Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 833
“Quarts” was the sobriquet of the dead man, and he had died of the cold.
There, in the rough barn where we stood huddling together for warmth, Mark was brave enough, and he was brave enough in a death-chamber. Indeed it is hardly braveness, just as it is hardly callousness so much as a survival of the early temper of men accustomed to the ending of lives — of the temper that has given us the “Dance of Death” or the Gravedigger of Hamlet. A dead man is to the countryman of hardly more account than a dead mole or the dry tufts of feathers that January leaves underneath all the bushes. It is a frame of mind repulsive or grotesque to the townsman, who never sees a dead thing save on butchers’ and fishmongers’ slabs, where indeed he sees more than enough. In the countryman it is merely part of that large innocence that allows him to accept as so many of the natural processes of life things that are always hidden in towns behind the serried walls of house-fronts. He sees more of life, and of necessity more of death.
But this same Mark had his own private conception of what would happen to him. He was not in the least mad, but he had — who knows how? — gathered it out of the Scriptures that he would never die, but be carried up to heaven in a chariot of fire. His eyes twinkled humorously when he said so, but you would put him into a fury if you expressed a doubt. He was a hedger and ditcher by trade, and, if he heard a rustling of some invisible object in the dusk or in the woods at night, he was tranquilly convinced that it was one of the Beasts of the Revelation. Being unmarried and living by himself in a tiny, disused toll-house, he was more solitary than most, and had more time to think. And it is astonishing how many countrymen have bizarre beliefs of this kind. I have come across them in tenant farmers, in veterinary surgeons, in water-bailiffs, and even in rural policemen — who, indeed, are the most solitary of all the users of high-roads and footpaths. The fact is that to be alone much in the country is to find oneself giving to hills, rows of trees or the coping-stones of bridges — to anything that one likes or dislikes for the obscure reasons that sway us — personal identities. One measures the world, after all, in human terms, and two foxes’ earths on a knoll will take after a time a semblance of eyes in a green forehead, just as houses have grim or jovial or lugubrious personalities expressed in their window blinds. And thus, for reasons obscure to us, certain portions of the familiar country influence us. There are hills that we ascend without weariness and downward slopes that we vaguely dislike; there are sheltered spots that for no known reason we find lugubrious, and bleak downs where some mysterious presence seems to temper to us the most dreary of winds. In that way a countryside comes to have the value of a personality; and so we speak of the spirit of Place.
Standing on certain hills it is impossible not to feel a conviction that the green earth waving away on each side into illimitable space is a vast entity, living in the growth of its grasses, and in the voice of its birds, the little tunnels of subterranean beasts and insects forming its veins and, whatever be the colour principle of its surfaces, being the blood of its complexion. But the feeling is arrived at only after a sufficient familiarity — a familiarity the length of which will differ with each individual, since there are some of us who will fall in love with a certain corner of the earth, even as with a certain woman, at the first glance. And just in the same way there are featureless stretches of land in which we feel at once at home, whilst blue regions of alps, of woods and mirroring lakes tire us as we may be tired by a brilliant talker.
For myself, no landscape is restful unless it contains many hedges and woods, and unless the horizon is somewhere broken into by the line of the sea — unless at least I feel that, from the top of a hill near at hand, that still, blue line might be seen. Far inland I seem to be beneath an impalpable weight, and on an absolutely naked down I am conscious of glancing round, in search of at least a clump of trees in which I might take refuge from the great gaze of the sky. But I have one friend who cannot live at peace out of sight of heather, and another who hates hedgerows because they interrupt the journey of his eye over the contours of the ground. I knew a farmer who moved from the marsh into the uplands; and he was forced to rent a cottage on the level again, because he missed the stagnant dykes and could not bear the sound of running water in the beck beneath the bedroom window of his farm in the hills.
