CHAPTER XXI

THE VILLAGE

I

The village stands round a triangular, flat green that has delicate sycamores here and there at one side; beneath them spotted cows, or horses, or a family of tramps; and among them the swallows waver. On two sides the houses are close together. The third, beyond the sycamores, is filled by a green hedge, and beyond it an apple orchard on a gentle hill, and in the midst of that a farmhouse and farm-buildings so happily arranged that they look like a tribe of quiet monsters that have crawled out of the sandy soil to sun themselves. There the green woodpecker leaps and laughs in flight. Down each side of the green run yellow roads that cross one another at the angles, two going north, two going south, and one each to the east and west. Along these roads, for a little way, stand isolated cottages, most of them more ancient and odd than those in the heart of the village, as if they had some vagrant blood and could not stay in the neat and tranquil community about the green. Thus, one is built high above the road and is reached by a railed flight of stone steps. The roof of another slopes right to the ground on one side in a long curve, mounded by stonecrop and moss, out of which an elder tree is beginning to grow; and it has a crumbling tiled porch, like an oyster shell in colour and shape. One has a blank wall facing the road, and into the mortar of it, while it was yet fresh, the workmen have stuck fragments and even complete rounds of old blue and white saucers and plates. In others the mortar is decorated by two strokes of the trowel forming a wedge such as is found on old urns. In the ruinous orchard by a fourth, among nettles and buttercups, there is always a gipsy tent and white linen like blossom on the hedge. One of these houses seems to have strayed on to the green. Years ago someone pitched a tent there, and in course of time put an apple pip into the ground close by and watched it grow. The codling tree is now but a stump, standing at the doorway of a black wooden cottage named after it. Between it and the village pond go the white geese with heads in air.

Off one of those roads the church lifts a dark tower along with four bright ash trees out of a graveyard and meadow which are all buttercups. On three of the others there are plain, square, plastered inns, “The Chequers,” “The Black Horse,” “The Four Elms,” where tramps sit on benches outside, and within the gamekeepers or passing carters sit and wear a little deeper the high curved arm-rests of the settles. But the chief inns stand opposite one another at one corner of the green, “The Windmill,” and “The Rose,” both of them rosy, half-timbered houses with sign boards; the one beneath a tall, rocky-based elm which a wood-pigeon loves, the other behind a row of straight, pollarded limes; and opposite them is a pond on the edge of the green. In these inns the wayfarer drinks under the dark seventeenth-century beams; the worn pewter rings almost like glass; moss and ivy and lichen, and flowers in the windows, and human beings with laughter and talk and sighs at parting, decorate the ancient walls. The lime trees run in a line along the whole of one side of the green, and at their feet still creeps a stream whose minnows hover and dart, and the black and white wagtail runs. Behind the trees are half the cottages of the village, some isolated among their bean rows and sunflowers, some attached in fantastic unions. Most are of one storey, in brick, which the autumn creepers melt into, or in timber and tiles perilously bound together by old ivy; in one the Jacobean windows hint at the manor house of which other memory is gone; all are tiled. Their windows are white-curtained, with geranium or fuchsia or suspended campanula, or full of sweets, and onions, and rope, and tin tankards, and ham, and carrot-shaped tops, dimly seen behind leaded panes. Between the houses and the limes, the gardens are given up to flowers and a path, or they have a row of beehives: in one flower-bed the fragment of a Norman pillar rests quietly among sweet rocket flowers. Instead of flower gardens, the wheelwright and the blacksmith have waggons, wheels, timber, harrows, coulters, spades, tyres, or fragments, heaped like wreckage on the sea floor, but with fowls and children or a robin amongst them, and perhaps, leaning against the trees, a brave, new waggon painted yellow or red or all blue.

On the other populous side of the green the houses are of the same family, without the limes; except that far back, among its lilac and humming maple foliage and flower, is the vicarage, a red, eighteenth-century house with long, cool, open windows, and a brightness of linen and silver within or the dark glimmer of furniture, and a seldom disturbed dream of lives therein leading “melodious days.” Of how many lives the house has voicelessly chronicled the days and nights! It is aware of birth, marriage, death; into the wall is kneaded a record more pleasing than brass. With what meanings the vesperal sunlight slips through the narrow staircase window in autumn, making the witness pause! The moon has an expression proper to the dwellers there alone, nested among the limes or heaving an ivory shoulder above the tower of the church.

From one side to the other the straight starlings fly.

