THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
THE
THE
HEART OF THE COUNTRY
A SURVEY OF A MODERN LAND
BY
FORD MADOX
" KpaTioroi/ fiicf] TOUT' tav d<p(ifteva.
" OiJroff yap dvrjp ovr* ev 'Apy«otr p-cyas,
" oi/r' au 8oKT)<r€i SapaTatv a>yiea>/icvor»
" €!/ TOIS T6 TToXXot? WV, aplOTOS CVpf0TJ."
LONDON
ALSTON RIVERS, LTD., ARUNDEL ST., W.C.
MCMVI
BRADBURY, AONEW & CO., LD., PR1NPKBS,
LONDON AND TONBR1DGB.
Io3o
Reserved.}
TO
HENRY JAMES.
CONTENTS
AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT . . Page xi
INTRODUCTORY. THE COUNTRY OF THE
TOWNSMAN.
The Restaurant. — The Islands of the Blest.— The man from the
Heart of the Country. — The mirage. — The change incur language.
— The permanence [of the idea. — Leaving town. — Each man's
heart. — The great view. — The " note " of the country one of pain.
— The empty room. — The belief in romance. — The watcher by
the bedside. — The country in inverted commas. — The Antaeus
town. — The scientists. — The townsman's difficulty in becoming a
countryman. — He discovers his ignorance. — The stages of a
country life.— The townsman's induction. —The landowner's point
of view. — The child in the country. — The slum child. — The hopper.
— The railway porter. — Going to a cricket match. — Views. —
" What a lot a fellow could do if he owned all that " , Page i
CHAPTER I. BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS.
The individuality of roads. — Turnpikes. — The ghosts on them.
— Solitary roads. — The real roads of the country. — What the
country is. — The railway hedgerows — Quicksets. — The two points
of view. — Different travellers. — Tramps. — Their castles in Spain. —
vii
CONTENTS
The tooth-comb tramp. — His fear of solitude. — Other tramps. —
Their ideals. — The German poet. — The townsman and the tramp.
—Travellers who might be rescued. — The Union. — Remarkable
paupers. — The carrier's cart. — Its users. — Its route. — Gossip. —
The countryman's memory. — A judgment on " Old F — ." — The
cart in a river. — Rustic independence. — The townsman learns his
place. — Cap-service. — The welcome home. — The return to the land.
— The Covent Garden porter. — Moving. — Its costliness. — The farm
waggon in the British Museum. — The captive waggoner. — Where
there is an exchange. — By-roads. — Who uses them. — The squirrel
on the high-road.— Market-day.— Country centres. . Page 33
CHAPTER II. ACROSS THE FIELDS.
Getting the lie of the land. — The man who loves his home. —
The man who loves the footpaths. — The country in undress. — New
Place.— The loafer gains dignity.— The Midland squire. — The squire
abroad.— Trespassing. — The number of paths across England. —
Pilgrim ways.— Pack tracks. — Cinder paths.— The student of
nature. — Nature and the countryman. — The oil beetle. — To what
end?— Linky. — White, ominous of death. — The townsman and
nature books.— Hasty pudding.— The old looker. — The sunset. —
Potato digging. — The countryman and the supernatural. — The
sick nurse. — The inquest. — Bizarre beliefs.— The feeling of famili-
arity.—Eefuge from one's self.— The hunting field.— Other field
sports.— The naturalist. — The breakdown.— The invalid and the
mirror. — *The vocation of the fields Page 71
CHAPTER III. IN THE COTTAGES.
The two-dwelling house.— Meary.— Her appearance.— Her philo-
sophy.—Her biography.— Her folk-lore.— Her religious beliefs,—
Her man.— She meets a ghost.— Her daily life.— Her death. --Her
viii
CONTENTS
money. — The belief in hoardings. — Its counter-part in France. —
A conversation in the Cafe de 1'Esperance. — The peasant and
retiring. — Improvidence. — Money spent on drink. — Children. —
Old couples. — The informer's descendants. — Rest in the country.
— The power of the peasant. — His want of corporate self-con-
sciousness.— The peasant's print. — The absence of youths in the
country. — The village maiden Page 107
CHAPTER IV. TOILERS OF THE FIELD.
Driven in by the weather. — The retired soldier. — The looker. —
Sunshine. — Their views of men who wear black coats. — Cases in
Chancery. — The countryman's reason for keeping a shut head. —
Differences in dialect. — The countryman, a man of the world. —
What you expect of a gentleman. — The carpenter and the
Financier. — S. — His venerability. — He annexes a guinea. — W — n.
— A comparatively honest man. — His industry. — His toleration of
other people's thefts. — His biography. — His humble ambition. —
His mates. — The influence of woodlands upon character. — A
woodland Heart of the Country. — Bad villages. — The parson's
power for good or evil. — The countryman and the Church. — The
countryman and superstitions. — Ghosts. — Witches and White
doctors. — The countryman and death. — N — and how he died. —
The Yorkshire stone mason.— The raw material of the world.
Page 133
CHAPTER V. UTOPIAS.
D d. — Its glories. — Superlatives. — Its uninterestingness. —
The old story. — Great houses not based on the plough. — The use
of ascertaining what is the best cowhouse. Cold storage.— The
usual castle in Spain.— English country life and outdoor life. —
Climate responsible for this. — Returning from hunting. — Parallel
afforded by the sagas. — Thej country house in wet weather. — Lack
ix
CONTENTS
of intellectual interest in the country. — The real landowner.— His
problems. — Landowning no longer pays. — The small landowner. —
His love for his acres. — The tenant farmer large and small. — The
small farmer the real stumbling-block. — A personal view. — A
personal Utopia. — Scheme for a syndicate possessed of a million
pounds sterling. — A career. — Town legislation for the country. —
Cottages and^the truck-system. — A dream. — Conflicting Utopias. —
The man from Lincolnshire.— The Northerners.— The Tory. — The
advanced thinker. — The political economist. — Return to nature
derided. — Another Utopia. — Babel. — The awakening . Page 165
L'ENVOI— "BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES/'
The field auction. — The sheep. — The buyers assemble. — The
sale begins. — Why we never laugh at tools. — In the idiot's shed. —
The auctioneer. — A public jester. — The country paper at Michael-
mas.— The passing of farmers. — Change, the note of all country-
sides.— Old Hooker. — His team of black oxen. — "It isn't the
same place at all." — The invisible presence of the dead. — The
odiousness of restorations. — The eventual acceptability of other
changes.— A late October walk. — The unchanging valley. — Leaders
of caravans Page 203
AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT.
THE present volume forms the second of three
small projections of a View of Modern Life ; it is a
natural sequel to a former work, the "Soul of
London." Its author has attempted to do in this
volume just as much as in the former one he attempted
to do for a modern city. As the " Soul of London"
was made up of a series of illustrations to a
point of view, so the " Heart of the Country " is a
series of illustrations to country moods. The subject
of the " Country " being so vast a one the limits of
the attempt must be obvious. Every man, in fact,
has a sort of ideal countryside — perhaps it is a
Utopian vision that he conjures up at will within his
own brain, perhaps it is no more than as it were
a mental " composite photograph " of all the country-
sides that he knows more or less well. It is this
latter vision of his own, this survey of several country-
sides that he knows more or less intimately, and ol
many countrysides that he has passed through or
visited for longer or shorter periods — it is some such
xi
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
mental "composite photograph " that the author of
such a book must attempt to render upon paper. In
this book the writer has followed implicitly the rule
laid down for himself in the former volume, and the
rule that he has laid down for himself for the forth-
coming volume ot this trilogy ; that is to say, that
though for many years he has read many works,
returns, or pamphlets dealing with rural questions,
and though these may have tinged his views and
coloured his outlook, he has attempted here to do no
more and no less than to depict — that is the exact
word — his personal view of his personal country-
side. This particular countryside limits itself strictly
to that portion of the British Isles that is most
psychologically English. It leaves out the greater
portion of Yorkshire, which is, in most of its condi-
tions, a part of Lowland Scotland ; on the west it
runs no further north than Carlisle; it neglects
Wales. Within these limits it gives, as well as the
powers of depiction of its projector have allowed,
a rendering of a rural cosmogony. If the attempt
appear somewhat megalomaniac, it has been under-
taken nevertheless in a spirit of true humility by
a person who, having spent the greater number
of his years in one or other Heart of the Country,
has a very wholesome fear of awakening all the
sleeping dogs of controversies most heated and most
bewildering. At the same time it leaves unsaid
xii
AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT
nothing that its author wished dispassionately to
record. It preaches no particular sermon ; it
announces no particular message ; it is practically
no more than a number of impressions arranged
after a certain pattern and in a certain order. (What
that order is may be seen if the reader who is
interested in the matter will refer to the paragraph
that occupies the greater part of page 22 and a small
portion of page 23.)
F. M. H.
WINCH ELSE A, April t 1906.
NOTE. — A number of extracts, selected rom the completed
book by the Editor, have appeared in the columns of the Tribune :
the book itself was written without any eye to such a form of
publication.
Xlll
THE COUNTRY OF THE
TOWNSMAN
INTRODUCTORY.
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN.
IN the cigarette smoke, breathing the rich odours
of ragouts that cloy the hunger, of verveine, of
patchouli, beneath tall steely-blue mirrors, over
crumpled napkins of an after-lunch in a French place
of refection, an eloquent and persuasive friend with
wide gestures was discoursing upon some plan that
was to make for the rest of the company fame,
fortune, rest, appetite, and the wherewithal to supply
it — an engrossing plan that would render the Islands
of the Blest territory habitable for them almost as
soon as they could reach the " next street," which, in
most of our minds, is the Future. Their heads came
close together across the table ; outside in the narrow
street carts rattled ; all round them was that atmo-
sphere of luxuries of a sort, with an orchestral
accompaniment of knives thrown down, of orders
shouted in French, in Italian, in Spanish ; words in
broken English, words in tones of command, of
.anger, of cynical passion, of furtive enjoyment — a
sort of surf-sound, continuous, rising and falling, but
3 B 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
utterly beyond analysis. And, as if it were a com-
partment that shut them in from all the world,
beneath the shelter of this Babel they discussed their
Eldorado of the day after to-morrow — their dim
Cyclades of the next street.
Those names, those myths shining so graciously
down the ages, have still for humanity a great
fascination. In one or the other of them each soul
of us finds his account. Dim Cyclades, Eldorados,
Insulae Beatse, Happy Hunting Grounds, Lands
flowing with Milk and Honey, Avalons, or mere
Tom Tiddler's Grounds — somewhere, between the
range of dim islands of a purple west, or that field
where we shall pick up gold and silver — somewhere
in that vast region is the spot that each of us
hopes to reach, to which all our strivings tend,
towards which all our roads lead. The more close
and airless the chamber from which we set out the
more glorious, no doubt, the mirage; the longer
the road, the more, no doubt, we shall prize the
inn at the end — the inn that we shall never reach;
the inn that is our goal precisely because we never
can reach it by any possible means. But in bands,
in companies, in twos or threes or singly — in
labourers' cottages, in omnibuses, in tall offices, we
discuss each plan that shall bring us one step nearer,
or in the dark silences of our own hearts we cherish
a passion so fierce and so solitary that no single soul
else in all the universe has a hint of our madness, our
presumption, our glorious ambition, or our baseness.
4
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
Thus in that dubious place of refection the one
friend could well enough discourse to his companions
upon their common Eldorado that should, the gods
being good, give them fame — and rest. It held them,
the idea, among all the clatter ; it made glorious
with its glamour the foul atmosphere. It was, as the
slang phrase has it, a master idea. Suddenly, pushing
out from behind the door, came a long, grey, bronzed
man.
Bewilderment at being torn from their train ot
thought, surprise, recognition, were the steps towards
immense pleasure.
" You ! " slipped from all their lips at once. He
dropped his great length into a small chair placed
askew at the corner of the table, and began to talk
about the country.
He had just come up from the Heart of the Country !
He was a man always very wonderful for them, as to
most of us in our childhood the people are who have
a command over beasts and birds, who live in the
rustle of woodlands, and commune with ringdoves as
with spiders. We credit them with powers not our
own, with a subtle magic, a magnetism more delicate
than that which gives power over crowds of men —
with keener eyesight, quicker hearing, and a velvety
touch that can caress small creatures. They have
something faun-like, something primeval, something
that lets us think that, in touch with them, we are
carried back into touch with an earlier world before
cities were, and before the nations of men had
5
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
boundaries. There are naturalists — but these men
are not naturalists ; they come out of no studies ; in
museums they shudder and are disquieted, just as
gipsies are vaguely unrestful when you ask them
to enter your house. In the towns these men will
see things that we never see ; they will note the fall
of sparrows, or, sailing through the air a mile above
the cross of St. Paul's, a sea-hawk will be visible to
them. Into the towns they will bring a touch of
sweetness and of magic — because they come from the
Heart of the Country.
He was all in grey, so that against an old stone
wall you would hardly have seen him, or on a
downside no bird would startle at passing him. It
happened that he mentioned the precise green valley
that for one of those men was the Heart of the
Country. It nestles beneath a steep, low cliff, in the
heart of an upland plain as vast and as purple, as
wavering and as shadeless as the sea itself. But
the green valley runs along a bottom, a little win-
terbourne directing its snake's course ; trees fill it
and overshadow old stone houses, and it is alive
with birds driven to it for water from the plains
above.
So that, green and sinuous, a mirage seemed to
dazzle and hang in air in the middle of the cigarette
smoke, making a pattern of its own, vivid and thirst-
inspiring, across the steely-blue of the restaurant
mirrors. It seemed to waver right above, and to
extinguish the luminous idea — to extinguish the very
6
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
light of their Eldorado. They talked of place after
place, pursuing the valley along its course, of a great
beacon here, a monolith there, of millponds and
villages that run one into another, boasting each one
a name more pleasant in the ear, or a tuft of elms
higher and more umbrageous. For if each man have
(and each of us has) his own Heart of the Country,
to each assuredly that typical nook, that green
mirage that now and then shines between him and
his workaday world, will be his particular Island of
the Blest, his island of perpetual youth, his closed
garden, which as the years go on will more and
more appear to contain the Fountain of Youth. And
as time goes on, too, life will assume more and more
an air of contest between the two strains of idealism
in the man — a contest between the Tom Tiddler's
Ground of the Town and Islands of the Blest that
lie somewhere in the Heart of the Country.
These metaphors, this ideal of an island smoothness
in Hyperborean seas, are not the less true because
they are not part of our present vernacular. Our
necessities, our modes of travel, our very speech,
have changed ; the necessity for that ideal remains.
Whilst, indeed, our speech was forming itself, they
wrote books with titles like " Joyful Newes from the
West Over Seas," and still in the tangible unknown
West, they could hope to find Happy Valleys. Now
with a mapped-out world we can no longer have
that hope. We travel still with that ideal, but the
hope has grown intangible.
7
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
On the one hand the world has become very small,
since we may have it all in a book, in pink, in green,
in yellow squares. We can reach any portion of it so
easily, we may have so easily pictures of it all, that
it is hardly worth the seeking. Intellectually, we
have learned that there is no Island of the Blest ; in
our inmost selves, automatically, we never acknow-
ledge it. We have brought our island nearer home ;
it lies beyond the horizon, but only just beyond. In
a sense we may even hope to reach it by the most
commonplace of methods. For the mere taking of a
pill there may be ours health, which is the fountain
of youth ; for the mere pulling the ropes of a machine,
for just waving our arms in certain magical postures
before dressing in the morning, there shall — so the
advertisements say — be ours a day of vigorous and
unclouded brain, a day that shall see us, unhandi-
capped by any bodily ill, descend to do our battles in
the market-place — a day in the land of Eldorado.
Thus do the clamant charlatans of the beyond in the
pale columns of our journals attempt to play upon
strings that three thousand or three hundred years
ago were rendered sweet by the melodies of those
other charlatans who were once living poets.
These things we only half believe in, even in this
England, which for the rest of the world is the
<' Land of Pills." But observe the face of your inter-
locutor when you tell him that you are going into the
country. Observe the half envy, half yearning, the
mixture of reminiscence and of forecasting plans that
8
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
will waver across his face, and mark all the shades
of expression in his " Lucky you ! "
Round the flat, dark, toilsome town there is the
vast green ring, the remembrance of which so many
men carry nowadays in their hearts. Put it, if you
will, that its attraction is simply that of the reverse
of the medal, that it is a thing they love merely
because it is not theirs'.
Its real pull is felt, the rope is cast off, when,
in his club, on his mantelpiece at home or at his
suburban post-office, the townsman leaves directions
for his letters to be forwarded. At that blessed moment
he loses touch with the world, casts off his identity,
heaves a sigh as if a great weight had fallen from his
shoulders, or even moves his limbs purposelessly in
order to realise to the fullest how a free man feels.
He has shaken off his identity. For as long as the
mood lasts he cannot be traced, he cannot be re-
called to earth. And supposing he never went to
the spot to which his letters are to be addressed — sup-
posing that, instead of taking train to that fly-fisher's
inn, to that moorland farm, or to that friend's manor
house, he went afoot to the shore of a Devonshire sea,
he might never be found again. He might shake
off all responsibilities; he might form ties lighter
to bear than the lightest snaffle that ever horse sub-
mitted to. He might find a threshold over which,
when he stepped in the morning, his feet would go
lightly, his eyes glance confidently over fields, seas,
and skies of a fabulous brightness.
9
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
He never does it — at least he has never done it
since here the townsman is and here, in whatever
particular town of life he has an abiding place —
here he is likely to remain. Some no doubt break the
chain. It has been asked, as we know well enough,
" What's become of Waring since he gave us all
the slip ? " But they never know, they who form the
" us all " of the line. Waring has disappeared —
gone ; he no longer exists ; the Heart of the Country
has swallowed him up. He was a weak man who
broke; those remaining are the strong, who shiver
a little sometimes at the thought that they may do
as Waring did.
The mood may last him for an hour or two ; it
obsesses him a little as he leans back in his train — the
fact is still there ; his letters are being forwarded to
a place that he has not yet reached. For a little time
he is still in the grey of the town; its magazines,
its papers, its advertisements hold his eyes imme-
diately. Gradually through the glass that encages
us he sees the green flicker through the grey of the
outskirts, as through the ragged drab skirts of a
child you may catch the flash of her knee when she
runs. The cloak spread over the ground becomes a
covering less and less efficient; then it is all green,
and amongst a geometrical whirl of corded posts
turning slowly right away to the horizon he shall
see the figures of women with blue handkerchiefs
over their heads kneeling down and tying the hops.
But that is still all remote, all shadowy. His
10
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
lungs are quite literally filled with the air of his
town. It is only when he steps out at his junction
where he " changes " that he is conscious of some
strange and subtle difference. On his forehead he
feels a sudden coolness, his foot falls more lightly,
he draws a deeper breath. It is because he is breathing
the breath of a free wind.
So he crosses the platform, and in the gloaming
gets into the smaller, dirtier, stuffier and darker, and
how infinitely more romantic, boxes that will carry
him through a fast darkening land into his par-
ticular Heart of the Country.
Each man of us has his own particular Heart, even
as each one has his own particular woman. And the
allegiance that he pays to it is very similar. He has
his time of passionate longing, of enjoyment, of
palling perhaps, or of a continually growing passion
that is a fervour of jealousy much such as a man may
feel for his wife. He has his love of the past, or he has
been whirled past places that later he will hope to
make his ; he has, and always, his ideal.
This he will never attain to. Put him upon a great
hill. Below him there will stretch plains almost
infinite; down into them the slopes on which he
stands' wave and modulate indefinitely. Above his
head is the real blue infinity ; on his left hand the
purple sea, with just a touch of the pink shore of
another land that may carry the mind to distances
ii
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
yet more vast. At his back there are grey silences ;
before his face, miles and miles away in the heart of
the sunset, there are dim purplish hills, like a lion
couchant, stretched out in a measureless ease. .To
this height he may have attained with great labour ;
until he reached it it had represented his ideal. But
after the first intaking of free air into the lungs he
will see those dim and glamorous hills. And just
beyond them once more his ideal will lie hidden.
A moment later, too, he will remember that in the
valley that he crossed to reach this height there were
an old mill with a great pond in which swallows
dipped, an old wheel revolving in a dripping tracery
of green weeds, a stream running down a valley all
aflame with kingcups. This old mill that he passed
nonchalantly enough may, he remembers when he
stands upon the height, contain his ideal chamber ;
or if he had followed the slow stream through the
marsh marigolds that would brush against his knees
he might find the particular Herb Oblivion that he
seeks ; or, lying down within sound of that old wheel,
he might by its incessant plash be lulled into
slumbers how easy !
Thus along with him he will carry always those
two small fardels, regret for neglected loves, longing
for the unattainable. No doubt at times he will drop
them. We differ much in these things. Some men
will feel all burdens drop from them for a time when
they buffet an immense wind; others, again, are
lulled into a pleasant doze in the immense heat and
12
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
haze of sheep-downs at noon ; upon some an immense
placidity is shed when in the late twilight they step
across the threshold of their inn into the mistiness
of a village street, when they hang over the stones
of a bridge and see waving in the eddies of a trout-
stream the reflection of rosy cottage windows.
These moods are rare enough ; yet they give for us
the " note " of the country, and certain of them stand
out for us through all our lives. Thus I remember,
years ago, running down through veiled moonlight,
between hedges that were a shimmering blaze ot
cow-parsley, upon a bicycle that by some miracle ot
chance ran so smoothly that I was unconscious ot
it as of myself. And the gentle slope was five miles
long. It was one of those sensations that are never
forgotten ; it was one that may hardly be recaptured,
unless, indeed, the hereafter be one long lying on
the tides of the winds.
For many — perhaps, if one knew the secrets of all
hearts, one would say for all humanity that is really
tied to the towns — the " note " of the country is one
of pain. This not because the country herself is
sad — she is only passionless — but because she is the
confidante of so many sorrows. The townsmen tear
themselves to pieces among the spines that abound
where men dwell. Their friends, their vocations,
their taxes, their rail service, their mistresses, their
children, their homes, all the creaking doors and
monotonous wall-papers — all these things grow weari-
some, grow nauseous, grow at last terrible even, and
13
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
so they take to the country for consolation. Some-
times they find it. Sometimes the country, like a
jealous wife, will say, " No, you bring yourself to
me only in your worst moods. Find another con-
soler." That, however, happens seldom, and, as a
rule, we discover eventually that she has acted for
the best in one way or another.
I know, for instance, a man whose Heart of the
Country is a certain empty room in a labourer's stone
cottage in the backwater of a tiny inland village.
He remembers it always as it was at night, with all
the doors and windows open in a breathless June,
and two candles burning motionlessly above white
paper. The peculiar whimper of sheep bells comes
always down the hill through the myriad little noises
of the night. In the rare moments when the bells
cease there comes the mournful and burdensome cry
of the peewits on the uplands. If this too is silent
there is the metallic little tinkle of a brook on
pebbles, the flutter of night moths beating against
the walls and ceiling of the lit room. The room
itself contains nothing save a table, a chair, a
shaving-glass and a razor, a pen and a little ink in
an egg-cup ; and the black night, magical and
gleaming, peers through the open windows and the
open door. It was like, so my friend tells me, being
hidden in a little lighted chamber of an immense
cavern — a place deep down in the eternal blackness
of the earth's centre.
And, according to his view, no man in the world
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
was ever more terribly burdened with griefs of a
hundred kinds. The inflictions that Fate can bestow
upon a man are ingenious and endless ; he may
have, say, the temperament of a poet, a hopeless
passion, a neglected genius, the disclosure of hidden
basenesses in himself, the consciousness of personal
failure, the ingratitude of friends ; or at given mo-
ments the whole circle of his life may seem to y^
crumble away and leave him naked beneath the
pitiless stars. Let us say that all these calamities
had overwhelmed this particular Waring. In that
solitude and blackness he fought, unavailingly
enough, against these devils ; he tried to people that
room with figures of his own imagination, so that
still in remembrance he seems to see a whole
galanty-show of kings and queens in mediaeval
garnitures passing dimly from door to door. At
times the razor that lay on the shelf behind his back
had the fascination of a lodestone, and on a hot,
blazing moonlight night he would rush out from his
room and wander, appalled and shaken, to the
middle of the white silent village, with the thatches
on the wall-tops silver, and the shadows vertical
beneath the moon. And then from the little
village bakery there came always the constant and
unchanging thrill of a single cricket — a monotonous
sound that seems to be shaken out upon the air
as a powder may be shaken from a box with a
pierced lid.
Thus that cave-like, cool room, those hot nights
15
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
and that thrill of the cricket, those shadows and that
fascination of an instrument that should bring a
swift and utter change, the slumbrous cottage faces,
the imagined and shadowy pageants, the creaking
cry of the peewits and the clamorous whimper of
sheep- bells — all these things, fusing together and
forming a little fold in space and time, go to make
what remains for my friend his Heart of the Country.
He did not in that solitude find any alleviation, but,
perhaps because his particular cross drew him away
from the real contemplation of material objects, that
spot remains to him something glamorous, some-
thing mysterious. Probably on account of those
woeful associations he will never go back to that spot,
and so it will remain for him to all time remote and
wonderful.
Thus that glamour and mystery are what he
gained from that stay ; and that subtle witch, the
Country, if she gave with one hand neither composure
nor good health, those illusions that are our daily
bread, gave with the other hand that other illusion,
blessed in its way — the belief that the earth holds
valleys filled with romance and mystery.
The powers of the country, its powers over our
moods, are not illimitable. At times hills, great skies,
bright hedgerows, or barns the thatch of which is
a network of mosses and flowers — at times all these
things are mockeries upon whose surface the very
sunlight lies like a blight. But at times, again, she
achieves the impossible, and serene twilights, the
16
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
chorus of birds at dawn, the sound of children's
voices from deep woods or the blue floors of coppices
in May, some immensely vivid sight or some in-
definitely complicated sound, some overwhelming
odour or the feel of the wind on the forehead, some
blessed touch from the material world will pierce
through the cloud of gloom that besets poor humanity
at its lower ebbs. And it is these things that are
unforgettable, it is these things that keep us going.
Other men will remember having watched by a
sick bed for several days and nights in succession,
in a house full of sickness, waiting all the time for
a temperature to fall. The drag of such nights and
days becomes terrible towards four in the morning.
A man sits in a twilight too dim to read by, he fears
to move lest the tinkle of medicine bottles awaken
the sleeper. He dare not sleep, he dare hardly
think for fear that sleep will overcome him. He re-
members, on the third or fourth of these nights, a
feeling like breaking, a tightening of the screw until
it seems that something must burst, so that without
more deliberation it is a necessity to be out of doors
for a second, for a minute, for however tiny a space
of change.
Out of doors there is coolness, the merest shimmer
of grey above the distant sea, the slow shaking out
of rays from a lighthouse that seems to be lessening
its pace out of weariness and because the dawn is
at hand; flowers and leaves appear indistinct and
visionary, the air is absolutely motionless. And
17 C
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
suddenly there comes a waft of light right across the
sky; a rook caws from the trees high overhead
— then the voices of the whole colony, soothing and
multitudinous ; a breeze stirs a spray of hops. The
corner is turned, the night is over.
It does, perhaps, consecrate the memory that,
going back to the close room, one may find that
at last the temperature of the sufferer has fallen,
but the unforgettable psychological relief comes with
that stir of the dawn breeze, and that sudden motion
of the hop tendrils is the acknowledgment that we
are no longer alone in a dead world.
#•#*•##•
All this is no doubt about "the country," in
inverted commas — about the land from the out-
side. It is one of the anomalies of our present
civilisation that the majority of self- conscious
humanity — the majority, at least, of those who read
books — should regard unbuilt-upon land from that
outside. It is a fact physically more remarkable
in its way than the earliest systems of cosmogonies.
That the earth should contain the universe was
thinkable enough. That the cities should contain
" the country " is one of those unthinkable things
that have passed into the subconsciousness of a great
section of mankind.
Hitherto, through the course of history the country
has seemed to triumph inevitably. The image of
the struggle has been not so much a moving of the
pendulum between town and country, but a kind of
18
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
Antaeus-town giant has gained its strength only
by touching the ground ; or, if you will, the image
is that of a bird that may soar but must come back
to earth. The country has " had the pull " because in
their origins all foods and all the necessaries of life
came from seeds of one kind or another, the chain
going always through the carnivora and the cotton
mills to end eventually in vegetation.
But modern scientific thinkers proclaim that this
chain is broken. Foods exquisite and nourish-
ing are to be made from mineral oils and acids ;
raiment of glorious dye and skin-caressing texture
is to be had from all sorts of coal-tar products.
The necessity for the Nature of green fields is at an
end, according to the New Millennialists. These
scientists adopt towards that particular Mother
Nature an angry and querulous tone; they accuse
her of producing a slow-witted race of men, of
hindering social progress, of fostering an anti-human
malady, the desire for solitude. And indeed to-day
I read in an organ of advanced thought that " the
country stock, which some reformers have been
demanding as an invigorating and necessary renewal
of the city race, is likely to prove positively harmful,
as adding an element not adjusted to city conditions."
The city, in fact, is said to have bred its own type.
And once outside the country habit of mind the
townsman finds a considerable difficulty in getting
back to a more psychological possession of a country
life. He may buy land, he may even take to rearing
19 C 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
stock, which is supposed to be the surest passport to
some sort of social standing in the country ; his
face may become bronzed, his raiment approximate
to that of the half-golfer, half-horse-coper, which is
nowadays the country's undress livery; but he will
not, save thus externally, get very much nearer to
being a countryman.
It may appear paradoxical, but it is as a matter of
fact a truism that country life is in all its branches
a singularly complicated matter. In a month or so
a man may get to know a town sufficiently for all
practical purposes. Generalised, all bricks and
mortar are much the same ; all town streets fall
under wide headings, and town societies are easily
classed within comfortable limits.
But your clever man of the world set down in the
country is, as soon as he opens his eyes, confronted
with an ignorance of his own that will at first render
him infuriated with the ignorance that he meets all
round him.
It will end, if his eyes remain open, in a modest
disbelief in his own mental powers. He will discover
the bewildering idiosyncrasies of each component
factor of the social life of villages and small towns ;.
he will discover that it is possible to make Montague-
Capulet quarrels out of grounds incredibly unim-
portant in his point of view ; he will discover that,,
broad-minded and aloof as he may be, he himself,
if in any sense he " lives " in the place, will become
involved over head and ears in these small feuds ;
20
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
and a little later he will discover himself— himselt
as an entity cast inward upon itself for intellectual
support, for interest, for employment, and for life.
It is, perhaps, then only that he will discover that
he knows nothing and probably never will know
anything appreciable of what in the cant of the day
is called Nature ; and to the measure of his humanity
and of his thirst for knowledge he will be irritated or
saddened by the amount of time that he will think he
has lost in the cities. The amassing of his fortune
such as it is will seem a small thing compared with the
fact that in amassing it he has so spoilt his quickness
of apprehension that he can never hope to distinguish
the flight of a redshank from that of a sandpiper.
And the longer he lives, or the longer his interest
remains alive, the deeper will his thoughts penetrate
He will discover that he knows nothing about wild
flowers, nothing about ploughed fields. He will be
startled by such questions as, " How many sheep will
an acre of marsh-land carry all the year round r "
and that most bewildering of problems, "In the
profit and loss balance-sheet of a fatted bullock what
should a farmer charge himself for the straw off his
own farm ; and what should he pay himself when in
the form of manure that straw is put upon his own
fields ? "
The farmer as an entity or as a problem will
begin to exist for him, and the farm labourer as a
" problem " perhaps still more than as an entity ;
and all the problems of the country — of game pre-
21
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
serving, of wild bird protection, of the introduction
of new crops, of the proper form for education, of
small holdings, of the amenities of life and scenery,
of the question of small houses, of the influence of
surface drainage upon trout streams, and of the
destinies of the country child — all these things will
give to his broad green horizon hundreds of new
significances, so that it will teem with a life more
complicated in its interworkings than any of which
he had before conceived.
