Rude as he looked he had an instinctive perception—supersensuous perception—that there was a hare on that mound, which twenty people might have passed without the least suspicion. “Go into the kitchen,” said Bevis, and Tom went with a broad smile of content on his features, for he well knew that to be sent into the kitchen was equivalent to a cheque drawn on the cellar and the pantry.
Bevis and Mark took their guns, Pan followed very happily, and they walked beside the hedges down towards the place, which was at some distance. The keenness of the morning air, from which the sun had not yet fully distilled the frost of the night, freshened their eagerness for sport. A cart laden with swedes crossed in front of them, and though the sun shone the load of roots indicated that winter was approaching. They passed an oak growing out in the field.
Under the tree there stood an aged man with one hand against the hoary trunk, and looking up into the tree as well as his bowed back, which had stiffened in its stoop, and his rounded shoulders would let him. His dress was old and sober tinted, his smock frock greyish, his old hat had lost all colour. He was hoary like the lichen-hung oak trunk. From his face the blood had dried away, leaving it a dull brown, the tan of seventy harvest fields burned into the skin, a sapless brown wrinkled face like a withered oak leaf.
Though he looked at them, and Bevis nodded, his eyes gave no sign of recognition; like a dead animal’s, there was no light in them, the glaze was settling. In the evening it might occur to him that he had seen them in the morning. His years pressed heavy on him, very heavy like a huge bundle of sticks; he was lost under his age. All those years “Jumps” had never once been out of sight of the high Down yonder (not far from Jack’s), the landmark of the place. Within sight of that hill he was born, within such radius he had laboured, and therein he was decaying, slowly, very slowly, like an oak branch. James was his real name, corrupted to “Jumps;” as “Jumps” he had been known for two generations, and he would have answered to no other.
One day it happened that “Jumps” searching for dead sticks came along under the sycamore-trees and saw Jack, and Bevis and Mark swimming. He watched them some time with his dull glazing eyes, and a day or two afterwards opened his mouth about it. “Never seed nobody do thuck afore,” he said, repeating it a score of times as his class do, impressing an idea on others by reiteration, as it takes so much iteration to impress it on them. “Never saw any one do that before.”
For seventy harvests he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis’s governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about those waters, not one had learned to swim. Very likely no one had learned since the Norman conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonalty forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer, and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller and not a home-staying man.
Tom, the ploughboy and bird-keeper, with his companions, the other plough-lads and young men, sometimes bathed in summer in the brook far down the meadows, splashing like blackbirds in the shallow water, running to and fro on the sward under the grey-leaved willows with the sunshine on their limbs. I delight to see them, they look Greek; I wish some one would paint them, with the brimming brook, the willows pondering over it, the pointed flags, the sward, and buttercups, the distant flesh-tints in the sunlight under the grey leaves. But this was not swimming. “Never saw any one do that before,” said the man of seventy harvests.
Under the oak he stood as Bevis and Mark passed that October morning. His hand was like wood upon wood, and as he leaned against the oak, his knees were bent one way and his back the other, and thus stiff and crooked and standing with an effort supported by the tree, it seemed as if he had been going as a beast of the field upon all fours and had hoisted himself upright with difficulty. Something in the position, in the hoary tree, and the greyish hue of his dress gave the impression of an arboreal animal.
But against the tree there leaned also a long slender pole, “teeled up” as “Jumps” would have said, and at the end of the pole was a hook. The old man had permission to collect the dead wood, and the use of his crook was to tear down the decaying branches for which he was now looking. A crook is a very simple instrument—the mere branch of a tree will often serve as a crook—but no arboreal animal has ever used a crook. Ah! “Jumps,” poor decaying “Jumps,” with lengthened narrow experience like a long footpath, with glazing eyes, crooked knee, and stiffened back, there was a something in thee for all that, the unseen difference that is all in all, the wondrous mind, the soul.
Up in the sunshine a lark sung fluttering his wings; he arose from the earth, his heart was in the sky. Shall not the soul arise?