In the html version of this eBook, illustrations are linked to higher-resolution versions of the images.

[ ]

THE SOUTH COUNTRY

THE HEART OF ENGLAND SERIES

This Series opens with a new work by Mr. Edward Thomas, that curious and enthusiastic explorer of the English Countryside, whose prose style gives him a claim to be regarded as the successor, as he is the biographer, of Richard Jefferies. The Series includes a new edition of Mr. Thomas’s other work, “The Heart of England,” and Mr. Hilaire Belloc’s “The Historic Thames.” These two volumes were originally issued in limited editions at one Guinea net per volume.

THE SOUTH COUNTRY. By Edward Thomas. Small crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

Mr. Thomas in this new book gives his impressions of a year’s wanderings afoot as the seasons change through Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Cornwall. It is a prose-poem of the most beautiful counties in England.

THE HEART OF ENGLAND. By Edward Thomas. Small crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

THE HISTORIC THAMES. By Hilaire Belloc, M.P. 3s. 6d. net.

Prospectus of above Books sent post free on application.

J. M. DENT & CO.
29-30, BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.

THE SOUTH
COUNTRY

by Edward Thomas

LONDON
J. M. DENT & CO.
1909

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

“As I can’t leap from cloud to cloud, I want to wander from road to road. That little path there by the clipped hedge goes up to the high road. I want to go up that path and to walk along the high road, and so on and on and on, and to know all kinds of people. Did you ever think that the roads are the only things that are endless; that one can walk on and on, and never be stopped by a gate or a wall? They are the serpent of eternity. I wonder they have never been worshipped. What are the stars beside them? They never meet one another. The roads are the only things that are infinite. They are all endless.”

Paul Ruttledge in
Where there is Nothing,
by W. B. Yeats.

TO
EDWARD GARNETT

CONTENTS

Several short passages from this book have been printed in “The Saturday Review,” “The Nation,” “The New Age,” “The Daily Chronicle,” and “The Daily News,” and are reprinted by permission.

THE SOUTH COUNTRY

CHAPTER I
THE SOUTH COUNTRY

The name of “South Country” is taken from a poem by Mr. Hilaire Belloc, beginning—

“When I am living in the Midlands,

They are sodden and unkind,

I light my lamp in the evening,

My work is left behind;

And the great hills of the South Country

Come back into my mind.”

The name is given to the south of England as distinguished from the Midlands, “North England”, and “West England” by the Severn. The poet is thinking particularly of Sussex and of the South Downs. In using the term I am thinking of all that country which is dominated by the Downs or by the English Channel, or by both; Cornwall and East Anglia have been admitted only for the sake of contrast. Roughly speaking, it is the country south of the Thames and Severn and east of Exmoor, and it includes, therefore, the counties of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and part of Somerset. East and west across it go ranges of chalk hills, their sides smoothly hollowed by Nature and the marl-burner, or sharply scored by old roads. On their lower slopes they carry the chief woods of the south country, their coombes are often fully fledged with trees, and sometimes their high places are crowned with beech or fir; but they are most admirably themselves when they are bare of all but grass and a few bushes of gorse and juniper and some yew, and their ridges make flowing but infinitely variable clear lines against the sky. Sometimes they support a plateau of flint and clay, which slopes gradually to the level of the streams. Sometimes they fall away to the vales in well-defined ledges—first a long curving slope, then a plain of cornland, and below that a steep but lesser slope covered with wood, and then again grassland or sandy heaths and rivers. Except on the plateau, the summits have few houses and very small hamlets; the first terrace has larger villages and even a town or two; but most of the towns are beneath on the banks of the rivers, and chiefly where they are broadest near the sea, or on the coast itself. The rivers flow mainly north and south, and can have but a short course before they enter the sea on the south or the Thames on the north. Those I remember best are the Stours, the two Rothers, but especially the one which joins the Arun, the Medway, the Len, the Eden, the Holling, the Teise, the Ouse, the Itchen, the Meon, the Wey, the Mole, the Kennet, the Ray, the Winterbournes, the Wiltshire Avon, the Wylye, the Ebble, and many little waters running gold over New Forest gravel or crystal over the chalk of Hampshire, and not least of all that unlucky rivulet, the Wandle, once a nymph that walked among her sisters—

So amiable, fair, so pure, so delicate,

So plump, so full, so fresh, her eyes so wondrous clear:

And first unto her lord, at Wandsworth doth appear,

That in the goodly court, of their great sovereign Tames,

There might no other speech be had amongst the streams,

But only of this Nymph, sweet Wandel, what she wore;

Of her complexion, grace, and how herself she bore.

Nor can I omit the Wiltshire and Berkshire canal, as it was fifteen years ago, between Swindon and Dauntsey, an unfrequented by-way through a quiet dairy country, and full of pike and tench among the weeds and under the tall water docks and willow herbs which even then threatened to subdue it as they now have done.

The chief roads make south, south-east, south-west and west from London; almost the only road going east and west and not touching London is the old road known between Winchester and Canterbury as the Pilgrims’ Way.

Most of the towns are small market towns, manufacturing chiefly beer; or they are swollen, especially in the neighbourhood of London, as residential quarters on lines of railway or as health and pleasure resorts on the sea. But any man used to maps will be wiser on these matters in an hour than I am. For what I have sought is quiet and as complete a remoteness as possible from towns, whether of manufactures, of markets or of cathedrals. I have used a good many maps in my time, largely to avoid the towns; but I confess that I prefer to do without them and to go, if I have some days before me, guided by the hills or the sun or a stream—or, if I have one day only, in a rough circle, trusting, by taking a series of turnings to the left or a series to the right, to take much beauty by surprise and to return at last to my starting-point. On a dull day or cloudy night I have often no knowledge of the points of the compass. I never go out to see anything. The signboards thus often astonish me. I wish, by the way, that I had noted down more of the names on the signboards at the cross-roads. There is a wealth of poetry in them, as in that which points—by a ford, too—first, to Poulner and Ringwood; second, to Gorley and Fordingbridge; third, to Linwood and Broomy: and another pointing to Fordingbridge, to Ringwood, and to Cuckoo Hill and Furze Hill: and another in the parish of Pentlow, pointing to Foxearth and Sudbury, to Cavendish and Clare, and to Belchamps and Yeldham. Castles, churches, old houses, of extraordinary beauty or interest, have never worn out any of my shoe leather except by accident. I like to come upon them—usually without knowing their names and legends—but do not lament when chance takes me a hundred times out of their way. Nor have I ever been to Marlow to think about Shelley, or to Winterslow for Hazlitt’s sake; and I enter Buriton many times without remembering Gibbon. They would move me no more than the statue of a man and a fat horse (with beribboned tail), which a grateful countryside erected to William III in the market square at Petersfield. I prefer any country church or chapel to Winchester or Chichester or Canterbury Cathedral, just as I prefer “All round my hat,” or “Somer is icumen in,” to Beethoven. Not that I dislike the cathedrals, or that I do not find many pleasures amongst them. But they are incomprehensible and not restful. I feel when I am within them that I know why a dog bays at the moon. They are much more difficult or, rather, I am more conscious in them of my lack of comprehension, than the hills or the sea; and I do not like the showmen, the smell and look of the museum, the feeling that it is admiration or nothing, and all the well-dressed and flyblown people round about. I sometimes think that religious architecture is a dead language, majestic but dead, that it never was a popular language. Have some of these buildings lived too long, been too well preserved, so as to oppress our little days with too permanent an expression of the passing things? The truth is that, though the past allures me, and to discover a cathedral for myself would be an immense pleasure, I have no historic sense and no curiosity. I mention these trivial things because they may be important to those who read what I am paid for writing. I have read a great deal of history—in fact, a university gave me a degree out of respect for my apparent knowledge of history—but I have forgotten it all, or it has got into my blood and is present in me in a form which defies evocation or analysis. But as far as I can tell I am pure of history. Consequently I prefer the old brick houses round the cathedral, and that avenue of archaic bossy limes to the cathedral itself with all its turbulent quiet and vague antiquity. The old school also close at hand! I was there after the end of the term once, and two boys were kicking a football in a half-walled court; it was a bright, cold, windy April afternoon; and the ancient brick was penetrated with their voices and the sound of the ball, and I thought there could be nothing lovelier than that court, the pleasant walls, and the broad playing fields in sight of a smooth noble hill and a temple of dark firs on top. I was not thinking of Winchester or of any one older than the fondest son of that “mother, more than mother,” and little of him; but was merely caught up by and with the harmony of man and his work, of two children playing, and of the green downs and windy sky.

And so I travel, armed only with myself, an avaricious and often libertine and fickle eye and ear, in pursuit, not of knowledge, not of wisdom, but of one whom to pursue is never to capture. Politics, the drama, science, racing, reforms and preservations, divorces, book clubs—nearly everything which the average (oh! mysterious average man, always to be met but never met) and the superior and the intelligent man is thinking of, I cannot grasp; my mind refuses to deal with them; and when they are discussed I am given to making answers like, “In Kilve there is no weathercock.” I expect there are others as unfortunate, superfluous men such as the sanitation, improved housing, police, charities, medicine of our wonderful civilization saves from the fate of the cuckoo’s foster-brothers. They will perhaps follow my meanders and understand. The critics also will help. They will misunderstand—it is their trade. How well they know what I ought, or at least ought not, to do. I must, they have said, avoid “the manner of the worst oleographs”; must not be “affected,” though the recipe is not to be had; must beware of “over-excitation of the colour sense.” In slow course of years we acquire a way of expression, hopelessly inadequate, as we plainly see when looking at the methods of great poets, of beautiful women, of athletes, of politicians, but still gradually as fitted to the mind as an old walking-stick to the hand that has worn and been worn by it, full of our weakness as of our strength, of our blindness as of our vision—the man himself, the poor man it may be. And I live by writing, since it is impossible to live by not writing in an age not of gold but of brass.

Unlearned, incurious, but finding deepest ease and joy out of doors, I have gone about the South Country these twenty years and more on foot, especially in Kent between Maidstone and Ashford and round Penshurst, in Surrey between London, Guildford and Horley, in Hampshire round Petersfield, in Wiltshire between Wootton Bassett, Swindon and Savernake. The people are almost foreign to me, the more so because country people have not yet been thrown into quite the same confusion as townspeople, and therefore look awkwardly upon those who are not in trade—writing is an unskilled labour and not a trade—not on the land, and not idle. But I have known something of two or three men and women, and have met a few dozen more. Yet is this country, though I am mainly Welsh, a kind of home, as I think it is more than any other to those modern people who belong nowhere. Here they prefer to retire, here they take their holidays in multitudes. For it is a good foster-mother, ample-bosomed, mild and homely. The lands of wild coast, of mountains, of myriad chimneys, offer no such welcome. They have their race, their speech and ways, and are jealous. You must be a man of the sea or of the hills to dwell there at ease. But the South is tender and will harbour any one; her quiet people resent intrusion quietly, so that many do not notice the resentment. These are the “home” counties. A man can hide away in them. The people are not hospitable, but the land is.

Yet there are days and places which send us in search of another kind of felicity than that which dwells under the Downs, when, for example, the dark wild of Ashdown or of Woolmer, some parcel of heathery land, with tufted pines and pale wandering roads, rises all dark and stormy out of the gentle vale, or on such an evening as when the sky is solemn blue save at the horizon where it is faint gold, and between the blue and the gold, across the north-west, lies an ashen waste of level cloud. This sky and its new moon and evening star below, is barred by the boles of beeches; through them the undulations of deserted ploughland are all but white with dewy grass and weed. Underfoot winds a disused path amid almost overlapping dog’s mercury. The earth is like an exhausted cinder, cold, silent, dead, compared with the great act in the sky. Suddenly a dog-fox barks—with melancholy and malice in the repeated hoarse yells—a sound that awakens the wildest past out of the wood and the old path. He passes by me at a trot, pausing a little to bark. He vanishes, but not his voice, into the wood, and he returns, still barking, and passes me again, filling the wood and the coombe below with a sound that has nothing to match it except that ashen waste in the beech-barred, cold blue and golden sky, against which the fox is carved in moving ebony. Or again, when a rude dark headland rises out of the mist of the plain into the evening sky. The woods seem but just freed from the horror of primeval sea, if that is not primeval sea washing their bases. Capella hangs low, pale, large, moist and trembling, almost engulfed between two horns of the wood upon the headland, the frailest beacon of hope, still fluttering from the storm out of which the land is emerging. Then, or at home looking at a map of Britain, the West calls, out of Wiltshire and out of Cornwall and Devon beyond, out of Monmouth and Glamorgan and Gower and Caermarthen, with a voice of dead Townsends, Eastaways, Thomases, Phillipses, Treharnes, Marendaz, sea men and mountain men.

Westward, for men of this island, lies the sea; westward are the great hills. In a mere map the west of Britain is fascinating. The great features of that map, which make it something more than a picture to be imperfectly copied by laborious childish pens, are the great promontories of Caernarvon, of Pembroke, of Gower and of Cornwall, jutting out into the western sea, like the features of a grim large face, such a face as is carved on a ship’s prow. These protruding features, even on a small-scale map, thrill the mind with a sense of purpose and spirit. They yearn, they peer out ever to the sea, as if using eyes and nostrils to savour the utmost scent of it, as if themselves calling back to the call of the waves. To the eyes of a child they stand for adventure. They are lean and worn and scarred with the strife and watching. Then gradually into the mind of the child comes the story that justifies and, still more, inspires and seems to explain those westward-pointing promontories. For, out towards them continually have the conquered races of the world retreated, and their settlements give those corners a strangeness and a charm to our fantastic sympathies. Out from them conquerors in their turn have gone to found a legend like the Welsh Madoc, an empire like the men of Devon. The blood of conquered and conqueror is in our veins, and it flushes the cheek at the sight or thought of the west. Each man of us is as ancient and complicated, as lofty-spired and as deep-vaulted as cathedrals and castles old, and in those lands our crypts and dark foundations are dimly remembered. We look out towards them from the high camps at Battlesbury and Barbury: the lines of the Downs go trooping along to them at night. Even in the bosom of the South Country, when the tranquil bells are calling over the corn at twilight, the westward-going hills, where the sun has fallen, draw the heart away and fill us with a desire to go on and on for ever, that same way. When, in the clear windy dawn, thin clouds like traveller’s joy are upon the high air, it seems that up there also, in those placid spaces, they travel and know the joy of the road, and the sun—feeding on the blue, as a child said yesterday, as Lucretius said before—goes the desired way. London also calls, making the needle whirl in the compass. For in London also a man may live as up “a great river wide as any sea”; and over some of the fairest of the South Country hangs the all-night glimmer of the city, warning, threatening, beckoning anon. Some of this country has already perished, or is so ramparted about that there is no stranger country in the world unless it be those perpendicular valleys cloven among the Blue Mountains, their floors level and of the purest grass, but accessible only at the end nearest the plain, where the cleft is sometimes so narrow that not even a dog can enter.

This, then, is my South Country. It covers the North Downs and the South Downs, the Icknield Way and the Pilgrims’ Way, and the cross-roads between them and the Thames and the sea, a land of hops, fruit, corn, high pasture, meadow, woodland, heath and shore. But there is no man of whose powers I stand more in awe than the topographical writer, from Mr. A. G. Bradley or Mr. E. V. Lucas downwards. I shall not attempt to compete with them. I should only be showing my ignorance and carelessness were I to label every piece of country which I chance to mention or describe. Any one can point out my omissions, my blindness, my exaggeration. Nor can I bring myself to mention the names of the places where I walked or sat down. In a sense this country is all “carved out of the carver’s brain” and has not a name. This is not the South Country which measures about two hundred miles from east to west and fifty from north to south. In some ways it is incomparably larger than any country that was ever mapped, since upon nothing less than the infinite can the spirit disport itself. In other ways it is far smaller—as when a mountain with tracts of sky and cloud and the full moon glass themselves in a pond, a little pond.

