Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 831
The episode was disagreeable to me, because in my part of the country they say that when the woodland beasts no longer regard you, you are “fey” — as good as a ghost. But it gave the measure of the solitude of that particular highway that so shy a beast as a squirrel could use a road for its passage upon any errand. And it travelled with an engrossed certitude, as if it were very assured of no danger or interruption. And indeed I had met no one for the last halfhour, and I met no one else till I got to Kingsbridge, a matter of three miles. Yet this was a main coast road leading to a market town, the metropolis of that peninsula.
Even on market-days, when once a week the highways assume the air of processional routes, it is only a small fraction of the country populations that shows itself. There will be farmers in their gigs; if the day be fine their wives will be with them too, and the hearts of the shopkeepers will be rejoiced. (I use the word “gig” generically for the farmer’s conveyance. It is very largely a matter of fashion or of roads. Thus, round Canterbury the farmer almost invariably uses some kind of dogcart, whilst in Devonshire and Cumberland he goes to market mostly on horseback, and round Salisbury the roads are filled with enormous and dusty versions of the familiar governess car.) Farmers, stock-breeders, veterinary surgeons, horse dealers, a small army of cattle drovers and successive companies of sheep, cattle, pigs, and even turkeys at times, will on these market-days pass in a pageant, out in the morning, home in the afternoon when the hour of the ordinary is passed. For an hour or two of the day the shops will be filled, the streets be impassable, the stairs of the inns be thronged with men falling over each other’s legs, in a fine atmosphere of malt liquors and a fine babel of prices and the merits of foodstuffs. But before nightfall each particular little heart of the country will once more have discharged its rustic blood as with one great weekly pulse; the dust or the mud of the highways will bear the impress of the innumerable feet of sheep, and silence and solitude will once more descend between the hedgerows, along which the white forms of owls will beat without sound. And so it will be all round the year.
But even the pulse-tide of market-days will not dislodge from their crannies and pockets the great populations of the country. The real labourer will go on working over his furrows, whether wheat fall below starvation price, or wool rise from fivepence to tenpence halfpenny. So that upon the roads the townsman come into the country will not make any intimate acquaintance even with the outward aspects of the whole body politic of the country. He will learn, first, how little he or his great town matters; and, lastly, how closely knit is the organisation of great stretches of territory that at first he will regard as so many miles of inhabited country occupied at haphazard by men having little organisation and less connection the one with the other. What will have swayed his particular town will in the country matter nothing. What will matter will be the price of things in the nearest market-place or cathedral city. Once out of his particular London the townsman will find himself come into the spheres of influence of innumerable places of small magnitude. “Going to town” will not be taking a railway journey to any great city; it will mean a short jaunt to Ashford, to Shrewton, to Kendal — or it may mean hardly more than going to the single shop of the next village. And going to town for the inhabitants of the small centres will mean going to centres only relatively more important — to Exeter, to Leicester, to Devizes, to Manchester, or to Carlisle. And in each of these places the townsman will discover new trade-marks, new puddings, new newspapers, new specifics, new celebrities, new names to honour. His own standards will not any more count; his best known will be the utterly ignored; and he will discover that in coming to his particular heart of the country, in searching for his Islands of the Blest, his fountain of youth, he will have gone through a sort of purification. He will have lost, along with his old landmarks, his very identity. And only very, very gradually will he take to himself a new form, a new power of influence for good or evil, a new knowledge, and even a new appellation. For quite assuredly some nickname will be assigned to him.
He will grow wise in time; he will get to know all the highways and lanes, and having exhausted their aspects and their lore, will take to the field paths. But even there — and there more than ever — he will have driven in upon him that fact of the extraordinary solidity and solidarity, the extraordinarily close grain of life in the heart of the country. It will depend upon himself whether or no he will ever force a way somewhere beneath its close-textured skin; whether he will take, as it were, real roots in the soil, or still for his social and mental support will call in aids from outside. He will have come to the heart of the country for rest; he will, if he is to be at one with it, find himself engaged only in a new struggle.
