Field and Hedgerow

R >> Richard Jefferies >> Field and Hedgerow

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WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS.

I.

If you will look at a grain of wheat you will see that it seems folded
up: it has crossed its arms and rolled itself up in a cloak, a fold of
which forms a groove, and so gone to sleep. If you look at it some time,
as people in the old enchanted days used to look into a mirror, or the
magic ink, until they saw living figures therein, you can almost trace a
miniature human being in the oval of the grain. It is narrow at the top,
where the head would be, and broad across the shoulders, and narrow again
down towards the feet; a tiny man or woman has wrapped itself round about
with a garment and settled to slumber. Up in the far north, where the
dead ice reigns, our arctic explorers used to roll themselves in a
sleeping-bag like this, to keep the warmth in their bodies against the
chilliness of the night. Down in the south, where the heated sands of
Egypt never cool, there in the rock-hewn tombs lie the mummies wrapped
and lapped and wound about with a hundred yards of linen, in the hope, it
may be, that spices and balm might retain within the sarcophagus some
small fragment of human organism through endless ages, till at last the
gift of life revisited it. Like a grain of wheat the mummy is folded in
its cloth. And I do not know really whether I might not say that these
little grains of English corn do not hold within them the actual flesh
and blood of man. Transubstantiation is a fact there.

Sometimes the grains are dry and shrivelled and hard as shot, sometimes
they are large and full and have a juiciness about them, sometimes they
are a little bit red, others are golden, many white. The sack stands open
in the market--you can thrust your arm in it a foot deep, or take up a
handful and let it run back like a liquid stream, or hold it in your palm
and balance it, feeling the weight. They are not very heavy as they lie
in the palm, yet these little grains are a ponderous weight that rules
man's world. Wherever they are there is empire. Could imperial Rome have
only grown sufficient wheat in Italy to have fed her legions Caesar would
still be master of three-fourths of the earth. Rome thought more in her
latter days of grapes and oysters and mullets, that change colour as they
die, and singing girls and flute-playing, and cynic verse of
Horace--anything rather than corn. Rome is no more, and the lords of the
world are they who have mastership of wheat. We have the mastership at
this hour by dint of our gold and our hundred-ton guns, but they are
telling our farmers to cast aside their corn, and to grow tobacco and
fruit and anything else that can be thought of in preference. The gold is
slipping away. These sacks in the market open to all to thrust their
hands in are not sacks of corn but of golden sovereigns, half-sovereigns,
new George and the dragon, old George and the dragon, Sydney mint
sovereigns, Napoleons, half-Napoleons, Belgian gold, German gold, Italian
gold; gold scraped and scratched and gathered together like old rags from
door to door. Sacks full of gold, verily I may say that all the gold
poured out from the Australian fields, every pennyweight of it, hundreds
of tons, all shipped over the sea to India, Australia, South Africa,
Egypt, and, above all, America, to buy wheat. It was said that Pompey and
his sons covered the great earth with their bones, for each one died in a
different quarter of the world; but now he would want two more sons for
Australia and America, the two new quarters which are now at work
ploughing, sowing, reaping, without a month's intermission, growing corn
for us. When you buy a bag of flour at the baker's you pay fivepence over
the counter, a very simple transaction. Still you do not expect to get
even that little bag of flour for nothing, your fivepence goes over the
counter in somebody else's till. Consider now the broad ocean as the
counter and yourself to represent thirty-five millions of English people
buying sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen million quarters of wheat from the
nations opposite, and paying for it shiploads of gold.

So that these sacks of corn in the market are truly filled with gold
dust; and how strange it seems at first that our farmers, who are for
ever dabbling with their hands in these golden sands, should be for ever
grumbling at their poverty! 'The nearer the church the farther from God'
is an old country proverb; the nearer to wheat the farther from mammon, I
may construct as an addendum. Quite lately a gentleman told me that while
he grew wheat on his thousand acres he lost just a pound an acre per
annum, _i.e._ a thousand a year out of capital, so that if he had not
happily given up this amusement he would now have been in the workhouse
munching the putty there supplied for bread.