It would need a more intellectual eye than mine to distinguish county from county by its physical character, its architecture, its people, its unique combination of common elements, and I shall not attempt it. As often as not I have no doubt mingled parts of Kent with my Wiltshire, and so on. And positively I cannot say to which belongs one picture that occurs to me as characteristic of the South Country—

A crossing of roads encloses a waste place of no man’s land, of dwarf oaks, hawthorn, bramble and fern, and the flowers of knapweed and harebell, and golden tormentil embroidering the heather and the minute seedling oaks. Follow one of these roads past straight avenues of elms leading up to a farm (built square of stone, under a roof of thatch or stone slate, and lying well back from the road across a level meadow with some willows in the midst, elms round about, willow herb waving rosy by the stream at the border), or merely to a cluster of ricks; and presently the hedges open wide apart and the level white road cools itself under the many trees of a green, wych elms, sycamores, limes and horse-chestnuts, by a pool, and, on the other side, the sign of the “White Hart,” its horns held back upon its haunches. A stone-built farm and its barns and sheds lie close to the green on either side, and another of more stateliness where the hedges once more run close together alongside the road. This farmhouse has three dormers, two rows of five shadowy windows below, and an ivied porch not quite in the centre; a modest lawn divided by a straight path; dense, well-watered borders of grey lavender, rosemary, ladslove, halberds of crimson hollyhock, infinite blending stars of Michaelmas daisy; old apple trees seeming to be pulled down almost to the grass by glossy-rinded fruit: and, behind, the bended line of hills a league away, wedding the lowly meadows, the house and the trees to the large heavens and their white procession of clouds out of the south and the sea. The utmost kindliness of earth is expressed in these three houses, the trees on the flat green, the slightly curving road across it, the uneven posts and rails leaning this way and that at the edge of the pond. The trees are so arranged about the road that they weave a harmony of welcome, of blessing, a viaticum for whosoever passes by and only for a moment tastes their shade, acknowledges unconsciously their attitudes, hears their dry summer murmuring, sees the house behind them. The wayfarer knows nothing of those who built them and those who live therein, of those who planted the trees just so and not otherwise, of the causes that shaped the green, any more than of those who reaped and threshed the barley, and picked and dried and packed the hops that made the ale at the “White Hart.” He only knows that centuries of peace and hard work and planning for the undreaded future have made it possible. The spirit of the place, all this council of time and Nature and men, enriches the air with a bloom deeper than summer’s blue of distance; it drowses while it delights the responding mind with a magic such as once upon a time men thought to express by gods of the hearth, by Faunus and the flying nymphs, by fairies, angels, saints, a magic which none of these things is too strange and “supernatural” to represent. For after the longest inventory of what is here visible and open to analysis, much remains over, imponderable but mighty. Often when the lark is high he seems to be singing in some keyless chamber of the brain; so here the house is built in shadowy replica. If only we could make a graven image of this spirit instead of a muddy untruthful reflection of words! I have sometimes thought that a statue, the statue of a human or heroic or divine figure, might more fitly than in many another stand in such a place. A figure, it should be, like that benign proud Demeter in marble now banished to a recess in a cold gallery, before which a man of any religion, or class, or race, or time might bow and lay down something of his burden and take away what makes him other than he was. She would be at home and blithe again, enshrined in the rain or in this flowery sunlight of an English green, near the wych elm and sycamore and the walls of stone, the mortar mixed, as in all true buildings, with human blood.

CHAPTER II
THE END OF WINTER—SUFFOLK—HAMPSHIRE

SUFFOLK.

There are three sounds in the wood this morning—the sound of the waves that has not died away since the sea carried off church and cottage and cliff and the other half of what was once an inland wood; the sound of trees, a multitudinous frenzied sound, of rustling dead oak-leaves still on the bough, of others tripping along the path like mice, or winding up in sudden spirals and falling again, of dead boughs grating and grinding, of pliant young branches lashing, of finest twigs and fir needles sighing, of leaf and branch and trunk booming like one; and through these sounds, the song of a thrush. Rain falls and, for a moment only, the dyked marshland below and beyond the wood is pale and luminous with its flooded pools, the sails of windmills climb and plunge, the pale sea is barred with swathes of foam, and on the whistling sands the tall white waves vaunt, lean forward, topple and lie quivering. But the rain increases: the sound and the mist of it make a wall about the world, except the world in the brain and except the thrush’s song which, so bright and clear, has a kind of humanity in it by contrast with the huge bulk of the noises of sea and wood.

Rain and wind cease together, and here on the short grass at the cliff’s edge is a strange birth—a gently convex fungus about two inches broad, the central boss of it faintly indented, the surface not perfectly regular but dimpled so as to break the light, and the edge wavering away from the pure circular form; in hue a pale chestnut paling to a transparent edge of honey colour; and the whole surface so smooth and polished by rain as to seem coated in ice. What a thought for the great earth on such a day! Out of the wood on to this grass the thrushes steal, running with heads down and stopping with heads prouder than stags’; out also into the short corn; and so glad are they that they quarrel and sing on the ground without troubling to find a perch.

It is perfectly still; the sun splutters out of the thick grey and white sky, the white sails shine on a sea of steel, and it is warm. And now in the luxury of the first humid warmth and quiet of the year the blackbird sings. The rain sets in at nightfall, but the wind does not blow, and still the blackbird sings and the thrushes will hardly leave the corn. That one song alone sweetens the wide vague country of evening, the cloudy oak woods, the brown mixen under the elms and the little white farm behind the unpruned limes, with its oblong windows irregularly placed and of unequal size, its white door almost at a corner, and the lawn coming right to the walls.

Day breaks and sun and wind dance together in the clouds and trees, but without rain. Larks sing over the dark heavy cornland in which the watery furrows shine. The dead drab grasses wave at the feet of the hedgerows. Little pools at meadow corners bring down the sky to the dark earth. Horses nod before the plough. A slight haze exhales from the innumerable rich spongy clods, between the hedges of oak and ash. Now and then shapeless rags of white or snow-grey clouds wander up from the west and for a little while obscure the white mountains of cloud, the blue sky, the silver sun; or the sweet smoke from the fires of hedgers and ditchers rises up against the edge of a copse. The white linen flaps and glows in cottage gardens; the dung cars go by crunching the flints into the mud; and the boots and bells of pony traps make a music forgotten since last February. It is only the twenty-second day of February, yet these delights of the soul through the eyes and ears are of spring. The children have begun to look for violets, and the youngest, being the nearest to them in stature and in nature, has found one. There she stands, four years old, with straight brown legs, her face clear and soft but brown as a new hazel nut, her hair almost of the same colour and paler where the sun has bleached it round her temples and falling over her cheeks and neck; and through it shine eyes of a deeper brown, the hue of the most exquisite flints. The eyes shine, the teeth shine through the ever parted long red lips, the chin shines, the brow shines most of all with a lustre that seems to come from the joyous brain behind.

She is beautiful and straight as the July corn, as the ash tree standing alone by the stream. She is fearless as fire, bold and restless as wind, clear-hearted, simple, bright and gay as a mountain water, in all her actions a daughter of the sun, the wind and the earth. She has loving looks for all. From her fair broad naked foot to her gleaming hair she is, to many, the dearest thing that lives.

Beside her plays a dog, with lifted ears, head on one side, rosy tongue bright against his yellow fur, waiting upon her fancies. His rest and his motion, like hers, are careless and beautiful, gifts of the sun, the wind and the earth. As I look at them I think of such a child and such a playmate that lived two thousand years ago in the sun, and once as they played each set a foot upon the soft clay of a tile that the tile maker had not yet burned hard and red. The tile fell in the ruin of a Roman city in Britain, was buried hundreds of years in ashes and flowering mould, and yesterday I saw the footprints in the dark red tile, two thousand years old.

A day follows of rain and wind, and it is the robin that is most heard among the dripping thorns, the robin and his autumnal voice. But the sky clears for sunset and the blackbird’s hour, and, as twilight ends, only the rear of the disappearing procession of day cloud is visible on the western horizon, while the procession of night has but sent up two or three dark forerunners. The sky is of palest blue, and Jupiter and Sirius are bright over the sea, Venus over the land and Mercury just over the far oaks. The sea is very dark except at the horizon which is pale with the dissolving remnant of sunset gold in it; but two ranks of breakers throw up a waving vapour of fairy foam against the dark waves behind.

Again there are roaring wet mornings and sunlit mornings, but in them all the pewits wheel over the marsh and their wild cries mingle with the sweet whimper of dunlins, the songs of larks, the glitter of the dykes, the wall of rain. All day the sky over heathery moorland is like a reduplication of the moorland, except that at the horizon the sky clears at intervals and fleets of pure white cloud sail over the dark ploughland and green pines; and the gentle sea is white only where the waves break on the sand like a line of children in white frocks advancing with wavers in the game of “Here we come gathering nuts and may.” Or the west is angry, thick and grey, the snow is horizontal and fierce, and yet the south has a bay of blue sky and in it a vast sunlit precipice of white cloud, and the missel thrushes roll out their songs again and again at the edges of many woods. Or a sun appears that brings out the songs of thrush and chaffinch and lark, and leaves a chequer of snow on pine and ploughland and on the mole hills of the meadows. Again the sun disappears and the swift heavy hail rebounds on the grass with a dancing as of sand-hoppers, and there is no other sound except a sudden hedgesparrow’s song to break in upon the beating of the pellets on hard ivy and holly and tender grass. In the frosty evening the first moth comes to the lamp.

Now the rain falls rejoicing in its power, and then the sky is sunny and the white clouds are bubble-shaped in the blue, the wet roads are azure with reflected sky, the trees are all of crystal, and the songs of thrushes can be heard even through the snorting and rumbling of a train.

HAMPSHIRE.

The beeches on the beech-covered hills roar and strain as if they would fly off with the hill, and anon they are as meek as a great horse leaning his head over a gate. If there is a misty day there is one willow in a coombe lifting up a thousand silver catkins like a thousand lamps, when there is no light elsewhere. Another day, a wide and windy day, is the jackdaw’s, and he goes straight and swift and high like a joyous rider crying aloud on an endless savannah, and, underneath, the rippled pond is as bright as a peacock, and millions of beech leaves drive across the open glades of the woods, rushing to their Acheron. The bush harrow stripes the moist and shining grass; the plough changes the pale stubble into a ridgy chocolate; they are peeling the young ash sticks for hop poles and dipping them in tar. At the dying of that windy day the wind is still; there is a bright pale half-moon tangled in the pink whirl of after-sunset cloud, a sound of blackbirds from pollard oaks against the silver sky, a sound of bells from hamlets hidden among beeches.

Towards the end of March there are six nights of frost giving birth to still mornings of weak sunlight, of an opaque yet not definitely misty air. The sky is of a milky, uncertain pale blue without one cloud. Eastward the hooded sun is warming the slope fields and melting the sparkling frost. In many trees the woodpeckers laugh so often that their cry is a song. A grassy ancient orchard has taken possession of the visible sunbeams, and the green and gold of the mistletoe glows on the silvered and mossy branches of apple trees. The pale stubble is yellow and tenderly lit, and gives the low hills a hollow light appearance as if they might presently dissolve. In a hundred tiers on the steep hill, the uncounted perpendicular straight stems of beech, and yet not all quite perpendicular or quite straight, are silver-grey in the midst of a haze, here brown, there rosy, of branches and swelling buds. Though but a quarter of a mile away in this faintly clouded air they are very small, aërial in substance, infinitely remote from the road on which I stand, and more like reflections in calm water than real things.

At the lower margin of the wood the overhanging branches form blue caves, and out of these emerge the songs of many hidden birds. I know that there are bland melodious blackbirds of easy musing voices, robins whose earnest song, though full of passion, is but a fragment that has burst through a more passionate silence, hedgesparrows of liquid confiding monotone, brisk acid wrens, chaffinches and yellowhammers saying always the same thing (a dear but courtly praise of the coming season), larks building spires above spires into the sky, thrushes of infinite variety that talk and talk of a thousand things, never thinking, always talking of the moment, exclaiming, scolding, cheering, flattering, coaxing, challenging, with merry-hearted, bold voices that must have been the same in the morning of the world when the forest trees lay, or leaned, or hung, where they fell. Yet I can distinguish neither blackbird, nor robin, nor hedgesparrow, nor any one voice. All are blent into one seething stream of song. It is one song, not many. It is one spirit that sings. Mixed with them is the myriad stir of unborn things, of leaf and blade and flower, many silences at heart and root of tree, voices of hope and growth, of love that will be satisfied though it leap upon the swords of life. Yet not during all the day does the earth truly awaken. Even in town and city the dream prevails, and only dimly lighted their chalky towers and spires rise out of the sweet mist and sing together beside the waters.

The earth lies blinking, turning over languidly and talking like a half-awakened child that now and then lies still and sleeps though with eyes wide open. The air is still full of the dreams of a night which this mild sun cannot dispel. The dreams are prophetic as well as reminiscent, and are visiting the woods, and that is why they will not cast aside the veil. Who would rise if he could continue to dream?

It is not spring yet. Spring is being dreamed, and the dream is more wonderful and more blessed than ever was spring. What the hour of waking will bring forth is not known. Catch at the dreams as they hover in the warm thick air. Up against the grey tiers of beech stems and the mist of the buds and fallen leaves rise two columns of blue smoke from two white cottages among trees; they rise perfectly straight and then expand into a balanced cloud, and thus make and unmake continually two trees of smoke. No sound comes from the cottages. The dreams are over them, over the brows of the children and the babes, of the men and the women, bringing great gifts, suggestions, shadowy satisfactions, consolations, hopes. With inward voices of persuasion those dreams hover and say that all is to be made new, that all is yet before us, and the lots are not yet drawn out of the urn.

We shall presently set out and sail into the undiscovered seas and find new islands of the free, the beautiful, the young. As is the dimly glimmering changeless brook twittering over the pebbles, so is life. It is but just leaving the fount. All things are possible in the windings between fount and sea.

Never again shall we demand the cuckoo’s song from the August silence. Never will July nip the spring and lengthen the lambs’ faces and take away their piquancy, or June shut a gate between us and the nightingale, or May deny the promise of April. Hark! before the end of afternoon the owls hoot in their sleep in the ivied beeches. A dream has flitted past them, more silent of wing than themselves. Now it is between the wings of the first white butterfly, and it plants a smile in the face of the infant that cannot speak: and again it is with the brimstone butterfly, and the child who is gathering celandine and cuckoo flower and violet starts back almost in fear at the dream.

The grandmother sitting in her daughter’s house, left all alone in silence, her hands clasped upon her knees, forgets the courage without hope that has carried her through eighty years, opens her eyes, unclasps her hands from the knot as of stiff rope, distends them and feels the air, and the dream is between her fingers and she too smiles, she knows not why. A girl of sixteen, ill-dressed, not pretty, has seen it also. She has tied up her black hair in a new crimson ribbon. She laughs aloud with a companion at something they know in common and in secret, and as she does so lifts her neck and is glad from the sole of her foot to the crown of her head. She is lost in her laughter and oblivious of its cause. She walks away, and her step is as firm as that of a ewe defending her lamb. She was a poor and misused child, and I can see her as a woman of fifty, sitting on a London bench, grey-complexioned, in old black hat, black clothes, crouching over a paper bag of fragments, in the beautiful August rain after heat. But this is her hour. That future is not among the dreams in the air to-day. She is at one with the world, and a deep music grows between her and the stars. Her smile is one of those magical things, great and small and all divine, that have the power to wield universal harmonies. At sight or sound of them the infinite variety of appearances in the world is made fairer than before, because it is shown to be a many-coloured raiment of the one. The raiment trembles, and under leaf and cloud and air a window is thrown open upon the unfathomable deep, and at the window we are sitting, watching the flight of our souls away, away to where they must be gathered into the music that is being built. Often upon the vast and silent twilight, as now, is the soul poured out as a rivulet into the sea and lost, not able even to stain the boundless crystal of the air; and the body stands empty, waiting for its return, and, poor thing, knows not what it receives back into itself when the night is dark and it moves away. For we stand ever at the edge of Eternity and fall in many times before we die. Yet even such thoughts live not long this day. All shall be healed, says the dream. All shall be made new. The day is a fairy birth, a foundling not fathered nor mothered by any grey yesterdays. It has inherited nothing. It makes of winter and of the old springs that wrought nothing fair a stale creed, a senseless tale: they are naught: I do not wonder any longer if the lark’s song has grown old with the ears that hear it or if it be still unchanged.