Along the roads go waggons and carts of faggots, or dung, or mangolds in winter; of oak bark in spring; of hay or corn in summer; of fruit or furniture in autumn.

A red calf, with white hind legs and white socks on her forelegs, strays browsing at the edge of the road. A close flock of sheep surges out of the dust and covers the green.

II

We were twelve in the tap of “The Four Elms.” Five tramps were on one side; on the other, six pure-blooded labourers who had never seen London, and a seventh. A faggot was burning in the hearth, more for the sake of its joyful sound and perfume than for its heat. The sanded floor, cool and bright, received continually the red hollowed petals that bled from a rose on the table. The pewter glimmered; the ale wedded and unwedded innumerable shades of red and gold as it wavered in the mystic heart of the tankard. The window was held fast, shut by the stems of a Gloire de Dijon rose in bloom, and through it could be seen the gloom of an ocean of ponderous, heaving clouds, with a varying cleft of light between them and the hills which darkened the woods and made the wheat fields luminous.

Now and then a labourer extended his arm, grasped the tankard, slowly bent his arm whilst watching a gleam on the metal, and silently drank, his eyes lifted as if in prayer; then slowly put it back and saw a fresh circle being formed around it by the ale that was spilled.

The tramps leaned on a walnut table, as old as the house, polished so that it seemed to be coated with ice, here and there blackened with the heat transferred to it by a glass bottle standing in the sun. They looked at one another, changed their attitudes and their drinks, gesticulated, argued, swore and sang. They became silent only when one of their number hammered a tune out of the reluctant piano. They were of several ages and types, of three nationalities, and had different manners and accents. One was a little epicurean Spanish skeleton who loved three things, his own pointed beard, a pot of cider, and the saying of Sancho Panza: “I care more for the little black of the nail of my soul than my whole body.” He was a grasshopper in the fields of religion, scandal and politics, and wore his hat scrupulously on one side. Another was a big, gentle Frenchman, with heavy eyelids, but a fresh boy’s laugh. Early in the evening he scourged the republic; later he laughed at the monarchy, the consulate and the empire; and as he went to sleep touched his hat and whispered “Vive la France!” His neighbour was fat, and repeated the Spaniard’s remarks when they had been forgotten. It was to be wondered when he walked, what purpose his legs were made to serve. At the inn it was to be seen that they were a necessary addition to the four legs of a chair. He wanted nothing but a seat and not often wanted that. He was, I may say, made to be a sitting rather than a sapient animal, and had been lavishly favoured by Nature with that intention. The fourth, a pale, sour anarchist, hardly ever spoke, but was apparently an honest man, whom his indignant fellows called “parson.” The last was one that been born a poet, but never made one. He sang when he was asked, and later when he was asked not to sing; very quietly and very bitterly he cried when he had sung, indulging in a debauch of despair. Before we parted, the twelfth man sang all the sixteen verses of “Sir Hugh of Lincoln,” in the hope of quenching their love of interminable songs. “Heaven and Hell!” said the tramp, “ye make me feel as if I was like Sir Hugh and Lady Helen and the Jew’s daughter all in one. Curse ye! bless ye!”

Half way through the evening the tramps were asleep. The labourers were as they were at the beginning. They sat a-row according to age, and nothing but age distinguished them. Their opinions were those of the year in which they were born; for they were of that great family which, at the prime of life or earlier, seems to begin growing backwards, to quote “grandfather,” more often, and thus to give the observer a glimpse of the Dark Ages. Life to them was at once as plain and as inexplicable as the patterns on their willow cups or toby jugs. The eldest had a gift of dumbness that sometimes lasted nearly half a century, but once set going and wandering from ploughs to horses, and from horses to the king, his loyalty brought this forth:--

“If that Edward wasn’t king he ought to be.” Advancing to the subject of hay with a digression on the church, “Which,” said the youngest, “which came first, parson or hay?”

“What,” said the eldest in a short speech that occupied an hour of time, without interruption from the rest, who drank through his periods and sat watching him while he drank in the intervals by way of semi-colon. “What is church for but rector to pray in? The parson prays for--for a good season, and a good season means a good hayrick like a church; well, then, Robert, George, Henry, and Palmston, I say that the day after they first wanted a rick they put up a church and put rector in to pray. I,” continued he, growing confident, “remember the Crimea. I had but four boys then, but bad times they were. But we had tea, we had tea; the wife used to grate up toast and pour boiling water on it.”

