“She’s a good girl, but she hasn’t got your patience, my dear.”
“Oh, here, Sam, here’s the change,” she said, giving him the bunch of maize.
In Cornwall many of the women looked less English than the men. The noticeable men were fair-haired and, of fair complexion, blue-eyed and rather small-headed, upright and of good bearing. The noticeable women had black hair, pale, seldom swarthy, faces, very dark eyes. Perhaps the eyes were more foreign than anything else in them: they were singularly immobile and seldom changed in expression with their voices. Several of the dark-eyed, black-haired women had a beauty of a fearless character like gypsy women, in their movement and expression. But the wives of small farmers and miners on piecework look old very soon and are puckered and shadowy in the face. Some of these middle-aged and old women suggested an early and barbarous generation. The eyes were small and deep-set, and the face narrowed forward like an animal’s; which gave the whole a peering expression of suspicion and even alarm. The eyes of most human beings are causes of bewilderment and dismay if curiously looked at; but the strangest I ever saw were in an old Cornish woman. They were black and round as a child’s, with a cold brightness that made them seem not of the substance of other eyes, but like a stone. They were set in a narrow, bony face of parchment among grey hair crisp and disarrayed. I saw them only for a few minutes while I asked a few questions about the way, and it was as much as I could do to keep up the conversation, so much did those motionless eyes invite me to plunge into an abyss of human personality—such intense loneliness and strangeness did they create, since they proclaimed shrilly and clearly that beyond a desire to be fed and clothed we had nothing in common. Had they peered up at me out of a cromlech or hut at Bosporthennis I could not have been more puzzled and surprised.
Men and women were hospitable and ready to smile as the Welsh are; and they have an alluring naïveté as well as some righteousness. One family was excessively virtuous or had a wish to appear so: I do not know which alternative to like the less, since it was in a matter of game. They rented land on a large estate and had a right to the rabbits: the hares were sacred to the great landowner. The farmer’s wife assured me that one of her sons had lately brought in a lame hare and proposed to put it out of its pain, but that she had said: “No, take it out and let it die outside anywhere. The best thing is to be afraid in things of this kind and then you won’t go wrong.” Doing much the same kind or quantity of manual work as their husbands and being much out of doors, the women’s manners were confident and free. Their speech was as a rule fluent and grammatical and clearly delivered, with less accent than in any part of England. Coming into a mining village one day and wanting tea, I asked a woman who was drawing water from a farmyard well if she could make me some, thinking she was the farmer’s wife. She said she would, but took me to one of a small row of cottages over the way, where her husband was half-naked in the midst of his Saturday wash. Taking no notice of him she led me into the sitting-room and, with a huge loaf held like a violin, began buttering and cutting thin slices while she talked to me, to the little children and to her husband, from the adjacent kitchen. She was tall, straight as a pillar, black-haired, with clear untanned but slightly swarthy skin, black eyes, kindly gleaming cheeks and red lips smiling above her broad breast and hips. Her clothes were black but in rags that hardly clung to her shoulders and waist. She was barely five and twenty, but had six young children about her, one in a cradle by the hearth and another still crawling at her feet. Her only embarrassment came when I asked to pay for my tea—she began adding up the cost, a pennyworth of bread and butter, a halfpennyworth of tea, etc.! The kitchen consisted simply of a large grate and baking oven, plain tables and chairs on a flagged floor. But the sitting-room was a museum—with photographs of a volunteer corps, of friends and relations on the wall over the fire; foxgloves in jam-pots surrounded by green crinkled paper in the fireplace; on the mantelpiece, cheap little vases and scraps of ore and more photographs. On the walls were three pictures: one of two well-dressed children being timidly inspected by fallow deer; another of a grandmother showing a book to a child whose attention is diverted by the frolics of two kittens at her side; and a third of Jesus, bleeding and crowned with thorns, high on a cross over a marble city beneath a romantic forest ridge, behind which was the conflagration of a crimson sunset.
Other sitting-rooms were similarly adorned, with the addition of a picture of John Wesley as a child escaping from the window of a burning house, with many anxious men holding up their hands from below. The smell of flowers and of sun-warmed furniture and old upholstery mingles in such rooms.
