Afoot in England

W >> W.H. Hudson >> Afoot in England

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It is one of his little exquisite pictures. Presently his
vision is called to the springing lark:

Just starting from the corn, he cheerly sings,
And trusts with conscious pride his downy wings;
Still louder breathes, and in the face of day
Mounts up and calls on Giles to mark his way.
Close to his eye his hat he instant bends
And forms a friendly telescope that lends
Just aid enough to dull the glaring light
And place the wandering bird before his sight,
That oft beneath a light cloud sweeps along;
Lost for a while yet pours a varied song;
The eye still follows and the cloud moves by,
Again he stretches up the clear blue sky,
His form, his motions, undistinguished quite,
Save when he wheels direct from shade to light.

In the end he falls asleep, and waking refreshed picks up his
poles and starts again brushing round.

Harvesting scenes succeed, with a picture of Mary, the village
beauty, taking her share in the work, and how the labourers in
their unwonted liveliness and new-found wit

Confess the presence of a pretty face.

She is very rustic herself in her appearance:--

Her hat awry, divested of her gown,
Her creaking stays of leather, stout and brown:
Invidious barrier! why art thou so high,
When the slight covering of her neck slips by,
Then half revealing to the eager sight
Her full, ripe bosom, exquisitely white?

The leather stays have no doubt gone the way of many other
dreadful things, even in the most rustic villages in the land;
not so the barbarous practice of docking horses' tails,
against which he protests in this place when describing the
summer plague of flies and the excessive sufferings of the
domestic animals, especially of the poor horses deprived of
their only defence against such an enemy. At his own little
farm there was yet another plague in the form of an old
broken-winged gander, "the pest and tryant of the yard," whose
unpleasant habit it was to go for the beasts and seize them by
the fetlocks. The swine alone did not resent the attacks but
welcomed them, receiving the assaults as caresses, and
stretching themselves out and lying down and closing their
pigs' eyes, they would emit grunts of satisfaction, while the
triumphant bird, followed by the whole gabbling flock, would
trample on the heads of their prostrate foes.

"Autumn" opens bravely:

Again the year's decline, 'midst storms and floods,
The thund'ring chase, the yellow fading woods
Invite my song.

It contains two of the best things in the poem, the first in
the opening part, describing the swine in the acorn season, a
delightful picture which must be given in full:--

No more the fields with scattered grain supply
The restless tenants of the sty;
From oak to oak they run with eager haste,
And wrangling share the first delicious taste
Of fallen acorns; yet but thinly found
Till a strong gale has shook them to the ground.
It comes; and roaring woods obedient wave:
Their home well pleased the joint adventurers leave;
The trudging sow leads forth her numerous young,
Playful, and white, and clean, the briars among,
Till briars and thorns increasing fence them round,
Where last year's mould'ring leaves bestrew the ground,
And o'er their heads, loud lashed by furious squalls,
Bright from their cups the rattling treasure falls;
Hot thirsty food; whence doubly sweet and cool
The welcome margin of some rush-grown pool,
The wild duck's lonely haunt, whose jealous eye
Guards every point; who sits prepared to fly,
On the calm bosom of her little lake,
Too closely screened for ruffian winds to shake;
And as the bold intruders press around,
At once she starts and rises with a bound;
With bristles raised the sudden noise they hear,
And ludicrously wild and winged with fear,
The herd decamp with more than swinish speed,
And snorting dash through sedge and rush and reed;
Through tangled thickets headlong on they go,
Then stop and listen for their fancied foe;
The hindmost still the growing panic spreads,
Repeated fright the first alarm succeeds,
Till Folly's wages, wounds and thorns, they reap;
Yet glorying in their fortunate escape,
Their groundless terrors by degrees soon cease,
And Night's dark reign restores their peace.
For now the gale subsides, and from each bough
The roosting pheasant's short but frequent crow
Invites to rest, and huddling side by side
The herd in closest ambush seek to hide;
Seek some warm slope with shagged moss o'erspread,
Dried leaves their copious covering and their bed.
In vain may Giles, through gathering glooms that fall,
And solemn silence, urge his piercing call;
Whole days and nights they tarry 'midst their store,
Nor quit the woods till oaks can yield no more.

