The Heart of England/Chapter 2
PART II
THE LOWLAND
CHAPTER II
FAUNUS
How nobly the ploughman and the plough and three horses, two chestnuts and a white leader, glide over the broad swelling field in the early morning! Under the dewy, dark-green woodside they wheel, pause and go out into the strong light again, and they seem one and glorious, as if the all-breeding earth had just sent them up out of her womb—mighty, splendid and something grim, with darkness and primitive forces clinging about them, and the night in the horses' manes.
The ship, the chariot, the plough, these three are, I suppose, the most sovereign beautiful things which man has made in his time, and such that were his race to pass away from the earth, would bring him most worship among his successors.
All are without parallel in nature, wrought out of his own brain by unaided man; and yet, during their life, worthy by their beauty, their purpose and their motion to challenge anything made by the gods on the earth or in the sea; and after their life is done, sublime and full of awe, so that when we come upon them neglected and see their fair, heroic curves, the dirge at their downfall passes inevitably into a pæan to their majesty. And they are very old. Probably the beasts and the birds, the winds and waves and hills know us as the creatures who make the ship, the chariot and the plough. These three things, as they go about their work, must have become universal symbols, so that when a man comes in sight, the other inhabitants of the earth say: Here is he who sails in ships and drives the chariot and guides the plough. And the greatest of all is the plough. It is without pride and also without vanity. The ship and the chariot have sometimes tried to conceal their ancient simplicity, though they have never done without it. But the plough is the same—in shape like a running hound, with tail uplifted and muzzle bowed to the scent.
Richard the ploughman is worthy of his plough and team. He moves heavily with long strides over the baked yellow field, swaying with the violent motion of the plough as it cuts the stubborn and knotty soil, and yet seeming to sway out of joy and not necessity. He is a straight, small-featured, thin-lipped man, red-haired and with blue eyes of a fierce loneliness almost fanatical. Hour after hour he crosses and recrosses the field, up to the ridge, whence he can see miles of hill and wood; down to the woodside where the rabbits hardly trouble to hide as he appears, or to the thick hedge with marigolds below and nearly all day the song of nightingales. The furrow is always straight; he could plough it so asleep, and sometimes perhaps he does. The larks sing invisible in the white May sky. The swallows and woodlarks and willow wrens and linnets, with their tenderest of all mortal voices, flit and sing about him. Partridges whirr and twang. A fox steals along the hedge, a squirrel glows and ripples across a bay of the field. And for a little time he notices these things in a mild complacency. He has even formed a theory that there is another finch like a chaffinch, but not such a singer, and he calls it a piefinch. He likes the bright weather, and his cheerful greeting leaves the passerby feeling stupid because he cannot equal it; few sounds can equal it, except the shout of a cuckoo and the abandoned clamour of a deep-voiced hound. He never becomes tired; at noon and evening in the tavern, he drinks standing, with one hand on the high door latch and the other holding the tankard, and talking all the time at the rate of one phrase to a minute, with serious mouth and distant eyes which must be symbols to help out the words, for certainly if those words mean no more than they would in another man's mouth, they convey little but the apparent ennui of all those long hours walking to this oak or that hawthorn spray.
At first sight the ploughman's task seems to be one which ought rightly to be set only to some well-balanced philosopher, who could calmly descend into himself during the many lonely hours and think of nature and man in orderly thoughts. To the ordinary man, with his drug-habit of taking to reverie during any long spell of solitude, such a task would seem fatal. In fact, it is pretty certain that many a plain fellow must be turned into a fool by the immense monotony of similar furrows and the same view repeated exactly every quarter of an hour. When he is still a boy, he goes about even in the four hours' darkness of the winter mornings with always a song amidst the sleet or the silent frost. At lunch he can look for nests or nuts or hunt a stoat. When work is over he looks forward to songs at "The Chequers" with those of his own age, or to a shamefaced walk with a girl, or to fishing for tench and eels, or even to a game of cricket. But when he is married all that is past. He leads his horses down to the plough, having some simple thought, a grievance, a recollection, perhaps a hope, running confusedly in his head, and all day he turns it over, repeating himself, exaggerating, puzzling over the meaning of someone's words, floundering in digressions, fitting new words to the wood-pigeon's talk, trying to keep straight and to make up his mind, justifying himself, condemning another, cursing him. Now and then he lifts his eyes to the sky or the wooded hills and his mind catches at an impression which never becomes a thought, but something between a picture and a tune in the head, and its half oblivion is pleasant, when suddenly the plough leaps forward from his relaxing grasp, he shouts "Ah, Charley!" to the leader, mutters a little and settles down again to the grievance or the recollection or the hope, to be disturbed on lucky days by the hounds, perhaps, but otherwise to go on and on; and at noon and evening he takes his horses back to the stable and confronts men with the same simple ejaculations as before, after the last glass possibly reviving his lonely thoughts, but ineffectually. "How Bill does talk!" they say. What wonder that the rustic moralist marks an infant's tomb with the words—
And souls to bodies join,
Millions shall wish their lives below
Had been as brief as thine."
But Richard is no ordinary man, for he is happy and proud, and somewhere in the fields or in the clouds that roll before him as his plough comes to the top of the ridge, he has found that draught of excellent grace—
Are by the gods to drink thereof assigned;
But such as drink, eternal happiness do find."
There is little of wisdom in his words except moderation; but his garden is luckier, his kitchen sweeter than all the rest in the hamlet, and of all his tasks—ploughing, harrowing, rolling, drudging, reaping, mowing, carting faggots or corn or hay or green meat or dung—he likes none better than the others, because he likes them all well as they come. And ah! to see him and his team all dark and large and heroic against the sky, ploughing in the winter or the summer morning, or to see him grooming the radiant horses in their dim stable on a calm, delaying evening, is to see one who is in league with sun and wind and rain to make odours fume richly from the ancient altar, to keep the earth going in beauty and fruitfulness for still more years.