Field and Hedgerow

R >> Richard Jefferies >> Field and Hedgerow

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Text prepared by Malcolm Farmer, Juliet Sutherland,
Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading team

FIELD AND HEDGEROW

BEING

THE LAST ESSAYS

OF

RICHARD JEFFERIES

_COLLECTED BY HIS WIDOW_

PREFACE.

For permission to reprint my husband's latest Essays my sincere thanks
are due to the Editors of the following publications:-

_The Fortnightly Review._
_Manchester Guardian._
_Pall Mall Gazette_.
_Standard._
_English Illustrated Magazine._
_Longman's Magazine._
_St. James's Gazette._.
_Art Journal._
_Chambers's Journal._
_Magazine of Art._
_Century Illustrated Magazine._

J.J.

CONTENTS.

HOURS OF SPRING

NATURE AND BOOKS

THE JULY GRASS

WINDS OF HEAVEN

THE COUNTRY SUNDAY

THE COUNTRY-SIDE: SUSSEX

SWALLOW-TIME

BUCKHURST PARK

HOUSE-MARTINS

AMONG THE NUTS

WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS

JUST BEFORE WINTER

LOCALITY AND NATURE

COUNTRY PLACES

FIELD WORDS AND WAYS

COTTAGE IDEAS

APRIL GOSSIP

SOME APRIL INSECTS

THE TIME OF YEAR

MIXED DAYS OF MAY AND DECEMBER

THE MAKERS OF SUMMER

STEAM ON COUNTRY ROADS

FIELD SPORTS IN ART: THE MAMMOTH HUNTER

BIRDS' NESTS

NATURE IN THE LOUVRE

SUMMER IN SOMERSET

AN ENGLISH DEER-PARK

MY OLD VILLAGE

MY CHAFFINCH

HOURS OF SPRING.

It is sweet on awaking in the early morn to listen to the small bird
singing on the tree. No sound of voice or flute is like to the bird's
song; there is something in it distinct and separate from all other
notes. The throat of woman gives forth a more perfect music, and the
organ is the glory of man's soul. The bird upon the tree utters the
meaning of the wind--a voice of the grass and wild flower, words of the
green leaf; they speak through that slender tone. Sweetness of dew and
rifts of sunshine, the dark hawthorn touched with breadths of open bud,
the odour of the air, the colour of the daffodil--all that is delicious
and beloved of spring-time are expressed in his song. Genius is nature,
and his lay, like the sap in the bough from which he sings, rises without
thought. Nor is it necessary that it should be a song; a few short notes
in the sharp spring morning are sufficient to stir the heart. But
yesterday the least of them all came to a bough by my window, and in his
call I heard the sweet-briar wind rushing over the young grass. Refulgent
fall the golden rays of the sun; a minute only, the clouds cover him and
the hedge is dark. The bloom of the gorse is shut like a book; but it is
there--a few hours of warmth and the covers will fall open. The meadow is
bare, but in a little while the heart-shaped celandine leaves will come
in their accustomed place. On the pollard willows the long wands are
yellow-ruddy in the passing gleam of sunshine, the first colour of spring
appears in their bark. The delicious wind rushes among them and they bow
and rise; it touches the top of the dark pine that looks in the sun the
same now as in summer; it lifts and swings the arching trail of bramble;
it dries and crumbles the earth in its fingers; the hedge-sparrow's
feathers are fluttered as he sings on the bush.

I wonder to myself how they can all get on without me--how they manage,
bird and flower, without me to keep the calendar for them. For I noted it
so carefully and lovingly, day by day, the seed-leaves on the mounds in
the sheltered places that come so early, the pushing up of the young
grass, the succulent dandelion, the coltsfoot on the heavy, thick clods,
the trodden chickweed despised at the foot of the gate-post, so common
and small, and yet so dear to me. Every blade of grass was mine, as
though I had planted it separately. They were all my pets, as the roses
the lover of his garden tends so faithfully. All the grasses of the
meadow were my pets, I loved them all; and perhaps that was why I never
had a 'pet,' never cultivated a flower, never kept a caged bird, or any
creature. Why keep pets when every wild free hawk that passed overhead in
the air was mine? I joyed in his swift, careless flight, in the throw of
his pinions, in his rush over the elms and miles of woodland; it was
happiness to see his unchecked life. What more beautiful than the sweep
and curve of his going through the azure sky? These were my pets, and all
the grass. Under the wind it seemed to dry and become grey, and the
starlings running to and fro on the surface that did not sink now stood
high above it and were larger. The dust that drifted along blessed it and
it grew. Day by day a change; always a note to make. The moss drying on
the tree trunks, dog's-mercury stirring under the ash-poles, bird's-claw
buds of beech lengthening; books upon books to be filled with these
things. I cannot think how they manage without me.