What dreams are there for that aged child who goes tottering and reeling up the lane at mid-day? He carries a basket of watercress on his back. He has sold two-pennyworth, and he is tipsy, grinning through the bruises of a tipsy fall, and shifting his cold pipe from one side of his mouth to the other. Though hardly sixty he is very old, worn and thin and wrinkled, and bent sideways and forward at the waist and the shoulders. Yet he is very young. He is just what he was forty years ago when the thatcher found him lying on his back in the sun instead of combing out the straw and sprinkling it with water for his use. He laid no plans as a youth; he had only a few transparent tricks and easy lies. Never has he thought of the day after to-morrow. For a few years in his prime he worked almost regularly for one or two masters, leaving them only now and then upon long errands of his own and known only to himself. It was then perhaps that he earned or received as a gift, along with a broken nose, his one name, which is Jackalone. For years he was the irresponsible jester to a smug townlet which was privately amused and publicly scandalized, and rewarded him in a gaol, where, unlike Tasso, he never complained. Since then he has lived by the sale of a chance rabbit or two, of watercress, of greens gathered when the frost is on them and nobody looking, by gifts of broken victuals, by driving a few bullocks to a fair, by casual shelter in barns, in roofless cottages, or under hedges.

He has never had father or mother or brother or sister or wife or child. No dead leaf in autumn wind or branch in flooded brook seems more helpless. He can deceive nobody. He is in prison two or three times a year for little things: it seems a charity to put a roof over his head and clip his hair. He has no wisdom; by nothing has he soiled what gifts were given to him at his birth. The dreams will not pass him by. They come to give him that confidence by which he lives in spite of men’s and children’s contumely.

How little do we know of the business of the earth, not to speak of the universe; of time, not to speak of eternity. It was not by taking thought that man survived the mastodon. The acts and thoughts that will serve the race, that will profit this commonwealth of things that live in the sun, the air, the earth, the sea, now and through all time, are not known and never will be known. The rumour of much toil and scheming and triumph may never reach the stars, and what we value not at all, are not conscious of, may break the surface of eternity with endless ripples of good. We know not by what we survive. There is much philosophy in that Irish tale of the poor blind woman who recovered her sight at St. Brigit’s well. “Did I say more prayers than the rest? Not a prayer. I was young in those days. I suppose she took a liking to me, maybe because of my name being Brigit the same as her own.”[1] Others went unrelieved away that day. We are as ignorant still. Hence the batlike fears about immortality. We wish to prolong what we can see and touch and talk of, and knowing that clothes and flesh and other perishing things may not pass over the borders of death with us, we give up all, as if forsooth the undertaker and the gravedigger had archangelic functions. Along with the undertaker and the gravedigger ranks the historian and others who seem to bestow immortality. Each is like a child planting flowers severed from their stalks and roots, expecting them to grow. I never heard that the butterfly loved the chrysalis; but I am sure that the caterpillar looks forward to an endless day of eating green leaves and of continually swelling until it would despise a consummation of the size of a railway train. We can do the work of the universe though we shed friends and country and house and clothes and flesh, and become invisible to mortal eyes and microscopes. We do it now invisibly, and it is not these things which are us at all. That maid walking so proudly is about the business of eternity.

And yet it would be vain to pretend not to care about the visible many-coloured raiment of which our houses, our ships, our gardens, our books are part, since they also have their immortal selves and their everlasting place, else should we not love them with more than sight and hearing and touch. For flesh loves flesh and soul loves soul. Yet on this March day the supreme felicity is born of the two loves, so closely interwoven that it is permitted to forget the boundaries of the two, and for soul to love flesh and flesh to love soul. And this ancient child is rid of his dishonours and flits through the land floating on a thin reed of the immortal laughter. This is “not altogether fool.” He is perchance playing some large necessary part in the pattern woven by earth that draws the gods to lean forward out of the heavens to watch the play and say of him, as of other men, of birds, of flowers: “They also are of our company.”...

In the warm rain of the next day the chiffchaff sings among the rosy blossoms of the leafless larches, a small voice that yet reaches from the valley to the high hill. It is a double, many times repeated note that foretells the cuckoo’s. In the evening the songs are bold and full, but the stems of the beeches are faint as soft columns of smoke and the columns of smoke from the cottages are like them in the still air.

Yet another frost follows, and in the dim golden light just after sunrise the shadows of all the beeches lie on the slopes, dark and more tangible than the trees, as if they were the real and those standing upright were the returned spirits above the dead.

Now rain falls and relents and falls again all day, and the earth is hidden under it, and as from a land submerged the songs mount through the veil. The mists waver out of the beeches like puffs of smoke or hang upon them or in them like fleeces caught in thorns: in the just penetrating sunlight the long boles of the beeches shine, and the chaffinch, the yellowhammer and the cirl bunting sing songs of blissful drowsiness. The Downs, not yet green, rise far off and look, through the rain, like old thatched houses.

When a hot sun has dried the woods the wind beats a cloud of pollen like grey smoke from the yews on the beechen coombes which are characteristic of Hampshire. They are steep-sided bays, running and narrowing far into and up the sides of the chalk hills, and especially of those hills with which the high flinty plateau breaks down to the greensand and the plain. These steep sides are clothed with beeches, thousands of beeches interrupted by the black yews that resemble caverns among the paler trees, or, in the spring, by the green haze of a few larches and the white flames of the beam tree buds. Sometimes a stream rises at the head of the coombe, and before its crystal is a yard wide and ankle deep over the crumbling chalk it is full of trout; the sunny ripples are meshed like honeycomb. If there is not a stream there is a hop garden, or there is a grassy floor approached by neither road nor path and crossed only by huntsman and hounds. All the year round the coombes, dripping, green and still, are cauldrons for the making and unmaking of mists, mists that lie like solid level snow or float diaphanous and horizontal of airiest silk across the moon or the morning sun. The coombes breed whole families, long genealogical trees, of echoes which the child delights to call up from their light sleep; so, too, do fox and owl at night, and the cow on a calm evening; and as to the horn and the cry of hounds, the hangers entangle and repeat them as if they would imprison them for ever, so that the phantom exceeds the true. This is the home of the orchises and of the daintiest snails. In spring, yellow and white and yellowish green flowers are before all the rest under the beeches—the flowers of the golden green saxifrage and delicate moschatel, the spurge and the spurge laurel, the hellebore, the white violet and wood sorrel, and the saffron-hearted primrose which becomes greenish in the light of its own leaves; to these must be added the yellow green of young foliage and of moss. Fairest of all the white flowers is the frost flower that grows about some rotten fallen branch day after day in curls that are beyond silk, or a child’s hair, or wool when it is first exposed to the sun by the shearer’s hand. Most conspicuous of the early green is that of the pale swords of sedge that bear purple brown feathers of flower at the end of March. The crystal wavering water, the pale green stems and ever so slightly curving blades, and the dark bloom, make the sense smart with joy. Never was ivy more luxuriant under the beeches, nor moss so powerful as where it arrays them from crown to pedestal. The lichens, fine grey-green bushy lichens on the thorns, are as dense as if a tide full of them had swept through the coombe. From the topmost branches hangs the cordage of ivy and honeysuckle and clematis. The missel thrush rolls out his clear song. The woodpecker laughs his loud shaking laughter as he bounds in his flight. Among the golden green mistletoe in the old shaggy apple tree at the entrance of the coombe the blackbird sings, composing phrases all the sweeter for being strangely like some in the songs that countrymen used to sing. Earth has no dearer voice than his when it is among the chilly rain at the end of the light. All day there have been blue skies and parading white clouds, and no wind, with sudden invasions of violent wind and hail or rain, followed by perfected calm and warmer sun—sun which lures the earliest tortoise-shell butterfly to alight on the footworn flints in the path up the coombe. At last the sky seems securely blue above the hangers and a clear small star or two pricks through it. But, emerging from the coombe, whose sides shut out half the heavens, you see that the west has wonderfully ordered and dressed itself with pale sky and precipitous, dark, modelled clouds and vague woods, and above them the new moon. The blackbirds sing, the dim Downs proceed, and the last shower’s drops glitter on the black boughs and pallid primroses. Why should this ever change? At the time it seems that it can never change. A wide harmony of the brain and the earth and the sky has begun, when suddenly darker clouds are felt to have ascended out of the north-west and to have covered the world. The beeches roar with rain. Moon and Downs are lost. The road bubbles and glows underfoot. A distant blackbird still sings hidden in the bosom of the rain like an enchanter hidden by his spells....

It is April now, and when it is still dark in the woods and hedges the birds all sing together and the maze of song is dominated by the owl’s hoot—like a full moon of sound above myriad rippling noises. Every day a new invader takes possession of the land. The wryneck is loud and persistent, never in harmony with other birds, a complete foreigner, and yet the ear is glad of his coming. He is heard first, not in the early morning, along a grove of oaks; and the whole day is his.

Then on every hand the gentle willow wrens flit and sing in the purple ash blossoms. The martins, the swallows, have each a day. One day, too, is the magpie’s: for he sits low near his mate in a thicket and chatters not aloud but low and tenderly, almost like the sedgewarbler, adding a faint plaintive note like the bullfinch’s, and fragments as of the linnet’s song, and chirrupings; disturbed, he flies away with chatter as hoarse as ever.

The rooks reign several days. They have a colony in a compact small oval beech wood that stands in a hollow amidst dry grey ploughland; and from the foxy-red summits of the trees, in the most genial hot day, their cawings are loud and mellow and warm as if they were the earth’s own voice; and all the while the dew is sliding along the branches, dropping into other drops or to the ground as the birds flutter at their nests, and from time to time one triple drop catches the sun and throbs where it hangs like Hesperus among the small stars.

And every tender eve is the blackbird’s. He sings out at the end of the long bare ash bough. Beneath him the gloomy crystal water stirs the bronze cresses, and on the banks the white anemones float above the dark misty earth and under the hazel leaves yet drooping in their infancy. The dark hollies catch the last light and shine like water. Behind all, the Downs are clear and so near that I feel as well as see the carving on their smooth and already green flanks. The blackbird gathers up all the low-lit beauty into one carol.

The flowers also have days to themselves, as the minute green moschatel when it is first found among the hedgerow roots, or the violets when, white and pale purple, they are smelt and then seen bowed with dew in the weedy sainfoin field which the chain harrow passed over but a few days before. Another notable day is when the junipers are perfectly coloured by their sloe-blue, or palest green, but chiefly grey, small berries. Another, a very great day, belongs to the willows, when their crowded fragrant catkins are yellow against the burning blue and all murmurous with bees. And the briers have their day when their green is a vivid flame in a gloomy air, against a dark immense wood and sepia sky. There is, too, a solitary maimed sycamore in one of the coombes that has a glorious hour when it stands yellow-green in separate masses of half-opened leaf, motionless and languid in the first joy of commerce with the blue air, yet glowing.

One morning, very early, when the moon has not set and all the fields are cold and dewy and the woods are still massed and harbouring the night, though a few thorns stand out from their edge in affrighted virgin green, and dim starry thickets sigh a moment and are still, suddenly the silence of the chalky lane is riven and changed into a song. First, it is a fierce impetuous downfall of one clear note repeated rapidly and ending wilfully in mid-burst. Then it is a full-brimmed expectant silence passing into a long ascendant wail, and almost without intervals another and another, which has hardly ceased when it is dashed out of the memory by the downpour of those rapidly repeated notes, their abrupt end and the succeeding silence. The swift notes are each as rounded and as full of liquid sweetness as a grape, and they are clustered like the grape. But they are wild and pure as mountain water in the dawn. They are also like steel for coldness and penetration. And their onset is like nothing else: it is the nightingale’s. The long wail is like a shooting star: even as that grows out of the darkness and draws a silver line and is no more, so this glides out of the silence and curves and is no more. And yet it does not die, nor does that liquid onset. They and their ghosts people each hanging leaf in the hazel thicket so that the silence is closely stored. Other notes are shut in the pink anemone, in the white stitchwort under and about the hazels, and in the drops of dew that begin to glitter in the dawn.

Beautiful as the notes are for their quality and order, it is their inhumanity that gives them their utmost fascination, the mysterious sense which they bear to us that earth is something more than a human estate, that there are things not human yet of great honour and power in the world. The very first rush and the following wail empty the brain of what is merely human and leave only what is related to the height and depth of the whole world. Here for this hour we are remote from the parochialism of humanity. The bird has admitted a larger air. We breathe deeply of it and are made free citizens of eternity. We hear voices that were not dreamed of before, the voices of those spirits that live in minute forms of life, the spirits that weave the frost flower on the fallen branch, the gnomes of underground, those who care for the fungus on the beech root, the lichen on the trunk, the algæ on the gravestone. This hazel lane is a palace of strange pomp in an empire of which we suddenly find ourselves guests, not wholly alien nor ill at ease, though the language is new. Drink but a little draught of this air and no need is there to fear the ways of men, their mockery, their cruelty, their foreignness.

The song rules the cloudy dawn, the waiting ranges of hills and their woods full of shadows yet crested with gold, their lawns of light, the soft distended grey clouds all over the sky through which the white sun looks on the world and is glad. But it has ceased when the perpendicular shafts of rain divide the mists over the hillside woods and the pewits tangle their flight through the air that is now alive with the moist gleaming of myriads of leaves on bramble, thorn and elder. Presently the rain is only a glittering of needles in the sun. For the sky is all one pale grey cloud, darker at the lowest edge where it trails upon the downs and veils their summits, except in the south-east. There the edge is lifted up over a narrow pane of silver across which fleet the long slender fringes of the clouds. Through this pane the sun sends a broad cascade of light, and up into this the fields and the Down beyond rise and are transfigured, the fields into a lake of emerald, the Down—here crowned by trees in a cluster—into a castle of pearl set upon the borders of the earth. Slowly this pane is broadened; the clouds are plumped into shape, are illumined, are distinguished from one another by blue vales of sky, until at length the land is all one gleam of river and pool and grass and leaf and polished bough, whether swollen into hills or folded into valleys or smoothed into plain. The sky seems to belong to this land, the sky of purest blue and clouds that are moulded like the Downs themselves but of snow and sun.

In the clear air each flower stands out with separate and perfect beauty, moist, soft and bright, a beauty than which I know nothing more nearly capable of transferring the soul to the days and the pleasures of infancy. The crust of half a lifetime falls away, and we can feel what Blake expressed when he wrote those lines in Milton—

Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours,

And none can tell how from so small a centre comes such sweet,

Forgetting that within that centre Eternity expands

Its ever-during doors, that Og and Anax fiercely guard.

First, ere the morning breaks, joy opens in the flowery bosoms,

Joy even to tears, which the Sun rising dries; first the Wild Thyme

And Meadow-sweet, downy and soft, waving among the reeds,

Light springing in the air, lead the sweet Dance; they wake

The Honeysuckle sleeping in the Oak, the flaunting beauty

Revels along upon the wind; the white-thorn lovely May

Opens her many lovely eyes; listening the Rose still sleeps.

None dare to wake her. Soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bed

And comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every Flower—

The Pink, the Jessamine, the Wallflower, the Carnation,

The Jonquil, the mild Lily opes her heavens; every Tree

And Flower and Herb soon fill the air with an innumerable Dance,

Yet all in order sweet and lovely....

Those words or such a morning—when the soul steps back many years; or is it many centuries?—might have moved M. Maeterlinck to his descriptions of certain great moments in the lives of plants. The terms of these descriptions are so chosen as to imply an intelligence and discriminating vital energy in plants. They prove and explain nothing, but they take one step towards the truth by disturbing the conventional scientific view and substituting that of a man who, passionately looking at many forms of life, finds them to be of one family. After this, it should be more and more difficult for men to think of flowers as if they were fragile toys from an exceptionally brilliant manufacturer.

