Part 10

Coming over the Downs one winter’s morning, I saw a thin blue spiral of smoke rising from the very centre of a great patch of gorse on a hill-side; and threading my way through the wilderness, bent on elucidating this phenomenon, I came at length upon a queer little scene. At the mouth of a sort of cave cut deep into the solid green heart of the gorse thicket, burned a little fire of sticks; and over it hung a pot that gave forth a savoury steam. Behind the fire lay Darkie on a snug couch of hay and old sacking, fast asleep, with a pipe in his mouth. Evidently he had dozed off in the midst of his preparations for a meal. I took one swift look round his castle, noting various old tins, old coats, and the like hanging over his head; several sugar-boxes filled with odd lumber behind him; and a shepherd’s folding-bar—a deadly weapon, twenty pounds or so of solid iron—lying conveniently to his hand; and then I crept away, as silently as I had come. Not that I feared any violence from him. In all the years we had been acquainted, I had never known him harm a mouse. But many was the time I had turned him away from my own door, unceremoniously enough; sometimes with hard words, once or twice, indeed, with threatenings of his natural enemy, the constable. And I feared now reprisals of a kind that would hurt almost as much as the folding-bar heftily wielded—I feared to see Darkie stagger to his feet and pull off to me one of my own long-discarded caps, hear him give me generous and courtly words of welcome, and a kind look out of his mastiff’s eyes, making me as free of his snug, green-roofed dwelling as I had so often made him free of the street.

Towards the hour of sunset I went up to the little attic window again, and looked out over the drenched housetops for any sign of a break in the weather. The rain had ceased, and the western sky had lightened somewhat, taking on an indefinable warmth of hue. There was no sunshine, nor any hope of sunshine; but there was a light abroad that picked out all the browns and reds and yellows in the landscape, wondrously intensifying them, while leaving all other hues as grey and cold as ever.

Past eleven o’clock, and a cloudless night of stars, with the wood-larks singing high over the village, and the cuckoos calling in the hills as though it were broad day. Yes—the change has come: Farmer Coles is never far out in his prognostications. It will be cutting weather to-morrow; and to-morrow I must be up with the earliest of them, and away to the Hoe-field.

IV

Of summer evenings in Windlecombe, all through haying and harvest time, you see men lounging about the village, one and all obsessed by the same trance-like, serenely dilatory mood. All have pipes well alight, leaving a trail of smoke behind them on the dusky golden air. All have hands thrust deep in trouser-pockets, carry their unshaven chins high, are tired as dogs, and look as somnolently happy as noontide owls. And of all the days of the week, there are more of these placid optimists abroad, and these characteristics are most to be noted in them, on the evening of the last working day.

To-night I went up and down the green—the most uncertain of a deliberately irresolute company—half a dozen times, perhaps, before, by common but unvoiced consent, we turned our lagging footsteps towards the inn. All the while I was rejoicing in a possession, priceless indeed, yet hard-won as might be—a heart and mind filled with the spirit of the _Cottar’s Saturday Night_. You cannot get this chief of all country pleasures in exchange for money. It is to be had in only one way, at the cost of long laborious days in the fields; and every tired muscle, every aching joint in my body, stood then as witness that I had done my best to earn what I had of it, if it might be earned at all. The old oak window-seat, in the parlour of the Three Thatchers, was as softly welcome as the Chancellor’s woolsack: I would not have exchanged that mug of home-brewed ale for a draught of ambrosia at the feet of the gods.

The crimson sunset light streamed hot upon me, as I sat on the window-ledge half among the parlour company, and half among those congregated on the benches under the virginia creeper outside. Every moment or two some other tired haymaker strolled up, and added his solid breadth and his tobacco smoke to the throng. But we were not all field-workers in the Three Thatchers to-night, nor had only the common causes of tired limbs and sun-parched throats brought us together. Young Daniel Dray was knitting his dark brows over some papers and account-books at the trestle-table; and young Tom Clemmer sat close by, thoughtfully swinging a cricket-bat pendulum-fashion between his outstretched legs. A silence fell upon the company.

