Part 16

But having made all these exact preparations, I chanced to turn to the open window for a final look down the street, and knew at once that I was lost. It was the steady far-off song from Tom Clemmer’s anvil that overcame me more than anything, and the red glow amidst the elder-boughs that overhung the forge. But all else conspired in one basilisk-like lure to get me forth. The busy wending to and fro, and the cheery commerce of tongues in the darkness, footsteps and voices that I knew as well as I knew my own; twinkling lights in cottages, the illumined windows of the little sweetstuff shop, the cobbler’s den, the inn, the village store; the church lit up for evensong, and the bell quietly tolling, as it seemed, somewhere far up in the black void of the sky; again, the smell of the night, that moist, earthy fragrance of decaying leaves, and tang of frost, and pungent scent of simmering fire-logs from stacks new-broached on these first chilly evenings in November—it all ranged itself together before me as something, ever present and constant in my life, that I too often disregarded, took for granted—the jumble of thatch and red-tiled roof and grey flint wall, sheep and lowing kine and cackling poultry, bevy of kindly human hearts, sharp tongues and willing hands, all wedged up together in one green crevice of the hills, and calling themselves collectively by the old South-Saxon name of Windlecombe.

I went first of all a few strides out over the green and looked backward, rightly to estimate, if I could, my own part in the little communal symphony. The bluff bulk of the house, with its coven roof and many gables, stood dark against the greyer darkness of the hills, and behind it rose sable elm plumes fast thinning under the recent autumn chills. From its windows shone lights of varying significance. There were my own red-shaded candles with a corner of a crammed bookcase dimly visible above them; there were naked kitchen lights with ware of polished pewter and copper glinting behind, and a pleasant clatter of crockery; there was a window where the light burnt red and low and wavering as from a spent hearth, and a quiet ripple of music from a piano keeping it congenial company; there was the window high up in the great gable, whose flickering light cast a bunch of head-shadows on the ceiling, suggestive of nursery bedtime, and fairy-tales round the fire. It was all very reassuring and enheartening. Yes: the old White House had its integral part to play in this good English game of Neighbourhood, and played it passing well.

Round Tom Clemmer’s forge a group of village lads was gathered, all looking on at the work with an interest that amounted well-nigh to fascination. As I came up, and stood unobserved in the shadow of the elder-tree, there was before me a picture in which two colours only were represented glowing crimson and deep velvety black. Young Tom stood, pincers in hand, watching the iron in the fire. Behind him his apprentice laboured at the bellows. With every wheezy puff, the furnace roared out an imprecation, and spat hot cinders upon the floor.

It was a large piece of metal that Tom had in work, something out of the ordinary run of his business, it seemed, and he turned it and shifted it with an anxious eye. No one spoke a word, for somehow we all knew that a crisis was coming, and we were expected to hold our tongues until it was victoriously past. At length the moment came. Tom thrust the pincers into the blaze and drew the white-hot iron out upon the anvil. Immediately the apprentice left the bellows, seized a great hammer, and swinging it over his head, began to let fall on the metal an unceasing rain of mighty blows. As Tom twisted and manoeuvred the glowing mass about with all the strength of his wiry arms, it lengthened, squared itself in the middle, flattened out at each end, bent into complicated curves, then turned upon itself and was united miraculously head to tail. Still gripping the writhing thing with one hand, Tom took a punch in the other, and pointed it to various parts of the work; and wherever he pointed, the hammer drove a bolt-hole clean and true through the rose-red iron. Finally Tom lifted the finished piece above his head, and came striding to the door with it. The crowd of onlookers scattered right and left. Out into the darkness he plunged, and straight to the pool by the roadside. We saw the thing poised for a moment like a mammoth fire-fly over the water; and then, with a roar and an angry splutter, it vanished into the pond.

It was scarcely six o’clock, and already the night was pitch-black, with a creeping, chilly air from the north. It was not loitering weather. People were moving briskly on their several ways. Cottage doors were shut, and windows diamonded with moisture. Roving about with no settled purpose but to humour the neighbourly fancy, and to identify myself with the evening life of the place, I presently came full tilt at a corner upon Farmer Coles.