The rag and bone men go from door to door filling an old bag with scraps
of linen, and so innumerable agents of bankers and financiers, vampires
that suck gold, are for ever prowling about collecting every golden coin
they can scent out and shipping it over sea. And what does not go abroad
is in consequence of this great drain sharply locked up in the London
safes as reserves against paper, and cannot be utilised in enterprises or
manufacture. Therefore trade stands still, and factories are closed, and
ship-yards are idle, and beautiful vessels are stored up doing nothing by
hundreds in dock; coal mines left to be filled with water, and furnaces
blown out. Therefore there is bitter distress and starvation, and cries
for relief works, and one meal a day for Board school children, and the
red flag of Socialism is unfurled. All because of these little grains of
wheat.

They talked of bringing artillery, with fevered lips, to roar forth
shrapnel in Trafalgar Square; why not Gatling guns? The artillery did not
come for very shame, but the Guards did, and there were regiments of
infantry in the rear, with glittering bayonets to prod folk into moving
on. All about these little grains of wheat.

These thoughts came into my mind in the winter afternoon at the edge of a
level corn-field, with the copper-sheathed spire of the village church on
my right, the sun going down on the left. The copper did not gleam, it
was dull and brown, no better than discoloured wood, patched with pieces
of later date and another shade of dulness. I wish they would glitter,
some of these steeples or some of our roofs, and so light up the reddish
brown of the elms and the grey lichened oaks. The very rooks are black,
and the starlings and the wintry fieldfares and redwings have no colour
at a distance. They say the metal roofs and domes gleam in Russia, and
even in France, and why not in our rare sunshine? Once now and then you
see a gilded weathercock shine like a day-star as the sun goes down three
miles away, over the dark brown field, where the plough has been going to
and fro through the slow hours. I can see the plough and the horses very
well at three miles, and know what they are doing.

I wish the trees, the elms, would grow tall enough and thick enough to
hide the steeples and towers which stand up so stiff and stark, and bare
and cold, some of them blunted and squab, some of them sharp enough to
impale, with no more shape than a walking-stick, ferrule upwards--every
one of them out of proportion and jarring to the eye. If by good fortune
you can find a spot where you cannot see a steeple or a church tower,
where you can see only fields and woods, you will find it so much more
beautiful, for nature has made it of its kind perfect. The dim sea is
always so beautiful a view because it is not disfigured by these
buildings. In the ships men live; in the houses among the trees they
live; these steeples and towers are empty, and no spirit can dwell in
that which is out of proportion. Scarcely any one can paint a picture of
the country without sticking in one of these repellent structures. The
oast-houses, whose red cones are so plentiful in Kent and Sussex, have
quite a different effect; they have some colour, and by a curious
felicity the builders have hit upon a good proportion, so that the shape
is pleasant; these, too, have some use in the world.

Westward the sun was going down over the sea, and a wild west wind, which
the glow of the sun as it touched the waves seemed to heat into fury,
brought up the distant sound of the billows from the beach. A line of
dark Spanish oaks from which the sharp pointed acorns were dropping,
darkest green oaks, shut out the shore. A thousand starlings were flung
up into the air out of these oaks, as if an impatient hand had cast them
into the sky; then down they fell again, with a ceaseless whistling and
clucking; up they went and down they came, lost in the deep green foliage
as if they had dropped in the sea. The long level of the wheat-field
plain stretched out from my feet towards the far-away Downs, so level
that the first hedge shut off the fields beyond; and every now and then
over these hedges there rose up the white forms of sea-gulls drifting to
and fro among the elms. White sea-gulls--birds of divination, you might
say--a good symbol of the times, for now we plough the ocean. The barren
sea! In the Greek poets you may find constant reference to it as that
which could not be reaped or sowed. Ulysses, to betoken his madness, took
his plough down to the shore and drew furrows in the sand--the sea that
even Demeter, great goddess, could not sow nor bring to any fruition. Yet
now the ocean is our wheat-field and ships are our barns. The sea-gull
should be painted on the village tavern sign instead of the golden
wheatsheaf.