In the stage of intimacy to which a man reaches as soon as he masters the field ways of his countryside he thus begins to make acquaintance with the mysteries of the earth; he begins, according to the light vouchsafed to him, to frame his own reading of the green kingdoms. He does it, no doubt, in the search for intellectual solace; it is part of his journey in quest of the Fortunate Islands. In a sense and to a certain degree other things will turn him aside. He will find refuge from himself in making toys for his children, in sleep by his fireside, in the slow talk of the ale bench, in the hunting-field, or over a book. No doubt the book is the best of all the things with which a man may stave off introspection, if the gossip of the alehouse be not better. And no doubt next to these we may place the saddle. Books and small-talk bring us in contact with the minds of our fellows; we may revel or idle in them without emulation and without effort. In hunting we are taken out-of-doors and brought into contact with beasts wrought up to their highest pitch, and with the animal in ourselves wrought up, that too to its highest vitality.
To the man who can feel it there is no sensation in life comparable to the waiting, on a frosty morning, by a woodside for the hounds to break cover. All the senses are keenly alive; each tuft of grass is of importance in the mist: the nostrils are filled with the faint twang of the morning and of the frost; the ears catch minute sounds — the crackle of underwood beneath the feet of the silent and distant hounds, the clink of stirrup against stirrup, the hard breathing of a horse. And one’s whole body, all the sensation of feeling that one possesses, is instinct with the shiver and breath of the beast that one bestrides. There is no waiting quite like it, since there is nowhere else just this union of nerves in two beasts so widely dissimilar the one from the other.
With the first whimper of the hounds on the scent, with the note of the horn, the cry of “Gone Away!” or the crash of the hounds breaking covert, this particular psychological “moment” ends. Contests have their place and emulation is aroused in horse even more than in rider. It isn’t — that particular tremour of waiting — recaptured at any check, though perhaps no theatrical performance is half so engrossing as the watching from one’s saddle of the hounds, with their noses to the ground, making a wide circle to recover the scent. But of course one has moments of another sort. One remembers putting one’s right arm over the eyes in rushing through a bullfinch. And I have a memory that I do not know whether I would or would not willingly dispense with, of lying helpless on my back on the further side of a sunken Devon hedge, with high above my face the silhouette against the sky of a horse’s fore-legs and a rider’s boot-tips. It seemed for a moment a curious and interesting spectacle, since it is seldom that one sees from below into the very shoes of a horse.
Thus in this as in all field sports, man, according to his sympathies, finds solace, oblivion, animal excitement, the means of passing the weary hours. They have their “moments,” and afterwards we can say that there is nothing like them. There is nothing like casting the last salmon flies of the day at dusk into a still and almost invisible water; there is nothing like the old and forgotten shooting with a trained dog in the thigh-high stubble of October wheat-fields; there is, for boys, nothing like the laying of a trail of paper across the trembling tufts of a bog at noon; there is nothing like... But what is there anywhere like any one of these things that beneath the sky and across the green acres will keep the mind from working in the treadmill of its proper thought? And what, after all, will arouse a rough fellowship between man and man so well as the tumble and scurry in a stack-yard where the rats are bolting and squeaking among men and terriers, sheep-dogs, spaniels and broom-handles?
And in a sense the field naturalist pursues a similar sport. With his eyes or his field-glasses he shoots the events of little creatures’ lives. To give himself moments, he is seeking to nail down to his consciousness the “moments” of their existences. Peering along the hedgerows, if he have seen a rabbit run fascinatedly around the uplifted head of a stoat, he will have bagged his event; or if he could see a cuckoo drop its egg into the nest of a chaffinch, the adder swallow its young alive, or the night-jar carry its children in its claws. He is building up his little house of observations; he is filling in the chinks of the wattle-wall that shuts out for him the monotony of his life. And the lines of the trees, the smell of the grass crushed beneath his feet, the sound of wind in the river reeds, the bow of the sky, the forms of clouds, or the great stillnesses of noon — all these things soothe his mind and make sacred these hours of his.
