On that poem of Crashaw’s to his ivory-handed mistress runs my thought as the road, towards evening, once more progresses without any hedges between it and the fields, when a broad double hedge or narrow copse of oak and ash, departs at a right angle from the way. Up to the briers and thorns at the hem of the trees comes the close, cool yellow grass and obtains a shadow there. Out on to that grass the blackbirds have strayed and are straying farther and farther; the rabbits, too, are well away from shelter, hopping a few steps and crouching. In the hedge itself a hedge-sparrow just once lets loose its frail dewy song, a nightingale utters one phrase of marvelling and is still. The musky wild roses star all the hedge and the scent begins to wander in the moist air with the scent of honeysuckle and of shadowy grasses. Under a now misted sky that makes the light seem to dwell no longer in it but in the grass, the flat, yellow field running to the little wood is a place impregnable and inaccessible. Invisible walls shut me off, though no hedge intervenes; no dreadful barrier could do it more effectually. It would be as easy to step into the past as into this candid field, a withdrawn world with its own sun.
A mile farther a little town stands upon the edge of this enclosed land. A brook runs down to its edge and half encircles it. Clean and fair, shining with linen, the meadows come right up to the town which turns its back upon them, with long rows of beans and peas dividing the yellow houses from one another. The chimney smoke rises above the criss-cross roofs of stone and thatch and then travels round the church tower, which emerges from the houses like some grave schoolmaster out of his children, most of them thronging close and others wandering in wedge or line into the fields. In the town the road loses itself, bewildered among islands made by inns and groups of cottages, the church and the shops. Among these pour a flock of sheep, swelling as the streets enlarge, contracting as they contract, and always filling them. Within the town there is not a blade of grass, nor a garden, nor a tree; and yet the richly burning roofs, the grey or white walls, the sign of “The Spotted Cow,” or the sign of “The Sun,” make not an interruption but a diversion in the fields, when suddenly, between two white walls, shines the green evening land, and across it a busy train rushes and vanishes with long, delicious, dying reverberations among the dark woods and rosy clouds at the horizon.
CHAPTER XII
AN OLD FARM
The sun rose two hours ago, but he is not to be found in the sky. Rather he seems to have disembodied himself and to be lazily concealed in the sweet mist that lies white and luminous over the half-mile of level meadows at the foot of this hill. Those meadows are brown with yet untouched grasses, grey and silken with the placid ruffled waves of yesterday’s new swathes, and liquid emerald where the hay has already been carted; and now the brown, now the grey, now the emerald warms and becomes visible under the feet of the light that dwells in the mist. Beyond the level rises a low but sudden hill of large, round-topped, colourless, misty trees, known by their outline alone, and in the heart of them a moving gleam as of sudden surf now and then, for there also the sun is wandering and hiding himself but not his light. I turn my head and, looking again, the sun is once more in the sky, the mist has gone. The vast, hunched, hot, purring summer country is clearly enjoying the light and warmth. The swallows flying are joyous and vivid in colour and form as if I had the eyes of some light-hearted painter of the world’s dawn. Where the gleam was, that haunt of the sun’s, that half-hour’s inn to which he turns from the long white road of the sky to rest, is seen to be the white farm house that stands in the midst of woods and ricks.
Yet, though so clear, the house, half a mile off, seems to have been restored by this fair and early light and the cooing of doves to the seeming happy age in which it was built. The long, tearing crow of the cock, the clink of dairy pans, the palpitating, groaning shout of the shepherd, Ho! ho! ho! ho! ho! now and then, even the whirr of the mowing machines, sound as if the distance that sweetens them were the distance of time and not only of space. They set a tune on this fair morning to “What a dainty life the milkmaid leads” or that old song:—
“Pack clouds away, and welcome day!
With night we banish sorrow.
Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft
To give my love good morrow.