Rain begins as I set out and mount under the beeches. The sky is dark as a ploughed field, but the leaves overhead are full of light like precious stones. The rain keeps the eyes down so that they see one by one the little things of the wayside, the strings of the grey-green and of the scarlet bryony berries, the stony bark of the young ash unveiled by the moving leaves, the million tall straight shoots which the strong nature of ash and hazel has soared into since the spring. Then follows field after field of corn, of sheep among hurdled squares, of mustard in flower, of grass, interrupted now and then by the massed laurels and rhododendrons and the avenues of monkey puzzles that announce the pleasure grounds of the rich. It is a high land of too level clay, chiefly blest in that it beholds the Downs, their saddles of woodland, and, through the deepest passes, the sea and an island rising out of it like an iceberg; and that it is traversed by the Pilgrims’ Way, which gathers to itself Canterbury-bells and marjoram under its hazels, and pours traveller’s-joy cloudily over the ash and brier that overhang the side of an old chalk pit, long, straight and even like a wall. Just here are many grassy lanes between hazel and blackthorn hedges. An old farmhouse with ivied chimneys and ten blind windows in front stands bereaved with weedy garden, but for miles the air sounds with poultry and the building of bungalows in deal and iron for strangers.[211] It is not a stranger that rides by. I think his fathers must have been in this land when Wolf Hanger was not a strange name for the beeches over the hill. He is a tall straight man with long narrow face, clear, not too irregular features, sallow complexion, black hair and black drooping moustache, and flashing eyes as dark as privet berries in autumn dews. Now it is a woodland country, of broad wooded common and low undulating Downs crowned or fringed by woods: this is “Swineherd’s County” according to the gypsies. Houses are few and stand either well off the road or with scarcely a dividing line between their gardens and the commons from which they have been filched. Their linen and red flannel flap under enormous beeches where an old track makes its way betwixt them. The children living here, the generations of them who have been bred in the little flint house, are children of the woods, their minds half made by the majestic but dark and deep-voiced trees that stand over them day and night and by the echoes—you may hear them summoning the echoes at evening out of the glades and see them pause as if dazed by the wild reply. Opposite the door is a close untrodden tangle of brier and thorn and bramble under oaks where the dead leaves of many autumns lie untouched even by the wind—so dense is the underwood—that sighs continually in the topmost boughs: at the edge nettles with translucent leaves waver and nod above mossy banks. Not far off is a Woodland Farm, a group of houses and barns and sheds built of flint and wood and thatched, aloof. A man enters one of the cavernous sheds with a pail; a thick, bent, knotty man, with bushy dark hair and beard and bright black eyes, a farmer, the son’s son of[212] one who rebuilt the house when the woods were darker and huger still. Life is a dark simple matter for him; three-quarters of his living is done for him by the dead; merely to look at him is to see a man live generations thick, so to speak, and neither Nature nor the trumpery modern man can easily disturb a human character of that density. As I watch him going to and fro I lose sight of everything away from his rude house and the tall woods, because they and he are so powerful—he has the trees as well as his ancestors at his back—and it is no flight of fancy to see him actually cut off from all the world except the house and woods, and yet holding his own, able to keep his fire burning, his larder full, his back covered and his house dry. I feel but a wraith as I pass by. I wonder what there is worth knowing that he does not know, with his bright eyes, bright long teeth, stiff limbs capable of unceasing toil, and that look of harmony with day and night. I see him looking on as the wounded trooper—two hundred and fifty years, a trifle, ago—drains the water just lifted from the well; look at his gallant face, his delicate ardour as of another race, bright dress, restless blue eyes, his helplessness after the defeat in a cavalry fight about nothing at all. The cornet rides away and the woodland fellow puts all his nature into the felling of a beech as into an object worthy of cold steel, and as he plies his axe he smiles at the thought of that brave, that silly face and sleek hair. He smiles to-day as he sees a youth go by with proud looks of command, incapable, as he well understands, of commanding anything except perhaps a wife or a groom or a regiment of townsmen—yet his landlord.