CHAPTER II. ACROSS THE FIELDS
THE wheat, the pastures, the slow beasts, birds, flowers and the little foot-bridges from which we may look into the dark waters of clear brooks, the hum of insects and the dewdrops that form a halo round our shadows when we walk across the fields in the moon-light or at dawn — all these parts of what we call Nature must of necessity take the second place, fill up the second phase of a country life. Being men, we must first settle our human contacts; then we may step over the stiles or pass between the kissing-gates. We must have found our pied-à-terre, our jumping-off place; we must set up our tripod before, as it were, we can take our photographs. We must have studied our maps, have asked our ways, have got the “lie of the land.”
This is no more than saying that we must have taken our bed at the inn, or have furnished our cottage and discovered where the nearest butcher has his shop; we must have “settled down” either in body or in spirit. Reversing the course of history, we must learn the highways which were built last before we can master the old ways of all — the field-paths. How long the first stage may be in its passing through is a matter that each man settles with his soul; it is essentially a matter of how much interest he can take in the practical side of his settling down. There are men so happily made that their pleasant lives are spent in doing little tasks in their rockeries or passing the time of day at tennis in walled gardens. They find, as it were, freedom in prisons; whilst others breathe only when they have the turf beneath their feet and are out of sight and sound of the roadside hedgerows.
I do not know that these latter penetrate more deeply, really, into the life of the country, but I am certain that they draw the deeper breaths. They take, as it were, the short cuts across life and, avoiding their fellow-men who present the more harrowing problems to the mind, they float along a stream of minute facts that afford solace, distraction or rest. There is, after all, nothing so soothing as to watch the growth of grasses, and no man to be envied so much as he who can keep his mind for so long tranquil. If the high-roads might lead us to some palace of human truth, somewhere along the footpaths, between a wood track and an oak-bole, we might find Nirvana and the Herb Oblivion.
We may find, too, the country in its undress, since the footpaths lead us to back doors or through stackyards, whilst to the high-roads farms and cottages turn their lace-curtained windows and their decorous drives. I had an equestrian friend who had passed during a number of years on a main road a square, stuccoed, dull box that was known as New Place. He visited it during several croquet seasons, and, entering it always through the front door, saw no reason to think that it was other than just a new place like any other. But one day, being afoot on the dull highway, he saw a kissing-gate in the hedge and a track that led across a broad bend of the wood. He passed outside a stone-walled stackyard, and at a pleasant distance there raised itself a charming, mellowed structure of red brick with six gables that offered to the rolling fields a glance, a yellow of lichens and a tracery of wall-pears it had taken three centuries to attain to. He could not fix the place in his mind; he could not find a name for it; it seemed miraculous that in a land he knew so well there could have been such a house unknown to him. Then he realised that it was the back of New Place. The front had been stuccoed and squared to suit the tastes of the ‘fifties. It offered that view to the new high-road; but the ancient path, that had been there before any house at all had stood, had led him to the other and the lovelier aspect.
The footpath, indeed, much more than doubles the attraction of the countryside, since the tracks, leading mostly from cottage to cottage, are almost innumerable. It is one of those things to which one hardly ever gets used — it is one of those things that change alike the aspect of countrysides and of the men who work upon them. I had walked a certain road for many days; I had seen for many days a certain labourer, not on the face of him estimable, slouching at night towards his beer-house. Suddenly, one evening, I saw this man, his rush basket slung across his back, with a bundle of rabbit-parsley tucked into the thongs; he was descending, so slowly that he appeared to hang in air, an ungracious Ganymede in fustian, over a hurdle that had appeared merely to close a gap in a hedge. Behind him, in the grass there ran the sinuous snake of a pathway, wavering as if for companionship beside a coppice or a little shaw. And it was a relief — a clearing of the air. For the man will appear no longer a loafer, sustained from hour to hour through the day by the thought of beer, or kept in suspense, as it were, by the cankerous artistry of selfindulgence. Here he was dropping into the road with limbs rendered heavy by work; he has become part of the body politic, one of those slow Titans who like wood-props keep up the inordinately weighty fabric of the State. He has gained dignity, and, since the number of inhabitants of my village is small, the whole village has gained dignity, and the whole world of which that village is the part with which I am best acquainted.