These things differ very much in different men,
but as a broad general plan the induction of a man
into a countryside runs upon these lines, and by
these steps he seems to descend further and further
into the bowels of the country. He views the country
from a distance ; coming into it he studies the means
of communication, and makes nodding acquaintance
with the men he meets between the hedgerows ;
next, crossing the fields by short cuts that he has
discovered, passing through little lanes and coppices,
or hopping laboriously from ridge to ridge of a
ploughed-up footpath, he comes across wild birds,
or watches yellow sheep gasping in the washing-
troughs ; he hears, pattering like a little shower or
rain, the sound of the turnip-flea at its devastations ;
he penetrates next into the farms and cottages and
makes acquaintance with all sorts of slow, browned
creatures of his own species. Then he will begin, to
the measure of the light vouchsafed him, to speculate
upon how the lots of these men maybe ameliorated,
22
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
and, after he has speculated as long as time is granted
to him, after he has essayed his own seedings and
garnered his own crops, he will die, and his " things "
will be sold, another pressing to occupy his accus-
tomed place. It is then, under these main headings,
with a hope of attaining to such a gradual deepening
of interest, that I have undertaken this projection of
the rustic cosmogony as it presents itself to me.
Speaking very broadly — and to a writer of gene-
ralisations a very great latitude of speech may be
allowed — this "Country" in inverted commas, this
peculiar Island of the Blest may be said to exist only
for a more or less lettered, more or less educated,
more or less easily circumstanced town class. Owing
to the social convention of land-holding the most
easily circumstanced of our body politic belong to
the landed class, and such attractions as the green
earth possesses for them is very much part of their
daily life. They are born among green fields ; they
went bird's-nesting, they rode their ponies over spring
wheat, they were, however artificially, part of the
landscape itself. For them, the associations of the
country will be the associations of youth and of high
spirits, accidental matters personal to themselves.
The peculiar decorative line of a pollard-willow-tree
will appeal to them in after-life, not because willow-
trees were things of which their youth was starved,
but because in the small hole of the pollard top of
one particular willow-tree they used, say, to leave
small packets of chocolates for a particular keeper's
23
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
daughter, or because in another hole of another tree
they made, in company with a good-humoured red-
haired boy, their first gunpowder mine. Thus in after
years willow-trees will have romantic associations for
them as they sit over the table full of correspondence
of a room in the Foreign Office.
And the poorer town classes do not, as a rule,
regard the country as a place in which they shall
regain health, or as a place of glamorous asso-
ciations; for, on the one hand, their purses, their
whole arrangement of a yearly budget will not allow
them to contemplate as part of the year's programme
a definite month in a farmhouse or beside the sea.
And as a general rule, if the industrial or shop
assistant townsman began life in the country, his
particular beginning of life was neither romantic nor
glamorous. He felt himself too near the earth, he
was too conscious of the social obligation to touch
his hat to people in more shining raiment, while he
himself was ungraciously clad, as a rule insufficiently
fed, and almost invariably miserably lacking in the
more poignant interests of life.
For it is undoubtedly one of the great defects
of life in the country that really contagious occu-
pations for the leisure times of any one not a child
are wanting, and the hobbledehoy must pass his
unoccupied moments in long, aching hours at the
corners of village streets. Up to a certain age there
are many pleasures to be had ; bird's-nesting, with its
peering into cracks and crannies of old masonry and
24
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
into the mysterious half-lights and distances of thorn
bushes, offers at once a sport and a collector's hobby ;
whilst to the ordinary seasonal games, to the marbles,
tip-cat, hoop-driving and leg- wicket of the town child,
the country child can add the slightly perilous delights
of trout-tickling, tree-climbing, and the robbing of
apple orchards.
Thus upon the whole the child of whatever degree
does prefer a real country life to the life of the streets.
He does not, of course, attach romantic values to
natural objects, but he finds in them enough of interest
to " keep him going," to tide him over the periods of
terrible monotony that fall upon the lives of all
children. I have questioned and closely observed a
number of children who had the opportunities of an
amphibious existence, who had practically only to
ask to be allowed to go either from town to country
or from country to town. Once the pleasures of
gazing into shop windows had been exhausted for
the year — and this passion is as natural in children
as is that for marbles and bull's-eye lanthorns — once
this passion had been exhausted for the year, the
children invariably preferred to be in the country;
they loved it for the freedom to be out-of-doors
roughly dressed, for the roads that they can run across
without being confined to the rigidly straight line
of destination; and they loved it above all for its
profusion.
To the real slum child, the child brought up in a
grey atmosphere, the sole window into any sort of
25
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
delight is an infinitesimal copper coin ; without an
unattainable number of half-pennies this child can
never really handle any number of any kind of objects ;
and only those who can remember their own childhood
can realise what that means. For in stone-paved courts
and asphalted streets there are not even little stones
to be picked up ; there is nothing to be made believe
with, and sharp-eyed rag-pickers seize upon even the
old tins that with a bit of string a child might turn
into a representation of a railway train. So that
almost the only things that the slum child sees in any
numbers are trouser buttons that he gets from Heaven
knows where, by Heaven knows what process of
gambling. The only other profusion which he ever
sees is sealed from him by glass windows or barred
to him by the invisible barrier of Property that erects
itself even before the greengrocer's stalls on the
pavements.
So that, set down in front of the tremendous waste
of plant life, the ownerless blades of grass, the
enormous spread of fields, the scampering pro-
fusion of wild rabbits, or the innumerable and
uncontrolled sheep, the slum child, the poor town
child is rendered absolutely breathless. He is for the
time being like a lifelong prisoner to whom has been
given the key of an unneeded street.
I came last hopping season upon a London child
raptly contemplating a little brook that ran close to
the golden straw wigwam in which her mother was
cooking bacon over a chip fire. They had arrived only
26
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
that afternoon, and their untidy bundles of sackcloth
gave a dilapidated look even to a very radiant corner
of a valley. The child, in a misty black skirt that did
not close at the back and wearing a battered sailor-
hat below which her curls hung limply, turned a
sharp little face suddenly to me and remarked, as
if it were a profound truth that had shaken her whole
world —
" There don't appear to be no turncocks here !
And there's more water than when the main burst
opposite Mrs. Taylor's." The nut-trees arched over
her head and, standing rubbing one foot upon the
instep of the other, she pulled a leaf that she let drop
into the water. It appeared to bring into her mind
another profound and wonderful truth — the fact that
here, in an every-day world, was a region in which
there were almost no " coppers " to cut and run
from. She had " often heered tell of the country,"
she said
I was never able to trace what further mental
revolutions took place in her, for almost immedi-
ately afterwards typhoid fever broke out in that
kraal of hoppers and it grew expedient to avoid
their corner of the long sunny hop valley ; but that
"note" of the country has been the dominant one
for any slum child with whom I have ever spoken, and
if, sooner or later/the " copper " does become manifest
vaguely, and laws of property, even in hazel twigs,
do finally assert themselves, profusion remains for
most of the poorer townsmen the master " note." I
27
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
drove yesterday nine or ten miles along a hog's-back
ridge to a cricket match in company with a railway
porter who was just one of those slum children grown
up. He had entered the service of the railway in a
London suburban station (he had been born in one of
the worst rookeries in Hammersmith), and he had to
be " shifted " on account of his health to one of the
smallest of wayside stations. Here for several years
he led a curious existence, in, but not of, the country,
passing his daylight hours in the station, but having
his home in the nearest large town — one of those
towns which are practically slices of London arranged
along the face of the sea.
We drove for some time down the valley, broad,
vividly green and tumultuous with thorn bushes in
flower. The railway man talked of the morning's
frost which had filled all that bottom land. " Warm
the night was in H ," he said ; " but when I came
out here first train — cor " he paused. "White "
He paused again, seeking for a simile, but finding
none he repeated, "All white." The rest of the
eleven who came from up the hill had nothing to say.
"Farmers say in the papers that there hasn't been
no such frost since '92. Bad for the station-master's
'taters,' I hear. Fruit too. Say, Jimmy, what does
frost do to French beans?" "Kills 'em, reckon,"
a farmer muttered.
So the Cockney went on repeating " Cor ! " and
" White ! You should 'a' seen ! " and gaining horti-
cultural information with a swiftness of speech and
28
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
intentness that compared with the taciturn accept-
ance of nature by the farmers as the eagerness of a
terrier before a rat-hole compares with the stoicism
of a great dane. We jogged between the hedgerows
till, just as the road began to mount, the fisherman
who was driving the waggonette pulled the pipe out
of his mouth, and remarked that he was born in
Martello Tower No. 42 in the year '57. The Cockney
suddenly burst on us with —
"I hear we sh'll see views from the top of this
hill!" The farmers said, "Ay, views! The finest
views in England." Their voices were phlegmatic
and nonchalant by comparison, as if they had a
local pride in the view, but carried the enthusiasm
no further than that. But the Cockney said again,
" Views ! I've often wanted to see them views. I've
often thought of walking sup the hill to see them
views." And he repeated with an interminable
variety of accentuation the fact that he had often
thought of " them views."
We reached the top of the hill, and from far
below the crepitation of a train met his ear. He
pulled out his watch, exclaimed, "The 1.27 not
more'n ten minutes late," then turned and caught the
trail of smoke that appeared like a plume being blown
swiftly across immensity. It was as if the whole of
the world opened out to him between the gaps of the
hedgerows. There were plains, woods, fields like
pieces of a pattern, two glimpses of sea between
shoulders of purple hill, innumerable churches,
29
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
innumerable villages, all the foreground an immense
valley, bright with vivid sunlight, dotted with white
thorn trees, like solid and soft substances moulded by
) careless fingers, casting shadows vivid and sparkling,
and all the background fading into those almost
incredible mysteries of haze that give to our distances
so pathetic and so romantic a beauty, that so wonder-
fully allure the eye to travel deeper and deeper, or to
rest itself in shades always more and more soft.
As he turned his head to speak his words were
stopped by the other broader view that swept up to the
horizon on the northern side of the ridge. Here there
were fields smaller, hillocks more abrupt, and always
more and more and more woodlands of every shadow
and shade of colour, until at last the whole surface
was like an unbroken carpet, a purple lawn with
swelling cushions to the indistinguishable distances.
We drove for many miles between these two views,
always along that upland hog's-back. I do not know
just when the railway man delivered himself of his
profound truth, but it was, "Cor! What a lot a
fellow could do if he had all that!"
The farmers uttered deep " Ahs," not in reference
to his sentiment, but in the fashion of proprietors,
as if before his eyes and to impress him they had
unrolled that tremendous panorama which I believe
hardly two of them had twice before seen ; for the real
countryman travels very little beyond his own valley,
and except for the road to the nearest market towns
is little of a guide in his country.
30
THE COUNTRY OF THE TOWNSMAN
And, as I stood fielding through a long and sleepy
afternoon, in a rough outfield whose grass was above
the ankles, over a shoulder of hill below which was
spread just such another panorama, it ran through
my head : " What a lot a fellow could do if he owned
all that ! "
What sermons he could preach in the primeval
church whose weathercock flashed sudden scintilla-
tions through miles of space; how, with the love of
his heart, he might for ever hide himself in one of
the white thatched cottages that fit into their hidden
valleys as children's toys fit into their boxes ; what
straight and joyous blows his axe might deliver
through the saplings of those shaves and coppices
(and surely in all life there is no sensation more
satisfying than that of a truly delivered, truly swung
axe-stroke as it sinks into and through a young tree
as thick as your leg!) ; or what Utopias he might, a
benevolent despot, set up somewhere on hill or dale,
between the grass that gives him foothold and the
last hill that his eye can reach !
These thoughts are no doubt anthropomorphic,
but I think that they are inherent in poor humanity,
to whom the high places of the green earth seem
for a time to communicate a feeling of having the
height of a giant and the powers of a godhead.
In one of the infinite variations to which human
thought lends itself this feeling of oversight, of
control over one's own destiny, or over the destinies
of an immense number — whether of human beings or
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
of blades of grass — some species of supernatural
endowment is the "note" of the promise that the
country makes to us, whether in the rushings of its
winds, in the tumultuous lines of the parti-coloured
mantle thrown down all across its surface, or in the
mighty chorus with which, from dark flanks of a
wooded hill, the birds sing down the sun in May.
In some subtle and mysterious way the country
seems to offer us the chance, the mirage of attaining,
each one of us, to his ideal. And for that reason each
one of us, at the different times of the year when the
malaise seizes him, itches to set forth in some sort of
knapsack, and on horse, a-foot, in swift carriages or
in the sheltered sloth of his own veranda, between
the hedgerows, across the fields, by the sands of the
sea, or through the interstices of his own thoughts
whilst his eyes follow sinuous lines of greenery, he
will attempt to track down that master-thought of his
existence, that mysterious white fawn that lies
couched beside some fountain, in some valley, in
some Fortunate Island
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
THE
HEART OF THE COUNTRY
i
CHAPTER I
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
EACH road has its own particular individuality,
nay more, each has its own moral character,
its ethics as it were, since what are ethics and
morals but the effects of one's attitude upon the
beings who come in contact with us? Roads will
soothe us, tire us, exhilarate us, fill us with thoughts
or excite our minds with pictures of the whole hosts
of history that have passed along them.
Some of us love best the turnpikes — and I love
them very well — broad, white, smooth, with generous
curves, with carpets of turf along the sides enough to
make lawns, with gentle rises and with great skies
above them.
How many centurions, how many Roman mis-
sionaries, how many sweating bearers of tin ore, how
many earls, how many kings, how many royal brides,
35 D 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
or how many forsaken women have passed over these
still, long stretches ! How many feet have danced
gaily along, how many have ached in the dust !
When men go along such a road it is as if they
went amid a crowd of invisible phantoms, hearing a
continuous rustle of inaudible whispers. Here is
the spot where a king drank, at the top of the rise.
Here is where the five robbers lay in wait in the
coppice. Here is the milestone on which, on a moon-
light night, there sat the ghost of a bride whom a
peasant woman saw raise a white face to hers. . . .
There are solitary roads that look over the corners
of great uplands and seem to be peopled by no
ghosts; only above the not distant barrows or the
many-tiered fortifications of grass slopes one imagines
that there peep the shaggy touzled heads of the
ancient and forgotten inhabitants of the land.
There are roads that climb the sides of hills, aslant,
so that from a distance they seem to be white sashes
of honour ; and from distances, too, one may see, high
on the downs, white fragments of roads, like plumes
or like bill -hooks, hanging from the skies. One
hardly imagines that one will ever climb them ; if
one does so, the road assumes so new an aspect that
it loses for the time the identity that it had for us
upon the lower steps.
But the essential road of "the country" is one that
runs between hedgerows — nay more, the essential
first note of "the country" is the hedgerow itself.
For, as far as I have been able to discover, the
36
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
tendency of the town dweller is to circumscribe " the
country," to restrict it within comparatively narrow
limits. Thus, to go out of Town may be to go to the
Riviera, to Cape Coast Castle, or to the Broads. But
to go to any one of these, to the sea-shore, or to the
Yorkshire moors, is not to go into the country. If
the townsman were taking a summer holiday at
Lynmouth, he would be at the seaside; if from
thence he went inland towards Barnstaple, that
would be going into the country. But if his course
led him Brendon way, he would be going, not into
the country, but on to the moor.
Land, in fact, that has any very distinctive
features — moors, hills, peaks, downs, marshes or
fens — such land is not the country. It is only where
the hedgerows journey beside the turnpikes, close in
the sunken lanes, or from a height are seen, like the
meshes of an ill-made net, to lie lightly upon hills
and dales, to parcel off irregular squares of vivid
green from jagged rhomboids of brown, of yellow, or
of purple— it is only where the hedgerow has its
agricultural use that the country of the townsman is.
No doubt this is a splitting of philological hairs, but
by minutely enquiring into philology one comes upon
historic truths ; and this hedgerow definition leads us
to see that the word indicates not mere land that
stretches beneath the free sky — otherwise the country
would take in the continent or the habitable globe
itself — but it indicated in the old days simply and
solely the agricultural land of England, the land
37
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
that in the slow revolution of the centuries has been
agricultural, pastoral, and agricultural again, and
now again pastoral. It is a vague stretch of territory,
with unknown villages, unknown fields, brooks,
plough-lands, smithies, ricks, hop-oasts, tithe-barns,
dovecotes, manors — but always the hedgerow shuts
in the horizon, so that to go into the country is, as it
were, to lose oneself in a maze ; whereas to go, say,
on to Lobden moorside, is to expose oneself nakedly
to the skies.
The hedgerow, indeed, is so much the mark of the
country that it conducts a man there from the towns
and conducts him once more home again, since,
where the quicken hedges of the railways take com-
mand of the lines, there the country begins. There
are few hedges so beautiful as those that we see
flitting past us, green, solid, sinuous, with here and
there a touch of blossom and here and there a
trimmed peacock. And there are few surfaces
pleasanter for the eye to rest upon than their slight
mosaic of spiny stem and green leaf.
There are, however, not many such hedges stretched
across the countryside, and perhaps in one's every-
day mood one may be glad. For a land where all
hedges were perfect quicksets would be a land fat
and prosperous, but a land slightly soulless. It is
true that one has one's other frame of mind, the
frame in which one longs for the good piece of work,
well executed for the work's sake— the frame of mind
in which one prefers a newly-tiled barn to the
38
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
broadest, most moss-begrown and sparrow and rat-
tunnelled thatched surface ; in which a new, white,
five-barred gate is as a soothing and beneficent rest for
eyes tired and depressed by age-green wattles straddled
across the gate gaps of an ill-tenanted homestead.
But before one will have reached to that frame
of mind, one will have travelled between many
hedgerows riotous with dog-rose, odorous with elder
in blossom, along which the nefarious but beloved
bramble will carry the delighted eye from briony to
briony. And journeying between these hedgerows,
the townsman who loves the country will pass through
several phases until he arrives at one or the other
of the two stages of country thought, until he arrives
in one or the other of the two camps that are set
over against each other. Loosely put, because the
point is one that must come to be elaborated later,
these two schools, these two hostile camps are that
of the farmer who likes to farm as his fathers did
because the life is goodly where farms are gracious,
and that of the man who clears away all picturesque
lumber because business is business. With both
combatants a really proper man will find himself at
one time or the other in sympathy, but the less-
thinking of us enlist for good under one banner or the
other. And, loosely put again, we may say that the
townsman who really " takes up " farming becomes a
"business man," whilst the townsman who merely lives
in the country because he loves it will groan at each
new strand of barbed wire and each new cement pigsty.
39
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
I have walked over many countrysides with many
different men — with an American Jesuit, who wanted
to see the most beautiful village of my own county
" tidied up,'' stripped of creepers and of ivy, painted,
and lit with electric light ; with a tramp, who was
lividly indignant because the local Countess had cut
down some timber and spoilt a whole stretch of park
land ; with a lawyer, to whom the first bit of dusty
fallow with barbed wire round it was already Arcadia ;
with sailors ashore, who wanted to see always more
barns and more barns round the homesteads, to
indicate endless profusion ; with a peasant poet in a
smock frock and with aged, faded blue eyes, who
declared that God did not love steam-ploughs; as
well as with a steam-plough and traction-engine
proprietor, who declared that his great hulks of iron,
standing, like enormous toys dragged by some god-
head, askew upon the hillside, dragging from side to
side across the furrows giant insects all of iron — his
devouring monsters were sending up those pillars of
smoke that should lead the Chosen People back to the
Land. But always, subconsciously enough, they divided
themselves into these two strains — they wanted hedge-
rows because they sheltered birds, yielded flowers, or
had existed in the days of their fathers ; or they wanted
iron fences and barbed wire because these give no
shade upon the crops, harbour neither birds nor insects,
and indicate that the right type of man, the economist,
is in charge of land that shall be rejuvenated.
My tramp, with his rain-beaten clothes, his jovial,
40
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
peak-bearded face, his luxurious sprawl along the
roadside, like a Roman Emperor on his couch at a
long table — my tramp was probably the most dis-
interested, or the most interested, of them all.
Tramps are, after all, first to be considered as users
of the highways or the hidden lanes, since they, along
with sparrows, weasels, traveller's-joy and young
lovers, really live their lives between the hedgerows.
The gipsy, with his caravan or his withy- supported
wigwam, is by comparison an indoor dweller. The
individualities of these travellers are infinite, but the
good tramp, the real thing of his kind, is precisely
the one who lies by the highway, banquetting with
his eyes. He is the artist — the man who loves the
road for its own sake : he has not any other ambi-
tions than shade from the sun, long grass, and
eternal autumn weather.
It puzzled me for many years to know what castles
in Spain a tramp built — what was his particular
Island of the Blest ; and after getting over the first
shyness of accosting these slightly repellent bundles
of clothes (for it is, after all, the clothes that repel
us), I pursued this ideal with some diligence.
It was Carew, the tramp of whom I have spoken,
who got me most easily over my shyness. He was
a man of no particular book-learning, though he
said that hardly a day passed without his picking
up a paper. He was the son of a Guardsman and
a prostitute, and his professional tale had it that
he had been bred up as a tooth-comb maker ;
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
machines had destroyed that occupation. He carried
a comb in his pocket ; but I fancy that he delighted
to comb his long golden beard, and had the comb
for that purpose, inventing the profession to fit the
implement. I have met him in Regent's Park, on the
Sussex Downs, in Cornwall, and in the Strand ; but
he always carried his boots under his arm — I never
knew quite why. I fancy it was on account of some
superstition : he did not like boots, but a sort of luck,
I imagine, clung to this particular pair. An odd
mixture of sardonic candour and savage reticence,
he would admit to having been in every gaol in the
South of England, but he would never reveal what
he was afraid of on the roads at night. He always
crept into the shelter of some house at nightfall,
and he had once, he told me, been arrested for
following a young lady five miles across Salisbury
Plain in the moonlight — with no other evil purpose
than the desire to keep a human being in sight.
In spite of the comb, he said he had never done a
day's work in his life, and never meant to. He lay
by the roadside, and sometimes he had been so
magnificently lazy that he had gone without food for
two days rather than beg. " You get sick of people's
faces at times," he said.
But Carew, as far as I can discover, built no
castles in Spain. He supposed that pneumonia
would carry him off one of these days, probably in
China, as he styled Lewes gaol. He called the
various prisons by the names of countries, and nick-
42
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
named workhouses after the great cities of the world.
Thus Eachend Hill Union was Paris with him,
and Bodmin, Rome; though this caused confusion,
because, of course, London itself is Rome in the
lingo of the hedgerows. His crimes, as far as I
know, were limited to sleeping out ; in this flagrant
offence he was very frequently taken because of the
nervous tendency which made him sleep in stack-
yards near cattle, or in farm stables near horses, for
the sake of company. He exhibited with pride a
small sheaf of newspaper cuttings which recorded
his convictions, and his insolent retorts to magis-
trates. He was delighted with these ; but he seemed
to have no further ambitions. He was as contented
with a "bob " as with a " quid " if I gave it him, and
apparently contented with a " brown/' He let life roll
by in front of him, and took from it as little as he gave.
If you stay for any time at an inn looking down on
one of the great tramp highways, you will see the
same faces, the same clothes, the same battered hats,
the same splay feet, pass and repass your window at
intervals of a day or two ; for many of these tramps,
having found a string of two or three comfortable
wards, will spend, like summer ghosts, the whole of
the warm season haunting the same countryside.
Congenital lack of candour, the desire to please their
interlocutor, sheer muzziness of brain, or sheer
ferocity, make it difficult to discover what may be the
ideal of this brown flotsam. Their universal and
official shibboleth has it that if they could only get a
41
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
steady job and a nice little cottage they would settle
down with the missus and kids and live respectable
under the parson for evermore. The more candid of
the men, when they were assured that their reply
would make no difference in the number of coppers
destined for them, confessed almost without excep-
tion that their ideal was to have a pension like
a soldier. This appeared to be, as it were, the
good establishment that every middle-class man
wishes for his daughter. As a matter of fact, a very
considerable percentage of the innumerable old
soldiers who solicit alms along the road do have
such pensions, and for perhaps three glorious nights
out of the month are kings of the earth — kings over
draggled and carneying subjects, as aware as their
monarch himself of when pay-day comes round, and
where the floodgates of oblivion will be let loose.
One very hot day last month, on a high-road broad
and parched, stretching out level and without end
beneath an empty sky, on a day so hot that the very
larks were silent, and the twittering duologue of the
linnets sounded as if it came from dusty little throats,
I sat down in the long grass under the hedge by
the side of a very inviting and swarthy tramp. He
suddenly brought out in a rich soft voice, without any
inquiry of mine —
" Lord ! I'd like to be a workhouse master. By
I'd like to be the master of a workhouse ! Wouldn't I
give the casuals champagne and porter-house steaks
one day, and wouldn't I wollup them the next ! "
44
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
A little time before I had walked along the same
road in a drenching rain with a German tramp, tiny,
wizened, ferret - faced, and with the extravagant
gestures of an actor. With his right hand he held
firmly to my sleeve, and from a great scroll of manu-
script in his left he read passages from a poem about
the beauties of nature abounding in the forest near
the town of Carlsruhe in Baden. His whole being
was engrossed in his work, he saw neither road, sky,
nor sea; only from time to time he broke off to
exclaim, "This is very pleasant, you will like this
very much ! " His life-history, varied and unromantic
as it was, would occupy too much space in the telling,
but his consoling thought was that Wagner had been
too poor to possess an overcoat whilst he was writing
his music drama of Rienzi ; and hope, ardour,
confidence and romance were in his eyes and voice
when, at saying farewell to me, he uttered the words : —
" There is a Russian author, I forget his name,
who has just bought an estate on the Volga for
700,000 marks ; once he was only a tramp like me."
He was quite illiterate and his poem was atrocious,
but he said that people on the road were very kind
to him; one gentleman at Brighton had given him
board and lodging for three nights.
Thus between the fragrant hedgerows the towns-
man newly come into his heart of the country will
see this vast body of dun-coloured units driven back-
wards and forwards like ghosts upon the tides of the
winds. For him, indeed, they must remain ghosts ;
45
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
as a rule he will feel the repulsion that we must all
feel for those who are outside our world, outside our
life, outside our praise, outside our banning or our
cursing.
They are as much outside pity or regret as are the
innumerable dead; they have gone back into the
heart of the country and have become one with
the ravens, the crows, the weasels, and the robins,
picking up the things that we have no use for,
from such small parcels of ground as we have not
enclosed.
To the really inveterate townsman every weather-
beaten man or woman that he passes along the road
is a tramp. It is as difficult for him to distinguish
a genuine waggoner from a fraudulent tooth-comb
maker as to tell rye grass from permanent pasture,
or the mistle from the song- thrush. But gradually
as he sinks deeper into the life of the country, passes
during weeks and months between hedgerows and
begins to note differences between the songs of birds,
he will acquire a sort of instinctive knack of dis-
tinguishing between one sort and the other. The
differences lie in minute things, in the poise of the
head, the way of setting down the foot, the glance of
the eye in passing. The townsman may make
experiments in reclaiming the tramp — like Hercules
he will wrestle with death for possession of one soul —
but once the man is really dead there is no recalling
him. He may set him up and endow him with tools,
clothes, a place to live in and all the fair simulacra of
46
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
our corporate life ; he may keep him propped up for
a day, for a week, for a month, for a year, but sooner
or later the body will collapse and the soul once
more be at one with the Maker of the hedgerow. To
try preventing the real tramp from following out his
life is like attempting to stifle the words of a poet or
the sighs of a miserable lover. But if he ever come
to examine meticulously, the townsman will discover
that amongst these ghosts there whirl past some that
still cling to life, that claim our pity and need such
helping hands as the gods will let us give. Once,
when I lived on a hillside below a common, I came
home in the evening down through the furze and saw
a faded old man and a faded old woman, with the
usual perambulator of the traveller, encamped in a
small sandpit. They were both painfully clean, and
beneath an arbour of gorse bushes had an odd air
of being Philemon and Baucis cast upon an unsym-
pathetic world, where the very twilight of the gods
had passed away. But what struck me most and
most disagreeably was to see my own favourite
yellow Orpington cock dancing up and down in front
of the old man full a quarter-of-a-mile away from my
gate. I imagined that he was one of those people
who can whisper poultry out of a field, just as gipsies
are said to do with stallions. But on reaching home
I saw my cock contentedly dusting himself in an ash-
heap, and when I went a couple of hours later to the
post, passing the old people's settlement, I saw that
the yellow cock had been reinforced by a gigantic
47
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
lop-eared rabbit, an aged tortoise-shell cat and a
battered accordion. These were the Lares and
Penates of this ancient couple, the signs that, evil
days having fallen upon them and the hatred of the
workhouse having forced them to take the road, they
still clung desperately to as much as they could
carry in a perambulator of their former householder's
dignity ; they still clung desperately to life, the old
man still hoping for fruit trees to prune, the old
woman still cherishing her ideal of many beehives to
look after.
Such cases as this — of people whom it would be
possible to help— are, of course, innumerable, per-
haps less to be numbered between the hedgerows
and across the fields than even in the towns ; for so
slender in the country is the margin between keeping
on going and folding one's hands that the real
wonder is not that the poor are always with us. The
high-road at one bend or another, or climbing to the
skyline, will inevitably take our townsman past a
great and gaunt building — the inevitable last earthly
home of how many! — and the sight of aged forms in
a uniform brown, sitting as if they were part of the
patterns of a dado along the bottom of the tall
blank wall, must almost as inevitably give our
traveller pause. Here are more of the dead, more
men outside the world, withdrawn into a mysterious
state which is neither work nor leisure, neither rest
nor anything but merely waiting; and waiting for
what ? I have often wondered what castles in the air
48
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
these particular poor mortals could find it in them to
build ; perhaps the territory upon which these edifices
are to arise will only be found on the other side of
the last stream of all. I have never had the heart
to enquire. But perhaps the real speculation in most
of their minds is as to how many currants will be
contained in the piece of "spotted dick" that will
form their Sabbath pudding.
When I think of all the remarkable men I have
known who have finished their careers in these last
resting-places and of all the august women, I am filled
for the moment with a sense of my own extravagant
unworthiness or with a fear for my own future. The
country, I think, breeds individualities stronger, more
vigorous, precisely more remarkable than are bred in
those stretches of territory where the cotton shuttles
fly in millions or trains burrow under the ground.
Or perhaps it is only I who have been fortunate
enough to come into contact with no man true to
type and no women who have not achieved much or
suffered greatly. I think, for instance, of Ned Post,
a wizened, blear-eyed, boastful, melodramatic old
ruffian, who was the last of a family of great mole
catchers — a man with an inherited gift in its line as
great as that of Bach's. I think of Swaffer, who had
year after year taken prizes as the best ploughman
of his country, who had crossed the Atlantic in the
sixties to take the prize as the best ploughman in the
State of Pennsylvania. I think of old Mark Swain,
who founded a poetic and remarkable religion of his
49 E
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
own ; and I think of old Mrs. Sylvester, who had for
thirty years kept going a small four-acre holding, out
of which she supported a bedridden husband and two
dissolute sons. And all these remarkable people died
in the same workhouse in the same winter week. These
things, of course, cannot be helped ; and perhaps it is
merely the touch of genius, or of that immense patience
which is so good a substitute for genius, which each of
these people possessed ; perhaps it was only that inde-
finable touch in men that, making them care more for
their work than for its profits, dropped them down those
steps of this world which have only one lowest stage.