“We called that coffee,” said the youngest, a lover of truth.

As the evening darkened and pipes went out and the scent of carnations came in with the wind, their speech became slower, with long intervals, as if they spoke only after ploughing a furrow. One by one they seemed to go out like the candles overhead, were silent, but never slept. The oldest, reddest and roundest of face, with white hair, looked like the sun at a mountain crest. The next seemed to be the spirit of beneficent rain, pale, vague, with moist eyes and tangled grey beard. The third was as the south wind, mild, cheerful, pink-faced, with a great rose in his button-hole. The fourth was the west wind, that lifts the hay from the level fields into the clouds at a breath, that robs the harebell of its dew and stores it with rain--a mighty man with head on breast, and small hands united, and flowing hair. And the youngest was the harvest moon, glowing, with close hair and elusive features, a presence as he sat there rather than a man. So they were in the twilight, like a frieze on the white wall.

“Well, us have had fun, haven’t us, George?” said the harvest moon. He received no answer as we passed out of “The Four Elms,” for all but he had left the world where words are spoken and opinions held; and the hazel lane seemed to be a temple of the mysterious elements that make the harvest and the apple crop and the glory of the hops.

III

Walking in a country churchyard it is often hard to think of it as a place of death. The children play among the tombs. At Easter the village girls bring hither primroses from the woods, planting some, scattering others. Labourers meet and talk there, for the footpaths all converge towards the church. Lovers walk there. The gravedigger is indeed often busy there, but you may go many times and not find him at a grave, and it is seldom but he is planting flowers, pruning bushes, or mowing grass. On the tombs themselves, in epitaph or in lack of epitaph, is written the corporate wisdom of the village, its philosophy and its history half transmuted into poetry. Fancy can never be quiet as the eye passes from Mary to Rebecca, from John to David, whose record let no one interpret untenderly. I have seen on an afternoon many a novel that shall never be written save as it is written here, deep without gloom, bitter without scandal, on those tablets that have kept their legends too long to be altogether fair. Even the harshest brevity has its fitness, as if it were penned by the right hand of Fate. And here, as in some other matters, we have made an insignificant advance upon our ancestors. The chief records of early races are their tombs. We know not so much that they lived as that they are dead. We guess at their lives from their dead bones. A tool, a weapon, a trinket, a favourite beast, is buried with them, conferring a life in death. In some ancient graves the bodies are found in a sitting posture, and if conjecture be just, we may suppose that the dead man once slept thus and dreamed, daring not to lie down, because no clothes kept off the frost or rain. So the endeavour to provide for an after life by utensils and food has not been wholly in vain. But “Tombs,” said the poet, “have their life and death.” The headstone is heir to the deceased and out in the world seeks a fortune, which is commonly bad. The fates of tombs have seldom been traced. The history of the epitaph has never been written. Thus is much common philosophy hidden away. Probably no body of literature could be found that is more fertile in homely truth and fancy. But collections of epitaphs either have no plan, or are intended to show only what is curious, brilliant, or very old.

In this little churchyard a chapter or two of history and progress is easily seen. At the middle of the eighteenth century the sexton wrote the epitaphs, dealing out eulogy and fact with a generous hand. After him came a series of nonentities, whose epitaphs are as like one another as Windsor chairs. Honest regret, or “smiling through tears,” was ousted by complacent joy at the celestial lot of the deceased. Decent friendship was replaced by encomiastic fraud. Like all fashions it was feeble, but like all fashions it had some good; it produced models of accurate expression of “not what he was, but what he should have been.” Then in the nineteenth century followed a silent age. “He was alive, and is dead;” tombstones with such inscriptions are like men who do not speak in company, and unlike them, they never disappoint. They say, at anyrate, not more than is written of honest men in heaven. The children of those silent people did little but irrelevantly quote or paraphrase the Bible and Dr. Watts. The epitaphs were now thought worthy of a clear, large type; the fashion at least taught children to spell. Some there were who gained no small village reputation by a diligent study of these sentences. Even the wiser pillars of the village, whether they could read or not, were sure of awe and admiration among their audience, if their speeches--political, religious, or scandalous--were launched by “As the great Dr. Watts wrote ...” or “In the words of Amos, whom you may know....” Not of this period, but first notorious then, was the epitaph on Sir ----, Bart. His family, being still one of splendour and influence, everything connected with it was held in esteem. It was, therefore, not unnatural that the admirers of an aged spinster should put upon her tomb the epitaph that was picked out with letters of gold on that of the young baronet--

“The good die young.”