Rough grass and scattered thorns and lofty groups of[213] mossy-pedestalled beeches lie on either side of the road, and grassy tracks lead to thatched cottages in the woods. A grey-clouded silver sky moves overhead. Along the road the telegraph wires go humming the one shrill note in this great harmony of men and woods and sky. Beyond, a broad champaign of corn and grey grass heaves from the woodland edge. The road is gay with red polished fruit and equally red soft leaves, with darkest purple and bronze and wine-red and green berries and leaves, and beam foliage still pure green and white. So high now are the unkempt hedges that the land is hid and only the sky appears above the coloured trees: except at a meeting of ways when a triangular patch of turf is sacred to burdock, ragwort and thistle and—touching the dust of the road—the lowly silverweed; an oak overhangs, yet the little open space admits a vision of the elephantine Downs going west in the rain. In a moment the world is once again this narrow one of the high-hedged lane, where I see and touch with the eye and enjoy the shapes of each bole and branch in turn, their bone-like shapes, their many colours of the wood itself, wrinkled and grooved, or overlaid by pale green mould, silver lichen or dark green moss. Each bend in the road is different. At one all the leaves are yellow but green-veined, the bramble, the hazel, the elder; and there is a little chalk pit below, fresh white and overhung by yew and the dark purple elder berries, small but distinct: at another there is a maple of exquisite small leaves and numerous accordingly, a fair-built tree in a lovely attitude and surmounted by a plume, only a small plume, of traveller’s-joy. In Swineherd’s County they call it “Angel’s hair.”
[214]
Suddenly there is a village of thatched roofs, phlox in the gardens, good spaces of green and of sycamore-trees between one house and the next, and a green-weeded crystal river pervading all with its flash and sound. The anvil rings and the fire glows in the black smithy. The wheel-wright’s timber leans outside his thatched shed against an ancient elder, etherealized by lucent yellow leaves. Before the inn a jolly ostler with bow legs and purple neck washes the wheels of a cart, ever and anon filling his pail from the stream and swishing the bright water over the wheels as they spin. A decent white-haired old man stands and watches, leaning on his stick held almost at arm’s length so as to make an archway underneath which a spaniel sprawls in the sun. The men are all at the corn and he does not know what to do. Can he read? asks the ostler, knowing the answer very well. No! We all read now, chuckles the ostler as he flings a pailful over the wheel. The old man is proud at least to have lived into such a notable day: “Yes, man reads now almost as well as master—quite as well. They used to be dummies, the working class people, yes, that they was. You can’t tell what will happen now.” Meantime the ostler fills his pail and the old man having too many thoughts to say any more, lays his blackthorn on the bench and calls for his glass of fourpenny ale.
Close by there is an entrance to the more open Downs. The uncut hedges are so thick that the lane seems a cutting through a wood, and soon it becomes a grassy track of great breadth under ash-trees and amidst purple dogwood and crimson-hearted traveller’s-joy, and finally it is a long broad field full of wild carrot and scabious through which many paths meander side by side until the[215] last gate gives a view, under oak and hazel sprays, on to the green undulations of hill and coombe, their sides studded with juniper and thorn, with something of oceanic breadth in the whole, as far as the utmost bound, leagues away, where a line of small trees stands against the sky in the manner of ships. The hedges in this downland are low or broken. A few ricks stand at the borders of stubble and grass. Sheep munch together in square pens. There is no house, and the rain has wiped out everything that moved save its own perpendicular fringes waving along the hills. This solitude of grey and brown is completed by the owner’s notice, on a frail and tottering post: “Trespassers will be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law.” Towards the farther verge compact copses of beech begin to saddle the ridges and invade the hollows so as to form cliffy dark sides to the friths of pale stubble or turf amongst them. And then the green way runs into a Roman road, and in the twilight and rain I can see many other narrow ancient tracks winding into the white road as straight as a sword, losing themselves in it like children in a dragon’s mouth. The turf alongside is mounded by tumuli; and against the hedge a gypsy family pretend to shelter from the windy rain; the man stands moody, holding the pony, the women crouch with chins upon knees, the children laugh and will not be still. They belong to the little roads that are dying out: they hate the sword-like shelterless road, the booming cars that go straight to the city in the vale below. They are less at home there than the swallows that haunt the leeward sides of the sycamores, ever rushing up towards the trees and ever beaten back, like children playing “I’m the king of the castle,” at the[216] verge of the city. There, by the inn piano, soldiers and their friends and women sing with vague pathos songs about “Mother” and “Dear Love” and “Farewell” and “Love is all” and “The girls,” while the streets glitter and gurgle with rain. Just before night the sky clears. It is littered with small dark clouds upon rose, like rocks on a wild and solitary coast of after-tempest calm, and it is infinitely remote and infinitely alluring. Those clouds are the Islands of the Blest. Even so alluring might be this life itself, this world, if I were out of it. For a moment I fancy how I might lean and watch it all, being dead. For a moment only, since the poverty of death is such that we cannot hope from it such a gift of contemplation from afar, cannot hope even that once out of the world we may turn round and look at it and feel that we are not of it any more, nor hope that we shall know ourselves to be dead and be satisfied. Rain shrouds the islands of the sky: the singers find them in their song.
