THE LINGERING OF THE LIGHT
With the West wind blowing down the valley, wet and warm from the Atlantic, men go home leisurely from their work in the fields, happy in the last of the light, and enjoying, though they never say so, the delicate melancholy of the hour. It is a gift you make no account of when the East wind brings it you, for that Scythian scourge withers what it touches, and under its whip the light itself seems like a husk about the day. Old people tell us that it brings the blight, whatever they mean by that. It brought locusts into Egypt once, and brings influenza into England. Perhaps they put the two together. It brings sick thinking too, a cold which has the property of drying up the springs of the blood. There’s no escape from it. The air seems thinner that comes from the East; brickwork will not keep it out, nor glazed windows. One fancies in the black mood of it that the “channering worm” at his work in the churchyard must feel it, and dive deeper into the mould.
But now one can enjoy the sweet grave evening and turn the mind hopefully to the prime of the year that is coming. The blackbird whistles for it in the leafless elm; a belated white hen on the hillside, very much at her ease, is still heeling up the turf and inspecting the result. A cottage wife, having her fire alight and kettle on the boil, stands for a moment at her open door. To mate the gentle influence of the evening she has made herself trim in clean white blouse and blue skirt, and looks what she was intended to be, a pretty young woman with a pride in herself. A friend, going home, stops her perambulator for a minute to exchange sentiments about the nights “drawing out.” Almost as she speaks this one draws in—for at this time of year twilight is a thing of moments. It will be dark before she is home. No matter: the wind is warm and balmy; she can take her ease, and her baby be none the worse. This is the weather that opens the human buds as well as the snowdrops, and gems the gardens with aconites, and the hearths with sprawling children. We do not heed Dr. Inge down here.
Here’s the end of January, and the winter, by our calendar, over in three weeks’ time. Since that calendar was written up we have invented a new winter. It is more difficult to get through April with safety, at least to garden buds, than any January we have known for forty years; but as far as we are concerned ourselves we can stand anything in April, with May to follow; whereas January can still intimidate, and a cold spell then will cause twice the sickness of the Spring-winter. January is to April as Till to Tweed:
“Till said to Tweed,
’Though ye rin wi’ speed,
An’ I rin slaw,
Where ye drown ae mon
I drown twa.”
If you look at the graves in a country churchyard, of the two outside generations, that is, of old people and young children, nearly all will have found their “bane” in December and January.
With us in the West, the thing which kills the plants in our gardens also kills the villagers, very old or very young: excessive wet, namely, followed by hard frost or murderous wind. The other day we had a day of warm drenches, drifting sheets of rain, a whole day of them, the wind in the West. About midnight, the weathercock chopped round to meet a whirl-blast from the East: the sky cleared, and it froze like mad. I went round my borders in the morning, quaking at the heart. The garden was like a battle-field. Nothing can cope with that. The babies get pneumonia, the veterans bronchitis, the sexton is busy; every day you hear the passing bell. Yet whether it is because we observe punctually the Laws of Being, or (as the Dean will have it) in spite of it, the facts are that the supply of babies never fails, and that we live to a great age. The oldest gardener I know—I shouldn’t wonder if he were the oldest gardener in the world—lives in this village. Eighty-nine.
“I know a girl—she’s eighty-five”—
That was Lord Houghton’s way of beginning a poem on Mrs. Grote. My gardener beats her by four years. To and fro, four times a day, he walks his half-mile—to work and back. I saw him the other day half-way up a cherry-tree, sawing off a dead branch. Mrs. Grote again:
“She lived to the age of a hundred and ten,
And died of a fall from a cherry-tree then.”
To look at his sapless limbs, you might think he could saw off one of them and take no hurt. But not at all. Life is high in him still. His eye is bright, his step is brisk. We have many octagenarians, but I believe he is the patriarch of our village. Mr. Frederic Harrison, in Bath, beats him by a year.
We are stoics, without knowing what that means down here. Whatever our years tell us we make no account of them, or of ailments, or physical discomfort; and as for Death, the Antick, however close he stand to us—the Grizzly One, we call him—we take no notice of him, so long as we can move about. The end is not long in coming when a man must keep the house, or his bed. Then, so sure as fate, he will stiffen at the joints and come out no more to enjoy the lingering of the light. The chalk, which he has been inhaling and absorbing all his life, will harden in him, and, he will tell you, “time’s up.” Want of imagination, that fine indifference to fate, perhaps—but I don’t know. I have never been able to deny imagination to our country folk. The faculty takes various forms, and is not to be refused to a man because it finds a harsh vent and issues contorted. I prefer to put it that tradition, which is our religion, has put obedience to the Laws of Life above everything else. One of those laws says, Work. And work we do, until we drop. There is a noble creature lying now, I fear, under a stroke which will prevent her doing another hand’s turn of work. Her children are all about her bed; I saw one of them this morning before she went there. She confessed, with tears, the anguish it would be to see her mother lying idle. Sixty-three, she was, and had never been a day without work in her children’s recollection. She had never been in bed after six in the morning, never stayed at home or abed except, of course, for child-bed. She had had eight children, brought up six of them to marry and prosper in the world. And now she lies stricken, and they, those prosperous young women, all about her bed. How well Shakespeare knew that world:
“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the stormy winter’s rages;
Thou thy earthly course hast run,
Home hast gone, and ta’en thy wages.”
Nothing for tears, or knocking of the breast. The words ring as solemnly as the bell. I cannot conceive of earthly thing more beautiful than such faithful, patient, diligent, ordered lives, rounded off by such mute and uncomplaining death-bed scenes. The fact that so they have been lived, so rounded off, for two thousand years makes them sacred, for me. How often has the good soul whose end I am awaiting now stood at her cottage door to mark the lingering of the light? May her passing be as gentle as this day’s has been!
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