BELLOC-HILLS AND THE SEA - THE CHANNEL
There is a valley in South England remote from ambition and from fear,
where the passage of strangers is rare and unperceived, and where the
scent of the grass in summer is breathed only by those who are native to
that unvisited land. The roads to the Channel do not traverse it; they
choose upon either side easier passes over the range. One track alone
leads up through it to the hills, and this is changeable: now green
where men have little occasion to go, now a good road where it nears the
homesteads and the barns. The woods grow steep above the slopes; they
reach sometimes the very summit of the heights, or, when they cannot
attain them, fill in and clothe the coombes. And, in between, along the
floor of the valley, deep pastures and their silence are bordered by
lawns of chalky grass and the small yew trees of the Downs.
The clouds that visit its sky reveal themselves beyond the one great
rise, and sail, white and enormous, to the other, and sink beyond that
other. But the plains above which they have travelled and the Weald to
which they go, the people of the valley cannot see and hardly recall.
The wind, when it reaches such fields, is no longer a gale from the
salt, but fruitful and soft, an inland breeze; and those whose blood was
nourished here, feel in that wind the fruitfulness of our orchards and
all the life that all things draw from the air.
In this place, when I was a boy, I pushed through a fringe of beeches
that made a complete screen between me and the world, and I came to a
glade called No Man's Land. I climbed beyond it, and I was surprised and
glad, because from the ridge of that glade I saw the sea. To this place
very lately I returned.
The many things that I recovered as I came up the countryside were not
less charming than when a distant memory had enshrined them, but much
more. Whatever veil is thrown by a longing recollection had not
intensified nor even made more mysterious the beauty of that happy
ground; not in my very dreams of morning had I, in exile, seen it more
beloved or more rare. Much also that I had forgotten now returned to me
as I approached--a group of elms, a little turn of the parson's wall, a
small paddock beyond the graveyard close, cherished by one man, with a
low wall of very old stone guarding it all round. And all these things
fulfilled and amplified my delight, till even the good vision of the
place, which I had kept so many years, left me and was replaced by its
better reality. "Here," I said to myself, "is a symbol of what some say
is reserved for the soul: pleasure of a kind which cannot be imagined
save in a moment when at last it is attained."
When I came to my own gate and my own field, and had before me the house
I knew, I looked around a little (though it was already evening), and I
saw that the grass was standing as it should stand when it is ready for
the scythe. For in this, as in everything that a man can do--of those
things at least which are very old--there is an exact moment when they
are done best. And it has been remarked of whatever rules us that it
works blunderingly, seeing that the good things given to a man are not
given at the precise moment when they would have filled him with
delight. But, whether this be true or false, we can choose the just turn
of the seasons in everything we do of our own will, and especially in
the making of hay. Many think that hay is best made when the grass is
thickest; and so they delay until it is rank and in flower, and has
already heavily pulled the ground. And there is another false reason for
delay, which is wet weather. For very few will understand (though it
comes year after year) that we have rain always in South England between
the sickle and the scythe, or say just after the weeks of east wind are
over. First we have a week of sudden warmth, as though the south had
come to see us all; then we have the weeks of east and south-east wind;
and then we have more or less of that rain of which I spoke, and which
always astonishes the world. Now it is just before, or during, or at the
very end of that rain--but not later--that grass should be cut for hay.
True, upland grass, which is always thin, should be cut earlier than the
grass in the bottoms and along the water meadows; but not even the
latest, even in the wettest seasons, should be left (as it is) to flower
and even to seed. For what we get when we store our grass is not a
harvest of something ripe, but a thing just caught in its prime before
maturity: as witness that our corn and straw are best yellow, but our
hay is best green. So also Death should be represented with a scythe and
Time with a sickle; for Time can take only what is ripe, but Death comes
always too soon. In a word, then, it is always much easier to cut grass
too late than too early; and I, under that evening and come back to
these pleasant fields, looked at the grass and knew that it was time.
June was in full advance: it was the beginning of that season when the
night has already lost her foothold of the earth and hovers over it,
never quite descending, but mixing sunset with the dawn.
