always along that upland hog's-back. I do not know just when the railway man delivered himself of his profound truth, but it was, "Cor! What a lot a fellow could do if he had all that!"
The farmers uttered deep " Ahs," not in reference to his sentiment, but in the fashion of proprietors, as if before his eyes and to impress him they had unrolled that tremendous panorama which I believe hardly two of them had twice before seen ; for the real countryman travels very little beyond his own valley, and except for the road to the nearest market towns is little of a guide in his country.
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THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
And, as I stood fielding through a long and sleepy afternoon, in a rough outfield whose grass was above the ankles, over a shoulder of hill below which was spread just such another panorama, it ran through my head : " What a lot a fellow could do if he owned all that ! "
What sermons he could preach in the primeval church whose weathercock flashed sudden scintilla- tions through miles of space; how, with the love of his heart, he might for ever hide himself in one of the white thatched cottages that fit into their hidden valleys as children's toys fit into their boxes ; what straight and joyous blows his axe might deliver through the saplings of those shaves and coppices (and surely in all life there is no sensation more satisfying than that of a truly delivered, truly swung axe-stroke as it sinks into and through a young tree as thick as your leg!) ; or what Utopias he might, a benevolent despot, set up somewhere on hill or dale, between the grass that gives him foothold and the last hill that his eye can reach !
These thoughts are no doubt anthropomorphic, but I think that they are inherent in poor humanity, to whom the high places of the green earth seem for a time to communicate a feeling of having the height of a giant and the powers of a godhead. In one of the infinite variations to which human thought lends itself this feeling of oversight, of control over one's own destiny, or over the destinies of an immense number — whether of human beings or
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
of blades of grass — some species of supernatural endowment is the "note" of the promise that the country makes to us, whether in the rushings of its winds, in the tumultuous lines of the parti-coloured mantle thrown down all across its surface, or in the mighty chorus with which, from dark flanks of a wooded hill, the birds sing down the sun in May.
In some subtle and mysterious way the country seems to offer us the chance, the mirage of attaining, each one of us, to his ideal. And for that reason each one of us, at the different times of the year when the malaise seizes him, itches to set forth in some sort of knapsack, and on horse, a-foot, in swift carriages or in the sheltered sloth of his own veranda, between the hedgerows, across the fields, by the sands of the sea, or through the interstices of his own thoughts whilst his eyes follow sinuous lines of greenery, he will attempt to track down that master-thought of his existence, that mysterious white fawn that lies couched beside some fountain, in some valley, in some Fortunate Island
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
THE
HEART OF THE COUNTRY
i
CHAPTER I BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
EACH road has its own particular individuality, nay more, each has its own moral character, its ethics as it were, since what are ethics and morals but the effects of one's attitude upon the beings who come in contact with us? Roads will soothe us, tire us, exhilarate us, fill us with thoughts or excite our minds with pictures of the whole hosts of history that have passed along them.
Some of us love best the turnpikes — and I love them very well — broad, white, smooth, with generous curves, with carpets of turf along the sides enough to make lawns, with gentle rises and with great skies above them.
How many centurions, how many Roman mis- sionaries, how many sweating bearers of tin ore, how many earls, how many kings, how many royal brides,
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
or how many forsaken women have passed over these still, long stretches ! How many feet have danced gaily along, how many have ached in the dust !
When men go along such a road it is as if they went amid a crowd of invisible phantoms, hearing a continuous rustle of inaudible whispers. Here is the spot where a king drank, at the top of the rise. Here is where the five robbers lay in wait in the coppice. Here is the milestone on which, on a moon- light night, there sat the ghost of a bride whom a peasant woman saw raise a white face to hers. . . .
There are solitary roads that look over the corners of great uplands and seem to be peopled by no ghosts; only above the not distant barrows or the many-tiered fortifications of grass slopes one imagines that there peep the shaggy touzled heads of the ancient and forgotten inhabitants of the land.
There are roads that climb the sides of hills, aslant, so that from a distance they seem to be white sashes of honour ; and from distances, too, one may see, high on the downs, white fragments of roads, like plumes or like bill -hooks, hanging from the skies. One hardly imagines that one will ever climb them ; if one does so, the road assumes so new an aspect that it loses for the time the identity that it had for us upon the lower steps.
But the essential road of "the country" is one that runs between hedgerows — nay more, the essential first note of "the country" is the hedgerow itself. For, as far as I have been able to discover, the
36
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
tendency of the town dweller is to circumscribe " the country," to restrict it within comparatively narrow limits. Thus, to go out of Town may be to go to the Riviera, to Cape Coast Castle, or to the Broads. But to go to any one of these, to the sea-shore, or to the Yorkshire moors, is not to go into the country. If the townsman were taking a summer holiday at Lynmouth, he would be at the seaside; if from thence he went inland towards Barnstaple, that would be going into the country. But if his course led him Brendon way, he would be going, not into the country, but on to the moor.
Land, in fact, that has any very distinctive features — moors, hills, peaks, downs, marshes or fens — such land is not the country. It is only where the hedgerows journey beside the turnpikes, close in the sunken lanes, or from a height are seen, like the meshes of an ill-made net, to lie lightly upon hills and dales, to parcel off irregular squares of vivid green from jagged rhomboids of brown, of yellow, or of purple— it is only where the hedgerow has its agricultural use that the country of the townsman is. No doubt this is a splitting of philological hairs, but by minutely enquiring into philology one comes upon historic truths ; and this hedgerow definition leads us to see that the word indicates not mere land that stretches beneath the free sky — otherwise the country would take in the continent or the habitable globe itself — but it indicated in the old days simply and solely the agricultural land of England, the land
37
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
that in the slow revolution of the centuries has been agricultural, pastoral, and agricultural again, and now again pastoral. It is a vague stretch of territory, with unknown villages, unknown fields, brooks, plough-lands, smithies, ricks, hop-oasts, tithe-barns, dovecotes, manors — but always the hedgerow shuts in the horizon, so that to go into the country is, as it were, to lose oneself in a maze ; whereas to go, say, on to Lobden moorside, is to expose oneself nakedly to the skies.
The hedgerow, indeed, is so much the mark of the country that it conducts a man there from the towns and conducts him once more home again, since, where the quicken hedges of the railways take com- mand of the lines, there the country begins. There are few hedges so beautiful as those that we see flitting past us, green, solid, sinuous, with here and there a touch of blossom and here and there a trimmed peacock. And there are few surfaces pleasanter for the eye to rest upon than their slight mosaic of spiny stem and green leaf.
There are, however, not many such hedges stretched across the countryside, and perhaps in one's every- day mood one may be glad. For a land where all hedges were perfect quicksets would be a land fat and prosperous, but a land slightly soulless. It is true that one has one's other frame of mind, the frame in which one longs for the good piece of work, well executed for the work's sake— the frame of mind in which one prefers a newly-tiled barn to the
38
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
broadest, most moss-begrown and sparrow and rat- tunnelled thatched surface ; in which a new, white, five-barred gate is as a soothing and beneficent rest for eyes tired and depressed by age-green wattles straddled across the gate gaps of an ill-tenanted homestead.
But before one will have reached to that frame of mind, one will have travelled between many hedgerows riotous with dog-rose, odorous with elder in blossom, along which the nefarious but beloved bramble will carry the delighted eye from briony to briony. And journeying between these hedgerows, the townsman who loves the country will pass through several phases until he arrives at one or the other of the two stages of country thought, until he arrives in one or the other of the two camps that are set over against each other. Loosely put, because the point is one that must come to be elaborated later, these two schools, these two hostile camps are that of the farmer who likes to farm as his fathers did because the life is goodly where farms are gracious, and that of the man who clears away all picturesque lumber because business is business. With both combatants a really proper man will find himself at one time or the other in sympathy, but the less- thinking of us enlist for good under one banner or the other. And, loosely put again, we may say that the townsman who really " takes up " farming becomes a "business man," whilst the townsman who merely lives in the country because he loves it will groan at each new strand of barbed wire and each new cement pigsty.
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
I have walked over many countrysides with many different men — with an American Jesuit, who wanted to see the most beautiful village of my own county " tidied up,'' stripped of creepers and of ivy, painted, and lit with electric light ; with a tramp, who was lividly indignant because the local Countess had cut down some timber and spoilt a whole stretch of park land ; with a lawyer, to whom the first bit of dusty fallow with barbed wire round it was already Arcadia ; with sailors ashore, who wanted to see always more barns and more barns round the homesteads, to indicate endless profusion ; with a peasant poet in a smock frock and with aged, faded blue eyes, who declared that God did not love steam-ploughs; as well as with a steam-plough and traction-engine proprietor, who declared that his great hulks of iron, standing, like enormous toys dragged by some god- head, askew upon the hillside, dragging from side to side across the furrows giant insects all of iron — his devouring monsters were sending up those pillars of smoke that should lead the Chosen People back to the Land. But always, subconsciously enough, they divided themselves into these two strains — they wanted hedge- rows because they sheltered birds, yielded flowers, or had existed in the days of their fathers ; or they wanted iron fences and barbed wire because these give no shade upon the crops, harbour neither birds nor insects, and indicate that the right type of man, the economist, is in charge of land that shall be rejuvenated.
My tramp, with his rain-beaten clothes, his jovial,
40
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
peak-bearded face, his luxurious sprawl along the roadside, like a Roman Emperor on his couch at a long table — my tramp was probably the most dis- interested, or the most interested, of them all. Tramps are, after all, first to be considered as users of the highways or the hidden lanes, since they, along with sparrows, weasels, traveller's-joy and young lovers, really live their lives between the hedgerows. The gipsy, with his caravan or his withy- supported wigwam, is by comparison an indoor dweller. The individualities of these travellers are infinite, but the good tramp, the real thing of his kind, is precisely the one who lies by the highway, banquetting with his eyes. He is the artist — the man who loves the road for its own sake : he has not any other ambi- tions than shade from the sun, long grass, and eternal autumn weather.
It puzzled me for many years to know what castles in Spain a tramp built — what was his particular Island of the Blest ; and after getting over the first shyness of accosting these slightly repellent bundles of clothes (for it is, after all, the clothes that repel us), I pursued this ideal with some diligence. It was Carew, the tramp of whom I have spoken, who got me most easily over my shyness. He was a man of no particular book-learning, though he said that hardly a day passed without his picking up a paper. He was the son of a Guardsman and a prostitute, and his professional tale had it that he had been bred up as a tooth-comb maker ;
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
machines had destroyed that occupation. He carried a comb in his pocket ; but I fancy that he delighted to comb his long golden beard, and had the comb for that purpose, inventing the profession to fit the implement. I have met him in Regent's Park, on the Sussex Downs, in Cornwall, and in the Strand ; but he always carried his boots under his arm — I never knew quite why. I fancy it was on account of some superstition : he did not like boots, but a sort of luck, I imagine, clung to this particular pair. An odd mixture of sardonic candour and savage reticence, he would admit to having been in every gaol in the South of England, but he would never reveal what he was afraid of on the roads at night. He always crept into the shelter of some house at nightfall, and he had once, he told me, been arrested for following a young lady five miles across Salisbury Plain in the moonlight — with no other evil purpose than the desire to keep a human being in sight.
In spite of the comb, he said he had never done a day's work in his life, and never meant to. He lay by the roadside, and sometimes he had been so magnificently lazy that he had gone without food for two days rather than beg. " You get sick of people's faces at times," he said.
But Carew, as far as I can discover, built no castles in Spain. He supposed that pneumonia would carry him off one of these days, probably in China, as he styled Lewes gaol. He called the various prisons by the names of countries, and nick-
42
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
named workhouses after the great cities of the world. Thus Eachend Hill Union was Paris with him, and Bodmin, Rome; though this caused confusion, because, of course, London itself is Rome in the lingo of the hedgerows. His crimes, as far as I know, were limited to sleeping out ; in this flagrant offence he was very frequently taken because of the nervous tendency which made him sleep in stack- yards near cattle, or in farm stables near horses, for the sake of company. He exhibited with pride a small sheaf of newspaper cuttings which recorded his convictions, and his insolent retorts to magis- trates. He was delighted with these ; but he seemed to have no further ambitions. He was as contented with a "bob " as with a " quid " if I gave it him, and apparently contented with a " brown/' He let life roll by in front of him, and took from it as little as he gave. If you stay for any time at an inn looking down on one of the great tramp highways, you will see the same faces, the same clothes, the same battered hats, the same splay feet, pass and repass your window at intervals of a day or two ; for many of these tramps, having found a string of two or three comfortable wards, will spend, like summer ghosts, the whole of the warm season haunting the same countryside. Congenital lack of candour, the desire to please their interlocutor, sheer muzziness of brain, or sheer ferocity, make it difficult to discover what may be the ideal of this brown flotsam. Their universal and official shibboleth has it that if they could only get a
41
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
steady job and a nice little cottage they would settle down with the missus and kids and live respectable under the parson for evermore. The more candid of the men, when they were assured that their reply would make no difference in the number of coppers destined for them, confessed almost without excep- tion that their ideal was to have a pension like a soldier. This appeared to be, as it were, the good establishment that every middle-class man wishes for his daughter. As a matter of fact, a very considerable percentage of the innumerable old soldiers who solicit alms along the road do have such pensions, and for perhaps three glorious nights out of the month are kings of the earth — kings over draggled and carneying subjects, as aware as their monarch himself of when pay-day comes round, and where the floodgates of oblivion will be let loose.