‘Well,’ said Tom Clemmer at last, ‘I dunno. ’Tis ne’ersome-matter awk’ard fer Windlecombe. Wi’ young Maast’ Coles hayin’, an’ Tim Searle hayin’; an’ George Locker, an’ Tom an’ George Wright, an’ Bill here all hayin’, how i’ fortun’ be us to make up a team?’

You could pick out the members of the cricket-club committee amidst the crowd by reason of their grave, troubled faces; whereas all other faces wore the easy contented smile of the village Saturday night. We had weighty business to consider. The annual challenge had arrived from the Stavisham club. They were a cocksure, overweening lot, the town-eleven; and we had set our hearts on beating them at next Saturday’s match. But there was the hay to carry, if the weather held. Many of our best players would be in the fields. It looked as though the town were to add Windlecombe again to their long list of village victories. Secretary Dray gnawed savagely at the butt of his pen.

‘I knows how ’twill be,’ he said. ‘Five men an’ a tail o’ boys—the ould story! Tom here ’ull knock up his couple o’ score; and then ’twill be hout, hout, hout, fer th’ rest o’ us i’ two hovers. An’ I can jest hear they chalk-headed town chaps larfin’!’

It was a dismal picture. The fragrance went out of our tobacco, and no man thought of his ale. The three canaries carolled so joyously in their cages overhead, that I could have wrung their necks with all the pleasure in life. Young Daniel stared straight into the eye of the setting sun with the very face of disaster.

‘But ’tis th’ bawlin’,’ he went on. ‘Ne’er a change o’ bawlers, there’ll be; an’ me an’ George Havers caan’t go on fer ever. Na, na! ’tis all over agen, I tell ye! The boys ull ha’ their fun, an’ Windlecombe another smashin’!’

He swept the club papers into his pocket, and rose to fill a pipe.

‘But mind ye!’ he added, looking grimly round on the company, ‘I’ll ha’ that there flitter-mouse grocer-chap’s wicket this time, or I’ll be— Ah! you see if I doan’t, if I ha’ to throw at his ’ed!’

* * * * *

Long after night had fallen, and all the village was quiet under the dim half-moon, I came out again upon the green, to wander and ruminate over the week that had gone by. I bared my arm to the biceps, and even in that disguising light I could see the sunburn dark upon it. Yawning and stretching involuntarily, a delicious ache spread over me from top to toe. The Seven Sisters loomed hard by, and I went and lay down at full length on one of the seats, looking up through the black wilderness of boughs at the flinching starshine, and watching the nightjars as they wheeled and whirred above me through the scented dark.

They are a merry company, the nightjars. Perhaps there is no other sound in Nature that comes nearer to pure mirth and jollity than this rhythmic, spinning-wheel chorus of theirs. Up there, where the dense pine foliage made a sort of black coast to the dark blue ocean of the summer night, a whole nation of them was astir. They did not utter their peculiar note when on the wing; but every moment or two one of the concourse came to rest on a branch with a sudden snap, and forthwith set his spinning-jenny blithely going.

There is another sound which you hear of summer evenings, often far into the night, and which is nearly akin to that of the nightjar. I heard it only a minute ago in one of the garden hedges as I came across the green. But when the two songs occur together, there is no confusing them. They are both continuous, mechanical sounds, and each is curiously varied in tone, speed, and intensity. But while the nightjar’s music is a rich full tremolo, uttered from some high point, generally the branch of a tree, the grasshopper-warbler sings always close to earth. His note is thinner, shriller, faster. If your fingers were as deft as his slender throat, you could imitate the sound exactly by the rapid chinking together of two threepenny-bits.

JULY

I

IN the spring of the year, July seems as far off as middle-age seems to youth, and almost as undesirable. But when midsummer-day is past and gone, whether in human life or the year’s progress, we look at things with clearer, more widely ranging eyes. The man in his prime strength, the season at the summit of its beauty—these are fairer things than the childhood and the springtime that have gone to make them. For the greater must be all the greater and more wonderful, because it contains the wondrous less.

Here is the first day of July come, and ever since sunrise I have been straying about the field-paths and lanes, wending home, indeed, only when the fierce noontide heat and a ravening hunger combined to drive me thither. There was this fierce, tropic quality in the sunlight from the very first. Though the gilt arrow on the church dial pointed barely to four o’clock, the level sunbeams struck hot and bright on the face; and the dew in the grass by the laneside was shrinking visibly with every moment. In an hour the last water-bell was gone from the shadiest nook in the wood. Only the teasels could defy the thirsty sun, and these kept their water-traps over-brimming, as if fed from a magic source, far into the heat of the day.