Next morning, before it was yet broad day, I awoke, and thought of the
mowing. The birds were already chattering in the trees beside my window,
all except the nightingale, which had left and flown away to the Weald,
where he sings all summer by day as well as by night in the oaks and the
hazel spinneys, and especially along the little river Adur, one of the
rivers of the Weald. The birds and the thought of the mowing had
awakened me, and I went down the stairs and along the stone floors to
where I could find a scythe; and when I took it from its nail, I
remembered how, fourteen years ago, I had last gone out with my scythe,
just so, into the fields at morning. In between that day and this were
many things, cities and armies, and a confusion of books, mountains and
the desert, and horrible great breadths of sea.
When I got out into the long grass the sun was not yet risen, but there
were already many colours in the eastern sky, and I made haste to
sharpen my scythe, so that I might get to the cutting before the dew
should dry. Some say that it is best to wait till all the dew has risen,
so as to get the grass quite dry from the very first. But, though it is
an advantage to get the grass quite dry, yet it is not worth while to
wait till the dew has risen. For, in the first place, you lose many
hours of work (and those the coolest), and next--which is more
important--you lose that great ease and thickness in cutting which comes
of the dew. So I at once began to sharpen my scythe.
There is an art also in the sharpening of a scythe, and it is worth
describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you will
see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet it. Then
also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it is a good
thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all your day's
mowing. The scythe you stand upright, with the blade pointing away from
you, and you put your left hand firmly on the back of the blade,
grasping it: then you pass the rubber first down one side of the
blade-edge and then down the other, beginning near the handle and going
on to the point and working quickly and hard. When you first do this you
will, perhaps, cut your hand; but it is only at first that such an
accident will happen to you.
To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the rule. First the
stone clangs and grinds against the iron harshly; then it rings
musically to one note; then, at last, it purrs as though the iron and
stone were exactly suited. When you hear this, your scythe is sharp
enough; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, with everything quite
silent except the birds, let down the scythe and bent myself to mow.
When one does anything anew, after so many years, one fears very much
for one's trick or habit. But all things once learnt are easily
recoverable, and I very soon recovered the swing and power of the mower.
Mowing well and mowing badly--or rather not mowing at all--are separated
by very little; as is also true of writing verse, of playing the
fiddle, and of dozens of other things, but of nothing more than of
believing. For the bad or young or untaught mower without tradition, the
mower Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past, does
all these things: He leaves great crescents of grass uncut. He digs the
point of the scythe hard into the ground with a jerk. He loosens the
handles and even the fastening of the blade. He twists the blade with
his blunders, he blunts the blade, he chips it, dulls it, or breaks it
clean off at the tip. If any one is standing by he cuts him in the
ankle. He sweeps up into the air wildly, with nothing to resist his
stroke. He drags up earth with the grass, which is like making the
meadow bleed. But the good mower who does things just as they should be
done and have been for a hundred thousand years, falls into none of
these fooleries. He goes forward very steadily, his scythe-blade just
barely missing the ground, every grass falling; the swish and rhythm of
his mowing are always the same.
So great an art can only be learnt by continual practice; but this much
is worth writing down, that, as in all good work, to know the thing with
which you work is the core of the affair. Good verse is best written on
good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed
wall. The pen thinks for you; and so does the scythe mow for you if you
treat it honourably and in a manner that makes it recognise its service.
The manner is this. You must regard the scythe as a pendulum that
swings, not as a knife that cuts. A good mower puts no more strength
into his stroke than into his lifting. Again, stand up to your work. The
bad mower, eager and full of pain, leans forward and tries to force the
scythe through the grass. The good mower, serene and able, stands as
nearly straight as the shape of the scythe will let him, and follows up
every stroke closely, moving his left foot forward. Then also let every
stroke get well away. Mowing is a thing of ample gestures, like drawing
a cartoon. Then, again, get yourself into a mechanical and repetitive
mood: be thinking of anything at all but your mowing, and be anxious
only when there seems some interruption to the monotony of the sound.
