III
For days past now the rain has been steadily falling, hour after hour, from dark to dark. Rain and wind together are always disconcerting, and often melancholy in the last degree; but still, soft summer rain like this, not heavy enough to obscure an outlook, yet sufficient to serve as an excuse for stopping indoors, has all sorts of commendable qualities. Much of the time, both in daylight and darkness, I have spent lolling out of a little dormer-window high up in the roof of this old house, and I have got to know many small things about life and work in Windlecombe that I have never known before.
It would seem that the cat and I are almost the only able-bodied creatures, feathered, four-footed, or human, that are not out and about in the rain, and I alone because the indoor mood happens to possess me. If I shed that craze before the weeping weather is done, I may be squelching about with the rest all day long in the sodden lanes; or slithering joyfully over the green turf of the Downs miles away, barefoot and bareheaded, absent-mindedly whistling the first halves of innumerable tunes as I go. But of that in its season. The cat and I are of a mind now. The comforts of a dry coat appeal to each of us for the moment irresistibly; and we lean out over the window-sill no farther than will afford me a view of the village doings, and her an eye-feast on the martins chattering about the roof-eaves below.
I saw Farmer Coles go by in his gig to-day, and heard him call out to his bailiff on the footway, ‘If ’tis fine, George, i’ th’ marnin’, get all th’ tackle down to th’ Hoe-field, an’ make a start first thing.’ The word brought my heart into my mouth. The Hoe-field is the field where the first wild rose opened to the spell of the nightingale’s music; and it meant that haying-time had come round at last. To-morrow there might be a new sound in Windlecombe, the high ringing note of the mowing-machines; and I knew then there would be no hour of daylight free from it, until the last meadow lay shorn and desolate under the summer sun.
In modern village life, the lot of the sentimentalist is no easy one, especially if he love his neighbour. Though he may secretly repine for the old days, when the grass came down to the rhythmic song of the scythe, and the corn to the tune of the sickle, he cannot blink the fact that, in farm life, prosperity and machinery go hand-in-hand together. The true, indeed the only, way for him now is to realise that not all the beauty of country things belongs to old times, and not all the hard, ugly utilitarianism of nowadays has come in with machinery. Honestly considered, there is no mechanical farm-implement of to-day essentially at variance with the spirit of beauty. A threshing-mill or a reaper-and-binder owes its form and parts to the same designer that made the sickle. The lines of a sailing-ship are unvaryingly lines of grace, because they are dictated by wind and water. And the unchanging needs of earth that made sickle, scythe, and ploughshare what they are, are as unchanging and imperious as ever.
It was hard to conceive the nightingale’s song without the loveliness of the mowing-grass—the green dragon-flies cruising over its sea of blossom, the shadows of the swallows’ wings upon it, and the grumbling bees like pearl-divers at fault down in its emerald depths. But now, listening to the songs of the birds in the village gardens round about, songs that seemed all the more joyous for the grey light and the unceasing patter of the rain, the truth fell cold upon me that the nightingale’s was no longer among them. But a few days past, she was keening as sorrowfully as ever. In the one glimpse of soused moonshine last night I had thought to hear her plaint far down by the river; but I could not be sure of it, and the sound had not returned. Maybe her song is done at last, and I could wish it so, now that the grass is to fall.