There are many common things of the country-side—small facts to be learned for the trouble of a glance—which are little known because the glance is seldom given. As I passed along the hedge where the teasels stood up straight as a row of church spires, the glitter of the water in their leaf-cups caught my eye, and I stopped to look at them. I had always thought of the teasels as natural drinking-places for the bees, and other flying or creeping things; but now I saw that their use was very different. Studying the plant carefully, the whole meaning of the thing dawned on me at last. The teasel must be a flesh-eater, more greedy and destructive than any spider in the land. In the cups a host of creatures lay drowned; and upon the green, translucent leaves and stems there crawled multitudes of others, all destined for the same fate. There were in the water not only small insects, but bumble-bees, large caterpillars and slugs, even broad-winged night-moths that had fallen to the teasel’s snare. I saw also that the pools of water insulating every stem served not as traps alone, but actually as digestive cells, wherein the carcases of the teasel’s prey were gradually resolved into the slime that lay at the bottom of each cup. Somehow, I conjectured, this must be absorbed into the tissue of the plant; and cutting one of the stems asunder, just where the water-holding leaves embraced it, I came upon what seemed proof of this—a ring of apertures at the base of each cup—sink holes, in fact—leading into the substance of the stem.

The path wound up a hill-side over a field of tares, rippling away before me through the sea of purple blossom until it ended abruptly against the blue sky far above. And here another minute wonder brought me to a halt. Though it was so early, the hive-bees were out and about in their thousands. The great field was besieged by them. The air throbbed with their music. A madness for honey-making seemed upon them all; and yet, of all the busy thousands upon thousands set loose amidst what seemed illimitable forage-ground, nowhere could I see a hive-bee upon a flower. I went down on hands and knees for a closer view, believing at first that my eyes were playing false with me. But there was no doubt about it. Though on every side the great furry bumble-bees were seizing upon, and dragging open the purple blooms of the tares, the hive-bees never touched these, for all they were in so huge a heat and flurry of work.

Now I knew that, while every other insect under heaven has its times of relaxation, deeming moments given over to dancing in a sunbeam or basking on a wall as moments not ill-spent, the honey-bee allows herself no such wasteful delights. If she were here in this tare-field in her thousands, and here she was, she came for no other purpose than a useful one. Clearly, therefore, the hive-bees were getting nectar in abundance: yet how, if they were not seeking it in the flowers?

Another minute’s careful watch resolved the mystery. The tare-plant can almost rank with the slug-devouring teasel as a curiosity of the country-side. Knowing well that the hive-bee’s tongue is not long enough to reach the sweets at the bottom of its flower-cup, the tare provides a special feast outside. At the base of each leaf-and flower-stalk, just where these join on to the main stem, will be found a little green flap or fin. In the centre of this fin is a valve, from which exudes a thick sweet liquid. If you are quicker than the bee, you may see the tiny globule shining in the sun as you turn the plant up. But even as you look, a bee fusses in between your fingers, drinks up the liquid in a moment, and hums off to the next stalk. If we can extend no more sympathy to the bee in her folly of never-ending labours than to a lily-of-the-field at toil, we must at least concede something for her fearlessness. A peep into her own looking-glass is not always all of virtue’s reward.

Over the field of purple tares, and on through the cornfields—wheat waving high and green, with the scarlet poppies flushing midway down in its murmuring depths. Who would have hawthorn and buttercups, the bridal white and gold of spring, when he can have poppies by the million, and roses, a wagon-load to be gathered from every hedgerow, if he will? Where I stood, breast-high in the wheat-field, the poppies crowded thick together among the green stems, making one unbroken sheet of colour that I could hardly look upon in the full light of the summer sun. A little way onward, and this blood-red flare was softened instantly: a dozen yards away there was nothing but the rustling green of the wheat. Every moment a lark rose out of the corn, singing, or dropped into it like a stone silently out of the blue. The hedgerow on the far side of the field shone with the roses, tremulous, uncertain, in the heated air. Beyond, in the blue mist of woodlands, a blackbird chanted his joy of the morning; and all round me in the distant ring of hills, there were cuckoos chiming, each note clear but double, some of the songs perfect still.