One very hot day last month, on a high-road broad and parched, stretching out level and without end beneath an empty sky, on a day so hot that the very larks were silent, and the twittering duologue of the linnets sounded as if it came from dusty little throats, I sat down in the long grass under the hedge by the side of a very inviting and swarthy tramp. He suddenly brought out in a rich soft voice, without any inquiry of mine —
" Lord ! I'd like to be a workhouse master. By
I'd like to be the master of a workhouse ! Wouldn't I give the casuals champagne and porter-house steaks one day, and wouldn't I wollup them the next ! "
44
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
A little time before I had walked along the same road in a drenching rain with a German tramp, tiny, wizened, ferret - faced, and with the extravagant gestures of an actor. With his right hand he held firmly to my sleeve, and from a great scroll of manu- script in his left he read passages from a poem about the beauties of nature abounding in the forest near the town of Carlsruhe in Baden. His whole being was engrossed in his work, he saw neither road, sky, nor sea; only from time to time he broke off to exclaim, "This is very pleasant, you will like this very much ! " His life-history, varied and unromantic as it was, would occupy too much space in the telling, but his consoling thought was that Wagner had been too poor to possess an overcoat whilst he was writing his music drama of Rienzi ; and hope, ardour, confidence and romance were in his eyes and voice when, at saying farewell to me, he uttered the words : — " There is a Russian author, I forget his name, who has just bought an estate on the Volga for 700,000 marks ; once he was only a tramp like me." He was quite illiterate and his poem was atrocious, but he said that people on the road were very kind to him; one gentleman at Brighton had given him board and lodging for three nights.
Thus between the fragrant hedgerows the towns- man newly come into his heart of the country will see this vast body of dun-coloured units driven back- wards and forwards like ghosts upon the tides of the winds. For him, indeed, they must remain ghosts ;
45
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
as a rule he will feel the repulsion that we must all feel for those who are outside our world, outside our life, outside our praise, outside our banning or our cursing.
They are as much outside pity or regret as are the innumerable dead; they have gone back into the heart of the country and have become one with the ravens, the crows, the weasels, and the robins, picking up the things that we have no use for, from such small parcels of ground as we have not enclosed.
To the really inveterate townsman every weather- beaten man or woman that he passes along the road is a tramp. It is as difficult for him to distinguish a genuine waggoner from a fraudulent tooth-comb maker as to tell rye grass from permanent pasture, or the mistle from the song- thrush. But gradually as he sinks deeper into the life of the country, passes during weeks and months between hedgerows and begins to note differences between the songs of birds, he will acquire a sort of instinctive knack of dis- tinguishing between one sort and the other. The differences lie in minute things, in the poise of the head, the way of setting down the foot, the glance of the eye in passing. The townsman may make experiments in reclaiming the tramp — like Hercules he will wrestle with death for possession of one soul — but once the man is really dead there is no recalling him. He may set him up and endow him with tools, clothes, a place to live in and all the fair simulacra of
46
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
our corporate life ; he may keep him propped up for a day, for a week, for a month, for a year, but sooner or later the body will collapse and the soul once more be at one with the Maker of the hedgerow. To try preventing the real tramp from following out his life is like attempting to stifle the words of a poet or the sighs of a miserable lover. But if he ever come to examine meticulously, the townsman will discover that amongst these ghosts there whirl past some that still cling to life, that claim our pity and need such helping hands as the gods will let us give. Once, when I lived on a hillside below a common, I came home in the evening down through the furze and saw a faded old man and a faded old woman, with the usual perambulator of the traveller, encamped in a small sandpit. They were both painfully clean, and beneath an arbour of gorse bushes had an odd air of being Philemon and Baucis cast upon an unsym- pathetic world, where the very twilight of the gods had passed away. But what struck me most and most disagreeably was to see my own favourite yellow Orpington cock dancing up and down in front of the old man full a quarter-of-a-mile away from my gate. I imagined that he was one of those people who can whisper poultry out of a field, just as gipsies are said to do with stallions. But on reaching home I saw my cock contentedly dusting himself in an ash- heap, and when I went a couple of hours later to the post, passing the old people's settlement, I saw that the yellow cock had been reinforced by a gigantic
47
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
lop-eared rabbit, an aged tortoise-shell cat and a battered accordion. These were the Lares and Penates of this ancient couple, the signs that, evil days having fallen upon them and the hatred of the workhouse having forced them to take the road, they still clung desperately to as much as they could carry in a perambulator of their former householder's dignity ; they still clung desperately to life, the old man still hoping for fruit trees to prune, the old woman still cherishing her ideal of many beehives to look after.
Such cases as this — of people whom it would be possible to help— are, of course, innumerable, per- haps less to be numbered between the hedgerows and across the fields than even in the towns ; for so slender in the country is the margin between keeping on going and folding one's hands that the real wonder is not that the poor are always with us. The high-road at one bend or another, or climbing to the skyline, will inevitably take our townsman past a great and gaunt building — the inevitable last earthly home of how many! — and the sight of aged forms in a uniform brown, sitting as if they were part of the patterns of a dado along the bottom of the tall blank wall, must almost as inevitably give our traveller pause. Here are more of the dead, more men outside the world, withdrawn into a mysterious state which is neither work nor leisure, neither rest nor anything but merely waiting; and waiting for what ? I have often wondered what castles in the air
48
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
these particular poor mortals could find it in them to build ; perhaps the territory upon which these edifices are to arise will only be found on the other side of the last stream of all. I have never had the heart to enquire. But perhaps the real speculation in most of their minds is as to how many currants will be contained in the piece of "spotted dick" that will form their Sabbath pudding.
When I think of all the remarkable men I have known who have finished their careers in these last resting-places and of all the august women, I am filled for the moment with a sense of my own extravagant unworthiness or with a fear for my own future. The country, I think, breeds individualities stronger, more vigorous, precisely more remarkable than are bred in those stretches of territory where the cotton shuttles fly in millions or trains burrow under the ground. Or perhaps it is only I who have been fortunate enough to come into contact with no man true to type and no women who have not achieved much or suffered greatly. I think, for instance, of Ned Post, a wizened, blear-eyed, boastful, melodramatic old ruffian, who was the last of a family of great mole catchers — a man with an inherited gift in its line as great as that of Bach's. I think of Swaffer, who had year after year taken prizes as the best ploughman of his country, who had crossed the Atlantic in the sixties to take the prize as the best ploughman in the State of Pennsylvania. I think of old Mark Swain, who founded a poetic and remarkable religion of his
49 E
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
own ; and I think of old Mrs. Sylvester, who had for thirty years kept going a small four-acre holding, out of which she supported a bedridden husband and two dissolute sons. And all these remarkable people died in the same workhouse in the same winter week. These things, of course, cannot be helped ; and perhaps it is merely the touch of genius, or of that immense patience which is so good a substitute for genius, which each of these people possessed ; perhaps it was only that inde- finable touch in men that, making them care more for their work than for its profits, dropped them down those steps of this world which have only one lowest stage.
But it has often occurred to me to wonder how their particular villages, hamlets or homesteads get on without them. For sooner or later the townsman in the country will discover how delicately balanced is the human economy of the village even in these days of distributed resources. In each community there is, as a rule, only one of a trade, and, if that one drop out, go into the Union, or, what is worst, if he become incensed against our particular towns- man, the result will be hindrances most disastrous, most disturbing for the customer's daily life.
Turning out of the byways and lanes that run from each of the villages round a market centre, there will come hooded vehicles drawn by old and gaunt horses. On the big roads these will seem to our townsman quaint or merely negligible. But each will be driven by an autocrat, grim, jovial, loquacious or saturnine — an autocrat having indispensably that gift which
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BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
is said to be inborn among the dwellers on thrones, the gift of memory. Before the gate of each cottage on the way to market the cart will draw up, and from the doors will issue suppliant women with their petitions, to which, all being well, the tyrant will give his gracious assent.
The image is by no means so very far-fetched, for should the carrier, as the phrase is, " get his knife into" any particular household upon his route, he can cause its inhabitants nearly as much personal inconvenience as any form of bad government. And the results are almost as far-spreading if he fall ill or die. I lived at one time in a farmhouse some ten miles from a cathedral and market city, and the stackyard was used by a carrier whose tattered old vans and dilapidated horses, with ankles fringed like those of a Cochin China fowl, occupied the tumbled- down barns and leaking sheds. It gave one a very good opportunity of studying means of communica- tions in the backwaters of the very heart of the
country. And indeed the carrier's route to D
was an artery.
Towards eight o'clock of a morning there was a sort of informal gathering in our yard. Children came with notes from outlying farms ; the baker brought empty sacks, women patterns to be matched ; the clergyman's wife her books to be changed at the circulating library ; gamekeepers came from afar with rabbits by the hundred slung before and behind them like fur garments. The dismal and dingy old
51 E 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
cushions were fitted on to the seats, and up a shaky ladder climbed the market women in their best clothes, with great baskets on their arms, ready for the three-hours' drive, with their feet on the dead rabbits, stifling in the smell of paraffin, of sugar, of stable hartshorn, of road dust and of humanity. Slowly jolting out of the yard, so that all the heads jerked one way and all back together, beneath the great elms and down towards the highway the swaying caravan set forth, with the tongues already going.
No man of the world of towns would believe what those tongues utter ; to listen is to have the pleasant country rides converted into something blighted. In the thatched cottages there dwell covetousness, drink, theft, incest — Heaven knows what ! In the great farm- houses there are covetousness, drink, theft, land- grabbing, sheep-stealing, swindling of the illiterate — God knows what! And Heaven knows what of truth there may dwell beneath the cloud of witness that goes up from that swaying machine with the drooping horse and drooping whip-lash. That some- thing of truth is there we may well concede; the carrier's cart hides amongst its other microbes no microbe of imagination or substantial invention. I am inclined to believe that almost every "scandal" that one hears in the carrier's cart is true to fact, and only as to motive exaggerated. What is wanted is the remembrance that poor humanity is poor humanity, that there are in the world pitfalls, gins,
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BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
temptations — works of the devil, as they had it in the old days.
And the townsman between the hedgerows must remember that the countryman has a prodigiously long memory. There was a farmer I knew well, an aged, apple-cheeked, hook-nosed, blue-eyed creature, with just a suggestion of frailness to add charm to his personality and to the fringe of white hair that fell below his old weather-green hat. He had not as far as one could tell a vice. He was popular with his hands, all of whom he had retained for many years ; he was cheerfully obeyed by his sons ; he was up every morning at daybreak, and he brewed his own ale. One day he had a stroke, and there was an end of his activities.
"Well, and that's a judgment on old F !" a
peasant woman said to me. F was then seventy- two. At the age of eighteen he had committed some fault — no doubt with a girl, but I have forgotten. So the paralysis was a judgment on him for that. The countryside could not set any other sin to his account ; but it had a memory casting back over the half of a century. Assuredly it is not here, but rather in the streets of the towns, that there grows the Herb Oblivion.
And inasmuch as there is not one of us without his secret that under the searching eyes and ever- waiting ears of small communities eventually comes to be disclosed — inasmuch as there is no man without covetousness, hardness of heart, intemper-
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
ance, or whatever may be the seven deadly sins, the catalogue of remembered crimes will seem to fall like a blight across the bright countryside and for a time at least dim its greenness for our townsman. But gradually the problem will readjust itself, and that particular aspect over the hedgerows will become, as it is to the carrier himself, part of the day's journey.
Arrived at his market-town, that autocrat will stable his horse at the "Leg of Mutton" ; will leave his cart in the inn-yard for parcels to be thrown into it, and will set about ordering chicken-meal, butcher's meat, No. 50 cottons, paraffin casks, volumes of poems, bedding-out plants, branding- irons and sheep- bells. And towards nightfall in summer, or long after dark in the winter, my friend Grant would be once more in the yard — with a pleasant smell of hot dust, or a romantic gleam of lamps under the great thatched eaves of the barns — and we should fall upon him for our joints, our weekly papers, our candles, and our bodily food, our physical and spiritual illuminants.
One evening a wild, prolonged and incompre- hensible drumming penetrated into our house; it brought all the white aprons of the village to the doors, and finally to the banks of our small stream. In a turmoil of foam, its neck wildly elevated, its eyes starting, its hoofs kicking up the very pebbles from the bottom of the brook, the carrier's horse lay, pinned down into the water beneath the van itself. Left alone for a minute whilst the carrier was
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BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
taking lemonade in our kitchen — the day was terribly hot — the horse had wandered to drink at its accustomed spot ; the van, tilting over upon the bank, had done the rest.
The result was desolation in the village and in many outlying homesteads. To be left with one's three-days' provisions at the bottom of the brook is, in places where shops are ten miles apart, as much of a hardship as would be entailed, say, by having for that space of time the bailiffs in the house for rates. And what more can a tyrant do than that? The whole current of one's domestic life — a thing with which, in the country, one's peace of mind is very much bound up — is disturbed and rendered distressing. One is forced to ask all sorts of favours, and to stand cap in hand before peasants whose rigidity of soul one discovers, enhanced by one's own physical emptiness. Mr. Gary, the sexton, may have a fowl or two to spare, and Mrs. Hood certainly has carrots. The point is whether Gary, who has never — one remembers at this instant — touched his hat or received twopence from us, can be brought by softness of voice or praise of his walking-stick to part with one of his chickens ; and how in the world is one to soften the heart of Mrs. Hood, who married a gentleman's coachman, and has in conse- quence a rigid back and a great personal dignity ?