To-day through the window-pane I see a lark high up against the grey
cloud, and hear his song. I cannot walk about and arrange with the buds
and gorse-bloom; how does he know it is the time for him to sing? Without
my book and pencil and observing eye, how does he understand that the
hour has come? To sing high in the air, to chase his mate over the low
stone wall of the ploughed field, to battle with his high-crested rival,
to balance himself on his trembling wings outspread a few yards above the
earth, and utter that sweet little loving kiss, as it were, of song--oh,
happy, happy days! So beautiful to watch as if he were my own, and I felt
it all! It is years since I went out amongst them in the old fields, and
saw them in the green corn; they must be dead, dear little things, by
now. Without me to tell him, how does this lark to-day that I hear
through the window know it is his hour?

The green hawthorn buds prophesy on the hedge; the reed pushes up in the
moist earth like a spear thrust through a shield; the eggs of the
starling are laid in the knot-hole of the pollard elm--common eggs, but
within each a speck that is not to be found in the cut diamond of two
hundred carats--the dot of protoplasm, the atom of life. There was one
row of pollards where they always began laying first. With a big stick in
his beak the rook is blown aside like a loose feather in the wind; he
knows his building-time from the fathers of his house--hereditary
knowledge handed down in settled course: but the stray things of the
hedge, how do they know? The great blackbird has planted his nest by the
ash-stole, open to every one's view, without a bough to conceal it and
not a leaf on the ash--nothing but the moss on the lower end of the
branches. He does not seek cunningly for concealment. I think of the
drift of time, and I see the apple bloom coming and the blue veronica in
the grass. A thousand thousand buds and leaves and flowers and blades of
grass, things to note day by day, increasing so rapidly that no pencil
can put them down and no book hold them, not even to number them--and how
to write the thoughts they give? All these without me--how can they
manage without me?

For they were so much to me, I had come to feel that I was as much in
return to them. The old, old error: I love the earth, therefore the earth
loves me--I am her child--I am Man, the favoured of all creatures. I am
the centre, and all for me was made.

In time past, strong of foot, I walked gaily up the noble hill that leads
to Beachy Head from Eastbourne, joying greatly in the sun and the wind.
Every step crumbled up numbers of minute grey shells, empty and dry, that
crunched under foot like hoar-frost or fragile beads. They were very
pretty; it was a shame to crush them--such vases as no king's pottery
could make. They lay by millions in the depths of the sward, and I
thought as I broke them unwillingly that each of these had once been a
house of life. A living creature dwelt in each and felt the joy of
existence, and was to itself all in all--as if the great sun over the
hill shone for it, and the width of the earth under was for it, and the
grass and plants put on purpose for it. They were dead, the whole race of
them, and these their skeletons were as dust under my feet. Nature sets
no value upon life neither of minute hill-snail nor of human being.

I thought myself so much to the earliest leaf and the first meadow
orchis--so important that I should note the first zee-zee of the
titlark--that I should pronounce it summer, because now the oaks were
green; I must not miss a day nor an hour in the fields lest something
should escape me. How beautiful the droop of the great brome-grass by the
wood! But to-day I have to listen to the lark's song--not out of doors
with him, but through the window-pane, and the bullfinch carries the
rootlet fibre to his nest without me. They manage without me very well;
they know their times and seasons--not only the civilised rooks, with
their libraries of knowledge in their old nests of reference, but the
stray things of the hedge and the chiffchaff from over sea in the ash
wood. They go on without me. Orchis flower and cowslip--I cannot number
them all--I hear, as it were, the patter of their feet--flower and bud
and the beautiful clouds that go over, with the sweet rush of rain and
burst of sun glory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am no more
than the least of the empty shells that strewed the sward of the hill.
Nature sets no value upon life, neither of mine nor of the larks that
sang years ago. The earth is all in all to me, but I am nothing to the
earth: it is bitter to know this before you are dead. These delicious
violets are sweet for themselves; they were not shaped and coloured and
gifted with that exquisite proportion and adjustment of odour and hue for
me. High up against the grey cloud I hear the lark through the window
singing, and each note falls into my heart like a knife.