And now there is a day of sun and high blue sky alternating with low, grey-yellow sky and driving snow that chequers the northern sides of the furrows and the beech boles. The sun melts the snow and all is clear, bright and cold, and the sky blue again with white and lofty clouds; many thrushes are singing; the broad vale is all one blue moorland that has buried its houses, and the Downs at the far side are close at hand. Towards evening the wind falls, and it is a glimpse of another world that is given as the sun is warm for a moment on a low curving slope of wet grass, with tall rookery beeches glowing on one hand and on the other bulging white clouds just emerging from behind the green edge into the blue, while very far away the Downs, both grass and wood, are deep blue under a broad pane of yellowish light.

The north wind makes walking weather, and the earth is stretched out below us and before us to be conquered. Just a little, perhaps, of the warrior’s joy at seeing an enemy’s fair land from the hill-top is mingled with the joy in the unfolding landscape. The ploughlands brighten over twenty miles of country, pale and dry, among dark woods and wooded hills; for the wind has crumbled the soil almost white, so that a sudden local sunlight will make one field seem actually of snow. The old road following a terrace of the hillside curves under yews away from the flinty arable and the grey, dry desolation round about the poultry-farmer’s iron house, to the side of a rich valley of oak and ash and deepening pastures traversed by water in a glitter. The green fire of the larch woods is yellow at the crest. There and in oak and ash the missel thrush is an embodiment of the north wind, summing it up in the boldness of his form and singing, as a coat of arms sums up a history. Mounted on the plume of the top of the tall fir, and waving with it, he sings of adventure, and puts a spirit into those who pass under and adds a mile to their pace. The gorse is in flower. In the hedges the goose-grass has already set its ladders against the thorns, ladders that will soon have risen to the top of every hedge like scaling ladders of an infinite army. Down from tall yew and ash hang the abandoned ropes of last year’s traveller’s joy that have leapt that height—who has caught them in the leap?—but the new are on their way, and even the old show what can be done as they sway from the topmost branches. At sunset an immense and bountiful land lies at our feet and the wine-red sun is pouring out large cups of conquest. The undulating ploughland is warm in the red light, and it is broken up by some squares of old brown stubble and of misty young wheat, and lesser green squares full of bleating and tinkling sheep. Out of these fields the dense beech copses rise sheer. Beyond, in the west, are ridges of many woods in misty conflagration; in the south-west, the line of the Downs under the level white clouds of a spacious and luminous sky. In the south, woods upon the hills are dissolving into a deep blue smoke, without form except at their upper edges. And in the north and north-west the high lands of Berkshire and Wiltshire are prostrate and violet through thirty miles of witching air. That also is a call to go on and on and over St. Catherine’s Hill and through Winchester until the brain is drowsed with the colours of night and day.

The colour of the dawn is lead and white—white snow falling out of a leaden sky to the white earth. The rose branches bend in sharper and sharper curves to the ground, the loaded yew sprays sweep the snow with white plumes. On the sedges the snow is in fleeces; the light strands of clematis are without motion, and have gathered it in clots. One thrush sings, but cannot long endure the sound of his unchallenged note; the sparrows chirrup in the ricks; the blackbird is waiting for the end of that low tingling noise of the snow falling straight in windless air.

At mid-day the snow is finer and almost rain, and it begins to pour down from its hives among the branches in short showers or in heavy hovering lumps. The leaves of ivy and holly are gradually exposed in all their gloomy polish, and out bursts the purple of the ash buds and the yellow of new foliage. The beech stems seem in their wetness to be made of a dark agate. Out from their tops blow rags of mist, and not far above them clouds like old spiders’ webs go rapidly by.

The snow falls again and the voices of the little summer birds are buried in the silence of the flakes that whirl this way and that aimlessly, rising and falling and crossing or darting horizontally, making the trees sway wearily and their light tops toss and their numbers roar continually in the legions of the wind that whine and moan and shriek their hearts out in the solitary house roofs and doors and round about. The silence of snow co-exists with this roar. One wren pierces it with a needle of song and is gone. The earth and sky are drowning in night and snow.

CHAPTER III
SPRING—HAMPSHIRE—KENT—SURREY

Next day the wind has flown and the snow is again almost rain: there is ever a hint of pale sky above, but it is not as luminous as the earth. The trees over the road have a beauty of darkness and moistness. Beyond them the earth is a sainted corpse, with a blue light over it that is fast annihilating all matter and turning the landscape to a spirit only. Night and the snow descend upon it, and at dawn the nests are full of snow. The yews and junipers on a league of Downs are chequered white upon white slopes, and the green larches support cirrus clouds of snow. In the garden the daffodils bend criss-cross under snow that cannot quite conceal the yellow flowers. But the snow has ceased. The sky is at first pale without a cloud and tender as from a long imprisonment; it deepens in hue as the sun climbs and gathers force. The crooked paths up the Downs begin to glitter like streaks of lightning. The thrushes sing. From the straight dark beeches the snow cannot fall fast enough in great drops, in showers, in masses that release the boughs with a quiver and a gleam. The green leaves close to the ground creep out, and against them the snow is blue. A little sighing wind rustles ivy and juniper and yew. The sun mounts, and from his highest battlement of cloud blows a long blast of light over the pure land. Once more the larch is wholly green, the beech rosy brown with buds. A cart goes by all a-gleam with a load of crimson-sprouting swedes and yellow-sprouting mangolds that seem to be burning through the net of snow above them. Down each side of every white road runs a stream that sings and glitters in ripples like innumerable crystal flowers. Water drips and trickles and leaps and gushes and oozes everywhere, and extracts the fragrance of earth and green and flowers under the heat that hastens to undo the work of the snow. The air is hot and wet. The snow is impatient to be water again. It still makes a cape over the briers and brambles, and there is a constant drip and steam and song of drops from the crossing branches in the cave below. Loud sounds the voice of leaf and branch and imprisoned water in the languor and joy of their escape. On every hand there is a drip and gush and ooze of water, a crackle and rustle and moan of plants and trees unfolding and unbending and greeting air and light; a close, humid, many-perfumed host; wet gloom and a multitudinous glitter; a movement of water and of the shadows like puffs of smoke that fleet over the white fields under the clouds.

And over and through it a cuckoo is crying and crying, first overhead, then afar, and gradually near and retreating again. He is soon gone, but the ears are long afterwards able to extract the spirit of the song, the exact interval of it, from among all the lasting sounds, until we hear it as clearly as before, out of the blue sky, out of the white cloud, out of the shining grey water. It is a word of power—cuckoo! The melting of the snow is faster than ever, and at the end of the day there is none left except in some hollows of the Downs on the slopes behind the topmost of the beeches that darkly fringe the violet sky. In the misty shutting of the light there are a thousand songs laced by cuckoos’ cries and the first hooting of owls, and the beeches have become merely straight lines of pearl in a mist of their own boughs. Below them, in the high woods, goes on the fall of the melting snow through the gloomy air, and the splash on the dead leaves. This gloom and monotonous sound make an exquisite cloister, visited but not disturbed by the sound of the blackbirds singing in the mist of the vale underneath. Slowly the mist has deepened from the woods to the vale and now the eye cannot see from tree to tree. Then the straight heavy rain descends upon the songs and the clatterings of blackbirds, and when they are silenced the moorhen’s watery hoot announces that the world belongs to the beasts and the rainy dark until to-morrow.

Beautiful upon the waters, beautiful upon the mountains, is the cuckoo’s song, and most rare over the snow. But of all places and hours I should choose the crags of Land’s End in a dawn of June; and let it be the end of that month and the wind be grey and cold, so that the ships stagger in the foam and crag-like waves as they catch the early light tenderly upon their sails. The cold beams, the high precipices yet full of shadow and of the giddy calling of daw and gull, the black but white-lipped water and the blacker cormorant flying straight across it just over the foam, the sky golden yet still pallid and trembling from the dungeon of night—through it floats that beloved voice breaking, breaking, and the strong year at the summit of its career has begun to decline. The song is memorable and fair also when the drenched gardens toss and spread their petals in the grass. Many a one hears it who will not hear it again, and many that once expected it impatiently hears it no more because he is old and deaf or because his heart is closed. There is not a broad and perfect day of heat and wind and sunshine that is not haunted by that voice seeming to say the earth is hollow under our feet and the sky hollow over our heads.

There are whole nights when the cuckoo will not sleep, and the woods on either side of a road twenty miles long emit the cry of these conquerors under the full moon and the white stars of love. If you pause it will appear that it is not a silence that this song rules over; for what was a silence was full of sounds, as many sounds as there are leaves, sounds of creeping, gliding, pattering, rustling, slow wormlike continuous noises and sudden sounds. And strangely at length is the glorious day reared high upon the ruins of this night, of which the survivors slink away into the old forgotten roads, the dense woods, the chimneys of deserted houses.

It is a jolly note only when the bird is visible close at hand and the power of his throat is felt. Often two or three will answer one another, or for half a day will loiter about a coombe for the sake of an echo. It is one of the richest sounds in nature when two sing together, the second note of one being almost blended with the first of the other; and so they continue as if themselves entranced by the harmony, and the navvy leans upon his pick to listen.

On the day after the great melting of the snow the white beam tree, at the edges of high woods and in the midst of the beeches, has its hour, when its thousands of large white buds point upward like a multitudinous candelabrum. For me the white beam is always associated with wayfaring. Its white buds are the traveller’s joy of spring. The buds like blossoms or flames bewitch from afar off. They are always upon sloping ground and usually upon hillsides in the chalk land. In the autumn their leaves often shrivel before falling, and turn to a colour that looks like pink almond blossom by contrast with juniper and yew. When they have fallen, they are as much to be noticed. They lie commonly with their white undersides uppermost, and though rain soaks them and wind scatters them and they are trodden down, they preserve their whiteness until the winter or the following spring. It is a tree that belongs, above all others except the yew, to the Pilgrims’ Way, and it is impossible to forget these leaves lying white on the untouched wayside sward, among the dewy purple and crimson and gold of other leaves, sparkling in the sun and entering into all the thoughts and fancies and recollections that come to one who goes in solitude along that old road when the scent of the dying year is pungent as smoke and sweet as flowers.

KENT, SURREY AND HAMPSHIRE.

The beam tree is bright on the soft hills all through the days of rain following upon the snow and sun. There are days when earth is absorbed in her delights of growth and multiplication. The rain is a veil which she wraps about her that she may toil and sing low at her myriad divine domesticities untroubled. Delicate snails climb the young stalks of grass and flower, and their houses, pearly, chocolate, tawny, pure or ringed or chequered, slide after them. The leaves, with their indescribable charm of infinitely varied division, of wild clematis, maple, brier, hawthorn, and many more, come forth into the rain which hangs on their drooping points and on the thorns. The lichen enjoys the enduring mist of the woods; the blackthorns are crusted and bearded with lichens of fleshy green-silver and ochre which grow even on the thorns themselves and round the new leaves and flowers. The birch is now an arrested shower of green, but not enough to hide the white limbs of the nymph in the midst of it. The beech trunk is now most exquisitely coloured: it is stained and spotted and blotched with grey and rough silver and yellow-green lichen, palest green mould, all the greens of moss, and an elusive dappling and graining of greys, of neutral tints and almost blacks in the wood itself, still more diversified by the trickling rain and the changing night. The yew bark is plated and scaled and stained with greens and reds and greys, powdered with green mould, and polished in places to the colour of mahogany. Even the long-deserted thistly cornfields are dim purple with ground-ivy flowers and violets. The marsh, the pasture, the wood, the hedge, has each its abundance of bloom and of scent; so, too, has the still water and the running water. But this is the perfect hour of the green of grass, so intense that it has an earthly light of its own in the sunless mist. It is best seen in meadows bounded on two or three sides by the sheer dark edges of woods; for in that contrast the grass seems a new element, neither earth, nor water, nor sky—under our feet like the earth, gleaming and even as water, remote and celestial as the sky. And the voices of the green growing in the rain are innumerable. The very ground has now one voice of its own, the gurgle of its soaking hollow places.

HAMPSHIRE.

The fields where the green is now greenest, those bounded on two or more sides by woods, are of a kind not peculiar to Hampshire. They are usually on the greensand and lie in smooth, often winding, hollows like the beds of rivers. Sometimes the banks of these beds are steep, and they are clothed in woods or in hedges of hornbeam, hazel, ash and thorn that have grown almost to woods. The meadows are green broad rivers running up between the dark trees that bathe their roots in primroses. Sometimes there is a stream of water running down the midst of such a field, but as the stream, being a boundary, is often lined with bushes, the particular charm is lost. In the perfect examples there is the smoothness of the long hollowed meadow, the green, the river-like form, the look of being a court or cloister between the trees. Another kind of field of great charm is made by the convexity of the land rising up from one side or both of such a hollow meadow. These heaving fields, some of a regular domed shape, are favourites of the sunset light, in spring when they are grassy, in August when they bear corn: at noon when there are cattle grazing on the steep slope, their shadows are an exact inversion of themselves, as in water.

Out of the rain and mist spring has now risen full-grown, tender and lusty, fragrant, many-coloured, many-voiced, fair to see, so that it is beyond a lover’s power to make even an inventory of her lovely ways. She is tall, she is fresh and bold, sweet in her motion and in her tranquillity; and there is a soft down upon her lip as there is a silken edge to the young leaves of the beeches.

KENT.

Even the motor road is pleasant now when the nightingales sing out of the bluebell thickets under oak and sweet chestnut and hornbeam and hazel. Presently it crosses a common, too small ever to draw a crowd, a rough up-and-down expanse of gorse and thorn, pierced by grassy paths and surrounded by turf that is rushy and mounded by old ant heaps; and here, too, there are nightingales singing alone, the sweeter for the contrast between their tangled silent bowers and the sharp, straight white road. The common is typical of the lesser commons of the south. Crouch’s Croft in Sussex is another, in sight of the three dusk moorland breasts of Crowborough; gorse-grown, flat, possessing a pond, and walled by tall hollies in a hedge. Piet Down, close by, is a fellow to it—grass and gorse and irregular pine—a pond, too—rough, like a fragment of Ashdown or Woolmer, and bringing a wild sharp flavour into the mellow cultivated land. Yet another is at Stone Street, very small, a few oaks up to their knees in blackthorn, gorse and bramble, with dusty edge and the hum of the telegraph wire for a song.

After the little common and long meadows, oak and ash, an old stone house with seven hundred years of history quiet within its walls and dark tiles—its cedar and yew and pine, its daisied grass, its dark water and swans—the four oast cones opposite, all taste more exquisitely. How goodly are the names hereabout!—Dinas Dene, the coombe in which the old house stands; Balk Shaw, Cream Crox, Dicky May’s Field, Ivy Hatch, Lady Lands, Lady’s Wood, Upper and Lower Robsacks, Obram Wood, Ruffats, Styant’s Mead, the Shode, and, of course, a Starvecrow. Almost due west goes one of the best of footpaths past hop garden, corn, currant plantations, rough copses, with glimpses of the immense Weald to the east, its trees massed like thirty miles of wood, having sky and cloud over its horizon as if over sea, and southward the wild ridge of Ashdown. Then the path enters tall woods of ash and oak, boulder-strewn among their anemone and primrose, bluebell and dog’s mercury, and emerges in a steep lane at the top of which are five cowled oast houses among cherry blossom and under black firs. Beyond there is a hollow winding vale of meadow and corn, its sides clothed in oak, hazel and thorn, revealing primroses between. Woods shut it away from the road and from all houses but the farm above one end. A few cattle graze there, and the sun comes through the sloping woods and makes the grass golden or pale.

Then the North Downs come in sight, above a church tower amid stateliest pale-foliaged beeches and vast undulations of meadow. They are suffused in late sunshine, their trees misty and massed, under a happy sky. Those beeches lie below the road, lining the edge of one long meadow. The opposite sun pours almost horizontal beams down upon the perfectly new leaves so as to give each one a yellow-green glow and to some a silver shimmer about the shadowy boles. For the moment the trees lose their anchor in the solid earth. They are floating, wavering, shimmering, more aërial and pure and wild than birds or any visible things, than aught except music and the fantasies of the brain. The mind takes flight and hovers among the leaves with whatsoever powers it has akin to dew and trembling lark’s song and rippling water; it is throbbed away not only above the ponderous earth but below the firmament in the middle world of footless fancies and half thoughts that drift hither and thither and know neither a heaven nor a home. It is a loss of a name and not of a belief that forbids us to say to-day that sprites flutter and tempt there among the new leaves of the beeches in the late May light.