In this mowing should be like one's prayers--all of a sort and always
the same, and so made that you can establish a monotony and work them,
as it were, with half your mind: that happier half, the half that does
not bother.
In this way, when I had recovered the art after so many years, I went
forward over the field, cutting lane after lane through the grass, and
bringing out its most secret essences with the sweep of the scythe until
the air was full of odours. At the end of every lane I sharpened my
scythe and looked back at the work done, and then carried my scythe down
again upon my shoulder to begin another. So, long before the bell rang
in the chapel above me--that is, long before six o'clock, which is the
time for the Angelus--I had many swathes already lying in order
parallel like soldiery; and the high grass yet standing, making a great
contrast with the shaven part, looked dense and high. As it says in the
Ballad of Val-ès-Dunes, where--
The tall son of the Seven Winds
Came riding out of Hither-hythe,
and his horse-hoofs (you will remember) trampled into the press and made
a gap in it, and his sword (as you know)
... was like a scythe
In Arcus when the grass is high
And all the swathes in order lie,
And there's the bailiff standing by
A-gathering of the tithe.
So I mowed all that morning, till the houses awoke in the valley, and
from some of them rose a little fragrant smoke, and men began to be
seen.
I stood still and rested on my scythe to watch the awakening of the
village, when I saw coming up to my field a man whom I had known in
older times, before I had left the Valley.
He was of that dark silent race upon which all the learned quarrel, but
which, by whatever meaningless name it may be called--Iberian, or
Celtic, or what you will--is the permanent root of all England, and
makes England wealthy and preserves it everywhere, except perhaps in
the Fens and in a part of Yorkshire. Everywhere else you will find it
active and strong. These people are intensive; their thoughts and their
labours turn inward. It is on account of their presence in these islands
that our gardens are the richest in the world. They also love low rooms
and ample fires and great warm slopes of thatch. They have, as I
believe, an older acquaintance with the English air than any other of
all the strains that make up England. They hunted in the Weald with
stones, and camped in the pines of the green-sand. They lurked under the
oaks of the upper rivers, and saw the legionaries go up, up the straight
paved road from the sea. They helped the few pirates to destroy the
towns, and mixed with those pirates and shared the spoils of the Roman
villas, and were glad to see the captains and the priests destroyed.
They remain; and no admixture of the Frisian pirates, or the Breton, or
the Angevin and Norman conquerors, has very much affected their cunning
eyes.
To this race, I say, belonged the man who now approached me. And he said
to me, "Mowing?" And I answered, "Ar." Then he also said "Ar," as in
duty bound; for so we speak to each other in the Stenes of the Downs.
Next he told me that, as he had nothing to do, he would lend me a hand;
and I thanked him warmly, or, as we say, "kindly." For it is a good
custom of ours always to treat bargaining as though it were a courteous
pastime; and though what he was after was money, and what I wanted was
his labour at the least pay, yet we both played the comedy that we were
free men, the one granting a grace and the other accepting it. For the
dry bones of commerce, avarice and method and need, are odious to the
Valley; and we cover them up with a pretty body of fiction and
observances. Thus, when it comes to buying pigs, the buyer does not
begin to decry the pig and the vendor to praise it, as is the custom
with lesser men; but tradition makes them do business in this fashion:--
First the buyer will go up to the seller when he sees him in his own
steading, and, looking at the pig with admiration, the buyer will say
that rain may or may not fall, or that we shall have snow or thunder,
according to the time of year. Then the seller, looking critically at
the pig, will agree that the weather is as his friend maintains. There
is no haste at all; great leisure marks the dignity of their exchange.
And the next step is, that the buyer says: "That's a fine pig you have
there, Mr. ----" (giving the seller's name). "Ar, powerful fine pig."
