Field and Hedgerow

R >> Richard Jefferies >> Field and Hedgerow

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But the forest is not vacant. It is indeed full of happy life. Every
hollow tree--and there are many hollow trees where none are felled--has
its nest of starlings, or titmice, or woodpeckers. Woodpeckers are
numerous, and amusing to watch. Wood-pigeons and turtle-doves abound, the
former in hundreds nesting here. Rooks, of course, and jackdaws,--daws
love hollow trees,--jays, and some magpies. The magpie is one of the
birds which have partly disappeared from the fields of England. There are
broad lands where not one is to be seen. Once looking from the road at
two in a field, a gentleman who was riding by stopped his horse and
asked, quite interested, 'Are those magpies?' I replied that they were.
'I have not seen any since I was a boy till now,' he said. Magpies are
still plentiful in some places, as in old parks in Somersetshire, but
they have greatly diminished in the majority of instances. There are some
here, and many jays. These are handsome birds, and with the green
woodpeckers give colour to the trees. Night-jars or fern-owls fly round
the outskirts and through the open glades in the summer twilight. These
are some of the forest birds. The rest visit the forest or live in it,
but are equally common to hedgerow and copse. Woodpeckers, jays, magpies,
owls, night-jars, are all distinctly forest and park birds, and are
continually with the deer. The lesser birds are the happier that there
are fewer hawks and crows. The deer are not torn with the cruel tooth of
hound or wolf, nor does the sharp arrow sting them. It is a little piece
of olden England without its terror and bloodshed.

The fawns fed away down the slope and presently into one of the broad
green open paths or drives, where the underwood on each side is lined
with bramble and with trailing white rose, which loves to cling to bushes
scarcely higher than itself. Their runners stretch out at the edges of
the drive, so that from the underwood the mound of green falls aslant to
the sward. This gradual descent from the trees and ash to the bushes of
hawthorn, from the hawthorn to the bramble, thence to the rose and the
grass, gives to the vista of the broad path a soft, graceful aspect.

After the fawns had disappeared, the squire went on and entered under the
beeches from which they had emerged. He had not gone far before he struck
and followed a path which wound between the beech trunks and was entirely
arched over by their branches. Squirrels raced away at the sound of his
footsteps, darting over the ground and up the stems of the trees in an
instant. A slight rustling now and then showed that a rabbit had been
startled. Pheasants ran too, but noiselessly, and pigeons rose from the
boughs above. The wood-pigeons rose indeed, but they were not much
frightened, and quickly settled again. So little shot at, they felt safe,
and only moved from habit.

He crossed several paths leading in various directions, but went on,
gradually descending till the gable end of a farmhouse became visible
through the foliage. The old red tiles were but a few yards distant from
the boughs of the last beech, and there was nothing between the house and
the forest but a shallow trench almost filled with dead brown leaves and
edged with fern. Out from that trench, sometimes stealthily slipping
between the flattened fern-stalks, came a weasel, and, running through
the plantains and fringe-like mayweed or stray pimpernel which covered
the neglected ground, made for the straw-rick. Searching about for mice,
he was certain to come across a hen's egg in some corner, perhaps in a
hay-crib, which the cattle, now being in the meadow, did not use. Or a
stronger stoat crept out and attacked anything that he fancied. Very
often there was a rabbit sitting in the long grass which grows round
under an old hay-rick. He would sit still and let anyone pass who did not
know of his presence, but those who were aware used to give the grass a
kick if they went that way, when he would carry his white tail swiftly
round the corner of the rick. In winter hares came nibbling at everything
in the garden, and occasionally in summer, if they fancied an herb: they
would have spoiled it altogether if free to stay there without fear of
some one suddenly appearing.

Dogs there were in plenty, but all chained, except a few mere puppies
which practically lived indoors. It was not safe to have them loose so
near the wood, the temptation to wander being so very strong. So that,
though there was a continual barking and long, mournful whines for
liberty, the wild creatures came in time to understand that there was
little danger, and the rabbit actually sat under the hay-rick.