But it has often occurred to me to wonder how their
particular villages, hamlets or homesteads get on
without them. For sooner or later the townsman
in the country will discover how delicately balanced
is the human economy of the village even in these
days of distributed resources. In each community
there is, as a rule, only one of a trade, and, if that
one drop out, go into the Union, or, what is worst,
if he become incensed against our particular towns-
man, the result will be hindrances most disastrous,
most disturbing for the customer's daily life.
Turning out of the byways and lanes that run from
each of the villages round a market centre, there will
come hooded vehicles drawn by old and gaunt horses.
On the big roads these will seem to our townsman
quaint or merely negligible. But each will be driven
by an autocrat, grim, jovial, loquacious or saturnine
— an autocrat having indispensably that gift which
50
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
is said to be inborn among the dwellers on thrones,
the gift of memory. Before the gate of each cottage
on the way to market the cart will draw up, and
from the doors will issue suppliant women with
their petitions, to which, all being well, the tyrant
will give his gracious assent.
The image is by no means so very far-fetched, for
should the carrier, as the phrase is, " get his knife
into" any particular household upon his route, he
can cause its inhabitants nearly as much personal
inconvenience as any form of bad government. And
the results are almost as far-spreading if he fall ill
or die. I lived at one time in a farmhouse some ten
miles from a cathedral and market city, and the
stackyard was used by a carrier whose tattered old
vans and dilapidated horses, with ankles fringed like
those of a Cochin China fowl, occupied the tumbled-
down barns and leaking sheds. It gave one a very
good opportunity of studying means of communica-
tions in the backwaters of the very heart of the
country. And indeed the carrier's route to D
was an artery.
Towards eight o'clock of a morning there was a
sort of informal gathering in our yard. Children
came with notes from outlying farms ; the baker
brought empty sacks, women patterns to be matched ;
the clergyman's wife her books to be changed at
the circulating library ; gamekeepers came from afar
with rabbits by the hundred slung before and behind
them like fur garments. The dismal and dingy old
51 E 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
cushions were fitted on to the seats, and up a shaky
ladder climbed the market women in their best
clothes, with great baskets on their arms, ready for
the three-hours' drive, with their feet on the dead
rabbits, stifling in the smell of paraffin, of sugar, of
stable hartshorn, of road dust and of humanity.
Slowly jolting out of the yard, so that all the heads
jerked one way and all back together, beneath the
great elms and down towards the highway the
swaying caravan set forth, with the tongues already
going.
No man of the world of towns would believe what
those tongues utter ; to listen is to have the pleasant
country rides converted into something blighted. In
the thatched cottages there dwell covetousness, drink,
theft, incest — Heaven knows what ! In the great farm-
houses there are covetousness, drink, theft, land-
grabbing, sheep-stealing, swindling of the illiterate
— God knows what! And Heaven knows what of
truth there may dwell beneath the cloud of witness
that goes up from that swaying machine with the
drooping horse and drooping whip-lash. That some-
thing of truth is there we may well concede; the
carrier's cart hides amongst its other microbes no
microbe of imagination or substantial invention. I
am inclined to believe that almost every "scandal"
that one hears in the carrier's cart is true to fact,
and only as to motive exaggerated. What is wanted
is the remembrance that poor humanity is poor
humanity, that there are in the world pitfalls, gins,
52
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
temptations — works of the devil, as they had it in the
old days.
And the townsman between the hedgerows must
remember that the countryman has a prodigiously
long memory. There was a farmer I knew well, an
aged, apple-cheeked, hook-nosed, blue-eyed creature,
with just a suggestion of frailness to add charm to
his personality and to the fringe of white hair that
fell below his old weather-green hat. He had not as
far as one could tell a vice. He was popular with
his hands, all of whom he had retained for many
years ; he was cheerfully obeyed by his sons ; he was
up every morning at daybreak, and he brewed his
own ale. One day he had a stroke, and there was
an end of his activities.
"Well, and that's a judgment on old F !" a
peasant woman said to me. F was then seventy-
two. At the age of eighteen he had committed some
fault — no doubt with a girl, but I have forgotten.
So the paralysis was a judgment on him for that.
The countryside could not set any other sin to his
account ; but it had a memory casting back over the
half of a century. Assuredly it is not here, but
rather in the streets of the towns, that there grows
the Herb Oblivion.
And inasmuch as there is not one of us without
his secret that under the searching eyes and ever-
waiting ears of small communities eventually comes
to be disclosed — inasmuch as there is no man
without covetousness, hardness of heart, intemper-
53
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
ance, or whatever may be the seven deadly sins, the
catalogue of remembered crimes will seem to fall like
a blight across the bright countryside and for a time
at least dim its greenness for our townsman. But
gradually the problem will readjust itself, and that
particular aspect over the hedgerows will become,
as it is to the carrier himself, part of the day's
journey.
Arrived at his market-town, that autocrat will
stable his horse at the "Leg of Mutton" ; will leave
his cart in the inn-yard for parcels to be thrown into
it, and will set about ordering chicken-meal, butcher's
meat, No. 50 cottons, paraffin casks, volumes of
poems, bedding-out plants, branding- irons and sheep-
bells. And towards nightfall in summer, or long
after dark in the winter, my friend Grant would be
once more in the yard — with a pleasant smell of hot
dust, or a romantic gleam of lamps under the great
thatched eaves of the barns — and we should fall upon
him for our joints, our weekly papers, our candles, and
our bodily food, our physical and spiritual illuminants.
One evening a wild, prolonged and incompre-
hensible drumming penetrated into our house; it
brought all the white aprons of the village to the
doors, and finally to the banks of our small stream.
In a turmoil of foam, its neck wildly elevated, its
eyes starting, its hoofs kicking up the very pebbles
from the bottom of the brook, the carrier's horse lay,
pinned down into the water beneath the van itself.
Left alone for a minute whilst the carrier was
54
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
taking lemonade in our kitchen — the day was
terribly hot — the horse had wandered to drink at its
accustomed spot ; the van, tilting over upon the
bank, had done the rest.
The result was desolation in the village and in
many outlying homesteads. To be left with one's
three-days' provisions at the bottom of the brook is,
in places where shops are ten miles apart, as much
of a hardship as would be entailed, say, by having
for that space of time the bailiffs in the house for
rates. And what more can a tyrant do than that?
The whole current of one's domestic life — a thing
with which, in the country, one's peace of mind is
very much bound up — is disturbed and rendered
distressing. One is forced to ask all sorts of favours,
and to stand cap in hand before peasants whose
rigidity of soul one discovers, enhanced by one's
own physical emptiness. Mr. Gary, the sexton, may
have a fowl or two to spare, and Mrs. Hood certainly
has carrots. The point is whether Gary, who has
never — one remembers at this instant — touched his
hat or received twopence from us, can be brought
by softness of voice or praise of his walking-stick
to part with one of his chickens ; and how in the
world is one to soften the heart of Mrs. Hood, who
married a gentleman's coachman, and has in conse-
quence a rigid back and a great personal dignity ?
Such treatment of the subject may appear humor-
ous, but it is sober enough when one needs must
undergo these humiliations. It is customary to
55
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
regard the rustic as servile in his habits and his
mind ; but one of the first things that the townsman
journeying between the hedgerows will discover is
how very little he counts, how very little he is
"placed" amongst the real peasants. His clothes,
his air of command, his glance of the eye, will secure
for him in the towns ready touchings of the cap and
profuse " Sirs " spicing the speech of inferiors. And
as long as he keeps to the railway stations and inns
of the country he will as likely as not receive the
same courtesies. But once between the hedgerows,
he will be conscious of a struggle. He may be, our
townsman, eminent in the tea or upholstery trade,
in the world of letters or of horse-breeding ; it is all
one to the peasant. The other day, in my own
village, I heard a wealthy lady lamenting that the
little girls did not curtsey to her : she had been in
the place six months. Yet I know residents who
for many years have paid their way, who in the
outer world are celebrated, who occupy fine houses
and dress simply but well — who, in short, are "good"
people — and the only man who touches his cap to
them is the policeman. The townsman, in fact, will
be struck at first by the sense of being appallingly
alone and unplaced so far as his inferiors go. He
may be " called on," may drive in a carriage and pair,
and may distribute blankets and brandy ; but the
backs of the hedgers will remain obstinately towards
him when he passes, and sheep-shearers will keep
their eyes down upon the fleeces falling between their
56
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
legs. It will be impossible to engage in conver-
sation with the better farm hands. Respect may be
purchased from some sort of men in stained corduroys,
at hedge-alehouses, for pints of beer ; but the men
and women who have a stake in the village, who are
" old-standers," will remain for long years wonder-
fully stiff in the back and arms. And the stages by
which recognition will come will be curious and
definite. The hat-touching test is, after all, the most
convenient standard, and, looked into carefully, after
allowance has been made for differences in different
localities, the process will be much as follows. After
six months or a year in the heart of the country the
townsman will find himself invited to become, say,
vice-president of a quoits club ; he will find himself
at the club dinner the neighbour of the jobbing
gardener of the village and of the permanent road-
mender. He will offer them cigarettes at the end of
the meal. After that, perfunctorily and when no
one is looking, these two will touch their caps to him.
But in the publicity of the village street, or if they
happen to be walking with other men, they will still
turn away their heads, or look with a stony and
unrecognising gaze.
The countryman is, in fact, extremely loth to
come to subjection ; something does force him to
acknowledge the existence of the Quality, something
indefinite that he obeys involuntarily and with dis-
like ; and he is more than loth to pay cap-service to
any newcomer, since he aspires always to shake off
57
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
the yoke. The touch of the cap in secret places is
due perhaps as much to shyness as to anything else —
an involuntary action of muscles that know nothing
else to do. Backed up by other men, however, and
unwilling to let the others know that he has come to
heel at all, the countryman will face the matter out
with as brave a heart as he can. So that at a
certain stage the townsman in a winter dusk may
pass six men going home from work together, and
every one of them may be personally known to him,
yet not one of them in his dun-coloured clothes, with
his rush basket over his back, will move an eyelid in
recognition. But, after many years of paying his
way and of being got used to, for no earthly
reason and at no given signal, passing the corner
of the churchyard on a Sunday evening, when all
men conscious of their best clothes are at their stiffest
and least amenable, the townsman will find himself
greeted by a whole chorus of " Fine evenings ! "
Then indeed he has received his accolade and has
found his place and welcome home.
It is almost necessary to write of the return to the
land thus from the standpoint of the comparatively
well-to-do. For the poor and the working classes of
the towns never really go back. One in five hundred
may be attracted by a " good job," but perhaps not
one in a hundred goes seeking, however uncon-
sciously, a country spirit. As a rule, town life
weakens the fibres of the muscles, more particularly
the muscles of the leg, so that a dock labourer how-
58
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
ever robust is apt to break down hopelessly when
put to a job of hay-making. I knew, indeed, one
very fine figure of a Covent Garden porter. He had
a face that, seen under a high tier of fruit baskets,
appeared like a sun trying to burst out from under a
pillar of fog, and, at the side of the Opera, he could
run backwards and forwards across the pavement
from dawn to noon without perspiring. Some odd
whim sent him down, in his own words, " to see
where things bloomin' well growed," and he took
kindly and good-humouredly to a piece of charlock
weeding in an immense wheatfield, in which even his
considerable bulk was as the tiniest of specks in a
whole downside of mustard-yellow. He liked the
work very well; but ten days sent him into the
infirmary, and, after going on tramp for a month or
so, doing a hand's turn here and there, he returned
to the piazza and work that he could do. He was
the only really competent London workman that I
have come across between the hedgerows, and except
for the fact that beneath a Wiltshire sun you could
get such a thirst that even somebody's blooming
patent lemonade tasted good — except for that, I
extracted from him no sign of any mental revelation
that had come to him in the silent places of the great
hills. He had had the patent lemonade served out
to him amongst the other haymakers of a temperance
farmer, and the fact that it was poured out of beer
jars gave a touch of savage and rueful indignation to
his voice.
59
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
He, as I have said, was a really competent man, in
the sense that he had work in a town and could do it
efficiently. But most of the rural immigrants that I
have met have been men, for one reason or another,
disqualified or disabled. Thus I have found employed
or seeking employment a trick diver and swimming
master, whose eyes had failed owing to the pressure of
water beneath the surface, a Drury Lane super who
had lost his voice, a metropolitan policeman who had
been treated once too often by a publican, and several
city clerks whose health had failed. But, as far as
my own observation goes, I should say that good men
in good work never do go back to the land. How
should they indeed ?
Towards Michaelmas or near Lady-Day — in any of
the seasons of the quarters — you will see beneath the
highway elms or over the white roads of the downs,
crossing bridges, at elbow-like little angles of
sunken lanes, tall waggons covered with tarpaulins
that bulge in ways that the eye, accustomed to
the rounded lumps of corn sacks or of bales of
wool, must needs deem barbarous and strange,
with the inverted leg of a chair sticking out of
a fold or the handle of a saucepan through an
eyelet hole of the tarpaulin — you will see high-poled
waggons ponderously blocking the road, creeping
onward with a great gravity as if in pensive thought.
Perched on the shafts will be a child with a cat in her
arms, and hanging to one of the side-boards a wicker
cage, through whose interstices there dazzle the
60
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
orange bill and coaly feathers of a blackbird. Here
is the countryman on the move — a whole family, a
whole unit of the human race in suspension betwixt
failure and new hope, betwixt the worse and the
better or the worse and the worse. Suddenly the
farm waggon, from being the dull transporter of dusty
bags and fat sheep covered in with nets, is transformed
into a ponderous machine of fate ; suddenly a family,
fixed and immovable, tied down to the ground with
all the weights of impedimenta as a balloon is tethered
by heavy bags of sand — suddenly this family has
become nomadic. Its tables are woefully inverted
beneath the sky ; its memorial cards, these milestones
of life that are the most precious decorations of all
cottage walls, are packed away in some obscure
corner of the creaking car.
But just because these Sittings are so ponderous
and so slow, they are very costly. I have seen blue
farm-carts with red wheels in the courtyard of the
British Museum, and only yesterday in the New
Road a cart with the inscription, So and So : Carrier,
Crowborough, Frant and Tunbridge Wells to the Spur
Inn, Borough High Street, was loading up the furniture
of a tinsmith who was migrating to the town of the
Pantiles. But this flit would cost five pounds : the
tinsmith had come into money and had bought a
little business of his own. He was not in any case
going into the country, but pursuing a fragment of
London across the Weald of Kent. How then,
lacking State-subsidised pantechnicons or something
61
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
of the sort, or municipal moving loans or something
of the sort, is the town mechanic without legacy or
windfall to transport his goods, his wife, his children
or himself back to the land ? The people moving
from the austere Government building were of course
seeking the idyllic; but they too no doubt had
some means, and could possibly work as well in
their cottage as in Bloomsbury. They did not at
least pass from a big wage to a low, and incur a
great expense at a time of transition when there
is inevitably least in the purse. The town mechanic
might indeed be willing to move into the country,
but how is he to get there ?
It is difficult enough for the countryman to " move "
sometimes. In a remote down-land district there
was a farmer I knew rather well who was noted for
keeping his hands for very long periods. He was
envied, moreover, because he managed to pay them
less than any farmer of those parts. He still paid on
the scale of the now nearly obsolete great hundred —
six score instead of five — for any piecework, a once
universal custom that education of the farm hands
has nearly killed in the land. On one of his down
roads I once met a waggoner I knew. The man was
notoriously good with horses, steady, sober, and
ready to sit up all night for a week with a sick mare.
Now his whip drooped, his feet dragged in the cart
ruts — and he was sobbing.
It was because he simply could not get away from
his master. It was a physical impossibility. Other
62
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
farmers were ready to take him — but he could not
" move." He had six children ; he earned fourteen
shillings a week. How in the world was he to get
away ? He could not save ; his master jeered at the
idea of advancing him money to move with, or of
lending him a waggon. There he was — there, it
seemed, he must simply remain. And this, I dis-
covered, was the secret of my friend keeping his hands
so long. Taxed with it, he merely chuckled. He had
selected all his men for their large families ; he lent
them his waggons to move in with over the heart-
breaking downland roads. And they never got away.
This, naturally, is an extreme case; but I seldom
meet a Michaelmas move without thinking of that
successful farmer's chuckle. They never get away.
And it is much the same with the labourers in the
great towns of the South.
In parts of the North it is different. Round about
Middlesborough, for instance, you may judge fairly
well of the state of farming by the attendance on the
second day of the annual statute fairs. If things are
well with the country, the farmer can offer attractive
terms to the extra hands that it is always the farmer's
first luxury to indulge in, and the men are ready to
be hired. But if the terms are not sufficiently good,
the farm hand will simply go back to the furnaces —
for a year, for two, or for three, and, iron work being
heavy, the muscles do not deteriorate as in so many
other trades. Thus in these particular parts there
is a constant flux between slag-heap and moorland.
63
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
But as a general rule town is town, and country
country ; and it is only in special districts that
along the high-roads you will meet with strong-armed
men passing from one to the other ; and, except for
the automobiles, which as yet have done little to
change the face of the country, the great roads are
singularly deserted. Tramps, carriers, postmen,
farm-waggons, farmers' gigs, governess carts, flocks
of sheep with their pungent odour, droves of cattle
with their piercing and mild eyes, cyclists passing
in whisps — all these do not contrive to make a popu-
lation for highways that were meant to reverberate
every quarter of an hour beneath the heavy wheels of
stage coaches. (And, indeed, the hard surface which
Macadam invented first began to render the horse
obsolescent, since no hoof can really stand much fast
work upon the iron of our great roads.)
Level, white and engrossed beneath the sky, as it
they too had purposes, as if they too sought some
sort of lovers' meeting of their own, where they
intersect at the journey's end, the great highways
run across the green islands.
The small by-roads, the sunken lanes, all the
network of little veins that bring, as it were, tributary
drops of blood, go off from side to side as if they were
the individuals of a marching body dropping out to
do sentry duty in hamlets off the line of march.
They have about them an air of secrecy, as if between
their hedgerows rather than on the great roads we
may learn what is at the heart of the country. Upon
64
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
them the townsman will meet more often little
children going upon the tiny errands that make up
the home-life of the countryman ; carts will be few,
and the tramp will be a rare visitor. But even in
the sunken lanes the note of the country road is one
of solitude, and if one desires privacy one will find
it there almost more certainly than in the fields them-
selves. Foot passengers take the footpaths in all but
the worst weather, and the by-roads are little enough
used save by an occasional grocer's cart or the
parson's son upon his bicycle with his tennis-racket
across the handle-bars.
Seen from a height, a countryside may appear
extraordinarily populated ; thatched roof may almost
touch thatched roof, and garden-tree twine its
branches into the apple boughs of the next orchard ;
but the real countryman travels so little that, save
where there are many " residents," the population of
both high-road and lane is extravagantly small. He
works, the countryman, in his nearest fields ; his
wife stays indoors and mends things ; it is only the
fringe, the hangers-on, the dilettanti, the children
going to or from school, and the distributors of the
means of existence, who make use of the roads of
either class. They are used, the roads, by all sorts
of inhabitants of fields and thickets ; the hedgerow
birds have a tameness, an unconcern that they would
show in no coppice, where the presence of an intruder
will be heralded by all sorts of warning notes,
sibilant and rancorous, or by the wild flutter of
65 F
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
arising wood-pigeons. I remember once having
fallen into a sort of reverie upon a road, and come
to a halt unconsciously. I do not know what was
in my mind, something pleasant and engrossing, I
think, because the day was hot, the hedgerows sweet
and umbrageous, and the long high-road sloped
down into the distant blue of the Devonshire sea.
Suddenly, many yards away, a strange little beast
with a fantastic gait appeared to be covering the
ground with tiny bounds. Seen from the front it
was impossible to recognise it; it had the amble
of no creature that one is familiar with. I stood still,
and it advanced, paying no manner of attention to
me. It assumed a reddish hue, its progress took
the aspect of a series of tiny bounds, its tail in
foreshortening lengthened out. It was a squirrel —
and it passed right over my foot.
The episode was disagreeable to me, because in my
part of the country they say that when the woodland
beasts no longer regard you, you are "fey" — as good
as a ghost. But it gave the measure of the solitude
of that particular highway that so shy a beast as a
squirrel could use a road for its passage upon any
errand. And it travelled with an engrossed certitude,
as if it were very assured of no danger or interrup-
tion. And indeed I had met no one for the last half-
hour, and I met no one else till I got to Kingsbridge, a
matter of three miles. Yet this was a main coast road
leading to a market town, the metropolis of that
peninsula.
66
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
Even on market-days, when once a week the high-
ways assume the air of processional routes, it is only
a small fraction of the country populations that shows
itself. There will be farmers in their gigs ; if the day
be fine their wives will be with them too, and the
hearts of the shopkeepers will be rejoiced. (I use the
word "gig" generically for the farmer's conveyance.
It is very largely a matter of fashion or of roads.
Thus, round Canterbury the farmer almost invariably
uses some kind of dogcart, whilst in Devonshire
and Cumberland he goes to market mostly on
horseback, and round Salisbury the roads are filled
with enormous and dusty versions of the familiar
governess car.) Farmers, stock-breeders, veterinary
surgeons, horse dealers, a small army of cattle drovers
and successive companies of sheep, cattle, pigs,
and even turkeys at times, will on these market-days
pass in a pageant, out in the morning, home in the
afternoon when the hour of the ordinary is passed.
For an hour or two of the day the shops will be filled,
the streets be impassable, the stairs of the inns be
thronged with men falling over each other's legs, in a
fine atmosphere of malt liquors and a fine babel ot
prices and the merits of foodstuffs. But before night-
fall each particular little heart of the country will
once more have discharged its rustic blood as with
one great weekly pulse ; the dust or the mud of the
highways will bear the impress of the innumerable
feet of sheep, and silence and solitude will once more
descend between the hedgerows, along which the
67 F 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
white forms of owls will beat without sound. And so
it will be all round the year.
But even the pulse-tide of market-days will not
dislodge from their crannies and pockets the great
populations of the country. The real labourer will
go on working over his furrows, whether wheat fall
below starvation price, or wool rise from fivepence to
tenpence halfpenny. So that upon the roads the
townsman come into the country will not make any
intimate acquaintance even with the outward aspects
of the whole body politic of the country. He will
learn, first, how little he or his great town matters ;
and, lastly, how closely knit is the organisation of
great stretches of territory that at first he will regard
as so many miles of inhabited country occupied at
haphazard by men having little organisation and less
connection the one with the other. What will have
swayed his particular town will in the country matter
nothing. What will matter will be the price of things
in the nearest market-place or cathedral city. Once out
of his particular London the townsman will find
himself come into the spheres of influence of in-
numerable places of small magnitude. " Going to
town " will not be taking a railway journey to any
great city ; it will mean a short jaunt to Ashford, to
Shrewton, to Kendal— or it may mean hardly more
than going to the single shop of the next village.
And going to town for the inhabitants of the small
centres will mean going to centres only relatively
more important — to Exeter, to Leicester, to Devizes,
68
BETWEEN THE HEDGEROWS
to Manchester, or to Carlisle. And in each of these
places the townsman will discover new trade-marks,
new puddings, new newspapers, new specifics,
new celebrities, new names to honour. His own
standards will not any more count ; his best known
will be the utterly ignored ; and he will discover that
in coming to his particular heart of the country, in
searching for his Islands of the Blest, his fountain of
youth, he will have gone through a sort of purifica-
tion. He will have lost, along with his old land-
marks, his very identity. And only very, very
gradually will he take to himself a new form, a new
power of influence for good or evil, a new knowledge,
and even a new appellation. For quite assuredly
some nickname will be assigned to him.
He will grow wise in time ; he will get to know
all the highways and lanes, and having exhausted
their aspects and their lore, will take to the field
paths. But even there — and there more than ever
— he will have driven in upon him that fact of the
extraordinary solidity and solidarity, the extra-
ordinarily close grain of life in the heart of the
country. It will depend upon himself whether or
no he will ever force a way somewhere beneath its
close-textured skin ; whether he will take, as it were,
real roots in the soil, or still for his social and mental
support will call in aids from outside. He will
have come to the heart of the country for rest ; he
will, if he is to be at one with it, find himself engaged
only in a new struggle.
ACROSS THE FIELDS
T
CHAPTER II
ACROSS THE FIELDS
HE wheat, the pastures, the slow beasts, birds,
flowers and the little foot-bridges from which
we may look into the dark waters of clear
brooks, the hum of insects and the dewdrops that
form a halo round our shadows when we walk across
the fields in the moon-light or at dawn — all these
parts of what we call Nature must of necessity take
the second place, fill up the second phase of a country
life. Being men, we must first settle our human
contacts ; then we may step over the stiles or pass
between the kissing-gates. We must have found
our pied-a-terre, our jumping-off place ; we must set
up our tripod before, as it were, we can take our
photographs. We must have studied our maps, have
asked our ways, have got the " lie of the land/'
This is no more than saying that we must have
taken our bed at the inn, or have furnished our
cottage and discovered where the nearest butcher has
his shop ; we must have " settled down " either in
body or in spirit. Reversing the course of history,
73
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
we must learn the highways which, were built last
before we can master the old ways of all — the field-
paths. How long the first stage may be in its
passing through is a matter that each man settles with
his soul ; it is essentially a matter of how much
interest he can take in the practical side of his
settling down. There are men so happily made
that their pleasant lives are spent in doing little tasks
in their rockeries or passing the time of day at tennis
in walled gardens. They find, as it were, freedom
in prisons ; whilst others breathe only when they
have the turf beneath their feet and are out of sight
and sound of the roadside hedgerows.
I do not know that these latter penetrate more
deeply, really, into the life of the country, but I am
certain that they draw the deeper breaths. They
take, as it were, the short cuts across life and,
avoiding their fellow-men who present the more
harrowing problems to the mind, they float along
a stream of minute facts that afford solace, dis-
traction or rest. There is, after all, nothing so
soothing as to watch the growth of grasses, and no
man to be envied so much as he who can keep his
mind for so long tranquil. If the high-roads might
lead us to some palace of human truth, somewhere
along the footpaths, between a wood track and an
oak-bole, we might find Nirvana and the Herb
Oblivion.
We may find, too, the country in its undress, since
the footpaths lead us to back doors or through stack-
74
ACROSS THE FIELDS
yards, whilst to the high-roads farms and cottages
turn their lace-curtained windows and their decorous
drives. I had an equestrian friend who had passed
during a number of years on a main road a square,
stuccoed, dull box that was known as New Place.
He visited it during several croquet seasons, and,
entering it always through the front door, saw no
reason to think that it was other than just a new
place like any other. But one day, being afoot
on the dull highway, he saw a kissing-gate in the
hedge and a track that led across a broad bend ot
the wood. He passed outside a stone-walled stack-
yard, and at a pleasant distance there raised itself a
charming, mellowed structure of red brick with six
gables that offered to the rolling fields a glance, a
yellow of lichens and a tracery of wall-pears it had
taken three centuries to attain to. He could not fix
the place in his mind ; he could not find a name
for it ; it seemed miraculous that in a land he knew
so well there could have been such a house un-
known to him. Then he realised that it was the
back of New Place. The front had been stuccoed
and squared to suit the tastes of the 'fifties. It offered
that view to the new high-road ; but the ancient path,
that had been there before any house at all had
stood, had led him to the other and the lovelier
aspect.
The footpath, indeed, much more than doubles the
attraction of the countryside, since the tracks, leading
mostly from cottage to cottage, are almost innumer-
75
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
able. It is one of those things to which one hardly
ever gets used — it is one of those things that change
alike the aspect of countrysides and of the men who
work upon them. I had walked a certain road for
many days ; I had seen for many days a certain
labourer, not on the face of him estimable, slouching
at night towards his beer-house. Suddenly, one
evening, I saw this man, his rush basket slung
across his back, with a bundle of rabbit-parsley
tucked into the thongs ; he was descending, so slowly
that he appeared to hang in air, an ungracious Gany-
mede in fustian, over a hurdle that had appeared
merely to close a gap in a hedge. Behind him, in
the grass there ran the sinuous snake of a path-
way, wavering as if for companionship beside a
coppice or a little shaw. And it was a relief— a
clearing of the air. For the man will appear no
longer a loafer, sustained from hour to hour through
the day by the thought of beer, or kept in suspense,
as it were, by the cankerous artistry of self-
indulgence. Here he was dropping into the road
with limbs rendered heavy by work ; he has be-
come part of the body politic, one of those slow
Titans who like wood-props keep up the inordinately
weighty fabric of the State. He has gained dignity,
and, since the number of inhabitants of my village
is small, the whole village has gained dignity, and
the whole world of which that village is the part with
which I am best acquainted.
And with the discovery of a new footpath the
76
ACROSS THE FIELDS
countryside gains, to more than the extent of
one new way, a feeling of liberty. The road you
have traversed is less a begrudged piece of dust
running between imprisoning hedges. You your-
self are more free, since, if the wish moved you,
here you could step aside ; the fields on each side of
the bridge seem more accessible, more your own and
your neighbour's, less the property of an intangible
landowner. For I think that it is inborn in humanity
to resent another man's ownership in land. Those
of us who belong to the land-owning class resent
trespass on our acres ; but the minute we become
travellers beyond our own ring-fence we desire, even
unreasonably, to make short cuts. There was once a
Midland squire whose acquaintance I had made
actually through trespassing upon his home paddock.
He had then been irate so that his grey whiskers
trembled. It seemed that he had just lost a right-
of-way action and he thought I was part of a " put
up job," to flaunt his loss of the right-of-way case in
his face. I had pleaded my ignorance of the neigh-
bourhood, the greater freedom of our parts of the
country in such matters ; and I succeeded in con-
vincing him so well of my innocence that he con-
ducted me across his own kitchen-garden very amiably
towards the high-road from which I never ought to
have strayed.
I met this same gentleman later at an inn in a
foreign countryside more or less my own; we took
a walk together, after he had good-humouredly recog-
77
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
nised me as the " fellow who trespassed " — and I was
horrified at the short cuts that he proposed to take
to reach a certain church. We went over peasants'
fields of tobacco, across the corner of a protected
stag park, through a vineyard, and right into the
door of the priest's cowshed before we emerged in
the churchyard. My friend had made a bee-line,
and it was only in the miraculous absence of a
garde champetre that we escaped a fine, since the
squire actually plucked an apple from a wayside tree,
tasted it, and swore it was like wood compared with
a Ribston pippin. Outside his own circle of landed
responsibilities he felt himself, in fact, to be a free
Briton.
In a sense we are all that. The average Briton
does indeed tremble at the thought of " trespassing/'
He trembles even unreasonably, since, except for
the obviously poor, no penalty attaches to the
offence. But he has a sort of shyness ; it is hardly
so much respect for the laws ; he would dislike being
turned off land, perhaps because it would mean a
.sort of "setting down" for him. Yet the one of
us most shy about trespassing will the most violently
resent being impeded on a footpath once he is assured
that it is a footpath. He will break down fences or
furiously harangue gamekeepers ; he will go his way
— he will, more than any Hampden, assert his rights.