Then the seller, saying also "Mr." (for twin brothers rocked in one
cradle give each other ceremonious observance here), the seller, I say,
admits, as though with reluctance, the strength and beauty of the pig,
and falls into deep thought. Then the buyer says, as though moved by a
great desire, that he is ready to give so much for the pig, naming half
the proper price, or a little less. Then the seller remains in silence
for some moments; and at last begins to shake his head slowly, till he
says: "I don't be thinking of selling the pig, anyways." He will also
add that a party only Wednesday offered him so much for the pig--and he
names about double the proper price. Thus all ritual is duly
accomplished; and the solemn act is entered upon with reverence and in a
spirit of truth. For when the buyer uses this phrase: "I'll tell you
what I will do," and offers within half a crown of the pig's value,
the seller replies that he can refuse him nothing, and names half a
crown above its value; the difference is split, the pig is sold, and in
the quiet soul of each runs the peace of something accomplished.
Thus do we buy a pig or land or labour or malt or lime, always with
elaboration and set forms; and many a London man has paid double and
more for his violence and his greedy haste and very unchivalrous
higgling. As happened with the land at Underwaltham, which the
mortgagees had begged and implored the estate to take at twelve hundred,
and had privately offered to all the world at a thousand, but which a
sharp direct man, of the kind that makes great fortunes, a man in a
motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a man of few words, bought for two
thousand three hundred before my very eyes, protesting that they might
take his offer or leave it; and all because he did not begin by praising
the land.
Well then, this man I spoke of offered to help me, and he went to get
his scythe. But I went into the house and brought out a gallon jar of
small ale for him and for me; for the sun was now very warm, and small
ale goes well with mowing. When we had drunk some of this ale in mugs
called "I see you," we took each a swathe, he a little behind me because
he was the better mower; and so for many hours we swung, one before the
other, mowing and mowing at the tall grass of the field. And the sun
rose to noon and we were still at our mowing; and we ate food, but only
for a little while, and we took again to our mowing. And at last there
was nothing left but a small square of grass, standing like a square of
linesmen who keep their formation, tall and unbroken, with all the dead
lying around them when the battle is over and done.
Then for some little time I rested after all those hours; and the man
and I talked together, and a long way off we heard in another field the
musical sharpening of a scythe.
The sunlight slanted powdered and mellow over the breadth of the valley;
for day was nearing its end. I went to fetch rakes from the steading;
and when I had come back the last of the grass had fallen, and all the
field lay flat and smooth, with the very green short grass in lanes
between the dead and yellow swathes.
These swathes we raked into cocks to keep them from the dew against our
return at daybreak; and we made the cocks as tall and steep as we could,
for in that shape they best keep off the dew, and it is easier also to
spread them after the sun has risen. Then we raked up every straggling
blade, till the whole field was a clean floor for the tedding and the
carrying of the hay next morning. The grass we had mown was but a little
over two acres; for that is all the pasture on my little tiny farm.
When we had done all this, there fell upon us the beneficent and
deliberate evening; so that as we sat a little while together near the
rakes, we saw the valley more solemn and dim around us, and all the
trees and hedgerows quite still, and held by a complete silence. Then I
paid my companion his wage, and bade him a good night, till we should
meet in the same place before sunrise.
He went off with a slow and steady progress, as all our peasants do,
making their walking a part of the easy but continual labour of their
lives. But I sat on, watching the light creep around towards the north
and change, and the waning moon coming up as though by stealth behind
the woods of No Man's Land.
The other day (it was Wednesday, and the air was very pure) I went into
the stable upon my way toward the wood, and there I saw my horse Monster
standing by himself, regarding nothingness. And when I had considered
what a shame it was to take one's pleasure in a wood and leave one's
helpless horse at home, I bridled him and saddled him and took him out,
and rode him the way that I had meant to go alone. So we went together
along the Stene under the North Wood until we got to the edge of the
forest, and then we took the green Ride to the right, for it was my
intention to go and look at the Roman road.
Behind my house, behind my little farm, there are as many miles of turf
as one cares to count, and then behind it also, but the other way, there
goes this deep and lonely forest. It is principally of beech, which is
the tree of the chalk, and no one has cut it or fenced it or thought
about it (except to love it), since the parts about my village took
their names: Gumber and Fairmile Bay Combe, the Nore, and the stretch
called No Man's Land.