Now this to me speaks as the roll of thunder that cannot be denied--you
must hear it; and how can you shut your ears to what this lark sings,
this violet tells, this little grey shell writes in the curl of its
spire? The bitter truth that human life is no more to the universe than
that of the unnoticed hill-snail in the grass should make us think more
and more highly of ourselves as human--as men--living things that think.
We must look to ourselves to help ourselves. We must think ourselves into
an earthly immortality. By day and by night, by years and by centuries,
still striving, studying, searching to find that which shall enable us to
live a fuller life upon the earth--to have a wider grasp upon its violets
and loveliness, a deeper draught of the sweet-briar wind. Because my
heart beats feebly to-day, my trickling pulse scarcely notating the
passing of the time, so much the more do I hope that those to come in
future years may see wider and enjoy fuller than I have done; and so much
the more gladly would I do all that I could to enlarge the life that
shall be then. There is no hope on the old lines--they are dead, like the
empty shells; from the sweet delicious violets think out fresh petals of
thought and colours, as it were, of soul.

Never was such a worshipper of earth. The commonest pebble, dusty and
marked with the stain of the ground, seems to me so wonderful; my mind
works round it till it becomes the sun and centre of a system of thought
and feeling. Sometimes moving aside the tufts of grass with careless
fingers while resting on the sward, I found these little pebble-stones
loose in the crumbly earth among the rootlets. Then, brought out from the
shadow, the sunlight shone and glistened on the particles of sand that
adhered to it. Particles adhered to my skin--thousands of years between
finger and thumb, these atoms of quartz, and sunlight shining all that
time, and flowers blooming and life glowing in all, myriads of living
things, from the cold still limpet on the rock to the burning, throbbing
heart of man. Sometimes I found them among the sand of the heath, the sea
of golden brown surging up yellow billows six feet high about me, where
the dry lizard hid, or basked, of kin, too, to old time. Or the rush of
the sea wave brought them to me, wet and gleaming, up from the depths of
what unknown Past? where they nestled in the root crevices of trees
forgotten before Egypt. The living mind opposite the dead pebble--did you
ever consider the strange and wonderful problem there? Only the thickness
of the skin of the hand between them. The chief use of matter is to
demonstrate to us the existence of the soul. The pebble-stone tells me I
am a soul because I am not that that touches the nerves of my hand. We
are distinctly two, utterly separate, and shall never come together. The
little pebble and the great sun overhead--millions of miles away: yet is
the great sun no more distinct and apart than this which I can touch.
Dull-surfaced matter, like a polished mirror, reflects back thought to
thought's self within.

I listened to the sweet-briar wind this morning; but for weeks and weeks
the stark black oaks stood straight out of the snow as masts of ships
with furled sails frozen and ice-bound in the haven of the deep valley.
Each was visible to the foot, set in the white slope, made individual in
the wood by the brilliance of the background. Never was such a long
winter. For fully two months they stood in the snow in black armour of
iron bark unshaken, the front rank of the forest army that would not
yield to the northern invader. Snow in broad flakes, snow in semi-flakes,
snow raining down in frozen specks, whirling and twisting in fury, ice
raining in small shot of frost, howling, sleeting, groaning; the ground
like iron, the sky black and faintly yellow--brutal colours of
despotism--heaven striking with clenched fist. When at last the general
surface cleared, still there remained the trenches and traverses of the
enemy, his ramparts drifted high, and his roads marked with snow. The
black firs on the ridge stood out against the frozen clouds, still and
hard; the slopes of leafless larches seemed withered and brown; the
distant plain far down gloomy with the same dull yellowish blackness. At
a height of seven hundred feet the air was sharp as a scythe--a rude
barbarian giant wind knocking at the walls of the house with a vast club,
so that we crept sideways even to the windows to look out upon the world.
There was everything to repel--the cold, the frost, the hardness, the
snow, dark sky and ground, leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all
benumbed. Yet the forest was still beautiful. There was no day that we
did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and say something
about it. Harder and harder grew the frost, yet still the forest-clad
hills possessed a something that drew the mind open to their largeness
and grandeur. Earth is always beautiful--always. Without colour, or leaf,
or sunshine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly's wing; without
anything sensuous, without advantage or gilding of summer--the power is
ever there. Or shall we not say that the desire of the mind is ever
there, and _will_ satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the
barren wild? The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively
longs for the beautiful; the means we possess to gratify it are
limited--we are always trying to find the statue in the rude block. Out
of the vast block of the earth the mind endeavours to carve itself
loveliness, nobility, and grandeur. We strive for the right and the true:
it is circumstance that thrusts wrong upon us.