There could be no more flat and uninteresting surface than this field, a
damp wet brown, water slowly draining out of the furrows, not a bird that
I can see. No hare certainly, or partridge, or even a rabbit--nothing to
sit or crouch--on that cold surface, tame and level as the brown cover of
a book. They like something more human and comfortable; just as we creep
into nooks and corners of rooms and into cosy arm-chairs, so they like
tufts or some growth of shelter, or mounds that are dry, between hedges
where there is a bite for them. I can trace nothing on this surface, so
heavily washed by late rain. Let now the harriers come, and instantly the
hounds' second sense of smell picks up the invisible sign of the hare
that has crossed it in the night or early dawn, and runs it as swiftly as
if he were lifting a clue of thread. The dull surface is all written over
with hieroglyphics to the hound, he can read and translate to us in
joyous tongue. Or the foxhounds carry a bee-line straight from hedge to
hedge, and after them come the hoofs, prospecting deeply into the earth,
dashing down fibre and blade, crunching up the tender wheat and battering
it to pieces. It will rise again all the fresher and stronger, for there
is something human in wheat, and the more it is trampled on the better it
grows. Despots grind half the human race, and despots stronger than
man--plague, pestilence, and famine--grind the whole; and yet the world
increases, and the green wheat of the human heart is not to be trampled
out.

The starlings grew busier and busier in the dark green Spanish oaks,
thrown up as if a shell had burst among them; suddenly their clucking and
whistling ceased, the speeches of contention were over, a vote of
confidence had been passed in their Government, and the House was silent.
The pheasants in the park shook their wings and crowed 'kuck, kuck--kow,'
and went to roost; the water in the furrows ceased to reflect; the dark
earth grew darker and damper; the elms lost their reddish brown; the sky
became leaden behind the ridge of the Downs; and the shadow of night fell
over the field.

Twenty-five years ago I went into a camera obscura, where you see
miniature men and women, coloured photographs alive and moving, trees
waving, now and then dogs crossing the bright sun picture. I was only
there a few moments, and I have never been in one since, and yet so
inexplicable a thing is memory, the picture stands before me now clear as
if it were painted and tangible. So many millions of pictures have come
and gone upon the retina, and yet I can single out this one in an
instant, and take it down as you would a book from a shelf. The millions
of coloured etchings that have fixed themselves there in the course of
those years are all in due order in the portfolio of the mind, and yet
they cannot occupy the space of a pin's point. They have neither length,
breadth, nor thickness, none of the qualifications of mathematical
substance, and yet they must in some way be a species of matter. The fact
indicates the possibility of still more subtle existences. Now I wish I
could put before you a coloured, living, moving picture, like that of the
camera obscura, of some other wheat-fields at a sunnier time. They were
painted on the surface of a plain, set round about with a margin of green
downs. They were large enough to have the charm of vague, indefinite
extension, and yet all could be distinctly seen. Large squares of green
corn that was absorbing its yellow from the sunlight; chess squares,
irregularly placed, of brown furrows; others of rich blood-red trifolium;
others of scarlet sainfoin and blue lucerne, gardens of scarlet poppies
here and there. Not all of these, of course, at once, but they followed
so quickly in the summer days that they seemed to be one and the same
pictures, and had you painted them altogether on the same canvas,
together with ripe wheat, they would not have seemed out of place. Never
was such brilliant colour; it was chalk there, and on chalk the colours
are always clearer, the poppies deeper, the yellow mustard and charlock a
keener yellow; the air, too, is pellucid. Waggons going along the tracks;
men and women hoeing; ricks of last year still among clumps of trees,
where the chimneys and gables of farmhouses are partly visible; red-tiled
barns away yonder; a shepherd moving his hurdles; away again the black
funnel of an idle engine, and the fly-wheel above hawthorn bushes--all so
distinct and close under that you might almost fear to breathe for fear
of dimming the mirror. The few white clouds sailing over seemed to belong
to the fields on which their shadows were now foreshortened, now
lengthened, as if they were really part of the fields, like the crops,
and the azure sky so low down as to be the roof of the house and not at
all a separate thing. And the sun a lamp that you might almost have
pushed along his course faster with your hand; a loving and interesting
sun that wanted the wheat to ripen, and stayed there in the slow-drawn
arc of the summer day to lend a hand. Sun and sky and clouds close here
and not across any planetary space, but working with us in the same
field, shoulder to shoulder, with man. Then you might see the white doves
yonder flutter up suddenly out of the trees by the farm, little flecks of
white clouds themselves, and everywhere all throughout the plain an
exquisite silence, a delicious repose, not one clang or harshness of
sound to shatter the beauty of it. There you might stand on the high down
among the thyme and watch it, hour after hour, and still no interruption;
nothing to break it up. It was something like the broad folio of an
ancient illuminated manuscript, in gold, gules, blue, green; with
foliated scrolls and human figures, somewhat clumsy and thick, but
quaintly drawn, and bold in their intense realism.

