The South Country

by Edward Thomas

Above the stream the elms open apart and disclose a wandering grey land and clumps of beeches, a grey windy land and a grey windy sky in which the dark clumps are islanded. Flocks of sheep move to and fro, and with them the swallows. Two shepherds, their heavy grey overcoats slung about their shoulders and the sleeves dangling, their flat rush baskets on their backs, stand twenty yards apart to talk, leaning on their sticks, while their swallow-haunted flocks go more slowly and their two dogs converse and walk round one another.

The oats have been trampled by rain, and two men are reaping it by hand. They are not men of the farm, but rovers who take their chance and have done other things than reaping in their time. One is a Hampshire man, but fought with the Wiltshires against “Johnny Boer”—he liked the Boers ... “they were very much like a lot of working men.... We never beat ’em.... No, we never beat ’em.” He is a man of heroic build; tall, lean, rather deep-chested than broad-shouldered, narrow in the loins, with goodly calves which his old riding breeches perfectly display; his head is small, his hair short and crisp and fair, his cheeks and neck darkly tanned, his eye bright blue and quick-moving, his features strong and good, except his mouth, which is over large and loose; very ready to talk, which he does continually in a great proud male voice, however hard he is working. A man as lean and hard and bright as his reaping hook. First he snicks off a dozen straws and lays them on the ground for a bond, then he slashes fast along the edge of the corn for two or three yards, gathers up what is cut into his hook and lays it across the straws: when a dozen sheaves are prepared in the same way he binds them with the bonds and builds them into a stook of two rows leaning together. It is impossible to work faster and harder than he does in cutting and binding; only at the end of each dozen sheaves does he stand at his full height, straight as an ash, and laugh, and round off what he has been saying even more vigorously than he began it. Then crouching again he slays twelve other sheaves. Then he goes over to the four-and-a-half-gallon cask in the hedge: it is a “fuel” that he likes, and he pays for it himself. In his walk and attitude and talk—except in his accent—there is little of the countryman. He is a citizen of the world, without wife or home or any tie except to toil—and after that pleasure—and toil again. A loose bold liver—and lover—there can be no doubt. The spirit of life is strong in him, in limbs and chest and eyes and brain, the spirit which compels one man to paint a picture, one to sacrifice his life for another, one to endure poverty for an idea, another to commit a murder. What is there for him—to be the mark for a bullet, to contract a ravenous disease, to bend slowly under the increasing pile of years, of work, of pleasures? He does not care. He is always seeing “a bit of life” from town to town, from county to county, a peerless fleshly man casting himself away as carelessly as Nature cast him forth into the world. His father before him was the same, ploughboy, circus rider, brickmaker, and day labourer again on the land, one who always “looked for a policeman when he had had a quart.” He set out on his travels again and disappeared. His wife went another way, and she is still to be met with in the summer weather, not looking as if she had ever borne such a son as this reaper. As she grows older she seems to stretch out a connecting hand to long-vanished generations, to the men and women who raised the huge earthen walls of the camps on these hills. She has a trembling small face, wrinkled and yellow like old newspaper, above a windy bunch of rags, chiefly black rags. A Welshwoman who has been in England fifty years, she remembers or thinks of chiefly those Welsh years when, as a girl, she rode a pony into Neath market. She hums a Welsh tune and still laughs at it because she heard it first in those days from one then poor and old and abject—she herself tall and wilful—and the words of it were: “O, my dear boy, don’t get married.” She would like once again to lie in her warm bed and hear the steady rain falling in the black night upon the mountain. She feels the sharp flint against the sole of her foot and appears not to be annoyed or indignant or resolved to be rid of the pain, but only puzzled by the flintiness of God as she travels, in the long pageant of those who go on living, the lonely downland road among the gorse and the foxgloves, in the hot but still misty morning when the grey and the chestnut horses, patient and huge and shining among the sheaves, wait for the reaping machine to be uncovered and the day’s work to begin.