With a little neck-craning, I can contrive a view of the Reverend’s garden, or as much of it as is discernible through the crowding trees. On the smooth fair lawn I can see his white doves strutting, but they are there alone to-day. Generally, when I look forth, there is the gaunt black figure pacing to and fro, with these snow-white atoms fluttering about its feet. At the end of the lawn an arm goes out, and the figure pulls up at the first touch on the rose-covered trellis. There is the bank of mignonette at the other end, and here he halts and turns, warned by the music of the bees. But I have never been able to guess what guides him unerringly between the rippled edges of the flower-beds; nor why, when walking under the wall, hung from end to end with blue racemes of wistaria, he goes no farther each way than the limit of the blossoms’ reach. The gleaming white turrets of syringa, of acacia, of guelder rose, these I know are just visible to him; and his doves lighten the darkness a little about his feet. But there are whole stretches of the garden given over to deep-hued things—rhododendrons and peonies, canterbury-bells and flaming tiger-lilies; amidst these he must pass with eyes as little aware of their passionate colour as I of the tiger-moth’s scarlet when he burrs in my ear at night. Yet is glowing colour of a truth a thing that reaches us through one sense alone? I have doubted it ever since—
An angry shout struck up to me just now from a side alley below the green, where some of the poorest and prettiest of the cottages are jumbled together. It is strange how far sounds carry on these still, rainy mornings. The shout was followed by the shrill tones of a woman, and the thud of something being hurled into the street. Presently, through the alley-mouth, appeared a man with a basket on his back. He came up the street through the rain, bent and lurching, his black beard wagging with imprecations he was at no pains to subdue. It was Darkie, the tramp, fern-seller, ne’er-do-well; a familiar figure in Windlecombe. As usual, he was pretty far gone in liquor. He took the middle of the way, addressing himself to all passers-by indiscriminately.
‘Wimmin,’ he cried, in his fine deep voice with the violoncello quality in it, ‘wimmin? ye may live ’til crack o’ Doom, sir, and then never larn how to take ’em! “I’ll ha’ two!” sez she, only laast Saddaday, ma’am, “an’ bring another brace, Darkie,” she sez, “when ye happens along agen,”—all as nice as nice could be, sir. An’ now, soon as ’a sot eyes o’ me, ’a hups wir futt, an’—’
He turned the corner of the house, and I heard no more.
I wonder, now, how Darkie fares this weather in his Downland eyrie. It has always been a mystery in Windlecombe as to where he passes his nights. At all times, winter or summer, he is to be met with, tramping up the lane towards the Downs; using the last light of day apparently in putting himself as far as may be from the chance of a night’s lodging; and, in the early mornings, you meet him trudging down again from the heights, his basket full of odd hedgeside garnerings for sale in the town. The mystery is a mystery to me no longer, although it was quite by chance I lit upon him in his secret nook.
Coming over the Downs one winter’s morning, I saw a thin blue spiral of smoke rising from the very centre of a great patch of gorse on a hill-side; and threading my way through the wilderness, bent on elucidating this phenomenon, I came at length upon a queer little scene. At the mouth of a sort of cave cut deep into the solid green heart of the gorse thicket, burned a little fire of sticks; and over it hung a pot that gave forth a savoury steam. Behind the fire lay Darkie on a snug couch of hay and old sacking, fast asleep, with a pipe in his mouth. Evidently he had dozed off in the midst of his preparations for a meal. I took one swift look round his castle, noting various old tins, old coats, and the like hanging over his head; several sugar-boxes filled with odd lumber behind him; and a shepherd’s folding-bar—a deadly weapon, twenty pounds or so of solid iron—lying conveniently to his hand; and then I crept away, as silently as I had come. Not that I feared any violence from him. In all the years we had been acquainted, I had never known him harm a mouse. But many was the time I had turned him away from my own door, unceremoniously enough; sometimes with hard words, once or twice, indeed, with threatenings of his natural enemy, the constable. And I feared now reprisals of a kind that would hurt almost as much as the folding-bar heftily wielded—I feared to see Darkie stagger to his feet and pull off to me one of my own long-discarded caps, hear him give me generous and courtly words of welcome, and a kind look out of his mastiff’s eyes, making me as free of his snug, green-roofed dwelling as I had so often made him free of the street.
Towards the hour of sunset I went up to the little attic window again, and looked out over the drenched housetops for any sign of a break in the weather. The rain had ceased, and the western sky had lightened somewhat, taking on an indefinable warmth of hue. There was no sunshine, nor any hope of sunshine; but there was a light abroad that picked out all the browns and reds and yellows in the landscape, wondrously intensifying them, while leaving all other hues as grey and cold as ever.
Past eleven o’clock, and a cloudless night of stars, with the wood-larks singing high over the village, and the cuckoos calling in the hills as though it were broad day. Yes—the change has come: Farmer Coles is never far out in his prognostications. It will be cutting weather to-morrow; and to-morrow I must be up with the earliest of them, and away to the Hoe-field.