Pheasants mingled with the fowls, and, like the fowls, only ran aside out
of the way of people. In early summer there were tiny partridge chicks
about, which rushed under the coop. The pheasants sometimes came down to
the kitchen door, so greedy were they. With the dogs and ponies, the
pheasants and rabbits, the weasels and the stoats, and the ferrets in
their hutches, the place seemed really to belong more to the animals than
to the tenant.

The forest strayed indoors. Bucks' horns, feathers picked up, strange
birds shot and stuffed, fossils from the sand-pits, coins and pottery
from the line of the ancient Roman road, all the odds and ends of the
forest, were scattered about within. To the yard came the cows, which,
with bells about their necks, wandered into the fern, and the swine,
which searched and rooted about for acorns and beech-mast in autumn. The
men who dug in the sand-pits or for gravel came this way in and out to
their labour, and so did those who split up the fallen trunks into logs.
Now and then a woodpecker came with a rush up from the meadows, where he
had been visiting the hedgerows, and went into the forest with a yell as
he entered the trees. The deer fed up to the precincts, and at intervals
a buck at the dawn got into the garden. But the flies from the forest
teased and terrified the horses, which would have run away with the
heavily loaded waggon behind them if not protected with fine netting as
if in armour. They did run away sometimes at harrow, tearing across the
field like mad things. You could not keep the birds out of the garden,
try how you would. They had most of the sowings up. The blackbirds pecked
every apple in the orchard. How the dead leaves in autumn came whirling
in thousands through rick-yard and court in showers upon the tiles! Nor
was it of much avail to sweep them away; they were there again to-morrow,
and until the wind changed. The swallows were now very busy building;
there were not many houses for them, and therefore they flocked here. Up
from over the meadows came the breeze, drawing into the hollow recesses
of the forest behind. It came over the grass and farther away over corn
just yellowing, the shadows of the clouds racing with it and instantly
lost in the trees. It drew through the pillars of the forest, and away to
the hills beyond.

The squire's ale was duly put for him, the particular gossip he liked was
ready for him; and having taken both, he looked at his old watch and went
on. His path now led for a while just inside the pale, which here divided
the forest from the meadows. In the olden time it would have been made of
oak, for they built all things then with an eye to endurance; but it was
now of fir, pitched, sawn from firs thrown in the copses. For the purpose
of keeping the deer in, it was as useful as the pale of oak. Oak is not
so plentiful nowadays. The high spars were the especial vaunting-places
of the little brown wrens which perched there and sang, in defiance of
all that the forest might hold. Rabbits crept under, but the hares waited
till evening and went round by the gates. Presently the path turned and
the squire passed a pond partly dried up, from the margin of which
several pigeons rose up, clattering their wings. They are fond of the
neighbourhood of water, and are sure to be there some time during the
day. The path went upwards, but the ascent was scarcely perceptible
through hazel bushes, which became farther apart and thinner as the
elevation increased, and the soil was less rich. Some hawthorn bushes
succeeded, and from among these he stepped out into the open park.
Nothing could be seen of the manor-house here. It was hidden by the roll
of the ground and the groups of trees. The close sward was already a
little brown--the trampling of hoofs as well as the heat causes the
brownish hue of fed sward, as if it were bruised. He went out into the
park, bearing somewhat to the right and passing many hawthorns, round the
trunks of which the grass was cut away in a ring by the hoofs of animals
seeking shadow. Far away on a rising knoll a herd of deer were lying
under some elms. In front were the downs, a mile or so distant; to the
right, meadows and cornfields, towards which he went. There was no house
nor any habitation in view; in the early part of the year, the
lambing-time, there was a shepherd's hut on wheels in the fields, but it
had been drawn away.