Through the grey land goes a narrow and flat vale of grass and of thatched cottages. The river winds among willows and makes a green world, out of which the Downs rise suddenly with their wheat. Here stands a farm with dormers in its high yellow roof and a square of beeches round about. There a village, even its walls thatched, flutters white linen and blue smoke against a huge chalk scoop in the Downs behind. For miles only the cherry-coloured clusters of the guelder-rose break through the rain and the gently changing grey of the cornland and green of the valley, until several farms of thatched brick gather together under elms and mellowing chestnuts and make a crooked hamlet. Or at a bend in the road a barn like a diminutive down stands among ricks and under elms; behind is a red farm and church tower embowered; in front, the threshing machine booms and smokes and an old drenched woman stands bent aloft receiving the sheaves in her blue stiff claws. Close by, a man leads a horse away from a field and its companion looks over the gate with longing, and turns away and again returning almost jumps it, but failing through fearfulness at seeing the other so near the bend in the road, races down the hedge and back and stands listening to the other’s whinny, and then scattering the turf dashes into an orchard beyond and whinnies as he gallops.

In majesty, rigid and black, the steam ploughs are working up against the treeless sky; and, just seen in the rain, the white horse carved upon the hill seems a living thing, but of mist.

Now, as if for the sake of the evening bells and the gleaners, the rain withholds itself, and over the drenching stubble the women and children, in black and grey and dirty white, crawl, doubled up, careless of the bells and of the soft moist gold of the sun that envelops them, as of the rain and wind that after a little while cover up the gold upon the field and the green and rose of the sky.

And so to the inn. Why do not inns have a regular tariff for the poorish man without a motor-car? Let inn-keepers bleed the rich, by all means, but why should they charge me one shilling and ninepence for a cod steak or a chop or the uneatable cold roast beef of new England, and then charge the same sum for the best part of a duckling and cheese and a pint of ale? I once asked the most enterprising publisher in London whether he would print a book that should tell the sober truth about some of our English inns, and he said that he dared not do anything so horrible. For fear of ruining my publisher I will not mention names, but simply say that at nine inns out of ten the charges are incalculable and excessive unless the traveller makes a point of asking beforehand what they are going to be, a course that provokes discomfort in his relation to the host outweighing what is saved. The tea room, on the other hand, is inexpensive. It lies behind a shop and there is a slaughter-house adjacent—even now the butcher can be heard parting the warm hide from the flesh. Inside, the room is green and the little light and the rain also come sickly through windows of stained glass and fall upon a piano, a bicycle, an embroidered deck chair, vases of dead grass on a marble-topped table, a screen pasted over with scraps from the newspapers, and, upon the walls, a calendar from the butcher depicting a well-dressed love scene, a text or two, pictures of well-dressed children and their animals, and upon the floor, oilcloth odorous and wet. Here, as at the inns, the adornments are dictated by a taste begotten by the union of peasant taste and town taste, and are entirely pretentious and unrelated to the needs of the host or of the guests.

CHAPTER XIV
AN OLD HOUSE AND A BOOK—WILTSHIRE

The country is deserted in the rain, and I have the world to myself, a world of frenzied rain among the elms of the lowland, an avenue of elms up to a great house, hidden sheep tinkling and bleating, shepherds muffled, huge slopes of grass and pearled clover above a coombe where a grey heron sails and clanks alone, a farm desolate among elder and ash at the highest part of the hills, and then miles of pathless pasture and stubble descending past an old camp and a tumulus to the submerged vale, where yellow elms tremble about a church tower, a cluster of red cottages and bowed yellow dahlias and chrysanthemums, and a house standing aloof. This house is some way from the Downs themselves, but just at the foot of a lesser slope, a fair golden hill—golden with cowslips in May—that rises on one side with a swift, short ascent and then shoots forward, as if with the impetus, almost level until, after crowning itself with beeches, it descends in a lazy curve to a field, roughened by the foundations of a vanished house, at one corner of which the chimneys join with another group of elms in the haze of rain.

Hanging from the wall in rags, too wet even to flap, are the remains of an auctioneer’s announcement of a sale at the house behind. Mahogany—oak chests—certain ounces of silver—two thousand books—portraits and landscapes and pictures of horses and game—of all these and how much else has the red house been disembowelled? It is all shadowy within, behind the windows, like the eyes of a corpse, and without sound, or form, or light, and it is for no one that the creeper magnificently arrays itself in bediamonded crimson and gold that throbs and wavers in the downpour. The martins are still there, and their play up and down before the twenty windows is a senseless thing, like the play of children outside a chamber of agony or grief. They seem to be machines going on and on when their master and purpose are dead. But then, too, there is gradually a consolation, a restfulness, a deceit, a forgetting, in the continuity of their movement and their unchanged voices. The two hundred autumns perpetuated in the tones of the bricks are in vain. Strangers will come, no doubt—I hope they will not—and be pleased, actually proud, at this mellowness, which ought to have died with the last of the family that built the house.