The girl laughed and said something; then they rose up and raced again, the heavier one this time encouraging himself with groans at each leap over the sheaves, flinging himself over with so much ferocity that he tumbled at the end well in front.
“You can jump, no mistake,” said the girl to the winner. “But what’s the matter with you?” she asked the other, putting a foxglove between her lips. Both were too much out of breath to speak, but in a few minutes started again. They ran faster than ever; they leapt well over the tops of the shocks, so high as to stumble at each descent. The winner of the last race could only just keep level with the other, and seemed about to collapse at each thundering jump, when his rival, beginning a great leap too early, fell in the middle of the shock and lost the race. They returned, the winner first, and lay sprawling, panting full in the girl’s face.
“Well, Luke, you have won, and there’s your kiss,” she said to the heavier lad.
“And, John, you have been beaten; we did not say what the loser should have, so here’s two for you,” she went on, this time taking the flower out of her mouth. “And now, lads, race again!”
This time the race was never in doubt. John took each leap as if he aimed at the harvest moon that rose before him. Luke tripped at several sheaves, and, at the bottom, climbed over the stone wall and disappeared. As to John, he came back and began racing and leaping alone, until the girl, feeling cold or in need of some company, went off and left the proud fellow to the moon and the line of shocks.
CHAPTER XL
THE INN
The night was dark and solid rain tumultuously invested the inn. As I stood in a dim passage I could see through the bar into the cloudy parlour, square and white, surrounded by settles, each curving about a round table made of one piece of elm on three legs. A reproduction of “Rent Day” and a coloured picture of a bold Spanish beauty hung on the wall, which, for the rest, was sufficiently adorned by the sharp shadows of men’s figures and furniture that mingled grotesquely. All the men but one leaned back upon the settles or forward upon the tables, their hands on their tankards, watching the one who sang a ballad—a ballad known to them so well that they seemed not to listen, but simply to let the melody surge about them and provoke what thoughts it would.
At some time, perhaps many times in his life, every man is likely to meet with a thing in art or nature or human life or books which astonishes and gives him a profound satisfaction, not so much because it is rich or beautiful or strange, as because it is a symbol of a thing which, without the symbol, he could never grasp and enjoy. The German archers making a target of Leonardo’s sculptured horse and horsemen at Milan; the glory of purple that has flown from a painted church window and settled upon a peasant’s shoulders for an hour; the eloquence, as of an epigram rich in anger and woe, of one bare branch that juts out from a proud green wood into the little midnight stars and makes them smaller with its splendid pang; a woodman felling one by one the black and golden oak trees in the spring and slaying their ancient shadows; or, in a discreet and massive crowd, one jet of laughter, so full of joy or defiance or carelessness that it seems to cut through the heavy air like the whistle of a bullet—the world is one flame of these blossoms, could we but see. Music has many of them in her gift. Music, the rebel, the martyr, the victor—music, the romantic cry of matter striving to become spirit—is itself such a symbol, and there is no melody so poor that it will not at some time or another, to our watchful or receptive minds, have its festal hour in which it is crowned or at least crucified, for our solemn delight. “Dolly Gray” I have heard sung all day by poor sluttish women as they gathered peas in the broad, burning fields of July, until it seemed that its terrible, acquiescent melancholy must have found a way to the stars and troubled them.
And of all music, the old ballads and folk songs and their airs are richest in the plain, immortal symbols. The best of them seem to be written in a language that should be universal, if only simplicity were truly simple to mankind. Their alphabet is small; their combinations are as the sunlight or the storm, and their words also are symbols. Seldom have they any direct relation to life as the realist believes it to be. They are poor in such detail as reveals a past age or a country not our own. They are in themselves epitomes of whole generations, of a whole countryside. They are the quintessence of many lives and passions made into a sweet cup for posterity. A myriad hearts and voices have in age after age poured themselves into the few notes and words. Doubtless, the old singers were not content, but we, who know them not, can well see in their old songs a kind of immortality for them in wanderings on the viewless air. The men and women—who hundreds of years ago were eating and drinking and setting their hearts on things—still retain a thin hold on life through the joy of us who hear and sing their songs, or tread their curving footpaths, or note their chisel marks on cathedral stones, or rest upon the undulating churchyard grass. The words, in league with a fair melody, lend themselves to infinite interpretations, according to the listener’s heart. What great literature by known authors enables us to interpret thus by virtue of its subtlety, ballads and their music force us to do by their simplicity. The melody and the story or the song move us suddenly and launch us into an unknown. They are not art, they come to us imploring a new lease of life on the sweet earth, and so we come to give them something which the dull eye sees not in the words and notes themselves, out of our own hearts, as we do when we find a black hearthstone among the nettles, or hear the clangour of the joyous wild swan, invisible overhead, in the winter dawn.