CHAPTER XI

MEADOWLAND

This is one of the tracts of country which are discovered by few except such as study the railway maps of England in order to know what to avoid. On those maps it is one of several large triangular sections which railways bound, but have not entered. All day long the engines scream along their boundaries, and at night wave fiery arms to the sky, as if to defend a forbidden place or a sanctuary. Within there is peace, and a long ancient lane explores it, with many windings and turnings back, as if it were a humble, diffident inquirer, fortunately creeping on, aiming at some kind of truth and not success, yet without knowing what truth is when he starts. Here it hesitates by a little pool, haunted, as is clear from the scribbled footprints on the shore, only by moorhen and wagtail, and, in the spindle trees beside it, by a witty thrush; there it goes joyously forward, straight among lines of tall oaks and compact thorns; then it turns to climb a hill from which all the country it has passed is visible first, meadow and withy copse and stream, and next the country which it has yet to pass--a simple dairy land with green grass, green woods, and stout grey haystacks round the pale farms. But in a little while it winds, confused again under high maple and dogwood hedges, downhill, as if it had already forgotten what the hilltop showed. On the level again the hollow wood which the willow wren fills with his little lonely song has to be penetrated; the farmyard must be passed through, and the spirit of the road looks in at the dairy window and sees the white discs of cream in the pans and the cool-armed maid lifting a cheese; and yet another farmyard it loiters in, watching the roses and plume-poppy and lupin of the front garden, going between the stables and the barn, and there spreading out as if it had resolved to cease and always watch the idle waggon, the fair-curved hay-rakes leaning against the wall, and the fowls which are the embodiment of senseless reverie--when lo! the path goes straight across wide and level pastures, with a stream at its side. Seen afar off, losing itself among the elms that watch over the hill-side church, the little white road is as some quiet, hermit saint, just returned from long seclusion, and about to take up his home for ever and ever in the chancel; but when we reach the place, he is still as far away, still uncertain in the midst of the corn below. At the charlock-yellow summit the road seems to lead into the sky, where the white ladders are let down from the sun.

The ways of such a road--when the June grass is high and in the sun it is invisible except for its blueness and its buttercups, and the chaffinch, the corn-bunting and yellowhammer, the sleepiest voiced birds, are most persistent--easily persuade the mind that it alone is travelling, travelling through an ideal country, belonging to itself and beyond the power of the world to destroy. The few people whom we see, the mower, the man hoeing his onion-bed in a spare half-hour at mid-day, the children playing “Jar-jar-winkle” against a wall, the women hanging out clothes,--these the very loneliness of the road has prepared us for turning into creatures of dream; it costs an effort to pass the time of day with them, and they being equally unused to strange faces are not loquacious, and so the moment they are passed, they are no more real than the men and women of pastoral:--

“He leads his Wench a Country Horn-pipe Round, About a May-pole on a Holy-day; Kissing his lovely Lasse (with Garlands Crownd) With whooping heigh-ho singing Care away; Thus doth he passe the merry month of May: And all th’ yere after in delight and joy, (Scorning a King) he cares for no annoy.”

The most credible inhabitants are Mertilla, Florimel, Corin, Amaryllis, Dorilus, Doron, Daphnis, Silvia and Aminta, and shepherds singing to their flocks--

“Lays of sweet love and youth’s delightful heat.”

Yonder the road curves languidly between hedges and broad fringes of green, and along it an old man guides the cattle in to afternoon milking. They linger to crop the wayside grass and he waits, but suddenly resumes his walk and they obey, now hastening with tight udders and looking from side to side. They turn under the archway of a ruined abbey, and low as if they enjoy the reverberation, and disappear. I never see them again; but the ease, the remoteness, the colour of the red cattle in the green road, the slowness of the old cowman, the timelessness of that gradual movement under the fourteenth century arch, never vanish.

Of such things the day is made, not of milestones and antiquities. Isolated, rapt from the earth, perhaps, by the very fatigue which at the end restores us to it forcibly, the mind goes on seeing and remembering these things.

Here the cattle stand at the edge of a pond and the tench swim slowly above the weeds amongst them as they stand. The sun strikes down upon the glassy water, but cannot take away the coolness of the reeds about the margin. Under the one oak in the meadow above, the farmer sits with his dog, so still that the dabchick does not dive and the water vole nibbles the reed, making a small sound, the only one.

There five little girls play the lovers’ game on a green in front of their cottages. One of them kneels down and cries quietly; the others hold hands and circle round her, singing--

“Poor Mary sits a-weeping, a-weeping, a-weeping, Poor Mary sits a-weeping, by the bright shining shore.

“Oh tell us what you’re weeping for, weeping for, weeping for, Oh tell us what you’re weeping for, by the bright shining shore.”

Then the little “poor Mary,” with her face still in her apron, takes up the singing, the others still moving round her:--

“I’m weeping for my true love, my true love, my true love, I’m weeping for my true love, by the bright shining shore.”

Then the others sing to her--

“Get up and choose a better one, a better one, a better one, Get up and choose a better one, by the bright shining shore.”