According to tradition, there is no forest in England in which a king has
not hunted. A king, they say, hunted here in the old days of the
cross-bow; but happily the place escaped notice in that artificial era
when half the parks and woods were spoiled to make the engraver's ideal
landscape of straight vistas, broad in the foreground and narrowing up to
nothing. Wide, straight roads--you can call them nothing else--were cut
through the finest woods, so that upon looking from a certain window, or
standing at a certain spot in the grounds, you might see a church tower
at the end of the cutting, In some parks there are half a dozen such
horrors shown to you as a great curiosity; some have a monument or pillar
at the end. These hideous disfigurements of beautiful scenery should
surely be wiped out in our day. The stiff, straight cutting could soon be
filled up by planting, and after a time the woods would resume their
natural condition. Many common highway roads are really delightful,
winding through trees and hedgerows, with glimpses of hills and distant
villages. But these planned, straight vistas, radiating from a central
spot as if done with ruler and pen, at once destroy the pleasant illusion
of primeval forest. You may be dreaming under the oaks of the chase or of
Rosalind: the moment you enter such a vista all becomes commonplace.
Happily this park escaped, and it is beautiful. Our English landscape
wants no gardening: it _cannot_ be gardened. The least interference kills
it. The beauty of English woodland and country is in its detail. There is
nothing empty and unclothed. If the clods are left a little while
undisturbed in the fields, weeds spring up and wild-flowers bloom upon
them. Is the hedge cut and trimmed, lo! the bluebells flower the more and
a yet fresher green buds forth upon the twigs. Never was there a garden
like the meadow: there is not an inch of the meadow in early summer
without a flower. Old walls, as we saw just now, are not left without a
fringe; on the top of the hardest brick wall, on the sapless tiles, on
slates, stonecrop takes hold and becomes a cushion of yellow bloom.
Nature is a miniature painter and handles a delicate brush, the tip of
which touches the tiniest spot and leaves something living. The park has
indeed its larger lines, its broad open sweep, and gradual slope, to
which the eye accustomed to small inclosures requires time to adjust
itself. These left to themselves are beautiful; they are the surface of
the earth, which is always true to itself and needs no banks nor
artificial hollows. The earth is right and the tree is right: trim either
and all is wrong. The deer will not fit to them then.

The squire came near enough to the corn-field to see that the wheat-ears
were beginning to turn yellow and that the barley had the silky
appearance caused by the beard, the delicate lines of which divide the
light and reflect it like gossamer. At some distance a man was
approaching; he saw him, and sat down on the grass under an oak to await
the coming of Ettles the keeper. Ettles had been his rounds and had
visited the outlying copses, which are the especial haunts of pheasants.
Like the deer, pheasants, if they can, will get away from the main wood.
He was now returning, and the squire, well knowing that he would pass
this way, had purposely crossed his path to meet him. The dogs ran to the
squire and at once made friends with him. Ettles, whose cheek was the
colour of the oak-apples in spring, was more respectful: he stood till
the squire motioned him to sit down. The dogs rolled on the sward, but,
though in the shadow, they could not extend themselves sufficiently nor
pant fast enough. Yonder the breeze that came up over the forest on its
way to the downs blew through the group of trees on the knoll, cooling
the deer as it passed.

MY OLD VILLAGE.

'John Brown is dead,' said an aged friend and visitor in answer to my
inquiry for the strong labourer.

'Is he really dead?' I asked, for it seemed impossible.

'He is. He came home from his work in the evening as usual, and seemed to
catch his foot in the threshold and fell forward on the floor. When they
picked him up he was dead.'

I remember the doorway; a raised piece of wood ran across it, as is
commonly the case in country cottages, such as one might easily catch
one's foot against if one did not notice it; but he knew that bit of wood
well. The floor was of brick, hard to fall on and die. He must have come
down over the crown of the hill, with his long slouching stride, as if
his legs had been half pulled away from his body by his heavy boots in
the furrows when a ploughboy. He must have turned up the steps in the
bank to his cottage, and so, touching the threshold, ended. He is gone
through the great doorway, and one pencil-mark is rubbed out. There used
to be a large hearth in that room, a larger room than in most cottages;
and when the fire was lit, and the light shone on the yellowish red brick
beneath and the large rafters overhead, it was homely and pleasant. In
summer the door was always wide open. Close by on the high bank there was
a spot where the first wild violets came. You might look along miles of
hedgerow, but there were never any until they had shown by John Brown's.

