At the end of the lane, at the head of one of the beechen chalky coombes, just where the beeches cease and the flinty clay begins, stands a thatched cottage under five tall ash-trees. A grassy lane runs by, but on three sides the place is surrounded by huge naked concave sweeps of grey ploughland which take the February sunshine and cloud shadow as delicately as beaten silver. The walls are of grey-white soft stone, but only a little of them is visible, because the steep thatch sweeps almost to the ground and overhangs the gables, in each of which is a small window and under one a door. In hot summer or windy winter, if the field happens to be without a crop, the earth is of the same colour as the thatch, and the cottage looks as if it were the work—like a mole-hill—of some creature that has worked underground and risen up just there and rested, peering out of the two dark windows upon the world. It is impossible to find any point of view from which any house can be seen along with this, except one—the ash-trees, the tall hazels of the lane, or the swelling fields hide them away. But the pewits loop their flight every spring over and round about the cottage, and the dark eyes under the thatch can always see a hare, and often half-a-dozen. Whether the ashes are purple in spring, yellow in autumn or grey in winter, whether the surrounding fields are bare, or green with turnips, or yellow with charlock, or empurpled gold with ripe wheat, the cottage is always the same stubborn,[197] dull, simple mound raised up out of the earth. The one other house is not so high; nor has it eyes; nor do an old man and a girl and two children go in and out of it; it is, in fact, not a house of the living, but of the dead, a round tumulus at the edge of the hill. The grey mound of the dead and the grey house of the living are at their best in the midst of winter and in the midst of summer. Standing upon the tumulus in the north-west wind, the cottage could be seen huddled under the lashing trees. Many a thousand beech-trees on the steep slopes below gave out a roar, and it was a majestic position to be up there, seeing and feeling that the strong wind was scouring the world with a stream miles deep and miles wide. Far underneath, two beechen promontories with bald white brows projected into the vast valley; not really much lower than the hill of the tumulus, but seeming so in that more than Amazonian stream of air. Beyond these promontories the broad land was washed bright and clear. Nearer at hand the thrice cleaned traveller’s-joy was as silken foam surging upon the surface of black yews and olive hazels. The kestrel swayed and lunged in his flight. Branches gleamed, hard and nervously moving. Rain-pools glittered, and each brittle stem and flower of a dead plant, each grass-blade and brown lock of beech or oak-leaf, gave out its little noise to join the oceanic murmur of the earth. Now and then a dead leaf took flight, rose high and went out over the valley till it was invisible, never descending, in search of the moon. Near the horizon a loose white drift went rapidly just over the summits of the highest woods; but in the upper air were the finest flowers of the wind—hard white flowers of cloud, flowers and mad[198] tresses and heaven-wide drapery of gods, and some small and white like traveller’s-joy, as if up there also they travelled and knew the houseless joy along the undulating highway of the deep wind. And the little house was as a watch-tower planted in the middle swirl of the current that was scouring valley and wood and sky and water and, as far as it could, the dull eyes and duller brains of men.
In summer I saw it at the end of one of those days of sun and wind and perfectly clear air when the earth appears immensely heavy and great and strong—so that for a moment it is possible to know the majesty of its course in space—and the sheep very light, like mere down, as they crawl in a flock over the grass. Swathes and wisps of white cloud were strewn over the high blue sky as if by haymakers. But the lanes were deep, and for miles at a time nearly shut out the sky, and all the day the lanes were empty and wholly mine. Here the high banks were thickly grown with wild parsnip, and its umbels of small yellow-green flowers, fragrant and a little over-sweet, were alive and, as it were, boiling over with bees and the sunniest flies. There the hazel was laced with white bryony, whose leaves and pale tendrils went hovering and swimming and floating over the hedge. In one place an elder-tree stood out of the hedge, stiff, with few branches, and every leaf upon them red as a rose. Wherever there was a waste strip beside the road the tall yellow ragwort grew densely, each of the nearer flowers as hard and clear as brass, the farther ones dimly glowing and half lost in the green mist of their leaves and the haze of the brightness of their multitudes. Where the road changed into an unused lane the grass was tall, and[199] under the hazels, yet fully seen, were the wild basil and marjoram and centaury and knapweed and wood-betony, and over them hung moths of green crimson-spotted silk. There, too, were the plants that smell most of the dry summer—the white parsleys and the white or rosy cow-parsnip, the bedstraws white and yellow, the yellow mugwort. Now and then the hedges gave way and on either hand was open turf; sloping steep and rough on one side, grooved by ancient paths of men and cattle, dotted by thorns, with the freshly flowering traveller’s-joy over them, ash-trees at the top; on the other side, level, skirted by cloudy wych-elms and having at one corner a white inn half shadowed by a walnut, and two sycamores and cattle below them; and at another, a stately autumnal house veiled by the cedars and straight yews on its darkly glowing lawn.