Such treatment of the subject may appear humor- ous, but it is sober enough when one needs must undergo these humiliations. It is customary to
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
regard the rustic as servile in his habits and his mind ; but one of the first things that the townsman journeying between the hedgerows will discover is how very little he counts, how very little he is "placed" amongst the real peasants. His clothes, his air of command, his glance of the eye, will secure for him in the towns ready touchings of the cap and profuse " Sirs " spicing the speech of inferiors. And as long as he keeps to the railway stations and inns of the country he will as likely as not receive the same courtesies. But once between the hedgerows, he will be conscious of a struggle. He may be, our townsman, eminent in the tea or upholstery trade, in the world of letters or of horse-breeding ; it is all one to the peasant. The other day, in my own village, I heard a wealthy lady lamenting that the little girls did not curtsey to her : she had been in the place six months. Yet I know residents who for many years have paid their way, who in the outer world are celebrated, who occupy fine houses and dress simply but well — who, in short, are "good" people — and the only man who touches his cap to them is the policeman. The townsman, in fact, will be struck at first by the sense of being appallingly alone and unplaced so far as his inferiors go. He may be " called on," may drive in a carriage and pair, and may distribute blankets and brandy ; but the backs of the hedgers will remain obstinately towards him when he passes, and sheep-shearers will keep their eyes down upon the fleeces falling between their
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BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
legs. It will be impossible to engage in conver- sation with the better farm hands. Respect may be purchased from some sort of men in stained corduroys, at hedge-alehouses, for pints of beer ; but the men and women who have a stake in the village, who are " old-standers," will remain for long years wonder- fully stiff in the back and arms. And the stages by which recognition will come will be curious and definite. The hat-touching test is, after all, the most convenient standard, and, looked into carefully, after allowance has been made for differences in different localities, the process will be much as follows. After six months or a year in the heart of the country the townsman will find himself invited to become, say, vice-president of a quoits club ; he will find himself at the club dinner the neighbour of the jobbing gardener of the village and of the permanent road- mender. He will offer them cigarettes at the end of the meal. After that, perfunctorily and when no one is looking, these two will touch their caps to him. But in the publicity of the village street, or if they happen to be walking with other men, they will still turn away their heads, or look with a stony and unrecognising gaze.
The countryman is, in fact, extremely loth to come to subjection ; something does force him to acknowledge the existence of the Quality, something indefinite that he obeys involuntarily and with dis- like ; and he is more than loth to pay cap-service to any newcomer, since he aspires always to shake off
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
the yoke. The touch of the cap in secret places is due perhaps as much to shyness as to anything else — an involuntary action of muscles that know nothing else to do. Backed up by other men, however, and unwilling to let the others know that he has come to heel at all, the countryman will face the matter out with as brave a heart as he can. So that at a certain stage the townsman in a winter dusk may pass six men going home from work together, and every one of them may be personally known to him, yet not one of them in his dun-coloured clothes, with his rush basket over his back, will move an eyelid in recognition. But, after many years of paying his way and of being got used to, for no earthly reason and at no given signal, passing the corner of the churchyard on a Sunday evening, when all men conscious of their best clothes are at their stiffest and least amenable, the townsman will find himself greeted by a whole chorus of " Fine evenings ! " Then indeed he has received his accolade and has found his place and welcome home.
It is almost necessary to write of the return to the land thus from the standpoint of the comparatively well-to-do. For the poor and the working classes of the towns never really go back. One in five hundred may be attracted by a " good job," but perhaps not one in a hundred goes seeking, however uncon- sciously, a country spirit. As a rule, town life weakens the fibres of the muscles, more particularly the muscles of the leg, so that a dock labourer how-
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BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
ever robust is apt to break down hopelessly when put to a job of hay-making. I knew, indeed, one very fine figure of a Covent Garden porter. He had a face that, seen under a high tier of fruit baskets, appeared like a sun trying to burst out from under a pillar of fog, and, at the side of the Opera, he could run backwards and forwards across the pavement from dawn to noon without perspiring. Some odd whim sent him down, in his own words, " to see where things bloomin' well growed," and he took kindly and good-humouredly to a piece of charlock weeding in an immense wheatfield, in which even his considerable bulk was as the tiniest of specks in a whole downside of mustard-yellow. He liked the work very well; but ten days sent him into the infirmary, and, after going on tramp for a month or so, doing a hand's turn here and there, he returned to the piazza and work that he could do. He was the only really competent London workman that I have come across between the hedgerows, and except for the fact that beneath a Wiltshire sun you could get such a thirst that even somebody's blooming patent lemonade tasted good — except for that, I extracted from him no sign of any mental revelation that had come to him in the silent places of the great hills. He had had the patent lemonade served out to him amongst the other haymakers of a temperance farmer, and the fact that it was poured out of beer jars gave a touch of savage and rueful indignation to his voice.
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
He, as I have said, was a really competent man, in the sense that he had work in a town and could do it efficiently. But most of the rural immigrants that I have met have been men, for one reason or another, disqualified or disabled. Thus I have found employed or seeking employment a trick diver and swimming master, whose eyes had failed owing to the pressure of water beneath the surface, a Drury Lane super who had lost his voice, a metropolitan policeman who had been treated once too often by a publican, and several city clerks whose health had failed. But, as far as my own observation goes, I should say that good men in good work never do go back to the land. How should they indeed ?
Towards Michaelmas or near Lady-Day — in any of the seasons of the quarters — you will see beneath the highway elms or over the white roads of the downs, crossing bridges, at elbow-like little angles of sunken lanes, tall waggons covered with tarpaulins that bulge in ways that the eye, accustomed to the rounded lumps of corn sacks or of bales of wool, must needs deem barbarous and strange, with the inverted leg of a chair sticking out of a fold or the handle of a saucepan through an eyelet hole of the tarpaulin — you will see high-poled waggons ponderously blocking the road, creeping onward with a great gravity as if in pensive thought. Perched on the shafts will be a child with a cat in her arms, and hanging to one of the side-boards a wicker cage, through whose interstices there dazzle the
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BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
orange bill and coaly feathers of a blackbird. Here is the countryman on the move — a whole family, a whole unit of the human race in suspension betwixt failure and new hope, betwixt the worse and the better or the worse and the worse. Suddenly the farm waggon, from being the dull transporter of dusty bags and fat sheep covered in with nets, is transformed into a ponderous machine of fate ; suddenly a family, fixed and immovable, tied down to the ground with all the weights of impedimenta as a balloon is tethered by heavy bags of sand — suddenly this family has become nomadic. Its tables are woefully inverted beneath the sky ; its memorial cards, these milestones of life that are the most precious decorations of all cottage walls, are packed away in some obscure corner of the creaking car.
But just because these Sittings are so ponderous and so slow, they are very costly. I have seen blue farm-carts with red wheels in the courtyard of the British Museum, and only yesterday in the New Road a cart with the inscription, So and So : Carrier, Crowborough, Frant and Tunbridge Wells to the Spur Inn, Borough High Street, was loading up the furniture of a tinsmith who was migrating to the town of the Pantiles. But this flit would cost five pounds : the tinsmith had come into money and had bought a little business of his own. He was not in any case going into the country, but pursuing a fragment of London across the Weald of Kent. How then, lacking State-subsidised pantechnicons or something
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
of the sort, or municipal moving loans or something of the sort, is the town mechanic without legacy or windfall to transport his goods, his wife, his children or himself back to the land ? The people moving from the austere Government building were of course seeking the idyllic; but they too no doubt had some means, and could possibly work as well in their cottage as in Bloomsbury. They did not at least pass from a big wage to a low, and incur a great expense at a time of transition when there is inevitably least in the purse. The town mechanic might indeed be willing to move into the country, but how is he to get there ?
It is difficult enough for the countryman to " move " sometimes. In a remote down-land district there was a farmer I knew rather well who was noted for keeping his hands for very long periods. He was envied, moreover, because he managed to pay them less than any farmer of those parts. He still paid on the scale of the now nearly obsolete great hundred — six score instead of five — for any piecework, a once universal custom that education of the farm hands has nearly killed in the land. On one of his down roads I once met a waggoner I knew. The man was notoriously good with horses, steady, sober, and ready to sit up all night for a week with a sick mare. Now his whip drooped, his feet dragged in the cart ruts — and he was sobbing.
It was because he simply could not get away from his master. It was a physical impossibility. Other
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BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
farmers were ready to take him — but he could not " move." He had six children ; he earned fourteen shillings a week. How in the world was he to get away ? He could not save ; his master jeered at the idea of advancing him money to move with, or of lending him a waggon. There he was — there, it seemed, he must simply remain. And this, I dis- covered, was the secret of my friend keeping his hands so long. Taxed with it, he merely chuckled. He had selected all his men for their large families ; he lent them his waggons to move in with over the heart- breaking downland roads. And they never got away.
This, naturally, is an extreme case; but I seldom meet a Michaelmas move without thinking of that successful farmer's chuckle. They never get away. And it is much the same with the labourers in the great towns of the South.
In parts of the North it is different. Round about Middlesborough, for instance, you may judge fairly well of the state of farming by the attendance on the second day of the annual statute fairs. If things are well with the country, the farmer can offer attractive terms to the extra hands that it is always the farmer's first luxury to indulge in, and the men are ready to be hired. But if the terms are not sufficiently good, the farm hand will simply go back to the furnaces — for a year, for two, or for three, and, iron work being heavy, the muscles do not deteriorate as in so many other trades. Thus in these particular parts there is a constant flux between slag-heap and moorland.
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
But as a general rule town is town, and country country ; and it is only in special districts that along the high-roads you will meet with strong-armed men passing from one to the other ; and, except for the automobiles, which as yet have done little to change the face of the country, the great roads are singularly deserted. Tramps, carriers, postmen, farm-waggons, farmers' gigs, governess carts, flocks of sheep with their pungent odour, droves of cattle with their piercing and mild eyes, cyclists passing in whisps — all these do not contrive to make a popu- lation for highways that were meant to reverberate every quarter of an hour beneath the heavy wheels of stage coaches. (And, indeed, the hard surface which Macadam invented first began to render the horse obsolescent, since no hoof can really stand much fast work upon the iron of our great roads.)
Level, white and engrossed beneath the sky, as it they too had purposes, as if they too sought some sort of lovers' meeting of their own, where they intersect at the journey's end, the great highways run across the green islands.
The small by-roads, the sunken lanes, all the network of little veins that bring, as it were, tributary drops of blood, go off from side to side as if they were the individuals of a marching body dropping out to do sentry duty in hamlets off the line of march. They have about them an air of secrecy, as if between their hedgerows rather than on the great roads we may learn what is at the heart of the country. Upon
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them the townsman will meet more often little children going upon the tiny errands that make up the home-life of the countryman ; carts will be few, and the tramp will be a rare visitor. But even in the sunken lanes the note of the country road is one of solitude, and if one desires privacy one will find it there almost more certainly than in the fields them- selves. Foot passengers take the footpaths in all but the worst weather, and the by-roads are little enough used save by an occasional grocer's cart or the parson's son upon his bicycle with his tennis-racket across the handle-bars.
Seen from a height, a countryside may appear extraordinarily populated ; thatched roof may almost touch thatched roof, and garden-tree twine its branches into the apple boughs of the next orchard ; but the real countryman travels so little that, save where there are many " residents," the population of both high-road and lane is extravagantly small. He works, the countryman, in his nearest fields ; his wife stays indoors and mends things ; it is only the fringe, the hangers-on, the dilettanti, the children going to or from school, and the distributors of the means of existence, who make use of the roads of either class. They are used, the roads, by all sorts of inhabitants of fields and thickets ; the hedgerow birds have a tameness, an unconcern that they would show in no coppice, where the presence of an intruder will be heralded by all sorts of warning notes, sibilant and rancorous, or by the wild flutter of
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
arising wood-pigeons. I remember once having fallen into a sort of reverie upon a road, and come to a halt unconsciously. I do not know what was in my mind, something pleasant and engrossing, I think, because the day was hot, the hedgerows sweet and umbrageous, and the long high-road sloped down into the distant blue of the Devonshire sea. Suddenly, many yards away, a strange little beast with a fantastic gait appeared to be covering the ground with tiny bounds. Seen from the front it was impossible to recognise it; it had the amble of no creature that one is familiar with. I stood still, and it advanced, paying no manner of attention to me. It assumed a reddish hue, its progress took the aspect of a series of tiny bounds, its tail in foreshortening lengthened out. It was a squirrel — and it passed right over my foot.
The episode was disagreeable to me, because in my part of the country they say that when the woodland beasts no longer regard you, you are "fey" — as good as a ghost. But it gave the measure of the solitude of that particular highway that so shy a beast as a squirrel could use a road for its passage upon any errand. And it travelled with an engrossed certitude, as if it were very assured of no danger or interrup- tion. And indeed I had met no one for the last half- hour, and I met no one else till I got to Kingsbridge, a matter of three miles. Yet this was a main coast road leading to a market town, the metropolis of that peninsula.
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Even on market-days, when once a week the high- ways assume the air of processional routes, it is only a small fraction of the country populations that shows itself. There will be farmers in their gigs ; if the day be fine their wives will be with them too, and the hearts of the shopkeepers will be rejoiced. (I use the word "gig" generically for the farmer's conveyance. It is very largely a matter of fashion or of roads. Thus, round Canterbury the farmer almost invariably uses some kind of dogcart, whilst in Devonshire and Cumberland he goes to market mostly on horseback, and round Salisbury the roads are filled with enormous and dusty versions of the familiar governess car.) Farmers, stock-breeders, veterinary surgeons, horse dealers, a small army of cattle drovers and successive companies of sheep, cattle, pigs, and even turkeys at times, will on these market-days pass in a pageant, out in the morning, home in the afternoon when the hour of the ordinary is passed. For an hour or two of the day the shops will be filled, the streets be impassable, the stairs of the inns be thronged with men falling over each other's legs, in a fine atmosphere of malt liquors and a fine babel ot prices and the merits of foodstuffs. But before night- fall each particular little heart of the country will once more have discharged its rustic blood as with one great weekly pulse ; the dust or the mud of the highways will bear the impress of the innumerable feet of sheep, and silence and solitude will once more descend between the hedgerows, along which the
67 F 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
white forms of owls will beat without sound. And so it will be all round the year.
