III
How fast time flies you can never truly estimate until you go step and step with it through the summer woods and fields. In a sense, town-life—where there is so much of permanence in environment—puts a drag on time, and not seldom pulls it up altogether. Moreover, in towns time is estimated by events, by experiences. You hear a great musician, see a great play, look on at some magnificent pageant, or are shocked by some catastrophe; and straightway there is half a lifetime of emotion thrust between two strokes of the clock. By so much in very truth your life has been lengthened; for it is the intensity of living that counts in the civic tale of years. If you find an old man not only declaring that he has lived long, but believing it, it is a great chance but he tells you so in the close-clipped cockney tongue of the town.
And yet it is better to live in some far-away country nook like Windlecombe, and be reminded with every gliding summer hour that time flies and life is short, if only because of the undoubted fact that such a frame of mind carries a belief in eternal youth as a necessary implication. Between life’s dawn and the dusk of its western sky, there is literally no time to grow old in a natural, aboriginal environment. So inextricably interwoven are the threads of human existence and that of the green world round about, that the annual rejuvenation of the one infallibly communicates itself to the other. With every spring we start life afresh. Though we may live to threescore years and ten, we are children still; and come upon death at last like an unexpected gust at a corner, old age unrealised to the very end.
In the weeks that are closing now, I have heard and seen more of the galloping hoofs of this swift, high-stepping jade, summer, than is good for entire peace of mind. Years ago I made a vow that I would never again eke out the fleeting golden days, like a miser to whom spending is not pleasure but only pain. I vowed that I would always squander time at this season; let it drift by unthinkingly; get my fill of sunshine, and fill and fill again to my heart’s content; yet do it as a strayed heifer in the corn, wantoning over an acre to each mouthful. But this time, as ever, the good resolution has been forgotten. The old parsimony has dogged the way at every step. I must be up with the sun in the small hours of each morning, fearful of losing a single beam from the millions. To waste in sleep the blue, spangled summer nights, when all the country-side is resonant of life and fragrant with the scent that comes only with the darkness, has seemed like sacrilege. Yet, for all my industry, July is nearing its end, and I know that I have drunk but a drop or two out of its vast ocean. And already I have renewed the old vow, to be disregarded as ever, doubtless, when July again comes round.
On all the high-lying corn lands now, harvest has begun; and the fields in the valley are fast taking on that deep tinge of gipsy-gold which is the sign of full maturity. Scarce had the shrill note of the mowing-machine stilled in the meadows, when the deeper voice of the reaper-and-binder began on the hill. All day long I sat in this cool quiet nook of a study, and the steady jarring sound came over to me from the hillside, filling the little room. I saw the machine with its pair of grey horses, waiting at the field-gate, while the scythe-men cut a way for it into the amber wall of the grain. Steadily hour after hour it worked round the field, until at last, looking forth towards noon, I saw that only a small triangular piece remained uncut in the middle of the field.
Now there were a score or so of the farm folk waiting hard by, each armed with a cudgel; and with them seemingly every dog in the village. As the machine went round, every time making the patch of standing corn smaller, I could see rabbits bolting in all directions from the diminishing cover; and there uprose continually a hubbub of voices from dogs and men. Towards the end, the stubble became alive with the little dark scurrying forms, fleeing to the surrounding fields, the most of them escaping harmlessly for want of pursuers. But even then, as I afterwards learned, some eight or nine dozen were killed.
I have always kept away from these harvest battues, as indeed from all scenes of sport and congregations of sportsmen. I am willing enough to profit by these activities, and receive and enjoy my full share of the furred and feathered spoil admittedly without one humanitarian qualm. But this much confessed, I would gladly welcome the day when everywhere, save in the rabbit warrens, the sound of the sporting gun should cease throughout this southern land. Rabbits must be kept down to the end of time; but, for the creatures that require preservation, too great a price is paid, and paid by the wrong class. It is not the owner of game-preserves who bears the main cost of his thunderous pleasuring. It is the lover of wild life, who sees the hawks and owls and small deer of the woodlands growing scarcer with every year; and the children who, in the springtime, are cheated out of their right to wander through the primrose glades.
