But there is a humorous as well as a tragic side to sheep-washing. The continual splashing of the water soon drenches all the approaches to the creek, making them as slippery as ice. The platform of hurdles running the whole length of the wash is a particularly hazardous place from which to look on at the fun; and many a spectator, venturing too near, has received an impromptu ducking. This is an accident to which the throwers-in, as well as all the crook-men, are specially liable; and the day is hardly complete unless some one has succeeded in dipping himself as well as the sheep. The time-honoured joke then is to force him down the creek with his woolly companions in misfortune, and send him under the bar with all the rest.
III
For days past now the rain has been steadily falling, hour after hour, from dark to dark. Rain and wind together are always disconcerting, and often melancholy in the last degree; but still, soft summer rain like this, not heavy enough to obscure an outlook, yet sufficient to serve as an excuse for stopping indoors, has all sorts of commendable qualities. Much of the time, both in daylight and darkness, I have spent lolling out of a little dormer-window high up in the roof of this old house, and I have got to know many small things about life and work in Windlecombe that I have never known before.
It would seem that the cat and I are almost the only able-bodied creatures, feathered, four-footed, or human, that are not out and about in the rain, and I alone because the indoor mood happens to possess me. If I shed that craze before the weeping weather is done, I may be squelching about with the rest all day long in the sodden lanes; or slithering joyfully over the green turf of the Downs miles away, barefoot and bareheaded, absent-mindedly whistling the first halves of innumerable tunes as I go. But of that in its season. The cat and I are of a mind now. The comforts of a dry coat appeal to each of us for the moment irresistibly; and we lean out over the window-sill no farther than will afford me a view of the village doings, and her an eye-feast on the martins chattering about the roof-eaves below.
I saw Farmer Coles go by in his gig to-day, and heard him call out to his bailiff on the footway, ‘If ’tis fine, George, i’ th’ marnin’, get all th’ tackle down to th’ Hoe-field, an’ make a start first thing.’ The word brought my heart into my mouth. The Hoe-field is the field where the first wild rose opened to the spell of the nightingale’s music; and it meant that haying-time had come round at last. To-morrow there might be a new sound in Windlecombe, the high ringing note of the mowing-machines; and I knew then there would be no hour of daylight free from it, until the last meadow lay shorn and desolate under the summer sun.
In modern village life, the lot of the sentimentalist is no easy one, especially if he love his neighbour. Though he may secretly repine for the old days, when the grass came down to the rhythmic song of the scythe, and the corn to the tune of the sickle, he cannot blink the fact that, in farm life, prosperity and machinery go hand-in-hand together. The true, indeed the only, way for him now is to realise that not all the beauty of country things belongs to old times, and not all the hard, ugly utilitarianism of nowadays has come in with machinery. Honestly considered, there is no mechanical farm-implement of to-day essentially at variance with the spirit of beauty. A threshing-mill or a reaper-and-binder owes its form and parts to the same designer that made the sickle. The lines of a sailing-ship are unvaryingly lines of grace, because they are dictated by wind and water. And the unchanging needs of earth that made sickle, scythe, and ploughshare what they are, are as unchanging and imperious as ever.
It was hard to conceive the nightingale’s song without the loveliness of the mowing-grass—the green dragon-flies cruising over its sea of blossom, the shadows of the swallows’ wings upon it, and the grumbling bees like pearl-divers at fault down in its emerald depths. But now, listening to the songs of the birds in the village gardens round about, songs that seemed all the more joyous for the grey light and the unceasing patter of the rain, the truth fell cold upon me that the nightingale’s was no longer among them. But a few days past, she was keening as sorrowfully as ever. In the one glimpse of soused moonshine last night I had thought to hear her plaint far down by the river; but I could not be sure of it, and the sound had not returned. Maybe her song is done at last, and I could wish it so, now that the grass is to fall.
With a little neck-craning, I can contrive a view of the Reverend’s garden, or as much of it as is discernible through the crowding trees. On the smooth fair lawn I can see his white doves strutting, but they are there alone to-day. Generally, when I look forth, there is the gaunt black figure pacing to and fro, with these snow-white atoms fluttering about its feet. At the end of the lawn an arm goes out, and the figure pulls up at the first touch on the rose-covered trellis. There is the bank of mignonette at the other end, and here he halts and turns, warned by the music of the bees. But I have never been able to guess what guides him unerringly between the rippled edges of the flower-beds; nor why, when walking under the wall, hung from end to end with blue racemes of wistaria, he goes no farther each way than the limit of the blossoms’ reach. The gleaming white turrets of syringa, of acacia, of guelder rose, these I know are just visible to him; and his doves lighten the darkness a little about his feet. But there are whole stretches of the garden given over to deep-hued things—rhododendrons and peonies, canterbury-bells and flaming tiger-lilies; amidst these he must pass with eyes as little aware of their passionate colour as I of the tiger-moth’s scarlet when he burrs in my ear at night. Yet is glowing colour of a truth a thing that reaches us through one sense alone? I have doubted it ever since—
An angry shout struck up to me just now from a side alley below the green, where some of the poorest and prettiest of the cottages are jumbled together. It is strange how far sounds carry on these still, rainy mornings. The shout was followed by the shrill tones of a woman, and the thud of something being hurled into the street. Presently, through the alley-mouth, appeared a man with a basket on his back. He came up the street through the rain, bent and lurching, his black beard wagging with imprecations he was at no pains to subdue. It was Darkie, the tramp, fern-seller, ne’er-do-well; a familiar figure in Windlecombe. As usual, he was pretty far gone in liquor. He took the middle of the way, addressing himself to all passers-by indiscriminately.