Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

The stranger would recall these stones as he followed the road through the gap into the circle of King’s Avon, for there in an ordinary field to the right of the road, just within the embankment, he would see, standing upright to the height of ten or twelve feet, a number of these stones, standing there with such apparent fixity and permanence that it was disconcerting to observe, on a closer inspection, an equal number of the stones fallen flat and half-buried in the ground. Their impressiveness grew, as the beholder began to realise from their symmetrical disposition that what he was considering was no less than the ruins of a temple. The village lay just beyond the field, and in the rough ground, near the field,—partly ditch below the embankment, partly undergrowth,—many more of the stones might be discovered, half-hidden by dead leaves and mosses, or even by tins and rubbish, and in one or two cases made prisoner, like some inarticulate Laocoon, by the serpenting roots of a beech overhanging the scarp. And as the stranger, after poking about among this tangle, proceeded along the lane towards the village, he would come upon other isolated stones, either embedded in the bank below the hedge, or used as a gate-post into a paddock, standing there patiently enough, towering above the gate and above the hedge, indifferent to the fate that had come upon it; and one, by the roadside, had been made to do duty as a milestone, and bore upon its face the distances to Bath and Marlborough in eighteenth-century script and Roman numerals. But, although the stones were now thus scattered and even totally removed for purposes of quarrying material, a patient observer might still piece together the design and dimension of the temple, standing once like Stonehenge in rings, when no human dwellings were there, in, as it were, a cup of the Downs, open to sun and rain. But this imaginary stranger would probably dwell rather upon the relationship between the stones of King’s Avon, and the stars that they had known unaltered, and the barrows humped upon the Downs, and the roughly-hewn flints turned up by the plough, the bones and antlers, and the stray tokens left, with very little fame, about the country, silent and enduring while religions perhaps slightly more enlightened because more charitable passed with the ages above their surfaces.

This paganism of England, he might have reflected as he made his way slowly from stone to stone, pausing before each and finding in each the same monotonous and uncommunicative austerity, this early English paganism, how bleakly different it was from the paganism of the South! Indeed, he might wonder whether to call his forebear pagan, which had a rich full-blooded sound, or, stripping him of garlands, to call him simply heathen. Here, in this flint country of the small northern island, no flowers and fruit had surrounded the sacrifice, no cymbals clashed, no grapes and plaited maize wreathed the horns of the victim, no songs accompanied the priest. A stone, a knife, and blood, red and grey, sufficed their ritual. This was no country to see nymphs in the streams and oaks, to hear the flute of a satyr in the beechwood. Yet there was a harsher dignity, beside which the Southern paganism was soft and ample, over-ripe with sweetness. It was a creed which would not concern itself with the fruits of earth; Demeter was not for it, nor lecherous Pan, nor a god clothed in the plumes of a swan. It would concern itself with nothing lower than the most majestic of human contemplations, the sun and the stars in their courses, so that after the lapse of centuries the upright stones still aspired to celestial communion when the gentle or the angry dawn broke over the rounded Atlantean shoulders of the Downs.

Clare Warrener rode idly along the leafy lane, her pony’s hoofs raising little grey puffs of dust. Nothing in particular occupied her mind, beyond the sight which she was going to see, and which for weeks now she had been anticipating. She had promised herself that she would ride on this day up on to the Downs, cast her eye over the festivity, and ride on again, with perhaps a slight resentment at this invasion of the hills; a resentment she knew to be absurd, since the rustic youths and girls at their celebrating had a better right to the hills than she had herself, they who were the descendants of shepherds and farmers, wresting for centuries a living from the poor stony soil. She loved in the hills their spaciousness, and their refusal to yield to tillage; at most they would grant pasture to the sheep crawling on their slopes, but for the rest they remained eternally, in the heart of an amenable and complacent island, the untamed spot—they, and the moorlands, and the hills of Wales and the North.

The shady lane which she had been following soon ceased to be bordered by trees and took an upward direction leading to the foot of the Downs. It became a steep white road mounting straight up the unboundaried slopes, with high banks on either side, and the winter rain-runnels marked in little zig-zagging ruts and pebbles. Some clumps of furze and a few thorn-trees grew on the lower reaches, but presently even these ceased, and the short turf was the only vegetation. Up here the air was pure and sharp; the grasses waved as they were blown by the breeze; in some places fires had left their blackened patches; a trail of smoke-coloured sheep moved cropping in the dip of a valley. Larks rose continually, soaring straight up into the air, impelled either by some impulse of their own or else disturbed by the sound of the pony’s passage. Clare rode with loose reins, letting the pony pick his own way among the pebbles. The road began to wind; it curved round a shoulder of hill, dipped into a hollow, rose steeply again, and all the time its direction was hidden round the next corner. At moments it reached a high point of vantage, whence Clare, looking down in the direction she had come, could see the low fertile lands, the farms, and the clump of trees pierced by the church-spire which was King’s Avon. But to north, east, and west, nothing but Downs, the great back of the south of England. She rode on. The pony climbed, his head down, his withers high. She felt the muscles of his flank moving warm beneath her leg; he climbed, strong and willing, and she put him at short cuts which entailed mounting an almost perpendicular slope of grass, for the pleasure of feeling him buckle to the effort.