To many this may seem a wearisomely trite point of view, affecting a grievance as old as the hills, and even less likely of obliteration. But though the point of view is ancient enough, the grievance is no longer so. Of late years the ranks of village dwellers have been very largely reinforced from the classes who care little for sport and a great deal for all other allurements of the country-side. Rural England is no longer peopled by sportsmen and the dependents of sportsmen; but, slowly and surely, a majority is creeping up in the villages, composed of men and women both knowing and loving Nature, and to whom the old-time local policy of endurance under deprivation of rights for expediency’s sake, is an incomprehensible, as well as an intolerable thing. All the vast-winged, beautiful marauders of the air that I love to watch, are ruthlessly shot down by the gamekeepers on a suspicion presumptive and unproved; but the fox that, in a single night, massacres every bird in the villager’s hen-roost, must go scatheless because poor profit may not be set before rich pastime.
One day, almost the hottest so far, I was out in the meadows, and came upon a curious thing. The path, or rather green lane, ran between high hedges. On either hand there was a great field of flowering crops, the one red clover, the other sainfoin. There must have been twenty or thirty acres of each stretching away under the tense still air and light, much of a colour, but the sainfoin of a softer, purer pink. Both fields seemed alike attractive to the bees; but while, to the right, the sainfoin gave out a mighty note of organ music, the red clover on my left was utterly silent. Looking through a gap in the foliage, I could not see there a single butterfly or bee. The truth, of course, was that the nectar in the trumpet-petals of the clover was too far down for the honey-bee to reach; nor would even the bumble-bees trouble about it, with a whole province of sainfoin hard by, over-brimming with choicer, more attainable sweets.
As I wandered along, between these great zones of sound and silence, the air seemed to grow hotter and more oppressive with every moment. There was something uncanny in the stillness of all around me. The green sprays in the tops of the highest elms lay against the blue sky sharp and clear, as though enamelled upon it. Not a bird sang in the woodland. Save for the deep throbbing melody from the sainfoin, all the world lay dumb and stupefied under the noontide glare. And then, chancing to turn and look southward, I saw the cause of it. A storm was coming up. Close down on the horizon lay a bank of cloud like a solid billow of ink. It was driving up at incredible speed. Though not a leaf or grass blade stirred around me, the cloud seemed tossed and torn in a whirlwind’s grip. Every moment it lifted higher towards the sun, changing its shape incessantly, black fold upon fold rolling together, colliding, giving place to others blacker still. And flying in advance of all this, borne by a still swifter air-current, were long sombre streamers of cloud rent into every conceivable shape of torn and tattered rags.
And now, as the dense cloud-pack got up, the brilliant light was blotted out at a stroke, and this startling thing happened. Every bee, apparently, at work in the vast field of sainfoin, spread her wings at the ominous signal, and raced for home. They swept over my head in numbers that literally darkened the sky. Again, literally, the sound of their going was like a continuous deep syren-note, striking point-blank in the ear. For a minute at most it endured, and then died away almost as suddenly as it came. A bleak ghostly light paled on everything around me. Little cat’s paws of wind flung through the torpid air. Afar the harsh voice of the oncoming tempest sounded. Slow hot gouts of water began to fall, and every moment the inky pall of cloud lit up with an internal fire.
At first, as I made off homeward in the track of the vanished bee-army, I tried to emulate their speed. But the torrent came surging and crying up in my rear, and in a dozen yards I was waterlogged. Thereafter, going leisurely, I came at last into the village, and so to the house. And here, in spite of the deluge, I must stop and look on at more wonders. It seemed almost impossible for any bird to sustain itself on wings under such a cataract. But there above me the martins were at their old incessant gambols, circling and darting about, hither and thither, high and low, in a whirling madcap crew; and higher still, right in the throat of the tempest, I could make out the swifts, hundreds strong, weaving their old mazy pattern on the sky, as though in the pearl and opal dusk of a summer’s evening.