Almost every group of oast houses here, seen either amongst autumn fruit or spring blossom, is equal in its effect to a temple, though different far, even when ivy-mantled as they occasionally are, from the grey towered or spired churches standing near. The low round brick tower of the oast house, surmounted by a tiled cone of about equal height, and that again crested with a white cowl and vane, is a pleasant form. There are groups of three which, in their age, mellow hue, roundness, and rustic dignity, have suggested the triple mother goddesses of old religions who were depicted as matrons, carrying babes or fruit or flowers, to whom the peasant brought thank-offerings when sun and rain had been kind. Those at Kemsing, for example, stand worthily beside the perfect grey-shingled spire, among elm and damson, against the bare cloudy Down. And there are many others near the Pilgrims’ Way of the same charm.

That road, in its winding course from Winchester to Canterbury, through Hampshire, Surrey and Kent, sums up all qualities of roads except those of the straight highway. It is a cart-way from farm to farm; or a footpath only, or a sheaf of half-a-dozen footpaths worn side by side; or, no longer needed except by the curious, it is buried under nettle and burdock and barricaded by thorns and traveller’s joy and bryony bines; it has been converted into a white country road for a few miles of its length, until an ascent over the Downs or a descent into the valley has to be made, and then once more it is left to footsteps upon grass and bird’s foot trefoil or to rude wheels over flints. Sometimes it is hidden among untended hazels or among chalk banks topped with beech and yew, and the kestrel plucks the chaffinch there undisturbed. Or it goes free and hedgeless like a long balcony half-way up the Downs, and unespied it beholds half the South Country between ash tree boles. Church and inn and farm and cottage and tramp’s fire it passes like a wandering wraith of road. Some one of the little gods of the earth has kept it safe—one of those little and less than omnipotent gods who, neglecting all but their own realms, enjoy the earth in narrow ways, delighting to make small things fair, such as a group of trees, a single field, a pure pool of sedge and bright water, an arm of sea, a train of clouds, a road. I see their hands in many a by-way of space and moment of time. One of them assuredly harbours in a rude wet field I know of that lies neglected between two large estates: three acres at most of roughly sloping pasture, bounded above by the brambly edge of a wood and below by a wild stream. Here a company of meadow-sweet invades the grass, there willow herb tall with rosy summits of flowers, hoary lilac mint, dull golden fleabane, spiry coltstails. The snake creeps careless through these thickets of bloom. The sedge-warbler sings there. One old white horse is content with the field, summer and winter, and has made a plot of it silver with his hairs where he lies at night. The image of the god is in the grey riven willow that leans leafless over the stream like a peasant sculpture of old time. There is another of these godkins in a bare chalk hollow where the dead thistles stick out through a yard of snow and give strange thoughts of the sailless beautiful sea that once rippled over the Downs: one also in the smell of hay and mixen and cow’s breath at the first farm out of London where the country is unsoiled. There is one in many a worthless waste by the roadside, such as that between two roads that go almost parallel for a while—a long steep piece, only a few feet broad, impenetrably overgrown by blackthorn and blackberry, but unenclosed: and one in each of the wayside chalk-pits with overhanging beech roots above and bramble below. One, too, perhaps many, were abroad one August night on a high hillside when the hedge crickets sang high up in the dogwood and clematis like small but deafening sewing machines, and the glowworms shone in the thyme, and the owl’s crying did not rend the breathless silence under the full moon, and in the confused moonlit chequer of the wood, where tree and shadow were equals, I walked on a grating of shadows with lights between as if from under the earth; the hill was given over to a light happiness through which I passed an unwilling but unfeared intruder.

In places these gods preside over some harmony of the earth with the works of men. There is one such upon the Pilgrims’ Way, where I join it, after passing the dark boughs and lightsome flowers of cherry orchards, grass full of dandelions, a dark cluster of pines, elms in groups and cavalcades, and wet willowy meadows that feed the Medway. Just at the approach there is a two-storied farm with dormers in the darkly mellowed roof, protected by sycamores and chestnuts, and before it a weather-boarded barn with thatched roof, and then, but not at right angles, another with ochre tiles, and other outbuildings of old brick and tile, a waggon lodge of flint and thatch beside a pond, at the edge of a broad unhedged field where random oaks shadow the grass. Behind runs the Pilgrims’ Way, invisible but easily guessed under that line of white beam and yew, with here and there an ash up which the stout plaited stems of ivy are sculptured, for they seem of the same material as the tree, and both of stone. Under the yew and white beam the clematis clambers over dogwood and wayfaring trees. Corn grows up to the road and sometimes hops; beyond, a league of orchard is a-froth round farmhouses or islands of oak; and east and west sweeps the crescent of the North Downs.

With the crescent goes the road, half-way up the sides of the hills but nearly always at the foot of the steepest slopes where the chalk-pits are carved white, like the concave of a scallop shell, out of the green turf. Luxuriant hedges bar the view except at gateways and stiles. At one place the upper hedge gives way to scattered thickets scrambling up the hill, with chalky ruts and rabbit workings between. Neither sheep nor crops cover the hill, nor yet is it common. Any one can possess it—for an hour. It is given up to the rabbits until Londoners can be persuaded to build houses on it. At intervals a road as old as the Way itself descends precipitously in a deep chalk groove, overhung by yew and beech, or hornbeam, or oak, and white clouds drifting in a river of blue sky between the trees; and joins farther south the main road which winds, parallel with the Pilgrims’ Way and usually south of it, from Winchester, through Guildford, Dorking, Westerham, Maidstone, Ashford, and Canterbury to Dover Strait. Not only chalk-pits and deep roads hollow the hills. For miles there is a succession of small smooth coombes, some grown with white thorn, some grassy, above the road, alternating with corresponding smooth breasts of turf. Towers and spires, but chiefly towers, lie beneath, and in the mile or so between one and the next there are red farms or, very rarely, a greater house at the end of a long wave of grass among trees. Above, the white full-bosomed clouds lean upon the green rampart of the hills and look across to the orchards, the woods beyond, the oaken Weald and its lesser ridges still farther, and then the South Downs and a dream of the south sea.

Rain falls, and in upright grey sheaves passes slowly before the fresh beech leaves like ghosts in shadowy procession; and once again the white clouds roll over the tops of the trees, and the green is virginal, and out of the drip and glimmer of the miles of blissful country rises the blackbird’s song and the cuckoo’s shout. The rain seems not only to have brightened what is to be seen but the eye that sees and the mind that knows, and suddenly we are aware of all the joy in the grandeur and mastery of an oak’s balance, in those immobile clouds revealed on the farthest horizon shaped like the mountains which a child imagines, in the white candles of the beam tree, in the black-eyed bird sitting in her nest in the hawthorn with uplifted beak, and in the myriad luxuriant variety of shape and texture and bright colour in the divided leaves of wood sanicle and moschatel and parsley and cranesbill, in the pure outline of twayblade and violet and garlic. Newly dressed in the crystal of the rain the landscape recalls the earlier spring; the flowers of white wood-sorrel, the pink and white anemone and cuckoo flower, the thick-clustered, long-stalked primroses and darker cowslips with their scentless sweetness pure as an infant’s breath; the solitary wild cherry trees flowering among still leafless beech; the blackbirds of twilight and the flower-faced owls; the pewits wheeling after dusk; the jonquil and daffodil and arabis and leopard’s bane of cottage gardens; the white clouds plunged in blue floating over the brown woods of the hills; the delicate thrushes with speckled breasts paler than their backs, motionless on dewy turf; and all the joys of life that come through the nostrils from the dark, not understood world which is unbolted for us by the delicate and savage fragrances of leaf and flower and grass and clod, of the plumage of birds and fur of animals and breath and hair of women and children.

How can our thoughts, the movements of our bodies, our human kindnesses, ever fit themselves with this blithe world? Is it but vain remorse at what is lost, or is it not rather a token of what may yet be achieved, that makes these images blind us as does the sight of children dressed for a play, some solemn-thoughtful, some wholly gay, suddenly revealed to us in brilliant light after the night wind and rain?

But at morning twilight I see the moon low in the west like a broken and dinted shield of silver hanging long forgotten outside the tent of a great knight in a wood, and inside are the knight’s bones clean and white about his rusted sword. In the east the sun rises, a red-faced drover and a million sheep going before him silent over the blue downs of the dawn: and I am ill-content and must watch for a while the fraying, changeful edges of the lesser clouds drift past and into the great white ones above, or hear rebellious music that puts for one brief hour into our hands the reins of the world that we may sit mightily behind the horses and drive to the goal of our dreams.

A footpath leads from the Pilgrims’ Way past the divine undulations and beech glades of a park—a broad piece of the earth that flows hither and thither in curves, sudden or slow but flawless and continuous, and everywhere clothed in a seamless garment of grass. The path crosses the white main road into a lesser one that traverses a common of beech and oak and birch. The leaves make an unbroken roof over the common: except the roads there is not a path in it. For it is a small and narrow strip of but a few acres, without any open space, gloomy, much overgrown by thickets. Last year’s leaves lie undisturbed and of the colour of red deer under the silky green new foliage and round the huge mossy pedestals of beech and in caves behind the serpentine locked roots. No child’s shout is heard. No lover walks there. The motor-car hurries the undesirable through and down into the Weald. And so it is alone and for themselves that the beeches rise up in carven living stone and expand in a green heaven for the song of the woodwren, pouring out pearls like wine.

Southward, on either side of the steep road, the slope is, below the beeches, given to corn and hops; at the foot are all the oaks and pasture of the Weald, diversified by hop gardens on many of the slanting fields that break up its surface. Looking back from here the hills above are less finely modelled than the downs still farther behind us in the north. But they also have their shallow coombes, sometimes two tiers of them, and they are indented by deep, wide-mouthed bays. One of them begins in copses of oak and hazel and sallow, a little arable, a farm, three oast cones, and a little steep orchard in a hollow of their own, which give way to hops, followed by grass and then a tortuous ploughland among the oaks and firs of the great woods that cover the more precipitous sides of the upper end of the bay. Exquisitely cultivated, this bay is yet a possession of cuckoo and nightingale, singing under the yellow-green and black-branched oaks and above the floor of bluebell and dark dog’s mercury.

Out of the coombe a deep lane ascends through beech, hazel and beam to another common of heather, and whinberry bathing the feet of scattered birch, and squat oak and pine, interrupted by yellow gravel pits.

Beyond is a little town and a low grey spire, neighboured by sycamores that stretch out horizontal boughs of broad leaves and new yellow-green flower tassels over long grass. Past the town—rapidly and continually resuming its sleep after the hooting of motor-cars—begins a wide and stately domain. At its edge are cottages doddering with age, but trim and flowery, and assuredly wearing the livery of the ripe, grave house of brick that stands on the grassy ascent above them, among new-leaved beech masses and isolated thorns dreaming over their shadows. That grove of limes, fair and decorous, leading up to the house is the work of Nature and the squire. His chestnut and pine plantations succeed. And now a pollard beech, bossy-rooted on a mound of moss and crumbling earth, its grotesque torso decorated as by childish hands with new leaves hanging among mighty boughs that are themselves a mansion for squirrel and jay and willow wren and many shadows, looks grimly down at the edge of a wood and asks for the wayfarer’s passport—has he lived well, does he love this world, is he bold and free and kind?—and if he have it not seals him with melancholy as he enters among the innumerable leaves of innumerable beeches beginning to respond to the straight, still, after-sunset rain, while the last cuckoos cry and the last footsteps and wheels of the world die away behind. The foliage has a pale, almost white, light of its own among the darkly dripping boughs, and when that is gone the rain and leaf under a spongy grey sky have a myriad voices of contentedness. Below, invisible in the dark rain but not unfelt, is the deep hollow land of the Weald. The owls whimper and mew and croon and hoot and shriek their triumphs.

SURREY.

In the morning a storm comes up on bellying blue clouds above the pale levels of young corn and round-topped trees black as night but gold at their crests. The solid rain does away with all the hills, and shows only the solitary thorns at the edge of an oak wood, or a row of beeches above a hazel hedgerow and, beneath that, stars of stitchwort in the drenched grass. But a little while and the sky is emptied and in its infant blue there are white clouds with silver gloom in their folds; and the light falls upon round hills, yew and beech thick upon their humps, the coombes scalloped in their sides tenanted by oaks beneath. By a grassy chalk pit and clustering black yew, white beam and rampant clematis, is the Pilgrims’ Way. Once more the sky empties heavy and dark rain upon the bright trees so that they pant and quiver while they take it joyfully into their deep hearts. Before the eye has done with watching the dance and glitter of rain and the sway of branches, the blue is again clear and like a meadow sprinkled over with blossoming cherry trees.

The decent vale consists of square green fields and park-like slopes, dark pine and light beech: but beyond that the trees gather together in low ridge after ridge so that the South Country seems a dense forest from east to west. On one side of the hill road is a common of level ash and oak woods, holly and thorn at their edges, and between them and the dust a grassy tract, sometimes furzy; on the other, oaks and beeches sacred to the pheasant but exposing countless cuckoo flowers among the hazels of their underwood. Please trespass. The English game preserve is a citadel of woodland charm, and however precious, it has only one or two defenders easily eluded and, when met, most courteous to all but children and not very well dressed women. The burglar’s must be a bewitching trade if we may judge by the pleasures of the trespasser’s unskilled labour.

In the middle of the wood is a four-went way, and the grassy or white roads lead where you please among tall beeches or broad, crisp-leaved shining thorns and brief open spaces given over to the mounds of ant and mole, to gravel pits and heather. Is this the Pilgrims’ Way, in the valley now, a frail path chiefly through oak and hazel, sometimes over whin and whinberry and heather and sand, but looking up at the yews and beeches of the chalk hills? It passes a village pierced by straight clear waters—a woodland church—woods of the willow wren—and then, upon a promontory, alone, within the greenest mead rippled up to its walls by but few graves, another church, dark, squat, small-windowed, old, and from its position above the world having the characters of church and beacon and fortress, calling for all men’s reverence. Up here in the rain it utters the pathos of the old roads behind, wiped out as if writ in water, or worn deep and then deserted and surviving only as tunnels under the hazels. I wish they could always be as accessible as churches are, and not handed over to land-owners—like Sandsbury Lane near Petersfield—because straight new roads have taken their places for the purposes of tradesmen and carriage people, or boarded up like that discarded fragment, deep-sunken and overgrown, below Colman’s Hatch in Surrey. For centuries these roads seemed to hundreds so necessary, and men set out upon them at dawn with hope and followed after joy and were fain of their whiteness at evening: few turned this way or that out of them except into others as well worn (those who have turned aside for wantonness have left no trace at all), and most have been well content to see the same things as those who went before and as they themselves have seen a hundred times. And now they, as the sound of their feet and the echoes, are dead, and the roads are but pleasant folds in the grassy chalk. Stay, traveller, says the dark tower on the hill, and tread softly because your way is over men’s dreams; but not too long; and now descend to the west as fast as feet can carry you, and follow your own dream, and that also shall in course of time lie under men’s feet; for there is no going so sweet as upon the old dreams of men.

CHAPTER IV
AN ADVENTURER

In one of the new cottages at the edge of the town beyond lives, or tries to live, a man who fought for many years in one of the suburbs a losing battle against London. His father had farmed land now covered by streets. He himself was persuaded to sell all but his house and garden to raise money for a business which promised his sons great wealth. He retained barely enough to live upon; the business, an honest one, failed; and in a short time misfortunes compelled him to open a shop. He converted the house—that was once a farmhouse—into a shop, and not five years ago it could still be seen at the end of a row of gaudy, glittering windows, itself a village shop, having but a common house window for the display of wares, the interior gloomy and approached through a strip of garden where a lime-tree put on and shed its leaves with the air of a princess of old romance. The back garden, half an orchard, was bordered along a side street by a high wall, and over that a broad cherry used to lean a gnarled branch and shower its blossoms upon the asphalte; the foot-passengers complained of the tree which had grown without foreknowledge of the fact that men would pass below in silk hats, and the branch was lopped. In the shop itself everything was for sale, everything that officious travellers could foist upon the little weak-eyed half-farmer, half-gardener who kept the shop—hosiery, leather bags, purses, cheap jewellery, fishing-tackle, cricket-bats, umbrellas, walking-sticks. A staircase led out of the shop to the bedrooms, just as it had done when the window on the narrow landing looked over hay-fields to Banstead Downs. When the cat was not lying upon the socks in the window, she had, very likely, been kept away by a litter of kittens somewhere among the seldom disturbed bundles of unfashionable ties, or she lay in the sun beneath the lime and watched her kittens pursuing the spiral flight of the yellow leaves.

