Yet there are days and places which send us in search of another kind of felicity than that which dwells under the Downs, when, for example, the dark wild of Ashdown or of Woolmer, some parcel of heathery land, with tufted pines and pale wandering roads, rises all dark and stormy out of the gentle vale, or on such an evening as when the sky is solemn blue save at the horizon where it is faint gold, and between the blue and the gold, across the north-west, lies an ashen waste of level cloud. This sky and its new moon and evening star below, is barred by the boles of beeches; through them the undulations of deserted ploughland are all but white with dewy grass and weed. Underfoot winds a disused path amid almost overlapping dog’s mercury. The earth is like an exhausted cinder, cold, silent, dead, compared with the great act in the sky. Suddenly a dog-fox barks—with melancholy and malice in the repeated hoarse yells—a sound that awakens the wildest past out of the wood and the old path. He passes by me at a trot, pausing a little to bark. He vanishes, but not his voice, into the wood, and he returns, still barking, and passes me again, filling the wood and the coombe below with a sound that has nothing to match it except that ashen waste in the beech-barred, cold blue and golden sky, against which the fox is carved in moving ebony. Or again, when a rude dark headland rises out of the mist of the plain into the evening sky. The woods seem but just freed from the horror of primeval sea, if that is not primeval sea washing their bases. Capella hangs low, pale, large, moist and trembling, almost engulfed between two horns of the wood upon the headland, the frailest beacon of hope, still fluttering from the storm out of which the land is emerging. Then, or at home looking at a map of Britain, the West calls, out of Wiltshire and out of Cornwall and Devon beyond, out of Monmouth and Glamorgan and Gower and Caermarthen, with a voice of dead Townsends, Eastaways, Thomases, Phillipses, Treharnes, Marendaz, sea men and mountain men.
Westward, for men of this island, lies the sea; westward are the great hills. In a mere map the west of Britain is fascinating. The great features of that map, which make it something more than a picture to be imperfectly copied by laborious childish pens, are the great promontories of Caernarvon, of Pembroke, of Gower and of Cornwall, jutting out into the western sea, like the features of a grim large face, such a face as is carved on a ship’s prow. These protruding features, even on a small-scale map, thrill the mind with a sense of purpose and spirit. They yearn, they peer out ever to the sea, as if using eyes and nostrils to savour the utmost scent of it, as if themselves calling back to the call of the waves. To the eyes of a child they stand for adventure. They are lean and worn and scarred with the strife and watching. Then gradually into the mind of the child comes the story that justifies and, still more, inspires and seems to explain those westward-pointing promontories. For, out towards them continually have the conquered races of the world retreated, and their settlements give those corners a strangeness and a charm to our fantastic sympathies. Out from them conquerors in their turn have gone to found a legend like the Welsh Madoc, an empire like the men of Devon. The blood of conquered and conqueror is in our veins, and it flushes the cheek at the sight or thought of the west. Each man of us is as ancient and complicated, as lofty-spired and as deep-vaulted as cathedrals and castles old, and in those lands our crypts and dark foundations are dimly remembered. We look out towards them from the high camps at Battlesbury and Barbury: the lines of the Downs go trooping along to them at night. Even in the bosom of the South Country, when the tranquil bells are calling over the corn at twilight, the westward-going hills, where the sun has fallen, draw the heart away and fill us with a desire to go on and on for ever, that same way. When, in the clear windy dawn, thin clouds like traveller’s joy are upon the high air, it seems that up there also, in those placid spaces, they travel and know the joy of the road, and the sun—feeding on the blue, as a child said yesterday, as Lucretius said before—goes the desired way. London also calls, making the needle whirl in the compass. For in London also a man may live as up “a great river wide as any sea”; and over some of the fairest of the South Country hangs the all-night glimmer of the city, warning, threatening, beckoning anon. Some of this country has already perished, or is so ramparted about that there is no stranger country in the world unless it be those perpendicular valleys cloven among the Blue Mountains, their floors level and of the purest grass, but accessible only at the end nearest the plain, where the cleft is sometimes so narrow that not even a dog can enter.
This, then, is my South Country. It covers the North Downs and the South Downs, the Icknield Way and the Pilgrims’ Way, and the cross-roads between them and the Thames and the sea, a land of hops, fruit, corn, high pasture, meadow, woodland, heath and shore. But there is no man of whose powers I stand more in awe than the topographical writer, from Mr. A. G. Bradley or Mr. E. V. Lucas downwards. I shall not attempt to compete with them. I should only be showing my ignorance and carelessness were I to label every piece of country which I chance to mention or describe. Any one can point out my omissions, my blindness, my exaggeration. Nor can I bring myself to mention the names of the places where I walked or sat down. In a sense this country is all “carved out of the carver’s brain” and has not a name. This is not the South Country which measures about two hundred miles from east to west and fifty from north to south. In some ways it is incomparably larger than any country that was ever mapped, since upon nothing less than the infinite can the spirit disport itself. In other ways it is far smaller—as when a mountain with tracts of sky and cloud and the full moon glass themselves in a pond, a little pond.