If a man's work that he has done all the days of his life could be
collected and piled up around him in visible shape, what a vast mound
there would be beside some! If each act or stroke was represented, say by
a brick, John Brown would have stood the day before his ending by the
side of a monument as high as a pyramid. Then if in front of him could be
placed the sum and product of his labour, the profit to himself, he could
have held it in his clenched hand like a nut, and no one would have seen
it. Our modern people think they train their sons to strength by football
and rowing and jumping, and what are called athletic exercises; all of
which it is the fashion now to preach as very noble, and likely to lead
to the goodness of the race. Certainly feats are accomplished and records
are beaten, but there is no real strength gained, no hardihood built up.
Without hardihood it is of little avail to be able to jump an inch
farther than somebody else. Hardihood is the true test, hardihood is the
ideal, and not these caperings or ten minutes' spurts.

Now, the way they made the boy John Brown hardy was to let him roll about
on the ground with naked legs and bare head from morn till night, from
June till December, from January till June. The rain fell on his head,
and he played in wet grass to his knees. Dry bread and a little lard was
his chief food. He went to work while he was still a child. At half-past
three in the morning he was on his way to the farm stables, there to help
feed the cart-horses, which used to be done with great care very early in
the morning. The carter's whip used to sting his legs, and sometimes he
felt the butt. At fifteen he was no taller than the sons of well-to-do
people at eleven; he scarcely seemed to grow at all till he was eighteen
or twenty, and even then very slowly, but at last became a tall big man.
That slouching walk, with knees always bent, diminished his height to
appearance; he really was the full size, and every inch of his frame had
been slowly welded together by this ceaseless work, continual life in the
open air, and coarse hard food. This is what makes a man hardy. This is
what makes a man able to stand almost anything, and gives a power of
endurance that can never be obtained by any amount of gymnastic training.

I used to watch him mowing with amazement. Sometimes he would begin at
half-past two in the morning, and continue till night. About eleven
o'clock, which used to be the mowers' noon, he took a rest on a couch of
half-dried grass in the shade of the hedge. For the rest, it was mow,
mow, mow for the long summer day.

John Brown was dead: died in an instant at his cottage door. I could
hardly credit it, so vivid was the memory of his strength. The gap of
time since I had seen him last had made no impression on me; to me he was
still in my mind the John Brown of the hayfield; there was nothing
between then and his death.

He used to catch us boys the bats in the stable, and tell us fearful
tales of the ghosts he had seen; and bring the bread from the town in an
old-fashioned wallet, half in front and half behind, long before the
bakers' carts began to come round in country places. One evening he came
into the dairy carrying a yoke of milk, staggering, with tipsy gravity;
he was quite sure he did not want any assistance, he could pour the milk
into the pans. He tried, and fell at full length and bathed himself from
head to foot. Of later days they say he worked in the town a good deal,
and did not look so well or so happy as on the farm. In this cottage
opposite the violet bank they had small-pox once, the only case I
recollect in the hamlet--the old men used to say everybody had it when
they were young; this was the only case in my time, and they recovered
quickly without any loss, nor did the disease spread. A roomy well-built
cottage like that, on dry ground, isolated, is the only hospital worthy
of the name. People have a chance to get well in such places; they have
very great difficulty in the huge buildings that are put up expressly for
them. I have a Convalescent Home in my mind at the moment, a vast
building. In these great blocks what they call ventilation is a steady
draught, and there is no 'home' about it. It is all walls and regulations
and draughts, and altogether miserable. I would infinitely rather see any
friend of mine in John Brown's cottage. That terrible disease, however,
seemed to quite spoil the violet bank opposite, and I never picked one
there afterwards. There is something in disease so destructive, as it
were, to flowers.