Into the darkness of these trees I rode very quietly with Monster, my
horse, but whether the autumn air were pleasanter to him or to me
neither of us could decide, for there is no bridge between two souls.
That is, if horses have a soul, which I suppose they have, for they are
both stupid and kindly, and they fear death as though a part, and but a
part, of them were immortal. Also they see things in the dark and are
cognisant of evil.
When I had gone some hundred yards towards the Roman road I saw, bending
lower than the rest on the tree from which it hung, a golden bough, and
I said to myself that I had had good luck, for such a thing has always
been the sign of an unusual experience and of a voyage among the dead.
All the other leaves of the tree were green, but the turn of the year,
which sends out foragers just as the spring does, marking the way it is
to go, had come and touched this bough and changed it, so that it shone
out by itself in the recesses of the forest and gleamed before and
behind. I did not ask what way it led me, for I knew; and so I went
onwards, riding my horse, until I came to that long bank of earth which
runs like a sort of challenge through this ancient land to prove what
our origins were, and who first brought us merry people into the circuit
of the world.
When I saw the Roman road the sharper influence which it had had upon my
boyhood returned to me, and I got off my horse and took his bit out of
his mouth so that he could play the fool with the grass and leaves
(which are bad for him), and I hitched the snaffle to a little broken
peg of bough so that he could not wander. And then I looked up and down
along the boles of the great North Wood, taking in the straight line of
the way.
I have heard it said that certain professors, the most learned of their
day, did once deny that this was a Roman road. I can well believe it,
and it is delightful to believe that they did. For this road startles
and controls a true man, presenting an eternal example of what Rome
could do. The peasants around have always called it the "Street." It
leads from what was certainly one Roman town to what was certainly
another. That sign of Roman occupation, the modern word "Cold Harbour,"
is scattered up and down it. There are Roman pavements on it. It goes
plumb straight for miles, and at times, wherever it crosses undisturbed
land, it is three or four feet above the level of the down. Here, then,
was a feast for the learned: since certainly the more obvious a thing
is, the more glory there must be in denying it. And deny it they did (or
at least, so I am told), just as they will deny that Thomas à Becket was
a Papist, or that Austerlitz was fought in spite of Trafalgar, or that
the Gospel of St. John is the Gospel of St. John.
Here then, sitting upon this Roman road I considered the nature of such
men, and when I had thought out carefully where the nearest Don might be
at that moment, I decided that he was at least twenty-three miles away,
and I was very glad: for it permitted me to contemplate the road with
common sense and with Faith, which is Common Sense transfigured; and I
could see the Legionaries climbing the hill. I remembered also what a
sight there was upon the down above, and I got upon my horse again to go
and see it.
When one has pushed one's way through the brambles and the rounded great
roots which have grown upon this street--where no man has walked perhaps
for about a thousand years--one gets to the place where it tops the
hill, and here one sees the way in which the line of it was first struck
out. From where one stands, right away like a beam, leading from rise to
rise, it runs to the cathedral town. You see the spot where it enters
the eastern gate of the Roman walls; you see at the end of it, like the
dot upon an "i," the mass of the cathedral. Then, if you turn and look
northward, you see from point to point its taut stretch across the weald
to where, at the very limit of the horizon, there is a gap in the chain
of hills that bars your view.
The strict design of such a thing weighs upon one as might weigh upon
one four great lines of Virgil, or the sight of those enormous stones
which one comes upon, Roman also, in the Algerian sands. The plan of
such an avenue by which to lead great armies and along which to drive
commands argues a mixture of unity and of power as intimate as the lime
and the sand of which these conquerors welded their imperishable cement.
And it does more than this. It suggests swiftness and certitude of aim
and a sort of eager determination which we are slow to connect with
Government, but which certainly underlay the triumph of this people. A
road will give one less trouble if it winds about and feels the contours
of the land. It will pay better if it is of earth and broken stones
instead of being paved, nor would any one aiming at wealth or comfort
alone laboriously raise its level, as the level of this road is raised.