And because we are all lovers of our rights, we
rejoice at the discovery of new paths. Here is a
.strip of land a foot wide, but inalienably the property
78
ACROSS THE FIELDS
of ourselves and our neighbours — a space of breathing-
ground and of escape, where, as it were, we may
remain within the letter of the law and yet cheat its
spirit. Of course, if we are poor men, the path will
have its dangers ; a keeper, intent on preserving the
privacy of his partridge nests, may lay a dead rabbit
beside the path and, walking after us with a mate,
swear it lay there just after we had passed. Then
probably we shall be fined ten shillings. (I have
known a footpath closed to all the cottagers of a
village by this dread.) But essentially the footpath
is a place on which we may all snap our fingers at
Authority ; so for that alone it is beloved.
And the paths, in most of England, are innumerable.
I know whole tracts of country, forty miles long, in
which there is hardly a field that one may not walk
across or skirt. Thus, for instance, from Aldington
Knoll you may pass under the nut boughs and
oaken underwood of the Weald, thirty-seven miles,
by wood paths, only going out of the shadow to cross
a road, or where the timber has been newly felled.
There are, of course, tracts of the home counties and
the Midlands where, in the presence of the landown-
ing spirit and the absence of a spirit of resistance,
miles of fat fields shaded by elms are closed to the
wayward foot. And there are immense moors and
downs where the pedestrian may choose his own way
by a compass across heather and ling or sheep turf
and wild thyme, where the footpath ceases on account
of so great a freedom of direction. But the country
79
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
of parks and millionaires is not the country, but a sort
of arid pleasure tract, and moors and plains are un-
hallowed by the work of the slow countrymen. For
certainly, wherever he is busied about the hedgerows
or in the wheat, there his lines of communication will
be found. Their real cause for existence is to help
him the more quickly to and from his work ; and the
farmer is not yet born so foolish as to hinder his own
hours of labour.
Thus here, as in the print that is common in our
hedge alehouses, and more common still in France,
the man who works in the fields bears the brunt
of the fray. It is true that you may trace — mostly
on hill -tops — the old ways of communication, pilgrim
ways that pass the remains of tiny chapels-of-ease
and make, like the rays of a spider's net, either
to the shrine of St. Thomas or towards the ports
from which men set sail for Compostella ; there
are broad soft roads across plains ; there are bridle-
paths that climb immense downs and in the softer
bottoms are paved, still, with great flag-stones, and
there are pack-tracks that have been abandoned for
ever by the feet of mules. In the North of England,
in the folded valleys and scars of the solitary hills,
you may still, as it were, see the hoof-marks of the
pack-horses the last of which made its last journey
not twenty years ago. And the survivals of all those
tracks do still add to the number of ways by which a
man may travel across the fields. But they remain
mere survivals ; the reason for their existence having
80
ACROSS THE FIELDS
gone, they are seldom travelled ; fences are being1
run across them more and more as the years go on.
It is no one's business to keep them alive ; so they
are dying out.
Thus the footpath of the heart of the country tends
to become more and more a means of access to work.
And indeed it is there that we seem to feel the real
heart-beats. On the roads the touch of the cities is
still to be felt. Miles and miles away from any town
one may be, nevertheless the road is a filament, a
vein, running from one to another. The real foot-
path is the telephone, steering merely between
countryman and countryman. It is true that in the
vicinity of the house-congeries we may find footpaths
that are degraded into cinder tracks. Broad and
black — that colour for which the Nature of the fields
seems to have so great an antipathy — they are
bordered with fringes of grass so green that it
appears, like the brilliant hues of aniline dyes, to
be a coal-tar product. These tracks let the foot
sink into them with a faint suggestion of being quick-
sands. They pass cement cottages ; dusty palings
separate them from the sordid bits of spaded earth
that always in the vicinity of a town seems to have
a dun colour, a clay consistency, and a top-dressing^
of bluish meat tins. Reaching in his walk these anti-
septic footways, the lovers of the country or the town
lover feel an antipathy, heave perhaps a sigh, and,
making for the nearest street, look out for a cab.
It is not that they will necessarily hate the town ;
81 G
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
what they will hate is the hybrid thing that is neither
town nor country — that is, a product as it were
of city fathers trying to bring themselves into a
bucolic state of mind. " Let us have either town or
country unadulterated; let us have paths in which
we shall meet humanity in undress or citizens decently
clad ! " he will exclaim. On these ways he will meet
mechanics in broadcloth or the club-doctor of mean
streets in clothes that are neither here nor there.
Then he will seek swiftly either the shop-fronts, the
artificial stone facades, the electric light standards
and the faint smell of horse-dung and dust of the
centre of a town ; or he will return upon his tracks to
where the path ran beneath nut bushes in the heart
of a wood.
The false idlers of the country, the young ladies
picking flowers, the retired solicitors, admirals,
bankers, and racing touts, the village clergyman
who thinks that his real sphere is, say, a smart
West End parish, and who in consequence wears a
querulous fold near the ends of his pursed lips, or
that most townish of all inhabitants of the country,
the student of nature — these, occasionally, with their
infinite variations, are the most exotic products that
one will meet on the footpaths. They have dropped,
as it were, over the hedges, out of motor cars or
desirable residences. They pass us like foreigners,
and have haughty and challenging glints in their
eyes. And I am almost tempted to say that the
lovers of nature, the self-conscious students of birds
82
ACROSS THE FIELDS
or flowers — the modern Whites of Selborne — are
themselves town products. The real countryman does
not know much about these things. He accepts them,
and would perhaps miss them ; but it is hardly part
of his nature to "name" them. It would probably
be disturbing to him to enquire too closely into the
history, say, of the oil-beetle, that lustrous inactive
creature that he crushes with his heavy foot in the
hot dust of the roads.
It would disquiet him, it would disturb the simple
and large outlines of his conception of life, just as to
conceive of eternity, of infinity, or of the indefinite
immortality of the soul would be disturbing to most
of humanity. We live, poor creatures of a day that
we no doubt are, in the midst of these mysteries,
much as the countryman lives among beasts, fowls,
and insects, one more mysterious than the other;
but the consideration of these shivering abstractions
humanity leaves to the priests, the metaphysician,
and all the other soul doctors whom it agrees to
regard as slightly extra - human. In the same
spirit the countryman leaves Nature to the stranger
who lives in the field. We crush with a careless
foot a creature impeded by the dust. But sup-
posing we knew that from egg to lustrous wing
this beetle had made a journey more perilous and
more miraculous than any Odyssey of Ulysses — that
it had survived a chance of a million to one against
its survival ? Some such life-history as this is to be
told of how many small creatures of the grasses and
83 G 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
the brooks? It is laid, as an egg, anywhere in the
earth; it must, when it comes forth, find a certain
plant. Say a million eggs are laid ; say a hundred
thousand tiny creatures reach the plant. It must then
ascend the stalk of that certain plant ; it must reach
the stamens of the flower, a dizzy journey in the
course of which ninety thousand succumb to rain,
to predatory insects, to birds, to the Will of God
manifested in one way or another ; there remain
ten thousand in these flowers. There they must stay
until a certain bee comes to gather honey : one
thousand are able to hold to life till then. When
the bee comes they must grapple to a certain spot
of the bee's hairy thigh ; they must be carried by
the bee home to its cell : one hundred may reach
the bee's cell. There, at the precise moment that
the bee lays its egg, the beetle larvae must drop
into the egg: maybe ten will do that; and maybe
one, after having fattened on the life juices of the
bee-grub, will come forth to the air a beetle — one
survivor of a million ! And it has gone through
these perils, it has endured the fatigues, the hair-
breadth escapes, the miraculous chances of this great
journey, to be crushed by a hob-nailed boot before it
has travelled one yard on the face of the earth. To
what end ?
For assuredly the countryman would ask, "To
what end ? " The nature student has essentially a
concrete mind. He observes, he registers. He sees
little yellow birds with jerking tails gliding over the
84
ACROSS THE FIELDS
surface of a water-plant, searching in the hot sunlight
meticulously for tiny insects. He notes the fact, and
it is sufficient for him. But the countryman is either
nearer God or nearer the necessities of life, put it
in which way you will. He desires to know " what
is the good of the thing ? " How much weight of
seed-corn will so much nitrate-fertiliser add to the
yield of his acre ? — What is the good of an oil-
beetle ? he would ask, if it came into his head to
consider.
Perhaps it is fortunate that he never does. For,
surrounded as he is, overwhelmed as he is by the
tremendous profusion, the inexplicable, seeming
waste of Nature, he would inevitably come to ask
that question which is the end of human effort.
I know a farmer — rather a good farmer — who came
from Lincolnshire into Kent, and was in consequence
called " Linky " in our marsh parish. He became,
perhaps on account of the change in the soil, singu-
larly loquacious and singularly full of ideas. Things
went wrong with him, and he began, as the saying
is, to hear the grass growing.
Tall, gnarled, bony, with enormous joints all over
his frame, he stopped me one day on a high-road and
began to put all sorts of questions as to the good of
things. What was the good of charlock ? Why had
God made bindweed and the turnip-flea i Why was
a man to feel as if he were overlooked — bewitched ?
His old horse, who was cropping the hedge, nearly
overturned the cart that contained a dilapidated
85
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
turning-lathe ; Linky had just bought it at a sale, not
that he needed it, but because once, years before, it
had come into his head that a turning-lathe might
be a thing to possess. He caught the horse's
rein furiously, pulled the beast into the road, and
then, with a sudden, dispirited motion of his hand,
let go the rein, and pointed over the ridge inland.
" The Union's there," he said ; " and I feel it's calling
me! I feel it." He turned on me: "Now, I ask
you, sir, what's the good of all this ? What's the
good ? "
He was not exactly dejected — in fact, his eyes,
sunk beneath a grotesquely-bumped forehead, were
remotely humorous. He looked over the plains on
both sides of the ridge. There were things agrowing
all over there, he said. All sorts of things. They
scratched up fields and tried to make corn come ; but
weeds came with the blessing of God — weeds didn't
need no help. Same with vermin as took his poultry ;
same with mildew as turned his dumplings sour in
the larder. Well, now, what were all those things ?
What did it all mean ? If so be the weeds had a
right to be there, they were of some account. God
looked after them and the vermin. Then where did
he come in — he, Linky ? Perhaps he wasn't of no
more account than weeds or vermin. Then what was
the good of going on ?
Linky, of course, had been drinking a little. But,
as far as I have been able to discover, it was that
sort of thought that had made him take to drink.
86
ACROSS THE FIELDS
And, as a rule, so stern is the fight that Nature wages
with the countryman that, once he begins to think
that kind of thought, he must take to drink or one
of the devils of the flesh. In consequence, the sur-
vivors, the men who keep to the land, are precisely
those who do not look around them, and who do not
name the beasts and the plants. Weeds are weeds,
and vermin vermin. You kill them one with another,
and there's an end of it. You must have a very firm
belief that the fields are made for crops, the pastures
for grass, and yourself the instrument of God's
administering the earth, or you will very soon slacken
in your struggle.
Man does not " name " his fellow-strugglers, partly
from indifference, no doubt, but also because he is
afraid. I remember seeing a whole downside in
central England white with a flower that I did not
recognise. It was something like a bleached cam-
panula, but square-stemmed and sweetly scented.
There were several village children, with long
black hair, big black eyelashes, and blue eyes— a
type as unfamiliar as the flower — kneeling down
and plucking the white blossoms, their hair sweeping
the tops of the long grasses. I asked one the name
of the flower. None of them knew, but they were
picking them to put on the coffin of little Charley,
who had been drowned in the mill-dam down the
hill last Saturday night.
A sudden and violent death of a child is a thing
so outstanding in country districts, that, up there in
•THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
the white light of the sun, on the green of the grass,
very high, the news seemed to make one see beneath
the shadows of the massive trees far down in the
hollow a deeper shadow. But no one in that
countryside seemed to know a name for those
flowers — neither the children nor the clergyman, nor
even the schoolmistress. They were flowers that
were used for putting on coffins — simply " flowers/'
as we say, " Let us get some flowers for the table."
And indeed such things are generally sorted roughly
into broad categories — thus, most green things
lacking flowers or odours are "weeds," most gay-
coloured blossoms not known to be poisonous are
" flowers," — and most white flowers are omens of
death, since they are used to deck biers, and at such
times alone are carried home. I always remember
the tone of weary contentment with which an old
lady, suffering much pain, received a gift of snow-
drops brought in ignorance of the meaning attached
to them. " You're letting me go/' she said. " I've
wanted to go for a long time; now I shall." And
very shortly afterwards she died. No one else of her
friends or family would have brought white flowers
into her home.
White hawthorn, Madonna lilies, the white owls
that screech, so it is said, outside lighted windows,
white insects that sometimes fly in at the casement,
in certain districts even daisies and marguerites and
Scotch roses — all these things are ominous of death
if they enter the house. I have even heard it said
88
ACROSS THE FIELDS
that certain feathery, and delicate moths that come
very rarely to flutter round one's lamp at night,
are the souls of the dead coming to summon away
the living. The emblems of life are rarer ; but in a
Lancashire cottage I heard a sick girl say, when a
friend brought her the first pink dog-rose of the
season, " Now I shall get well since I've lived so far
round the year." And to see the first swallow is, in
certain parts, regarded as an assurance of life until
these travellers return again over the seas.
In the same large way owls, hawks, jays, shrikes,
and cuckoos are classified as vermin; swallows,
robins, and sometimes wrens are given their names
and regarded as sacred ; edible birds, from pheasants
to jacksnipes, are called game or wild fowl ; and
most song birds and such others as have brownish
plumage are called, and hated as, sparrows. An
American naturalist who covered half the globe and
a portion of England in the forlorn hope of hearing
a nightingale sing, had the fortune to hear Philomela
herself called " a sparrer."
But this large acceptance of the pleasures afforded
by nature implies no lack of appreciation. Upon the
whole, I think the real countryman enjoys the sights,
the sounds, the heat of the sun, and the odour that
the earth gives off after rain — he enjoys them as
much as and perhaps with a more pagan enjoyment
than any of the townsmen, who get much of their
pleasure out of books. A townsman will read pages
of such passages —
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
"A linnet warbles, a bee drops over the hedge,
the tips of the hawthorn petals commence to become
brown, the odour of bean flowers is wafted from the
neighbouring field" — a whole catalogue of rural
sights and sounds, that will as it were "waft an
odour " of the country into the atmosphere of fog and
gaslight. In the same spirit ladies who never cook
will read old-world recipes, and " book lovers " who
have no still-room will smack their lips in imagination
over cordials the concoction of which went out before
stage-coaches died from the roads.
And coming into the country, the townsman will
find that some of the glamour that he felt in his
room attaches for him to the monotonous chaffinch
as, with its shimmer of rose, purplish-brown and
grey-white it drops, crying " Pink, pink," from an
elm bough into the long grass beside the footpath.
In the same way a person with a very good cook
of her own will dredge flour into boiling milk, scorch
her face above a wood fire, prepare passably, and eat
and enjoy hasty pudding or frumity — things not
unpleasant to the palate, though, save for the asso-
ciations of their names, not really worth scorching
one's face for. And I have known a sober friend
seriously endanger his equilibrium by drinking my
own mead on a summer day, rather because of the
sound of the name than because the liquor is really
delightful.
The countryman, of course, never eats hasty
pudding save when some accident has taken his
90
ACROSS THE FIELDS
missus unprepared ; frumity, even in Dorsetshire,
he will no longer look at ; mead he might drink in
winter to keep off a cold when he cannot get hot rum
with a lump of butter in it ; but he will certainly not
read " Nature books," and he will certainly never get
into the frame of mind that will make him transfer
the thoughts of any book into his attitude ms-a-vis
of Nature herself. He has a general phrase that he
applies to all these things. " It does you good . . ."
It does you good to see the wheat go rippling in
great waves up a twenty-acre field ; it does you good
to smell rain coming up on the south-west wind, to
hear church-bells chiming melodiously across smooth
grass, to hear the birds singing in the dawn, to
watch hounds break covert, to stand gazing at a
great sunset, to hear the jingle of harness as the
horses come back from the hayfields in the moon-
light.
Labourers, farmers or their womenfolk develop
tastes in such matters. One man loves a frosty
dawn, with the roads as hard as iron in the ruts ;
another likes the feel of the north wind on his
hands. Another loves the coolness that comes with
the sea wind only after immense heat in a long
day ; another, the peculiar tang of odour that rises
with mist from the salt marshes. What may influence
these tastes you never learn. The man I spoke of
as loving a frosty dawn, told me (I met him at such
a moment — a gnarled shepherd, a " looker," as they
call them, not much higher than my shoulders, with
9'
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
whiskers glistening with rime and his black clay
pipe sending forth the tiniest wisps of smoke in the
face of a blood-red sun) that on such a morning
as that he was first breeched. No doubt, the pride
of that transition from babyhood to boyhood
sanctified such frosty mornings for ever in his mind.
Perhaps association has most to do with it — perhaps
the mere sensation of physical well-being. Who can
tell ?
But certain shadows and lights, certain winds that
quicken the blood in the veins, certain cloud forms,
the songs of certain birds, or certain views at certain
times of day — one each of one or other of these things
will undoubtedly give a "moment" — the moment of
the year — to every countryman. And these things
hold him in a country that is every day losing its
other attractions.
I know a country solicitor, a grave, unsentimental,
taciturn man, who repressed with sternness any
tendency towards imagination in his children or his
clerks. He was offered an exceedingly lucrative
partnership in London, and he refused it because ot
a sunset. It was a long valley that wound away
between spurs right into the west, and there the sun
always went down with an incredible glory, sending
its light level along the bottoms, mirroring itself
on flat stretches of mist or glistening in winding
channels. At the eastward end a hill rose, and
standing by a windmill the solicitor was accustomed
to look at this sunset every Sunday evening. He
92
ACROSS THE FIELDS
had seen it for years and he could not leave it. And,
indeed, this particular sunset view — it was seen
between tall stone pines — attracted all the little town
on Sundays. You met, on the path to the mill, the
blacksmith, the grocers, the hotel-keeper's wife, the
village lovers from hamlets all round, the squire's
cook, and the Wesleyan minister. These people
would gaze and gaze and go away without saying
anything. No doubt for the blacksmith it sublimated
the thoughts of the price of shoeing iron, and for the
others, too, it put a fine or a tranquil glory into that
moment of their existence. One rather inarticulate
person once told me that the conflagration of the
descended sun and the lights whirled heavenwards
from the mists and pools reminded him of the Plains
of Heaven. I fancy that he was thinking of Martin's
picture of that name. On the other hand, a man of
great taste, who had savoured, as a connoisseur does
his wine, many famous views the world over, re-
garded such a sunset and remarked that it was very
suburban.
That is the connoisseur, speaking from the outside ;
but the real peasant, the real pagan, loves nature and
the earth inarticulately. After we have worked for
long hours of long days in the years that beneath
the sky are so long in turning, we get, even the most
inarticulate of us, moments of sensuous delight from
merely being in the place in which we are. The
woodman, working alone in the thick woods, will at
noon in the winter sunshine stand still and lean on
93
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
his axe. In his small clearing he will feel as if he
were in a church. (I have heard a man say so.) The
sunlight will be warm, the silence absolute all round
him, and the very sound of the other axes in the
distance will be deliberate, reflective, as if sacred.
Or the farmer, lying on his stomach in the dewy grass
at twilight along the edge of a black coppice, waiting
with his gun for the rabbits to enter dimly out of the
burrows — in the shadows and the silence, beneath the
brush of the owl's wing as it skims over him, he will
feel the indefinite fear of the supernatural steal over
him, a curious sense of mournful ominousness dif-
ferent altogether in kind from the dread that will
heset him in any haunted house or churchyard.
One gets, if one be at all sensitive, odd little shocks
and emotions in the fields. I have myself dug very
late in a potato patch, after many hours in a hot
-day. There comes a time when one cannot leave
work ; one goes on as long as light holds, even if it
be only the light of the stars. The whitened apple
trunks stand out like the pillars of an aisle down by
the hedge ; the glow of the supper fire dances visible
in reflection on the cottage ceiling, the sound of the
brook becomes important in a windless dusk. And
the air having grown cool after the sun had set, I
have thrust my hand into the earth to feel for
potatoes, and found it flesh- warm. After all the
heat seemed to have departed from the world it was
like suddenly coming in contact with a living being.
I am, perhaps, over fanciful, but to me it has always
94
ACROSS THE FIELDS
seemed like finding the breast of a woman — as
if Nature herself had taken a body and the heat
of life.
But, indeed, in the intense solitude of field work
the mind exhausts its material topics. And of
material topics there are few enough in the country
and its cottages ; so that the mind of the man who is
much employed along the hedgerows turns inwards
very often and exhausts itself in metaphysical specu-
lations. This is more particularly so at dusk, when
not only is there little to think about but less to see.
In the countryman's mind there arise superstitions
about beasts and birds, theories of life and of the
universe, even new religions. He will be extra-
ordinarily callous in the face of death ; but he will
be wonderful in his speculations as to what will
happen after death.
I knew very well a labourer of the rather better
class. Small, very brown, with the clear enunciation
that still in places survives the blurred cockney of
the school-teacher's work, with little eyes that twinkled
in a clear-cut face, he was much sought after in
the village as a sick nurse during nights, when the
wife of a man needed rest. Certain men have the
gift of being asked, the soothing voice and the
willingness to perform these last functions — and my
friend must have seen the death of many men.
Quietly, but without any abating of the twinkle in
his eyes, he would tell you how So-and-So died
" sweeting dreadful " ; So-and-So went off sudden
95
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
like the bottom falling out of a bucket of water ;
whilst it was more than he could do to hold down old
Sam, the hop-dryer, who had the delirium tremens,
so he died on the floor. And at an inquest I have
seen Mark go up to the corpse that we were viewing
and, catching hold of the hand, say, " Reckon that
won't ever lift no more pots; 'tis main still for you
now, old Quarts." " Quarts " was the sobriquet of the
dead man, and he had died of the cold.
There, in the rough barn where we stood huddling
together for warmth, Mark was brave enough, and he
was brave enough in a death-chamber. Indeed it is
hardly braveness, just as it is hardly callousness so
much as a survival of the early temper of men accus-
tomed to the ending of lives — -of the temper that has
given us the " Dance of Death " or the Gravedigger of
Hamlet. A dead man is to the countryman of hardly
more account than a dead mole or the dry tufts of
feathers that January leaves underneath all the
bushes. It is a frame of mind repulsive or grotesque
to the townsman, who never sees a dead thing save
on butchers' and fishmongers' slabs, where indeed he
sees more than enough. In the countryman it is
merely part of that large innocence that allows him
to accept as so many of the natural processes of life
things that are always hidden in towns behind the
serried walls of house-fronts. He sees more of life,
and of necessity more of death.
But this same Mark had his own private conception
of what would happen to him. He was not in the
ACROSS THE FIELDS
least mad, but he had — who knows how ? — gathered it
out of the Scriptures that he would never die, but be
carried up to heaven in a chariot of fire. His eyes
twinkled humorously when he said so, but you would
put him into a fury if you expressed a doubt. He
was a hedger and ditcher by trade, and, if he heard a
rustling of some invisible object in the dusk or in the
woods at night, he was tranquilly convinced that it
was one of the Beasts of the Revelation. Being
unmarried and living by himself in a tiny, disused
toll-house, he was more solitary than most, and had
more time to think. And it is astonishing how many
countrymen have bizarre beliefs of this kind. I have
come across them in tenant farmers, in veterinary
surgeons, in water-bailiffs, and even in rural police-
men— who, indeed, are the most solitary of all the
users of high-roads and footpaths. The fact is that
to be alone much in the country is to find oneself
giving to hills, rows of trees or the coping-stones of
bridges — to anything that one likes or dislikes for
the obscure reasons that sway us — personal identities.
One measures the world, after all, in human terms,
and two foxes' earths on a knoll will take after a
time a semblance of eyes in a green forehead, just as
houses have grim or jovial or lugubrious personalities
expressed in their window blinds. And thus, for
reasons obscure to us, certain portions of the familiar
country influence us. There are hills that we ascend
without weariness and downward slopes that we
vaguely dislike ; there are sheltered spots that for no
97 H
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
known reason we find lugubrious, and bleak downs
where some mysterious presence seems to temper to
us the most dreary of winds. In that way a country-
side comes to have the value of a personality ; and so
we speak of the spirit of Place.
Standing on certain hills it is impossible not to
feel a conviction that the green earth waving away
on each side into illimitable space is a vast entity,
living in the growth of its grasses, and in the voice of
its birds, the little tunnels of subterranean beasts and
insects forming its veins and, whatever be the colour
principle of its surfaces, being the blood of its com-
plexion. But the feeling is arrived at only after a
sufficient familiarity — a familiarity the length of
which will differ with each individual, since there are
some of us who will fall in love with a certain corner
of the earth, even as with a certain woman, at the
first glance. And just in the same way there are
featureless stretches of land in which we feel at once
at home, whilst blue regions of alps, of woods and
mirroring lakes tire us as we may be tired by a
brilliant talker.
For myself, no landscape is restful unless it contains
many hedges and woods, and unless the horizon is
somewhere broken into by the line of the sea — unless
at least I feel that, from the top of a hill near at hand,
that still, blue line might be seen. Far inland I seem
to be beneath an impalpable weight, and on an
absolutely naked down I am conscious of glancing
round, in search of at least a clump of trees in which
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I might take refuge from the great gaze of the
sky. But I have one friend who cannot live at peace
out of sight of heather, and another who hates hedge-
rows because they interrupt the journey of his eye
over the contours of the ground. I knew a farmer
who moved from the marsh into the uplands ; and he
was forced to rent a cottage on the level again,
because he missed the stagnant dykes and could
not bear the sound of running water in the
beck beneath the bedroom window of his farm in
the hills.
In the stage of intimacy to which a man reaches
as soon as he masters the field ways of his country-
side he thus begins to make acquaintance with
the mysteries of the earth ; he begins, according to
the light vouchsafed to him, to frame his own reading
of the green kingdoms. He does it, no doubt, in the
search for intellectual solace ; it is part of his journey
in quest of the Fortunate Islands. In a sense and to
a certain degree other things will turn him aside. He
will find refuge from himself in making toys for his
children, in sleep by his fireside, in the slow talk of
the ale bench, in the hunting-field, or over a book.
No doubt the book is the best of all the things with
which a man may stave off introspection, if the
gossip of the alehouse be not better. And no doubt
next to these we may place the saddle. Books and
small-talk bring us in contact with the minds of our
fellows ; we may revel or idle in them without emu-
lation and without effort. In hunting we are taken
99 H 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
out-of-doors and brought into contact with beasts
wrought up to their highest pitch, and with the
animal in ourselves wrought up, that too to its highest
vitality.
To the man who can feel it there is no sensation
in life comparable to the waiting, on a frosty morn-
ing, by a woodside for the hounds to break cover.
All, the senses are keenly alive; each tuft of grass is of
importance in the mist : the nostrils are filled with the
faint twang of the morning and of the frost ; the ears
catch minute sounds — the crackle of underwood
beneath the feet of the silent and distant hounds,
the clink of stirrup against stirrup, the hard breathing
of a horse. And one's whole body, all the sensation
of feeling that one possesses, is instinct with the
shiver and breath of the beast that one bestrides.
There is no waiting quite like it, since there is
nowhere else just this union of nerves in two beasts
so widely dissimilar the one from the other.
With the first whimper of the hounds on the scent,
with the note of the horn, the cry of " Gone Away ! "
or the crash of the hounds breaking covert, this
particular psychological " moment " ends. Contests
have their place and emulation is aroused in horse
even more than in rider. It isn't — that particular
tremour of waiting — recaptured at any check, though
perhaps no theatrical performance is half so engrossing
as the watching from one's saddle of the hounds, with
their noses to the ground, making a wide circle to
recover the scent. But of course one has moments
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ACROSS THE FIELDS
of another sort. One remembers putting one's right
arm over the eyes in rushing through a bullfinch.
And I have a memory that I do not know whether I
would or would not willingly dispense with, of lying
helpless on my back on the further side of a sunken
Devon hedge, with high above my face the silhouette
against the sky of a horse's fore-legs and a rider's
boot-tips. It seemed for a moment a curious and
interesting spectacle, since it is seldom that one sees
from below into the very shoes of a horse.
Thus in this as in all field sports, man, according
to his sympathies, finds solace, oblivion, animal
excitement, the means of passing the weary hours.
They have their " moments/' and afterwards we
can say that there is nothing like them. There
is nothing like casting the last salmon flies of the
day at dusk into a still and almost invisible water ;
there is nothing like the old and forgotten shooting
with a trained dog in the thigh-high stubble ot
October wheat-fields ; there is, for boys, nothing like
the laying of a trail of paper across the trembling
tufts of a bog at noon ; there is nothing like . . .
But what is there anywhere like any one of these
things that beneath the sky and across the green
acres will keep the mind from working in the tread-
mill of its proper thought ? And what, after all, will
arouse a rough fellowship between man and man so
well as the tumble and scurry in a stack-yard where
the rats are bolting and squeaking among men and
terriers, sheep-dogs, spaniels and broom-handles ?
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
And in a sense the field naturalist pursues a
similar sport. With his eyes or his field-glasses he
shoots the events of little creatures' lives. To give
himself moments, he is seeking to nail down to his
consciousness the "moments" of their existences.
Peering along the hedgerows, if he have seen a rabbit
run fascinatedly around the uplifted head of a stoat,
he will have bagged his event ; or if he could
see a cuckoo drop its egg into the nest of a chaffinch,
the adder swallow its young alive, or the night-jar
carry its children in its claws. He is building up his
little house of observations ; he is filling in the
chinks of the wattle-wall that shuts out for him the
monotony of his life. And the lines of the trees, the
smell of the grass crushed beneath his feet, the sound
of wind in the river reeds, the bow of the sky, the
forms of clouds, or the great stillnesses of noon — all
these things soothe his mind and make sacred these
hours of his.
That in its way is the best gift that the Nature of
the fields offers to man — a memory of oblivion tem-
pered with a sensation that is hardly a memory of
times passed with the cool airs on the cheek, with the
eye unconsciously deluded and filled by the lines of
a world drawing all its hues from the air, the soil and
the vapours that hang as it were in a third space
between air and soil. I have said that the most en-
grossing of pastimes are the gossip of the alehouse
and the reading of men's thoughts. And in a sense
these are the things that keep us going nowadays
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ACROSS THE FIELDS
through the between-beats of the clock. But there
are times of break-down when neither of these human
emanations has power to hold the mind, or, to put it
more justly, when the mind has no longer the power
to hold to them. After long periods of illness, of
mourning, of mental distress, no news of the out-
side world and no ecstasy of verse will hold the
mind ; events and thoughts pass through the tired
consciousness leaving no trace, as the smoke ot
orchard fires passes through apple boughs. Then
Nature may assert a sway of her own.
I remember seeing a countryman recovering from a
long illness with his bed-head set towards the window.
He seemed to be in a state of coma, but from time
to time he asked for a looking-glass. Because his
appearance after his illness was rather terribly emaci-
ated, the glass was for long refused to him. At
last he fell to weeping weakly, and some one
found a hand-mirror for him. He held it high up,
never looking at himself, but turning the face of the
glass to the window. He had been longing to see the
green of the grassy hill that rose up before his cottage,
and although his brain had been too weak to say that
he wished his bed turned round he had imagined that
stratagem of bringing greenness into his confining
room. It was a longing, he said afterwards, such as
women are said to feel before the birth of children ; and
no satisfaction ever equalled that of this poor man
who had imagined himself doomed to die without
again seeing sunlight on the grass.
