A beggar is a rich man on some of these August days, especially one I know, whom first I met some Augusts ago now. A fine Sunday afternoon had sprinkled the quiet and thinly-peopled land with black-dressed men and white-dressed women, the older married couples and their trains of children keeping chiefly to the roads and most straightforward paths, the younger, with one child or none, choosing rather the green lanes, while the lovers and the boys found out tall hedge-sides and the footpaths across which more than one year’s growth of hazel had spread, so that the shortest of the maids must stoop. Many showers following a dry season made miles of the country as clean and fragrant as a garden. Honeysuckle and privet were in every hedge with flowers that bring a thrill of summer bridals on their scent. The brisk wind was thymy from the Downs. The ragwort was in its glory; it rose tall as a man in one straight leap of dark-foliaged stem, and then crowned itself in the boldest and most splendid yellows derived from a dark golden disc and almost lemon rays; it was as if Apollo had come down to keep the flocks of a farmer on these chalk hills and his pomp had followed him out of the sky. A few birds still sang; one lark now and then, a cirl-bunting among the topmost haws of a thorn, chiffchaffs in the bittersweet and hazel of the little copses. There was apparently comfort, abundance and quiet[187] everywhere. They were seen in the rickyards where grand haystacks, newly thatched, stood around ancient walnut-trees. Even the beeches had a decorous look in their smooth boles and perfect lavish foliage. The little patches of flowery turf by the roadside and at corners were brighter and warmer than ever, as the black bees and the tawny skipper butterflies flew from bloom to bloom of the crimson knapweed. Amplest and most unctuous of all in their expression of the ceremonious leisure of the day and the maturity of the season were the cart-horses. They leaned their large heads benignly over the rails or gates; their roan or chestnut flanks were firm and polished; manes, tails and fetlocks spotless; now and then they lifted up their feet and pressed their toes into the ground, showing their enormous shoes that shone and were of girth sufficient to make a girdle for the lightest of the maids passing by.
Sunday with not too strict a rod of black and white ruled the land and made it all but tedious except in the longest of the green lanes, which dipped steeply under oaks to a brook muffled in leaves and rose steeply again, a track so wet in spring—and full of the modest golden green of saxifrage flowers—that only the hottest Sunday ever saw it disturbed except by carter and horses. In a hundred yards the oak-hidden windings gave the traveller a feeling of reclusion as if he were coiled in a spool; very soon a feeling of possession ripened into one of armed tyranny if another’s steps clattered on the stones above. Sometimes in a goodly garden a straight alley of shadows leads away from the bright frequented borders to—we know not quite whither, and perhaps, too much delighted with half-sad reverie, never learn, smother even the[188] guesses of fancy, lest they should bring some old unpleasant truth in their train; but if the fancy will thread the alley and pass the last of the shadows it is into some such lane as this that it would gladly emerge, to come at last upon the pure wild. It seemed that I had come upon the pure wild in this lane, for in a bay of turf alongside the track, just large enough for a hut and thickly sheltered by an oak, though the south-west sun crept in, was a camp. Under the oak and at the edge of the tangled bramble and brier and bracken was a low purple light from those woodside flowers, self-heal and wood-betony. A perambulator with a cabbage in it stood at one corner; leaning against it was an ebony-handled umbrella and two or three umbrella-frames; underneath it an old postman’s bag containing a hammer and other tools. Close by stood half a loaf on a newspaper, several bottles of bright water, a black pot of potatoes ready for boiling, a tin of water steaming against a small fire of hazel twigs. Out on the sunny grass two shirts were drying. In the midst was the proprietor, his name revealed in fresh chalk on the side of his perambulator: “John Clark, Hampshire.”
He had spent his last pence on potatoes and had been given the cabbage. No one would give him work on a Sunday. He had no home, no relations. Being deaf, he did not look for company. So he stood up, to get dry and to think, think, think, his hands on his hips, while he puffed at an empty pipe. During his meditation a snail had crawled half-way up his trousers, and was now all but down again. He was of middle height and build, the crookedest of men, yet upright, like a branch of oak which comes straight with all its twistings. His head[189] was small and round, almost covered by bristly grey hair like lichen, through which peered quiet blue eyes; the face was irregular, almost shapeless, like dough being kneaded, worn by travel, passion, pain, and not a few blows; where the skin was visible at all through the hair it was like red sandstone; his teeth were white and strong and short like an old dog’s. His rough neck descended into a striped half-open shirt, to which was added a loose black waistcoat divided into thin perpendicular stripes by ribs of faded gold; his trousers, loose and patched and short, approached the colour of a hen pheasant; his bare feet were partly hidden by old black boots. His voice was hoarse and, for one of his enduring look, surprisingly small, and produced with an effort and a slight jerk of the head.
He was a Sussex man, born in the year 1831, on June the twenty-first (it seemed a foppery in him to remember the day, and it was impossible to imagine with what ceremony he had remembered it year by year, during half a century or near it, on the roads of Sussex, Kent, Surrey and Hampshire). His mother was a Wild—there were several of them buried not far away under the carved double-headed tombstones by the old church with the lancet windows and the four yews. He was a labourer’s son, and he had already had a long life of hoeing and reaping and fagging when he enlisted at Chatham. He had kept his musket bright, slept hard and wet, and starved on thirteenpence a day, moving from camp to camp every two years. He had lost his youth in battle, for a bullet went through his knee; he lay four months in hospital, and they took eighteen pieces of bone out of his wound—he was still indignant because he was[190] described as only “slightly wounded” when he was discharged after a “short service” of thirteen years. He showed his gnarled knee to explain his crookedness. Little he could tell of the battle except the sobbing of the soldier next to him—“a London chap from Haggerston way. Lord! he called for his mother and his God and me to save him, and the noise he made was worse than the firing and the groaning of the horses, and I was just thinking how I could stop his mouth for him when a bullet hits me, and down I goes like a baby.”
He had been on the road forty years. For a short time after his discharge he worked on the land and lived in a cottage with his wife and one child. The church bells were beginning to ring, and I asked him if he was going to church. At first he said nothing, but looked down at his striped waistcoat and patched trousers; then, with a quick violent gesture of scorn, he lifted up his head and even threw it back before he spoke. “Besides,” he said, “I remember how it was my little girl died——My little girl, says I, but she would have been a big handsome woman now, forty-eight years old on the first of May that is gone. She was lying in bed with a little bit of a cough, and she was gone as white as a lily, and I went in to her when I came home from reaping. I saw she looked bad ............