But in all that the Romans did there was something of a monument. Where
they might have taken pipes down a valley and up the opposing side they
preferred the broad shoulders of an arcade, and where a seven-foot door
would have done well enough to enter their houses by they were content
with nothing less than an arch of fifty. In all their work they were
conscious of some business other than that immediately to hand, and
therefore it is possible that their ruins will survive the establishment
of our own time as they have survived that of the Middle Ages. In this
wild place, at least, nothing remained of all that was done between
their time and ours.
These things did the sight on either side of the summit suggest to me,
but chiefly there returned as I gazed the delicious thought that learned
men, laborious and heavily endowed, had denied the existence of this
Roman road.
See with what manifold uses every accident of human life is crammed!
Here was a piece of pedantry and scepticism, which might make some men
weep and some men stamp with irritation, and some men, from sheer
boredom, fall asleep, but which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure
joy, as I considered carefully what kind of man it is who denies these
things; the kind of way he walks; the kind of face he has; the kind of
book he writes; the kind of publisher who chisels him; and the kind of
way in which his works are bound. With every moment my elation grew
greater and more impetuous, until at last I could not bear to sit any
longer still, even upon so admirable a beast, nor to look down even at
so rich a plain (though that was seen through the air of Southern
England), but turning over the downs I galloped home, and came in
straight from the turf to my own ground--for what man would live upon a
high road who could go through a gate right off the turf to his own
steading and let the world go hang?
And so did I. But as they brought me beer and bacon at evening, and I
toasted the memory of things past, I said to myself: "Oxford,
Cambridge, Dublin, Durham--you four great universities--you terrors of
Europe--that road is older than you: and meanwhile I drink to your
continued healths, but let us have a little room ... air, there, give us
air, good people. I stifle when I think of you."
There is a hill not far from my home whence it is possible to see
northward and southward such a stretch of land as is not to be seen from
any eminence among those I know in Western Europe. Southward the
sea-plain and the sea standing up in a belt of light against the sky,
and northward all the weald.
From this summit the eye is disturbed by no great cities of the modern
sort, but a dozen at least of those small market towns which are the
delight of South England hold the view from point to point, from the
pale blue downs of the island over, eastward, to the Kentish hills.
A very long way off, and near the sea-line, the high faint spire of that
cathedral which was once the mother of all my county goes up without
weight into the air and gathers round it the delicate and distant
outlines of the landscape--as, indeed, its builders meant that it should
do. In such a spot, on such a high watch-tower of England, I met, three
days ago, a man.
I had been riding my kind and honourable horse for two hours, broken,
indeed, by a long rest in a deserted barn.
I had been his companion, I say, for two hours, and had told him a
hundred interesting things--to which he had answered nothing at
all--when I took him along a path that neither of us yet had trod. I had
not, I know; he had not (I think), for he went snorting and doubtfully.
This path broke up from the kennels near Waltham, and made for the High
Wood between Gumber and No Man's Land. It went over dead leaves and
quite lonely to the thick of the forest; there it died out into a
vaguer and a vaguer trail. At last it ceased altogether, and for half an
hour or so I pushed carefully, always climbing upwards, through the
branches, and picked my way along the bramble-shoots, until at last I
came out upon that open space of which I had spoken, and which I have
known since my childhood. As I came out of the wood the south-west wind
met me, full of the Atlantic, and it seemed to me to blow from Paradise.
I remembered, as I halted and so gazed north and south to the weald
below me, and then again to the sea, the story of that Sultan who
publicly proclaimed that he had possessed all power on earth, and had
numbered on a tablet with his own hand each of his happy days, and had
found them, when he came to die, to be seventeen. I knew what that
heathen had meant, and I looked into my heart as I remembered the story,
but I came back from the examination satisfied, for "So far," I said to
myself, "this day is among my number, and the light is falling. I will
count it for one." It was then that I saw before me, going easily and
slowly across the downs, the figure of a man.
He was powerful, full of health and easy; his clothes were rags; his
face was open and bronzed. I came at once off my horse to speak with
him, and, holding my horse by the bridle, I led it forward till we met.