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
The country, in fact, the country of the fields and
of the footpaths, gives most freely to those who bring
something with them, whether it be the labour of their
hands or of their brains, whether it be an interest, a
hobby, a pursuit, a tranquillity or merely an exhaus-
tion. To those whose minds are simply empty, or to
those whose thoughts centre upon themselves, the
country is a back cloth, a flat surface portraying
an aching pageantry of hills, of fields, of woods, a
concrete frame for a dull listlessness, or an intolerable
prison. But to those who love her as a support,
as an addition to a self-sacrifice, as a frame to a
passion, to those who work and those who love,
she is a beneficent personality. Ask indeed the
lovers who wander along the little footpaths or
shelter in the ways and nooks of woodlands what
the country is to them. They might not answer
in words, but they feel that hers is a beneficent
presence, auspicious, soothing and sheltering, a
presence that finds words for their dumbness, that
lends them patience in their suspenses. So that
when a lover says, " How sweet the May do smell ! "
he voices an unrest and praises at once the perfume
of the flowers and the being of his mistress who has
quickened his senses. And the worker with his mind
who comes out of his door to stand gazing across
level fields to the horizon, he too finds his thoughts
purified and supported, set as they are in relief, so
that his ideas themselves appear to be the pattern
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ACROSS THE FIELDS
upon a groundwork of flat green. That indeed is the
mission, the vocation of the fields that we cross — to be
a groundwork for the thoughts of poor humanity that
in its journey through life needs so many supports, so
many solaces.
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IN THE COTTAGES
CHAPTER III
IN THE COTTAGES
AT the end of a closed field, in a hollow of the
woods, so deep and so moist that it was twilight
there even at high noon, there stood a thatched
mud cottage — a two-dwelling house — the door-sill of
which I never crossed without anticipations of pleasure
such as I have known on the sills of few houses.
There lived at one end of the hovel an aged man for
whom I had no respect, and in the low dark rooms,
hung with clothes upon lines that kept away the
draughts of the gaping walls, Meary.
I met her first at dusk, scrambling over the high
stile of a path that, running between squatters'
hovels on a common, was one of a maze of similar
paved footways. In a purplish linsey-woolsey, as
broad as the back of a cow, her face hidden in a
black sun-bonnet that suggested the hood of a hop-
oast, she was burdened with two immense baskets,
from which protruded the square blue, white, and
lead-coloured packages of the village grocer up on
the ridge from which we had both descended. I
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
offered to carry her burdens as far as we might be
going together, and she said, without the least touch
of embarrassment or of over-recognition —
"Why, thank ye, mister. I'll do as much for you
when ye come to be my age."
Her face was round and brown, her forehead broad
and brown, and her brown eyes were alert and
reposeful as if she were conscious of a reserve of
strength sufficient to help her over all the stiles that
are to be found in this life. They had, her eyes, the
sort of masterfulness that you will see in those of a
bull that gazes across the meadows and reflects.
I think I cared for her more than for any friend I
have made before or since, and now that she has
been dead for a year or so her memory seems to
make sacred and to typify all those patient and
good-humoured toilers of the fields that, for me,
are the heart of the country. If you saw her at work
in the hop-fields, with her hands and arms stained
walnut -green to the elbows; in her own potato-
patch stooping, in immense boots, to drop the seed
potatos into the rows ; striding through the dewy
grass of the fields to do a job of monthly nursing ;
or standing with one hand over her eyes in the
doorway that she fitted so exactly that her thin hair
was brushed by the four-foot thatch, she had one
unfailing form of words, one unfailing smile upon
her lips — " Ah keep all on gooing ! " And that
was at once her philosophy and her reason for
existence.
no
IN THE COTTAGES
And to keep all on going until you drop — as she >/
did, poor soul, until within three days of the appearance
of her illness — that is the philosophy and the apologia
pro mtd of the country-side. Your ambition is simply
that : health, so that you may keep getting about ;
strength, so that you may, to the end, do your bits
of jobs and have a moment to do a job or two for a
bedridden neighbour ; and, in old age, a sufficient
remainder of your faculties to pass censure on the
doings of the neighbour you have helped. To have
accepted helping hands enough to let you feel that
you too are part of the body politic, and to have
retained independence enough to let you refuse
benefits when the spirit moves you — these are the
undefined aspirations that keep occupied the weather-
beaten cottages at the corners of fields, the two
dwelling-houses with roofs green from the drip ot
orchard trees, and the quiet and solitary graveyards
of the scattered hamlets.
This particular Meary, being just a month younger
than the Queen (there is still only one Queen in the
cottages), had lived just the life of every other
countrywoman, and in her conversation, a propos ot
whatever topic might occur, fragments of her past
life came constantly to the surface. If you spoke of
the drought being bad for root crops, she would say —
" Ah ! I lost my two toes after a bit of turnip-peel
when I was four, jumping down into a ditch for it."
In those days the children searched the dry
ditches for such things. Or, before the A d draper's
Til
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
window, she would give a quaint little idea of herself
in a yellow nankin dress, cut so tight to save stuff
that she could not move her tiny arms. You knew
you had " innards " most days of the week, she said,
when she was a child. Once, out of mischief, she
had handed her mother, who was at the kneading-
trough, a paper of snuff instead of one of allspice,
and the whole week's baking came yellow and evil-
tasting. But they had had to eat it. She had never
eaten baker's bread till she was twelve, nor butcher's
meat till she was twenty ; sometimes they had had a
bit of tug mutton, which comes from a sheep found
drowned in a dyke. Her stepfather had a bit of bacon
once a week, and then the children had the crock
water it was boiled in.
After a time — " I was a pretty girl then, I'd have
you to know," she used to say — she had been
attracted by a travelling basket-maker. When he
was about their village she used to slip out and put a
pinch of tea into the kettle over his fire in the dingle.
She was sent away into service to preserve her from
an infatuation for the " pikey," who was not re-
garded as respectable, though he earned better
money than two agricultural labourers. At nights,
lying in the servants' bedroom of Lady Knatch-
bull's (the great house had as many windows
as there were days in the year), the girls were accus-
tomed to tell each other folk-stories — of queens who
went wandering over the earth, having been turned
out-of-doors for inscrutable reasons, whose hands
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IN THE COTTAGES
were cut off for reasons more inscrutable, or who
were reconciled to their kingly husbands or princely
sons at the price of a pound of salt. Or the dark
room would be peopled with witches, or dismal
songs sung of the murder of trusting girls — with
obvious morals for the girls of the servants' room.
There were twelve slept together there. They taught
each other to read, but no one knew how to write,
and Meary never learned. They were sent to church
of a Sunday, filling a great square pew for all the
world like a cattle truck, but they never learned any-
thing of religion. Nevertheless, at times Meary
dreamed of Jesus Christ preaching in a green field from
a waggon, and telling the women again not to trust
the men, but to be good to each other and to small
children. Once while Jesus was preaching Meary' s
mother, who had died years before, came to her,
dressed all in white, and told her to be a good girl.
But eventually the pikey came to mend baskets at
the Hall, and she went away with him. She did not
see any use in being married ; she reckoned it was
something for the Quality. If he was your man, he
was your man, and there was an end of it. If he
wanted to leave you, he'd leave you, married or not ;
it was all one. Once her man did leave her, and she
walked right from Paddock Wood to St. Martin's
Cliff in twenty-eight hours to find him again. It
was on that journey that she saw the ghost. It was
sitting on a milestone, dressed like a bride in a coal-
scuttle bonnet. She thought it was just a woman,
"3 I
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
and said, " Hullo, missus ! " three times, to it. Then
it raised its head, and she saw that there was no face
in the bonnet.
" Oh, well, poor thing," says Meary, " reckon
I never hurt you and you've no call to hurt me."
So she went on her way along that long Dover road.
Eventually her man grew too weak or too lazy to
keep the roads. He was much older than she,
having already in 1815 been condemned to be hung
for stealing oats when he was a waggoner's mate,
and having been reprieved on consenting to serve in
the Navy during the Hundred Days. They settled
down in a cottage by the canal at B , and there for
years Meary kept herself and him. She had a certain
original genius, such as that which prompted her to
keep fowls for profit at a time when no labourers had
ever thought of such a thing ; but for the rest she
worked at stone-picking on the uplands, at tying
hops, at potato-planting, at pea-sticking, at one of
the hundred things by which the rural economy is
maintained, and in addition she did her monthly
nursing, her sick-tending, her laying-out corpses,
and her weekly job of charing at the rectory. It
was to secure this last that she eventually consented
to be married to her man. Shortly afterwards he
was stung in the leg by an adder, and, blood-
poisoning setting in, he became more useless than
ever. Then she fell, broke her leg, and lay for long
weeks in hospital, using up all her savings of hen-
money, until one day, being seized with a presenti-
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IN THE COTTAGES
ment, she rose, dressed herself, and, crawling in one
way or another painfully home, she found her man
dead. She retained a lame leg for the rest of
her life.
And for the rest of her life she worked. She kept " all
on gooing." Eventually, as I have said, she died very
suddenly of cancer at the age of seventy-four. But
even then she showed no signs of decay. You might
have taken her for a hard- worked woman of forty ;
she was as solid and as brown as a clod of earth.
She died, of course, in the workhouse infirmary, and
of course, too, the chaplain, or the surgeon, or the
man who drove her there, or possibly even myself,
since I was known to have seen much of her, were
suspected of having in some way got hold of " her
money/' For the poor, who ought in all conscience to
know how hard it is to amass the smallest of sums, are
exceedingly credulous as to the hoardings of old
creatures living in the most sordid of hovels. I have
seldom known an old woman die without some such
legend attaching itself to her corsets, as that they
crackled with bank-notes, or were as weighty as
so much lead with a lining of sovereigns. In the
French country, it is said that such old women have
a very uncertain tenure of life, but the fact that such
stories do not much attach to English countrysides
should be evidence that the English peasant is more
law-abiding in his imagination.
I was standing, I mean, in the doorway of a low
French estaminet when there came in an exceedingly
115 12
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
old, toothless, and bowed woman, with a broken
basket slung over her back. She began to talk
in a happy gibberish of a beau marin who was to
marry her next Thursday. She groped under the
table with a pointed stick for a crust of bread that by
a miracle lay on the sanded floor, and dropping it
over her back into her basket, went her way, a
hopping figure like a little old goblin, under the thin
poplars of the immensely long and dusty road.
" What a life ! " said one man at a table.
" Why no/' retorted the benignant-thinking hostess.
" Is she not as happy as we others ? When she finds
such a crust of bread is it not to her as great a
pleasure as to us when we add forty sous to our
savings ? "
Life is like that, after all ! And if every new
Thursday no beau marin comes to marry her, would it
not be every next Thursday that he would marry her ?
" Such a man," retorted a waggoner, sitting with
his head between his hands — " such-and-such a man
was seen on the thatch of her hut, listening at the
chimney last week. One Thursday will come when,
not the beau marin> but the excellent ser gents will find
her with her throat cut and her rooms stripped bare."
" You are a fool," the hostess blinked.
" Ah ! " the waggoner answered, " don't we all
know that M. Un Tel dropped old Marie TheVese
down the draw-well ? They say she fell. But why
did she go who had no cause to use water ? And why
was no money found ? "
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IN THE COTTAGES
It is not that sort of story that one hears on the
ale-house bench in England, and it is not the fear of
the law of libel that prevents it. It is simply that the
English imagination does not run in that groove. Or
perhaps it is only that the English peasant is more
patient, for in his stories the thief always waits for the
old woman to die before going through her stays.
And indeed the fact that the only reward for a life
of toil should be the empty reputation of stays
quilted with bank-notes, or, for an old man, the legend
of a baccy-box filled with golden sovereigns — that
fact seems to be a proof of a wonderful patience
in these tribes of the fields. For all the rest ot
humanity — for the humanity who read or write
books, cast up ledgers, minister behind counters,
bars or the grilles of banks — for all of us who do not
walk behind the plough, draw furrows for potatoes,
tie hops, or tend pigs, for all of us who are not down
upon the earth itself, there is always a vision of a
modest competence at our day's decline. But here
there is nothing.
There is not in the country even a day-dream of
anything. Upon the whole my Meary was the
wisest person I have ever met. Broad-minded,
temperate, benevolent, cheerful and cynical, she
could confront every hap and mishap of life,
whether her own, her neighbour's, or the state's,
with a proper fortitude or a sane sympathy. She
had experienced more vicissitudes in her own
scale of things than had most people ; she had
"7
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
covered more miles of country and gone through
more hours of toil. Yet her philosophy of life was
simply that, that you " keep all on gooing." And even
that you could only do if you were most fortunate, if
you had that greatest of all gifts, health, which alone
makes possible the pedestrian existence. Without
that your " gooing " ends in the workhouse.
Perhaps that peasant imagination, the stays
quilted with notes, is, as it were, a rudimentary
trace of our ideal of retiring. It is the nearest
approach to a castle in the air, a faint mirage of our
impossible Island of the Blest. It is the peasant's
acknowledgment that a modest competence is at
least thinkable for one of his number; and, oddly
enough, it is always to the weakest, the oldest
and the least competent that he credits the posses-
sion. Not even Meary herself ever thought of
" saving " ; whereas you will observe that to the
French field labourer — as to my hostess of the
Estaminet de I'Esperance, who in her turn was the
wisest French person I have ever spoken with — the
first idea of the sou which he so sedulously hunts for
in his sandier soil, is that of a thing to be " saved."
It is the basis of some sort of investment in Rentes,
mageres or otherwise, or it is the commencement of
the purchase of some tiny patch of land, of a new
cow or a first goat.
But short of a pig, which only too often does not
pay its way, English " Meary " has no machinery
of lucrative banking ; she has only her stays or her
n8
IN THE COTTAGES
stocking- up the chimney, just as her husband has
only his baccy-box or the loose brick in the hearth
floor. And improvements in the conditions of living
have of late centuries limited themselves almost
entirely to a cheapening of commodity in the case
of the field labourer. He gets his food, which is now
largely tinned or packet stuff, cheaper than he did,
and for smaller sums he buys his comparatively
shoddy garments ; but his wages and his housing
remain practically the same.
No doubt my Meary and her neighbours are im-
provident : the cottages contain children and beer is
drunk in the houses of call, and if men and women
did without these two luxuries they might have
reasonable sums in the savings-bank or nest-eggs
that would fall to them from benefit societies when
they reached the ages of fifty-five. It is no doubt
appalling to think that whereas the average earning
per agricultural family in England is fifteen shillings
per week, the average expenditure upon beer (the
figures are those of temperance reformers) should be
eleven pence per family. Exactly reckoned out this
means that, if it lived at so proportionately appalling
a rate of expenditure, a family existing upon^i,ooo
per annum would spend £61 2s. 2§d. upon its
pleasures — its clubs for the heads of the family, its
wines, spirits, liqueurs, mineral waters for itself and
its guests. For it must be remembered that the
ale-house is the club, the only place of meeting save
the corner of the churchyard, the only possibility
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
that the field labourer has of enjoying any kind of
social life at all in almost every English village.
No doubt this 6£ °/Q of unnecessary expenditure
upon enjoyment would be impossibly high in any
other English class ; and of course, when we add to
it the necessary expenditure upon the children that
the field labourer so lavishly indulges in, we do
attain to a picture of improvidence that is eminently
disturbing to many people. But the fact seems to
me to be that when a man has so little opportunity
for pleasure or for rational investment as has the
English field labourer, it is almost hypocritical to
expect him to be only a little less abstemious
than the angels of God or very much more than
a man.
I have pondered a good deal upon this problem of
the absence of earthly castles in the air ; they are
simply not to be found in the scheme of life of my
good Meary and her neighbours. They do not seem
to hope for any kind of Island of the Blest, and are
agreeably surprised and a little ashamed if, when old
age reaches them, their children support them. But
a period of real rest or retiring is not for them. It
does not come, at least, within their scheme of things.
Of course, scattered over the countryside, we find old
couples enjoying a modest leisure. But these are
almost invariably people who have come across some
unwonted stroke of luck. In a parish that I know
very well, for instance, there were three such couples.
But one pair had been gentlemen's servants, and
1 20
IN THE COTTAGES
made a way for themselves by keeping a cow and
drawing small pensions. Another pair had good
children earning good money in several towns. The
third had inherited a little money from a not very
creditable source, and lived a hidden, odd life
in the shadow of the deep boughs of a wooded
hill in the midst of a random collection of squatters'
huts that somehow they had come to own. In one
they lived, in another they kept their pigs, in another
they had a great number of bees. The whole little
encampment was shut in by a very high quicken
hedge, so that they seemed to pass all their days
in a mysterious shadow, not very willing even to part
with their honey as far as one could discover, for
their garden gate was almost always padlocked, so
that to knock at their front door it was necessary
to find a hop-pole and to prod it from a distance.
Then an upper window would open and a small
wizened face look out.
It finally came to light, in the mysterious way in
which these things will out in the London papers,
that the little old man was the son of an informer.
His father had betrayed a whole neighbouring village
of smugglers seventy years before, and these, his
descendants, a brother and sister, still lived on the
blood-money. Where they had been in the interval
before they came to B , or why they should hide
their heads in a country where the sons of notorious
criminals flourish and are honoured, is a little of a
mystery still ; but there they did live and there they
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
enjoyed such rest as is vouchsafed to anyone here.
And it will be observed that all these three resting
couples were the exceptions of the countryside.
The other one or two old people who there lived at
home and in a measure of ease had parish relief. I
have never come across a man or woman who had
saved enough to live on when they grew too old to
work, and I have never come across one who seriously
thought of such a thing.
They take, the country people, their rests between
work in snatches so intense that perhaps they scarcely
rouse themselves to think of any longer spaces of
doing nothing, for I know of no object, no symbol
so absolutely typical of relaxation as the attitude of
one of our field labourers after a hard day. If you
will think of him sitting beside his tea-table, his head
hanging a little, his legs wide apart as if to balance
himself on a thing so fragile as a cottage chair, his
hands, above all, open, immense and at rest, as if,
having grasped many and heavy things, they would
never again close upon a plough-handle or use-pole
— if you will make a mental image, refining a little
and idealising a little, you will be thinking of man-
kind utterly at rest. You will be thinking, too, of
the mankind who does not consider either the
future or the past — of the man whose nights are
the walls between concrete periods of the mere
present, whose days are each one a cell, shut off and
unconnected, having no relation to the day which
went before, and none to that which shall ensue after
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IN THE COTTAGES
the black oblivion of the coming night. For in which
of those days, dominated by a real sun, overshadowed
by real clouds, or swept by real and vast winds, shall
they find leisure to formulate a scheme of life to
provide against that figurative rainy day that the
rest of the world so continually dreads ? There is no
time between bed and bed, and at night no lying
awake. That, after all, is the improvidence of nature.
For the ideas of making a career, of putting by
against the decline of life, of retiring — these ideas
are of a very modern, an artificial, growth. I am
almost tempted to say that they have sprung up only
with the growth of the Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic-indus-
trial-commercialism that is Modernity. That is,
naturally, a side-speculation ; but what has always
seemed to me an astonishing, an even astounding
feature of most social comities is, not that the peasant
should now be leaving the land, but that he should
have been content to remain for so long the mere
substratum of the body politic. For here we have
a whole body of men controlling the one thing that
is absolutely necessary to all other estates, con-
trolling absolutely the one thing without which
human lives cannot be lived.
"They must then," a philosopher from another
planet and another plane of thought would say,
— " they must necessarily be the lords of the world.
All other trades, professions, avocations, guilds,
castes, crafts, or followings must come to them, suing
upon bended knees for the mere stuff to keep their
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
ribs from sticking through their sides. They control,
your field-workers, the food supply of your world;
then they must control your world." And, indeed,
it is odd to think that from the days of Pharaoh
to the days when the rulers of Rome kept themselves
in place and power by supplying bread et circenses to
a town populace, from then to mediaeval days, and
from those days to these of transatlantic market
manipulations, through all the mists of time to
which annals and chronicles supply dimmed charts
and landmarks, there has never been a wheat-corner
of one kind or another that has been "engineered"
or had its origin with the actual peasant — with the
actual field-worker. There have, of course, been wars
for the fixing of labourers' wages, as there was in
England, and there have been Peasant Wars, as in
Germany, but there has never been a case in which
the peasant has shown himself aware of his actual
power — his power to withhold food. Such class wars
as he has waged — and in England there has only
been the one — have been wars in which he used the
weapons of the other classes, swords, billhooks, and
whatever other primitive implements of steel he
could lay hands to. But he has never used the most
terrible weapon of all — he has never simply stayed
his hand.
It is not, of course, very wonderful, though it is
appalling to consider what would be the results of a
universal peasants' « strike." But the peasant has
hardly ever had a corporate self-consciousness ; he
124
IN THE COTTAGES
has certainly never " organised," it is much, even, if
he have so much as thought of his rather wretched
circumstances. You get, for instance, his philosophy
of keeping on going expressed in " Piers Plowman "
— how many centuries ago — and in addition to it a
consciousness of the bitterness of life; and in
addition to that a belief that Providence, on the Last
Day and for ever, shall give material recompense to
those who suffered so long and so inarticulately :
" There the poor dare plead
And prove by pure reason
To have allowance of his lord
By the law, he it claimeth."
And, joy that never joy had, he asketh of the
rightful Judge. Since to the birds, beasts, and wild
worms of the green wood that suffer grievously in
winter, God sends summer that is their sovereign
joy, assuredly and of pure reason God shall give to
the poor toilers of the field, after their long winter of
this world, an eternal summer. Something of this
bitterness, tempered with the idea of retribution here-
after, may have remained to the peasant throughout
the ages ; but how different it is from the corporate
consciousness of the other nearly indispensable crafts.
How different it is from the spirit of the blacksmith's
motto : —
" By hammer and hand
All Art doth stand."
It was, I imagine, during the French Revolution
125
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
that some idea of this sort began to permeate
the field labourer. But even then it was more
a matter of individuals than of a body corporate.
The print to which I have referred already is not,
at any rate, in any form discoverable earlier than
in a French version of 1782. It shows a man
bearing upon his back many others : a king on the
top, then, in a bunch, a soldier, a priest, a lawyer,
a doctor, a merchant. Those who form the burden
bear scrolls : " I govern all," " I fight for all," " I
pray for all," " I cure all," " I sell for all," and the
figure with its bowed head, like Atlas groaning
beneath the weight of a world, exhibits the legend :
"I work for all." I have seen versions of this
print, redesigned with different attributes in wood
engraving, in steel engravings, in chromolithograph
or even copied by hand, all over Europe — in
estaminets in La Vendee, in inns in Herefordshire,
in farms in Kent, and in the Kotten of Westphalia.
If it is not the charter, it is, this print, at least the
claim to recognition of the worker on the soil. It was
probably first designed in the France of 1782. Yet
even in the England of a century and a quarter later
the field labourer has not found any corporate or
articulate means of intercommunication ; he has not
imagined any method of revenging himself on the
classes above him. He has not, I mean, waged any
war, claimed the land, or so much as " struck " in any
vast numbers. What he has done has been simply to go
over to the enemy. For, with the spread of education,
126
IN THE COTTAGES
with the increase of communication, there has come not
the determination to better the conditions of life in
the country, but the simple abandonment of the land.
It is, I think, a truism to anyone who knows the
country, though I have found townsmen to deny it,
that there are whole stretches of territory in England
where a really full-witted or alert youth of between
sixteen and thirty will absolutely not be found. I
visited lately eighteen farms of my own neigh-
bourhood, covering a space of about four miles by
two miles, and on this amount of ground only five
boys found employment. Four of these were below
the average intelligence, and had at school not
passed the fourth standard; the fifth was so " stupid "
that he could not be trusted to do more than drive
the milk-cart to and from the station. And of all the
farm-labourers' families that I know well — some forty-
six in number — only two have youths at home, and one
of these has "something the matter with his legs."
Of one hundred and twelve of other families that I
know in a nodding way, not more than five have boys at
work in the fields. Making a rough calculation of the
figures as they have presented themselves to me, I
find that just over five per cent, of the country-born
boys I have known have stayed of their own free
choice on the land. The public statistics for the
whole of England are somewhat higher in this par-
ticular ; but in the purely agricultural Midlands the
standard of intelligence is somewhat lower, and in
the North of England the living-in system still pre-
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
vails, and does for various reasons keep the young-
men in their places.
The figure among the girls is probably even more
striking. A girl of moderately good looks or of an
intelligence at all alert is almost unknown in many,
many villages of England. I was much struck by
the statement of a friend of mine the other day. A
man of much intelligence and of unrivalled know-
ledge of country life, he had been spending a month
watching the birds and small beasts of a certain
countryside. He had covered a good deal of ground
in that time, and at last he saw a pleasant and
bright-looking girl. He had grown so weary of
seeing only worn, stupid or dazed faces that he
got off his cycle and remarked to her that he was
glad to see that she at least was stopping in her
own village.
" I ! " she said with an accent of scorn ; " I wouldn't
stop in such a dull old hole if you gave me ^10 a
day! I'm visiting my parents for three days/'
Yet the village in question was almost world-
famous for its beauty, and her father's wages were
rather high.
I do not for the moment want to extract any other
meaning from this striking rural exodus than may
attach to my own astonishment. But it does seem to
me astonishing that this really downtrodden class
should have given just this form to its protest.
There has not, I mean, been any discoverable attempt
worth the mention to fight the battle as a battle.
128
IN THE COTTAGES
You do not anywhere find that the field labourer has
attempted to raise the price that he receives from his
employer,* nor do you find that the young people of
the countrysides have ever made any attempt to
brighten or to enhance the intellectual colourings of
their lives. You do not find anywhere spelling
bees, newspaper clubs, debating societies, or sub-
scription dances. Yet there is no reason in the world
why these things should not have been attempted.
Nay more, all the old seasonal excitements of the
country are dying out : the fairs, the May-day cele-
brations, the sparrow shoots, the bonfire clubs, even
the very cricket clubs, which are subsidised, as a rule,
"from above" — all the old merriments and "merry-
neets" of the country have almost gone. In the
course of the last four years I have seen the custom
of May Barns and the village waits abandoned in a
place where they have existed since its first houses
were built. But no trace of any attempt to amuse
* You will find this most strikingly exemplified in the case of
such temporary industries as that of hop-picking, where a whole
village turns out together, and where, if anywhere, some sort of
stand for better money might be made. " Strikes " do, of course,
occur where there are many " foreigners " employed, but practically
never where all the pickers are village people. The cottagers
accept uncomplainingly the grower's wage, which is based upon
his computation of what the price of hops may be expected to
prove ; of course, when I say the peasant has never struck, I do
not forget the name of Mr. Joseph Arch. But from his day back to
that of John Ball agitators and stack-burnings have been so com-
paratively rare that " never " remains a word sufficiently accurate
for the uses of impressionism.
I2Q K
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
themselves is to be found amongst the peasants of
this countryside. The whole population of field
workers is simply throwing down its tools; it is
making no struggle for existence ; it is simply going
away in silence, without a protest and without a trace
of listening to outward persuasions. And I know
very well that if I live to be as old as my old Meary
there will be no one like her to lift my basket over
the stile.
And when I think of her, standing dun-coloured,
smiling and square in the dusk of that sunken foot-
path, I am rather saddened. For, following her
footsteps into the shadowy land that is the past, all
the generation for whom she stood is going, now
so fast.
There will be none to take their places. It
any remain they will be the slow-witted : whilst she
and those she stood for were merely unlettered,
a thing very different. Yet, perhaps, we do wrong
to regret that there should no longer be a whole
world of our fellow - creatures pulled out of their
natural shapes, stunted in their minds and leading
lives dull and unlovely so that we may have certain
aesthetic feelings gratified. No doubt in the scale
of things the young shop-assistant, with her pre-
served figure, her gayer laugh, her brighter
complexion, her courtships, her ideals and her
aspiration for a villa in a row, with a brass
knocker and an illustrated bible on the parlour table
— no doubt the young shop-assistant is a better
130
IN THE COTTAGES
product of humanity than Meary, with her broad face,
her great mouth, great hands, and cow-like heave of
the shoulders. Nevertheless, I suppose that we must
needs regret this passing. For, after all, it is a
stage of the youth of the world that is passing away
along with our own youth. It is the real heart of the
country that is growing a little colder as our own
hearts grow colder. It is one of the many things that
our children — that our very adolescent nephews and
nieces — will never know.
131 K 2
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
CHAPTER IV
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
I DO not know why in particular, and at this par-
ticular moment, there should come up in my
memory a very rainy day. I was with three
other men, driven in from work by the weather. We
were idly watching the heavy showers that slanted
across the triangular farmyard, driving down from
the grey hollows and grey slopes of the downs
behind, until the water dropped like curtains of
beads from the eaves of the waggon lodge beneath
which we sheltered.
I had been making a new strawberry bed, and a
Falstaffian, shiny, shaven-faced scamp, by-named
Sunshine because of his appearance, had been helping
me. The shepherd, or, as we styled it, the looker,
was flaying a sheep that hung from one of the tie
beams of the open shed, and Hunt, a retired soldier,
who also did a job of lookering on the farm, lank, ill-
shaven and sallow, leant back against a mowing
machine, and looked with red and malignant eyes
across the slants of rain. He rubbed his wet nose
135
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
with the back of his hand and snarled out, " Now if
I had my rights I shouldn't be here wet and sick
feeling."
The shepherd — who had been a shepherd all his
life on the one farm — made a slight incision with his
knife, and drew the skin a shade lower on the red
carcase.
" If we all had, we shouldn't none of us be," he
said, with a laconic air.
Sunshine, who had run away from his wife in the
next county, grunted merrily.
He himself would be sitting in Brock Castle
drawing-room, and all the lands below the hill would
be his, Hunt drawled viciously.
" And I'd have a tidy bit of land of my own, too,"
the shepherd said.
An aunt of his had died with property in the Chan-
cery, Sunshine laughed, and, as luck would have
it, I could make a similar claim.
" 'Reckon no one would have to work if it wasn't
for they lawyers," Hunt snarled ; and the shepherd
said that if a man in a black coat came along ques-
tioning him he kept very whist and quiet.
" Might be a parson, now," Sunshine argued.
Well, parsons and lawyers pig together, too, the
shepherd answered. More than once he had taken a
note to the vicarage, and seen parson and lawyer
Hick having tea together. No— take his advice, and
do not speak to a man with a white collar and a
black coat.
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TOILERS OF THE FIELD
He was of opinion that your own quality was as
much as you could deal with : " Never you have no
truck with strangers, or as like as not you'd sign away
rights of yours you'd never heard of— and before you
could say Jack Ploughman."
The retired soldier had been born on the wrong
side of the blanket, I believe, for I could not otherwise
make much of his wrongs, and a large liver, gained
in India, seemed to sour him. But both Sunshine
and the looker were of most contented kinds. Yet
they told remarkable stories of the wrongs that they,
their relations, or A., B. and C. of that countryside,
had suffered at the hands of the local Quality. The
shepherd's father, for instance, had owned a mud
cottage and a good orchard — probably squatted land.
One day, when he was about sixty-six, Squire
C k had come along and said, " Look here, old
looker ; I'll build you a brick cottage and let you
live in it till you die, roomy and comfortable, if so
be when you die you will engage it comes to me."
The old looker had consented ; and all the other
squatters on the common had taken similar offers.
But the old looker had died before the new cottage
had been built two months, and out the old woman
and her kids had had to turn.
"That was how the C 's came into all the
C n property," the looker said.