It would need a more intellectual eye than mine to distinguish county from county by its physical character, its architecture, its people, its unique combination of common elements, and I shall not attempt it. As often as not I have no doubt mingled parts of Kent with my Wiltshire, and so on. And positively I cannot say to which belongs one picture that occurs to me as characteristic of the South Country—
A crossing of roads encloses a waste place of no man’s land, of dwarf oaks, hawthorn, bramble and fern, and the flowers of knapweed and harebell, and golden tormentil embroidering the heather and the minute seedling oaks. Follow one of these roads past straight avenues of elms leading up to a farm (built square of stone, under a roof of thatch or stone slate, and lying well back from the road across a level meadow with some willows in the midst, elms round about, willow herb waving rosy by the stream at the border), or merely to a cluster of ricks; and presently the hedges open wide apart and the level white road cools itself under the many trees of a green, wych elms, sycamores, limes and horse-chestnuts, by a pool, and, on the other side, the sign of the “White Hart,” its horns held back upon its haunches. A stone-built farm and its barns and sheds lie close to the green on either side, and another of more stateliness where the hedges once more run close together alongside the road. This farmhouse has three dormers, two rows of five shadowy windows below, and an ivied porch not quite in the centre; a modest lawn divided by a straight path; dense, well-watered borders of grey lavender, rosemary, ladslove, halberds of crimson hollyhock, infinite blending stars of Michaelmas daisy; old apple trees seeming to be pulled down almost to the grass by glossy-rinded fruit: and, behind, the bended line of hills a league away, wedding the lowly meadows, the house and the trees to the large heavens and their white procession of clouds out of the south and the sea. The utmost kindliness of earth is expressed in these three houses, the trees on the flat green, the slightly curving road across it, the uneven posts and rails leaning this way and that at the edge of the pond. The trees are so arranged about the road that they weave a harmony of welcome, of blessing, a viaticum for whosoever passes by and only for a moment tastes their shade, acknowledges unconsciously their attitudes, hears their dry summer murmuring, sees the house behind them. The wayfarer knows nothing of those who built them and those who live therein, of those who planted the trees just so and not otherwise, of the causes that shaped the green, any more than of those who reaped and threshed the barley, and picked and dried and packed the hops that made the ale at the “White Hart.” He only knows that centuries of peace and hard work and planning for the undreaded future have made it possible. The spirit of the place, all this council of time and Nature and men, enriches the air with a bloom deeper than summer’s blue of distance; it drowses while it delights the responding mind with a magic such as once upon a time men thought to express by gods of the hearth, by Faunus and the flying nymphs, by fairies, angels, saints, a magic which none of these things is too strange and “supernatural” to represent. For after the longest inventory of what is here visible and open to analysis, much remains over, imponderable but mighty. Often when the lark is high he seems to be singing in some keyless chamber of the brain; so here the house is built in shadowy replica. If only we could make a graven image of this spirit instead of a muddy untruthful reflection of words! I have sometimes thought that a statue, the statue of a human or heroic or divine figure, might more fitly than in many another stand in such a place. A figure, it should be, like that benign proud Demeter in marble now banished to a recess in a cold gallery, before which a man of any religion, or class, or race, or time might bow and lay down something of his burden and take away what makes him other than he was. She would be at home and blithe again, enshrined in the rain or in this flowery sunlight of an English green, near the wych elm and sycamore and the walls of stone, the mortar mixed, as in all true buildings, with human blood.
CHAPTER II
THE END OF WINTER—SUFFOLK—HAMPSHIRE
SUFFOLK.
There are three sounds in the wood this morning—the sound of the waves that has not died away since the sea carried off church and cottage and cliff and the other half of what was once an inland wood; the sound of trees, a multitudinous frenzied sound, of rustling dead oak-leaves still on the bough, of others tripping along the path like mice, or winding up in sudden spirals and falling again, of dead boughs grating and grinding, of pliant young branches lashing, of finest twigs and fir needles sighing, of leaf and branch and trunk booming like one; and through these sounds, the song of a thrush. Rain falls and, for a moment only, the dyked marshland below and beyond the wood is pale and luminous with its flooded pools, the sails of windmills climb and plunge, the pale sea is barred with swathes of foam, and on the whistling sands the tall white waves vaunt, lean forward, topple and lie quivering. But the rain increases: the sound and the mist of it make a wall about the world, except the world in the brain and except the thrush’s song which, so bright and clear, has a kind of humanity in it by contrast with the huge bulk of the noises of sea and wood.
Rain and wind cease together, and here on the short grass at the cliff’s edge is a strange birth—a gently convex fungus about two inches broad, the central boss of it faintly indented, the surface not perfectly regular but dimpled so as to break the light, and the edge wavering away from the pure circular form; in hue a pale chestnut paling to a transparent edge of honey colour; and the whole surface so smooth and polished by rain as to seem coated in ice. What a thought for the great earth on such a day! Out of the wood on to this grass the thrushes steal, running with heads down and stopping with heads prouder than stags’; out also into the short corn; and so glad are they that they quarrel and sing on the ground without troubling to find a perch.