But even the pulse-tide of market-days will not dislodge from their crannies and pockets the great populations of the country. The real labourer will go on working over his furrows, whether wheat fall below starvation price, or wool rise from fivepence to tenpence halfpenny. So that upon the roads the townsman come into the country will not make any intimate acquaintance even with the outward aspects of the whole body politic of the country. He will learn, first, how little he or his great town matters ; and, lastly, how closely knit is the organisation of great stretches of territory that at first he will regard as so many miles of inhabited country occupied at haphazard by men having little organisation and less connection the one with the other. What will have swayed his particular town will in the country matter nothing. What will matter will be the price of things in the nearest market-place or cathedral city. Once out of his particular London the townsman will find himself come into the spheres of influence of in- numerable places of small magnitude. " Going to town " will not be taking a railway journey to any great city ; it will mean a short jaunt to Ashford, to Shrewton, to Kendal— or it may mean hardly more than going to the single shop of the next village. And going to town for the inhabitants of the small centres will mean going to centres only relatively more important — to Exeter, to Leicester, to Devizes,
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to Manchester, or to Carlisle. And in each of these places the townsman will discover new trade-marks, new puddings, new newspapers, new specifics, new celebrities, new names to honour. His own standards will not any more count ; his best known will be the utterly ignored ; and he will discover that in coming to his particular heart of the country, in searching for his Islands of the Blest, his fountain of youth, he will have gone through a sort of purifica- tion. He will have lost, along with his old land- marks, his very identity. And only very, very gradually will he take to himself a new form, a new power of influence for good or evil, a new knowledge, and even a new appellation. For quite assuredly some nickname will be assigned to him.
He will grow wise in time ; he will get to know all the highways and lanes, and having exhausted their aspects and their lore, will take to the field paths. But even there — and there more than ever — he will have driven in upon him that fact of the extraordinary solidity and solidarity, the extra- ordinarily close grain of life in the heart of the country. It will depend upon himself whether or no he will ever force a way somewhere beneath its close-textured skin ; whether he will take, as it were, real roots in the soil, or still for his social and mental support will call in aids from outside. He will have come to the heart of the country for rest ; he will, if he is to be at one with it, find himself engaged only in a new struggle.
ACROSS THE FIELDS
T
CHAPTER II ACROSS THE FIELDS
HE wheat, the pastures, the slow beasts, birds, flowers and the little foot-bridges from which we may look into the dark waters of clear brooks, the hum of insects and the dewdrops that form a halo round our shadows when we walk across the fields in the moon-light or at dawn — all these parts of what we call Nature must of necessity take the second place, fill up the second phase of a country life. Being men, we must first settle our human contacts ; then we may step over the stiles or pass between the kissing-gates. We must have found our pied-a-terre, our jumping-off place ; we must set up our tripod before, as it were, we can take our photographs. We must have studied our maps, have asked our ways, have got the " lie of the land/'
This is no more than saying that we must have taken our bed at the inn, or have furnished our cottage and discovered where the nearest butcher has his shop ; we must have " settled down " either in body or in spirit. Reversing the course of history,
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
we must learn the highways which, were built last before we can master the old ways of all — the field- paths. How long the first stage may be in its passing through is a matter that each man settles with his soul ; it is essentially a matter of how much interest he can take in the practical side of his settling down. There are men so happily made that their pleasant lives are spent in doing little tasks in their rockeries or passing the time of day at tennis in walled gardens. They find, as it were, freedom in prisons ; whilst others breathe only when they have the turf beneath their feet and are out of sight and sound of the roadside hedgerows.
I do not know that these latter penetrate more deeply, really, into the life of the country, but I am certain that they draw the deeper breaths. They take, as it were, the short cuts across life and, avoiding their fellow-men who present the more harrowing problems to the mind, they float along a stream of minute facts that afford solace, dis- traction or rest. There is, after all, nothing so soothing as to watch the growth of grasses, and no man to be envied so much as he who can keep his mind for so long tranquil. If the high-roads might lead us to some palace of human truth, somewhere along the footpaths, between a wood track and an oak-bole, we might find Nirvana and the Herb Oblivion.
We may find, too, the country in its undress, since the footpaths lead us to back doors or through stack-
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yards, whilst to the high-roads farms and cottages turn their lace-curtained windows and their decorous drives. I had an equestrian friend who had passed during a number of years on a main road a square, stuccoed, dull box that was known as New Place. He visited it during several croquet seasons, and, entering it always through the front door, saw no reason to think that it was other than just a new place like any other. But one day, being afoot on the dull highway, he saw a kissing-gate in the hedge and a track that led across a broad bend ot the wood. He passed outside a stone-walled stack- yard, and at a pleasant distance there raised itself a charming, mellowed structure of red brick with six gables that offered to the rolling fields a glance, a yellow of lichens and a tracery of wall-pears it had taken three centuries to attain to. He could not fix the place in his mind ; he could not find a name for it ; it seemed miraculous that in a land he knew so well there could have been such a house un- known to him. Then he realised that it was the back of New Place. The front had been stuccoed and squared to suit the tastes of the 'fifties. It offered that view to the new high-road ; but the ancient path, that had been there before any house at all had stood, had led him to the other and the lovelier aspect.
The footpath, indeed, much more than doubles the attraction of the countryside, since the tracks, leading mostly from cottage to cottage, are almost innumer-
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able. It is one of those things to which one hardly ever gets used — it is one of those things that change alike the aspect of countrysides and of the men who work upon them. I had walked a certain road for many days ; I had seen for many days a certain labourer, not on the face of him estimable, slouching at night towards his beer-house. Suddenly, one evening, I saw this man, his rush basket slung across his back, with a bundle of rabbit-parsley tucked into the thongs ; he was descending, so slowly that he appeared to hang in air, an ungracious Gany- mede in fustian, over a hurdle that had appeared merely to close a gap in a hedge. Behind him, in the grass there ran the sinuous snake of a path- way, wavering as if for companionship beside a coppice or a little shaw. And it was a relief— a clearing of the air. For the man will appear no longer a loafer, sustained from hour to hour through the day by the thought of beer, or kept in suspense, as it were, by the cankerous artistry of self- indulgence. Here he was dropping into the road with limbs rendered heavy by work ; he has be- come part of the body politic, one of those slow Titans who like wood-props keep up the inordinately weighty fabric of the State. He has gained dignity, and, since the number of inhabitants of my village is small, the whole village has gained dignity, and the whole world of which that village is the part with which I am best acquainted.
And with the discovery of a new footpath the
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countryside gains, to more than the extent of one new way, a feeling of liberty. The road you have traversed is less a begrudged piece of dust running between imprisoning hedges. You your- self are more free, since, if the wish moved you, here you could step aside ; the fields on each side of the bridge seem more accessible, more your own and your neighbour's, less the property of an intangible landowner. For I think that it is inborn in humanity to resent another man's ownership in land. Those of us who belong to the land-owning class resent trespass on our acres ; but the minute we become travellers beyond our own ring-fence we desire, even unreasonably, to make short cuts. There was once a Midland squire whose acquaintance I had made actually through trespassing upon his home paddock. He had then been irate so that his grey whiskers trembled. It seemed that he had just lost a right- of-way action and he thought I was part of a " put up job," to flaunt his loss of the right-of-way case in his face. I had pleaded my ignorance of the neigh- bourhood, the greater freedom of our parts of the country in such matters ; and I succeeded in con- vincing him so well of my innocence that he con- ducted me across his own kitchen-garden very amiably towards the high-road from which I never ought to have strayed.
I met this same gentleman later at an inn in a foreign countryside more or less my own; we took a walk together, after he had good-humouredly recog-
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
nised me as the " fellow who trespassed " — and I was horrified at the short cuts that he proposed to take to reach a certain church. We went over peasants' fields of tobacco, across the corner of a protected stag park, through a vineyard, and right into the door of the priest's cowshed before we emerged in the churchyard. My friend had made a bee-line, and it was only in the miraculous absence of a garde champetre that we escaped a fine, since the squire actually plucked an apple from a wayside tree, tasted it, and swore it was like wood compared with a Ribston pippin. Outside his own circle of landed responsibilities he felt himself, in fact, to be a free Briton.
In a sense we are all that. The average Briton does indeed tremble at the thought of " trespassing/' He trembles even unreasonably, since, except for the obviously poor, no penalty attaches to the offence. But he has a sort of shyness ; it is hardly so much respect for the laws ; he would dislike being turned off land, perhaps because it would mean a .sort of "setting down" for him. Yet the one of us most shy about trespassing will the most violently resent being impeded on a footpath once he is assured that it is a footpath. He will break down fences or furiously harangue gamekeepers ; he will go his way — he will, more than any Hampden, assert his rights.
And because we are all lovers of our rights, we rejoice at the discovery of new paths. Here is a .strip of land a foot wide, but inalienably the property
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of ourselves and our neighbours — a space of breathing- ground and of escape, where, as it were, we may remain within the letter of the law and yet cheat its spirit. Of course, if we are poor men, the path will have its dangers ; a keeper, intent on preserving the privacy of his partridge nests, may lay a dead rabbit beside the path and, walking after us with a mate, swear it lay there just after we had passed. Then probably we shall be fined ten shillings. (I have known a footpath closed to all the cottagers of a village by this dread.) But essentially the footpath is a place on which we may all snap our fingers at Authority ; so for that alone it is beloved.
And the paths, in most of England, are innumerable. I know whole tracts of country, forty miles long, in which there is hardly a field that one may not walk across or skirt. Thus, for instance, from Aldington Knoll you may pass under the nut boughs and oaken underwood of the Weald, thirty-seven miles, by wood paths, only going out of the shadow to cross a road, or where the timber has been newly felled. There are, of course, tracts of the home counties and the Midlands where, in the presence of the landown- ing spirit and the absence of a spirit of resistance, miles of fat fields shaded by elms are closed to the wayward foot. And there are immense moors and downs where the pedestrian may choose his own way by a compass across heather and ling or sheep turf and wild thyme, where the footpath ceases on account of so great a freedom of direction. But the country
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of parks and millionaires is not the country, but a sort of arid pleasure tract, and moors and plains are un- hallowed by the work of the slow countrymen. For certainly, wherever he is busied about the hedgerows or in the wheat, there his lines of communication will be found. Their real cause for existence is to help him the more quickly to and from his work ; and the farmer is not yet born so foolish as to hinder his own hours of labour.
Thus here, as in the print that is common in our hedge alehouses, and more common still in France, the man who works in the fields bears the brunt of the fray. It is true that you may trace — mostly on hill -tops — the old ways of communication, pilgrim ways that pass the remains of tiny chapels-of-ease and make, like the rays of a spider's net, either to the shrine of St. Thomas or towards the ports from which men set sail for Compostella ; there are broad soft roads across plains ; there are bridle- paths that climb immense downs and in the softer bottoms are paved, still, with great flag-stones, and there are pack-tracks that have been abandoned for ever by the feet of mules. In the North of England, in the folded valleys and scars of the solitary hills, you may still, as it were, see the hoof-marks of the pack-horses the last of which made its last journey not twenty years ago. And the survivals of all those tracks do still add to the number of ways by which a man may travel across the fields. But they remain mere survivals ; the reason for their existence having
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gone, they are seldom travelled ; fences are being1 run across them more and more as the years go on. It is no one's business to keep them alive ; so they are dying out.
Thus the footpath of the heart of the country tends to become more and more a means of access to work. And indeed it is there that we seem to feel the real heart-beats. On the roads the touch of the cities is still to be felt. Miles and miles away from any town one may be, nevertheless the road is a filament, a vein, running from one to another. The real foot- path is the telephone, steering merely between countryman and countryman. It is true that in the vicinity of the house-congeries we may find footpaths that are degraded into cinder tracks. Broad and black — that colour for which the Nature of the fields seems to have so great an antipathy — they are bordered with fringes of grass so green that it appears, like the brilliant hues of aniline dyes, to be a coal-tar product. These tracks let the foot sink into them with a faint suggestion of being quick- sands. They pass cement cottages ; dusty palings separate them from the sordid bits of spaded earth that always in the vicinity of a town seems to have a dun colour, a clay consistency, and a top-dressing^ of bluish meat tins. Reaching in his walk these anti- septic footways, the lovers of the country or the town lover feel an antipathy, heave perhaps a sigh, and, making for the nearest street, look out for a cab.
It is not that they will necessarily hate the town ;
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
what they will hate is the hybrid thing that is neither town nor country — that is, a product as it were of city fathers trying to bring themselves into a bucolic state of mind. " Let us have either town or country unadulterated; let us have paths in which we shall meet humanity in undress or citizens decently clad ! " he will exclaim. On these ways he will meet mechanics in broadcloth or the club-doctor of mean streets in clothes that are neither here nor there. Then he will seek swiftly either the shop-fronts, the artificial stone facades, the electric light standards and the faint smell of horse-dung and dust of the centre of a town ; or he will return upon his tracks to where the path ran beneath nut bushes in the heart of a wood.
The false idlers of the country, the young ladies picking flowers, the retired solicitors, admirals, bankers, and racing touts, the village clergyman who thinks that his real sphere is, say, a smart West End parish, and who in consequence wears a querulous fold near the ends of his pursed lips, or that most townish of all inhabitants of the country, the student of nature — these, occasionally, with their infinite variations, are the most exotic products that one will meet on the footpaths. They have dropped, as it were, over the hedges, out of motor cars or desirable residences. They pass us like foreigners, and have haughty and challenging glints in their eyes. And I am almost tempted to say that the lovers of nature, the self-conscious students of birds
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or flowers — the modern Whites of Selborne — are themselves town products. The real countryman does not know much about these things. He accepts them, and would perhaps miss them ; but it is hardly part of his nature to "name" them. It would probably be disturbing to him to enquire too closely into the history, say, of the oil-beetle, that lustrous inactive creature that he crushes with his heavy foot in the hot dust of the roads.