Sunshine beamingly told the story of how his aunt
had signed away her land in Chancery to a lawyer
come all the way from the shires to get her name to a
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THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
paper when none of her nephews were by. And
the shepherd capped it with the tale of old Jacky
Banks, who had worked all his life on that very farm.
He had had fifteen pounds a-year for forty years, never
spent a penny of it except for baccy, and had it under
his bed when he died, along with his watch. Well,
he lived in, on the farm, and died in what was now the
drawing-room. Old missus, who was a powerful old
woman, lugging buckets about the stackyard and
doing a man's work till she died, had taken all old
Jacky's money from under his bed before his eyes were
properly glazed, and his relations never saw a penny
of it, nor the watch and chain neither.
I have frequently thought that the reputation for
stupidity, for slowness of brain, for grossness of
manner that the townsman accords to the field labourer
must really arise from mere suspiciousness. The shep-
herd's advice to his friends to keep a shut head to people
wearing black coats is very generally followed in the
cottages. It must be remembered that the labourer
cannot see any reason why his betters should want
to talk with him. The only motive that he can
accord to them is that of desiring to " get something
out" of him. He has heard of land-grabbing, of
land in Chancery ; he has known of cases innumerable
in which the small tenant-farmer, the three-hundred-
acre man, has over - reached his labourers. His
cottage doors are beset by pedlars of sorts— watch
pedlars, pension tea pedlars, illustrated Bible pedlars,
and the agents of foreign lotteries. All these people
" 138
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
wear black coats and speak with specious and silky
accents of gentility. I remember, too, walking along
a dark road from the station with a youngish girl ot
the scullery-maid type. She chatted amiably as long as
I was invisible, but when the light of a carriage fell
upon me she looked at me with startled eyes, uttered,
"Why, you're a gentleman!" and took to her heels.
For in the eyes of the cottage mothers there is only
one reason why a gentleman should wish to talk to a
cottage girl.
And the speculation has sometimes occurred to me,
too, what impression the voice, the accent and the
language of the more instructed class must make
upon the ears accustomed to broader and harsher
sounds. I remember discussing a certain rather
charming lady with an old labourer, and he said —
" Why, she was very nice in her ways, but she'd a
pernicketty way of speaking that ah couldn't stomach
much."
If, in fact, brogues, dialects and dropped "h's"
affect the educated ear disagreeably, must not
soft and delicate inflections of vowel sounds cause a
vague or a very definite feeling of unrest ? I do not
imagine that a labourer can ever feel really at ease
with that particular kind of foreignness. It cannot be
home-like. Most country speech nowadays is tinged
and coarsened by the horrible sounds of the cockney
language, but it was not always so. I remember,
years ago, going to order a waggon at a new
dismal-looking villa residence, the property of a self-
139
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
made man. The man himself came to the door. He
was over ninety, tall, straight, with faded blue eyes,
very white hair and trembling hands ; but his voice
and accent were charming and flute-like. He said,
for instance —
"De harses beien't home from plovin' most deas
till nun/'
The words look grotesque in print, but all the
sounds were very clear and precise. And indeed
with the very old people of all countrysides it is
generally the same. They give the impression of
speaking, very correctly and with great self-respect,
a dead language.
So that for these and many reasons the person of
quality, the strange squire, the Bible pedlar, the
parson, or the dog-licence man, are suspect. All these
wearers of clothes not weather-beaten and soil-stained,
all these speakers with unhomely voices, all these
people who have too ready a flow of words to be
easily trusted — all these English foreigners, in fact,
are individuals to whom it is wisest to keep a " shet
hed." You can gain nothing from them, they may
be after some vague property of yours. I think,
really, that the attitude of the field-labourer towards
his betters is that of, say, a Dutch colonial farmer
towards the early diamond prospectors. There may
be diamonds, gold, petroleum, or Heaven knows what
upon his property ; who knows what these strangers
might make out of the unknown mysterious pos-
sibilities r
140
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
I heard, for instance, the other day of a quite
authentic Chancery case. Here an old labourer, who
had served with distinction in the Army, was
really the heir to some property. His children had
employed lawyers, but the old man obstinately
refused to give them any assistance. Once he went
to the solicitor's office with his medals and birth
certificate as means of identification, but having
surrendered them he sat all night upon the doorstep
for fear they should be taken out of the office and
sold. Now, having recovered them, he sits upon them
continually in his hooded chair, he absolutely refuses
to swear any affidavit or to give any testimony in any
court of law. And there the case remains at a stand-
still. This, of course, is an extreme instance, but it is
as it were a symptom of a very widespread disease.
For it must be remembered that the field labourer
has not any reason for courting the society of his
betters. He cannot by any possible means rise in the
social scale. A successful draper will become a knight
and build a manor-house, but there is no kind of
" success " open to the usual farm labourer. Hence
he has no reason for snobbishness and " knows his
place." A lady of my acquaintance once invited
her wood-reeve to sit down to tea with her. He
gave as a reason for refusing that —
" You don't put a toad in your waistcoat pocket."
Perhaps for that very reason the field labourer has
as a rule much less of class hatred than his town cousin.
You do not hear, beside the ale-house ingle, the same
141
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
diatribes against the rich that you will in a work-
man's train ; you will not, if you are one ot the rich,
have such approaches as you may make met with an
ostentatious defiance. I have been met in the country
by " shut heads," but have never been harangued for
my lewdness or luxurious habits as has time and
again happened to me at the hands of town labourers.
The nearest I have come to it in the country was
once when I asked my way of a statuesque old woman
in a lilac sun-bonnet. She misdirected me, and when,
returning an hour later, I saw her and reproached her,
she said —
" Well, you idle chaps has nothing better to do than
to waste time. How did / know ye really wanted to
go to L— ?"
The feeling expressed in the lines I have quoted
from Piers Plowman does undoubtedly still exist. Once
I took one end of the table at an underwood sale
dinner in an inn barn. The churchwardens had been
brought in ; I had made the best of ladling out rum
punch with a ladle that had a George II. guinea
inlaid in its bowl (and you have no idea how difficult
it is to ladle punch into thirty tumblers without spilling
a quantity. The quill-like silver stem quivers in
your hand and you feel that sixty or a hundred eyes
are fixed upon your fingers). The smoke from the
pipes ascended to the rough rafters of the barn ;
repletion mellowed the talk of cants of ash-saplings
-and of chestnut wattlegates ; we had eaten roast
:goose and plum pudding with brandy sauce; we
142
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
were a matter of ninety buyers, all labourers, except
for three farmers, the auctioneer and myself. Then
songs were called for ; ten or a dozen men set them-
selves to press one of the farmers for Old Joe's
Wedding Day. The farmer, a man who worked
himself, fat, hard, bullet-headed and inscrutable, sat
with twinkling eyes, sunk deep in his chair as if he
heard and saw nothing of his persuaders. Suddenly
in the midst of their clamour a high, clear, thin sound
thrilled through the air. Coming as it did from his
lips which hardly appeared to move, it produced a
most extraordinary impression, as if a bull had spoken
with the voice of a canary.
But the next favourite, or perhaps the real favourite,
since Farmer Files had a kind of official position,
was a fanatical-looking man called Hood, whom I had
never seen before. He rose without any pressing. Tall,
scraggy, long-necked, bearded, and with flashing eyes,
he reminded me of some furious Hebrew prophet or of
some Solomon Eagle. He had impassioned gestures of
claw-like hands when the whites of his eyes would
show. He recited a piece of verse called, I think,
" Christmas Day." It was full of the miseries rather
than the wrongs of the poor. Because he had a real
dramatic gift the piece was moving to listen to.
The rate-collector harassed a poor family — Hood
glared round the room; a keeper unjustly accused the
house-father of stealing goose eggs — he thundered with
one hand on the trestle table and a glass fell to the
floor; finally the bailiff came in for rent whilst the thaw
H3
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
drip was trickling through the thatch — and the
man's lowered voice and gloomy eyes seemed to cast
a real shadow of tragedy on the faces of his
hearers.
For me at least the rest of the poem spoiled the
eiFect, since a long -lost son from Australia came
back at that very moment, and after having taken the
oppressed family to the inn for a square Christmas
meal, he bought the house of the oppressive landlord
and settled his parents in it. That, of course, was the
retributive joy of the Piers Plowman poem. Joy
that never joy had, had come into more than his own
even on earth, and whatever one's regret for the
spoilt art of the piece (the agony really had been
skilfully piled up), one would not grudge the hard-
faced peasant listeners their touch of idealism and
softening. The wood sale is the great event of the year
in these parts.
But the reciter evidently had his feelings, his grim
humour. For as he sat down amidst violent sounds
of feet and of hands on the table, he said —
" I reckon, tho', when they got into their big house,
they'd send chaps for three months to Maidstone
along of a turnip, just the same as if they'd never
been poor/'
It was not, I mean, in his mind a song against the
rich, but merely one against the bitterness of things.
He seemed to be uttering in his own sardonic way
those inimitable French words, " Cela vous donne une
fiere idee de Vhomme." But, indeed, it has always
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TOILERS OF THE FIELD
seemed to me that the countryman is more of a
man of the world than his offshoot in the towns. He
has a far greater knowledge of life.
The faces of town houses are inscrutable masks ;
class and class pass each other's streets but never
penetrate the rooms. The town labourer relies for
his knowledge of his social superiors upon the
relatively vile gossip of the Press. The superior
townsman has even less opportunity for really ob-
serving the lives of the poorer of the working
classes.
In the country the social barriers are more rigid,
but the peasant really does know something of what
goes on in the great houses and may comment upon
them after his lights ; and after his light the country
gentleman may know and comment upon the lives
of his upholders. Life in the country has, in short, a
great solidarity and a great interdependence, and
with this greater knowledge comes, as a rule, a greater
tolerance. This must, indeed, be the case where one's
ideas of life are founded upon a knowledge of that
life.
But, of course, along with the easy tolerance of
the man of the world there goes a larger morality.
I know a Cabinet Minister whom in Town one would
never suspect of robbing the public funds, yet when he
had a part of his park re-fenced he calmly caused the
palings, where they abutted on the high road, to be set
five feet further out upon the roadside turf. Thus he
stole one acre-and-a-half of public land; and the local
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
peasantry rather applauded the act. It was, they said,
part of what one expected of the gentry.
I was talking, too, to a village carpenter the other
day about a notorious financier who had made a
notorious failure. He had bought the local estate
from Lord A. and had employed this carpenter to
the tune of £150. Of this the carpenter had received
2s. od. in the pound. Said the red-bearded, pleasant
carpenter —
"Well, Mr. P. was a gentleman. Only he got
among these great folks and they led him wrong." A
rough diamond but a gentleman. Why, Lord A. used
to give only five pounds to the school fund and five
pounds to the club. Mr. P. he gave fifteen to each.
He was a gentleman.
When I objected that he had made ^135 out of the
carpenter to give thirty to these charities, he only
answered —
" Oh, you expects that! But Mr. P. was a gentle-
man. He gave fifteen pounds where Lord A. only
gave five ! "
If you are a countryman you do indeed " expect that,"
because you are a man of the world. But for the
same reason you are not strictly honest yourself, you
repay yourself in kind. At one time I lived two miles
away from a pillar-box, and on my daily journeys to
the post I used to make a halfway house of a certain
lonely one-floored damp cottage. There dwelt in it
an aged couple. The man had had eleven children by a
former wife, and the woman twelve by a first husband ;
146
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
they had married at the ages of seventy-nine and
seventy, because two blankets are warmer on one bed
than one a-piece on two. The old woman was in-
tensely active, an indefatigable maker of mushroom
catsup, which she carried up hill and down dale to
sell, and a most lugubrious and whining beggar. But
old S. was the most venerable person I have ever
seen. He had a high bald head, from which there
flowed silky white locks, an aquiline nose, a full voice
and a sort of quaver that would have done credit to
any ecclesiastic. Seated in his chair beside his
duck's-nest grate in the low room, the walls of which
were covered with black-and-white memorial cards and
glass rolling pins as thickly as is the side wall of a
cathedral with votive tablets, he would mouth out
noble sentiments such as ".Honesty is the best policy/
and stretch a quivering hand across the square
opening of the fire-place. He appeared then like one
of those venerable patriarchs that one sees in wood-
cuts illustrating the Cottar's Saturday Night or early
Victorian pietistic works. And indeed he was a fine
old fellow.
Yet when I gave him a job of picking up potatoes
for me and overpaid him handsomely because his ap-
pearance was so venerable, he would beg me to tell
the neighbours that he only did it out of friendship,
since he was •' on his club ;" or he would relate
some such anecdote as the following : —
" I was a-gooing up the Knoll Hill one evening
when what does I see leein' in the roadway but a
'47 L2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
golden guinea and a broken stick with some drops of
blood on it. ' Hullo, my fine fellow/ says I, ' theer's
been some bad work here, so up you comes into my
baccy-box/ And off I goes into the woods as quick
as quick, for why, if the owner had come back, he
might have claimed it of me."
I do not mean to say that these instances ot
dishonesty are striking or even singular. Naturally
there might be cited numbers of cases of sharp
practices that would bring the hearts of countrysides
up to a level in these matters with the bars of the
towns where the confidence trick flourishes ; but
old s was a little above the average of his
fellows in the precepts, the appearance and even the
practice of morality. Yet here we find him swindling
his club — which is the meanest of crimes really, since
it tells against one's fellows in poverty — and we
find him taking advantage of what he supposed to be
a crime. He told the anecdote with a twinkle of
the eye and that fine preaching inflexion of the voice
which goes with the statement that honesty is the
best policy, that upright and manly inflexion of the
voice which so amply conveys the idea that Provi-
dence is on the side of the speaker.
Upon the whole the most honest person that I have
ever really known in the country was W n. He
was a man of about forty, grizzled, brown, gray-eyed
and altogether pleasant in the face. He had an air
of pathetic weariness too, and I really liked him very
much, and have spent many hours talking to him whilst
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TOILERS OF THE FIELD
he worked for me. In a rough-and-ready way he could
do anything from managing a steam -plough to indoor
painting and glazier's work. He has thatched a
stable for me, planted an asparagus bed, made my
book-shelves, and, though he can neither write nor
cypher, he has managed my coverts of underwood and
kept the accounts to the last farthing. He is ex-
traordinarily hard-working.
Once when I was making alterations in an old farm-
house, piercing a door through an outside wall and
opening up an ingle, I carried W n from his own
village and set him to these tasks. I went to bed
myself one night thoroughly worn out and offered
W n a bed too. He preferred to get on with
his job, and I left him crouching by the hearth,
his hand half up the chimney and one candle
burning on a brick in the desolate dining-room.
All through the night I could hear, when I woke,
W n's cold chisel hammered against the hard
mortar or the rumble of bricks as they fell in the
chimney. And when I went down in the morning to
get him a cup of tea, there was W n, the ingle
completely opened out, the man with his head on one
side, the chisel in one hand and the mallet in the
other, sitting on a pile of old bricks, reddened from
hair to boot soles with brick-dust, and fallen into a
light sleep, so that when I stumbled over a brick his
hammer as if automatically struck the cold chisel and
knocked away a flake of mortar.
He did not make the least fuss about his hard
149
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
night, and did not even ask for overtime pay. It was
all in his day's work. And upon the whole, thinking
of the way he must have kept on going through the
hours that to me would have been intolerably long
and solitary, I felt proportionately ashamed of my-
self and respectful to W n. I mean that I felt
that he was a better man at his work than I at
mine.
I would trust him with untold gold, and indeed
I do still trust him with sums of money that for
him must be very considerable. But I am quite
certain that, though he will fight for my interest
with all sorts of builders, seed-chandlers or market-
gardeners, he will pick up inconsiderable trifles about
my house, little things that I shall not miss, cracked
boots, old caps from cupboards under the stairs — all
sorts of things that I would give him with all the joy
in the world. And he tolerated the fact that his
" missus/' who used to do our washing, would fail to
return an occasional handkerchief or baby's petticoat
(W n like all his improvident brethren has an
immense family of tiny children). "Women are like
that," he would say between puffs of his pipe. His
grey eyes would twinkle pleasantly when he recounted
the small peculations of his mates, the larger dis-
honesties of the builders whom he knew very well, or
the land-grabbing of the Cabinet Minister of whom I
have spoken. That was his world as he saw it, and
W n was a man of the world.
He had been a waggoner's mate as a boy, he had
150
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
been a plough hand when the marsh took more acres
of seed turnips than now, alas, are to be seen in all
England. When the plough failed as a profession he
had migrated to Margate, which was in the throes of
building a new suburb, and he had worked as bricklayer,
plasterer, paper-hanger, painter, plumber and layer-
down of lawn grass in a whole estate of new villas.
When the " slump " in the building trade came he
returned to B n. He worked for the farmers at
hedging, at lookering, at hop-tending, at haying when
work was plentiful in the summer. In tho winter
he would take a contract for dykeing from the War
Office or would make rather good money by working
in his own covert of wood, which he bought each year
at the Michaelmas wood sales. He kept a pig or
two and a few fowls, and did upon the whole fairly
well.
Here is, in short, a very proper man, an all-round
one, and one very fairly well contented. He did not
want to return to town life, where the fact that he was
illiterate hampered him a little. In a vague way he
was conscious that there was no kind of career open
to him at all. He would have liked to have got a
small bit of land, and it worried him a little that this
was absolutely impossible. Or he would have liked
to have been able to work all the year round in the
woods. And indeed W n is the best worker in
the underwood that I have ever come across, and had
a way of making the best penny out of the fourteen
different kinds of poles and withies and wattles — a way
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
that when I did employ him in the woods I found
singularly lucrative. He had, in fact, a certain ad-
ministrative gift, and although absolutely without
resources he could always manage to raise the fifteen
or twenty pounds that were needed for his Michaelmas
transaction.
W n was a good man ; perhaps he was the best
of his district, or perhaps it was only because of his
handsome, saddish, brown face that I took to him.
But if I had not chosen him I could have had twenty
or fifty others in that part nearly as good workmen,
practically as hard-working and practically as honest
and with practically as much resourcefulness and
business ability. It is probably the underwood that
keeps this goodish type of worker in these parts, since
wood-work calls for a large amount of intelligence,
handiness with tools and ability to keep out of debt
over the year-end, though you must needs be in debt
for nine months out of the year. But given these char-
acteristics it pays well and, upon the whole, surely.
For these reasons I liked W n's countryside
better than any other I have known before or since,
and indeed, with its deep folds of the hills, its little
jewel-green, dark and misty fields between tangled cop-
pices, with its small cottages, its aged farms and its high
and deep woods covering the ground like a mantle for
further than the eye could reach from any height;
with its good, nourishing, greasy mud, its high
hedgerows and its spreading neglected small orchards,
it remains for me my particular heart of the country.
15*
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
The cottager there is of a good type ; the cottages are
old, rat-ridden, clay-floored, but the fires are well
tended, the wood-smoke pleasant, the furniture old and
substantial as a rule, the bread heavy, the butter good,
the pork fat, the tea strong, the cheese stings the tongue.
These things mean a good deal in the psychology
of a people, and the people there, having been much
left to themselves, and having come of a riotous,
smuggling, harum-scarum stock, were independent,
resenting intrusions, and willing only to take you at
their own particular valuation. What was curious
to me were the " bad " villages of the neighbourhood.
There were two of these, C Street and the
Freight, set at each end of the united villages of
A n and B n. It was difficult indeed to say
why these were " bad " ; but in each of them the
people were darker-browed, squalider, more furtive-
eyed. A family resemblance ran from cottage to
cottage ; drunkenness was certainly unusually frequent
and various other forms of vice were said to charac-
terise them. I do not know about that, but certainly
no decent family, however pressed for housing,
would willingly move into either C Street
or the Freight. Thus their populations were con-
stantly recruited, whenever a cottage fell vacant, by
families lacking in self-respect.
I have heard this singular phenomenon accounted
for by a supposed difference of race between village
and village. In the case of the celebrated strip of
country, about forty miles by seven, which is usually
153
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
accounted the "worst" in England, race might
possibly operate ; but I am fairly certain that it was
not so in either the Freight or C Street. It was
not a matter of position either that gave them their
peculiar similarities, since one lies well in the marsh,
and the other is high on the ridge — one is com-
posed of rather squalid modern brick cottages, the
other of quite decent little old houses, so that it was
hardly to be set down to insanitary surroundings ;
nor yet could it be laid to the charge of overcrowding,
since in neither village is there more than one
family to be found in any cottage, nor has any one
family more than three children. I am personally
inclined to put it down to the absence of a clergyman
in either parish.
For — and being no Churchman, I may say it
without fear — the influence of a clergyman in a
village may be very potent for good in the cleanli-
ness, the sobriety, and, above all, in the treatment of
the children. He acts to some extent as a former of
public opinion. He is frequently narrow, bigoted,
and short-sighted ; he is almost invariably quite out
of touch with the mental and spiritual needs of his
parishioners, and, as a rule, he is regarded by them
with either suspicion or good-natured tolerance ; but
one does notice a distinct deterioration in parishes
where the clergyman is lazy or dishonest. And the
deterioration is not in morals alone, but in the
feeling of solidarity in the parish itself. Where he
does not keep the accounts of the club, administer
154
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
the charities, take part in the parish meetings —
where, in fact, he does not do his best to be the
centre and to organise some sort of social life, social
life seems to die out altogether. But the really good
parson — the man who does his best after his own
lights or after the simple traditions expected of him,
that man may do an almost infinite amount towards
making his parishioners hold together. The mere
fact that he establishes and keeps going little clubs
and organisations — silly as they may be from any
high intellectual standpoint — brings the men and
women of the cottages out from their homes. A
Cottage Garden Show Society is a small thing, but it
will need two or three " officers " of sorts, and these
officers will come together on a ground just slightly
different from that of the churchyard corner or the
potato field. It enables the men to meet each other
under newer and slightly wider aspects.
In a sense the clergyman is the only organiser
that a village is certain to possess. There may be
men of ability among the cottagers, but they will
have to fight for any position of authority. The
clergyman has it already ; and, given a certain tact
and a certain goodness of heart, he may go to the
grave with a good deal of affection and leave an
easy task to his successor, however incapable. On
the other hand, a really dishonest clergyman may do
an infinite deal of mischief; for the parson is almost
always regarded with suspicion by very keen eyes,
and once a clergyman runs, say, into debt, flagrantly
155
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
and without the excuse of a poor stipend or a large
family, an angel from God would find it an almost
impossible task to persuade the inhabitants of that
parish that there is ever any good in the clergy — or
in human nature at all. And that effect will outlast
the efforts of generations of his successors.
From the point of view of faith, I believe that
the Church of England is absolutely out of touch
with the field labourer in Southern England. Its
creed is unknown, its ritual meaningless, and the
language of its services so antiquated as to be
almost incomprehensible. I had in my service a girl
from a very decent labourer's family — a girl of very
much more than the average quickness of natural
intelligence. Our vicar heard that she had not been
confirmed, and after having given her what he
deemed the necessary instruction, he presented her
at the next confirmation. A week afterwards I
happened to ask her if she would care to go abroad
with the family. She declined very resolutely, and
upon my asking her why, she said, " Because if the
ship sank the fishes would eat my soul." And upon
going through the confirmation manual that she had
got by heart I discovered that she understood hardly
seventy-five per cent, of its words. Thus, in such a
sentence as, " Here the priest shall approach the
altar," she understood only the words " here/' <' the,"
and " shall."
My dear friend Meary once brought me a Bible
that another cottager wished me to value for her.
156
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
She said : " I don't believe it can be real old, because
it's got the New Testament in it."
The other day I heard a very intelligent grave-
digger say : " I wonder Jesus Christ made so many
damp places whilst He was making the earth." He
was also the parish clerk, and the words were said
quite reverently.
Talking to me in my garden one day, W n
said to me —
" I don't blame the parsons for what they tell us.
They're taught by the folks above them when they're
young — just as that tree there was crook'd when it
were young." But he did not see how he could be called
to believe that three Gods are one, or that if he were
made in God's own image he could be troubled with
toothaches as he was. And if so be God did make man
in His own image, then the man's as good as his master.
I am not, of course, indicting the creed of the
Church, but I am convinced, as far as my own observ-
ation will convince me, that that creed is very little
brought home and very little explained to the field
labourer. He needs something extremely simple,
something extremely comforting and something
taught in the plainest language. It is in very few
parishes that he gets it. And, upon the whole, I
should say that the chapels are nearly as far out of
touch with the field labourer as the churches. Thus,
with his long hours for introspection, his frequent
readings of the Bible, and the fragments of church
or chapel language that he has been able to make
157
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
his own, the field labourer moves across the acres,
half heathen, and patching together religions, super-
stitions, and cosmogonies, each man very much for
himself. I remember hearing the reply of a priest
abroad to a poor woman who said that she found it
very difficult to believe in the doctrine of Papal
Infallibility. He said, "That is a matter for the
theologians. Try, my child, to believe as much of
it as you can/'
And for the English field labourer, most of the
articles of the Christian faith are matters for the
theologians; and the theologian is as much outside
his world as is the classical scholar or the spiritual-
ist. The spiritualist would indeed be nearer the
needs and creeds of the field labourer if he had
any means of reaching him, since beliefs in mani-
festations of that particular kind of other- world -
liness die very hard in the rural districts. In fact,
I doubt if they decrease at all except in so far as the
populations decrease. I have never myself taken
much interest in these particular phenomena, but I
am personally acquainted with two witches, and I
can hardly think of a wood or a farmyard which has
not its ghost, if one will take the trouble to search
for it. At times in country districts one will run
up against odd reluctances on the part of the
peasantry. Thus, I have found it impossible to get
an errand done for me along a certain road, or a
man has for no obvious reason been more than
reluctant to dig a certain patch of ground, to cut
158
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
down a certain tree, or to doctor one of his cows.
And, by going tactfully into the matter, I have dis-
covered that a headless horseman rides down that
road, an evil fate overtakes the digger in that ground,
the tree is one in whose branches there lives the
spirit of a suicide, or the cow had been overlooked.
These things do not play much visible part in the
life of the heart of the country-side ; but there they
are. They exist ; they are factors of the daily round ;
they are as much part of the field labourer's life as
are, say, the stars, the rain that follows on the sound
of the sea heard inland, the legends of creation, or
the price of crops. They are part of the nature of
things — nay, they are even more, since he regards
them as an ultimate resource. When his doctor,
his vet., his parson, or his prayers have failed, he
may always discover where there dwells a white
witch or a wise man who for five sixpences placed
on a table in the form of a cross will do him a
world of good, or tell him at least whether his cow
or his old woman will get through this time. I met
last Saturday (and shall meet next) a young, dull-
looking farm - labourer who has achieved some
remarkable cures where doctors have been given
up; and, for the matter of that, I know where
to go to procure a piece of written paper that, worn
round the neck, will prove a most potent love
philtre.
The field labourer is tacit in front of these things.
There they are ; you may use them or laugh at them
159
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
till you need to use them; but you do not much
question them. Why should you ? Parson tells you
one thing, and papers and people who don't like
parsons tell you something else. Your problem is
how best to keep all on going till you drop. Different
men differ a lot — from Portuguese to Members ot
Parliament and men from the Shires. It takes all
sorts to make a world, and some men must needs
know more than others. Have not all of us seen old
Ned Post, who has been in the Indies and learnt how
to keep his head in a basin of water for ten minutes
without being a farthing the worse, which is more
than you or I or old Squire Williams could do ? And
old Ned Post is nothing to look at. So the field
labourer keeps an open mind.
Dyspepsia is a scourge of the cottagers, and most
men have had long periods of hunger that cloud the
thinking faculties a little. I have been soundly taken
to task by a critic of a former book of mine for
quoting the words of a doctor. He said that the town
street-arab had a stronger grip on life than the field
labourer. But although I am not sure, I think that
the doctor was right. For, as far as I have seen, the
field labourer dies very easily once he is ill. His
diet is atrocious ; it is atrociously cooked : his cottage,
as a rule, is insanitary, draughty, damp, and too small.
His work is too hard, his opportunities for mental
relaxation pitifully too restricted. Except for his open-
air life — which causes a great deal of over-exposure —
he has very little to keep him in either mental or
1 60
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
bodily health. And I do not really see why he should
want to live.
I was much impressed the other day by the death
of a man who had worked on a certain farm all his
life. He was stalwart, bearded, hook-nosed, and his
figure, with a broad felt hat which he always wore
tied on with a handkerchief round crown and chin,
had been to me always a familiar feature of that
country-side. One saw him pottering about among
the sheep of distant fields or stamping across
the mixen in the heavy rains. His face was fresh-
coloured, and he had a sort of saturnine humour, a
taciturnity of his own. One day we heard, " N is
taken ill."
I went to see him. It was odd, his brown face and
grizzled beard peeping out from the white bed-
clothes, and he said, grimly, " Well, mister, I'm going
to die."
His wife set up a wail from the scullery — "He's
going to die ! he's going to die ! "
There was absolutely nothing the matter with him
save for a touch of chill to the liver. But, standing
beside him, I felt really that there was no reason why
he should make an effort to get better. The rain fell
dismally outside, yellow damson leaves stuck them-
selves on to his window-panes with each gust of
wind, the hills were grey, the road was grey.
What exact reason could I give him for getting up
and facing the eight months of cold, wet, and toil
that must be his ? I did, of course, my best to induce
161 M
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
him to make an effort ; but you cannot make bricks
without straw. He was dead within the week.
I have here done my best to render my particular im-
pression of the field labourer, because it seems to me
that he is the basis, the bed-rock upon which the social
fabric of our country-sides must rest. If there be a
heart of the country, he is the heart of the heart. He
is the stuff from which we have all developed, and to
him, no doubt, we shall all return sooner or later. He
seems to me to be, in fact, just much of a make with
his fellows, not much better and certainly not at
all worse than his neighbours of whatever class. Of
course every one of us will meet with field labourers
who are nearly brutes ; I have met many. But the
general impression left after much dealing with him
is not that of association with a low type. Rather
it is that of pleasure and of admiration. For such
virtues as he has, he has in spite of his environment ;
his vices are nearly all the product of his hard life.
You cannot expect much more than a decent friendli-
ness, sobriety and openness of mind from a man
whose function in life is no more than to keep on
going ; and the wonder is how he does it. Yesterday
I had a man in to do some weeding for me, and whilst
he worked I talked with him. He was a Yorkshireman
who had been a stonemason of the higher class, one
of those men who make good money by imitating
mediaeval work for the restorations in old churches.
But the stone-dust had injured his lungs, and he had
come south to find a better climate and purely out-
162
TOILERS OF THE FIELD
of-door work. Going about among the field labourers,
he said, made him think precisely that, he could not
make out how they did it. He never went near a
public - house, he never bought himself any new
clothes, he lived with the utmost frugality, like a
canny Yorkshireman, yet he could not make both ends
meet. Yet these fellows always seemed to have two-
pence for a glass of beer, though they had wives
and families. He uttered his opinion with a rather
unctuous and odious tone, as a condemnation of the
beer-drinking that he was above. But the tribute
was, to my mind, none the less striking.
And there, for me, the agricultural labourer stands.
He is, after all, E very-man, this final pillar of the state,
this back-bowed creature who supports king, soldier,
priest, merchant and the rest. And if I desire to
have a good idea of my kind, unefiere tdeede I'homme^ I
think of him. He is the raw material from which we
draw, the mud from which our finer clays are baked.
It takes all sorts to make a world, and in the cottages,
precisely, you find all the sorts that are necessary.