‘The very man!’ said he, barring the way jovially with his stout oak stick. ‘Didn’t ye promise me that when I killed that four-year-old wether, ye’d come and take a bite along o’ us? Well, ’tis a saddle to-night, and I was on the road to fetch ye. Round about, man, and straight for the faarm!’

Now, when a South-Down flock-master—whose pedigree sheep are famous throughout the county—bids you to his table, with the announcement that the principal dish is to be mutton, there is only one thing to do, that is, if you are human, and of sane mind. I turned and went along with him without demur.

‘Jane’s sister and her man be with us,’ said Farmer Coles, as we left the village behind and mounted the steep lane that led to the farmhouse. ‘And Weaverly ’ull be there; and the gells be home, so we wunt lack for company. I don’t know as ye ever met Jane’s sister’s man?—Parrett by name. No? Wunnerful well-eddicated man, though, he be.’

We found the Rev. Mr. Weaverly, a shining gem of purest water, set in the ring of hearty country faces that surrounded the drawing-room fire. The broad-shouldered, broad-faced man, with a mat of sandy beard and a very bald head, who occupied the great armchair in the corner, I judged to be Mr. Parrett. Mrs. Coles and her sister, both comfortable of mien and rigidly ceremonious of visage, sat side by side in flowing black silk gowns, knitting as for a wager. The younger members of the household, who filled the interspaces of the circle, fidgeted in a constraint of merry silence, exchanging covert glances of boredom, and all obviously pricking ears for the first sound of the dinner-gong. This clanged out behind us almost at the moment of our entry into the room, providentially cutting short the first amenities of greeting; and before my fingers had done aching from Mr. Parrett’s grip, I found myself sitting at the loaded board with Mrs. Parrett’s voluminous drapery overflowing me on the one side, and, on the other, her husband’s great brown barricade of an elbow securely fencing me in.

‘Mutton,’ observed Mr. Weaverly presently, by way of filling up a pause in the conversation due to our all watching with secret anxiety Farmer Coles’s attack on the joint, ‘mutton, and on a Monday! You remember the little game of alliteration we played at the school treat, Mrs. Coles? Really, we could make an admirable sequence here! Mutton, and Monday, and Miss Matilda sitting by my side, and—and—if it were only March instead of—’

‘And we’ll soon all be munchin’ of it, sir!’ cried Farmer Coles. ‘Ha, ha, ha! That’s the best Hem o’ all! Gravy, George?’

At the inclusion of her name in the sequence, the eldest Miss Coles had blushed, then let her glance demurely droop upon her chrysanthemum-wreathed bosom. It was a moment of exceeding pride and satisfaction to her, for here was Mr. Weaverly beside her—an incontestable, a beautiful fact—while Miss Sweet for once was half a mile away. Now she looked up coyly.

‘I think,’ she hesitated, ‘I could suggest a— Oh! I know a lovely one!’

Mr. Weaverly laid down knife and fork, to rub his hands delightedly.

‘Do tell us!’ he murmured. ‘I am positively longing to—’

The eldest Miss Coles turned him glamorous eyes.

‘Marmaduke!’ she said.

And I think I was the only one present to realise the whole ingenuity of the manœuvre. For she had contrived here, in the open family circle, before a dozen people, yet with entire meetness and propriety, to address Mr. Weaverly by his Christian name.

As the meal progressed, and tongues became generally loosened, Mr. Parrett—whose silence, except as regarded his hearty application to his food, had so far remained unbroken—now essayed to contribute his share of the talk. His first effort was a startling one.

‘D-d-d’ he began, smiling over his shoulder at me, ‘d-do you l-l-l—’ He stopped, and gazed helplessly towards his wife.

‘Like, dear?’ suggested Mrs. Parrett, softly.

‘N-no! I was agoing t-t-to ask ye if ye l-l-l—’

‘Lend, then?’

‘Hur, hur! Emma, I don’t want to b-b-borrow nauthin’ o’ the gentleman! It was just to ask if he l-l-lived—there y’ are!—in W-w-w— Whatsay, Jane?’