It would disquiet him, it would disturb the simple and large outlines of his conception of life, just as to conceive of eternity, of infinity, or of the indefinite immortality of the soul would be disturbing to most of humanity. We live, poor creatures of a day that we no doubt are, in the midst of these mysteries, much as the countryman lives among beasts, fowls, and insects, one more mysterious than the other; but the consideration of these shivering abstractions humanity leaves to the priests, the metaphysician, and all the other soul doctors whom it agrees to regard as slightly extra - human. In the same spirit the countryman leaves Nature to the stranger who lives in the field. We crush with a careless foot a creature impeded by the dust. But sup- posing we knew that from egg to lustrous wing this beetle had made a journey more perilous and more miraculous than any Odyssey of Ulysses — that it had survived a chance of a million to one against its survival ? Some such life-history as this is to be told of how many small creatures of the grasses and
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
the brooks? It is laid, as an egg, anywhere in the earth; it must, when it comes forth, find a certain plant. Say a million eggs are laid ; say a hundred thousand tiny creatures reach the plant. It must then ascend the stalk of that certain plant ; it must reach the stamens of the flower, a dizzy journey in the course of which ninety thousand succumb to rain, to predatory insects, to birds, to the Will of God manifested in one way or another ; there remain ten thousand in these flowers. There they must stay until a certain bee comes to gather honey : one thousand are able to hold to life till then. When the bee comes they must grapple to a certain spot of the bee's hairy thigh ; they must be carried by the bee home to its cell : one hundred may reach the bee's cell. There, at the precise moment that the bee lays its egg, the beetle larvae must drop into the egg: maybe ten will do that; and maybe one, after having fattened on the life juices of the bee-grub, will come forth to the air a beetle — one survivor of a million ! And it has gone through these perils, it has endured the fatigues, the hair- breadth escapes, the miraculous chances of this great journey, to be crushed by a hob-nailed boot before it has travelled one yard on the face of the earth. To what end ?
For assuredly the countryman would ask, "To what end ? " The nature student has essentially a concrete mind. He observes, he registers. He sees little yellow birds with jerking tails gliding over the
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surface of a water-plant, searching in the hot sunlight meticulously for tiny insects. He notes the fact, and it is sufficient for him. But the countryman is either nearer God or nearer the necessities of life, put it in which way you will. He desires to know " what is the good of the thing ? " How much weight of seed-corn will so much nitrate-fertiliser add to the yield of his acre ? — What is the good of an oil- beetle ? he would ask, if it came into his head to consider.
Perhaps it is fortunate that he never does. For, surrounded as he is, overwhelmed as he is by the tremendous profusion, the inexplicable, seeming waste of Nature, he would inevitably come to ask that question which is the end of human effort.
I know a farmer — rather a good farmer — who came from Lincolnshire into Kent, and was in consequence called " Linky " in our marsh parish. He became, perhaps on account of the change in the soil, singu- larly loquacious and singularly full of ideas. Things went wrong with him, and he began, as the saying is, to hear the grass growing.
Tall, gnarled, bony, with enormous joints all over his frame, he stopped me one day on a high-road and began to put all sorts of questions as to the good of things. What was the good of charlock ? Why had God made bindweed and the turnip-flea i Why was a man to feel as if he were overlooked — bewitched ? His old horse, who was cropping the hedge, nearly overturned the cart that contained a dilapidated
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
turning-lathe ; Linky had just bought it at a sale, not that he needed it, but because once, years before, it had come into his head that a turning-lathe might be a thing to possess. He caught the horse's rein furiously, pulled the beast into the road, and then, with a sudden, dispirited motion of his hand, let go the rein, and pointed over the ridge inland. " The Union's there," he said ; " and I feel it's calling me! I feel it." He turned on me: "Now, I ask you, sir, what's the good of all this ? What's the good ? "
He was not exactly dejected — in fact, his eyes, sunk beneath a grotesquely-bumped forehead, were remotely humorous. He looked over the plains on both sides of the ridge. There were things agrowing all over there, he said. All sorts of things. They scratched up fields and tried to make corn come ; but weeds came with the blessing of God — weeds didn't need no help. Same with vermin as took his poultry ; same with mildew as turned his dumplings sour in the larder. Well, now, what were all those things ? What did it all mean ? If so be the weeds had a right to be there, they were of some account. God looked after them and the vermin. Then where did he come in — he, Linky ? Perhaps he wasn't of no more account than weeds or vermin. Then what was the good of going on ?
Linky, of course, had been drinking a little. But, as far as I have been able to discover, it was that sort of thought that had made him take to drink.
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And, as a rule, so stern is the fight that Nature wages with the countryman that, once he begins to think that kind of thought, he must take to drink or one of the devils of the flesh. In consequence, the sur- vivors, the men who keep to the land, are precisely those who do not look around them, and who do not name the beasts and the plants. Weeds are weeds, and vermin vermin. You kill them one with another, and there's an end of it. You must have a very firm belief that the fields are made for crops, the pastures for grass, and yourself the instrument of God's administering the earth, or you will very soon slacken in your struggle.
Man does not " name " his fellow-strugglers, partly from indifference, no doubt, but also because he is afraid. I remember seeing a whole downside in central England white with a flower that I did not recognise. It was something like a bleached cam- panula, but square-stemmed and sweetly scented. There were several village children, with long black hair, big black eyelashes, and blue eyes— a type as unfamiliar as the flower — kneeling down and plucking the white blossoms, their hair sweeping the tops of the long grasses. I asked one the name of the flower. None of them knew, but they were picking them to put on the coffin of little Charley, who had been drowned in the mill-dam down the hill last Saturday night.
A sudden and violent death of a child is a thing so outstanding in country districts, that, up there in
•THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
the white light of the sun, on the green of the grass, very high, the news seemed to make one see beneath the shadows of the massive trees far down in the hollow a deeper shadow. But no one in that countryside seemed to know a name for those flowers — neither the children nor the clergyman, nor even the schoolmistress. They were flowers that were used for putting on coffins — simply " flowers/' as we say, " Let us get some flowers for the table." And indeed such things are generally sorted roughly into broad categories — thus, most green things lacking flowers or odours are "weeds," most gay- coloured blossoms not known to be poisonous are " flowers," — and most white flowers are omens of death, since they are used to deck biers, and at such times alone are carried home. I always remember the tone of weary contentment with which an old lady, suffering much pain, received a gift of snow- drops brought in ignorance of the meaning attached to them. " You're letting me go/' she said. " I've wanted to go for a long time; now I shall." And very shortly afterwards she died. No one else of her friends or family would have brought white flowers into her home.
White hawthorn, Madonna lilies, the white owls that screech, so it is said, outside lighted windows, white insects that sometimes fly in at the casement, in certain districts even daisies and marguerites and Scotch roses — all these things are ominous of death if they enter the house. I have even heard it said
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that certain feathery, and delicate moths that come very rarely to flutter round one's lamp at night, are the souls of the dead coming to summon away the living. The emblems of life are rarer ; but in a Lancashire cottage I heard a sick girl say, when a friend brought her the first pink dog-rose of the season, " Now I shall get well since I've lived so far round the year." And to see the first swallow is, in certain parts, regarded as an assurance of life until these travellers return again over the seas.
In the same large way owls, hawks, jays, shrikes, and cuckoos are classified as vermin; swallows, robins, and sometimes wrens are given their names and regarded as sacred ; edible birds, from pheasants to jacksnipes, are called game or wild fowl ; and most song birds and such others as have brownish plumage are called, and hated as, sparrows. An American naturalist who covered half the globe and a portion of England in the forlorn hope of hearing a nightingale sing, had the fortune to hear Philomela herself called " a sparrer."
But this large acceptance of the pleasures afforded by nature implies no lack of appreciation. Upon the whole, I think the real countryman enjoys the sights, the sounds, the heat of the sun, and the odour that the earth gives off after rain — he enjoys them as much as and perhaps with a more pagan enjoyment than any of the townsmen, who get much of their pleasure out of books. A townsman will read pages of such passages —
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
"A linnet warbles, a bee drops over the hedge, the tips of the hawthorn petals commence to become brown, the odour of bean flowers is wafted from the neighbouring field" — a whole catalogue of rural sights and sounds, that will as it were "waft an odour " of the country into the atmosphere of fog and gaslight. In the same spirit ladies who never cook will read old-world recipes, and " book lovers " who have no still-room will smack their lips in imagination over cordials the concoction of which went out before stage-coaches died from the roads.
And coming into the country, the townsman will find that some of the glamour that he felt in his room attaches for him to the monotonous chaffinch as, with its shimmer of rose, purplish-brown and grey-white it drops, crying " Pink, pink," from an elm bough into the long grass beside the footpath.
In the same way a person with a very good cook of her own will dredge flour into boiling milk, scorch her face above a wood fire, prepare passably, and eat and enjoy hasty pudding or frumity — things not unpleasant to the palate, though, save for the asso- ciations of their names, not really worth scorching one's face for. And I have known a sober friend seriously endanger his equilibrium by drinking my own mead on a summer day, rather because of the sound of the name than because the liquor is really delightful.
The countryman, of course, never eats hasty pudding save when some accident has taken his
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missus unprepared ; frumity, even in Dorsetshire, he will no longer look at ; mead he might drink in winter to keep off a cold when he cannot get hot rum with a lump of butter in it ; but he will certainly not read " Nature books," and he will certainly never get into the frame of mind that will make him transfer the thoughts of any book into his attitude ms-a-vis of Nature herself. He has a general phrase that he applies to all these things. " It does you good . . ." It does you good to see the wheat go rippling in great waves up a twenty-acre field ; it does you good to smell rain coming up on the south-west wind, to hear church-bells chiming melodiously across smooth grass, to hear the birds singing in the dawn, to watch hounds break covert, to stand gazing at a great sunset, to hear the jingle of harness as the horses come back from the hayfields in the moon- light.
Labourers, farmers or their womenfolk develop tastes in such matters. One man loves a frosty dawn, with the roads as hard as iron in the ruts ; another likes the feel of the north wind on his hands. Another loves the coolness that comes with the sea wind only after immense heat in a long day ; another, the peculiar tang of odour that rises with mist from the salt marshes. What may influence these tastes you never learn. The man I spoke of as loving a frosty dawn, told me (I met him at such a moment — a gnarled shepherd, a " looker," as they call them, not much higher than my shoulders, with
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
whiskers glistening with rime and his black clay pipe sending forth the tiniest wisps of smoke in the face of a blood-red sun) that on such a morning as that he was first breeched. No doubt, the pride of that transition from babyhood to boyhood sanctified such frosty mornings for ever in his mind. Perhaps association has most to do with it — perhaps the mere sensation of physical well-being. Who can tell ?
But certain shadows and lights, certain winds that quicken the blood in the veins, certain cloud forms, the songs of certain birds, or certain views at certain times of day — one each of one or other of these things will undoubtedly give a "moment" — the moment of the year — to every countryman. And these things hold him in a country that is every day losing its other attractions.
I know a country solicitor, a grave, unsentimental, taciturn man, who repressed with sternness any tendency towards imagination in his children or his clerks. He was offered an exceedingly lucrative partnership in London, and he refused it because ot a sunset. It was a long valley that wound away between spurs right into the west, and there the sun always went down with an incredible glory, sending its light level along the bottoms, mirroring itself on flat stretches of mist or glistening in winding channels. At the eastward end a hill rose, and standing by a windmill the solicitor was accustomed to look at this sunset every Sunday evening. He
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had seen it for years and he could not leave it. And, indeed, this particular sunset view — it was seen between tall stone pines — attracted all the little town on Sundays. You met, on the path to the mill, the blacksmith, the grocers, the hotel-keeper's wife, the village lovers from hamlets all round, the squire's cook, and the Wesleyan minister. These people would gaze and gaze and go away without saying anything. No doubt for the blacksmith it sublimated the thoughts of the price of shoeing iron, and for the others, too, it put a fine or a tranquil glory into that moment of their existence. One rather inarticulate person once told me that the conflagration of the descended sun and the lights whirled heavenwards from the mists and pools reminded him of the Plains of Heaven. I fancy that he was thinking of Martin's picture of that name. On the other hand, a man of great taste, who had savoured, as a connoisseur does his wine, many famous views the world over, re- garded such a sunset and remarked that it was very suburban.
That is the connoisseur, speaking from the outside ; but the real peasant, the real pagan, loves nature and the earth inarticulately. After we have worked for long hours of long days in the years that beneath the sky are so long in turning, we get, even the most inarticulate of us, moments of sensuous delight from merely being in the place in which we are. The woodman, working alone in the thick woods, will at noon in the winter sunshine stand still and lean on
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his axe. In his small clearing he will feel as if he were in a church. (I have heard a man say so.) The sunlight will be warm, the silence absolute all round him, and the very sound of the other axes in the distance will be deliberate, reflective, as if sacred. Or the farmer, lying on his stomach in the dewy grass at twilight along the edge of a black coppice, waiting with his gun for the rabbits to enter dimly out of the burrows — in the shadows and the silence, beneath the brush of the owl's wing as it skims over him, he will feel the indefinite fear of the supernatural steal over him, a curious sense of mournful ominousness dif- ferent altogether in kind from the dread that will heset him in any haunted house or churchyard.