That in its way is the best gift that the Nature of the fields offers to man — a memory of oblivion tempered with a sensation that is hardly a memory of times passed with the cool airs on the cheek, with the eye unconsciously deluded and filled by the lines of a world drawing all its hues from the air, the soil and the vapours that hang as it were in a third space between air and soil. I have said that the most engrossing of pastimes are the gossip of the alehouse and the reading of men’s thoughts. And in a sense these are the things that keep us going nowadays 102 through the between-beats of the clock. But there are times of break-down when neither of these human emanations has power to hold the mind, or, to put it more justly, when the mind has no longer the power to hold to them. After long periods of illness, of mourning, of mental distress, no news of the outside world and no ecstasy of verse will hold the mind; events and thoughts pass through the tired consciousness leaving no trace, as the smoke of orchard fires passes through apple boughs. Then Nature may assert a sway of her own.
I remember seeing a countryman recovering from a long illness with his bed-head set towards the window. He seemed to be in a state of coma, but from time to time he asked for a looking-glass. Because his appearance after his illness was rather terribly emaciated, the glass was for long refused to him. At last he fell to weeping weakly, and some one found a hand-mirror for him. He held it high up, never looking at himself, but turning the face of the glass to the window. He had been longing to see the green of the grassy hill that rose up before his cottage, and although his brain had been too weak to say that he wished his bed turned round he had imagined that stratagem of bringing greenness into his confining room. It was a longing, he said afterwards, such as women are said to feel before the birth of children; and no satisfaction ever equalled that of this poor man who had imagined himself doomed to die without again seeing sunlight on the grass.
The country, in fact, the country of the fields and of the footpaths, gives most freely to those who bring something with them, whether it be the labour of their hands or of their brains, whether it be an interest, a hobby, a pursuit, a tranquillity or merely an exhaustion. To those whose minds are simply empty, or to those whose thoughts centre upon themselves, the country is a back cloth, a flat surface portraying an aching pageantry of hills, of fields, of woods, a concrete frame for a dull listlessness, or an intolerable prison. But to those who love her as a support, as an addition to a self-sacrifice, as a frame to a passion, to those who work and those who love, she is a beneficent personality. Ask indeed the lovers who wander along the little footpaths or shelter in the ways and nooks of woodlands what the country is to them. They might not answer in words, but they feel that hers is a beneficent presence, auspicious, soothing and sheltering, a presence that finds words for their dumbness, that lends them patience in their suspenses. So that when a lover says, “How sweet the May do smell!” he voices an unrest and praises at once the perfume of the flowers and the being of his mistress who has quickened his senses. And the worker with his mind who comes out of his door to stand gazing across level fields to the horizon, he too finds his thoughts purified and supported, set as they are in relief, so that his ideas themselves appear to be the pattern 104 upon a groundwork of flat green. That indeed is the mission, the vocation of the fields that we cross — to be a groundwork for the thoughts of poor humanity that in its journey through life needs so many supports, so many solaces.
CHAPTER III. IN THE COTTAGES
AT the end of a closed field, in a hollow of the woods, so deep and so moist that it was twilight there even at high noon, there stood a thatched mud cottage — a two-dwelling house — the door-sill of which I never crossed without anticipations of pleasure such as I have known on the sills of few houses. There lived at one end of the hovel an aged man for whom I had no respect, and in the low dark rooms, hung with clothes upon lines that kept away the draughts of the gaping walls, Meary.
I met her first at dusk, scrambling over the high stile of a path that, running between squatters’ hovels on a common, was one of a maze of similar paved footways. In a purplish linsey-woolsey, as broad as the back of a cow, her face hidden in a black sun-bonnet that suggested the hood of a hop-oast, she was burdened with two immense baskets, from which protruded the square blue, white, and lead-coloured packages of the village grocer up on the ridge from which we had both descended. I offered to carry her burdens as far as we might be going together, and she said, without the least touch of embarrassment or of over-recognition —
“Why, thank ye, mister. I’ll do as much for you when ye come to be my age.”
