Tout doux.’”
Then perhaps we will lazily inquire why songs about the price of malt, or the coming of a Beautiful Ass out of the East should stir and uplift and compose the hearts of men dreaming of an ideal beauty on an April evening, and so to more songs and then to bed, finding at the last moment the serene and beautiful, perhaps, in the glimpse of holy evening landscape rich in unseen nightingales as we fall asleep.
CHAPTER V
NO MAN’S GARDEN
For a mile, alongside a bright high-road, runs a twelve-foot strip of grass and clover and buttercups, with cinquefoil’s golden embroidery in the turf at the edge. Little circular heaps of silver wood ash mark the cold fires of tramps, here and there. Here also they sleep in the sun, in summer and autumn, and in winter lean in the dense hedge that keeps the north wind away. The hedge is rich and high, of thorn overgrown by traveller’s joy and bryony; and at its feet, stitchwort, campions, vetchlings and bird’s-foot trefoil grow luxuriantly.
This is no man’s garden. Every one who is nobody sits there with a special satisfaction, watching the swift, addle-faced motorist, the horseman, the farmer, the tradesman, the publican, go by; for here he is secure as in the grave, and even as there free—if he can—to laugh or scoff or wonder or weep at the world.
As I was trying to persuade some buoyant bryony strands with snaky heads to return to the hedge from which they had wandered into danger, a tramp came up.
“Have you seen my old woman?” he asked.
“Not know her? She is the cursedest, foulest-mouthed old woman in the country, fond of too much drink, and she has just been spending the winter in prison—she prefers it to the workhouse which I have just left. But she just suits me. There is no one like her. They often tell me to take another instead of her, but I never will....
“I don’t know that you would like to see her. She is not a beauty, and she is not dressed up well. She is as crooked as an oak branch, and she has one leg longer than the other, and as to her face I could make a better one myself with a handful of dirt. She drags as she walks, what with keeping up with me all these years. You may know her, because she is always smoking. She cannot eat; she lives on tobacco and beer....