I
The charm of Sussex woods, though you may frequent them at all times in and out of season, is that they are never the same woods from year to year. The great trees, indeed, keep their old familiar forms and stations, but the undergrowth of hazel, ash, larch, or silver-birch is periodically cleared away. This year, a certain hillside or deep hollow may be hidden under a thicket of growth impenetrable not only to the casual wanderer, but to the very sunlight itself; and next year the wood-cutters may have swept it clean, leaving only the forest trees to cast their shadows over a sunny wilderness that your eyes, though you have journeyed this way scores of times, have never yet beheld. Clearings wherein the children gathered primroses by the thousand one spring, are overgrown and all but impassable the next. The very paths and waggon-ways change their direction, as the woodmen vary the scene of their labours from year to year. And in the track of the copse-cutters, arise all manner of new plants; new birds come to nest; new sights and sounds throng about the way at every turn—so, in nearly all seasons, a strange new land is brought to your very feet, in the midst of things familiar, maybe, for a score of years.
In the dead deeps of winter, nothing seems so remote, so hopelessly unattainable, as the March sunshine; yet here it is at last, and here I am, sitting on a hazel-stole softly cushioned with ivy, alone and deliciously idle, in a clearing I have just discovered in the heart of Windle Woods.
All this part of the wood has lain untouched for a decade, perhaps, given over to the jays and magpies, and other wildest of wild nesting things. There is a green lane only a few hundred feet distant, and along it I have journeyed many a time during the past year, never dreaming that the clearing existed. And yet, no later than last April, the woodmen must have been here with their bill-hooks, hacking and hewing, and letting in the living sunlight where the earth had known no more than green gloaming on the brightest day.
It is strange how quickly the fertile soil awakens from such a lethargy of long, dark years. From where I sit, high upon the sunny slope, I can see nothing but greenery. All that remains of the dense growth of hazel, that covered this part of the wood, is gathered into great square piles, looking like windowless houses set here and there on the sunny declivity. Primroses shine everywhere; truly not in the abundance of April, but still there is no yard of ground without their sulphur sheen. Red deadnettle makes a rosy flush in the grass at my feet. There is ground-ivy round the base of each hazel-stole, with its pale violet flowers, so minute, yet making such a brave show by sheer strength of numbers. And hovering everywhere over this still mere of sunshine, with its sunken treasure of blossom, are butterflies—great sulphur-yellow butterflies—flapping idly along, little tortoiseshells and peacocks that have laid up through the winter, and one gorgeous red-admiral, also a hibernator, veering about in the sunshine with outspread, motionless wings.
To this secret nook of woodland I came but an hour ago, yet in that one hour of still March sunshine, I have seen and heard more things than could be chronicled, perhaps, in a day’s hard driving of the swiftest pen. To set down only the things that dwell foremost in the memory is not easy. I had been here only a few minutes when a rabbit came racing across the clearing, dodging in and out of the hazel-stoles in tremendous hurry and fear. On seeing me, he turned off at a sharp angle, then scurried away into the wood. A full five minutes after came a stealthy rustling from the same direction, and a ruddy-furred stoat drew into view, his snake-like head alternately poised high in the sunshine and lowered amidst the grass, as he carefully picked up the rabbit’s trail. He was going at only a tithe of the rabbit’s pace, but going without an instant’s hesitation. Where the rabbit had turned off at seeing me, the stoat also veered sharply round. He went straight for the wood, entering it, as far as I could judge, at exactly the same spot. So he would go on, I knew, until at last his blood-thirsty cunning and pertinacity had outworn the rabbit’s speed.
Then a woodpecker came over the clearing, his crimson cap and tarnished jerkin of lincoln-green looking strangely tawdry and theatrical in the brilliant sunshine. He flew heavily yet swiftly, arresting the motion of his wings at every four or five beats, much as a finch flies. As he passed over, he uttered his weird call-note, that sounds something like ‘Ploo-ee, ploo-ee!’ wherein, however, there is a tang of crafty cynicism indescribable. Not far from where I sat was a beech-tree, and to this tree I watched him go. He climbed up the smooth bark like a cat, taking the trunk spiral-wise. Then, when almost at its summit, he stopped and beat out of the hard wood, with his pick-axe of a bill, such a note as can be likened to nothing else in nature. So fast fell the blows of his beak, that between them no interval could be distinguished. They ran together into one smooth, continuous volume of sound. Extraordinarily musical it was, with a plaintive quality and a variableness of tone, now loud, now soft, that could not fail to impress the dullest ear. The note was prolonged for half a minute or so, and then the bird stopped to listen. Far away over the wood-top I heard the answering sound. For this woodpecker-music in springtime is a true love-call, and you will hear it onward through the months until the last pair of birds is mated in the wood.