You will find unlettered men who have in them the
makings of kings, of priests, of merchants, and of
soldiers. They seem as it were to be resting there
beneath the thatches, on the clay floors, to be waiting
for the call of Destiny, for the odd flick from the finger-
nail of Fate that shall send them, in the persons ot
their seed, up the ladders to the highest ranges. And
to these cottages there shall descend in good time
the children of our rulers, the seed of our mighty
163 M 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
ones ; just as to-day, driving carriers' carts, speeding*
the plough, carrying buckets to pig-styes, you will
find men bearing the great names ; Fiennes, Talbots,
Howards, Spencers, Darcys, all are there, all came
from there, and shall no doubt once more go out
thence into the world.
For the real heart of the country is the cottage,
the image being not far-fetched but exact, since in
this dwelling the sons of men learn temperance,
endurance, caution, tolerance, since here they are
hardened, strengthened, tempered and rendered tough.
The cottage is, as it were, positively the heart, since
it sends forth the aspiring drops of blood that go to
make up the body politic, since it receives them
always again at last, purifies them always once more,
and always once more sends them forth upon the
eternal round of ups and downs that is the history or
the families of mankind.
164
UTOPIAS
CHAPTER V
UTOPIAS
" 'TX D is the farm of T. W. L n, the sports-
1 man and financier.
•^"^ " It consists of 800 acres of made land . . .
Though of comparatively small acreage . . for
perfection of equipment it is approached by no
farm on the earth ; its livestock is the best that
experts can select and money can buy. The D d
stables contain the best trotting-bred sires in the
world, the champion large harness - horse and
champion small harness-horse, the champion saddle-
horse and the champion pony. Its herd of Jersey
cattle is headed by the best Jersey bull in existence ;
its kennels of English bulldogs, Blenheim, Prince
Charles, and Ruby spaniels are equal, if not superior,
to any in the world
"D — — d represents the outlay of £400,000 spent,
and it is run at an annual outlay of £40,000 over re-
ceipts. ... It is lighted by electricity, the lights, by
the way, being specially worthy of notice from the
manner of their hanging — they are attached to the
167
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
2fhts
trunks of the trees, and the wires leading to the lights
are hidden under a profusion of ivy and roses. . . .
The grounds are piped for water under high pressure,
and the ugly stand-pipe has been elaborated into a
picturesque look-out tower with a peal of bells that
strike the hours and play the Westminster chimes at
sunrise and sunset. The buildings are heated through-
out by hot water, the stables have ceiling coils that
give a temperature of 50° in the coldest weather. The
roads are macadamised and are lighted by electric
lamps at intervals of 200 feet That the
scale of D d may truly be called grand is apparent
from the next building, the riding-school, 200 feet x
130 feet, or larger than the Agricultural Hall at Isling-
ton, England The stable for farm horses is
200 feet long and contains a carpenter's shop. . . ."
This castle is not in Spain, nor is it the dream of some
farmer worried to death with the problem of making
both ends meet where everything that goes off his
farm walks upon its own legs ; nor yet is it the ideal
work-house of the one field-labourer who has had
leisure for ideals. But perhaps it is what we are
coming to.
I copy these passages — they are not the most pro-
fuse— from one of the more respectable of our country
journals, where D d is cited as a model of what
things should be if Great Britain were an agricultural
Utopia.
And of course, except for the superlatives, the " no
farm on earth/' " the best that money can buy," and so
1 68
UTOPIAS
on, the description of any one of these marvels might
come from some English valley or park-land. Lord
B 's famous breed of Wensleydales might be as
sumptuously housed; Mr. C. 's prize Berkshires
might have floors to their sties of marble as costly ;
or the cow- stalls of the Duchess of W 's short-
horns may be as well warmed as those of D d.
But at D d there are all these things together ; and
there is everything else as well ; and D d and the
electric lights, and the trees, and the flowers (Mr.
L n, the owner, was the proprietor of the world-
shaking L n carnation, which sold for $30,000) —
all these things, all this fairy palace, sprang up in a
barren land in three years' time. It was a leisure
creation of Mr. T. W. L n, whose real work is
"captaining the fight against the S Trust, the
greatest combination of capital the world has seen."
Of course it is really only the old story over again.
All over England, all over Europe, there are the
great and mellow houses. They confront the evening
skies from hill tops, or in sleepy vale-lands they take
the luxurious rays of the sun. And most of them
rose in the same way, Blenheim having been built as
a leisure work whilst Marlborough was " captaining
the fight " in the Low Countries against " the greatest
combination " of chicanery and of troops the world
had seen. And whether gained by the sword of
knights or the reed pens of diplomatists, whether
the growth of ages in the hands of dominant families,
or whether they sprang up at the biddings of single
169
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
geniuses of one kind and another, our cis-Atlantic
castles and houses are not intimate products of the
soil. They were not based on fortunes made by the
plough and crook; they were bought with money
made on the battle-field or the back stairs of palaces,
with money earned at sea or in the plains of the Pun-
jab. It is this fact that makes D d, which of course ^
in Massachusetts, so profoundly uninteresting. It is
not a new creation ; it is not showing the way to any-
thing ; it is simply imitation by a man who has money
enough for anything. Mr. T. W. L n might just
as well have spent his gold upon having made for
himself a crown of radium.
On the other hand, so vast is the problem of the
country, so deep do its ramifications go that it is
really only the spirit of Mr. L n's enterprise that
one can cavil at — the spirit that prompts an " annual
outlay of ;£ 40,000 over receipts." For what is the
use of this expenditure ? It is on a par with that of
a Roman Emperor who might feed his horses on
gilded corn. As well give his cows marble baths ; no
knowledge is gained. Yet the problem of the best
stabling for cows is intimately interesting to the social
reformer, since it must have a bearing upon the whole
question of land tenure. If you cannot afford the
best sort of stable for a cow out of a small holding,
you must rule cow-keeping out of the profitable pur-
suits of the small holder, and to that extent you must
discount the possibility that the small holding will
prove the basis of your agricultural Utopia. Or
170
UTOPIAS
again, a princely expenditure upon electric apparatus
may undoubtedly have its uses as leading a forlorn
hope. For certain thinkers hold that the whole
problem of the fight between the stock-breeder and
the butcher might be solved by giving cold-storage
into the hands of the farmer. In that case the stock-
breeder could fatten his beasts just when and how he
would, according to his district, his climate, the nature
of his soil, the state of his seed crops, and so on. And
having his fatted beast he could slaughter it when
it suited him and store his carcases in his re-
frigerator, selling his meat to a chastened and
humbled butcher. In that way the farmer would
secure the bulk of the price that the consumer pays
for his meat, and the middleman would be brought
to his knees.
That, at least, is the contention of the cold-storage
theorist. Yet how is it to be tested unless some farmer
capitalist make the experiment and actually finds out
whether the idea is financially as sound as it is alluring.
It is for these reasons that, in face of a rural question
as saddening as it is bewildering, one regrets the
belauding of displays like that of Mr. T. W. L n.
It is as if one should, in the days when Arthur Young
was trying to improve farming, hold up the Trianon
chalets as models to an admiring world of agricul-
turists. Heaven forbid, at the same time, that I
should seem to decry the expenditure of the millionaire
who built D d in three years. For perhaps
itself is the solution of the problem.
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
Perhaps it is to be the fate of the country — of the
English country at least — to become just one large
playground for millionaires. In essentials, large
stretches of England have for many years past been
little else than that. And it is perhaps the inversion
of that feeling that has given to land-owning its
power to confer social precedence; for in essence
the political strength of county families has been
the fact that their rents from broad acres lifted
them above the necessity of making a living by the
commercialism that our legislature exists to control.
They could, as it were, erect great town houses,
because they drew their resources from the country,
just as the county families that perpetually succeeded
theirs could build great country houses out of town
revenues.
Perhaps that tendency is on the wane; perhaps —
and D d might be evidence of the fact — it is on the
increase. I imagine, however, that it remains really
much the same — that when one of us, one of the
ordinary half-town, half-country mortals that most of
us are — when one of us shuts his eyes and builds his
castle in the air, in his particular image of where and
how he would live if he became really rich, some sort
of D d would arise, some sort of great house, not
so vulgar, not so shining, lacking the electric-light
wires that are trained to climb up trees and shine out
amongst the astonished sparrows in their nests. We
should have, no doubt, our town asylum ; but sub-
stantially there would be large, tall or low rooms,
172
UTOPIAS
with high, clear or leaded windows, looking out upon
a lake with water lilies, upon a sunny Italian garden,
upon urns, statues of fauns, upon a paved courtyard,
or upon the misty distances of lawns, the still forms,
the branch-like antlers of tranquil deer.
We might or might not have our tall and quiet
libraries ; we should have our long, still galleries of
old pictures ; we should have our gun-rooms, our
saddle-rooms, our boot-rooms, our still-rooms. We
should have our great ranges of stables, our kennels,
perhaps, and possibly our neat, pleasant home-farm.
We should almost certainly have our immense and
well-stocked coverts (with perhaps a litter or two of
netted fox cubs) ; we should perhaps be too lazy to
aspire to anything more than a very honorary master-
ship of our local Pytchley ; or we might, whilst
building our castle, imagine ourselves endowed with
the gift of hard riding, and enough of nerve and of
energy. We might have our thatched pavilion, our
smooth lawns, on which, each summer, our under-
keepers, our stable-men, and our local curates should
meet wandering teams of cricketers. Our outer
architecture might be all stone or all black-and-
white ; our fireplaces all Italian marble or all British
oak. But if we are wise in our imaginings, though
our halls gleam with marble, our argosies, as in
the days of Bacchylides, will still be laden with
Egyptian bales. 1 mean that, for our revenues, we
shall still depend on investments other than those
in land. We shall have acres enough to play with,
173
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
acres enough to give us consequence in the
neighbourhood, but never one that would give us
anxiety.
And there is D d again, a little more mellow,
a little less spick-and-span, without the champion
heavy harness stallion that there would really be no
fun in purchasing ready - made ; but substantially
there would be D d, and the problem of what is to
become of the real land as far away as ever. It will
be objected that in my castle of Spain I have taken
into account only the most material things — I have
left out the soul. But our climate, our dear green
turf, our good roads, our excellent railways, but above
all our climate, are responsible for that. It was, I think,
Charles II. who said that, upon the whole, the British
weather was the best weather in the world, for in
the whole year there is no day, either for its in-
clemency or its heat, so unpleasant that a man may
not go abroad.
Our English great houses are out-of-door houses ;
our English country life is an out-of-door life. You
do not, with all the expenditure, find concert- rooms,
theatres, or studios as part of the English house
design. A small German prince would solace him-
self in the winters and summers with an indoor
and an outdoor orchestra. An ordinary Russian
landed proprietor would have a number of his house
serfs trained as actors. But we do not choose our
servants on those lines. After all these years, the
old Norse spirit survives in us — the spirit that dictated
174
UTOPIAS
the lines depicting how a man should feel after a
hard day : —
• * Who heedeth weariness
That hath been day-long on the mountain in the winter weather's
stress
And now stands in the lighted doorway and seeth the wives draw
nigh,
And heareth men dighting the banquet and the bed whereon he shall
lie? "
If you substitute the coverts or the grouse moors
or the saddle for "the mountain" of the second
line, you have there the feeling of the whole of the
really Utopian country-sides — the feelings to lead
up to which the whole of wealthy rural England
really exists. Fox-hunting, perhaps, has gone. It
is said to be too expensive all round; it costs, say,
two thousand pounds to keep a two-days-a-week
pack now where it used to cost one thousand pounds ;
and with the present system of keeping the great
shoots back, it is almost impossible to draw the best
coverts till after Christmas; the foxes, preserved
within wire enclosures, are too plentiful, and show no
sport. Partridge shooting is no longer what it was,
and the annual pheasant slaughter is a matter of two
gorgeous days a year, instead of affording moderate
occupation all the winter through. A pheasant costs
a pound apiece to shoot, a partridge ten shillings,
a salmon twenty-seven shillings per pound to the
rod; and, so the old-fashioned sportsmen will tell
you, all these things have gone to the deuce, because
of the specialisation in all sports. Nevertheless the
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
spirit — that of the lighted doorway after the winter
day — remains the dominant factor of our country life
in its wealthier aspects, whether we rush down to it
for three days out of the year in which we shoot into
a sort of dark milky-way of pheasants, or whether we
still have the heavenly luck to hunt five days a week.
It has, of course, its aesthetic and poetic sides too ;
without them it would probably not appeal to the
Englishman, who is at bottom always at least a
potential poet. In the long rides back do not we all
remember the dying swirls of sunset in the winter
skies, the still darkness of the Scotch firs, the gleam
of light upon the laurels in the drive, and that
sweetest of all sounds, the robin's song, from the dark
bushes ? Do not we all really remember the gleam of
the bedroom candles as we lounge before our private
and particular fire, too lazy, too luxuriating, too
pleasantly reminiscent not to let the near clamour of
the gong, reverberating along the great corridor,
startle us before we have even begun to think of
dressing? And, indeed, in a sense, the aesthetic
satisfaction will remain to one through dinner-time,
with its show of candles on women's shoulders, and
through the long, lounging hour or two before the
smoking-room fire. The body, as it were, being
beaten and purified by the long day, the mind has
the power to be appreciative, and we are as lazily
attentive to effects of light and shade as to the
smoke-room stories, or to the "shop" of the sport
in which we may have sought this Nirvana.
176
UTOPIAS
It is a good life ; but how very much an out-of-door
life ! Think of what an English country-house party
is on a really torrential day — on a day on which even
an English country lady will not go into the open*
Think of the intolerable boredom of it. There is
absolutely nothing to be done. In the dim, tall
library a hunting-crop and a flask lie on the writing-
desk, and you are not in the mood for a folio edition
of Drydale's Monasticon ; you are not in the mood
for a mechanical piano's rendering of the Seventh
Symphony in the great drawing-room; you are not
in the mood for flirting in the little drawing-room ;
you have written all the letters you can possibly write
before breakfast — and the rain pours down. At last
something really exciting occurs. Two self-sacrificing
persons, the son of the house and his fiancee, having
in desperation put on shiny mackintoshes and sou'-
westers, stand, wind-blown and laughing figures,
putting at clock-golf on the lawn just beneath the
billiard-room window. And for as long as they will
keep it up beneath the furious showers, you may
stand with all the rest of the house party, watching
them, and betting as to whether his skill — or his
admiration for her pretty, wet, blonde cheeks-
will make him win or lose the next five puts.
When they are tired of it you may go to the stable
and talk to your man as to how he is to get to the
next house on your programme. There is nothing
else for it.
The point is — of course one must qualify all these
I77 N
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
generalisations with " as a rule " — there will be abso-
lutely no resources in the house for any organised
and general indoor occupation. As for building a
concert-room or a theatre, the English territorial
magnate would rather consider seriously the idea ot
erecting a covered tennis-court, since tennis is a game
that a man may play till he is fifty, and improve all
the time. Of course, the court, with its grilles and
pent-houses, will cost a little more than a music-room,
but then it will be of more social value. And, indeed,
since there are so few days of an English year on which
one cannot go out-of-doors, it is hardly of much value
to make, in the arrangements of our everyday great
houses, too much allowance for indoor occupations,
which must inevitably be of an intellectual nature.*
* I do not wish to be taken as sneering at the intellectual faculties
of the country gentleman, or to insinuate that no great noble has taken
an interest in music or the fine arts, or that no house party has
•ever organised private theatricals, or occupied itself on rainy days in
playing card-games. In how many country houses have we not been
overwhelmed by the splendours of Raphaels, of Holbeins, of Snyders,
of Vandykes, or even of Correggios ? There is, of course, no land like
the English country for them. And in how many noble libraries have
we not longed to spend long hours? And no doubt, across the countries,
one might still find scholars as fastidious or dilettanti, as keen as those
who gathered together these dear and priceless things or erected those
long and august corridors. Nevertheless the "note" of modern
English country-life, in its social aspects, does seem to me to remain
an out-of-door one ; and on their social sides the great English land-
owners do seem more and more to be directing their energies towards
giving their friends that particular physico-sensuous feeling of well-
being after stress of weather. So that, if one wanted to imagine a
•country Utopia, one would picture it, not as a land where it was always
summer and always afternoon, but as a land where the year turned
178
UTOPIAS
Such, no doubt, and more or less, is the usual psycho-
logy of the really wealthy life as it is lived in the English
counties. Naturally it is always in a state of fluescence ;
the motor car may be affecting it ; one card game or
another may be rising to fashion or falling into
desuetude ; hunting may be becoming impossible,
or shooting merely a means of organised boredom.
But in the large that kind of life is very much
alive, is very much " lived." Considered Utopianly,
as an ideal, as a region where one may build
castles in the air, it is not more really inspiring
than any other. And if it draws its revenues from
outside the land, it is merely D- d over again;
it is not, as a social phenomenon, more interesting
than a life lived, say, in a gorgeous and uninspired
palace of the Riviera.
But the moment that we can think of such a life as a
growth of the soil, the moment we can think of the great
house as being supported almost absolutely by the acres
that surround it, we reach a different level of social
interest. For then it is at least real and significant.
It becomes even poignant ; for I have frequently felt
aroused to interest when, in such a great house, I have
been able to remember that, whilst the rest of the
house-party were having as much of a " good time "
as, to each one after his kind, the gods, his liver or
his temperament, would vouchsafe — whilst all the
always between October and February, and where it was nearly always
half-past six — when, naturally, it is too dark to look at pictures, and
one feels too healthy to want to read books.
179 N 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
rest were talking in knots, looking out of windows,
running laughing along the corridors, there was,
somewhere in some lower room, deep in the background
of the great pile of buildings, in a sort of den hung
round with maps and estate plans, in some office of
one sort or other, a man with knitted brows en-
gaged in getting out of the land the wherewithal to
keep in motion all that light-hearted and pleasant life
— the real landowner.
One knows very well that nowadays his is no very
easy task. It is a desperate process of making two
ends meet, and the tendency of this particular two
ends is to get further and further apart ; the wire of
the circle as it were contracts and contracts between
his hands that strive to draw them together. For
whilst his rent-roll grows steadily less, his standard
of living — which, if he is to lead his countryside, needs
must vie with the standard set by townsmen — his
standard of living grows more and more costly. He
is hampered by the wastefulness of his ancestors, with
acres of Italian gardens laid out by the second earl,
with a mile of stone terraces planned by the eleventh
marquis, or with a whole town of stables. All these
things must be kept up, whilst rents are falling and
whilst the hereditary pack costs two pounds for every
one that it cost when rents were at their highest.
Of course the acres of garden should be turned into
lawns, the gardeners sent to the right about, the stables
pulled down, the stone balustrades allowed to crumble
in the winter frosts ; the hounds even should be once
1 80
UTOPIAS
more sent back to their trenchers. It is the day of
desperate remedies ; but these things are compre-
hensibly bitter.
Naturally the keynote of the symphony is struck
by a very different phrase. I was talking to one of
the largest and most progressive landowners in the
country, and he said —
" Well, you see, landowning as a business simply
doesn't pay any longer." I doubt myself whether, " as
a business/' it ever really did pay on that particular
scale. As a rule the Italian gardens, the stone
terraces, the stable towns were built originally by
" spenders " or by men who had made money outside
the land. They represent either trees cut down or
successful manipulations of the funds ; either sales
of outlying farms or grants from a grateful nation ;
either newly-discovered coal-pits or the growth of
manufacturing towns upon estates in another county.
And the great land fortunes of to-day are regulated
by all sorts of :odd improvidences on the part of
distant ancestors. Thus to-day the Earl of B is
starving in his castle with his thousands of acres,
because in 1840 his grandfather was powerful enough
to prevent the passage of a railway within seven
miles of his estate. And Lord L is a millionaire
twice over because his grandfather could not prevent
that railway's trespass, and now the descendant owns
two pottery towns which have covered the green grass.
And there are, of course, instances of that sort of ill-
luck or good to be heard everywhere for the asking.
181
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
But, as a rule, land-owning as a business simply
does not pay any longer. It would be premature to
assert that it never will. Perhaps, owing to some un-
foreseen revolution of the wheel of fortune, owing, say,
to the new fashion of week-ending, the landowner
who has been forced to let his mansion to a financier
will really see the end of his rainy days, will really
come into his own again, and return once more to the
sound of welcoming church-bells. Perhaps, in fact,
the old system will simply come back again to its
lusty growth. It is not, of course, by any means dead
yet; you may discover throughout the length and
breadth of the land hundreds of estates that pay
very well; the old spirit of land-owning, its exclu-
siveness, its belief that the possession of secular
title-deeds is ample atonement for the lack of good
looks, good humour, wit, intellect, talent, or any other
human quality. It is still, socially, nearly as good a
thing as ever it was to be one of the Shropshire
Thwaites and nothing else. But, upon the whole, it
is not as good a " business."
And the real fight for existence will come not so
much from the great landowner. The ownership of
40,000 acres and a castle is not so poignant a thing as
to own 2,000 and an old house. The great man is,
as a rule, much further from his fields and his trees.
But the small one knows, sometimes, each blade of
grass, and has for years debated with his father or his
brother whether the view from the drawing-room
would or would not be improved by cutting down
182
UTOPIAS
three old elms that stand two hundred yards away at
the top of a rise. He will have pondered for years
in his mind whether the day has come to give up
the time of his estate carpenter to opening out the
twelve windows that were blocked up at the time of
the window-tax. He is, after all, the man who will
fight bitterly for the retention of the present system.
And all his retainers, his brothers, his sisters, even
his old uncles, will fight with him.
For I do not know anything quite like standing on
ground that one's ancestors have owned for a century
or so. You have heard of garden paths, of coppices,
of cow-stalls, of deer-licks; you have heard your
people speak of them all your life. You will see in
the house - diary just when your grandfather de-
termined to make that fish-pond at the bottom of the
lawn ; in the same old books you will see when the
high timber in the home-woods was last cut, and you
will discover why that very old oak in the centre
of the wood was spared then. It was because it
reminded your great-grandmother of a tree under
which her mother had sat two days before she died.
The struggle, with these smaller holders, is not so
much to make both ends meet. It is not a matter of
putting Italian gardens down to grass, or one of
putting down ten or a dozen horses, of letting a
castle here or there, and retaining still a princely
income. One may say of Lord So-and-So that he is
the luckiest man in the peerage, since, when his
Towers was burnt down, he lost at once the necessity
183
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
of keeping up an enormous house erected by genera-
tions of " spenders " and received insurance in-
demnities amounting to a quarter-of-a-million pounds.
But if the manor-house of Squire William burns he
will receive little enough by way of insurance, and his
rentals, when everything is deducted, will not bring
him in seven hundred a-year on which to bring up
five children and to maintain some sort of traditional
splendour. And it will be the squire rather than the
lord who will be cut to the heart at the thought of
parting with his estate at a "times " price or for more.
And it will be the squire, with his family, large in
number and filled with the love of the family house,
the trees, the fish-ponds and the paddocks — it will be
all the great class of Shropshire Thwaites who will
the most bitterly oppose any system of reform of
land tenures. With those people, as with the others,
landowning as a business has ceased as a rule to "be
profitable." But they would rather pay for their senti-
ment, they would rather live on their seven hundred
a-year than see their particular beloved holdings broken
up into three or four hundred small plots and sold for
a price that might make them for ever independent of
the land. No doubt their sentiments are the right
sentiments, and no doubt it is better for such men
to wait with an anxious eye upon the markets in the
hope that once again they may be able to ask from
his farmers rents such as will enable him to send all
his sons to Sandhurst.
The step from such a man to the farmer who owns
184
UTOPIAS
his own farm and from that farmer to the owner of two
or three acres of accommodation land is not very far ;
but it is far enough. Yet, with them and the agricul-
tural labourer, the whole of the community that lives
directly out of the land is exhausted. There remains
that curious middleman, the tenant farmer.
The really large tenant farmer, the man with suf-
ficient energy and sufficient capital to manage fifteen
hundred acres or so, is a business man for whom one
may have a respect. He is a great employer of labour,
an organiser, a man with special knowledge and with
possibilities of self-adaptation. But I am inclined to
see in the smaller tenant farmer the real weak spot of
our rural system, the real inefficient third wheel that
is cracking beneath the weight of this particular cart.
Our present triple-stranded rope is made up of land-
lord, tenant, and labourer. It has been laid down
over and over again, and I suppose it is true, that the
land to-day will not show three profits, that one of this
trio must go. It cannot very well be the agricultural
labourer; it certainly will not be the landlord. It
must then be the small tenant farmer.
The really large farmer, whether he "runs" a
district of the Cotswolds on the ranche system, or
really farms great plain-lands on the downs, pays a rent
proportionately so small that he is, financially at
least, in as good a position as his landlord, since what
he loses in rent he gains by not having the fancy that
he must maintain a feudal position. He must employ
good workmen, since his supervision cannot be very
180
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
meticulous ; he must farm well, since his stake is so
large that he cannot afford to change his tenancy once
he is settled. And, his stake being so large, he has
great power over his landlord. The small tenant
farmer has neither these advantages nor these incen-
tives. It pays him to cheat his hands, to neglect his
hedges, to starve his land, to take scratch crops, to
indulge in the hundred-and-one meannesses by which
a hundred-and-one small profits may be gained.
I offer these views, of course, only for what they are
worth, and as a purely personal contribution to a
puzzling subject in which I profess to see no more
clearly than five hundred of my neighbours. And were
I in a position to initiate legislation I am not sure that
I should do so upon the lines of a drastic abolition of
this third wheel. I see the matter in this light, but I
am by no means sure that it is not merely because of
a "kink" in my own eyes. For I must confess that
the small tenant farmer as a class does not interest
me nearly as much as either the farm-labourer or the
landowner. . I am far less at home at the ordinary
of a market-day than at the fireside of a ridge ale-
house ; I feel myself more likely to come in contact
with ignorant prejudice and self-conceit uttered in loud
voices, and it has always seemed to me that, as a class,
the tenant-farmer is just a tradesman like any other.
He goes somewhat more into the open-air, but there
the difference seems to end. He sells the produce of
other men's handiwork, and he sells it very badly.
If it be claimed for him that he directs that production,
iS6
UTOPIAS
it must be conceded that he directs it very badly. I
have had it said to me, by a friend who knows tenant-
farmers as well as I may claim to know the field-
labourer, that the best farmers had, in his experience,
almost always been something else. The most suc-
cessful farmer he ever knew had been a linen-draper
who had found the long hours of his trade too trying
for his health. And, on the whole, my own observation
would lead me to confirm the views of this particular
friend, for the two most prosperous 3OO-acre tenant-
farmers that I have known began life, the one as a
country grocer, the other as a Wesleyan minister.
I ought, however, to add that one of the very worst
farmers I know is also a country grocer and draper,
a man who is singularly adept at all the tricks of
farm-starving. He does certainly contrive to make
his farm pay, and even pays his reduced rent very
regularly; but the state of his hedges and of his farm-
buildings makes me sigh whenever I think of them,
and I should not like to be the tenant who will
succeed him.
Nevertheless, the general moral of this seems to be
merely that the farmer gains by having had at one
period of his career some outside interest, some
experience of a larger world, or at least some training
in keeping accounts. For in these hard days and
years farming, like everything else, has become a com-
petitive business, and needs for success a thoroughly
awakened man with an eye to public events, and
perhaps, before all things, a power of combination.
187
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
This the farmer never seems to have possessed ; he
is not, in the councils of the nation, any better
represented than is the field labourer. He is, for
instance, hopelessly penalised by his railways, yet he
never even thinks of combining to force down freight
rates. He might not be successful even if he tried ;
but he has never tried.
I write of him with some harshness ; but I am not
blind to the pathos of his case. It will wring my
heart when I think of the hopeless struggle made
by many small men; of the tired look in their
eyes, of their thin beards, of their weary struggles
with that most capricious of all the flails of Fate, the
weather. But in spite of the pathos of it, this class
of wearied and haggard men seems to me to be just
precisely the wrong men in the wrong places. They
have been on their farms for generations without
getting any "forrader," and in this bitter struggle
the man who stands still must for ever be left behind.
I do not mean to say that there is no place for the
small farmer, but I should like to see his particular
farm regarded as being merely one stage in a definite
career. Let me sketch perfunctorily my ideal parish,
my particular Utopia of the present land system. For,
at least under the present system, what seems to me to
be sapping the land of its population, and sapping the
population of its energies, is the fact that there is no
chance, no ignis fatuus chance even of a career. If you
arean agricultural laboureryou have reliance of rising,
you cannot take a small holding because there are none
1 88
UTOPIAS
to take; if you are a small holder you have no chance of
getting a larger farm, and you have no chance of rising
from farm to farm. Humanity being romantic, this
means that no rural Dick Whittington will ever turn on
any hill-top to listen to his chime of bells. What could
the bells say to him ? " Turn again, Whittington — and
end in the workhouse." Now, if I had, say, 50,000
acres of mixed down, hill-side, woodland and marsh
to play with, I should like to experiment with the
holdings in some such arrangement as the following.
I would have, say —
400 holdings of between i and 10 acres apiece,
50 holdings of 20 acres apiece
= 1,000
10
150 M
... = 1,500
5
,, 300 .,
= 1,500
4
4
2
5°° ..
= 2,000
„ S.ooo „ „
... = 10,000
2
,, „ 10,000 ,, ,,
= 20,000
This would account for 42,000 acres, and the
remaining 8,000 I would leave available for the
pleasure-grounds of large houses, for villa residences,
for week-end cottages, and for what not.
Here we should have, as it were, the manceuvring-
ground for an army of 10,000 souls. So many
thousand — the privates — would be the men and the
families of the field labourers, men too young,
too indolent, too dissipated, or too merely slow-
brained ever to rise or to have risen. But such a
man might save enough money to acquire a holding
189
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
of from one to ten acres ; or he might show enough
intelligence to satisfy an agricultural bank that he
could be trusted with money enough to be aided in
the acquirement of such a holding. Then he would
be, as it were, promoted to the rank of corporal or
lance-corporal. He would have a holding not large
enough to render himself quite self-supporting, and
he would be there ready to be employed by the larger
farmers at times when there was need for extra
labour. And from that stage, either by proofs of
saving or of being aided by the banks, he might be
promoted to the rank, as it were, of a sergeant in this
army— he might acquire a holding of twenty acres ;
and so given luck or genius, he might go upwards
until he or his sons might take one of the large mixed
farms of five thousand, or one of the downland ranche
farms often thousand acres.
Here there is a practicable scheme — practicable
enough to a syndicate with a million of pounds to
experiment with, and one needing nothing like special
legislation to put it in force. I do not, of course, go
into any detail, such as the planting of woodlands,
which, in the winters, would provide so much and
such attractive work to the poorer labourers ; nor yet
such details as the providing of amusements, easy
means of transit, or social centres. For these, after
all, necessary as they are, are not so much of an
attraction to keen men as is the chance of making a
career. But here, at least, is a scheme, Utopian in a
sense, but in a sense, too, founded on the eternal
190
UTOPIAS
necessity of mankind to struggle upwards. It would
be a Utopia, but not one of those bright, cast-iron
schemes in which all provision for development, for
flux and reflux, all chances of change, are left out.
And it would be practical, inasmuch as it would give
a chance to keen men of entering the lowest ranks
and of striving up to the highest. That, I think, is
really what is wanted. It would give a chance, too,
to the field labourer ; it would be a means of tapping
all that substratum which, as I have tried to prove in
a previous chapter, contains every possibility. There
are in the present-day cottages men and the children
of men fitted to fill every position in such a com-
munity— men fitted to be workers, to be overseers, to
be wood-reeves, to be farmers, and to be accountants.