Strangers are apt to wonder first at the longevity common in the parish--then at the humour of the thing--and go away both contented and deceived. For some time it was not uncommon to quote a grave passage from Shakespeare, with decent omission of the author’s name; when, however, a revolutionist not only published “Shakespeare” on a headstone, but “Romeo and Juliet” too, the vicar was approached, the sexton ran a risk every day, the inn-keeper, the J.P. was approached. The bereaved person had in the meantime erased the offending words, and until recently you might read--

“God rest his soul! He was a merry man,”

beneath which the curious eye may still discover “Kings iii.” placed there in homage to parish prejudice. The storm almost raised by the introduction of two lines by Robert Burns--“a poet as well as a drunkard,” according to village rumour--is still remembered. The parish clerk having doubted whether it was in “Ancient and Modern” took refuge in the book of Ecclesiastes, until a confidant (a fearless thinker and a friend of Chartists) swore it was written by a lord. The vicar was questioned. Opening a book whose cover was well known to the doubter, and repeating with nasal unction the offending words, he drew tears and apologies from the man. After that comparative freedom of choice was enjoyed, and some went bravely back to

“Afflictions sore long years I bore,”

as recently as 1885. Tennyson was in favour at that time; no one grumbled since he was the author of

“That good man, the clergyman.”

But when I brush aside the leaves and flowers of herb honesty, growing by the older graves, although I am willing to admit that the village view of death has become more solemn, I cannot but wish back again the author of

“This world has lost old John the sexton, What business has he in the next one?”

Where are the robuster views of which this is a late reminder? The gay, the fanciful, the calmly elaborate epitaphs seem to have gone for ever, and in the newer portion of the churchyard it is hard not to think of death, unless we turn to the unnamed little mounds that rise and fall like summer waters, so calm, so soft, so green, that fancy cannot make them aught save pillows for the weary. I have seen a tramp sleeping there and envied him his unconscious return to the good old _insouciance_ which was warm with the thought that in the midst of death we are yet alive.

IV

From the churchyard run twelve footpaths; some ending at farmhouses close by; some losing themselves in the nearest road; one leading nowhere, nor of any use to-day, since the house which drew it thither across the wheat is under the cow-parsley and grass; one going on without end, touching here and there a farmhouse, crossing a road, passing in at the door of an inn and out through the garden, as if some friendly man had made the path by following his heart’s desire. Most of the paths led up on to the hills among which the village is set. From the highest part, in spring, the warmth and life of the scene below contrast strangely with its immense age, as the new brazen leaves of the oak with their ancient trunk. The houses are old, the church older, the farm wall yonder is partly the remains of a castle of Norman date. The hedges twist so fantastically because they also are old, marking ancient paths, the edges of departed woods, the gradually advancing line of men’s camp fires overcoming the wilderness. In that hollow the gemote used to sit. Here a company of cavalry charged down the hill and to a man went over the chalk pit to the road and to death. There stood an abbey, now speaking only through a curve added to the undulations of the land. In the next village a poet was born. A dolmen rises out of the wheat in one field, like a quotation from an unknown language in the fair page of a book. The names of the places are in the same language, and yet how smoothly they issue from the lips. The little roads, so old, wind among the fields timidly as if they marked the path of one creeping with difficulty through forest coeval with the world. Some roads have disappeared--there where the wheat grows thin in a narrow band across the field. Another is disappearing; worn to the depth of some feet below the surrounding fields by the feet of adventurers, lovers, exiles, plain endurers of life, its end is to become a groove full of hazels and birds, the innermost kernel of the land, because nobody owns and nobody uses it. In contrast with those, how certain of its aim the great road running east and west, the road of conqueror, pilgrim, merchant, the embodiment of will and opportunity; and that, too, so old that heron and rook seem to recognise it as they go over at nightfall. There is no age that does not play its part in the symphony of this June scene. And yet, standing still upon the ridge commanding it, when the roads are overhung by the blythe new green of beech leaves and paved with their ruddy chaff, these things become a part of the silence and clear air which they trouble and enrich as do the storied pavements and walls of a cathedral, thrilling the ear and shaming the powers of the eye, so that in the end the mind vibrates with the strangely interwoven melodies of joy in the life that still triumphs within us, and of acquiescence in the death which will leave of us not so much trace as can add to the silence and clear air one tone audible to mortal men.