This is the time when the queen-wasps come out of their winter hiding-places, and the first bumble-bees appear. Of the hive-bees very few seek out these isolated clearings; they have all gone to the riverside where the sallows and willows are in bloom. But as I sat listening to the medley of birds and insect-voices around me, trying to pick out one after the other from the chaos of song, I heard the soft note of a honey-bee down in the blue veronica close at hand. Yet she touched none of the flowers. She passed all by, and went scrambling down among the moss and dead leaves. Knowing that the honey-bee never wastes time, and anxious to find out what she might be doing there, I watched her as she painfully went over the moss-fronds one by one, sending forth a shrill, fretful note at intervals, very like an interjection of disappointment at not finding what she needed. At last her search came to a successful end. It was a dew-drop she had been seeking, one of the few that had escaped the thirsty glances of the sun. Silently she drank. And then, as she rose into mid-air with her burden, there was no mistaking the triumphant quality of her song. At this time, water is the all-important factor in the prosperity of the hive; and the bee knew well she was carrying home something of greater worth even than a load of the purest honey.
Leaving the clearing at length, I went homeward by a roundabout way, through the oldest part of the wood. Traversing one of the shadiest paths, where the oaks grew thick together overhead, I came to a turn in the way. Just beyond, there was a single spot of sunshine lying on the moss-green path, and in it a squirrel gambolled, as though he were taking a bath in the yellow pool of light. Often throughout the winter I had come upon squirrels thus, tempted out of their warm winter-houses by some day of exceptional mildness. For the squirrel is no true hibernator. He sleeps through the cold spells, often for weeks at a stretch. But, like the hive-bees, warm weather at once rouses him from his dray, and sends him forth ravenous to his secret store of acorns or beech-mast.
Old Tom Clemmer once told me of a custom regarding the squirrel which, in his boyhood, was rife in most Downland villages. On Saint Andrew’s Day, towards the end of each November, most of the Windlecombe men and boys used to foregather on the green, armed with short sticks, shod at one end with some heavy piece of metal. The party would then go out into the woods for this, the annual squirrel-hunt, or ‘skugging’ as it was called. The weighted sticks were thrown at the squirrels as they leaped in the branches overhead; and some of the folk, Tom Clemmer himself among the number, were famous for their skill at this pastime. Skugging, however, being essentially a poor man’s brutal sport, has been long ago suppressed.
My squirrel in the pool of sunshine blocked the path, and there was no way round. I must perforce disturb him. I watched him clamber upward into the wilderness of budding oak-boughs, his glossy red-brown coat gleaming in the sunshine as he went.
Presently, coming into a spacious valley of beeches, where the eye could wander far and wide, between the grey-green trunks, over a bare, undulating carpet of last year’s leaves—for scarcely anything will grow under beech—I caught sight of an object which drew my steps over to the near hillside. It was a spot of shining white painted about breast high on the smooth bark of one of the trees. I knew what it meant. It was the White Spot of Doom—the token of the woodreeve to his men that the tree was to be felled; and this was the time, when the sap was beginning to run strong and rinding would be easy, for the death sentence to be carried out.
I looked at the white spot, and if I could have saved the tree by obliterating it there and then, I would have done so gladly. Carved deeply into its wood, and so long ago that the characters were all but illegible, was a double set of initials, and, between them, two hearts at once united and transfixed by the same arrow. Below these roughly-hewn signs a date appeared. I had often come upon the legend in my walks, and stopped to ruminate over it. Who had cut it I never knew, nor indeed whether C. D. and L. E. W., if they were alive to-day, would have joined with any enthusiasm in my desire for its preservation. But somehow it came to me at the moment as an infinitely pathetic thing, that the tree should be cut down after all those years, and the record destroyed—it had been done so obviously for perpetuity. What kind of stony-hearted villain must the woodreeve have been, I thought to myself, who could daub that patch of white paint so callously near to the silent eloquence of such an inscription?