The owner made no concessions except such as he was forced to, as when he bought the stock of jewellery because the traveller praised his cat; or allowed the cherry tree to be mutilated because the new Borough Council commanded. He dressed in breeches, gaiters and heavy boots, and never wore a coat or took his pipe out of his mouth (except to play with puss). Seldom did he leave the house, unless it was to go into the garden or to take a walk down the emptied busy street at night, when the only sound was the crickets’ song from the bakers’ shops. The little old house rippled over by creeper was beautiful then—the lime tree and the creeper trembling in the gusty moonlight, and the windows and doorway hollow and dark and romantic as if a poet had made them to sting men’s hearts with beauty and with regret.

No one can ever say what the old man thought as he slammed the door after one of these walks and was alone with himself. Certainly he regretted the big decorous high-gated houses that used to stand opposite his, veiled by wistaria, passion flower and clematis; the limes that used to run the whole length of his father’s land, but now all gone, save this one (how lovely its fallen leaves looked in the as yet untrodden streets in autumn mornings, lying flat and moistly golden under the fog!); the balsam growing through the railings; the dark yew tree that looked among bright lilac and laburnum like a negro among the women in the Arabian Nights; the pathway through the churchyard, in the days before they had to rail it in to preserve the decent turf—in vain, for it was now littered with newspapers and tram-tickets among the tombs of —— Esquire, —— Esquire, for they were all esquires. He regretted the houses and gardens, but less than their people, the men and women of some ease and state, of speech whose kindliness was thrice kind through its careful dignity, so he thought. And then the children, there were no such children now; and the young men and women, the men a little alarming, the women strong and lovely and gentle enough to supply him with incarnations at once of all those whom he read of in the novels of Scott. They had gone long ago, except those who survived vaguely in the novels. He remembered their houses better, for it was not until after some years that they were pulled down, their orchards grubbed up, and their rich mould carried away in sacks to the trumpery villas round about—dragged along the road and spilt in a long black trail. It was wonderful dark mould, and the thought of the apples, the plums, the nectarines, the roses which had grown out of it made him furious when it was taken to their gardens by people who would be gone in a year or less, and would grow in it nothing but nasturtiums and sunflowers.

There followed a period when, the old attitudes, the things that had been handed down from the last revolution, having been broken up, the gardens became a possession of nettles and docks, and fewer and fewer were the crown-imperials and hollyhocks to survive the fall of the houses. The scaffold-poles, the harsh blocks of stone, the rasping piles of bricks, the scores of cold earthenware and iron articles belonging to the rows of villas about to replace the old houses, looked more like ruin than preparation as they lay stark and hideous among the misty grass and still blue elms. There were days when the thrushes still sang well among the rioting undisturbed shrubberies. But soon men felled the elms and drove away their shadows for ever, and all that dwelled or could be imagined therein. No more would the trees be enchanted by the drunken early songs of blackbirds. The heavenly beauty of earthly things went away upon the timber carriages and was stamped with mud. The butts of the trees were used to decorate the gardens of the new houses. Two, indeed, were spared by some one’s folly, and a main bough fell in the night and crushed through a whole fortnight’s brickwork.

Those elms had come unconsciously to be part of the real religion of men in that neighbourhood, and certainly of that old man. Their cool green voices as they swayed, their masses motionless against the evening or the summer storms, created a sense of pomp and awe. They gave mystic invitations that stirred his blood if not his slowly working humble brain, and helped to build and to keep firm that sanctuary of beauty to which we must be able to retire if we are to be more than eaters and drinkers and newspaper readers. When they were gone he wondered, still humbly, what would do their work in the minds of the newcomers. Looking at the features of the younger people, held in a vice of reserve or pallidly leering, and hearing the snarl of their voices, he was not surprised. They had not been given a chance. How could they have the ease, the state, the kindliness of the old inhabitants? They had no gods, only a brand-new Gothic church. Often they supported this or that new movement, or bought a brave new book, but they continued to sneer timidly or brutally at everything else. They were satisfied with a little safe departure from the common way, some mental or spiritual equivalent to the door-knocker of imitation hammered copper. They did not care very much for trees though they planted them in every street, where the grammar-school boys and errand-boys mutilated them one by one in the dark; they cut off the heads of a score of tall poplars, lest perchance the west wind should one day do the same thing when one of the million was passing below.

The new people were a mysterious, black-liveried host, the grandchildren of peers, thieves, gutter-snipes, agricultural labourers, artisans, shopkeepers, professional men, farmers, foreign financiers, an unrelated multitude. They were an endless riddle to the old man. He used to stare at their houses as one might stare at a corpse in the hope of discovering that there was something alive there. They were as impenetrable as their houses, when at night the blinds of the lighted rooms were drawn and figures or parts of figures shot fantastically by. He read of their bankruptcies, their appointments, their crimes, their successes, unwittingly, in the newspapers. He could never take it as a matter of course to pass, to be continually surrounded by, thousands of whom he knew nothing, to whom he was nothing. Well did they keep their secrets, this blank or shamefaced crowd of discreetly dressed people who might be anywhere to-morrow.

He turned from them to his garden and cherry-tree, and thinking of those who had walked there, and in the long garden on the other side of the fence, he felt at home again, with his cat and her long line of descendants. That long garden had survived the big house to which it had belonged. A merchant had lived there with his family of four daughters, dark, tall women, whose pride and tender speech the old trees in their garden often recalled. All were beautiful, and they were most beautiful together. They walked, they rode, they played and read in the garden, and the old man could see them there. They were said to be clever and their father was wealthy. They were nearly always together, and as often as possible with him. They were a tribe apart, of extraordinary perfection of strength and grace, holding their own against the world. And yet, as the old man thought to himself, looking at their garden in the rain, not one of them was ever married. They had moved right into London after selling their house and land. They had come to his shop once or twice after and made an excuse for going into the garden: they looked into their own as if they had lost something there. Thinking of them he went into his shop and opened a book. A minute black insect, disturbed from among the leaves, crawled over and over the white page as he pretended to read; it went in zigzags half-an-inch long, lost in the black and white desert, sometimes turning the sharp edge and going to the other side of the page; but as a rule the edge alarmed it and it retreated; it was never still. It reminded him of himself. They were both lost upon the vast surface of the earth.

But, of course, that was not why he left. Nobody knew why he left. In his seventieth year he ran away, bursting out of the crowd as one sheep no braver than the rest will do sometimes, inexplicably. He has brought his cats with him, and he has money enough to last until he is dead. Being considered by his niece as of unsound mind, he is free to do as he will and is happy when he is alone.

CHAPTER V
SUSSEX

A few miles south of that great presiding pollard beech is the boundary line between Surrey and Kent on the north and Sussex on the south. A few miles over the line the moorland organ roll of heather and birch and pine succeeds the grassy undulations and the well-grown beech and oak. The yellow roving lines of the paths cut through the heather into the sand add to the wildness of the waste, by their suggestion of mountain torrents and of channels worn in the soft rock or clay by the sea. The same likeness in little is often to be seen upon a high-pitched roof of thatch when the straw is earth-coloured and tunnelled by birds and seamed by rain. Here the houses are of stone, unadorned, heather-thatched. The maker of birch-heath brooms plies his trade. There are stacks of heath and gorse in the yard. All the more fair are the grooves in the moorland, below the region of pines, where the tiled white-boarded mill stands by the sheen of a ford, and the gorse is bright and white clothes are blowing over neat gardens and the first rose. On a day of rain and gloom the answer of the gorse to sudden lights and heats is delicious; all those dull grey and glaucous and brown dry spines bursting into cool and fragrant fire is as great a miracle as the turning of flames to roses round a martyr’s feet.

It is only too easy for the pheasant lords to plant larch in parallelograms: to escape from them it is necessary to go in amongst them. Yet there are parts of the forest large and dark and primeval in look, with a few poor isolated houses and a thin file of telegraph posts crossing it among the high gloomy pines and down to the marshy hollows, to the strewn gold of dwarf willows, and up again to the deserted wooden windmill, the empty boarded cottage, the heather-thatched sheds at the southern edge of the moor. Looking at this tract of wild land the mind seems to shed many centuries of civilization and to taste something of the early man’s alarm in the presence of the uncultured hills—an alarm which is in us tempered so as to aid an impression of the sublime. Its influence lingers in the small strips of roadside gorse beyond its proper boundary. Then, southward, there are softly dipping meadows, fields of young corn, and oaks thrown among the cowslips. The small farmhouses are neat and good—one has a long stone wall in front, and, over the road, tall Scotch firs above a green pond dappled by the water crowfoot’s white blossoms and bordered by sallow and rush. Narrow copses of oak or wide hedges of hazel and sallow line the road; and they are making cask hoops under lodges of boughs at the woodsides. Bluebells and primroses and cuckoo flowers are not to be counted under the trees. The long moist meadows flow among the woods up and down from farm to farm and spire to tower. Each farmhouse group is new—this one is roofed and walled with tiles; and opposite is a tangle of grass and gorse, with fowls and hen-coops amongst it, a sallowy pond, a pile of faggots, some crooked knees of oak, some fresh-peeled timber: old grey hop poles lean in a sheaf all round a great oak. The gates are of good unpainted oak, and some few are of a kind not often seen elsewhere, lower than a hurdle and composed of two stout parallel bars united by twenty uprights and by two pieces meeting to form a V across these. The gates deserve and would fill a book by themselves.

Green lucent calipers of flags shadow one another in little wayside ponds, white-railed; for this is the Weald, the land of small clay ponds. The hazels are the nightingale’s. In many of the oak woods the timber carriages have carved a way through primroses and bluebells deep into the brown clay. The larger views are of cloudy, oak woods, ridge behind ridge, and green corn or grass and grey ploughland between; and of the sun pouring a molten cataract out of dark machicolated clouds on to one green field that glows a moment and is insignificant again: the lesser are of little brambly precipitous sandpits by the road, of a white mill at a crossing, of carved yews before black-timbered inns, of a starling that has learned the curlew’s call perched on a cottage roof, of abeles all rough silver with opening leaf shivering along the grass-bordered evening road, of two or three big oaks in a meadow corner and in their shadow unblemished parsley and grasses bowed as if rushing in the wind. At an inn door stands a young labourer, tall and straight but loosely made, his nose even and small, his eyes blue and deep set, his lips like those of Antinous, his face ruddy and rough-grained, his hair short and brown and crisp upon his fair round head; his neck bound by a voluminous scarf (with alternate lozenges of crimson and deep green divided by white lines) that is gathered beneath his chin by a brass ring and thence flows down under his blue coat; his trousers of grey cord, dirty and patched with drab to a weathered stone colour, fitting almost tightly to his large thighs and calves and reaching not too near to his small but heavily-shod feet. A prince—a slave. He is twenty, unmarried, sober, honest, a noble animal. He goes into a cottage that stands worn and old and without a right angle in its timbers or its thatch any more than in its apple trees and solitary quince which all but hide the lilac and massed honesty of the little garden. This is a house—I had almost said this is a man—that looked upon England when it could move men to such songs as, “Come, live with me and be my love,” or—

“Hey, down a down!” did Dian sing,

Amongst her virgins sitting;

“Than love there is no vainer thing,

For maidens most unfitting.”

And so think I, with a down, down derry.

For a moment or less as he goes under the porch I seem to see that England, that swan’s nest, that island which a man’s heart was not too big to love utterly. But now what with Great Britain, the British Empire, Britons, Britishers, and the English-speaking world, the choice offered to whomsoever would be patriotic is embarrassing, and he is fortunate who can find an ideal England of the past, the present, and the future to worship, and embody it in his native fields and waters or his garden, as in a graven image.

The round unending Downs are close ahead, and upon the nearest hill a windmill beside a huge scoop in the chalk, a troop of elms below, and then low-hedged fields of grass and wheat. The farms are those of the downland. One stands at the end of the elm troop that swerves and clusters about its tiled roof, grey cliff of chimney-stack, and many gables; the stables with newer tiles; the huge slope of the barn; the low mossy cart-lodge and its wheels and grounded shafts; the pale straw stacks and the dark hay ricks with leaning ladders. A hundred sheep-bells rush by with a music of the hills in the wind. The larks are singing as if they never could have done by nightfall. It is now the hour of sunset, and windy. All the sky is soft and dark-grey-clouded except where the sun, just visible and throbbing in its own light, looks through a bright window in the west with a glow. Exactly under the sun the grass and wheat is full both of the pure effulgence and of the south-west wind, rippling and glittering: there is no sun for anything else save the water. North of the sun and out of its power lies a lush meadow, beyond it a flat marshland cut by several curves of bright water, above that a dark church on a wooded mound, and then three shadowy swoops of Down ending at a spire among trees.

South-west, the jagged ridgy cluster of a hillside town, a mill and a castle, stand dark and lucid, and behind them the mere lines of still more distant downs.

CHAPTER VI
A RETURN TO NATURE

I turn into my next inn with unusual hopes. For it was here some years ago that I met for the first time a remarkable man. It was nine o’clock on a late July evening, and the haymakers, only just set free, came stamping into the bar. The last waggon-load stopped at the door while the red-whiskered carter stood, one hand on the latch, and drank his pint before leading his horses into the stall. After the haymakers, in their pale corduroys and dirty white slops, came a tall, spare, shock-headed man, not recently shaved, dressed in grey—grey coat, grey breeches and stockings, and a tall, hard felt hat that was old and grey. He called for sixpenny ale, and wiping the hay dust from his neck sat down beside me.

No, he is not here to-day. Perhaps he will never get out of London again.

I asked him the way to the nearest village, and whether a bed was to be had there. He answered that it was some way off—paused, looked at me, drank from his tankard—and added in a lower voice that he would be glad if I would come and share his place. Such an unusual invitation enforced assent.

A quarter of a mile down the next by-way he opened a little oaken gate that slammed after us, and there, in a corner of a small, flat field, was his sleeping place, under an oak. Would I care to join him in fried bacon and broad beans and tea at six the next morning?

He lit a wisp of hay and soon had a fire burning, and brought over some hay and sacks for the second bed. The lights of the farmhouse shone on the other side of the little field behind lilac bushes. The farmhouse pump gave out a cry like a guinea fowl for a few minutes. Then the lights went out. I asked the name of the farm and he told me.

“I come here almost every summer for the haymaking,” he said, and detecting my surprise that it was not his first year of haymaking, he continued—

“It is my tenth summer, to be exact.”

He was a man of hardly over thirty, and I noticed that his hands, though small and fine, were rough and warty and dark. Thoughtlessly I remarked that he must find the winter hard if he travelled like this all the year round.

“Yes,” he said, with a sigh, “it is, and that is why I go back in the winter; at least partly why.”

“Go back——?”

“Yes, to London.”

I was still perplexed. He had the air of a town-bred man of the clerkly class, but no accent, and I could not think what he did in London that was compatible with his present life.

“Are you a Londoner, then?”

“Yes, and no. I was born at the village of —— in Caermarthenshire. My father was a clerk in a coal merchant’s office of the neighbouring town. But he thought to better himself, worked hard in the evenings and came to London, when I was seven, for a better-paid post. We lived in Wandsworth in a small street newly built. I went to a middle-class school close by until I was sixteen, and then I went into a silk merchant’s office. My father died soon after. He had never been strong, and from the first year’s work in the city, I have heard my mother say, he was a doomed man. He made no friends. While I was young he gave up all his spare time to me and was happy, wheeling me, my mother walking alongside, out into the country on every Sunday that was not soaking wet, and nearly every Saturday afternoon, too.