But the kitchens are often as charming as in Wales. I remember one especially near Carn Galver. The farmhouse was of whitened stone under a steep thatch. In front were fuchsia trees in the corner of a stony yard; to one side, the haystacks and piles of furze and bracken and peat. The farmer’s wife was carrying peat on an iron hook into the kitchen and I followed her. A pan of yellow scalded cream stood inside. The fireplace was a little room in itself, with seats at each side and a little fire of wood and three upright turves in one corner of the great stone hearth: over the fire the kettle boiled. Horse ornaments of polished brass surmounted the fireplace. The wallpaper had given up its pattern long since to a smoky uneven gold; nailed to it were calendars and lists of fairs and sales; against it were two small tables, one to support a Bible and an almanac, the other spread with a white cloth on which was a plate and a bowl of cream. Behind the door and between it and the fire was a high-backed settle of dark wood, with elbow-rests. The floor was flagged and sanded. The light came in through a little square window on to the Bible by the opposite wall, and through the open door on to the figure of the housewife, a woman of forty. A delicate white face shone beneath a broad untrimmed straw hat that was tied tightly under her chin so as to hide her ears and most of her black hair. Her black skirt was kilted up behind; a white apron contrasted with black shoes, black stockings and black clothes. At first her face was hardly seen, not only because but a part of it emerged from the shell of her hat, but because the spirit that emanated from it was more than the colour and features and so much in harmony with the sea and crag and moor and dolmen of her land. It is evading an insuperable difficulty to say that this spirit was not so much human as fay. It was the spirit of which her milky complexion, the bright black eyes, white teeth and fine red lips of her readily smiling and naïvely watching fearless face, her slender form, her light and rapid movements upon small feet, were only the more obvious expressions. Her spirit danced before her—not quite visibly, not quite audibly—as she moved or spoke or merely smiled; if it could have been seen it would have been a little singing white flame changing to blue and crimson in its perpetual flickering. It was a spirit of laughter, of laughter unquenchable since the beginning of time, of laughter in spite of and because of all things, the laughter of life like a jewel in desolate places. It was a spirit most ancient and yet childlike, birdlike: it belonged to a world outside any which other human beings ever seemed to touch, but the laughter in it made it friendly, for it was far deeper than humour, it was gaiety of heart. Her goings to and fro on those light feet had the grace, quickness, suddenness of a bird, of a wren that slips from twig to twig and jets out its needle of song, of a moorhen flicking its tail and hooting sharply. Her laugh startled and delighted like the laugh of the woodpecker as it leaps across the glades—like the whistling of birds up amongst the dark clouds and the moon. But most of all she called to mind the meadow pipit of her own crags, that rises from green ledges out over the sea and then, falling slantwise with body curved like a crescent, utters his passionate pulsating song, so rapid and passionate that it seems impossible and unfit that it should end except in death, yet suddenly ceasing as it lands again upon the samphire or the thrift. The spirit was as quicksilver in the corners of her eyes, as quicksilver in the heart. Such a maid she must have been as the bard would have thought to send out the thrush to woo for him, when he heard the bird of ermine breast singing from the new-leaved hazel at dawn, on the edge of a brook among the steep woods—singing artfully with a voice like a silver bell—solemnly, too, so as to seem to be performing a sacrifice—and amorously, bringing balm to lovers’ hearts and inspiring the bard to send by him a message to the sun of all maidens that she, white as the snow of the first winter night, should come out to the green woods to him. She had lived for generations on the moor, for generations upon generations, and this was what she had gained from heather and furze and crag and seawind and sunshine tempered by no trees—inextinguishable laughter. But she was inarticulate. She milked the cows, made butter, baked bread, kept the peat fire burning and tended her children. When she talked, I asked for more cream. Perhaps after several more generations have passed she will be a poet and astonish the world with a moorland laughter of words that endure.
Everything in that house was old or smooth and bright with use, and the hollowed threshold of the doorway in the sun put me in mind of a hundred old things and of their goodliness to mortal eyes—the wrecked ship’s ribs, their bolt-holes rusty, that stand among nettles as gate-posts—the worn dark stones that rock to the tread among the ripples of an umbrageous ford—many a polished stile and gate—the group of rigid but still gracious bowery thorns dotted with crimson haws in the middle of a meadow, their holes and lower branches rubbed hard and smooth and ruddy like iron by the cows—the ash staff beginning to bend like its master, the old man upon the roads who once wore scarlet and wound the horn for Mr. ——’s hounds. Odd it is how old use sanctifies a little thing. There was once a hut where a good man, but a poor and a weak and unwise, stayed all one fair summer and talked of English roads—he was a lord of the roads, at least of South Country roads—and of ships, which he knew. Now on the first night of his stay, needing a candlestick he kicked off the top of a pointed wooden paling, so as to make a five-angled piece on which he stuck the candle in its own grease. All through his stay he used the candlestick, when he read the Divina Commedia and Pantagruel and Henry Brocken and recollected airs of Italy and Spain, amidst the sound of nightjars and two leafy streams: the light flickered out as he mused about the open sea, calm but boundless and without known harbour, on which he was drifting cheerfully, regardless of Time, pied with nights and days. The hut was burnt and the man went—to drown a little afterwards with a hundred unlike himself in the sea—but among nettle and dock the candlestick was picked up safe. It had broken off straight and the simple shape was pleasant; it was dark with age; along with the mound and little pillar of wax remaining it had the shape of a natural thing; and it was his.
Animate as well as inanimate things are open to this sanctification by age or use. I am not here thinking of ceremonious use—for which I have small natural respect, so that I have been denied the power of appreciating either a great religious pomp or the dancing of Mademoiselle Genée. But some men, particularly sailors and field labourers, but also navvies and others who work heavily with their hands, have this glory of use. Their faces, their clothes, their natures all appear to act and speak harmoniously, so that they cause a strong impression of personality which is to be deeply enjoyed in a world of masks, especially of black clerical masks. One of the best examples of this kind was a gamekeeper who daily preceded me by twenty or thirty yards in a morning walk up through a steep wood of beeches. He was a short, stiffly-built and stoutish man who wore a cap, thick skirted coat and breeches, leather gaiters and heavy boots, all patched and stained, all of nearly the same colour as his lightish-brown hair and weathered skin, but not so dark as the gun over his shoulder. The shades of this colour were countless and made up like the colour of a field of ripe wheat, which they would have resembled had they not been liberally dusted all over, just as his brown beard was grizzled. He went slowly up, swinging slightly at the shoulders and always smoking a pipe of strong shag tobacco of which the fumes hovered in the moist air with inexpressible sweetness and a good brown savour: if I may say so, the fit emanation of the brown woodland man who, when he stood still, looked like the stump of a tree.