One gets, if one be at all sensitive, odd little shocks and emotions in the fields. I have myself dug very late in a potato patch, after many hours in a hot -day. There comes a time when one cannot leave work ; one goes on as long as light holds, even if it be only the light of the stars. The whitened apple trunks stand out like the pillars of an aisle down by the hedge ; the glow of the supper fire dances visible in reflection on the cottage ceiling, the sound of the brook becomes important in a windless dusk. And the air having grown cool after the sun had set, I have thrust my hand into the earth to feel for potatoes, and found it flesh- warm. After all the heat seemed to have departed from the world it was like suddenly coming in contact with a living being. I am, perhaps, over fanciful, but to me it has always
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seemed like finding the breast of a woman — as if Nature herself had taken a body and the heat of life.
But, indeed, in the intense solitude of field work the mind exhausts its material topics. And of material topics there are few enough in the country and its cottages ; so that the mind of the man who is much employed along the hedgerows turns inwards very often and exhausts itself in metaphysical specu- lations. This is more particularly so at dusk, when not only is there little to think about but less to see. In the countryman's mind there arise superstitions about beasts and birds, theories of life and of the universe, even new religions. He will be extra- ordinarily callous in the face of death ; but he will be wonderful in his speculations as to what will happen after death.
I knew very well a labourer of the rather better class. Small, very brown, with the clear enunciation that still in places survives the blurred cockney of the school-teacher's work, with little eyes that twinkled in a clear-cut face, he was much sought after in the village as a sick nurse during nights, when the wife of a man needed rest. Certain men have the gift of being asked, the soothing voice and the willingness to perform these last functions — and my friend must have seen the death of many men. Quietly, but without any abating of the twinkle in his eyes, he would tell you how So-and-So died " sweeting dreadful " ; So-and-So went off sudden
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like the bottom falling out of a bucket of water ; whilst it was more than he could do to hold down old Sam, the hop-dryer, who had the delirium tremens, so he died on the floor. And at an inquest I have seen Mark go up to the corpse that we were viewing and, catching hold of the hand, say, " Reckon that won't ever lift no more pots; 'tis main still for you now, old Quarts." " Quarts " was the sobriquet of the dead man, and he had died of the cold.
There, in the rough barn where we stood huddling together for warmth, Mark was brave enough, and he was brave enough in a death-chamber. Indeed it is hardly braveness, just as it is hardly callousness so much as a survival of the early temper of men accus- tomed to the ending of lives — -of the temper that has given us the " Dance of Death " or the Gravedigger of Hamlet. A dead man is to the countryman of hardly more account than a dead mole or the dry tufts of feathers that January leaves underneath all the bushes. It is a frame of mind repulsive or grotesque to the townsman, who never sees a dead thing save on butchers' and fishmongers' slabs, where indeed he sees more than enough. In the countryman it is merely part of that large innocence that allows him to accept as so many of the natural processes of life things that are always hidden in towns behind the serried walls of house-fronts. He sees more of life, and of necessity more of death.
But this same Mark had his own private conception of what would happen to him. He was not in the
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least mad, but he had — who knows how ? — gathered it out of the Scriptures that he would never die, but be carried up to heaven in a chariot of fire. His eyes twinkled humorously when he said so, but you would put him into a fury if you expressed a doubt. He was a hedger and ditcher by trade, and, if he heard a rustling of some invisible object in the dusk or in the woods at night, he was tranquilly convinced that it was one of the Beasts of the Revelation. Being unmarried and living by himself in a tiny, disused toll-house, he was more solitary than most, and had more time to think. And it is astonishing how many countrymen have bizarre beliefs of this kind. I have come across them in tenant farmers, in veterinary surgeons, in water-bailiffs, and even in rural police- men— who, indeed, are the most solitary of all the users of high-roads and footpaths. The fact is that to be alone much in the country is to find oneself giving to hills, rows of trees or the coping-stones of bridges — to anything that one likes or dislikes for the obscure reasons that sway us — personal identities. One measures the world, after all, in human terms, and two foxes' earths on a knoll will take after a time a semblance of eyes in a green forehead, just as houses have grim or jovial or lugubrious personalities expressed in their window blinds. And thus, for reasons obscure to us, certain portions of the familiar country influence us. There are hills that we ascend without weariness and downward slopes that we vaguely dislike ; there are sheltered spots that for no
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known reason we find lugubrious, and bleak downs where some mysterious presence seems to temper to us the most dreary of winds. In that way a country- side comes to have the value of a personality ; and so we speak of the spirit of Place.
Standing on certain hills it is impossible not to feel a conviction that the green earth waving away on each side into illimitable space is a vast entity, living in the growth of its grasses, and in the voice of its birds, the little tunnels of subterranean beasts and insects forming its veins and, whatever be the colour principle of its surfaces, being the blood of its com- plexion. But the feeling is arrived at only after a sufficient familiarity — a familiarity the length of which will differ with each individual, since there are some of us who will fall in love with a certain corner of the earth, even as with a certain woman, at the first glance. And just in the same way there are featureless stretches of land in which we feel at once at home, whilst blue regions of alps, of woods and mirroring lakes tire us as we may be tired by a brilliant talker.
For myself, no landscape is restful unless it contains many hedges and woods, and unless the horizon is somewhere broken into by the line of the sea — unless at least I feel that, from the top of a hill near at hand, that still, blue line might be seen. Far inland I seem to be beneath an impalpable weight, and on an absolutely naked down I am conscious of glancing round, in search of at least a clump of trees in which
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I might take refuge from the great gaze of the sky. But I have one friend who cannot live at peace out of sight of heather, and another who hates hedge- rows because they interrupt the journey of his eye over the contours of the ground. I knew a farmer who moved from the marsh into the uplands ; and he was forced to rent a cottage on the level again, because he missed the stagnant dykes and could not bear the sound of running water in the beck beneath the bedroom window of his farm in the hills.
In the stage of intimacy to which a man reaches as soon as he masters the field ways of his country- side he thus begins to make acquaintance with the mysteries of the earth ; he begins, according to the light vouchsafed to him, to frame his own reading of the green kingdoms. He does it, no doubt, in the search for intellectual solace ; it is part of his journey in quest of the Fortunate Islands. In a sense and to a certain degree other things will turn him aside. He will find refuge from himself in making toys for his children, in sleep by his fireside, in the slow talk of the ale bench, in the hunting-field, or over a book. No doubt the book is the best of all the things with which a man may stave off introspection, if the gossip of the alehouse be not better. And no doubt next to these we may place the saddle. Books and small-talk bring us in contact with the minds of our fellows ; we may revel or idle in them without emu- lation and without effort. In hunting we are taken
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out-of-doors and brought into contact with beasts wrought up to their highest pitch, and with the animal in ourselves wrought up, that too to its highest vitality.
To the man who can feel it there is no sensation in life comparable to the waiting, on a frosty morn- ing, by a woodside for the hounds to break cover. All, the senses are keenly alive; each tuft of grass is of importance in the mist : the nostrils are filled with the faint twang of the morning and of the frost ; the ears catch minute sounds — the crackle of underwood beneath the feet of the silent and distant hounds, the clink of stirrup against stirrup, the hard breathing of a horse. And one's whole body, all the sensation of feeling that one possesses, is instinct with the shiver and breath of the beast that one bestrides. There is no waiting quite like it, since there is nowhere else just this union of nerves in two beasts so widely dissimilar the one from the other.
With the first whimper of the hounds on the scent, with the note of the horn, the cry of " Gone Away ! " or the crash of the hounds breaking covert, this particular psychological " moment " ends. Contests have their place and emulation is aroused in horse even more than in rider. It isn't — that particular tremour of waiting — recaptured at any check, though perhaps no theatrical performance is half so engrossing as the watching from one's saddle of the hounds, with their noses to the ground, making a wide circle to recover the scent. But of course one has moments
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of another sort. One remembers putting one's right arm over the eyes in rushing through a bullfinch. And I have a memory that I do not know whether I would or would not willingly dispense with, of lying helpless on my back on the further side of a sunken Devon hedge, with high above my face the silhouette against the sky of a horse's fore-legs and a rider's boot-tips. It seemed for a moment a curious and interesting spectacle, since it is seldom that one sees from below into the very shoes of a horse.
Thus in this as in all field sports, man, according to his sympathies, finds solace, oblivion, animal excitement, the means of passing the weary hours. They have their " moments/' and afterwards we can say that there is nothing like them. There is nothing like casting the last salmon flies of the day at dusk into a still and almost invisible water ; there is nothing like the old and forgotten shooting with a trained dog in the thigh-high stubble ot October wheat-fields ; there is, for boys, nothing like the laying of a trail of paper across the trembling tufts of a bog at noon ; there is nothing like . . . But what is there anywhere like any one of these things that beneath the sky and across the green acres will keep the mind from working in the tread- mill of its proper thought ? And what, after all, will arouse a rough fellowship between man and man so well as the tumble and scurry in a stack-yard where the rats are bolting and squeaking among men and terriers, sheep-dogs, spaniels and broom-handles ?
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And in a sense the field naturalist pursues a similar sport. With his eyes or his field-glasses he shoots the events of little creatures' lives. To give himself moments, he is seeking to nail down to his consciousness the "moments" of their existences. Peering along the hedgerows, if he have seen a rabbit run fascinatedly around the uplifted head of a stoat, he will have bagged his event ; or if he could see a cuckoo drop its egg into the nest of a chaffinch, the adder swallow its young alive, or the night-jar carry its children in its claws. He is building up his little house of observations ; he is filling in the chinks of the wattle-wall that shuts out for him the monotony of his life. And the lines of the trees, the smell of the grass crushed beneath his feet, the sound of wind in the river reeds, the bow of the sky, the forms of clouds, or the great stillnesses of noon — all these things soothe his mind and make sacred these hours of his.
That in its way is the best gift that the Nature of the fields offers to man — a memory of oblivion tem- pered with a sensation that is hardly a memory of times passed with the cool airs on the cheek, with the eye unconsciously deluded and filled by the lines of a world drawing all its hues from the air, the soil and the vapours that hang as it were in a third space between air and soil. I have said that the most en- grossing of pastimes are the gossip of the alehouse and the reading of men's thoughts. And in a sense these are the things that keep us going nowadays
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through the between-beats of the clock. But there are times of break-down when neither of these human emanations has power to hold the mind, or, to put it more justly, when the mind has no longer the power to hold to them. After long periods of illness, of mourning, of mental distress, no news of the out- side world and no ecstasy of verse will hold the mind ; events and thoughts pass through the tired consciousness leaving no trace, as the smoke ot orchard fires passes through apple boughs. Then Nature may assert a sway of her own.
I remember seeing a countryman recovering from a long illness with his bed-head set towards the window. He seemed to be in a state of coma, but from time to time he asked for a looking-glass. Because his appearance after his illness was rather terribly emaci- ated, the glass was for long refused to him. At last he fell to weeping weakly, and some one found a hand-mirror for him. He held it high up, never looking at himself, but turning the face of the glass to the window. He had been longing to see the green of the grassy hill that rose up before his cottage, and although his brain had been too weak to say that he wished his bed turned round he had imagined that stratagem of bringing greenness into his confining room. It was a longing, he said afterwards, such as women are said to feel before the birth of children ; and no satisfaction ever equalled that of this poor man who had imagined himself doomed to die without again seeing sunlight on the grass.
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The country, in fact, the country of the fields and of the footpaths, gives most freely to those who bring something with them, whether it be the labour of their hands or of their brains, whether it be an interest, a hobby, a pursuit, a tranquillity or merely an exhaus- tion. To those whose minds are simply empty, or to those whose thoughts centre upon themselves, the country is a back cloth, a flat surface portraying an aching pageantry of hills, of fields, of woods, a concrete frame for a dull listlessness, or an intolerable prison. But to those who love her as a support, as an addition to a self-sacrifice, as a frame to a passion, to those who work and those who love, she is a beneficent personality. Ask indeed the lovers who wander along the little footpaths or shelter in the ways and nooks of woodlands what the country is to them. They might not answer in words, but they feel that hers is a beneficent presence, auspicious, soothing and sheltering, a presence that finds words for their dumbness, that lends them patience in their suspenses. So that when a lover says, " How sweet the May do smell ! " he voices an unrest and praises at once the perfume of the flowers and the being of his mistress who has quickened his senses. And the worker with his mind who comes out of his door to stand gazing across level fields to the horizon, he too finds his thoughts purified and supported, set as they are in relief, so that his ideas themselves appear to be the pattern
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upon a groundwork of flat green. That indeed is the mission, the vocation of the fields that we cross — to be a groundwork for the thoughts of poor humanity that in its journey through life needs so many supports, so many solaces.
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CHAPTER III IN THE COTTAGES
AT the end of a closed field, in a hollow of the woods, so deep and so moist that it was twilight there even at high noon, there stood a thatched mud cottage — a two-dwelling house — the door-sill of which I never crossed without anticipations of pleasure such as I have known on the sills of few houses. There lived at one end of the hovel an aged man for whom I had no respect, and in the low dark rooms, hung with clothes upon lines that kept away the draughts of the gaping walls, Meary.
I met her first at dusk, scrambling over the high stile of a path that, running between squatters' hovels on a common, was one of a maze of similar paved footways. In a purplish linsey-woolsey, as broad as the back of a cow, her face hidden in a black sun-bonnet that suggested the hood of a hop- oast, she was burdened with two immense baskets, from which protruded the square blue, white, and lead-coloured packages of the village grocer up on the ridge from which we had both descended. I
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offered to carry her burdens as far as we might be going together, and she said, without the least touch of embarrassment or of over-recognition —
"Why, thank ye, mister. I'll do as much for you when ye come to be my age."
Her face was round and brown, her forehead broad and brown, and her brown eyes were alert and reposeful as if she were conscious of a reserve of strength sufficient to help her over all the stiles that are to be found in this life. They had, her eyes, the sort of masterfulness that you will see in those of a bull that gazes across the meadows and reflects.