‘’Tis apple-pie, George. Or maybe ye’d sooner try the—’

‘Pie, Jane! Pie, my d-dear! Pie, if _you_ please, mum! An’ a double dose o’ sh-sh-shuggar. They allers says—don’t they, sir?—as if a man has a sweet-t-t-t—’

‘Sweetheart, dear?’

‘Oo, ay!’ laughed Mr. Parrett, suddenly inspired. He looked across the table roguishly at Mr. Weaverly and Matilda, and all glances followed his. ‘Ah, well: n-n-never mind! We was all young once, and—’

Mrs. Coles deftly drew the fire of attention away from the absorbed, unconscious pair.

‘William, dear; Emma has nothing in her glass. And there you sit, staring at the cheese as if—as if it were only for show, and as wooden as you are! And do pray pass the old ale to Mr.—’

‘Oh, deplorably, deplorably so!’ sighed Mr. Weaverly to the rapt Matilda. ‘Over and over again I have remonstrated with her, but all in vain, I fear. Each time I have said, “Mrs. Gates, if you will feed little children on new hot bread, and red herrings, and”—only think of it!—“beer, you will find not only their physical but their moral nature entirely—”’

It is strange how, in a room full of heterogeneous talk, the attention of a quiet listener flits uncontrollably from one quarter to another. Much as I was interested in Mrs. Gates’s domestic policy, I lost it here, to find myself in the rick-yard, taking part, against my will, in some complicated sporting affray.

‘And there were three of them, father, in the trough; and I crept up and got the gun-barrel through a hole in the side of the sty, and just as the old buck-rat—’

And then it was Mr. Parrett again.

‘Emma ’ull tell ye b-b-better ’n me, Jane. It came hoot-tooting round the corner, and afore I could s-s-s—’

‘Stop, George?’

‘N-n-nonsense!—afore I could s-s-s—’

‘Seize hold o’ the—?’

‘Emma, do bide quiet!—afore I could s-s-say Jack Robinson, the ould mare, she b-b-backed upon her harnches, and she—’

And from Miss Matilda:

‘Oh! I should so love to, Mr. Weaverly! Is there a very beautiful view? And could we walk there and back in an afternoon, do you think?’

And from Farmer Coles, folding up his napkin: ‘Well, if no one wunt have no more—’

The rest was lost in the rustle of Mrs. Coles’s skirts, as she uprose.

‘And now, William dear, I think we ladies will leave you to your smoke. And when you are quite ready, we will have a rubber and a little music.’

In the drawing-room presently, the farmer and his wife, and Mr. and Mrs. Parrett, sat down to a solemn, silent game of whist. A ‘Happy Family’ party made a vortex of merriment in a far corner. At the piano stood Mr. Weaverly, translating into soft melodious trifles such songs as ‘The Wolf’ and ‘Hearts of Oak.’ As for me, I was happy in the great chair with the family portrait album, full of early Victorian photographs, which I sincerely believe to be amongst the most fascinating and informing productions of all that fertile reign. But after an hour of this inspiring occupation, I was suddenly roused to the contemplation of a still greater wonder. One of the card-players had spoken, and that sharply.

‘Emma! Emma, my dear!’

I strolled over, and watched the play. Something had happened to disturb Mr. Parrett, for though his face was turned from me, I could see that his bald head had taken on a purple hue. And gradually, as the game progressed, the mystery became clear.

‘Emma, my d-d-_dear_! Emma!’

It was Mr. Parrett’s voice again, and this time with a sharper ring of warning and remonstrance. Two or three times in the next half-hour he spoke thus, and each time now I was able to detect the cause. Mrs. Parrett was cheating. Continually her neck craned for a sidelong view of her opponents’ cards. She revoked unblushingly. Once I could have sworn I saw a card-corner sticking out of a fold in her silken lap. The aces she seemed to be trying to mark with her thumb-nail. And all the time, though Mr. Parrett got momentarily redder and more wrathful, Farmer Coles and his wife sat serenely smiling, evidently well used to dear Emma and her little harmless, eccentric ways.