In the morning the ground is beautiful with blue light from one white-clouded pane of sky that will not be hidden by the tumultuous rain. Outside the city the new thatch of the ricks shines pale in the sodden land, which presently gives way to a great water with leaning masts and a majestic shadowy sweep of trees down to the flat shore, to level green marsh and bridges crossing the streams that are announced by ripples in the sun, by swishing sedge, by willows blenching. Beyond is forest again. First, scattered cottages and little yellow apples beaming pale on crooked trees; then solitudes of heather and bracken, traversed and lighted by blue waters, ponds and streams among flats of rushes; and beyond, at either hand, woods on low and high land endlessly changing[217] from brightness to gloom under windy clouds. The roads are yellow, and oaks and beeches hang over them in whispering companies. The wind reigns, in the high magnificent onset of the clouds, in the surging trees, in the wings of rooks and daws, in bowing sedges and cotton grass, in quivering heather and grass, in rippling water, in wildly flying linen; yet in the open there is a strange silence because the roar in my ears as I walk deafens me to all sound.
White ponies graze by dark waters and stir the fragrance of the bog myrtle. The rises of the heathery moor are scarred yellow where the gravel is exposed. Sometimes great beeches, plated with green lichen and grey, wave their stiffening foliage overhead; or there is a group of old hollies encircled by coeval ivy whose embraces make them one, and both seem of stone. Sometimes the yellow road runs green-edged among heather and gorse, shadowed by pines that shake and plunge in the wind but are mute. A white fungus shines damp in the purple moor. There are a myriad berried hawthorns here, more gorse, more heather and bracken. The tiny pools beneath are blown into ripples like a swarming of bees, but the infuriate streams cannot trouble the dark water and broad lily leaves in their bays. Other pools again are tranquil and lucid brown over submerged moss and pennywort and fallen leaves, worlds to themselves with a spirit indwelling in the pure element. Presently, denser trees hold back the wind save in their tempestuous crests, and now the road is carpeted with pine needles and nothing can be seen or felt but the engulfing sound of wind and rain. The pines are interrupted by tall bracken, hollies and thorns, by necks of turf and isolated hawthorns[218] thereon; and far away the light after rain billows grandly over the mounded forest. Many a golden stream pours through the dark trees. Oaks succeed, closing in lichened multitudes about a grassy-rutted ferny road, but suddenly giving way to beeches pallid and huge. One lies prone across the road, still green of leaf, having torn up a mound of earth and bracken and bramble as large as a house in its upheaval. Others have lost great branches, and the mossy earth is ploughed by their fall. They seem to have fought in the night and to be slumbering with dreams of battle to come; and their titanic passions keep far away the influence of the blue sky and silver clouds that laugh out unconcerned after the rain.
After them birches and birchlings grow out of the heather backed by a solid wall of oaks. And again there are many beeches over mossy golden turf, and one tree of symmetrical rounded foliage makes a circle of shade where nothing grows, but all about it a crowd of dwarf brackens twinkle and look like listeners at an oracle. Beyond, countless pillars of dark pines tower above green grass. Then the road forks; a shapely oak, still holding up dead arms through clouds of greenery, stands at one side; at the other a green road wanders away under beeches in stately attitudes and at ceremonious distance from one another: straight ahead, open low meadows surround a reedy water where coot and moorhen cry to each other among willow islets and the reflex of a bright and windy heaven. And yet once more the road pierces the dense woodland roar, form and colour buried as it were in sound, except where a space of smoothest turf expands from the road, and out of the crimson berries of an old thorn comes the voice of a robin singing persist[219]ently; and past that, inevitably, is a cottage among the beeches. More cottages are set in the moorland that rolls to an horizon of ridgy oak away from small green meadows behind the cottages. These give way to treeless undulations like gigantic long barrows, coloured by sand, by burnt gorse and by bracken; farther away a wooded hump all dark under threatenings of storm; and farthest of all, the Downs, serene and pale. The plough begins to invade the forest. The undulations sink to rest in a land of corn and cloud, of dark green levels, of windy whitened abeles, and a shining flood gilded by a lofty western sky of gold and grey. Beside the darkling waters couches an old town with many windows looking under thatch and tile upon grave streets, ending in a spread of the river where great horses wading lift their knees high as they splash under a long avenue of aspens and alarm the moorhens. Beautiful looks the running river under the night’s hunting of the clouds and the few bright stars, and beautiful again, broad blue, or streaked, or shadowy, or glittering, or reed-reflecting, beside a white mill or company of willows, under the breezes and pearl of dawn; and I wish there were a form for saluting a new country’s gods and the adhuc ignota ... flumina.