And with the discovery of a new footpath the countryside gains, to more than the extent of one new way, a feeling of liberty. The road you have traversed is less a begrudged piece of dust running between imprisoning hedges. You yourself are more free, since, if the wish moved you, here you could step aside; the fields on each side of the bridge seem more accessible, more your own and your neighbour’s, less the property of an intangible landowner. For I think that it is inborn in humanity to resent another man’s ownership in land. Those of us who belong to the land-owning class resent trespass on our acres; but the minute we become travellers beyond our own ring-fence we desire, even unreasonably, to make short cuts. There was once a Midland squire whose acquaintance I had made actually through trespassing upon his home paddock. He had then been irate so that his grey whiskers trembled. It seemed that he had just lost a right-of-way action and he thought I was part of a “put up job,” to flaunt his loss of the right-of-way case in his face. I had pleaded my ignorance of the neighbourhood, the greater freedom of our parts of the country in such matters; and I succeeded in convincing him so well of my innocence that he conducted me across his own kitchen-garden very amiably towards the high-road from which I never ought to have strayed.
I met this same gentleman later at an inn in a foreign countryside more or less my own; we took a walk together, after he had good-humouredly recognised me as the “fellow who trespassed “ — and I was horrified at the short cuts that he proposed to take to reach a certain church. We went over peasants’ fields of tobacco, across the corner of a protected stag park, through a vineyard, and right into the door of the priest’s cowshed before we emerged in the churchyard. My friend had made a bee-line, and it was only in the miraculous absence of a garde champêtre that we escaped a fine, since the squire actually plucked an apple from a wayside tree, tasted it, and swore it was like wood compared with a Ribston pippin. Outside his own circle of landed responsibilities he felt himself, in fact, to be a free Briton.
In a sense we are all that. The average Briton does indeed tremble at the thought of “trespassing.” He trembles even unreasonably, since, except for the obviously poor, no penalty attaches to the offence. But he has a sort of shyness; it is hardly so much respect for the laws; he would dislike being turned off land, perhaps because it would mean a sort of “setting downfor him. Yet the one of us most shy about trespassing will the most violently resent being impeded on a footpath once he is assured that it is a footpath. He will break down fences or furiously harangue gamekeepers; he will go his way — he will, more than any Hampden, assert his rights.
And because we are all lovers of our rights, we rejoice at the discovery of new paths. Here is a strip of land a foot wide, but inalienably the property of ourselves and our neighbours — a space of breathing-ground and of escape, where, as it were, we may remain within the letter of the law and yet cheat its spirit. Of course, if we are poor men, the path will have its dangers; a keeper, intent on preserving the privacy of his partridge nests, may lay a dead rabbit beside the path and, walking after us with a mate, swear it lay there just after we had passed. Then probably we shall be fined ten shillings. (I have known a footpath closed to all the cottagers of a village by this dread.) But essentially the footpath is a place on which we may all snap our fingers at Authority; so for that alone it is beloved.
And the paths, in most of England, are innumerable. I know whole tracts of country, forty miles long, in which there is hardly a field that one may not walk across or skirt. Thus, for instance, from Aldington Knoll you may pass under the nut boughs and oaken underwood of the Weald, thirty-seven miles, by wood paths, only going out of the shadow to cross a road, or where the timber has been newly felled. There are, of course, tracts of the home counties and the Midlands where, in the presence of the landowning spirit and the absence of a spirit of resistance, miles of fat fields shaded by elms are closed to the wayward foot. And there are immense moors and downs where the pedestrian may choose his own way by a compass across heather and ling or sheep turf and wild thyme, where the footpath ceases on account of so great a freedom of direction. But the country of parks and millionaires is not the country, but a sort of arid pleasure tract, and moors and plains are unhallowed by the work of the slow countrymen. For certainly, wherever he is busied about the hedgerows or in the wheat, there his lines of communication will be found. Their real cause for existence is to help him the more quickly to and from his work; and the farmer is not yet born so foolish as to hinder his own hours of labour.