There was another wheat-field by the side of which I used to walk
sometimes in the evenings, as the grains in the cars began to grow firm.
The path ran for a mile beside it--a mile of wheat in one piece--all
those million million stalks the same height, all with about the same
number of grains in each car, all ripening together. The hue of the
surface travelled along as you approached; the tint of yellow shifted
farther like the reflection of sunlight on water, but the surface was
really much the same colour everywhere. It seemed a triumph of culture
over such a space, such regularity, such perfection of myriads of plants
springing in their true lines at the same time, each particular ear
perfect, and a mile of it. Perfect work with the plough, the drill, the
harrow in every detail, and yet such breadth. Let your hand touch the
ears lightly as you walk--drawn through them as if over the side of a
boat in water--feeling the golden heads. The sparrows fly out every now
and then ahead; some of the birds like their corn as it hardens, and some
while it is soft and full of milky sap. There are hares within, and many
a brood of partridge chicks that cannot yet use their wings. Thick as the
seed itself the feathered creatures have been among the wheat since it
was sown. Finches more numerous than the berries on the hedges; sparrows
like the finches multiplied by finches, linnets, rooks, like leaves on
the trees, wood-pigeons whose crops are like bushel baskets for capacity;
and now as it ripens the multitude will be multiplied by legions, and as
it comes to the harvest there is a fresh crop of sparrows from the nests
in the barns, you may see a brown cloud of them a hundred yards long.
Besides which there were the rabbits that ate the young green blades, and
the mice that will be busy in the sheaves, and the insects from
spring-time to granary, a nameless host uncounted. A whole world, as it
were, let loose upon the wheat, to eat, consume, and wither it, and yet
it conquers the whole world. The great field you see was filled with gold
corn four feet deep as a pitcher is filled with water to the brim. Of
yore the rich man is said, in the Roman classic, to have measured his
money, so here you might have measured it by the rood. The sunbeams sank
deeper and deeper into the wheatears, layer upon layer of light, and the
colour deepened by these daily strokes. There was no bulletin to tell the
folk of its progress, no Nileometer to mark the rising flood of the wheat
to its hour of overflow. Yet there went through the village a sense of
expectation, and men said to each other, 'We shall be there soon.' No one
knew the day--the last day of doom of the golden race; every one knew it
was nigh. One evening there was a small square piece cut at one side, a
little notch, and two shocks stood there in the twilight. Next day the
village sent forth its army with their crooked weapons to cut and slay.
It used to be an era, let me tell you, when a great farmer gave the
signal to his reapers; not a man, woman, or child that did not talk of
that. Well-to-do people stopped their vehicles and walked out into the
new stubble. Ladies came, farmers, men of low degree, everybody--all to
exchange a word or two with the workers. These were so terribly in
earnest at the start they could scarcely acknowledge the presence even of
the squire. They felt themselves so important, and were so full, and so
intense and one-minded in their labour, that the great of the earth might
come and go as sparrows for aught they cared. More men and more men were
put on day by day, and women to bind the sheaves, till the vast field
held the village, yet they seemed but a handful buried in the tunnels of
the golden mine: they were lost in it like the hares, for as the wheat
fell, the shocks rose behind them, low tents of corn. Your skin or mine
could not have stood the scratching of the straw, which is stiff and
sharp, and the burning of the sun, which blisters like red-hot iron. No
one could stand the harvest-field as a reaper except he had been born and
cradled in a cottage, and passed his childhood bareheaded in July heats
and January snows. I was always fond of being out of doors, yet I used to
wonder how these men and women could stand it, for the summer day is
long, and they were there hours before I was up. The edge of the
reap-hook had to be driven by force through the stout stalks like a
sword, blow after blow, minute after minute, hour after hour; the back
stooping, and the broad sun throwing his fiery rays from a full disc on
the head and neck. I think some of them used to put handkerchiefs doubled
up in their hats as pads, as in the East they wind the long roll of the
turban about the head, and perhaps they would have done better if they
had adopted the custom of the South and wound a long scarf about the
middle of the body, for they were very liable to be struck down with such
internal complaints as come from great heat. Their necks grew black, much
like black oak in old houses. Their open chests were always bare, and
flat, and stark, and never rising with rounded bust-like muscle as the
Greek statues of athletes.