Presently she heard voices and laughter borne to her on the wind. Before long she reached a kind of plateau of grass, the highest point of all, which commanded a wide view of both Downs and the chessboard landscape far below, crossed by the white roads like streamers from a Maypole; and at the further end of this plateau she saw scattered in pairs over the grass, and assembled at one point as a nucleus from which these couples had detached themselves, the youth of the village of King’s Avon in holiday clothes with wild flowers strung about them. She reined in her pony, not liking to interrupt their fun by drawing too near or seeming to admire them as a curiosity. She could recognise most of them at that distance; she picked out the red head of Daisy Morland, the long limbs of Peter Gorwyn, the sunbonnet of Phoebe Patch, the silly laugh of young Baskett, the straw-coloured shock of hair belonging to Job Lackland, the black strap-shoes and white stockings of Annabel Blagdon, who was the belle of the village, and, finally, prowling on the outskirts rather like a pariah dog, the indefinably misshapen form of Olver Lovel. Near by the group were set down the wicker baskets in which they had brought their meal, also the trowels, spades, turf-cutters, and hoes, apparently forgotten. The occasion of the expedition was rendered completely invisible by the sprawling of the persons seated upon it. This was none other than one of the famous White Horses, which on that day must be scoured, that is to say, cleaned of ten years’ accumulation of weeds and grasses; though it was said that less plantains were uprooted than matches made that day, and that the true business of keeping the White Horse duly scoured was performed by some sober shepherd with a pocket-knife, idling away the hours while his sheep moved slowly within his sight. Nevertheless the tradition must be maintained. Clare felt a slight wistfulness that she might not join in with the party, but she had been for so many years strictly forbidden to do this by an indignant Martha Sparrow,—“’Twould not be befitting your station at all, Miss Clare, indeed, to go with those rough louts of boys and hoydens of girls,”—that she had come to accept this ban as a law of nature, without question. She therefore sat her pony at a distance, looking on enviously at the clumsy fun in progress, watching the boys roll over and over down the slope and get up dusting themselves and laughing, or wrestling with one another on the grass and making a show of their superior strength before the girls, who laughed and applauded. She felt especially envious when she saw Job Lackland pick up his fiddle, settle it firm under his chin, and begin to play, the notes of the old-fashioned tune reaching her as clearly as notes struck on a bell, and she could see the sprigged waistcoat and cut-away coat which Job always wore on feast-days when he thought he might be called upon to play the fiddle. The others scrambled to their feet and began a country-dance, a sort of combination of a Morris dance and Sir Roger de Coverley, for they fluttered their handkerchiefs as they danced, and at the same time ran in couples up and down between two lines formed by the other dancers.

The muslin dresses and coal-scuttle bonnets of the girls, and the smocks of the young men, together with their fluttering handkerchiefs and their hands gaily clasped high as they turned and twisted beneath, made a coloured and merry patch on the top of the hill, like a lot of butterflies.

Job fiddled with increasing energy, and as he fiddled he tried to beat time for the dancers with his bow, so that every now and then he would miss out a bar while he waved his bow to re-establish order in the dance which threatened to become confused. At last they all fell exhausted upon the grass, and cider was passed round, and the old White Horse, who had been temporarily revealed during the dance, was once more hidden from view by the spreading frocks and sprawling limbs.

There were other preparations now in evidence, for to emulate the scouring of the greater White Horse of Berkshire the youth of King’s Avon indulged themselves in more or less organised games, which again were but a cloak to their braggart vanity towards the girls. A rude platform was erected on trestles on the flat summit of the hill, and towards this the whole company surged, leaving the white scar of the Horse once more exposed and placid upon the hillside. The direction of the games was in the hands of young Gorwyn; he beat a small drum to call his audience to order; he marshalled the competitors; he posted tow-headed Lackland with his fiddle to strike up a tune during the intervals.

The competitors stood in a group to one side, suddenly sheepish; the audience, which by now consisted almost entirely of girls, ranged themselves beneath the platform with the nudges and upturned faces of anticipation. Clare could only see the crowns of their hats and sunbonnets.