I think I cared for her more than for any friend I have made before or since, and now that she has been dead for a year or so her memory seems to make sacred and to typify all those patient and good-humoured toilers of the fields that, for me, are the heart of the country. If you saw her at work in the hop-fields, with her hands and arms stained walnut -green to the elbows; in her own potato- patch stooping, in immense boots, to drop the seed potatos into the rows ; striding through the dewy grass of the fields to do a job of monthly nursing ; or standing with one hand over her eyes in the doorway that she fitted so exactly that her thin hair was brushed by the four-foot thatch, she had one unfailing form of words, one unfailing smile upon her lips — " Ah keep all on gooing ! " And that was at once her philosophy and her reason for existence.
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And to keep all on going until you drop — as she >/ did, poor soul, until within three days of the appearance of her illness — that is the philosophy and the apologia pro mtd of the country-side. Your ambition is simply that : health, so that you may keep getting about ; strength, so that you may, to the end, do your bits of jobs and have a moment to do a job or two for a bedridden neighbour ; and, in old age, a sufficient remainder of your faculties to pass censure on the doings of the neighbour you have helped. To have accepted helping hands enough to let you feel that you too are part of the body politic, and to have retained independence enough to let you refuse benefits when the spirit moves you — these are the undefined aspirations that keep occupied the weather- beaten cottages at the corners of fields, the two dwelling-houses with roofs green from the drip ot orchard trees, and the quiet and solitary graveyards of the scattered hamlets.
This particular Meary, being just a month younger than the Queen (there is still only one Queen in the cottages), had lived just the life of every other countrywoman, and in her conversation, a propos ot whatever topic might occur, fragments of her past life came constantly to the surface. If you spoke of the drought being bad for root crops, she would say —
" Ah ! I lost my two toes after a bit of turnip-peel when I was four, jumping down into a ditch for it."
In those days the children searched the dry ditches for such things. Or, before the A d draper's
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window, she would give a quaint little idea of herself in a yellow nankin dress, cut so tight to save stuff that she could not move her tiny arms. You knew you had " innards " most days of the week, she said, when she was a child. Once, out of mischief, she had handed her mother, who was at the kneading- trough, a paper of snuff instead of one of allspice, and the whole week's baking came yellow and evil- tasting. But they had had to eat it. She had never eaten baker's bread till she was twelve, nor butcher's meat till she was twenty ; sometimes they had had a bit of tug mutton, which comes from a sheep found drowned in a dyke. Her stepfather had a bit of bacon once a week, and then the children had the crock water it was boiled in.
After a time — " I was a pretty girl then, I'd have you to know," she used to say — she had been attracted by a travelling basket-maker. When he was about their village she used to slip out and put a pinch of tea into the kettle over his fire in the dingle. She was sent away into service to preserve her from an infatuation for the " pikey," who was not re- garded as respectable, though he earned better money than two agricultural labourers. At nights, lying in the servants' bedroom of Lady Knatch- bull's (the great house had as many windows as there were days in the year), the girls were accus- tomed to tell each other folk-stories — of queens who went wandering over the earth, having been turned out-of-doors for inscrutable reasons, whose hands
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were cut off for reasons more inscrutable, or who were reconciled to their kingly husbands or princely sons at the price of a pound of salt. Or the dark room would be peopled with witches, or dismal songs sung of the murder of trusting girls — with obvious morals for the girls of the servants' room. There were twelve slept together there. They taught each other to read, but no one knew how to write, and Meary never learned. They were sent to church of a Sunday, filling a great square pew for all the world like a cattle truck, but they never learned any- thing of religion. Nevertheless, at times Meary dreamed of Jesus Christ preaching in a green field from a waggon, and telling the women again not to trust the men, but to be good to each other and to small children. Once while Jesus was preaching Meary' s mother, who had died years before, came to her, dressed all in white, and told her to be a good girl.
But eventually the pikey came to mend baskets at the Hall, and she went away with him. She did not see any use in being married ; she reckoned it was something for the Quality. If he was your man, he was your man, and there was an end of it. If he wanted to leave you, he'd leave you, married or not ; it was all one. Once her man did leave her, and she walked right from Paddock Wood to St. Martin's Cliff in twenty-eight hours to find him again. It was on that journey that she saw the ghost. It was sitting on a milestone, dressed like a bride in a coal- scuttle bonnet. She thought it was just a woman,
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
and said, " Hullo, missus ! " three times, to it. Then it raised its head, and she saw that there was no face in the bonnet.
" Oh, well, poor thing," says Meary, " reckon I never hurt you and you've no call to hurt me." So she went on her way along that long Dover road.
Eventually her man grew too weak or too lazy to keep the roads. He was much older than she, having already in 1815 been condemned to be hung for stealing oats when he was a waggoner's mate, and having been reprieved on consenting to serve in the Navy during the Hundred Days. They settled
down in a cottage by the canal at B , and there for
years Meary kept herself and him. She had a certain original genius, such as that which prompted her to keep fowls for profit at a time when no labourers had ever thought of such a thing ; but for the rest she worked at stone-picking on the uplands, at tying hops, at potato-planting, at pea-sticking, at one of the hundred things by which the rural economy is maintained, and in addition she did her monthly nursing, her sick-tending, her laying-out corpses, and her weekly job of charing at the rectory. It was to secure this last that she eventually consented to be married to her man. Shortly afterwards he was stung in the leg by an adder, and, blood- poisoning setting in, he became more useless than ever. Then she fell, broke her leg, and lay for long weeks in hospital, using up all her savings of hen- money, until one day, being seized with a presenti-
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ment, she rose, dressed herself, and, crawling in one way or another painfully home, she found her man dead. She retained a lame leg for the rest of her life.
And for the rest of her life she worked. She kept " all on gooing." Eventually, as I have said, she died very suddenly of cancer at the age of seventy-four. But even then she showed no signs of decay. You might have taken her for a hard- worked woman of forty ; she was as solid and as brown as a clod of earth. She died, of course, in the workhouse infirmary, and of course, too, the chaplain, or the surgeon, or the man who drove her there, or possibly even myself, since I was known to have seen much of her, were suspected of having in some way got hold of " her money/' For the poor, who ought in all conscience to know how hard it is to amass the smallest of sums, are exceedingly credulous as to the hoardings of old creatures living in the most sordid of hovels. I have seldom known an old woman die without some such legend attaching itself to her corsets, as that they crackled with bank-notes, or were as weighty as so much lead with a lining of sovereigns. In the French country, it is said that such old women have a very uncertain tenure of life, but the fact that such stories do not much attach to English countrysides should be evidence that the English peasant is more law-abiding in his imagination.
I was standing, I mean, in the doorway of a low French estaminet when there came in an exceedingly
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old, toothless, and bowed woman, with a broken basket slung over her back. She began to talk in a happy gibberish of a beau marin who was to marry her next Thursday. She groped under the table with a pointed stick for a crust of bread that by a miracle lay on the sanded floor, and dropping it over her back into her basket, went her way, a hopping figure like a little old goblin, under the thin poplars of the immensely long and dusty road. " What a life ! " said one man at a table.
" Why no/' retorted the benignant-thinking hostess. " Is she not as happy as we others ? When she finds such a crust of bread is it not to her as great a pleasure as to us when we add forty sous to our savings ? "
Life is like that, after all ! And if every new Thursday no beau marin comes to marry her, would it not be every next Thursday that he would marry her ?
" Such a man," retorted a waggoner, sitting with his head between his hands — " such-and-such a man was seen on the thatch of her hut, listening at the chimney last week. One Thursday will come when, not the beau marin> but the excellent ser gents will find her with her throat cut and her rooms stripped bare."
" You are a fool," the hostess blinked.
" Ah ! " the waggoner answered, " don't we all know that M. Un Tel dropped old Marie TheVese down the draw-well ? They say she fell. But why did she go who had no cause to use water ? And why was no money found ? "
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IN THE COTTAGES
It is not that sort of story that one hears on the ale-house bench in England, and it is not the fear of the law of libel that prevents it. It is simply that the English imagination does not run in that groove. Or perhaps it is only that the English peasant is more patient, for in his stories the thief always waits for the old woman to die before going through her stays.
And indeed the fact that the only reward for a life of toil should be the empty reputation of stays quilted with bank-notes, or, for an old man, the legend of a baccy-box filled with golden sovereigns — that fact seems to be a proof of a wonderful patience in these tribes of the fields. For all the rest ot humanity — for the humanity who read or write books, cast up ledgers, minister behind counters, bars or the grilles of banks — for all of us who do not walk behind the plough, draw furrows for potatoes, tie hops, or tend pigs, for all of us who are not down upon the earth itself, there is always a vision of a modest competence at our day's decline. But here there is nothing.
There is not in the country even a day-dream of anything. Upon the whole my Meary was the wisest person I have ever met. Broad-minded, temperate, benevolent, cheerful and cynical, she could confront every hap and mishap of life, whether her own, her neighbour's, or the state's, with a proper fortitude or a sane sympathy. She had experienced more vicissitudes in her own scale of things than had most people ; she had
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covered more miles of country and gone through more hours of toil. Yet her philosophy of life was simply that, that you " keep all on gooing." And even that you could only do if you were most fortunate, if you had that greatest of all gifts, health, which alone makes possible the pedestrian existence. Without that your " gooing " ends in the workhouse.
Perhaps that peasant imagination, the stays quilted with notes, is, as it were, a rudimentary trace of our ideal of retiring. It is the nearest approach to a castle in the air, a faint mirage of our impossible Island of the Blest. It is the peasant's acknowledgment that a modest competence is at least thinkable for one of his number; and, oddly enough, it is always to the weakest, the oldest and the least competent that he credits the posses- sion. Not even Meary herself ever thought of " saving " ; whereas you will observe that to the French field labourer — as to my hostess of the Estaminet de I'Esperance, who in her turn was the wisest French person I have ever spoken with — the first idea of the sou which he so sedulously hunts for in his sandier soil, is that of a thing to be " saved." It is the basis of some sort of investment in Rentes, mageres or otherwise, or it is the commencement of the purchase of some tiny patch of land, of a new cow or a first goat.
But short of a pig, which only too often does not pay its way, English " Meary " has no machinery of lucrative banking ; she has only her stays or her
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stocking- up the chimney, just as her husband has only his baccy-box or the loose brick in the hearth floor. And improvements in the conditions of living have of late centuries limited themselves almost entirely to a cheapening of commodity in the case of the field labourer. He gets his food, which is now largely tinned or packet stuff, cheaper than he did, and for smaller sums he buys his comparatively shoddy garments ; but his wages and his housing remain practically the same.
No doubt my Meary and her neighbours are im- provident : the cottages contain children and beer is drunk in the houses of call, and if men and women did without these two luxuries they might have reasonable sums in the savings-bank or nest-eggs that would fall to them from benefit societies when they reached the ages of fifty-five. It is no doubt appalling to think that whereas the average earning per agricultural family in England is fifteen shillings per week, the average expenditure upon beer (the figures are those of temperance reformers) should be eleven pence per family. Exactly reckoned out this means that, if it lived at so proportionately appalling a rate of expenditure, a family existing upon^i,ooo per annum would spend £61 2s. 2§d. upon its pleasures — its clubs for the heads of the family, its wines, spirits, liqueurs, mineral waters for itself and its guests. For it must be remembered that the ale-house is the club, the only place of meeting save the corner of the churchyard, the only possibility
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that the field labourer has of enjoying any kind of social life at all in almost every English village.
No doubt this 6£ °/Q of unnecessary expenditure upon enjoyment would be impossibly high in any other English class ; and of course, when we add to it the necessary expenditure upon the children that the field labourer so lavishly indulges in, we do attain to a picture of improvidence that is eminently disturbing to many people. But the fact seems to me to be that when a man has so little opportunity for pleasure or for rational investment as has the English field labourer, it is almost hypocritical to expect him to be only a little less abstemious than the angels of God or very much more than a man.
I have pondered a good deal upon this problem of the absence of earthly castles in the air ; they are simply not to be found in the scheme of life of my good Meary and her neighbours. They do not seem to hope for any kind of Island of the Blest, and are agreeably surprised and a little ashamed if, when old age reaches them, their children support them. But a period of real rest or retiring is not for them. It does not come, at least, within their scheme of things. Of course, scattered over the countryside, we find old couples enjoying a modest leisure. But these are almost invariably people who have come across some unwonted stroke of luck. In a parish that I know very well, for instance, there were three such couples. But one pair had been gentlemen's servants, and
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made a way for themselves by keeping a cow and drawing small pensions. Another pair had good children earning good money in several towns. The third had inherited a little money from a not very creditable source, and lived a hidden, odd life in the shadow of the deep boughs of a wooded hill in the midst of a random collection of squatters' huts that somehow they had come to own. In one they lived, in another they kept their pigs, in another they had a great number of bees. The whole little encampment was shut in by a very high quicken hedge, so that they seemed to pass all their days in a mysterious shadow, not very willing even to part with their honey as far as one could discover, for their garden gate was almost always padlocked, so that to knock at their front door it was necessary to find a hop-pole and to prod it from a distance. Then an upper window would open and a small wizened face look out.
It finally came to light, in the mysterious way in which these things will out in the London papers, that the little old man was the son of an informer. His father had betrayed a whole neighbouring village of smugglers seventy years before, and these, his descendants, a brother and sister, still lived on the blood-money. Where they had been in the interval
before they came to B , or why they should hide
their heads in a country where the sons of notorious criminals flourish and are honoured, is a little of a mystery still ; but there they did live and there they
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enjoyed such rest as is vouchsafed to anyone here. And it will be observed that all these three resting couples were the exceptions of the countryside.
The other one or two old people who there lived at home and in a measure of ease had parish relief. I have never come across a man or woman who had saved enough to live on when they grew too old to work, and I have never come across one who seriously thought of such a thing.