The breast-bone was burned black, and their arms, tough as ash, seemed
cased in leather. They grew visibly thinner in the harvest-field, and
shrunk together--all flesh disappearing, and nothing but sinew and muscle
remaining. Never was such work. The wages were low in those days, and it
is not long ago, either--I mean the all-year-round wages; the reaping was
piecework at so much per acre--like solid gold to men and women who had
lived on dry bones, as it were, through the winter. So they worked and
slaved, and tore at the wheat as if they were seized with a frenzy; the
heat, the aches, the illness, the sunstroke, always impending in the
air--the stomach hungry again before the meal was over, it was nothing.
No song, no laugh, no stay--on from morn till night, possessed with a
maddened desire to labour, for the more they could cut the larger the sum
they would receive; and what is man's heart and brain to money? So hard,
you see, is the pressure of human life that these miserables would have
prayed on their knees for permission to tear their arms from the socket,
and to scorch and shrivel themselves to charred human brands in the
furnace of the sun.

Does it not seem bitter that it should be so? Here was the wheat, the
beauty of which I strive in vain to tell you, in the midst of the flowery
summer, scourging them with the knot of necessity; that which should give
life pulling the life out of them, rendering their existence below that
of the cattle, so far as the pleasure of living goes. Without doubt many
a low mound in the churchyard--once visible, now level--was the sooner
raised over the nameless dead because of that terrible strain in the few
weeks of the gold fever. This is human life, real human life--no rest, no
calm enjoyment of the scene, no generous gift of food and wine lavishly
offered by the gods--the hard fist of necessity for ever battering man to
a shapeless and hopeless fall.

The whole village lived in the field; a corn-land village is always the
most populous, and every rood of land thereabouts, in a sense, maintains
its man. The reaping, and the binding up and stacking of the sheaves, and
the carting and building of the ricks, and the gleaning, there was
something to do for every one, from the 'olde, olde, very olde man,' the
Thomas Parr of the hamlet, down to the very youngest child whose little
eye could see, and whose little hand could hold a stalk of wheat. The
gleaners had a way of binding up the collected wheatstalks together so
that a very large quantity was held tightly in a very small compass. The
gleaner's sheaf looked like the knot of a girl's hair woven in and bound.
It was a tradition of the wheat field handed down from generation to
generation, a thing you could not possibly do unless you had been shown
the secret--like the knots the sailors tie, a kind of hand art. The
wheatstalk being thick at one end makes the sheaf heavier and more solid
there, and so in any manner of fastening it or stacking it, it takes a
rounded shape like a nine-pin; the round ricks are built thick in the
middle and lessen gradually toward the top and toward the ground. The
warm yellow of the straw is very pleasant to look at on a winter's day
under a grey sky; so, too, the straw looks nice and warm and comfortable,
thrown down thickly in the yards for the roan cattle.

After the village has gone back to its home still the work of the wheat
is not over; there is the thatching with straw of last year, which is
bleached and contrasts with the yellow of the fresh-gathered crop. Next
the threshing; and meantime the ploughs are at work, and very soon there
is talk of seed-time.

I used to look with wonder when I was a boy at the endless length of wall
and the enormous roof of a great tithe barn. The walls of Spanish
convents, with little or no window to break the vast monotony, somewhat
resemble it: the convent is a building, but does not look like a home; it
is too big, too general. So this barn, with its few windows, seemed too
immense to belong to any one man. The tithe barn has so completely
dropped out of modern life that it may be well to briefly mention that
its use was to hold the tenth sheaf from every wheat-field in the parish.
The parson's tithe was the real actual tenth sheaf bodily taken from
every field of corn in the district. A visible tenth, you see; a very
solid thing. Imagine the vast heap they would have made, imagine the
hundreds and hundreds of sacks of wheat they filled when they were
threshed. I have often thought that it would perhaps be a good thing if
this contribution of the real tenth could be brought back again for
another purpose. If such a barn could be filled now, and its produce
applied to the help of the poor and aged and injured of the village, we
might get rid of that blot on our civilisation--the workhouse. Mr.
Besant, in his late capital story, 'The Children of Gibeon,' most truly
pointed out that it was custom which rendered all men indifferent to the
sufferings of their fellow-creatures. In the old Roman days men were
crucified so often that it ceased even to be a show; the soldiers played
at dice under the miserable wretches: the peasant women stepping by
jested and laughed and sang. Almost in our own time dry skeletons creaked
on gibbets at every cross-road:--

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