All these things I saw as if they had been my own, as if I were going again slowly through old treasures long hidden away, so that they were memoried and yet unexpected. Nothing was too small to be seen, and ascending the chalk hill among the beeches every white flint was clear on the sward, each in its different shape—many chipped as the most cunning chisel would be proud to chip them; one, for example, carved by the loss of, two exquisitely curved and balanced flakes into the likeness of a moth’s expanded upper wings.
A dark beech alley, paved with the gold and green of moss and walled by crumbling chalk, brought me to the tumulus. There lay the old house in shadow, its ash crests lighted yellow by horizontal beams that caught here the summit of a wood, and there the polished grass stems on a rising field. It was the one house, and at that[200] hour it gathered to itself all that can be connected with a home. It was alone, but its high cool thatch was full of protection and privacy, sufficient against sun or rain or wind or frost, yet impregnated with free air and light. Its ash-trees communed with the heavens and the setting sun. The wheat glowed at its gates. The dark masses of the lower woods enhanced by a touch of primeval gloom and savagery the welcoming expression of the house. Slowly the light died out of the ash-tops and the wheat turned to a mist. The wood seemed to creep up close and lay its shadows over the house. But, stronger than the wood and the oncoming tide of night that enveloped it, the spirits of roof and wall and hearth were weaving a spell about the house to guard it, so that it looked a living, breathing, dreaming thing. Nimble, elvish, half-human but wholly kind small spirits I fancied them, creeping from corners in stone and thatch and rafter, at war with those that dwelt in lonely and dark places, that knew not fire and lamp and human voices save as invaders. For a little while there was a pause, a suspense, a hesitation—Could the small spirits win?—Were not the woods older and more mighty?—Was not that long black bar of cloud across the cold west something sinister, already engulfing the frail white moon? But suddenly, as if the life of the house had found a powerful voice, one eye in the nearer gable was lit by a small lamp and a figure could be guessed behind it. The first Promethean spark of fire stolen from the gods was hardly a more signal victory than that at which the house and I rejoiced when the white light glimmered across the corn. It seemed the birth of light.
[201]
The man who lives under that roof and was born there seventy years ago is like his house. He is short and immensely broad, black-haired, with shaved but never clean-shaven face creased by a wide mouth and long, narrow black eyes—black with a blackness as of cold, deep water that had never known the sun but only the candle-light of discoverers. His once grey corduroys and once white slop are stained and patched to something like the colour of the moist, channelled thatch and crumbling “clunch” of the stone walls. He wears a soft felt hat with hanging broad brim of darker earthy hues; it might have been drawn over his face and ears in his emergence from his native clay and flint. Only rarely does his eye—one eye at a time—gloom out from underneath, always accompanied by a smile that slowly puckers the wrinkled oak-bark of his stiff cheeks. His fingers, his limbs, his face, his silence, suggest crooked oak timber or the gnarled stoles of the many times polled ash. It is barely credible that he grew out of a child, the son of a woman, and not out of the earth itself, like the great flints that work upwards and out on to the surface of the fields. Doubtless he did, but like many a ruined castle, like his own house, he has been worn to a part of the earth itself. That house he will never give up except by force, to go to workhouse or grave. They want him to go out for a few days that it may be made more weather-tight; but he fears the chances and prefers a rickety floor and draughty wall. He is half cowman, half odd-job man—at eight shillings a week—in his last days, mending hedges, cleaning ditches, and carrying a sack of wheat down the steep hill on a back that cannot be bent any farther. Up to his knees in the February ditch, or cutting[202] ash-poles in the copse, he is clearly half converted into the element to which he must return.
When the underwood is for sale it is a pleasure to read the notices fixed to the doors of barn and shed, with the names of the copses and woods. At Penshurst lately, for example, I saw these names—
Black Hoath Wood.
Heronry Pond.
Marlpit Field.
Tapner’s Wood.
Ashour Farm.
Sidney’s Coppice.
Weir Field.
Well Place.
I was back in Sidney’s time, remembering that genial poem of Ben Jonson’s, “To Penshurst,” and especially the lines—
“Thy copse too, named of Gamage, thou hast there,
That never fails to serve thee season’d deer,
When thou wouldst feed or exercise thy friends.
The lower land, that to the river bends,
Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed;
The middle grounds thy mares and horses breed.
Each bank doth yield thee conies; and the tops
Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sidney’s copps,
To crown thy open table, doth provide
The purple pheasant with the speckled side, ...”
and so onward to that opulence and ease three centuries old—
&l............