One morning a labouring man came to the door with a spade, and asked if
he could dig the garden, or try to, at the risk of breaking the tool in
the ground. He was starving; he had had no work for two months; it was
just six months, he said, since the first frost started the winter.
Nature and the earth and the gods did not trouble about _him_, you see;
he might grub the rock-frost ground with his hands if he chose--the
yellowish black sky did not care. Nothing for man! The only good he found
was in his fellow-men; they fed him after a fashion--still they fed him.
There was no good in anything else. Another aged man came once a week
regularly; white as the snow through which he walked. In summer he
worked; since the winter began he had had no employment, but supported
himself by going round to the farms in rotation. They all gave him a
trifle--bread and cheese, a penny, a slice of meat--something; and so he
lived, and slept the whole of that time in outhouses wherever he could.
He had no home of any kind. Why did he not go into the workhouse? 'I be
afeared if I goes in there they'll put me with the rough uns, and very
likely I should get some of my clothes stole.' Rather than go into the
workhouse he would totter round in the face of the blasts that might
cover his weak old limbs with drift. There was a sense of dignity and
manhood left still; his clothes were worn, but clean and decent; he was
no companion of rogues; the snow and frost, the straw of the outhouses,
was better than that. He was struggling against age, against nature,
against circumstance; the entire weight of society, law, and order
pressed upon him to force him to lose his self-respect and liberty. He
would rather risk his life in the snowdrift. Nature, earth, and the gods
did not help him; sun and stars, where were they? He knocked at the doors
of the farms and found good in man only--not in Law or Order, but in
individual man alone.

The bitter north wind drives even the wild fieldfare to the berries in
the garden hedge; so it drives stray human creatures to the door. A third
came--an old gipsy woman--still stout and hearty, with green fresh brooms
to sell. We bought some brooms--one of them was left on the kitchen
floor, and the tame rabbit nibbled it; it proved to be heather. The true
broom is as green and succulent in appearance in January as June. She
would see the 'missis.' 'Bless you, my good lady, it be weather, bean't
it? I hopes you'll never know what it be to want, my good lady. Ah, well,
you looks good-tempered if you don't want to buy nothing. Do you see if
you can't find me an old body, now, for my girl--now do'ee try; she's
confined in a tent on the common--nothing but one of our tents, my good
lady--that's true--and she's doing jest about well' (with briskness and
an air of triumph), 'that she is! She's got twins, you see, my lady, but
she's all right, and as well as can be. She wants to get up; and she says
to me, "Mother, do'ee try and get me a body; 'tis hard to lie here abed
and be well enough to get up, and be obliged to stay here because I've
got nothing but a bedgown." For you see, my good lady, we managed pretty
well with the first baby; but the second bothered us, and we cut up all
the bits of things we could find, and there she ain't got nothing to put
on. Do'ee see if 'ee can't find her an old body.' The common is an open
piece of furze and heath at the verge of the forest; and here, in a tent
just large enough to creep in, the gipsy woman had borne twins in the
midst of the snow and frost. They could not make a fire of the heath and
gorse even if they cut it, the snow and whirling winds would not permit.
The old gipsy said if they had little food they could not do without
fire, and they were compelled to get coke and coal somehow--apologising
for such a luxury. There was no whining--not a bit of it; they were
evidently quite contented and happy, and the old woman proud of her
daughter's hardihood. By-and-by the husband came round with straw
beehives to sell, and cane to mend chairs--a strong, respectable-looking
man. Of all the north wind drove to the door, the outcasts were the best
off--much better off than the cottager who was willing to break his spade
to earn a shilling; much better off than the white-haired labourer, whose
strength was spent, and who had not even a friend to watch with him in
the dark hours of the winter evening--not even a fire to rest by. The
gipsy nearest to the earth was the best off in every way; yet not even
for primitive man and woman did the winds cease. Broad flakes of snow
drifted up against the low tent, beneath which the babes were nestling to
the breast. Not even for the babes did the snow cease or the keen wind
rest; the very fire could scarcely struggle against it. Snow-rain and
ice-rain; frost-formed snow-granules, driven along like shot, stinging
and rattling against the tent-cloth, hissing in the fire; roar and groan
of the great wind among the oaks of the forest. No kindness to man, from
birth-hour to ending; neither earth, sky, nor gods care for him, innocent
at the mother's breast. Nothing good to man but man. Let man, then, leave
his gods and lift up his ideal beyond them.