Her face was round and brown, her forehead broad and brown, and her brown eyes were alert and reposeful as if she were conscious of a reserve of strength sufficient to help her over all the stiles that are to be found in this life. They had, her eyes, the sort of masterfulness that you will see in those of a bull that gazes across the meadows and reflects.
I think I cared for her more than for any friend I have made before or since, and now that she has been dead for a year or so her memory seems to make sacred and to typify all those patient and good-humoured toilers of the fields that, for me, are the heart of the country. If you saw her at work in the hop-fields, with her hands and arms stained walnut - green to the elbows; in her own potato-patch stooping, in immense boots, to drop the seed potatos into the rows; striding through the dewy grass of the fields to do a job of monthly nursing; or standing with one hand over her eyes in the doorway that she fitted so exactly that her thin hair was brushed by the four-foot thatch, she had one unfailing form of words, one unfailing smile upon her lips—” Ah keep all on gooing!” And that was at once her philosophy and her reason for existence.
And to keep all on going until you drop — as she did, poor soul, until within three days of the appearance of her illness — that is the philosophy and the apologia pro vita of the country-side. Your ambition is simply that: health, so that you may keep getting about; strength, so that you may, to the end, do your bits of jobs and have a moment to do a job or two for a bedridden neighbour; and, in old age, a sufficient remainder of your faculties to pass censure on the doings of the neighbour you have helped. To have accepted helping hands enough to let you feel that you too are part of the body politic, and to have retained independence enough to let you refuse benefits when the spirit moves you — these are the undefined aspirations that keep occupied the weatherbeaten cottages at the corners of fields, the two dwelling-houses with roofs green from the drip of orchard trees, and the quiet and solitary graveyards of the scattered hamlets.
This particular Meary, being just a month younger than the Queen (there is still only one Queen in the cottages), had lived just the life of every other countrywoman, and in her conversation, à propos of whatever topic might occur, fragments of her past life came constantly to the surface. If you spoke of the drought being bad for root crops, she would say—”Ah! I lost my two toes after a bit of turnip-peel when I was four, jumping down into a ditch for it.”
In those days the children searched the dry ditches for such things. Or, before the A — d draper’s 111 window, she would give a quaint little idea of herself in a yellow nankin dress, cut so tight to save stuff that she could not move her tiny arms. You knew you had “innards” most days of the week, she said, when she was a child. Once, out of mischief, she had handed her mother, who was at the kneading-trough, a paper of snuff instead of one of allspice, and the whole week’s baking came yellow and evil-tasting. But they had had to eat it. She had never eaten baker’s bread till she was twelve, nor butcher’s meat till she was twenty; sometimes they had had a bit of tug mutton, which comes from a sheep found drowned in a dyke. Her stepfather had a bit of bacon once a week, and then the children had the crock water it was boiled in.
After a time—” I was a pretty girl then, I’d have you to know,” she used to say — she had been attracted by a travelling basket-maker. When he was about their village she used to slip out and put a pinch of tea into the kettle over his fire in the dingle. She was sent away into service to preserve her from an infatuation for the “pikey,” who was not regarded as respectable, though he earned better money than two agricultural labourers. At nights, lying in the servants’ bedroom of Lady Knatchbull’s (the great house had as many windows as there were days in the year), the girls were accustomed to tell each other folk-stories — of queens who went wandering over the earth, having been turned out-of-doors for inscrutable reasons, whose hands were cut off for reasons more inscrutable, or who were reconciled to their kingly husbands or princely sons at the price of a pound of salt. Or the dark room would be peopled with witches, or dismal songs sung of the murder of trusting girls — with obvious morals for the girls of the servants’ room. There were twelve slept together there. They taught each other to read, but no one knew how to write, and Meary never learned. They were sent to church of a Sunday, filling a great square pew for all the world like a cattle truck, but they never learned anything of religion. Nevertheless, at times Meary dreamed of Jesus Christ preaching in a green field from a waggon, and telling the women again not to trust the men, but to be good to each other and to small children. Once while Jesus was preaching Meary’s mother, who had died years before, came to her, dressed all in white, and told her to be a good girl.