Thus here, as in the print that is common in our hedge alehouses, and more common still in France, the man who works in the fields bears the brunt of the fray. It is true that you may trace — mostly on hill-tops — the old ways of communication, pilgrim ways that pass the remains of tiny chapels-of-ease and make, like the rays of a spider’s net, either to the shrine of St. Thomas or towards the ports from which men set sail for Compostella; there are broad soft roads across plains; there are bridlepaths that climb immense downs and in the softer bottoms are paved, still, with great flag-stones, and there are pack-tracks that have been abandoned for ever by the feet of mules. In the North of England, in the folded valleys and scars of the solitary hills, you may still, as it were, see the hoof-marks of the pack-horses the last of which made its last journey not twenty years ago. And the survivals of all those tracks do still add to the number of ways by which a man may travel across the fields. But they remain mere survivals; the reason for their existence having So gone, they are seldom travelled; fences are being run across them more and more as the years go on. It is no one’s business to keep them alive; so they are dying out.
Thus the footpath of the heart of the country tends to become more and more a means of access to work. And indeed it is there that we seem to feel the real heart-beats. On the roads the touch of the cities is still to be felt. Miles and miles away from any town one may be, nevertheless the road is a filament, a vein, running from one to another. The real footpath is the telephone, steering merely between countryman and countryman. It is true that in the vicinity of the house-congeries we may find footpaths that are degraded into cinder tracks. Broad and black — that colour for which the Nature of the fields seems to have so great an antipathy — they are bordered with fringes of grass so green that it appears, like the brilliant hues of aniline dyes, to be a coal-tar product. These tracks let the foot sink into them with a faint suggestion of being quicksands. They pass cement cottages; dusty palings separate them from the sordid bits of spaded earth that always in the vicinity of a town seems to have a dun colour, a clay consistency, and a top-dressing of bluish meat tins. Reaching in his walk these antiseptic footways, the lovers of the country or the town lover feel an antipathy, heave perhaps a sigh, and, making for the nearest street, look out for a cab.
It is not that they will necessarily hate the town; what they will hate is the hybrid thing that is neither town nor country — that is, a product as it were of city fathers trying to bring themselves into a bucolic state of mind. “Let us have either town or country unadulterated; let us have paths in which we shall meet humanity in undress or citizens decently clad! “ he will exclaim. On these ways he will meet mechanics in broadcloth or the club-doctor of mean streets in clothes that are neither here nor there. Then he will seek swiftly either the shop-fronts, the artificial stone façades, the electric light standards and the faint smell of horse-dung and dust of the centre of a town; or he will return upon his tracks to where the path ran beneath nut bushes in the heart of a wood.
The false idlers of the country, the young ladies picking flowers, the retired solicitors, admirals, bankers, and racing touts, the village clergyman who thinks that his real sphere is, say, a smart West End parish, and who in consequence wears a querulous fold near the ends of his pursed lips, or that most townish of all inhabitants of the country, the student of nature — these, occasionally, with their infinite variations, are the most exotic products that one will meet on the footpaths. They have dropped, as it were, over the hedges, out of motor cars or desirable residences. They pass us like foreigners, and have haughty and challenging glints in their eyes. And I am almost tempted to say that the lovers of nature, the self-conscious students of birds or flowers — the modern Whites of Selborne — are themselves town products. The real countryman does not know much about these things. He accepts them, and would perhaps miss them; but it is hardly part of his nature to “name” them. It would probably be disturbing to him to enquire too closely into the history, say, of the oil-beetle, that lustrous inactive creature that he crushes with his heavy foot in the hot dust of the roads.