Out of the far distance now, as I lingered over the carving in that mood of moralising sentimentality, there came creeping up the hollow stillness of the glade a murmur of voices, and, in a little, the tramp of heavy feet. I recognised the gang of woodmen carrying the tools of their craft; and behind them a little rabble of village-folk, mostly children. I drew off some way up the hillside, and sat me down on a stump, to look on at the now imminent, as well as inevitable spectacle.
To watch a great tree felled, especially when such a giant as this lovers’ tree was in question, is one of the most exciting things to be met with in country-life. There is ever growing suspense for the onlooker from the moment when the first axe-blow sends its echo ringing through the aisles of the wood, to that last stunned feeling after the mighty tree is down. The speed and workmanlike dexterity with which the gang now got to their task only served to intensify this sensation. One buckled on a pair of climbing-irons and carried aloft two long ropes, securing them to the trunk at its highest point of division. While he was still up there, like a perching crow black against the sky, another took a great glittering axe, and, stepping slowly round the tree, dealt it a succession of downward and inward blows, cutting out a deep ring all round the bole some six or eight inches above ground-level. On the side towards which the tree was to fall, this cut was now widened and deepened until it laid bare a good foot breadth of the solid heart of the wood. And while the amber chips were still flying under the axe, the rest of the gang were carrying the ropes away at two sharp angles, and binding them securely to neighbouring trees.
And now began the crucial part of the business. The great wood-saw was got to work, with four strong men at it. Cutting close to the ground on the far side of the tree, the shining blade tore its way steadily into the wood. Inch by inch it drove its ragged teeth forward, and at every lunge it gave forth a savage gasping scream, and a spume of yellow sawdust spirted from the cut, gathering in an ever-growing heap on either side. No other sound broke the stillness of the glen for a full ten minutes or more. No one among the mute, expectant crowd, nor any of the woodmen, seemed to move hand or foot. All watched and waited, as it appeared, breathlessly. There were just these four strong men labouring to and fro, the flash of the hungry saw-blade in the sunlight, and the harsh sudden screech of the direful thing every time it ripped at the vitals of the tree. The gang of woodmen had divided at a sign from their chief, and stood, three or four of them bearing on each rope. The leader watched the saw, a hand on each hip. Once he raised a hand the saw stopped; a row of steel wedges was driven in behind it; the saw began once more its old rasping melody. At last the hand went up again. The work was done. I could see the black line of the cut reaching within an inch or so of the deep axe-cleft on the face of the tree.
Long ago, on shipboard, I had been present at the firing of one of the heaviest guns that ever put to sea; and what followed now reminded me strangely of that deafening experience. The leader marshalled his men, and directed operations with short, sharp words of command, much as the gun-lieutenant had done. There was the same busy preparation and skurrying to and fro, the same moment of suspense, the same terrific outcome. Every available man was now set to haul on the ropes, while the leader of the gang himself took a mallet and, with mighty blows, drove the wedges in. Thick and fast the blows fell, and their echoes went chevying each other down the ravine. The vast-spreading tree quaked, lashed its branches wildly about overhead. The crowd of waiting children and old women were ordered farther back from the zone of danger. Now the great mallet redoubled its blows, and the two gangs of men bore on the ropes with all their might and main. Still, though the commotion overhead increased to the force of a hurricane, no other sign of movement other than a faint shudder, was visible in the trunk of the tree. One last blow of the mallet, and one last pull all together, and then a sharp crack sounded, as it were, from the bowels of the earth. The ropemen leant back in one huge final effort, then dropped the ropes, and ran for their lives. There came a slithering, tearing noise as the mighty beech toppled forward, tearing itself from the clinging, cumbering embrace of its age-long fellows, then down it came to earth with one long, rolling, thunderous, crackling roar.
Where I stood, I felt the solid earth quake and shudder. Between the moment when the uppermost branches of the great tree began to force their way in a wide, descending arc through the thicket of intercepting branches, and the moment of the last terrific boom, as the trunk struck the earth, there seemed a strangely long interval of time. Another thing struck me with all the force of unimaginable novelty. All the undermost branches of the tree as it fell were splintered into a thousand fragments, and these, flying upward and outward, in a great cloud, gave an effect as if the mighty trunk had fallen into water.
And now I learned for the first time why all the poor folk had followed the woodmen with their baskets. The tree was no sooner prone on the ground, and the last soaring splinter come rattling out of the sky, than a rush was made to the spot by all. Here was firewood in plenty for every one, as much as each could gather or carry. And it was firewood already chopped.