CHAPTER XII

AN OLD FARM

The sun rose two hours ago, but he is not to be found in the sky. Rather he seems to have disembodied himself and to be lazily concealed in the sweet mist that lies white and luminous over the half-mile of level meadows at the foot of this hill. Those meadows are brown with yet untouched grasses, grey and silken with the placid ruffled waves of yesterday’s new swathes, and liquid emerald where the hay has already been carted; and now the brown, now the grey, now the emerald warms and becomes visible under the feet of the light that dwells in the mist. Beyond the level rises a low but sudden hill of large, round-topped, colourless, misty trees, known by their outline alone, and in the heart of them a moving gleam as of sudden surf now and then, for there also the sun is wandering and hiding himself but not his light. I turn my head and, looking again, the sun is once more in the sky, the mist has gone. The vast, hunched, hot, purring summer country is clearly enjoying the light and warmth. The swallows flying are joyous and vivid in colour and form as if I had the eyes of some light-hearted painter of the world’s dawn. Where the gleam was, that haunt of the sun’s, that half-hour’s inn to which he turns from the long white road of the sky to rest, is seen to be the white farm house that stands in the midst of woods and ricks.

Yet, though so clear, the house, half a mile off, seems to have been restored by this fair and early light and the cooing of doves to the seeming happy age in which it was built. The long, tearing crow of the cock, the clink of dairy pans, the palpitating, groaning shout of the shepherd, _Ho! ho! ho! ho! ho!_ now and then, even the whirr of the mowing machines, sound as if the distance that sweetens them were the distance of time and not only of space. They set a tune on this fair morning to “What a dainty life the milkmaid leads” or that old song:--

“Pack clouds away, and welcome day! With night we banish sorrow. Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft To give my love good morrow. Wings from the wind to please her mind, Notes from the lark I’ll borrow: Bird, prune thy wing, nightingale, sing, To give my love good morrow. To give my love good morrow, Notes from them all I’ll borrow.

Wake from thy nest, robin redbreast! Sing, birds, in every furrow, And from each bill let music shrill Give my fair love good morrow. Blackbird and thrush in every bush, Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow, You pretty elves, amongst yourselves Sing my fair love good morrow. To give my love good morrow, Sing, birds, in every furrow.”

In those days when the house was built the poets were mainly townsmen, preferring the town. Of the modern sad passion of Nature they had nothing: they loved the fields in their season. They went out into the country and in their _fêtes champêtres_ there was something gay and foreign from us, the thought of which calls up a vision of fields more unspoiled than they are now. There were elves in those days; country people saw them, if poets failed. If you were returning home after nightfall, from a day’s shooting, you might see the torches among the oaks that lit the king of the cats to his grave. The country had always been there and was to be there for ever. Men greeted it and smiled as once they greeted Helen, not thinking of her immortality. And there--yonder, half a mile away--lingers that age. I see it in the green and silver wheat, and its glimmering, rustling hurry, and in the bright path beside; the very noises of a gun rolling and breaking up and embedding themselves in the dense wood cannot mutilate it, but rather hint that somewhere, where the echoes last play, a spirit of mirth is in hiding still.

The farmer himself confirms the superstition. Though nearly seventy, he is staunch and straight, and spending most of his day on horseback, with his calm, large-featured, sandstone face, filling easily and handsomely with clear-souled anger and delight, he suggests the thought of a Centaur, an impossible, noble dream of horse and man created by a god dissatisfied with man and beast. Thirty centuries ago such a man, so marvellously in harmony with the earth, would have gone down in men’s memories as a demi-god or the best-loved of the fauns. His voice rings over the meadows or across the table at the inn as strong as a cow’s, as deep and humming and sweet as a bee’s in a chimney. When he passes by men look at him, I think, as if he cast no shadow, so compact of light is he. He has known sorrow, he has known pains that threaten to crack the brain, but never melancholy. There is a kind of gaiety in his sorrow even as in his joy; for sorrow changes him only as a shadow changes a merry brook. He breathes of a day when men had not so far outstripped the lark and nightingale in heaviness as we have done. His jesting bathes the room or the lane in the light of a Golden Age and the freshness of all the May days we can never recover. Nor do I know anything human more pleasant than his grave smiling as he stands in the newly reaped cornfields under the last light and sees the large purple land and takes it all unto himself, and then turns without a sigh and, drawing a long draught of his own cider in the cool granary, drinks deep. He rises early and yet is as cheerful when he goes first afield as when he goes to bed.

His house, dark with panelling and heavy furniture of every generation since it was built, would be gloomy were it not for his blithe sentiment about the past. He speaks of the long-dead generations not as if they were names, but so that they are known certainly to have lived and worked and enjoyed. That one planted the spreading oak, that globed green world of nightingale and willow-wren and dove; that added the knolled pasture and cut the deep, stony lane that leads to it through the brook; another built the fruit wall and bought the copy of _Tristram Shandy_ that stands with a hundred other books in the dining-room. The books themselves are good to look at, all of them original or early editions. There is _The Whole Duty of Man_ and many sermons, Prior, _The Spectator_, Thomson’s _Seasons_, Fielding, _The Rambler_, _The Task_, _The Deserted Village_, _The Waverley Novels_, Dickens, and nothing later than _In Memoriam_; at that the family seems to have stopped buying books. He knows them shrewdly enough, but it is as what the family has approved and lived on that he values them. Never was a man who seemed to take his mortality so happily and naturally. One day, showing me a small board of ancient things, he brought out a tray of coins, none earlier than Charles II., but each connected with one or another of the family. Amongst them was a modern sixpence. That was his third deposit, after the guinea and the groat, and he was too much pleased with these slender memorials not to do his own part in continuing them. “What,” he said carelessly, “would they think of me in a hundred years’ time if I had not put a sixpence in?” And he smiled lightly as if he had been on a hill and seen the long tracts of time ahead and his farm and strangers of his own blood working in its fields.