Something grey and spotted and puffy, not unlike a toad, moved about
under the gorse of the garden hedge one morning, half hidden by the
stalks of old grasses. By-and-by it hopped out--the last thrush, so
distended with puffed feathers against the frost as to be almost
shapeless. He searched about hopelessly round the stones and in the
nooks, all hard and frostbound; there was the shell of a snail, dry and
whitened and empty, as was apparent enough even at a distance. His keen
eye must have told him that it was empty; yet such was his hunger and
despair that he took it and dashed it to pieces against a stone. Like a
human being, his imagination was stronger than his experience; he tried
to persuade himself that there might be something there; hoping against
hope. Mind, you see, working in the bird's brain, and overlooking facts.
A mere mechanism would have left the empty and useless shell
untouched--would have accepted facts at once, however bitter, just as the
balance on the heaviest side declines immediately, obeying the fact of an
extra grain of weight. The bird's brain was not mechanical, and therefore
he was not wholly mastered by experience. It was a purely human
action--just what we do ourselves. Next he came across to the door to see
if a stray berry still remained on a creeper. He saw me at the window,
and he came to the window--right to it--and stopped and looked full at me
some minutes, within touch almost, saying as plainly as could be said, 'I
am starving--help me.' I never before knew a thrush make so unmistakable
an appeal for assistance, or deliberately approach so near (unless
previously encouraged). We tried to feed him, but we fear little of the
food reached him. The wonder of the incident was that a thrush should
still be left--there had not been one in the garden for two months.
Berries all gone, ground hard and foodless, streams frozen, snow lying
for weeks, frost stealing away the vital heat--ingenuity could not devise
a more terrible scene of torture to the birds. Neither for the thrushes
nor for the new-born infants in the tent did the onslaught of the winter
slacken. No pity in earth or heaven. This one thrush did, indeed, by some
exceptional fortune, survive; but where were the family of thrushes that
had sung so sweetly in the rainy autumn? Where were the blackbirds?

Looking down from the stilts of seven hundred feet into the deep coombe
of black oaks standing in the white snow, day by day, built round about
with the rugged mound of the hills, doubly locked with the key of
frost--it seemed to me to take on itself the actuality of the ancient
faith of the Magi. How the seeds of all living things--the germs--of bird
and animal, man and insect, tree and herb, of the whole earth--were
gathered together into a four-square rampart, and there laid to sleep in
safety, shielded by a spell-bound fortification against the coming flood,
not of water, but of frost and snow! With snow and frost and winter the
earth was overcome, and the world perished, stricken dumb and dead, swept
clean and utterly destroyed--a winter of the gods, the silence of snow
and universal death. All that had been passed away, and the earth was
depopulated. Death triumphed. But under the snow, behind the charmed
rampart, slept the living germs. Down in the deep coombe, where the dark
oaks stood out individually in the whiteness of the snow, fortified round
about with immovable hills, there was the actual presentment of
Zoroaster's sacred story. Locked in sleep lay bud and germ--the
butterflies of next summer were there somewhere, under the snow. The
earth was swept of its inhabitants, but the seeds of life were not dead.
Near by were the tents of the gipsies--an Eastern race, whose forefathers
perhaps had seen that very Magian worship of the Light; and in those
tents birth had already taken place. Under the Night of winter--under the
power of dark Ahriman, the evil spirit of Destruction--lay bud and germ
in bondage, waiting for the coming of Ormuzd, the Sun of Light and
Summer. Beneath the snow, and in the frozen crevices of the trees, in the
chinks of the earth, sealed up by the signet of frost, were the seeds of
the life that would replenish the air in time to come. The buzzing crowds
of summer were still under the snow.

This forest land is marked by the myriads of insects that roam about it
in the days of sunshine. Of all the million million heathbells--multiply
them again by a million million more--that purple the acres of rolling
hills, mile upon mile, there is not one that is not daily visited by
these flying creatures. Countless and incalculable hosts of the
yellow-barred hover-flies come to them; the heath and common, the moor
and forest, the hedgerow and copse, are full of insects. They rise under
foot, they rise from the spray brushed by your arm as you pass, they
settle down in front of you--a rain of insects, a coloured shower. Legion
is a little word for the butterflies; the dry pastures among the woods
are brown with meadow-brown; blues and coppers float in endless
succession; all the nations of Xerxes' army were but a handful to these.
In their millions they have perished; but somewhere, coiled up, as it
were, and sealed under the snow, there must have been the mothers and
germs of the equally vast crowds that will fill the atmosphere this year.
The great bumble-bee that shall be mother of hundreds, the yellow wasp
that shall be mother of thousands, were hidden there somewhere. The food
of the migrant birds that are coming from over sea was there dormant
under the snow. Many nations have a tradition of a former world destroyed
by a deluge of water, from the East to the West, from Greece to Mexico,
where the tail of a comet was said to have caused the flood; but in the
strange characters of the Zend is the legend of an ark (as it were)
prepared against the snow. It may be that it is the dim memory of a
glacial epoch. In this deep coombe, amid the dark oaks and snow, was the
fable of Zoroaster. For the coming of Ormuzd, the Light and Life Bringer,
the leaf slept folded, the butterfly was hidden, the germ concealed,
while the sun swept upwards towards Aries.

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