It is a delightful passage to one that knows a pig--the animal
we respect for its intelligence, holding it in this respect
higher, more human, than the horse, and at the same time laugh
at on account of certain ludicrous points about it, as for
example its liability to lose its head. Thousands of years of
comfortable domestic life have failed to rid it of this
inconvenient heritage from the time when wild in woods it ran.
Yet in this particular instance the terror of the swine does
not seem wholly inexcusable, if we know a wild duck as well as
a pig, especially the duck that takes to haunting a solitary
woodland pool, who, when intruded on, springs up with such a
sudden tremendous splash and flutter of wings and outrageous
screams, that man himself, if not prepared for it, may be
thrown off his balance.

Passing over other scenes, about one hundred and fifty lines,
we come to the second notable passage, when after the sowing
of the winter wheat, poor Giles once more takes up his old
occupation of rook-scaring. It is now as in spring and
summer--

Keen blows the blast and ceaseless rain descends;
The half-stripped hedge a sorry shelter lends,

and he thinks it would be nice to have a hovel, no matter how
small, to take refuge in, and at once sets about its
construction.

In some sequestered nook, embanked around,
Sods for its walls and straw in burdens bound;
Dried fuel hoarded is his richest store,
And circling smoke obscures his little door;
Whence creeping forth to duty's call he yields,
And strolls the Crusoe of the lonely fields.
On whitehorn tow'ring, and the leafless rose,
A frost-nipped feast in bright vermilion glows;
Where clust'ring sloes in glossy order rise,
He crops the loaded branch, a cumbrous prize;
And on the flame the splutt'ring fruit he rests,
Placing green sods to seat the coming guests;
His guests by promise; playmates young and gay;
But ah! fresh pastures lure their steps away!
He sweeps his hearth, and homeward looks in vain,
Till feeling Disappointment's cruel pain
His fairy revels are exchanged for rage,
His banquet marred, grown dull his hermitage,
The field becomes his prison, till on high
Benighted birds to shades and coverts fly.

"The field becomes his prison," and the thought of this trival
restraint, which is yet felt so poignantly, brings to mind an
infinitely greater one. Look, he says--

From the poor bird-boy with his roasted sloes

to the miserable state of those who are confined in dungeons,
deprived of daylight and the sight of the green earth, whose
minds perpetually travel back to happy scenes,

Trace and retrace the beaten worn-out way,

whose chief bitterness it is to be forgotten and see no
familiar friendly face.

"Winter" is, I think, the best of the four parts it gives the
idea that the poem was written as it stands, from "Spring"
onwards, that by the time he got to the last part the writer
had acquired a greater ease and assurance. At all events it
is less patchy and more equal. It is also more sober in tone,
as befits the subject, and opens with an account of the
domestic animals on the farm, their increased dependence on
man and the compassionate feelings they evoke in us. He is,
we feel, dealing with realities, always from the point of view
of a boy of sensitive mina and tender heart--one taken in
boyhood from this life before it had wrought any change in
him. For in due time the farm boy, however fine his spirit
may be, must harden and grow patient and stolid in heat and
cold and wet, like the horse that draws the plough or cart;
and as he hardens he grows callous. In his wretched London
garret if any change came to him it was only to an increased
love and pity for the beasts he had lived among, who looked
and cried to him to be fed. He describes it well, the frost
and bitter cold, the hungry cattle following the cart to the
fields, the load of turnips thrown out on the hard frozen
ground; but the turnips too are frozen hard and they cannot
eat them until Giles, following with his beetle, splits them
up with vigorous blows, and the cows gather close round him,
sending out a cloud of steam from their nostrils.

The dim short winter day soon ends, but the sound of the
flails continues in the barns till long after dark before the
weary labourers end their task and trudge home. Giles, too,
is busy at this time taking hay to the housed cattle, many a
sweet mouthful being snatched from the load as he staggers
beneath it on his way to the racks. Then follow the
well-earned hours of "warmth and rest" by the fire in the big
old kitchen which he describes:--

For the rude architect, unknown to fame,
(Nor symmetry nor elegance his aim),
Who spread his floors of solid oak on high,
On beams rough-hewn from age to age that lie,
Bade his wide fabric unimpaired sustain
The orchard's store, and cheese, and golden grain;
Bade from its central base, capacious laid,
The well-wrought chimney rear its lofty head
Where since hath many a savoury ham been stored,
And tempests howled and Christmas gambols roared.