“It was on one of these excursions, when they had left me to myself a little while to talk more gravely than they usually did when we were out like that, that there was suddenly opened before me—like a yawning pit, yet not only beneath me but on every side—infinity, endless time, endless space; it was thrust upon me, I could not grasp it, I only closed my eyes and shuddered and knew that not even my father could save me from it, then in a minute it was gone. To a more blessed child some fair or imposing vision might have risen up out of the deep and given him a profounder if a sadder eye for life and the world. How unlike it was to the mystic’s trance, feeling out with infinite soul to earth and stars and sea and remote time and recognizing his oneness with them. To me, but later than that, this occasionally recurring experience was as an intimation of the endless pale road, before and behind, which the soul has to travel: it was a terror that enrolled me as one of the helpless, superfluous ones of the earth.

“I was their only child that lived, and my father’s joy in me was very great, equalled only by his misery at the life which he had to lead and which he foresaw for me. He used to read to me, waking me up for the purpose sometimes when he reached home late, or if he did not do that rousing me an hour before breakfast. His favourite books were The Compleat Angler and Lavengro, the poems of Wordsworth, the diaries of Thoreau and the Natural History of Selborne. I remember crying—when I was twelve—with despair of human nature’s fickleness to think that White, even though he was an old man, could have it in his heart to write that farewell to natural history at the end of his last letter to Barrington. My father read these books to me several times in a sad, hoarse voice—as it seemed to me, though when he paused he was happy enough—which I had often great trouble to endure as I got older and able and willing to read for myself. So full was I of a sense of the real wild country which I had never seen—the Black Mountains of Caermarthen I hardly recalled—that I became fanciful, and despised the lavish creeper that hung like a costly dress over the fence between our garden and the next, because the earth it grew in was not red earth but a black pasty compound, full of cinders and mortar and decayed rags and kittens. I used to like to go to the blacksmith’s to smell the singeing hoof and to the tram-stables and smell the horses, and see the men standing about in loose shirts, hanging braces, bare arms, clay pipes, with a sort of free look that I could not see elsewhere. The navvies at work in the road or on the railway line were a tremendous pleasure, and I noticed that the clerks waiting for their trains in the morning loved to watch these hulking free and easy men doing something that looked as if it mattered, not like their own ledger work and so on. I had the same sort of pleasure looking up the street that rose from east to west and seeing the sun set between the two precipices of brick wall at the top; it was as if a gate opened there and through it all the people and things that saddened me had disappeared and left me to myself; it was like the pit, too, that opened before me as a little child.

“My father died of consumption. I was then just able to earn my own living, so I was left in lodgings and my mother returned to Wales. I worked hard at figures; at least I went early and stayed late and never stopped to talk to the others; yet I made frequent mistakes, and the figures swam in a mist of American rivers and English waterfalls and gipsy camps, so that it was a wonder I could ever see my Thoreau and Wordsworth and Borrow without these figures. Fancy men adopting as a cry the ‘right to work’! Apparently they are too broken-spirited to think of a right to live, and would be content only to work. It is not wonderful that with such a cry they do very little. Men cannot fight hard for the ‘right to work’ as I did. My office was at the bottom of a pit. The four sides of the pit were walls with many windows, and I could hear voices speaking in the rooms behind and the click of typewriters, but could not see into them. Only for two or three days in June could I see the sun out of the pit. But in the hot days blue-bottles buzzed on my panes and I took care of them until one by one they lay dead upon the window ledge. There were no spiders and they seemed to have a good life. Sparrows sometimes flew up and down the pit, and once for a week I had the company of a black-and-white pigeon. It sat day after day in a hole in the opposite wall until it died and fell on to the paved yard below. The clouds sailed over the top of the pit. Sea-gulls flew over, all golden-winged, in October afternoons. I liked the fog when all the lights were lit, and though we did not know one another in the pit we seemed to keep one another company. But I liked the rain best of all. It used to splash down from all sides and make a country noise, and I looked up and saw the quaint cowls sitting like cats on the chimney-pots, and had ridiculous fancies that took me far away for a second or two.

“The worst time of all was two or three years after my father’s death. I spent most of my poor earnings on clothes; I took the trouble to talk and smoke and think as much as possible like the other nine young men in the railway carriage that took me into the city; I learned their horrible, cowardly scorn for those who were poor or outlandish, and for all things that were not like those in their own houses or in those of the richer people of their acquaintance or envy. We were slaves, and we gilded our collars.”

“But the journalist and hack writer,” said I, “is worse off. At least your master only asked for your dregs. The hack writer is asked to give everything that can be turned into words at short notice, and so the collar round his neck is never taken off as yours was between six in the afternoon and nine in the morning.”

“Ah, but it is open to you to do good or bad. We could only do bad. All day we were doing things which we did not understand, which could not in any way concern us, which had nothing to do with what we had been taught at school, had read in books or had heard from our fathers and mothers. When he was angry the head of the firm used to say we had better take care or a machine would supersede us in ten years instead of twenty. We had been driven out of life into a corner in an underground passage where everything was unnecessary that did not help us to be quick at figures, or taking down letters from dictation, or neat in dress and obedient to the slaves who were set over us. When we were out of the office we could do nothing which unfitted us for it. The head of the firm used to say that we were each ‘playing a part, however humble, in the sublime machine of modern civilization, that not one of us was unnecessary, and that we must no more complain or grow restive than does the earth because it is one of the least elements in this majestic universe.’ We continued to be neat when we were away from the office, we were disobedient to everything and everybody else that was not armed with the power of taking away our bread—to the old, the poor, the children, the women, the ideas which we had never dreamed of, and that came among us as a white blackbird comes in the winter to a barbarous parish where keeper and gardener and farmer go out with their guns and stalk it from hedge to hedge until, starved and conspicuous and rather apart from its companions, it falls to their beastly shot and is sold to one of the gentry who puts it into a glass case.

“Sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday I broke away in a vague unrest, and walked alone to the pretty places where my father and mother had taken me as a little boy. Most of them I had not seen for five or six years. My visits were often formal. I walked out and was glad to be back to the lights of the street, the strong tea, the newspaper and the novel. But one day I went farther than usual to a wood where we used to go without interference and, after finding all the blackbirds’ and thrushes’ and robins’ nests within reach, boil a kettle and have tea. I had never in that wood seen any man or woman except my father and mother; never heard a voice except theirs—my father perhaps reading Wordsworth aloud—and the singing birds’ and the moorhens’ in the pond at the edge; it used to shut out everything but what I had learned to love most, sunshine and wind and flowers and their love. When I saw it again I cried; I really could not help it. For a road had been made alongside of it, and the builder’s workmen going to and fro had made a dozen gaps in the hedge and trodden the wood backward and forward and broken down the branches and made it noisome. Worse than all, the field, the golden field where I used to lie among the buttercups and be alone with the blue sky—where I first felt the largeness and dearness and nearness of the blue sky as a child of eight and put up my hand in my delight to draw it through the soft blue substance that seemed so near—the field was enclosed, a chapel built; it was a cemetery for all the unknown herd, strange to one another, strange to every one else, that filled the new houses spreading over the land.

“At first I was for running away at once. But the sight made me faint-hearted and my legs dragged, and it was all I could do to get home—I mean, to my lodgings.

“However, I was quite different after that. I was ashamed of my ways, and now spent all my spare time and money in going out into the country as far as possible, and reading the old books and the new ones that I could hear of in the same spirit. I lived for these things. It was now that I knew my slavery. Everything reminded me of it. The return half of my railway ticket to the country said plainly, ‘You have got to be back at —— not later than 10.39 p.m.’ Then I used to go a different way back or even walk the whole way to avoid having this thing in my pocket that proclaimed me a slave.

“It was now that I first accepted the invitation of a relation who lived on the east coast very near the sea. The sea had a sandy shore bounded by a perpendicular sandy cliff, to the edge of which came rough moorland. The sea washed the foot of the cliff at high tide and swept the yellow sand clean twice a day, wiping away all footprints and leaving a fresh arrangement of blue pebbles glistering in the bitter wind. It was impossible to be more alone than on this sand, and I was contented again. The sea brought back the feelings I had when I lay in the buttercup field—the cemetery—and looked into the sky. Walking over the moor the undulations of the land hid and revealed the sea in an always unexpected way, and often as I turned suddenly I seemed to see the blue sky extended so as to reach nearly to my feet and half-way up it went small brown or white clouds like birds—like ships—in fact they were ships sailing on a sea that mingled with the sky. It seemed a beautiful life, where clouds could not help being finely spun or carved, or pebbles help being delicious to eye and touch. But out of the extremity of my happiness came my worst grief. I fell in love. I fell in love with one of my cousins, a girl of seventeen. She never professed to return my love, but she was a most true friend, and for a time I was intoxicated with the delight; I now envy even the brief moment of pain and misery that I had in those days.

“She was clever and understanding so that I was always at my best with her, and yet, too, she was as sweet as a child and strange as an animal. The few moments of pain were when I saw her with the other girls. When they were together, running on the sands or talking or dancing they seemed all to be one, like the wind; and sometimes I thought that like the wind they had no heart amongst them—except mine that raced with the runners and sighed among the laughers. It was lovely to see her with animals! with cows or horses, her implicit motherhood going out to them in an animal kindness, a bluff tenderness without thought. At times I looked carefully and solemnly into her eyes until I was lost in a curious pleasure like that of walking in a shadowy, still, cold place, a cathedral or wintry grove—she had the largest of dark grey eyes; and she did not turn away or smile, but looked fearlessly forward, careless and unashamed like a deep pool in a wood unused to wayfarers. Then she seemed so much a child, and I longed for the days (which I had never really had) when I could have been as careless and bold and free as she was. No, I could never teach those eyes and lips the ways of love: that was for some boy to do. And I thought I will be content to love her and to have her friendliness. I was old for my years, and my life without the influence of women in office and lodgings, I thought, had made me unfit for her delicate ways. I turned away and the sunny ships in the sea were mournful because of my thoughts. But I could not wait. I told her my love. She was not angry or indifferent. She did not reject it. She was afraid. They sent her away to college. She overworked and overplayed, and they have told me she is now a schoolmistress. I see her sad and firm with folded hands. When I knew her she was tall and straight, with long brown hair in two heavy plaits, a shining, rounded brow, dark-lashed, grey eyes, and a smile of inexpressible sweetness in which I once or twice surprised her, pleased with the happiness and beauty of her thoughts and of Nature.

“When I had lost her, or thought I had—

Not comforted to live

But that there is this jewel in the world

Which I may see again——

I resolved that I would not be a slave any more. For a few weeks I used to fancy it was only by a chance I had lost her, and every now and then as I mused over it I got heated and my thoughts raced forward as if in the hope of overtaking and averting that very evil chance which had already befallen, and had in fact caused the train of thought.

“I saved every penny that I could from my salary. In six months I had saved twenty pounds. Out of this I bought a new black suit, a pair of boots and a hat, and gave them to my landlady and asked her to take care of them until I returned, which might be at the end of October. It was then April. I gave notice to my employers and left them. The next day very early I left London, and walked all day and all night until I reached the sea. There I bathed and ate a hearty meal, and walking along the cliffs till I came to a small farmhouse I engaged a bedroom, and there I slept and thought and slept undisturbed for twenty-four hours. I was free. I was free to dream myself no longer one of the mob-led mob. With care my money would last until mid-summer, even if I did no work.

“It was a warm, wet May, and by the end of the month there was a plentiful crop of weeds, and I had no difficulty in getting work at hoeing. Strawberry picking and cherry picking followed. I was very slow and earned little, but it was now warm enough to sleep out, and I earned my food. By the end of July, as I liked the work, I was as useful with my hayrake as any of the women and better than most of the odd hands. I wore my fingers raw at tying up barley and oats and, later on, at feeding the threshing machine. But before the end of October the weather drove me back to London, with ten shillings in my pocket.

“I put on my new clothes and got as good a berth as my first one, and in the hope of another spring and summer out of doors I passed the winter cheerfully. To save more money I went to bed as soon as I got back to my lodgings, and read myself to sleep.

“In May a spell of fine weather drove me to give notice again, and I walked as far as Maidstone the first day. My second summer was like my first. I was already known at half-a-dozen farms. When they could not give me work at once they gave me leave to fish in the three or four ponds to be found on all the farms in the Weald of Kent, and I had many a large, if not always savoury, meal of tench and eels. At the end of the summer I had three pounds in my pocket, and little less by the end of October.

“The winter I passed as before. For five years I lived in this way. Then, for the sake of going abroad on my savings, I worked for a whole year at a desk, and spent four months along the Loire and down to Bordeaux; from there I worked my passage to Newport. Since then I have gone back to my old plan.”

Here he paused and mused. I asked him if he still found it easy to get work in London.

“No, that’s it,” he replied; “my handwriting is worse and it is slow. The first weeks in London seem to undo all the good of my summer outing, especially as my salary is less than it used to be. They begin to ask me if I am a married man when I apply for work. The November rains remind me that I have rheumatism. It is my great fear that I may need a doctor, and so spend my savings, and be unable to leave London until field work is plentiful in June. But I have my freedom; I could, if necessary, take an under-cowman’s place and live entirely on the land. They begin to look at my hands when I apply for clerical work, and I can’t wear gloves.”

“And ten years hence?”

“That is ten years too far ahead for me to look, though I am less cheerful than I used to be. I realize that I belong to the suburbs still. I belong to no class or race, and have no traditions. We of the suburbs are a muddy, confused, hesitating mass, of small courage though much endurance. As for myself, I am world-conscious, and hence suffer unutterable loneliness. I know what bitterness it is to be lacking in those strong tastes and impulses which, blinding men to what does not concern them, enables them to live with a high heart. For example, I have a sensitive palate and am glad of my food, yet whenever I taste lamb—which I do when I can—my pleasure is spoilt by the sight of the butcher carrying a lamb under his arm. There it is. I am sensitive on all sides. Your true man would either forget the sight or he would be moved to a crusade. I can do neither.

“I am weary of seeing things, the outsides of things, for I see nothing else. It makes me wretched to think what swallows are to many children and poets and other men, while to me they are nothing but inimitable, compact dark weights tumbling I do not know how through the translucent air—nothing more, and yet I know they are something more. I apprehend their weight, buoyancy and velocity as they really are, but I have no vision. Then it is that I remember those words of Sir Thomas Browne’s—

“‘I am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet makes no part in us; and that it is the Spirit of God, the fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty essence, which is the life and radical heat of spirits.... This is that gentle heat that brooded on the waters and in six days hatched the world; this is that irradiation that dispels the mists of hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, despair; and preserves the region of the mind in serenity. Whosoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel his pulse) I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to me there is no heat under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwell in the body of the sun.’

“I dare not say I live. And yet the cows, the well-fed, quiet cows, in this fine soft weather stare enviously at me through the gate, though they know nothing of death, and I know it must come, and that even though often desired, when it comes it will be unwelcome——Yet they stare enviously at me, I am sure.

“I have no courage. I can at least endure. I can use my freedom to become a slave again, and at least I know that I have lost nothing by my way of living. Yes, I can endure, and if after my death I am asked questions difficult to answer, I can ask one that is unanswerable which I have many times asked myself—often in London, but not here. Here I love my food and my work, my rest. My dreams are good. I am not unkindly spoken to; I make no enemies.

“But yet I cannot look forward—there is nothing ahead—just as I cannot look back. My people have not built; they were not settled on the earth; they did nothing; they were oil or grit in a great machine; they took their food and shelter modestly and not ungratefully from powers above that were neither kind nor cruel. I hope I do no less; I wish I could do more.