The hundreds of times I saw the tall chimney of that cottage rise out of
the hill-side as I came home at all hours of the day and night! the first
chimney after a long journey, always comfortable to see, especially so in
earlier days, when we had a kind of halting belief in John Brown's
ghosts, several of which were dotted along that road according to him.
The ghosts die as we grow older, they die and their places are taken by
real ghosts. I wish I had sent John Brown a pound or two when I was in
good health; but one is selfish then, and puts off things till it is too
late--a lame excuse verily. I can scarcely believe now that he is really
dead, gone as you might casually pluck a hawthorn leaf from the hedge.

The next cottage was a very marked one, for houses grow to their owners.
The low thatched roof had rounded itself and stooped down to fit itself
to Job's shoulders; the walls had got short and thick to suit him, and
they had a yellowish colour, like his complexion, as if chewing tobacco
had stained his cheeks right through. Tobacco juice had likewise
penetrated and tinted the wall. It was cut off as it seemed by a
party-wall into one room, instead of which there were more rooms beyond
which no one would have suspected. Job had a way of shaking hands with
you with his right hand, while his left hand was casually doing something
else in a detached sort of way. 'Yes, sir,' and 'No, sir,' and nodding to
everything you said all so complaisant, but at the end of the bargain you
generally found yourself a few shillings in some roundabout manner on the
wrong side. Job had a lot of shut-up rooms in his house and in his
character, which never seemed to be opened to daylight. The eaves hung
over and beetled like his brows, and he had a forelock, a regular antique
forelock, which he used to touch with the greatest humility. There was a
long bough of an elm hanging over one gable just like the forelock. His
face was a blank, like the broad end wall of the cottage, which had no
window--at least you might think so until you looked up and discovered
one little arrow slit, one narrow pane, and woke with a start to the idea
that Job was always up there watching and listening. That was how he
looked out of his one eye so intensely cunning, the other being a wall
eye--that is, the world supposed so, as he kept it half shut, always
between the lights; but whether it was really blind or not I cannot say.
Job caught rats and rabbits and moles, and bought fagots or potatoes, or
fruit or rabbit-skins, or rusty iron: wonderful how he seemed to have
command of money. It was done probably by buying and selling almost
simultaneously, so that the cash passed really from one customer to
another, and was never his at all. Also he worked as a labourer, chiefly
piecework; also Mrs. Job had a shop window about two feet square: snuff
and tobacco, bread and cheese, immense big round jumbles and sugar, kept
on the floor above, and reached down by hand, when wanted, through the
opening for the ladder stairs. The front door--Job's right hand--was
always open in summer, and the flagstones of the floor chalked round
their edges; a clean table, clean chairs, decent crockery, an old clock
about an hour slow, a large hearth with a minute fire to boil the kettle
without heating the room. Tea was usually at half-past three, and it is a
fact that many well-to-do persons, as they came along the road hot and
dusty, used to drop in and rest and take a cup--very little milk and much
gossip. Two paths met just there, and people used to step in out of a
storm of rain, a sort of thatched house club. Job was somehow on fair
terms with nearly everybody, and that is a wonderful thing in a village,
where everybody knows everybody's business, and petty interests
continually cross. The strangest fellow and the strangest way of life,
and yet I do not believe a black mark was ever put against him; the
shiftiness was all for nothing. It arose, no doubt, out of the constant
and eager straining to gain a little advantage and make an extra penny.
Had Job been a Jew he would have been rich. He was the exact counterpart
of the London Jew dealer, set down in the midst of the country. Job
should have been rich. Such immense dark brown jumbles, such
cheek-distenders--never any French sweetmeats or chocolate or bonbons to
equal these. I really think I could eat one now. The pennies and
fourpenny bits--there were fourpenny bits in those days--that went behind
that two-foot window, goodness! there was no end. Job used to chink them
in a pint pot sometimes before the company, to give them an idea of his
great hoards. He always tried to impress people with his wealth, and
would talk of a fifty-pound contract as if it was nothing to him. Jumbles
are eternal, if nothing else is. I thought then there was not such
another shop as Job's in the universe. I have found since that there is a
Job shop in every village, and in every street in every town--that is to
say, a window for jumbles and rubbish; and if you don't know it, you may
be quite sure your children do, and spend many a sly penny there. Be as
rich as you may, and give them gilded sweetmeats at home, still they will
slip round to the Job shop.