The tired ploughman, steeped in luxurious heat, by and by
falls asleep and dreams sweetly until his chilblains or the
snapping fire awakes him, and he pulls himself up and goes
forth yawning to give his team their last feed, his lantern
throwing a feeble gleam on the snow as he makes his way to the
stable. Having completed his task, he pats the sides of those
he loves best by way of good-night, and leaves them to their
fragrant meal. And this kindly action on his part suggests
one of the best passages of the poem. Even old well-fed
Dobbin occasionally rebels against his slavery, and released
from his chains will lift his clumsy hoofs and kick,
"disdainful of the dirty wheel." Short-sighted Dobbin!

Thy chains were freedom, and thy toils repose,
Could the poor post-horse tell thee all his woes;
Show thee his bleeding shoulders, and unfold
The dreadful anguish he endures for gold;
Hired at each call of business, lust, or rage,
That prompts the traveller on from stage to stage.
Still on his strength depends their boasted speed;
For them his limbs grow weak, his bare ribs bleed;
And though he groaning quickens at command,
Their extra shilling in the rider's hand
Becomes his bitter scourge . . . .

The description, too long to quote, which follows of the
tortures inflicted on the post-horse a century ago, is almost
incredible to us, and we flatter ourselves that such things
would not be tolerated now. But we must get over the ground
somehow, and I take it that but for the invention of other
more rapid means of transit the present generation would be as
little concerned at the pains of the post-horse as they are at
the horrors enacted behind the closed doors of the
physiological laboratories, the atrocity of the steel trap,
the continual murdering by our big game hunters of all the
noblest animals left on the globe, and finally the annual
massacre of millions of beautiful birds in their breeding time
to provide ornaments for the hats of our women.

"Come forth he must," says Bloomfield, when he describes how
the flogged horse at length gains the end of the stage and,
"trembling under complicated pains," when "every nerve a
separate anguish knows," he is finally unharnessed and led to
the stable door, but has scarcely tasted food and rest before
he is called for again.

Though limping, maimed and sore;
He hears the whip; the chaise is at the door . . .
The collar tightens and again he feels
His half-healed wounds inflamed; again the wheels
With tiresome sameness in his ears resound
O'er blinding dust or miles of flinty ground.

This is over and done with simply because the post-horse is no
longer wanted, and we have to remember that no form of cruelty
inflicted, whether for sport or profit or from some other
motive, on the lower animals has ever died out of itself in
the land. Its end has invariably been brought about by
legislation through the devotion of men who were the "cranks,"
the "faddists," the "sentimentalists," of their day, who were
jeered and laughed at by their fellows, and who only succeeded
by sheer tenacity and force of character after long fighting
against public opinion and a reluctant Parliament, in finally
getting their law.

Bloomfield's was but a small voice crying in the wilderness,
and he was indeed a small singer in the day of our greatest
singers. As a poet he was not worthy to unloose the buckles
of their shoes; but he had one thing in common with the best
and greatest, the feeling of tender love and compassion for
the lower animals which was in Thomson and Cowper, but found
its highest expression in his own great contemporaries,
Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth. In virtue of this feeling
he was of their illustrious brotherhood.

In conclusion, I will quote one more passage. From the
subject of horses he passes to that of dogs and their
occasional reversion to wildness, when the mastiff or cur, the
"faithful" house-dog by day, takes to sheep-killing by night.
As a rule he is exceedingly cunning, committing his
depredations at a distance frown home, and after getting his
fill of slaughter he sneaks home in the early hours to spend
the day in his kennel "licking his guilty paws." This is an
anxious time for shepherds and farmers, and poor Giles is
compelled to pay late evening visits to his small flock of
heavy-sided ewes penned in their distant fold. It is a
comfort to him to have a full moon on these lonely
expeditions, and despite his tremors he is able to appreciate
the beauty of the scene.

With saunt'ring steps he climbs the distant stile,
Whilst all around him wears a placid smile;
There views the white-robed clouds in clusters driven
And all the glorious pageantry of heaven.
Low on the utmost bound'ry of the sight
The rising vapours catch the silver light;
Thence fancy measures as they parting fly
Which first will throw its shadow on the eye,
Passing the source of light; and thence away
Succeeded quick by brighter still than they.
For yet above the wafted clouds are seen
(In a remoter sky still more serene)
Others detached in ranges through the air,
Spotless as snow and countless as they're fair;
Scattered immensely wide from east to west
The beauteous semblance of a flock at rest.