At this, Mary rises, and chooses one of those from the ring, and the two stand in the middle, holding each other’s hands crossed, while the others sing--

“Your true love is a shepherd’s cross, a shepherd’s cross, a shepherd’s cross, Your true love is a shepherd’s cross, by the bright shining shore.”

So Mary now takes her place in the ring; her true love becomes “poor Mary,” and chooses another lover amidst the same song; and at last, when all have been Marys and true lovers, with resolute faces, they scatter carelessly and forget. Finding some marbles in a roadside crevice, I ask one child to play, but she says that marbles are not played after Good Friday. A white cow rests beside, so much in love with peace that it grazes lying down. On the other side of the road the bacon hisses and smells from a farmhouse whose mountainous thatch makes a cool cave of tranquillity; on the sunny slopes the starlings who have honeycombed the thatch, whistle or creep in with food or straw. Not one path disturbs the unfrequented verdure of the green, though the road winds lazily round it.

Yonder, up a steep field, goes a boy birdnesting in a double hedge, stooping to the nettles for the white-throat’s eggs, straining high among the hawthorns for a dove’s. He does not hasten. Now and then he calls “cuckoo,” not a timorous note, but lusty like the bird’s own: and now he lies down to suck a thrush’s egg. He will not take the robin’s eggs, “or I shall get my arm broken,” he says. A cruel game, but so long as he loves it with all his heart perhaps it is forgiven him, and in a few years he will never again go slowly up that field, forgetful of schoolmaster, father and mother and the greatness of man.

At noon there is a hamlet in front. On one side of it the church thrusts a golden weathercock high into the blue sky, and with his proud and jolly head uplifted towards the north the bird flames and exults; on the other side, tall beeches give out the sleepy noise of rooks. Straight ahead “The White Hart,” a white inn with heavy, overhanging thatch, divides the road in two. Those white walls can never cease to glow; they have persuaded the sun to sleep under those eaves for ever like the carter on the bench. The sign-board hangs silent, but the sign has melted away. A waggon stands by the door; the waggoner holds a chestnut mare with one hand, with the other he slowly tilts the glittering tankard and shows all of his brown throat throbbing; the hostess watches.

The low white kitchen is cut in two by a tall, semi-circular settle, to which the hostess returns, and with a round elm table between her and the fire she lops fine greens into a pail. A tenanted fireplace is better than a cold one on any day of the year, and it is cool in the window seat between the ale and the wind. Outside lies the little road, waiting for me. And now we go on together, the road having still the advantage of me, though it has poured no libation.

All through the long afternoon that land offers symbols of peace, security and everlastingness. Tall hedges half hidden in a rising tide of long, starry herbage, ponds where the probing carp make the lily leaves rise and flap, wide meadows where the cows wander half a mile an hour, vast green cumulus clouds with round summits here and there disclosing infinite receding glooms of blue--these with their continual presence store the mind, giving it not only the poignant joy in which half consciously we know that never again shall we be just here and thus, but the joy, too, of knowing that we take these things along with us to the end--

“Then whate’er Poor laws divide the public year, Whose revolutions wait upon The wild turns of the wanton sun; There all the year is love’s long spring, There all the year love’s nightingales shall sit and sing.”

On that poem of Crashaw’s to his ivory-handed mistress runs my thought as the road, towards evening, once more progresses without any hedges between it and the fields, when a broad double hedge or narrow copse of oak and ash, departs at a right angle from the way. Up to the briers and thorns at the hem of the trees comes the close, cool yellow grass and obtains a shadow there. Out on to that grass the blackbirds have strayed and are straying farther and farther; the rabbits, too, are well away from shelter, hopping a few steps and crouching. In the hedge itself a hedge-sparrow just once lets loose its frail dewy song, a nightingale utters one phrase of marvelling and is still. The musky wild roses star all the hedge and the scent begins to wander in the moist air with the scent of honeysuckle and of shadowy grasses. Under a now misted sky that makes the light seem to dwell no longer in it but in the grass, the flat, yellow field running to the little wood is a place impregnable and inaccessible. Invisible walls shut me off, though no hedge intervenes; no dreadful barrier could do it more effectually. It would be as easy to step into the past as into this candid field, a withdrawn world with its own sun.

A mile farther a little town stands upon the edge of this enclosed land. A brook runs down to its edge and half encircles it. Clean and fair, shining with linen, the meadows come right up to the town which turns its back upon them, with long rows of beans and peas dividing the yellow houses from one another. The chimney smoke rises above the criss-cross roofs of stone and thatch and then travels round the church tower, which emerges from the houses like some grave schoolmaster out of his children, most of them thronging close and others wandering in wedge or line into the fields. In the town the road loses itself, bewildered among islands made by inns and groups of cottages, the church and the shops. Among these pour a flock of sheep, swelling as the streets enlarge, contracting as they contract, and always filling them. Within the town there is not a blade of grass, nor a garden, nor a tree; and yet the richly burning roofs, the grey or white walls, the sign of “The Spotted Cow,” or the sign of “The Sun,” make not an interruption but a diversion in the fields, when suddenly, between two white walls, shines the green evening land, and across it a busy train rushes and vanishes with long, delicious, dying reverberations among the dark woods and rosy clouds at the horizon.