Two roads go northward against the stream; the main road straight or in long curves on one side of the river, the other on the opposite bank in a string of fragments zigzagging east and west and north. These fragments connect houses or groups of houses with one another, and it looks as if only by accident they had made the whole which now connects two towns. Their chief business is to serve the wheels and feet of those bound upon domestic or hamlet but not urban business. Seen upon[220] the map the road sets out straight for a town far north; but in two miles the hospitality of a great house seems to draw it aside, then of “The Plough”; emerging again it wanders awhile before returning to its northward line; and this it does time after time, and as often as it pauses a lesser road runs out of it to the great road across the river. There are scores of such parallel roads—sometimes the lesser is in part, or entirely, a footpath—in England, and in avoiding the dust, the smell, the noise, the insolence of the new traffic, the lesser are an invaluable aid. This one proceeds without rise or fall through the green river levels, but looks up to a ridge of white-scarred purple moor away from the stream, with oak and thatched cottages below the heather. It creeps in and out like an old cottage woman at a fair and sees everything. It sees all the farms and barns. It sees the portly brick house and its gardens bounded by high fruit walls and its walnut-trees in front, on the bank of a golden brook that sings under elms and sallows; the twenty-four long white windows, the decent white porch, the large lawns, the pond and its waterfowl sounding in the reeds, the oaks and acacias, the horse mowing the lawn lazily, the dogs barking behind the Elizabethan stables. It sees the broad grassy borders—for this is not a road cut by a skimping tailor—and the woods of oak and ash and hazel which the squirrel owns, chiding, clucking and angrily flirting his tail at those who would like to share his nuts. At every crossing road these grassy borders, which are in places as broad as meadows so that cattle graze under their elms, spread out into a green; and round about are yellow thatched cottages with gardens full of scarlet bean flowers and yellow dahlias; and a pond reflects the[221] blue and white sky, wagtails flutter at the edge and geese launch themselves as if for a voyage. The only sound upon the road is made by the baker’s cart carrying a fragrant load.
After ten miles the road crosses the river and wanders even farther from the highway. Here there are more woods of hazel and oak, and borders where sloe and blackberry shine, polished by rain, among herbage of yellow ragwort and flea-bane, purple knapweed, yellowing leaves. The gateways show steep meadows between the woods. One shows two lovers of sixteen years old gathering nuts in the warm sun, the silence, the solitude. The boy bends down and she steps quickly and carelessly upon his back to reach a cluster of six, and then descending looks away for a little while and turns her left cheek to him, softly smiling wordless things to herself, so that her lover could not but lean forward and kiss her golden skin where it is most beautiful beneath her ear and her looped black hair. There is a maid whose ways are so wonderful and desirable that it would not be more wonderful and desirable if Helen had never grown old and Demeter had kept Persephone. For a day white-throated convolvulus hides all the nettles of life. Of all the delicate passing things I have seen and heard—the slow, languid, gracious closing and unclosing of a pewit’s rounded wings as it chooses a clod to alight on; the sound of poplar leaves striving with the sound of rain in a windy summer shower; the glow of elms where an autumn rainbow sets a foot amongst them; the first fire of September lighted among men and books and flowers—not one survives to compare with this gateway vision of a moment on a road I shall never travel again. To rescue[222] such scenes from time is one of the most blessed offices of books, and it is a book that I remember now as I think of that maiden smiling, a book[5] which says—
And I could tell thee stories that would make thee laugh at all thy trouble, and take thee to a land of which thou hast never dreamed. Where the trees have ever blossoms, and are noisy with the humming of intoxicated bees. Where by day the suns are never burning, and by night the moon-stones ooze with nectar in the rays of the camphor-laden moon. Where the blue lakes are filled with rows of silver swans, and where, on steps of lapis-lazuli, the peacocks dance in agitation at the murmur of the thunder in the hills. Where the lightning flashes without harming, to l............