From the wheat, the path led me presently into the oat-fields, green too, but of a cooler, greyer tinge; and full of a stealthy motion and the sound of wind, though scarce a breath was moving overhead. There is something eerie, mysterious, about a field of oats on a hot summer’s morning. It is as though the ears bent together and whispered to each other, passing the word on unceasingly from plant to plant. Looking over the plane of grey-green awns, stretching away under the still sunshine, you see low wavelets rise and fall, furrows come and go; the light changes; or, suddenly, the whole expanse grows mute and still. A gentle, inconstant breeze would produce exactly this effect; but you see it when not a leaf moves in the highest treetops, when even the aspens have hushed their quivering music under the noontide glare. No doubt, in a minor degree, all plants show this movement, whether it be caused by the travelling heat of the sun, or be simply due to the varying impetus of growth. In a great field of corn closely drilled, there are always the separate individualities of the plants comprising it to be reckoned with. That these exist in fact, as well as in fancy, is difficult to demonstrate. But that each field has a communal spirit—often different from, or wholly antagonistic to, that of its near neighbour—is evident. For how else to explain why all the ears of corn in one field lean eastward, and all the ears in the next field may incline normally to the west?

Coming homeward at last, surfeited of sunshine, eyes and ears outwearied with the brilliance and the melody of the day, I stopped awhile in the shadow of the church tower to consider an old familiar, yet perennially interesting thing. Just as I, at fiercest noon, was returning to the shelter of my own cool, ivy-mantled nest, the swifts that built in the tower were lancing back to their homes in the gloom of the belfry. Singly, in twos and threes together, every moment saw them arriving and disappearing through the jalousies; but now none went forth again, though they had been coming and going all the morning long. There they would remain, I knew, quiet in the temperate dark of the old tower, until the sun had got out of its furnace-like mood. And then they would be out and about again, yet filled with a wholly different spirit. And towards sunset they would be tearing round the sky in a madcap chevy-chase, screaming like black imps let out of Inferno.

II

Windlecombe Mead, where the village cricket matches have been played from time immemorial, lies on the gently sloping ground between Arun river and the hills. It was the day of the great annual match with Stavisham, and most of the older villagers had congregated on the benches round the scoring-tent, when, in the sweltering heat of early afternoon, I hurried down to the field with pencil and book. The townsmen, it seemed, had won the toss, and had elected to put the home-team in. Young Tom Clemmer and young Daniel Dray were already at the wickets, taking middle. I looked round at the glum, set faces of the spectators, and felt tragedy in the air.

‘Fower men an’ a parson,’ whispered the old cobbler to me behind his hand, ’a ould rickety chap as caan’t run, an’ five bits o’ lads! Drat that there hay! Heough! Now they’re aff!’

The umpire had called Play. The fast Stavisham bowler—we knew him of old—retired into open country, wheeled, and bore down on the crease like a bull at a gate. Young Daniel ducked, then turned up a face of indignant scarlet. But the ball had gone by for two, and a chuckle of relief spread through the crowd. The bowler prepared to try again.

‘Dan’l’s got th’ sun in ’s eyes,’ said old Dray anxiously, as he watched. ‘’A never can bide that top wicket! Steady now, Dannie, an’ keep a straight bat!’

He roared out the last words. And then, in a moment, we were all on our feet in consternation. The ball had never left the bowler’s hand—that much we were sure of. Daniel stood at his wicket safe and sound, but Tom Clemmer was coming back to the tent, followed by a derisive chorus from the whole field.

‘Hout, Tom? Never hout!’

‘What i’ th’ wureld houted ye, lad?’

‘Hout! Never!—’tis a swindle, Tom!’

Amidst the eager exclamations of his friends, Tom Clemmer strode into the tent, and began slowly to unbuckle his pads. All the time he stared fixedly into space.

‘I could ha’ hup wi’ my fist,’ he said, after a moment’s wrathful silence, addressing no one in particular, ’an’ I could ha’ gi’en that there grocer-chap sech a— But there! ’tis no sense yammerin’! Doan’t ye run out, sir, or ’a ’ll ha’ ye, same as ’a had me!’