III

Here is a winter’s day already, and still November. As I looked forth at sunrise this morning, the whole village was white with frost. I could hear the ice in the wheel-ruts crackling under the tread of passers-by. A single thrush piped forlornly somewhere in the dense thicket of the churchyard. And as I leaned out into the nipping blast, a word came up to me, bandied between a trudging labourer and his friend, a word that brought with it an entire new sheaf of thoughts and memories. ‘More ’n ’aaf like Christmas, bean’t ut, Bill?’ It was said but in jest, and that unthinkingly. Yet, by the calendar, as a glance now told me, Christmas was scarce a month away.

While the sun was yet no more than a white spot in the faint gold mists of morning, I took the lane that led to the Downs. It was strange to see how the frost had missed all the bright-hued berries in the hedgerows, and how the ivy-leaves were only rimmed with white. It was the same with the prickly holly foliage. The spines were thickly encrusted, while the dark green membranes of the leaves had given no fingerhold to the frost. But the colour of the grass, and dead dry herbage, by the wayside was completely blotted out. Every blade and twig stood up stark and white against its fellow; and here it was easy to see which way the frozen air had been drifting all night long, because on the windward side the pale accretion was thicker: in the more exposed places it more than doubled the natural girth of the stems.

Where the dew-pond lay, at the top of the hill, far above the swimming lowland mists, there must have been bright sunshine from the very first; for here the veneer of frost had melted into dewdrops, that flashed back a thousand prismatic rays amidst the emerald of the grass at every step. But behind each upstanding tussock, the frost still held as white and thick as ever. The water, too, in the pond was still frozen over. As I came up to the rail, a flock of starlings rose whirring over my head. They had been waiting there on the sunny side of the bank for the ice to melt round the pond edges, and thither they would return to slake their morning thirst, as soon as I passed on.

Keen and unkindly blew the blast, so that one must keep ever moving to withstand the chill of it. Looking round me on the waste of hills, I could see that the northern slopes still retained their wintry hue, though all those facing to the sun were intensely green. Below in the valley only the oak-woods kept their bronze stain of autumn. Every other tree, the hedges that divided ploughlands and meadows, the winding line of thicket marking the course of the river, all looked bare and dark in the glistening pallor of the sun. The river itself, between the broad water-meadows, seemed like a river of ink.

[Picture: “The Ferryman’s Cottage”]

As I took in all the cheerless, void purity of what lay below me, thinking to myself that this indeed was winter, there came a sudden cawing and dawing high up in the frosty steel-blue dome of the sky; and here again was confirmation of that unenlivening fact. A great company of rooks and jackdaws was streaming by, but with none of its summer zest and purpose. The throng made a general progress towards the south, yet it was obviously doing little more than killing time, spinning out the business of a doubtful journey into the semblance of a morning’s task. Instead of going straight forward in one steady strong tide, the birds were incessantly veering back in wide circles, crossing and re-crossing each other’s paths aimlessly, and weaving a mazy dark pattern on the sky.

I watched this dubious host from the hill-top until it vanished in the eye of the sun; and then, fairly beaten at last by the razor-edged north wind, turned and went back to the village. It was winter again, in very truth; and there was little sense or profit in blinking it. I would strike my flag now, as I had struck it often before. And the flag with me was the little staging of fernery that still concealed the yawning blackness of my study hearth. I pulled it all down and stowed it away; and by and by, when the ash logs were sizzling and glowing, and the sparks were volleying up the flue, and a living warmth pervading the room, I plucked up new heart and courage:

‘No mirth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member; No warmth, no shine—’

It was all as false now as it must ever have been. And as for butterflies and bees, what but a sick fancy could crave for such delicacies out of season?

DECEMBER

I

WE sat on the churchyard wall, the Reverend and I, debating many things.

It was one of those silent, gloomy afternoons that would be cold but for their exceeding stillness. A heavy grey pall of sky lowered overhead. A multitude of noisy sparrows was going to bed in the thicket of ilex and yew, denoting that the time was nearing sunset, although not a tinge of sunset colour showed in the shrouded west. The same impulse, it seemed, had brought us both out of doors, which, elementally, was nothing more than a sudden realisation of the impossibility of remaining within. In the whole year’s round, perhaps, there come only two or three days like this. You become the prey of a conviction that something cataclysmic is going to happen. There is a sense of the world slowing down in its age-long, giddy race through the pathless ether; a feeling that its momentum is almost spent, and that any instant it may come to a final stop, to be followed by the Last Trump and dissolution of all things. The mute house seems alive about you, and full of a sort of terror and foreboding. You are seized with an apprehension that the ceilings and roof are falling in; and, hurrying forth, a like doubt comes upon you as to the stability of the sky: it looks so overburdened and unsafe. In this easeless, impotent frame of mind, I came up into the churchyard as being the most reassuring place I could think of, and found the Reverend wandering there for a like reason and in much the same mood.