Then I asked him whither he was going, and whether, as I knew these open
hills by heart, I could not help him on his way.
He answered me that he was in no need of help, for he was bound nowhere,
but that he had come up off the high road on to the hills in order to
get his pleasure and also to see what there was on the other side. He
said to me also, with evident enjoyment (and in the accent of a lettered
man), "This is indeed a day to be alive!"
I saw that I had here some chance of an adventure, since it is not every
day that one meets upon a lonely down a man of culture, in rags and
happy. I therefore took the bridle right off my horse and let him
nibble, and I sat down on the bank of the Roman road holding the
leather of the bridle in my hand, and wiping the bit with plucked grass.
The stranger sat down beside me, and drew from his pocket a piece of
bread and a large onion. We then talked of those things which should
chiefly occupy mankind: I mean, of happiness and of the destiny of the
soul. Upon these matters I found him to be exact, thoughtful, and just.
First, then, I said to him: "I also have been full of gladness all this
day, and, what is more, as I came up the hill from Waltham I was
inspired to verse, and wrote it inside my mind, completing a passage I
had been working at for two years, upon joy. But it was easy for me to
be happy, since I was on a horse and warm and well fed; yet even for me
such days are capricious. I have known but few in my life. They are each
of them distinct and clear, so rare are they, and (what is more) so
different are they in their very quality from all other days."
"You are right," he said, "in this last phrase of yours.... They are
indeed quite other from all the common days of our lives. But you were
wrong, I think, in saying that your horse and clothes and good feeding
and the rest had to do with these curious intervals of content. Wealth
makes the run of our days somewhat more easy, poverty makes them more
hard--or very hard. But no poverty has ever yet brought of itself
despair into the soul--the men who kill themselves are neither rich nor
poor. Still less has wealth ever purchased those peculiar hours. I also
am filled with their spirit to-day, and God knows," said he, cutting his
onion in two, so that it gave out a strong savour, "God knows I can
purchase nothing."
"Then tell me," I said, "whence do you believe these moments come? And
will you give me half your onion?"
"With pleasure," he replied, "for no man can eat a whole onion; and as
for that other matter, why I think the door of heaven is ajar from time
to time, and that light shines out upon us for a moment between its
opening and closing." He said this in a merry, sober manner; his black
eyes sparkled, and his large beard was blown about a little by the
wind. Then he added: "If a man is a slave to the rich in the great
cities (the most miserable of mankind), yet these days come to him. To
the vicious wealthy and privileged men, whose faces are stamped hard
with degradation, these days come; they come to you, you say, working (I
suppose) in anxiety like most of men. They come to me who neither work
nor am anxious so long as South England may freely import onions."
"I believe you are right," I said. "And I especially commend you for
eating onions; they contain all health; they induce sleep; they may be
called the apples of content, or, again, the companion fruits of
mankind."
"I have always said," he answered gravely, "that when the couple of them
left Eden they hid and took away with them an onion. I am moved in my
soul to have known a man who reveres and loves them in the due measure,
for such men are rare."
Then he asked, with evident anxiety: "Is there no inn about here where a
man like me will be taken in?"
"Yes," I told him. "Down under the Combe at Duncton is a very good inn.
Have you money to pay? Will you take some of my money?"
"I will take all you can possibly afford me," he answered in a cheerful,
manly fashion. I counted out my money and found I had on me but 3s.7d.
"Here is 3s. 7d.," I said.
"Thank you, indeed," he answered, taking the coins and wrapping them in
a little rag (for he had no pockets, but only holes).
"I wish," I said with regret, "we might meet and talk more often of many
things. So much do we agree, and men like you and me are often lonely."
He shrugged his shoulders and put his head on one side, quizzing at me
with his eyes. Then he shook his head decidedly, and said: "No, no--it
is certain that we shall never meet again." And thanking me with great
fervour, but briefly, he went largely and strongly down the escarpment
of the Combe to Duncton and the weald; and I shall never see him again
till the Great Day....
BELLOC-HILLS AND THE SEA - THE CHANNEL