It was a pretty cottage, well backed with trees and bushes, with a
south-east mixture of sunlight and shade, and little touches that cannot
be suggested by writing. Job had not got the Semitic instinct of keeping.
The art of acquisition he possessed to some extent, that was his right
hand; but somehow the half-crowns slipped away through his unstable left
hand, and fortune was a greasy pole to him. His left hand was too cunning
for him, it wanted to manage things too cleverly. If it had only had the
Semitic grip, digging the nails into the flesh to hold tight each
separate coin, he would have been village rich. The great secret is the
keeping. Finding is by no means keeping. Job did not flourish in his old
days; the people changed round about. Job is gone, and I think every one
of that cottage is either dead or moved. Empty.

The next cottage was the water-bailiffs, who looked after the great pond
or 'broad'. There were one or two old boats, and he used to leave the
oars leaning against a wall at the side of the house. These oars looked
like fragments of a wreck, broken and irregular. The right-hand scull was
heavy, as if made of ironwood, the blade broad and spoon-shaped, so as to
have a most powerful grip of the water. The left-hand scull was light and
slender, with a narrow blade like a marrow scoop; so when you had the
punt, you had to pull very hard with your left hand and gently with the
right to get the forces equal. The punt had a list of its own, and no
matter how you roved, it would still make leeway. Those who did not know
its character were perpetually trying to get this crooked wake straight,
and consequently went round and round exactly like the whirligig beetle.
Those who knew used to let the leeway proceed a good way and then alter
it, so as to act in the other direction like an elongated zigzag. These
sculls the old fellow would bring you as if they were great treasures,
and watch you off in the punt as if he was parting with his dearest. At
that date it was no little matter to coax him round to unchain his
vessel. You had to take an interest in the garden, in the baits, and the
weather, and be very humble; then perhaps he would tell you he did not
want it for the trimmers, or the withy, or the flags, and you might have
it for an hour as far as he could see; 'did not think my lord's steward
would come over that morning; of course, if he did you must come in,' and
so on; and if the stars were propitious, by-and-by the punt was got
afloat. These sculls were tilted up against the wall, and as you
innocently went to take one, Wauw!--a dirty little ill-tempered mongrel
poodle rolled himself like a ball to your heels and snapped his
teeth--Wauw! At the bark, out rushed the old lady, his housekeeper,
shouting in the shrillest key to the dog to lie still, and to you that
the bailiff would be there in a minute. At the sound of her shrewish
'yang-yang' down came the old man from the bank, and so one dog fetched
out the lot. The three were exactly alike somehow. Beside these diamond
sculls he had a big gun, with which he used to shoot the kingfishers that
came for the little fish; the number he slaughtered was very great; he
persecuted them as Domitian did the flies: he declared that a kingfisher
would carry off a fish heavier than itself. Also he shot rooks, once now
and then strange wild fowl with this monstrous iron pipe, and something
happened with this gun one evening which was witnessed, and after that
the old fellow was very benevolent, and the punt was free to one or two
who knew all about it. There is an old story about the stick that would
not beat the dog, and the dog would not bite the pig, and so on; and so I
am quite sure that ill-natured cur could never have lived with that
'yang-yang' shrew, nor could any one else but he have turned the gear of
the hatch, nor have endured the dog and the woman, and the constant
miasma from the stagnant waters. No one else could have shot anything
with that cumbrous weapon, and no one else could row that punt straight.
He used to row it quite straight, to the amazement of a wondering world,
and somehow supplied the motive force--the stick--which kept all these
things going. He is gone, and, I think, the housekeeper too, and the
house has had several occupants since, who have stamped down the old
ghosts and thrust them out of doors.

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