He spoke now to the curate, who was preparing to go to the wicket, and the truth dawned upon us at last. The bowler had played Tom a very ancient and very mean-spirited trick. Old Clemmer, regardless of the agony it caused him, stamped his swaddled foot upon the ground.

‘An’ to think, Tom!’ he groaned, ‘as ye lit up th’ forge-fire special for ’un only laast Sunday, ’cause his ould mare—’

But we had no thought for anything but the disaster that had befallen us, and all that was now imminent. With Tom Clemmer, the one hope of Windlecombe, out of the fight, what might happen to the rest? With bated breath we watched for the third ball. Young Daniel drove it over the bowler’s head, and with a trembling pencil I put down two to his name. Playing with desperate care, he added two more before the end of the over, and we began to pluck up heart again. Young Tom came and stood behind me. His big thumb travelled down the list of names on the scoring-book.

‘’Tis not lost yet!’ he said with reviving cheerfulness. ‘Dan’l may do well, wanst ’a gets set. An’ belike Mr. Weaverly ’ull bide out a bit. Then there be Huggins wi’ his luck; an’ who knaws but what the boys ’ull account fer a dozen or so atween ’em?’

I had now time, as the fielders were accommodating themselves to the left-handed batting of the curate, to glance down the list. The last name came upon me as an utter surprise.

‘What? Never old Stallwood! Why, he must be seventy, if he’s a—’

‘Ay! Cap’n Stall’ard sure enow! ’Tis a joke, more ’n anything. But ne’er another livin’ sowl there wur, as cud— Oh, Jupitty! Mr. Weaverly’s hout leg-afore!’

But it was not Mr. Weaverly’s leg. With a white face, his body bent to the shape of an inverted letter L, and both arms clasped about his middle, the curate came tip-toeing back to the tent. He sat down silently in a corner. Huggins—a lean, red-whiskered giant in moleskins—burst out into the sunshine and made for the wicket, waving his bat like a war-club and murmuring imprecations as he went.

‘Now ’tis jest touch-an’-go,’ said young Tom in my ear. ‘If ’a hits ’em, they’ll travel, you mark me! ’Twill be eether th’ river, th’ town, or Windle Hill.’

Huggins stood at the wicket, legs wide apart, and bat held high over his head. The bowling now was swift, stealthy, underhand. The ball sped down the pitch, never leaving the grass for an inch. A crack rang out in the dazzling July sunshine. Daniel Dray started to run, but the batsman waved him back. Huggins stood watching the skied ball until it came to ground in the next field. He laughed uproariously.

‘What d’ye think o’ ee?’

It was another four, and that made eleven in all. Huggins swung up his bat, and spread his great hob-nailed boots for a still mightier effort. The ball hissed down the pitch. Huggins caught it as it hopped from a tussock. Like a lark it soared up into the blue, and we heard a clear musical plunk as it dropped into the river. A roar of delight burst from the crowd.

‘Lost ball!’ shouted Tom behind me. ‘Hooroar! Seventeen!’

Huggins spat upon his hands, took a reef in his leather belt, and lifted his bat again. The little underhand bowler came crouching up to the crease, and launched the new ball almost from his knees. Wide and wild it flew this time. But there was a sound of crashing timber; Huggins’s wicket scattered into space, stumps and bails whirling together half-way up the pitch. He had hit the wrong thing.

‘An’ now,’ wailed poor Tom Clemmer, ‘’tis as good as finished. Dan’l wunt ha’ no chaance. Jest as well declare, an’ ha’ done wi’ it. Th’ boys?—they’ll be all done in a hover, an’—’

‘Well, an’ what about th’ Cap’n, Tom?’

It was the voice of the Captain himself, and we all turned to look. He was leaning comfortably against the tent pole, the very picture of an old, superannuated forecastle-hand. He wore his usual vast faded blue suit. A seaman’s cap with hard shiny peak gripped his bald head from the rear. His red face swam in joviality and perspiration. Tom regarded him with mingled respect and doubt.

‘Ye caan’t run, Maast’ Stall’ard.’

‘Trew, Tom!’

‘An’ ye ha’ant touched a crickut bat fer thirty year.’