They take, the country people, their rests between work in snatches so intense that perhaps they scarcely rouse themselves to think of any longer spaces of doing nothing, for I know of no object, no symbol so absolutely typical of relaxation as the attitude of one of our field labourers after a hard day. If you will think of him sitting beside his tea-table, his head hanging a little, his legs wide apart as if to balance himself on a thing so fragile as a cottage chair, his hands, above all, open, immense and at rest, as if, having grasped many and heavy things, they would never again close upon a plough-handle or use-pole — if you will make a mental image, refining a little and idealising a little, you will be thinking of man- kind utterly at rest. You will be thinking, too, of the mankind who does not consider either the future or the past — of the man whose nights are the walls between concrete periods of the mere present, whose days are each one a cell, shut off and unconnected, having no relation to the day which went before, and none to that which shall ensue after
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the black oblivion of the coming night. For in which of those days, dominated by a real sun, overshadowed by real clouds, or swept by real and vast winds, shall they find leisure to formulate a scheme of life to provide against that figurative rainy day that the rest of the world so continually dreads ? There is no time between bed and bed, and at night no lying awake. That, after all, is the improvidence of nature. For the ideas of making a career, of putting by against the decline of life, of retiring — these ideas are of a very modern, an artificial, growth. I am almost tempted to say that they have sprung up only with the growth of the Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic-indus- trial-commercialism that is Modernity. That is, naturally, a side-speculation ; but what has always seemed to me an astonishing, an even astounding feature of most social comities is, not that the peasant should now be leaving the land, but that he should have been content to remain for so long the mere substratum of the body politic. For here we have a whole body of men controlling the one thing that is absolutely necessary to all other estates, con- trolling absolutely the one thing without which human lives cannot be lived.
"They must then," a philosopher from another planet and another plane of thought would say, — " they must necessarily be the lords of the world. All other trades, professions, avocations, guilds, castes, crafts, or followings must come to them, suing upon bended knees for the mere stuff to keep their
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ribs from sticking through their sides. They control, your field-workers, the food supply of your world; then they must control your world." And, indeed, it is odd to think that from the days of Pharaoh to the days when the rulers of Rome kept themselves in place and power by supplying bread et circenses to a town populace, from then to mediaeval days, and from those days to these of transatlantic market manipulations, through all the mists of time to which annals and chronicles supply dimmed charts and landmarks, there has never been a wheat-corner of one kind or another that has been "engineered" or had its origin with the actual peasant — with the actual field-worker. There have, of course, been wars for the fixing of labourers' wages, as there was in England, and there have been Peasant Wars, as in Germany, but there has never been a case in which the peasant has shown himself aware of his actual power — his power to withhold food. Such class wars as he has waged — and in England there has only been the one — have been wars in which he used the weapons of the other classes, swords, billhooks, and whatever other primitive implements of steel he could lay hands to. But he has never used the most terrible weapon of all — he has never simply stayed his hand.
It is not, of course, very wonderful, though it is appalling to consider what would be the results of a universal peasants' « strike." But the peasant has hardly ever had a corporate self-consciousness ; he
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has certainly never " organised," it is much, even, if he have so much as thought of his rather wretched circumstances. You get, for instance, his philosophy of keeping on going expressed in " Piers Plowman " — how many centuries ago — and in addition to it a consciousness of the bitterness of life; and in addition to that a belief that Providence, on the Last Day and for ever, shall give material recompense to those who suffered so long and so inarticulately :
" There the poor dare plead And prove by pure reason To have allowance of his lord By the law, he it claimeth."
And, joy that never joy had, he asketh of the rightful Judge. Since to the birds, beasts, and wild worms of the green wood that suffer grievously in winter, God sends summer that is their sovereign joy, assuredly and of pure reason God shall give to the poor toilers of the field, after their long winter of this world, an eternal summer. Something of this bitterness, tempered with the idea of retribution here- after, may have remained to the peasant throughout the ages ; but how different it is from the corporate consciousness of the other nearly indispensable crafts. How different it is from the spirit of the blacksmith's motto : —
" By hammer and hand All Art doth stand."
It was, I imagine, during the French Revolution
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that some idea of this sort began to permeate the field labourer. But even then it was more a matter of individuals than of a body corporate. The print to which I have referred already is not, at any rate, in any form discoverable earlier than in a French version of 1782. It shows a man bearing upon his back many others : a king on the top, then, in a bunch, a soldier, a priest, a lawyer, a doctor, a merchant. Those who form the burden bear scrolls : " I govern all," " I fight for all," " I pray for all," " I cure all," " I sell for all," and the figure with its bowed head, like Atlas groaning beneath the weight of a world, exhibits the legend : "I work for all." I have seen versions of this print, redesigned with different attributes in wood engraving, in steel engravings, in chromolithograph or even copied by hand, all over Europe — in estaminets in La Vendee, in inns in Herefordshire, in farms in Kent, and in the Kotten of Westphalia. If it is not the charter, it is, this print, at least the claim to recognition of the worker on the soil. It was probably first designed in the France of 1782. Yet even in the England of a century and a quarter later the field labourer has not found any corporate or articulate means of intercommunication ; he has not imagined any method of revenging himself on the classes above him. He has not, I mean, waged any war, claimed the land, or so much as " struck " in any vast numbers. What he has done has been simply to go over to the enemy. For, with the spread of education,
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with the increase of communication, there has come not the determination to better the conditions of life in the country, but the simple abandonment of the land. It is, I think, a truism to anyone who knows the country, though I have found townsmen to deny it, that there are whole stretches of territory in England where a really full-witted or alert youth of between sixteen and thirty will absolutely not be found. I visited lately eighteen farms of my own neigh- bourhood, covering a space of about four miles by two miles, and on this amount of ground only five boys found employment. Four of these were below the average intelligence, and had at school not passed the fourth standard; the fifth was so " stupid " that he could not be trusted to do more than drive the milk-cart to and from the station. And of all the farm-labourers' families that I know well — some forty- six in number — only two have youths at home, and one of these has "something the matter with his legs." Of one hundred and twelve of other families that I know in a nodding way, not more than five have boys at work in the fields. Making a rough calculation of the figures as they have presented themselves to me, I find that just over five per cent, of the country-born boys I have known have stayed of their own free choice on the land. The public statistics for the whole of England are somewhat higher in this par- ticular ; but in the purely agricultural Midlands the standard of intelligence is somewhat lower, and in the North of England the living-in system still pre-
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vails, and does for various reasons keep the young- men in their places.
The figure among the girls is probably even more striking. A girl of moderately good looks or of an intelligence at all alert is almost unknown in many, many villages of England. I was much struck by the statement of a friend of mine the other day. A man of much intelligence and of unrivalled know- ledge of country life, he had been spending a month watching the birds and small beasts of a certain countryside. He had covered a good deal of ground in that time, and at last he saw a pleasant and bright-looking girl. He had grown so weary of seeing only worn, stupid or dazed faces that he got off his cycle and remarked to her that he was glad to see that she at least was stopping in her own village.
" I ! " she said with an accent of scorn ; " I wouldn't stop in such a dull old hole if you gave me ^10 a day! I'm visiting my parents for three days/'
Yet the village in question was almost world- famous for its beauty, and her father's wages were rather high.
I do not for the moment want to extract any other meaning from this striking rural exodus than may attach to my own astonishment. But it does seem to me astonishing that this really downtrodden class should have given just this form to its protest. There has not, I mean, been any discoverable attempt worth the mention to fight the battle as a battle.
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You do not anywhere find that the field labourer has attempted to raise the price that he receives from his employer,* nor do you find that the young people of the countrysides have ever made any attempt to brighten or to enhance the intellectual colourings of their lives. You do not find anywhere spelling bees, newspaper clubs, debating societies, or sub- scription dances. Yet there is no reason in the world why these things should not have been attempted. Nay more, all the old seasonal excitements of the country are dying out : the fairs, the May-day cele- brations, the sparrow shoots, the bonfire clubs, even the very cricket clubs, which are subsidised, as a rule, "from above" — all the old merriments and "merry- neets" of the country have almost gone. In the course of the last four years I have seen the custom of May Barns and the village waits abandoned in a place where they have existed since its first houses were built. But no trace of any attempt to amuse
* You will find this most strikingly exemplified in the case of such temporary industries as that of hop-picking, where a whole village turns out together, and where, if anywhere, some sort of stand for better money might be made. " Strikes " do, of course, occur where there are many " foreigners " employed, but practically never where all the pickers are village people. The cottagers accept uncomplainingly the grower's wage, which is based upon his computation of what the price of hops may be expected to prove ; of course, when I say the peasant has never struck, I do not forget the name of Mr. Joseph Arch. But from his day back to that of John Ball agitators and stack-burnings have been so com- paratively rare that " never " remains a word sufficiently accurate for the uses of impressionism.
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
themselves is to be found amongst the peasants of this countryside. The whole population of field workers is simply throwing down its tools; it is making no struggle for existence ; it is simply going away in silence, without a protest and without a trace of listening to outward persuasions. And I know very well that if I live to be as old as my old Meary there will be no one like her to lift my basket over the stile.
And when I think of her, standing dun-coloured, smiling and square in the dusk of that sunken foot- path, I am rather saddened. For, following her footsteps into the shadowy land that is the past, all the generation for whom she stood is going, now so fast.
There will be none to take their places. It any remain they will be the slow-witted : whilst she and those she stood for were merely unlettered, a thing very different. Yet, perhaps, we do wrong to regret that there should no longer be a whole world of our fellow - creatures pulled out of their natural shapes, stunted in their minds and leading lives dull and unlovely so that we may have certain aesthetic feelings gratified. No doubt in the scale of things the young shop-assistant, with her pre- served figure, her gayer laugh, her brighter complexion, her courtships, her ideals and her aspiration for a villa in a row, with a brass knocker and an illustrated bible on the parlour table — no doubt the young shop-assistant is a better
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product of humanity than Meary, with her broad face, her great mouth, great hands, and cow-like heave of the shoulders. Nevertheless, I suppose that we must needs regret this passing. For, after all, it is a stage of the youth of the world that is passing away along with our own youth. It is the real heart of the country that is growing a little colder as our own hearts grow colder. It is one of the many things that our children — that our very adolescent nephews and nieces — will never know.
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TOILERS OF THE FIELD
CHAPTER IV TOILERS OF THE FIELD
I DO not know why in particular, and at this par- ticular moment, there should come up in my memory a very rainy day. I was with three other men, driven in from work by the weather. We were idly watching the heavy showers that slanted across the triangular farmyard, driving down from the grey hollows and grey slopes of the downs behind, until the water dropped like curtains of beads from the eaves of the waggon lodge beneath which we sheltered.
I had been making a new strawberry bed, and a Falstaffian, shiny, shaven-faced scamp, by-named Sunshine because of his appearance, had been helping me. The shepherd, or, as we styled it, the looker, was flaying a sheep that hung from one of the tie beams of the open shed, and Hunt, a retired soldier, who also did a job of lookering on the farm, lank, ill- shaven and sallow, leant back against a mowing machine, and looked with red and malignant eyes across the slants of rain. He rubbed his wet nose
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with the back of his hand and snarled out, " Now if I had my rights I shouldn't be here wet and sick feeling."
The shepherd — who had been a shepherd all his life on the one farm — made a slight incision with his knife, and drew the skin a shade lower on the red carcase.
" If we all had, we shouldn't none of us be," he said, with a laconic air.
Sunshine, who had run away from his wife in the next county, grunted merrily.
He himself would be sitting in Brock Castle drawing-room, and all the lands below the hill would be his, Hunt drawled viciously.
" And I'd have a tidy bit of land of my own, too," the shepherd said.
An aunt of his had died with property in the Chan- cery, Sunshine laughed, and, as luck would have it, I could make a similar claim.
" 'Reckon no one would have to work if it wasn't for they lawyers," Hunt snarled ; and the shepherd said that if a man in a black coat came along ques- tioning him he kept very whist and quiet.
" Might be a parson, now," Sunshine argued. Well, parsons and lawyers pig together, too, the shepherd answered. More than once he had taken a note to the vicarage, and seen parson and lawyer Hick having tea together. No— take his advice, and do not speak to a man with a white collar and a black coat.
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He was of opinion that your own quality was as much as you could deal with : " Never you have no truck with strangers, or as like as not you'd sign away rights of yours you'd never heard of— and before you could say Jack Ploughman."
The retired soldier had been born on the wrong side of the blanket, I believe, for I could not otherwise make much of his wrongs, and a large liver, gained in India, seemed to sour him. But both Sunshine and the looker were of most contented kinds. Yet they told remarkable stories of the wrongs that they, their relations, or A., B. and C. of that countryside, had suffered at the hands of the local Quality. The shepherd's father, for instance, had owned a mud cottage and a good orchard — probably squatted land. One day, when he was about sixty-six, Squire
C k had come along and said, " Look here, old
looker ; I'll build you a brick cottage and let you live in it till you die, roomy and comfortable, if so be when you die you will engage it comes to me." The old looker had consented ; and all the other squatters on the common had taken similar offers. But the old looker had died before the new cottage had been built two months, and out the old woman and her kids had had to turn.
"That was how the C 's came into all the
C n property," the looker said.
Sunshine beamingly told the story of how his aunt had signed away her land in Chancery to a lawyer come all the way from the shires to get her name to a
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paper when none of her nephews were by. And the shepherd capped it with the tale of old Jacky Banks, who had worked all his life on that very farm. He had had fifteen pounds a-year for forty years, never spent a penny of it except for baccy, and had it under his bed when he died, along with his watch. Well, he lived in, on the farm, and died in what was now the drawing-room. Old missus, who was a