This is almost the only passage in the poem in which something
of the vastness of visible nature is conveyed. He saw the
vastness only in the sky on nights with a full moon or when he
made a telescope of his hat to watch the flight of the lark.
It was not a hilly country about his native place, and his
horizon was a very limited one, usually bounded by the
hedgerow timber at the end of the level field. The things he
depicts were seen at short range, and the poetry, we see, was
of a very modest kind. It was a "humble note" which pleased
me in the days of long ago when I was young and very ignorant,
and as it pleases me still it may be supposed that mentally I
have not progressed with the years. Nevertheless, I am not
incapable of appreciating the greater music; all that is said
in its praise, even to the extremest expressions of admiration
of those who are moved to a sense of wonder by it, find an
echo in me. But it is not only a delight to me to listen to
the lark singing at heaven's gate and to the vesper
nightingale in the oak copse--the singer of a golden throat
and wondrous artistry; I also love the smaller vocalists--the
modest shufewing and the lesser whitethroat and the
yellowhammer with his simple chant. These are very dear to
me: their strains do not strike me as trivial; they have a
lesser distinction of their own and I would not miss them from
the choir. The literary man will smile at this and say that
my paper is naught but an idle exercise, but I fancy I shall
sleep the better tonight for having discharged this ancient
debt which has been long on my conscience.

Chapter Twenty-Five: My Friend Jack

My friend rack is a retriever--very black, very curly, perfect
in shape, but just a retriever; and he is really not my
friend, only he thinks he is, which comes to the same thing.
So convinced is he that I am his guide, protector, and true
master, that if I were to give him a downright scolding or
even a thrashing he would think it was all right and go on
just the same. His way of going on is to make a companion of
me whether I want him or not. I do not want him, but his idea
is that I want him very much. I bitterly blame myself for
having made the first advances, although nothing came of it
except that he growled. I met him in a Cornish village in a
house where I stayed. There was a nice kennel there, painted
green, with a bed of clean straw and an empty plate which had
contained his dinner, but on peeping in I saw no dog. Next
day it was the same, and the next, and the day after that;
then I inquired about it--Was there a dog in that house or
not? Oh, yes, certainly there was: Jack, but a very
independent sort of dog. On most days he looked in, ate his
dinner and had a nap on his straw, but he was not what you
would call a home-keeping dog.

One day I found him in, and after we had looked for about a
minute at each other, I squatting before the kennel, he with
chin on paws pretending to be looking through me at something
beyond, I addressed a few kind words to him, which he received
with the before-mentioned growl. I pronounced him a surly
brute and went away. It was growl for growl. Nevertheless I
was well pleased at having escaped the consequences in
speaking kindly to him. I am not a "doggy" person nor even a
canophilist. The purely parasitic or degenerate pet dog moves
me to compassion, but the natural vigorous outdoor dog I fear
and avoid because we are not in harmony; consequently I suffer
and am a loser when he forces his company on me. The outdoor
world I live in is not the one to which a man goes for a
constitutional, with a dog to save him from feeling lonely,
or, if he has a gun, with a dog to help him kill something.
It is a world which has sound in it, distant cries and
penetrative calls, and low mysterious notes, as of insects
and corncrakes, and frogs chirping and of grasshopper
warblers--sounds like wind in the dry sedges. And there are
also sweet and beautiful songs; but it is very quiet world
where creatures move about subtly, on wings, on polished
scales, on softly padded feet--rabbits, foxes, stoats,
weasels, and voles and birds and lizards and adders and
slow-worms, also beetles and dragon-flies. Many are at enmity
with each other, but on account of their quietude there is no
disturbance, no outcry and rushing into hiding. And having
acquired this habit from them I am able to see and be with
them. The sitting bird, the frolicking rabbit, the basking
adder--they are as little disturbed at my presence as the
butterfly that drops down close to my feet to sun his wings on
a leaf or frond and makes me hold my breath at the sight of
his divine colour, as if he had just fluttered down from some
brighter realm in the sky. Think of a dog in this world,
intoxicated with the odours of so many wild creatures, dashing
and splashing through bogs and bushes! It is ten times worse
than a bull in a china-shop. The bull can but smash a lot of
objects made of baked clay; the dog introduces a mad panic in
a world of living intelligent beings, a fairy realm of
exquisite beauty. They scuttle away and vanish into hiding as
if a deadly wind had blown over the earth and swept them out
of existence. Only the birds remain--they can fly and do not
fear for their own lives, but are in a state of intense
anxiety about their eggs and young among the bushes which he
is dashing through or exploring.