Modern education is excellent in its way, because it
really does give some commencements of a wider
outlook. And children so educated would be excel-
lent recruits in such a land army, excellent raw
material for such apprenticeships.
But if no such chances of a " career " be given, or
if no such chances arise, there seems to me to be very
little use in starting farm colonies, or bringing town
labourers back to small holdings. Possibly the
present generation, disillusioned as to the conditions
of town life, might remain in the glebes and closes,
but their children would inevitably recommence the
process of going into the towns. The gain would be
merely temporary.
I labour the point of the " career," because I have
191
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
not anywhere seen it put as clearly as I should wish,
and because it seems to me the most valuable contri-
bution that I personally can make to this old-
standing and intolerable problem. Once that could
be settled, many other vexed points, such as that of
housing, that of rentals, that of tenures, of land
registration and transfer — even the really burning
question of transport — would settle themselves. For
such a community would be so powerful, and com-
posed of units so bound together by common interests,
that it would be able to make its voice heard and its
power felt by all the railway-companies and the other
vested interests that now so hamper the isolated
" farmer."
The question of land-tenure, as I have said, would
settle itself upon the lines most profitable to all con-
cerned. I am by no means certain that an individual
possession of small holdings or of large farms would
be really as free from objection as the ownership of
the land by a public-spirited individual or a broadly-
constituted syndicate, or that it would be as free from
objection as the state ownership of the land. But I
do think that the opening of an office — whether state,,
estate, or syndicate — where every man who wished it,,
and could produce, say, a voter's qualification, where,,
in fact, every voter of a district could purchase on the
lowest reasonable terms the right to a certain occu-
pation of a certain minimum extent of land for a
certain limit of time— where a man could ask to have
an interest in the land as freely as he now can
IQ2
UTOPIAS
purchase postage-stamps — the provision of such an
office is one of the first duties of experimentalists in
land reform.
No doubt we want, before all things, " data " ; but
the collection of statistics is an endless task, and the
reading of meanings into these collections is little
more than pleasant occupation for persons who have
never had any dealings with the land. And at present
the broad tendency of the real countryman is to say,
"Leave things alone to right themselves." The
townsman meanwhile is crying out, " We must force
the masses back to the land because we are on the
eve of physical deterioration. We must send the old
people back to form new and healthy blood with which
in the future we once more may be recruited."
For, upon the whole, the townsman, aware that the
country interests have been neglected for the last
sixty years so that the towns may grow, is itching to
apply town methods of legislation to the country; and
upon the whole, the country says, " Having neglected
us for half a century, neglect us yet a little more so
that we may work out our own ruin or salvation along
the lines of supply and demand."
And the problems set before the reforming towns-
man are bewildering enough. The young and con-
fident cry out — " The whole thing will be solved by
the provision of cheap cottages."
" /," says my friend the great Liberal landowner,
"have just built 400 cottages at £200 apiece," and
he plumes himself upon his public spirit.
193 O
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
"But," cries out a new section of the young and
confident, "the truck system must not apply. No
employer, no landowner must build cottages for his
own labourers, since that will mean that the labourer
will take his rent in kind/'
" Then how in the world is the trick to be done ? " a
good Tory of the old school growls sardonically. " I
must build cottages on my neighbour's land, and the
other fellow must build cottages on mine, I suppose ? "
A young friend of mine, having no personal views,
sober, quiet and essentially a listener, told me that one
night, having tired himself for many months with col-
lecting " data " and listening to " views,'' he fell asleep.
He had formed no views of his own, perhaps he was
incapable of an original effort. But he dreamt that
he was on a certain terrace overlooking the Thames.
At first he sat alone in a cane arm-chair, and he was
saying dreamily —
" Something ought to be done for the land."
" Something is going to be done," said a voice at
his elbow, and he saw that he had been joined by one
of a Party that was coming into power then. " We
are going to tax land- values. We are going to
make land-owning such an expensive business that
no one will want to own land. We need new sources
of revenue."
" How will that help the farmer ? " another voice said.
A man from Lincolnshire had come upon the terrace,
and many other figures were pouring desultorily into the
open air from the tall windows of the gray buildings.
194
UTOPIAS
" What we need is intelligent labour. Give lessons
in potato-planting at the Board Schools and do away
with arithmetic."
" No, no ! " cried a Northerner. "Make your Board
School education even more literary than it is, but
re-establish the living-in system on farms. It was
when the boys learned their work on the farms and in
them that the best labourers were bred."
" No. Away with the living-in system altogether,"
muttered an American Londoner. "It hinders the
increase of population. Labourers who live in do not
marry until they are old. We need all the children
that we can beget or the country will be absolutely
solitary."
" Something ought to be done," my friend murmured
in his dream, but his murmur was a little less
confident.
" We are going to tax all the large estates with a
graduated tax so that the small holder will be en-
couraged," a working-man member fulminated. " We
are going to drive out the Yankee millionaire who is
turning the whole country into pleasure parks."
" That would be absolutely wrong," said one political
economist. "That would drive money out of the
country. The man who erects a D d is spending
more money on his pleasures than any farmer can.
And pleasure is a commodity that a land may produce,
just as much a commodity as corn is."
" But," said another political economist, " the point
is whether five thousand planters on five thousand
iQ5 O 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
acres of land will not produce more of some other com-
modity than will be produced in pleasure by one man
with 5,000 acres of deer park."
" Oh, that's all nonsense ! " said an ironical Con-
servative. And he proceeded to tell an anecdote
of a lady of title who had disforested her deer-moors
at the demand of her crofters. The crofters, at the
year's end, had found that their rates went up to 27^.
in the pound because the moors no longer paid deer-
forest rates. The crofters had clamoured for the deer
again.
" I'm rather in agreement with the deer-park man,"
said an Advanced Thinker, a little surprised to find
himself in the same boat with the Conservative. " The
real problem of to-day is not the re-population of the
country, but the evolution of an ideal town. So,
at least, it has always seemed to us who are the
scientific sociologists. But still, since the subject is
on the tapis, it should be an easy matter to evolve a
really Utopian agricultural community. The really
ideal "
"If you will excuse me," said a Director, " I should
wish to point out to you that a city which is at once
the ideal town and the home of the ideal agricultural
community is already under construction. Our pro-
spectus says, 'This company has not been formed
with the view of entering into a land speculation,
its primary object being to promote a great social
improvement, and to deal at once with the two
vital questions of overcrowding in towns and depopu-
196
UTOPIAS
lation of rural districts. The land comprised in the
estate ' "
" I have read your prospectus," a Mathematician
interrupted the lecture, " and it occurs to me that if
your city were extended upon its present scale the
whole country would be taken up before the whole
population of the country was accommodated."
" Besides," a Political Historian took up the objec-
tions, " history teaches us that great industrial cities
have always been caused to arise by natural features,
such as rivers, sea-ports or, as is the case of Lanca-
shire and its cotton cities, by a combination of sea-
ports, rivers and atmospheric conditions. Now your
city possesses no natural advantages except that
it is within easy railway journey of the capital. It
will therefore differ from no other suburb, will solve no
problem, and will depend for its existence on the fact
that the problem of housing in the capital has not yet
been solved."
" Let me remind you that you are getting far away
from the problems of agriculture," the Advanced
Thinker once more took up his parable, "/stand
for the future; therefore I surely before all others
have the right here to be heard."
The terrace by this time was entirely filled by dis-
putants. They obscured the view for my friend whose
dream had caused them to arise. He was surrounded
and overwhelmed by their forms and by their voices.
But giving way, as all crowds will do, to the disputant
who made the most confident claim to a hearing, they
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
fell silent and paid attention to the Advanced Thinker.
He lay back in his arm-chair, facing that of my friend
who had dreamed him ; he cleared his throat and,
with the level intonation of one used to making long
speeches and thinking long thoughts, he began, after
having swallowed a jujube —
" The matter divides itself into several heads. In
the first place it is open to doubt whether all reasons
for the existence of the field labourer have not
vanished with the advance of the applied sciences.
We are now — or we are upon the point of being — able
to reconstruct out of common clay, coal-tar products,
and natural mineral oils, all the food-stuffs that are
necessary for human sustenance. Let me, however,
concede for the sake of argument that it would be
possible to cultivate one staple commodity — say
wheat — at a cheaper rate than its constituents could
be evolved from coal-tar and reconstructed so as to
be digestible and nutritive. Then we have con-
structed engines that, with the expenditure of the
care of merely one man, will be able to scratch up,
rake, furrow, roll, and cover practically unlimited
acreages of land in the shortest of spaces of
time."
" How about my heavy clays ? " cried a Norfolk
farmer from the background.
" How about my light sands ? " cried another.
"I've had to give up steam ploughs and return to
horses ! "
" Details— details," said the Advanced Thinker
198
UTOPIAS
unconcernedly. "I think I have proved to my
hearers that even for purposes of cultivation the need
for men upon the land has vanished."
" You need a man with a d d good head-piece
to drive one of my engines," said a steam-plough
proprietor.
"Precisely — precisely," the Advanced Thinker
retorted. " What we need is not men with a know-
ledge of soils, but skilful mechanics. Any soil, light
or heavy, can be handled and clean ploughed by the
right type of engine. But let me resume my train of
thought. It seems to me, as to many of my friends
who have spoken or not spoken, that the ultimate and
the real function of the land is to become one vast
pleasure park. We shall be rid, then, of the poor,
warped, gnarled, unintelligent farm labourers, farmers,
small holders, and the rest. We shall be rid once
for all of the steam, the mire, and the grime of Mother
Earth. We shall be able to breed a clean, straight-
backed race of men, fit to meet and to solve the real
problems that lie before humanity."
Loud cries of derision, of rage, and of mockery
came from all the idealists of the now great assembly.
Our friend the dreamer caught fragments of phrases :
" Return to the earth," " Mother Nature," "The good,
free air," "The health- giving, brown soil," "The
truth of the broad heavens," and " The dignity of
labour."
But the tumult stilled as dream tumults will still
themselves, and the Advanced Thinker proceeded —
199
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
" Oh, well, since you will have mud-grubbers, let
me sketch a really modern rural Utopia. . . ."
There were to be in the centre of this town or
village great light and airy schools — these before all.
Then there should be a library, communal cook and
bake-houses, a vast communal eating-room where
all meals should be taken in common, communal
thrashing-barns and cold-storage barns, communal
engine-sheds, communal theatres, concert - rooms,
debating halls, and a place of free worship, com-
munal barracks for communal domestic servants who
should at convenient hours make the beds, dust,
sweep, or decorate the individual cottages. These,
small, white, beautiful in design, and not too close
together, should cluster in a ring round one of the
communal buildings, and from each cluster, radiating
as the spokes of a wheel, there should run over the
plain, cinder tracks along which the men should cycle
to their holdings. . . . Here at least men might
live the lives of men and find food for the mind along
with a measure of health-giving labour. . . .
Stirred by this attractive vision of a white-walled
township studded with a ring of trees, the spires of
its communal buildings rising like tall poplars above
the red roofs, the white walls, and the green plain like
a great shallow bowl beneath a plain blue sky dotted
with balloon-like pink and woolly clouds, itching to
be nearer the realisation of this smiling and radiant
vision, impatient for some one who should take the
first step towards it, my dreaming friend moved
200
UTOPIAS
in his cane arm-chair and uttered his unfailing
formula —
" Something must be done ! "
And immediately the whole assembly began to cry
out in a babel of tongues ; a vast multitude of white
faces, each with intent eyes, and opened, shouting
mouths ; a weird and tremendous crowd, like that in
the gigantic imaginings of a great mediaeval painter
of a Last Judgment; thousands and thousands and
millions and millions of voices, in all the tongues of
the world, in all imaginable accents, with all the pos-
sible tones of assurance, began to cry out panaceas,
all the first steps towards the solution of this problem.
And each man of all the millions (the thing was
apparent to the dream consciousness of my friend)
— each man had a panacea that differed from that of
his neighbour.
A cold chill, a weariness of nightmare, oppressed
the dreamer, he half started from his chair, and found
himself lying alone upon his own veranda in his own
cane lounge. A suddenly arisen great gust of wind
was rushing through the dark forms of the pines and
poplars across the way, and against the full white
face of the moon the form of a bat silhouetted itselt
for a minute.
" Certainly something must be done," my friend said
to himself.
The wind fell, and the poplars reached, tall,
motionless, and black, towards the heavens.
201
L' ENVOI
"BY ORDER OF THE
TRUSTEES
L'ENVOI
"BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES . . ."
OUT on the field before the house, in serrated rows
that dwindle from the height of clothes-presses
to the small clusters of jam jars showing above
the tufts of already wintering grass, there lie all the
paraphernalia with which a man throughout his life
has attempted to stave off the bare terror of the four
walls of his rooms. There is the old arm-chair in
which he throned it for so long as the central figure of
the small cluster of beings that went with him to the
edge of the last descent that he should ever make.
There, a mere bundle of brown pieces ot wood, ot
sacking, of cordage and of screws, is the bed on
which he passed so many nights ; it confronts at last
the grey sky from which during so many hours of
darkness he hid ; and ludicrous, pathetic or merely
sordid, confronted as they are by the eternal truths of
wind, weather, light and earth, from which they too
hid so long, lie all the essential verities of a man's
life.
Near the field-gate stands the thin blue figure of the
policeman, a symbol of the law, with the pale light
205
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
glinting on his silvered buttons ; near him, fat,
bearded and assured, stands the auctioneer, a symbol
of the commerce that continues, though all men
die; plastered upon the gate-post, its bold black
letters odd and pathetically frail, contrasted as
they are with the aged spines of the high-road
hedges, there shines the white placard whose first
words read —
" By order of the Trustees of So-and-so, deceased/'
Far down in the meadow, huddled together in dull
amazement/is the flock of sheep, the rightful tenantry
of this October grass ; and entering the field, in
knots or singly, desultorily, shyly, as sheep them-
selves enter an unaccustomed pasture, there come the
buyers, who, gradually growing emboldened, saunter
down the rows of " things " ; finger the worn curtains
that once shut out the light ; sit warily in chairs that,
meant for hard floors, sink ominously into the damp
turf; or turn round to the skies pictures of men in
hunting coats who bear golden-headed children upon
their shoulders.
A small nimble pony, frightened by an arriving motor-
car, breaks away from the knot of traps tethered
at the further gate-way. With its little dog-cart
behind it, it runs round and round in the field as if it
ivere performing some circus feat upon the soft tan ot
the turf. Men with their knees bent and their hands
stretched out and downwards, narrow the circle
around it. When at length it stops and allows itself
to be caught, the occupants of the motor-car enter
206
"BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES . . ."
the field as if they were the masquers of Henry VIII. ,
distinguished strangers from another planet. The
auctioneer, having drunk from a case bottle and
brushed some crumbs from his grey beard, mounts a
kitchen chair; the crowd, sure now of a legitimate
centre, close round him with faces already on the
grin ; an old saucepan is held above the heads of the
crowd. The auctioneer says —
" Now here's a very valuable . . . '."
You do not hear the last word because already the
laugh goes up. The sale has begun.
And, wandering among the least considered trifles
of how many poor friends of mine (they will never be
poor any more), I have often thought that that first
laugh of the auction crowd marks the last stage in
the dissolution of So-and-so. Never before, however
poor or however despised he were, could his meanest
household utensil be really laughed at. If it were
only an old kettle, its holes stopped up with soap, so
long as its owner kept it in use it would have about
it some of the sanctity of the house itselt, and
some of the sanctity of a tool. And we never
laugh at tools ; the more old, the more battered, the
more makeshift they may be, the more we admire
its owner, since with them he performs feats of in-
creasing difficulty. Nor, for the same reason perhaps,
do we ever laugh at a poverty-stricken house, since
that too is an implement, and, gazing at broken roofs,
broken doors, gaping walls or apertured windows, we
must needs wonder how a man, much such a one as
207
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
we are, can in it and by its aid perform that most
desperate feat of all, the feat of living.
As long as poor So-and-so kept things going with
all these poor makeshifts, as long as the small bundle
of odd bed-wrenches, broken chisels, disused clock
keys and rusty pony-clippers formed a portion of his
wordly goods that now forms " Lot 7 " — as long as
he lay still in an upper room, as long even as he re-
tained a sort of corporate identity by means of the
" Trustees of So-and-so " who have ordered this sale,
for so long these poor things were still sharers of that
reverence that we must pay to a man however despised.
I remember being present when some farm-hands, from
beneath a bed of rotting straw in an out-house corner,
raked out old pipes, old boxes of matches, mouldy
crusts of bread, mouldy rinds of gnawed cheese, and
a battered tobacco-box. They were the horde of the
village idiot who on that bed in that barn corner had
six months before yielded up his soul to the clutches
of a rigid frost. He had been dead six months, but
in the face of these scraps of his we felt him
suddenly to rise once more ; he had been the last man
to touch them ; he had so ordered their lying there.
And until they were kicked pell-mell out into the
mixen before the door, his presence seemed still to
stand in the corner of the barn. We called him " Poor
Old Ben . . . .," remembered him, and to that
extent paid to him the tribute that each man pays to
the majesty of humanity in its units.
But the auctioneer is the ironist speaking from
208
"BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES . . ."
beneath the august shadow of the eternal passing
of life. He has taken the place of the gravediggers of
Hamlet, and since a man's skull is so much less than
his snuff-box a part of the man that we know, the
auctioneer's broad, coarse or bitterly jocular comments
are more winged than were ever those of the digger
of graves. For the grave is inevitable and we accept
it without protest ; but no man's Chippendale bureau
set out on the grass need say inevitably, "To this
favour we must all come." Every man must die;
but it seems always a little pitiful that any man should
die so unbefriended that he has no one who will treasure
up for his dead sake these most intimate of his asso-
ciates, these his implicitly faithful vassals.
Yet in the end to these favours almost everything
that is lasting must come. Heirlooms, descending as
it were stage by stage in a funnel-shaped progress,
must almost inevitably reach an outlet which is this of
the auction. To the oldest of families there always
comes a last member, and to that last member always
his trustees. It is that at the best, since it is always good
to be dead ; at the worst the trustees may be those
" In Bankruptcy." Then selling is at its bitterest ;
and each of the intermediate kinds of sellings means
change, and every change is a thing that humanity
must a little fear. Thus in that open field, beneath
that grey sky, round the public jester upon his kitchen
chair, the laughter of each man and woman ringsja
thought falsely. For who among us can be quite
certain that it will not be his turn next to die
209 p
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
untreasured, to fail miserably, or to leave that
country-side ?
Countrymen rise and fall ; the auctioneer is always
at the flood of his eloquence. He is the one man of
the rural world who is assured of prosperity, the one
man certain to flourish all the more because of wide-
spread ruin. It is always a little depressing to me to
open my country paper about Michaelmas. There, in
place of the familiar and uninteresting local notes of
the central pages, I find, year after year, four im-
mense sheets, an area almost as large as the main-
sail of a yacht, given up to the announcements in
small, broken print of forthcoming sales by auction.
Glimpses of how many farms will not flash before
one's eyes if one have really the heart to go through
all those little poignant notices of failure, of decay,
and of change. Here is Ruffian's Hill farm, with its
great stone kitchen that one remembers best lit by one
tiny candle flame ; here is Penny Farthing farm with the
great barns. Well, Higgins has gone; old Hooker
has failed. Here is the Brook farm that stood so high,
with the two twisted poplars, like plumes, on each side
of it against the sky. Here are Coldharbour and the
Court Lodge that Files ran. Well, rum-shrub is
said to have caused that display of 210 sheep, so many
drawing-room chairs, and so much live and dead
farming stock beneath the inclement sky. Here too
is Dog's Hill. Mrs. Hackinge has had to sell. We
all knew she would ever since her husband hanged
himself in the cart-lodge because hops fell below
210
"BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES . . ."
thirty shillings. Hackinge was always a wild-cat
man, going in for poultry and apple farming, and
selling feathers for mattresses and the Lord knows
what.
Thus most of us shiver a little when we meet the
auctioneer in his dog-cart briskly quartering the roads
like a game-dog. It is as if on the hard road the
shoes of his horse rapped out, "Change, change,
change-ty-change"; it is as if his bright eyes saw the
smut on how many fair fields of wheat, the foot-rot
in how many flocks. And " change, change, change,"
is the note of all country-sides. Yet it is astonishing
how little the change is in evidence once the changes
are made. You put a corrugated iron roof in place
of the thatch on the great barn, and in two years' time
you have forgotten that the covering was ever dun-
coloured and soft. You put James Harper into
Penny Farthing in place of old Hooker, and, ir
you do not forget old Hooker, you wonder a
little, when you think how well James Harper,
who started as a weazened and niggardly innovator,
has been bronzed, beaten and worried by weather
till he fits into his place for all the world as well as old
Hooker ever did. And one forgets, somehow, that old
Hooker died before the telegraph office was opened at
the Corner. One forgets even that he was there before
the new tenants came to the Hall, and it startles
one to hear them say that they do not even remember
old Hooker's mother, who trotted about on two sticks
for a year-and-a-half after old Hooker died. These
211 p 2
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
people at the Hall do not even remember Miss Wilton,
the post-mistress, though, when one comes to think of
it, it does not seem possible that the hills can look quite
the same without her to tear a hole in one's brown-
paper parcels so that she might see what one's friends
sent for Christmas.
Yet in spite of all these impossibilities there is the
place, our heart of the country, very much the same.
It is even more the same, since to all the original
new impressions that it once made upon us there is
superadded this cloud of little memories, these films
of dust, these makings of histories. For in a sense it
is just the deaths that go to make up the restfulnesses,
the old associations, the glamours of each heart of
the country. At each change we cry out, each death
we lament, each bankrupt we shake by the hand and
assure him that after his failure the place can never
seem the same. Yet each of these changes hallows
for us some spot ; each of them renders some corner
of a corner more sacred, more intimately our own by
right of memories. We do not, as it were, discover the
Fountain of Youth that we set out to seek ; but we do
find out, little by little, the secret of growing old
mellowly and with reverence. We discover suddenly
that we are one of the few who can remember when
Penny Farthing tithe-barn was thatched, who can
remember an old fellow called Hooker. He used to
break in a team of black oxen to the plough every
year, and, wild as you may think the idea, it paid him
very well. If he had call to use them for any press
212
"BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES . . ."
of plough-work, there they were ; if not, he fattened
them off just like any other bullock, and nothing lost
save the small pains he had been at. And, sitting by
the fire one winter night when it is too wild to get
out and too wild for a friend to come in, one will
surprise oneself by trying to remember how the place
looked when first, by birth or by imagination, we
opened our eyes upon it. And we shall surprise our-
selves by saying : " Why, it isn't the same place at
all." For so gradually will the change have come
that we shall never have heeded it in the large ; the
spirit of the place will seem to remain utterly the
same. It is that sort of feeling that prompted the
direction that I once received in a strange country-
side—
" You go down the lane till you come to the place
where Farmer Banks's old barn used to stand when
he kept six cows in it."
In the imagination of the speaker, the barn and
even the cows existed hazily, but not more hazily
than did the now cleared field ; the field was there,
cleared, but not more real than the barns of some
years ago. This detritus of the dead, this dust left,
as it were, in a film, is like the " patina " that gives
value to old bronzes, like the age and yellowness that
give tone to old ivories. We see our country-sides
through this veil, and the trees, the hillocks, and the
smithies seem to speak to us with human voices. In
other lands, in lands to which we can attach no asso-
ciations, a hill is just a hill, a river a river. Without
213
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
at least a fictitious crop of historic facts no scenery
would hold us. The plains of France to us may be
fair ; but if we cannot at least invent for ourselves
some sort of scheme of all the dead who have
ploughed them up, fertilised them with their blood,
or ridden over them towards love or death, without
some cloud of human ghosts to people them, we shall
not settle down amidst the hedges of Brittany. Cali-
fornia has its brilliant hues, its great gorges, its vast
prospects, but they will not really hold us ; neither
will the lakes, the swards, the green trees of those most
beautiful of islands, New Zealand. Work might keep
us there, the chance of profit, or even the hope ot
healing a damaged lung ; but no spirit of the place
calls us. Many of us may love solitude; we may
hate the sight of living man ; but few can dispense
with the invisible presence of the dead — of the dead
that the auctioneer with his croaking jokes long has
since doomed to oblivion.
Changes may worry us dreadfully — the cutting
down of familiar avenues, the setting up of wire
fences in place of old hedgerows ; but as long as the
changes are real in the sense of being called for by
the spirit of the age we shall at last accept them and
make them a part of our spirit of the place. It is only
when, as in the case of that most odious of all things,
the restoration of old churches and old buildings —
it is only when the changes are out of touch with
modernity — when, in fact, the changes are "fakes,"
that they will remain for ever eye-sores, that they
214
"BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES . . ."
will for ever strike false notes. A landowner that I
knew has erected some brick pigsties in a lovely old
orchard. At first I hated them ; but little by little I
have grown accustomed to the sight of the buildings
and the "feeling " of the pigs. I have grown to feel
that the pigs were more or less necessary, and that
the sties, because they are suited for their purpose,
are neither distasteful nor vulgar. But every time that
I pass our old church, now, alas ! picked clean and
white as dry bones are clean and white, I shudder a
little, and every time I enter our fine old Hall that
has been spoiled by the addition of a new wing in a
style limply aping the mediaeval.
These latter changes are imitative and are mean-
ingless ; but the others we accept. If it be the
fate of the country to be turned into one vast ter-
ritory of pleasure parks eventually, we shall accept
the pleasure park as the standard, just as now, upon
the whole, we accept the small farm ; if it be the fate
of the country to be cut up into squares for small
holders, sooner or later we or our children will accept
the fact that every view over dales and valleys will
appear like a never-ending draught-board. The eye
will accept its freedom to travel over miles and miles,
just as nowadays it welcomes its imprisonment by
hedgerow after hedgerow, and the flat sweep of culti-
vated territory will be as much the country as is
to-day the closed-in maze that we love. In the
region of change that is the country, change is, in
short, the very breath of life, the sole thing that we
215
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
have to comment on, the sole basis of the news that
keeps us all going.
And it all goes so very slowly. Last year I took
a late October walk down a long valley. It had
been one of those days that one loves and lingers
through, as if they must be our last on a pleasant
earth. The valley was broad, the grass covered with a
bluish haze, the sunshine was very red, the river ran
sluggishly between high banks. The year was dying
away, so that each minute of sunlight seemed a precious
gift, and the day died so fast that hardly could one resist
the attempt to hold it, physically, by some gesture of
the hands, by some effort of the will. It was one of
those days that, one is acutely aware, can never
return. Other days pass, and are no doubt reckoned ;
this will live for ever in the memory. Winter was
coming, night, sleep — and who knows whether not
death itself?
But suddenly, on changing the direction at the turn
of the river, there before us, close at hand in the
absolutely still air, all warmed with the wash of light
from the low sun, was the little range of hills that
bound the valley. And everything on them had a
quaint distinctness. Below was the golden roof of a
farm that might have been a roof in Caxton's day ;
just before it was a rush-thatched hut, its background
small, green, foreshortened fields like squares in a
pattern, and all flat. And appearing so exactly above
the hut that it seemed as if they must fall down the
smoking brick chimneys were a ploughman and his
216
"BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES . . ."
team moving swiftly — two black horses and two
white, a boy with a harrow following, and to one
side a man with a seed-trough slung round him,
sowing with both hands. Even at that distance
one could see the light haze of the flying seeds.
It might have been a coloured picture in a child's
book of to-day; it might, without the change of a
visible detail, have been a picture in a missal. Just
over the bank was the great high-road along which
the motor-cars screamed; just beyond that, over the
hill and out of sight, was a great, broad, hedgeless
" scientific " farm. But, standing there that afternoon,
and walking back in the dying day for miles along
that bank, we might, for all the eye could see, have
been there this afternoon or half a millennium ago, so
slowly does always moving Change move in the heart
of the country. If there we do not find the Foun-
tain of Youth, there at least we may learn to grow
old without perceiving it, to fuse into the tide ot
humanity that individually matters so little — the tide
of humanity that in its course across the earth has
smoothed and rounded so many hill-tops, has altered
the lines of so many fields, has bound down so many
rivers to their courses, has held back the sea from so
many wildernesses of marsh and fen, has fought so
bravely, with so little glory, so long a fight against
the irresistible forces of Nature.
Nature is, indeed, at once the auctioneer and the
trustee of us men who walk the lurrows in the heart
of the country — the trustee rather than the auctioneer,
217
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
since the price of labour that we pay goes into no
pocket other than ours. Men, so long ago, scraped
and furrowed the ridges that terrace the dun faces
of the great slopes, and Nature hands them
down to us who have forgotten even what those
old householders looked like. We have forgotten
them, just as we have forgotten how that dead man
looked who sat, years ago, in the arm-chair that we
bought off the grass — in the arm-chair in which
now one of us thrones it, the king of a tiny clan, the
leader of a little caravan-load of mortals — the leader
for a short moment across the small holding of time
that shall still be ours.
THE END
BRADBURY, AGNEW & CO., LD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND TONBRIDGB.
THIRD IMPRESSION. NOW READY.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE FIFTH QUEEN.
Crown 8vo. 6s.
FROM THE EARLY REVIEWS.
" A notable work of fiction."— Outlook.
" It is an ambitious theme which Mr. Hueffer has taken, and we have
NOTHING BUT CONGRATULATION for him on the resultant
achievement ; this book further strengthens his position as ONE OF
THE ABLEST OF THE YOUNGER WRITERS OF THE
DAY."— Daily Telegraph.
"Mr. Hueffer has accomplished a MEMORABLE PIECE OF
WORK. There is power and thought in the characterisation, and the
whole work has an astonishing effect in revealing to us the flesh and
blood side of history."— Daily News.
" His portrait of Catherine Howard, impulsive, warm-hearted, truth-
speaking, yet daring amidst the most unprincipled intrigue, is
SINGULARLY ATTRACTIVE AND LIFE-LIKE, making an
admirable foil to the grimly-conceived Lady Mary." — Tribune.
" It is vivid, full of zest, packed with matter, and a novel of incident,
told by a man of intellect, is a rare and valuable production."— The
Times.
LONDON j ALSTON RIVERS, LTD.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE SOUL OF LONDON.
Imp. i6mo. 55. nett.
"It is long since we came across a more attractive collection of
essays on any subject, and the author is to be heaitily congratulated on
his success." — The Morning Post.
" ' The Soul of London,' published to:day, is the latest and truest
image of London, built up out of a series of brilliant negations that
together are more hauntingly near to a composite picture of the city
than anything we have ever seen before. . . ." — The Daily Mail.
" Londoners should read this book ; and even more certainly should
countrymen and denizens of provincial cities read it" — The Standard.
" There have been many books on London, written by literary men,
statisticians, reformers. But no one has achieved or attempted what in
this book Mr. Hueffer has done with power and fine insignt."— The
Daily News.
" Dealing mainly with the present, Mr. Hueffer has displayed to the
full the desiderated alertness, precision and instinct. The reader
receives an impression of a marvellously equipped guide, whose business
in life it is to have multifarious information at his fingers' ends. At
times one marvels at the knowledge of out-of-the-way subjects, but the
information is conveyed so simply that one never questions its accuracy,
and so entirely without side that one does not resent being instructed."
— The Daily Chronicle.
LONDON: ALSTON RIVERS, LTD.
DA
630
F67
1906
Ford, Ford Madox
The heart of the country
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