“Now again returns that old feeling of my childhood—I felt it when I had left my cousin—I have felt it suddenly not only in London, but on the top of the Downs and by the sea; the immense loneliness of the world, as if the next moment I might be outside of all visible things. You know how it is, on a still summer evening, so warm that the ploughman and his wife have not sent their children to bed, and they are playing, and their loud voices startle the thought of the woods; my feeling is like that, space and quiet and my own littleness stupendously exaggerated. I have wished I could lay down my thoughts and desires and noises and stirrings and cease to trouble that great peace. It was, perhaps, of this loneliness that the Psalmist spoke: ‘My days are consumed like smoke.... I watch, and am as a sparrow alone on the housetop.’ The world is wrong, but the night is fine; the dew light and the moist air is full of the honeysuckle scent. I will smoke another pipe of your tobacco and leave you for a while. I like to be alone before I sleep.”

The next I saw of him was when he was frying bacon and boiling beans for our meal. “Forget my night thoughts,” he said, “and be thankful for the white dry road and the blue sky. We are not so young but that we must be glad it is summer and fine. As for me, the dry weather is so sweet that I like the smell of elder flower and the haycart horses’ dung and the dust that get into the throat of an evening. Good-bye.”

He went away to wash at the pump, as the cattle spread out from the milking-stalls into the field and filled it with their sweet breath and the sound of their biting the thick grass.

I saw him again a few years later.

London was hot and dry, and would have been parched, cracked and shrivelled had it been alive instead of dead. The masonry was so dry that the eye wearied of it before the feet wearied of the pavement, and both desired the rain that makes the city at one with Nature. The plane-trees were like so many captives along the streets, shackled to the flagstones, pelted with dust, humiliated, all their rusticity ravished though not forgotten. The very sky, lofty, blue, white-clouded, was parched, the blue and the white being soiled by a hot, yellowish-grey scum that harmonizes with gritty pavements and stark towers and spires. The fairest thing to be seen—away from the river—was the intense young green of the grass-blades trying to grow up through the gratings which surround the trees of the streets. The grass was a prophet muttering wild, ambiguous things, and since his voice was very small and came from underground, it was hard to hear him, even without understanding. Thousands tread down the grass, so that except for a few hours at night it can never emerge from the grating.

Some vast machinery plunged and thundered behind the walls, but though they trembled and grew hot, it burst not through. Even so the multitude in the streets, of men and horses and machines and carriages of all kinds, roared and moved swiftly and continuously, encaged within walls that are invisible; and they also never burst through. Both are free to do what they are told. All of the crowd seem a little more securely imprisoned than him who watches, because he is aware of his bars; but they move on, or seem to do, on and on, round and round, as thoughtless as the belt of an engine.

There was not one face I knew; not one smiled; not one relaxed or contracted with a thought, an emotion, a fancy; but all were clear, hard, and fixed in a vice, so that though they were infinite in their variety—no two eyebrows set the same way, no two mouths in the same relation to the eyes—the variety seemed the product of a senseless ingenuity and immense leisure, as of a sublime philatelist. Hardly one spoke; only the women moved from left to right instead of straight on, and their voices were inaudible when their lips moved. The roar in which all played a part developed into a kind of silence which not any one of these millions could break; the sea does not absorb the little rivers more completely than this silence the voices of men and women, than this solitude their personalities. Now and then a face changed, an eyebrow was cocked, or a mouth fell; but it meant less to me than the flutter as of a bird when drop by drop the rain drips from the beeches and gives a plash and a trembling to one leaf and then another in the undergrowth. There is a more than human force in the movement of the multitude, more than the sum of all the forces in the arched necks, the grinding chest muscles, and the firm feet of the horses, the grace of the bright women, the persistency of the tall men and thick men. They cannot stop. They look stupid or callous or blank or even cruel. They are going about another’s business; they conceal their own, hiding it so that they forget (as a drunkard forgets where he has hidden his gold) where they have hidden it, hiding their souls under something stiffer and darker than the clothing of their bodies. It is hard to understand why they do not sometimes stop one another, to demand where the soul and the soul’s business is hid, to snatch away the masks. It was intolerable that they were not known to me, that I was not known to them, that we should go on like waves of the sea, obeying whatever moon it is that sends us thundering on the unscalable shores of night and day. Such force, such determination as moved us along the burning streets might scale Olympus. Where was he who could lead the storming-party?

Between a pack of cabs and a pack of ’buses there was a quiet space of fifty yards in length; for a little while it seemed that the waves were refusing their task. There was not one black coat, not one horse, not one brightly loaded ’bus: no haste. It was a procession.

In front marched a tall son of man, with white black-bearded face, long black hair, more like plumage than hair in its abundance and form, and he wore no hat. He walked straight as a soldier, but with long, slow steps, and his head hung so that his bare breast supported it, for he had no coat and his shirt was half open. He had knee-breeches, bare dark legs, and shoes on his feet. His hands were behind his back, as if he were handcuffed. Two men walked beside him in other men’s black clothes and black hats worn grey—two unnoticeable human beings, snub-nosed, with small, rough beards, dull eyes, shuffling gait. Two others followed them close, each carrying one of the poles of a small white banner inscribed with the words: “The Unemployed.” These also were unnoticeable, thin, grey, bent, but young, their clothes, their faces, their hair, their hats almost the same dry colour as the road. It was impossible to say what their features were, because their heads hung down and their hats were drawn well on to their heads, and their eyes were unseen. They could not keep step, nor walk side by side, and their banner was always shaky and always awry. Next, in no order, came three others of the same kind, shambling like the rest, of middle height, moderately ill-dressed, moderately thin, their hands in their pockets. In one of these I recognized the man who was born in Caermarthenshire. A cart came close behind, drawn by a fat grey donkey who needed no driving, for the one who rode in the cart had his back to the shafts, and, leaning forward on a tub into which money was expected to be thrown, he appeared to be talking to those who trailed at the back, for he waved an arm and wagged his yellow beard. He was fat, and dressed in a silk hat, frock-coat and striped trousers, almost too ancient to be ridiculous had they not kept company with a jaunty pair of yellow boots. He was midway between a seaside minstrel and a minister, had not one gesture destroyed the resemblance by showing that he wore no socks. Round about his coat also were the words: “The Unemployed,” repeated or crudely varied. Those whom he addressed were the fifteen or twenty who completed the procession but seemed not to listen. They were all bent, young or middle-aged men, fair-haired, with unintentional beards, road-coloured skins and slightly darker clothes. Many wore overcoats, the collars turned up, and some had nothing under them except a shirt, and one not that. All with hands in pockets, one carrying a pipe, all silent and ashamed, struggled onward with bent knees. No two walked together; there was no approach to a row or a column in their arrangement, nor was there any pleasing irregularity as of plants grown from chance-scattered seed; by no means could they have been made to express more feebleness, more unbrotherliness, more lack of principle, purpose or control. Each had the look of the meanest thief between his captors. Two blue, benevolent, impersonal policemen, large men, occasionally lifted their arms as if to help forward the contemptible procession; sometimes, with a quick motion of the hand, they caused the straggling rear to double their pace for a few yards by running with knees yet more bent and coat-tails flapping and hands still deep in pockets—only for a few yards, for their walking pace was their best, all having the same strength, the same middle height, the same stride, though no two could be seen keeping step.

The traffic thickened, and amidst the horses that nodded and trampled and the motor-cars that fumed and fretted the procession was closed up into a grey block behind the donkey-cart. On one side of the donkey was the black-bearded man, his right arm now resting on the animal’s neck; on the other side the policemen; in front the standard-bearers hung down their heads and held up their poles. Often the only remnant visible was the raven crest of the leader.

The multitude on the pavement continued to press straight onward, or to flit in and out of coloured shops. None looked at the standard, the dark man and his cloudy followers, except a few of the smallest newspaper boys who had a few spare minutes and rushed over to march with them in the hope of music or a speech or a conflict. The straight flower-girl flashed her eyes as she stood on the kerb, her left arm curving with divine grace round the shawl-hidden child at her bosom, her left hand thrust out full of roses. The tender, well-dressed women leaning on the arms of their men smiled faintly, a little pitiful, but gladly conscious of their own security and pleasantness. Men with the historic sense glanced and noted the fact that there was a procession. One man, standing on the kerb, took a sovereign from his pocket, looked at it and then at the unemployed, made a little gesture of utter bewilderment, and dropping the coin down into the drain below, continued to watch. Comfortable clerks and others of the servile realized that here were the unemployed about whom the newspapers had said this and that—(“a pressing question”—“a very complicated question not to be decided in a hurry”—“it is receiving the attention of some of the best intellects of the time”—“our special reporter is making a full investigation”—“who are the genuine and who are the impostors?”—“connected with Socialist intrigues”)—and they repeated the word “Socialism” and smiled at the bare legs of the son of man and the yellow boots of the orator. Next day they would smile again with pride that they had seen the procession which ended in feeble, violent speeches against the Army and the Rich, in four arrests and an imprisonment. For they spoke in voices gentle with hunger. They were angry and uttered curses. One waved an arm against a palace, an arm that could scarcely hold out a revolver even were all the kings sitting in a row to tempt him. In the crowd and disturbance the leader fell and fainted. They propped him in their arms and cleared a space about him. “Death of Nelson,” suggested an onlooker, laughing, as he observed the attitude and the knee-breeches. “If he had only a crown of thorns ...” said another, pleased by the group. “Wants a bit of skilly and real hard work,” said a third.

CHAPTER VII
A RAILWAY CARRIAGE—SURREY—SUSSEX

I left London as quickly as possible. The railway carriage was nearly full of men reading the same newspapers under three or four different names, when a little grizzled and spectacled man of middle age entered—a printer, perhaps—with a twisted face and simple and puzzled expression that probably earned him many a laugh from street-corner boys. As he sat down he recognized a sailor, a tall, ponderous, kind-faced man made in three distinct storeys, who supported his enormous red hands upon knees each fit to have been the mould of a hero’s helmet.

“Well, I never did, and how are you, Harry?”

They looked at one another kindly but with a question piercing through the kindness and an effort to divine the unknowable without betraying curiosity. The kindness did, in fact, melt away the almost physical obstacle of twenty years spent apart and in ignorance of one another.

“When did you leave the old place?” said the sailor.

“Soon after you did yourself, Harry; just after the shipwreck of the Wild Swan; twenty-one, twenty-two—yes, twenty-two years ago.”

“Is it so long? I could have sworn you had that beard when I saw you last,” and the sailor looked at him in a way that showed he had already bridged the twenty-two years and knew the man.

“Yes, twenty-two years.”

“And do you ever go back to the old place? How’s Charlie Nash, and young Woolford, and the shepherd?”

“Let me see——”

“But how is Maggie Looker?” broke in the sailor upon a genial answer in the bud.

“Oh, didn’t you know? She took ill very soon after you went away, and then they thought she was all right again; but they could not quite get rid of the cough, and it got bad in the winter, and all through the spring it was worse.”

“And so she died in the summer.”

“So she did.”

“Oh, Christ! but what times we had.”

And then, in reminiscences fast growing gay—the mere triumph of memory, the being able to add each to the other’s store, was a satisfaction—they told the story of a pretty country girl whom they had quarrelled over until she grew too proud for both; how heavy was her hair; how she could run, and nobody was like her for finding a wasps’-nest. Her boldness and carelessness filled them with envy still.

“I reckon we old ones would call her a tomboy now,” said the sailor.

“I should say we would.”

“Now, I wonder what sort of a wife she would have made?”

“Hum, I don’t know....”

“Do you remember that day her and you and me got lost in the forest?”

“Yes, and we were there all night, and I got a hiding for it.”

“Not Maggie.”

“Not poor Maggie.”

“And when we couldn’t see our way any more we lifted her up into that old beech where the green woodpecker’s nest was.”

“Yes, and you took off your coat and breeches to cover her up.”

“And so did you, though I reckon one would have been enough now I come to think of it.”

“I don’t know about that. But how we did have to keep on the move all night to keep warm.”

“And dared not go very far for fear of losing the tree.”

“And in the morning I wondered what we should do about getting back our clothes.”

“You wanted me to go because my shirt hadn’t any holes in it.”

“But we both went together.”

“And, before we had made up our minds which should go first and call, up she starts. Lord, how she did laugh!”

“Ay, she did.”

“And says, ‘Now, that’s all my eye and Betty Martin, boys’; and so did we laugh, and I never felt a bit silly either. She was a good sort of girl, she was. Man and woman, I never met the likes of her, never heard tell of the equal of her,” said the sailor musingly.

“Married, Harry?”

“No, nor likely to be, I don’t think. And yourself?”

“Well, I was.... I married Maggie.... It was after the first baby....”

A small boy in a corner could not get on with his novelette: he stared open-mouthed and open-eyed, now and then unconsciously imitating their faces; or he would correct this mere wonderment and become shy and uncomfortable at the frank ways of these men talking aloud in a crowded carriage, and utterly regardless of others, about private matters.

A trim shop assistant pretended to read about the cricket, but listened, and could not conceal his cold contempt for men so sunken as to give themselves away like this.

A dark, thin, genial, pale-faced puritan clerk looked pitifully—with some twinkles of superiority that asked for recognition from his fellow-passengers—these children, for as such he regarded them, and would not wholly condemn.

Others occasionally jerked out a glance or rolled a leaderless eye or rustled a newspaper without losing the dense veil over their individuality that made them tombs, monuments, not men.

One sat gentle, kindly, stupidly envying these two their spirited free talk, their gestures, the hearty draughts of life which they seemed to have taken.

All were botanists who had heard and spoken words but had no sense of the beauty and life of the flower because fate had refused, or education destroyed, the gift of liberty and of joy.

SURREY.

Then I saw a huge silence of meadows, of woods, and beyond these, of hills that raised two breasts of empurpled turf into the sky; and, above the hills, one mountain of cloud that beamed as it reposed in the blue as in a sea. The white cloud buried London with a requiescat in pace.

I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers—as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero. I like to see the preliminaries of this toil where Nature tries her hand at mossing the factory roof, rusting the deserted railway metals, sowing grass over the deserted platforms and flowers of rose-bay on ruinous hearths and walls. It is a real satisfaction to see the long narrowing wedge of irises that runs alongside and between the rails of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway almost into the heart of London. And there are many kinds of weather when the air is full of voices prophesying desolation. The outer suburbs have almost a moorland fascination when fog lies thick and orange-coloured over their huge flat wastes of grass, expectant of the builder, but does not quite conceal the stark outlines of a traction engine, some procumbent timber, a bonfire and frantic figures darting about it, and aërial scaffolding far away. Other fields, yet unravished but menaced, the fog restores to a primeval state. And what a wild noise the wind makes in the telegraph wires as in wintry heather and gorse! When the waste open spaces give way to dense streets there is a common here and a lawn there, where the poplar leaves, if it be November, lie taintless on the grass, and the starlings talk sweet and shrill and cold in the branches, and nobody cares to deviate from the asphalte path to the dewy grass: the houses beyond the green mass themselves gigantic, remote, dim, and the pulse of London beats low and inaudible, as if she feared the irresistible enemy that is drawing its lines invisibly and silently about her on every side. If a breeze arises it makes that sound of the dry curled leaves chafing along the pavement; at night they seem spies in the unguarded by-ways. But there are also days—and spring and summer days, too—when a quiet horror thicks and stills the air outside London.

The ridges of trees high in the mist are very grim. The isolated trees stand cloaked in conspiracies here and there about the fields. The houses, even whole villages, are translated into terms of unreality as if they were carved in air and could not be touched; they are empty and mournful as skulls or churches. There is no life visible; for the ploughmen and the cattle are figures of light dream. All is soft and grey. The land has drunken the opiate mist and is passing slowly and unreluctantly into perpetual sleep. Trees and houses are drowsed beyond awakening or farewell. The mind also is infected, and gains a sort of ease from the thought that an eternal and universal rest is at hand without any cry or any pain.

SUSSEX.

The road skirts the marshland, the stream and the town, and goes through a gap in the Downs towards another range and more elms and farms at its feet. Stately walks the carter’s boy with his perpendicular brass-bound whip, alongside four waggon-horses, while the carter rides. It is a pleasant thing to see them going to their work in the early gold of the morning, fresh, silent, their horses jingling, down the firm road. If they were leading their team to yoke them to the chariot of the sun they could not be more noble. They are the first men I have seen this morning, and truly they create for a little while the illusion that they are going to guide the world and that all will be well in the golden freshness under the blue.