I had good reason, then, to congratulate myself on Jack's
surly behaviour on our first meeting. Then, a few days later,
a curious thing happened. Jack was discovered one morning in
his kennel, and when spoken to came or rather dragged himself
out, a most pitiable object. He was horribly bruised and sore
all over; his bones appeared to be all broken; he was limp and
could hardly get on his feet, and in that miserable condition
he continued for some three days.

At first we thought he had been in a big fight--he was
inclined that way, his master said--but we could discover no
tooth marks or lacerations, nothing but bruises. Perhaps, we
said, he had fallen into the hands of some cruel person in one
of the distant moorland farms, who had tied him up, then
thrashed him with a big stick, and finally turned him loose to
die on the moor or crawl home if he could. His master looked
so black at this that we said no more about it. But Jack was
a wonderfully tough dog, all gristle I think, and after three
days of lying there like a dead dog he quickly recovered,
though I'm quite sure that if his injuries had been
distributed among any half-dozen pampered or pet dogs it would
have killed them all. A morning came when the kennel was
empty: Jack was not dead--he was well again, and, as usual,
out.

Just then I was absent for a week or ten days then, back
again, I went out one fine morning for a long day's ramble
along the coast. A mile or so from home, happening to glance
back I caught sight of a black dog's face among the bushes
thirty or forty yards away gazing earnestly at me. It was
Jack, of course, nothing but his head visible in an opening
among the bushes--a black head which looked as if carved in
ebony, in a wonderful setting of shining yellow furze
blossoms. The beauty and singularity of the sight made it
impossible for me to be angry with him, though there's nothing
a man more resents than being shadowed, or secretly followed
and spied upon, even by a dog, so, without considering what I
was letting myself in for, I cried out "Jack" and instantly he
bounded out and came to my side, then flew on ahead, well
pleased to lead the way.

"I must suffer him this time," I said resignedly, and went on,
he always ahead acting as my scout and hunter--self-appointed,
of course, but as I had not ordered him back in trumpet tones
and hurled a rock at him to enforce the command, he took it
that he was appointed by me. He certainly made the most of
his position; no one could say that he was lacking in zeal.
He scoured the country to the right and left and far in
advance of me, crashing through furze thickets and splashing
across bogs and streams, spreading terror where he went and
leaving nothing for me to look at. So it went on until after
one o'clock when, tired and hungry, I was glad to go down into
a small fishing cove to get some dinner in a cottage I knew.
Jack threw himself down on the floor and shared my meal, then
made friends with the fisherman's wife and got a second meal
of saffron cake which, being a Cornish dog, he thoroughly
enjoyed.

The second half of the day was very much like the first,
altogether a blank day for me, although a very full one for
Jack, who had filled a vast number of wild creatures with
terror, furiously hunted a hundred or more, and succeeded in
killing two or three.

Jack was impossible, and would never be allowed to follow me
again. So I sternly said and so thought, but when the time
came and I found him waiting for me his brown eyes bright with
joyful anticipation, I could not scowl at him and thunder out
No! I could not help putting myself in his place. For here
he was, a dog of boundless energy who must exercise his powers
or be miserable, with nothing in the village for him except to
witness the not very exciting activities of others; and that,
I dscovered, had been his life. He was mad to do something,
and because there was nothing for him to do his time was
mostly spent in going about the village to keep an eye on
the movements of the people, especially of those who did
the work, always with the hope that his services might be
required in some way by some one. He was grateful for the
smallest crumbs, so to speak. House-work and work about the
house--milking, feeding the pigs and so on--did not interest
him, nor would he attend the labourers in the fields. Harvest
time would make a difference; now it was ploughing, sowing,
and hoeing, with nothing for Jack. But he was always down at
the fishing cove to see the boats go out or come in and join
in the excitement when there was a good catch. It was still
better when the boat went with provisions to the lighthouse,
or to relieve the keeper, for then Jack would go too and if
they would not have him he would plunge into the waves and
swim after it until the sails were hoisted and it flew like a
great gull from him and he was compelled to swim back to land.
If there was nothing else to do he would go to the stone
quarry and keep the quarrymen company, sharing their dinner
and hunting away the cows and donkeys that came too near.
Then at six o'clock he would turn up at the cricket-field,
where a few young enthusiasts would always attend to practise
after working hours.

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