IV
Of summer evenings in Windlecombe, all through haying and harvest time, you see men lounging about the village, one and all obsessed by the same trance-like, serenely dilatory mood. All have pipes well alight, leaving a trail of smoke behind them on the dusky golden air. All have hands thrust deep in trouser-pockets, carry their unshaven chins high, are tired as dogs, and look as somnolently happy as noontide owls. And of all the days of the week, there are more of these placid optimists abroad, and these characteristics are most to be noted in them, on the evening of the last working day.
To-night I went up and down the green—the most uncertain of a deliberately irresolute company—half a dozen times, perhaps, before, by common but unvoiced consent, we turned our lagging footsteps towards the inn. All the while I was rejoicing in a possession, priceless indeed, yet hard-won as might be—a heart and mind filled with the spirit of the Cottar’s Saturday Night. You cannot get this chief of all country pleasures in exchange for money. It is to be had in only one way, at the cost of long laborious days in the fields; and every tired muscle, every aching joint in my body, stood then as witness that I had done my best to earn what I had of it, if it might be earned at all. The old oak window-seat, in the parlour of the Three Thatchers, was as softly welcome as the Chancellor’s woolsack: I would not have exchanged that mug of home-brewed ale for a draught of ambrosia at the feet of the gods.
The crimson sunset light streamed hot upon me, as I sat on the window-ledge half among the parlour company, and half among those congregated on the benches under the virginia creeper outside. Every moment or two some other tired haymaker strolled up, and added his solid breadth and his tobacco smoke to the throng. But we were not all field-workers in the Three Thatchers to-night, nor had only the common causes of tired limbs and sun-parched throats brought us together. Young Daniel Dray was knitting his dark brows over some papers and account-books at the trestle-table; and young Tom Clemmer sat close by, thoughtfully swinging a cricket-bat pendulum-fashion between his outstretched legs. A silence fell upon the company.
‘Well,’ said Tom Clemmer at last, ‘I dunno. ’Tis ne’ersome-matter awk’ard fer Windlecombe. Wi’ young Maast’ Coles hayin’, an’ Tim Searle hayin’; an’ George Locker, an’ Tom an’ George Wright, an’ Bill here all hayin’, how i’ fortun’ be us to make up a team?’
You could pick out the members of the cricket-club committee amidst the crowd by reason of their grave, troubled faces; whereas all other faces wore the easy contented smile of the village Saturday night. We had weighty business to consider. The annual challenge had arrived from the Stavisham club. They were a cocksure, overweening lot, the town-eleven; and we had set our hearts on beating them at next Saturday’s match. But there was the hay to carry, if the weather held. Many of our best players would be in the fields. It looked as though the town were to add Windlecombe again to their long list of village victories. Secretary Dray gnawed savagely at the butt of his pen.
‘I knows how ’twill be,’ he said. ‘Five men an’ a tail o’ boys—the ould story! Tom here ’ull knock up his couple o’ score; and then ’twill be hout, hout, hout, fer th’ rest o’ us i’ two hovers. An’ I can jest hear they chalk-headed town chaps larfin’!’
It was a dismal picture. The fragrance went out of our tobacco, and no man thought of his ale. The three canaries carolled so joyously in their cages overhead, that I could have wrung their necks with all the pleasure in life. Young Daniel stared straight into the eye of the setting sun with the very face of disaster.
‘But ’tis th’ bawlin’,’ he went on. ‘Ne’er a change o’ bawlers, there’ll be; an’ me an’ George Havers caan’t go on fer ever. Na, na! ’tis all over agen, I tell ye! The boys ull ha’ their fun, an’ Windlecombe another smashin’!’
He swept the club papers into his pocket, and rose to fill a pipe.
‘But mind ye!’ he added, looking grimly round on the company, ‘I’ll ha’ that there flitter-mouse grocer-chap’s wicket this time, or I’ll be— Ah! you see if I doan’t, if I ha’ to throw at his ’ed!’
Long after night had fallen, and all the village was quiet under the dim half-moon, I came out again upon the green, to wander and ruminate over the week that had gone by. I bared my arm to the biceps, and even in that disguising light I could see the sunburn dark upon it. Yawning and stretching involuntarily, a delicious ache spread over me from top to toe. The Seven Sisters loomed hard by, and I went and lay down at full length on one of the seats, looking up through the black wilderness of boughs at the flinching starshine, and watching the nightjars as they wheeled and whirred above me through the scented dark.
They are a merry company, the nightjars. Perhaps there is no other sound in Nature that comes nearer to pure mirth and jollity than this rhythmic, spinning-wheel chorus of theirs. Up there, where the dense pine foliage made a sort of black coast to the dark blue ocean of the summer night, a whole nation of them was astir. They did not utter their peculiar note when on the wing; but every moment or two one of the concourse came to rest on a branch with a sudden snap, and forthwith set his spinning-jenny blithely going.
There is another sound which you hear of summer evenings, often far into the night, and which is nearly akin to that of the nightjar. I heard it only a minute ago in one of the garden hedges as I came across the green. But when the two songs occur together, there is no confusing them. They are both continuous, mechanical sounds, and each is curiously varied in tone, speed, and intensity. But while the nightjar’s music is a rich full tremolo, uttered from some high point, generally the branch of a tree, the grasshopper-warbler sings always close to earth. His note is thinner, shriller, faster. If your fingers were as deft as his slender throat, you could imitate the sound exactly by the rapid chinking together of two threepenny-bits.