‘Wind and dirty weather coming,’ said he, ‘the sort of times to make people think of home and fireside, the need for human peace on earth, and good-will towards men—the very weather for me.’

As we sat on the wall, silent awhile, the bells in far-off Stavisham began their chime, every note drifting over to us sharp and clear through the miles of torpid air.

‘Winter coming,’ he went on; ‘the winter we all need once a year to knit us closer together. Listen to Saint Barnabas practising his Christmas carillons!—forging his link in the chain of bell-ringing that in a week or two will stretch all round the world. It is my time coming, my own time. For did you ever think how little eyesight matters at Christmas? Blindness is nothing to a man then. Christmas is all glad sound; warm heart-beats; faithful words. And, please God, when the day dawns, there shall not be a cottage-nest in Windlecombe that does not overflow with these.’

To see him so deeply moved, and hear him run on presently about his many schemes of comfort and relief, the furtherance of joy and merriment, good-will and good cheer, to be sown broadcast throughout his little domain, was yourself to take the infection irresistibly. Whatever Christmas has become in the great outer world, in Windlecombe he held us year by year to all the old ideals and traditions. As I harkened to him, the black sky, the sullen, miasmic air, lost their significance. I found myself thinking only of the golden light and undimmed azure that must eternally lie beyond and above it all. And now—though I might have heard it long ago, if I had had but the heart to look up and listen—there, high against the drab heaven, a lark soared and sang.

II

The dirty weather has come indeed. For many days I have not seen the tops of the hills. They have been hidden in the rain-clouds that have been dragging ceaselessly over the combe. The rain has not seemed to fall, but to flow horizontally from west to east, a gliding white curtain of water-drops, hiding all but the nearest houses from the view. And yet, for all the deluge and the sobbing wind, the gloom, the cold, the miry ways, I would not change this solitary, inaccessible spot in England for the best of foreign sunshine, ease, and gaiety to be found by the Tideless Sea.

Perhaps, if winter is to be given a place at all in the calendar, it must come in these few weeks leading on to Christmas. It is true that, so far as the natural outdoor world is concerned, there is no winter, in the human conception of a season of decay and death. In an hour, when the sky lightened a little and the rain ceased its rattle on the window, I went out and found next year’s corn greening the hill-side; and in all the bare dark woodland there was not a twig without its new buds ripe and ready for another spring. The year’s miracle-play was beginning all over again before its last lines were said.

Yet because, as the old vicar maintains, winter is a human necessity by reason of its heart-welding, neighbour-making qualities, winter we must all have; and so at this time I am glad to hoodwink myself into the belief that the rough-voiced, harrying weather is the very negation of life, bringing us all together for mutual comfort, like children in the dark.

The rain is over now, seemingly for good. Last night at sundown the wind fell, and the grey cloud canopy lifted off to the northward, like the opening lid of a box. As the dense cloud pack broke away from the western horizon, the sun burst through, and poured a sudden stream of red-gold light up the combe. Before this light had paled, the whole sky was crystal clear; and in the east, just above the earth-line, shone the moon—a perfect human face, full-jowled, low-foreheaded, gazing down upon us all with a puzzled, quizzical smile upon her comfortable chops. I came up the street apostrophising her, and ran into a basket, and behind the basket was Grewes. He laid a bunch of lean bony fingers in my hand.

‘This is life again,’ he said feelingly. ‘To be weatherbound in a caravan, you know— Well, it is a little trying even for common people, but for a genius—Spelthorne, you see, cannot bear any constraint. At home he has a studio as big as a church, and when it rains he walks up and down it. But when he tries that in a caravan— Really, I have been very sorry for him, though of course I kept outside as much as I could.’