Part 15 (1/2)
The shepherd came down the hill carrying his greatcoat slung at his back upon his crook, and balanced by the long handle projecting in front. He was very ready and pleased to show his crook, which, however, was not so symmetrical in shape as those which are represented upon canvas. Nor was the handle straight; it was a rough stick--the first, evidently, that had come to hand.
As there were no hedges or copses near his walks, he had to be content with this bent wand till he could get a better. The iron crook itself he said was made by a blacksmith in a village below. A good crook was often made from the barrel of an old single-barrel gun, such as in their decadence are turned over to the bird-keepers.
About a foot of the barrel being sawn off at the muzzle end, there was a tube at once to fit the staff into, while the crook was formed by hammering the tough metal into a curve upon the anvil. So the gun--the very symbol of destruction--was beaten into the pastoral crook, the emblem and implement of peace. These crooks of village workmans.h.i.+p are now subject to compet.i.tion from the numbers offered for sale at the shops at the market towns, where scores of them are hung up on show, all exactly alike, made to pattern, as if stamped out by machinery.
Each village-made crook had an individuality, that of the blacksmith--somewhat rude, perhaps, but distinctive--the hand shown in the iron. While talking, a wheatear flew past, and alighted near the path--a place they frequent. The opinion seems general that wheatears are not so numerous as they used to be. You can always see two or three on the Downs in autumn, but the shepherd said years ago he had heard of one man catching seventy dozen in a day.
Perhaps such wholesale catches were the cause of the comparative deficiency at the present day, not only by actual diminution of numbers, but in partially diverting the stream of migration. Tradition is very strong in birds (and all animated creatures); they return annually in the face of terrible destruction, and the individuals do not seem to comprehend the danger. But by degrees the race at large becomes aware of and acknowledges the mistake, and slowly the original tracks are deserted. This is the case with water-fowl, and even, some think, with sea-fish.
There was not so much game on the part of the hills he frequented as he had known when he was young, and with the decrease of the game the foxes had become less numerous. There was less cover as the furze was ploughed up. It paid, of course, better to plough it up, and as much as an additional two hundred acres on a single farm had been brought under the plough in his time. Partridges had much decreased, but there were still plenty of hares: he had known the harriers sometimes kill two dozen a day.
Plenty of rabbits still remained in places. The foxes' earths were in their burrows or sometimes under a hollow tree, and when the word was sent round the shepherds stopped them for the hunt very early in the morning. Foxes used to be almost thick. He had seen as many as six (doubtless the vixen and cubs) sunning themselves on the cliffs at Beachy Head, lying on ledges before their inaccessible breeding-places, in the face of the chalk.
At present he did not think there were more than two there. They ascended and descended the cliff with ease, though not, of course, the straight wall or precipice. He had known them fall over and be dashed to pieces, as when fighting on the edge, or in winter by the snow giving way under them. As the snow came drifting along the summit of the Down it gradually formed a projecting eave or cornice, projecting the length of the arm, and frozen.
Something like this may occasionally be seen on houses when the partially melted snow has frozen again before it could quite slide off.
Walking on this at night, when the whole ground was white with snow, and no part could be distinguished, the weight of the fox as he pa.s.sed a weak place caused it to give way, and he could not save himself. Last winter he had had two lambs, each a month old, killed by a fox which ate the heads and left the bodies; the fox always eating the head first, severing it, whether of a hare, rabbit, duck, or the tender lamb, and ”covering”--digging a hole and burying--that which he cannot finish. To the buried carcase the fox returns the next night before he kills again.
His dog was a cross with a collie: the old sheep-dogs were s.h.a.ggier and darker. Most of the sheep-dogs now used were crossed with the collie, either with Scotch or French, and were very fast--too fast in some respects. He was careful not to send them much after the flock, especially after feeding, when, in his own words, the sheep had ”best walk slow then, like folk”--like human beings, who are not to be hastened after a meal. If he wished his dog to fetch the flock, he pointed his arm in the direction he wished the dog to go, and said, ”Put her back.” Often it was to keep the sheep out of turnips or wheat, there being no fences. But he made it a practice to walk himself on the side where care was needed, so as not to employ the dog unless necessary.
There is something almost Australian in the wide expanse of South Down sheepwalks, and in the number of the flocks, to those who have been accustomed to the small sheltered meadows of the vales, where forty or fifty sheep are about the extent of the stock on many farms. The land, too, is rented at colonial prices, but a few s.h.i.+llings per acre, so different from the heavy meadow rents. But, then, the sheep-farmer has to occupy a certain proportion of arable land as well as pasture, and here his heavy losses mainly occur.
There is nothing, in fact, in this country so carefully provided against as the possibility of an English farmer becoming wealthy. Much downland is covered with furze; some seems to produce a gra.s.s too coa.r.s.e, so that the rent is really proportional. A sheep to an acre is roughly the allowance.
From all directions along the roads the bleating flocks concentrate at the right time upon the hillside where the sheep-fair is held. You can go nowhere in the adjacent town except uphill, and it needs no hand-post to the fair to those who know a farmer when they see him, the stream of folk tender thither so plainly. It rains, as the shepherd said it would; the houses keep off the drift somewhat in the town, but when this shelter is left behind, the sward of the hilltop seems among the clouds.
The descending vapours close in the view on every side. The actual field underfoot, the actual site of the fair, is visible, but the surrounding valleys and the Downs beyond them are hidden with vast ma.s.ses of grey mist. For a moment, perhaps, a portion may lift as the breeze drives it along, and the bold, sweeping curves of a distant hill appear, but immediately the rain falls again and the outline vanishes. The glance can only penetrate a few hundred yards; all beyond that becomes indistinct, and some cattle standing higher up the hill are vague and shadowy.
Like a dew, the thin rain deposits a layer of tiny globules on the coat; the gra.s.s is white with them hurdles, flakes, everything is as it were the eighth of an inch deep in water. Thus on the hillside, surrounded by the clouds, the fair seems isolated and afar off. A great cart-horse is being trotted out before the little street of booths to make him show his paces; they flourish the first thing at hand--a pole with a red flag at the end--and the huge frightened animal plunges. .h.i.ther and thither in clumsy terror. You must look out for yourself and keep an eye over your shoulder, except among the sheep-pens.
There are thousands of sheep, all standing with their heads uphill. At the corner of each pen the shepherd plants his crook upright: some of them have long brown handles, and these are of hazel with the bark on; others are ash, and one of willow. At the corners, too, just outside, the dogs are chained, and, in addition, there is a whole row of dogs fastened to the tent pegs. The majority of the dogs thus collected together from many miles of the Downs are either collies, or show a very decided trace of the collie.
One old shepherd, an ancient of the ancients, grey and bent, has spent so many years among his sheep that he has lost all notice and observation--there is no ”speculation in his eye” for anything but his sheep. In his blue smock frock, with his brown umbrella, which he has had no time or thought to open, he stands listening, all intent, to the conversation of the gentlemen who are examining his pens. He leads a young restless collie by a chain; the links are polished to a silvery brightness by continual motion; the collie cannot keep still; now he runs one side, now the other, b.u.mping the old man, who is unconscious of everything but the sheep.
At the verge of the pens there stand four oxen with their yokes, and the long slender guiding-rod of hazel placed lightly across the necks of the two foremost. They are quite motionless, except their eyes, and the slender rod, so lightly laid across, will remain without falling. After traversing the whole field, if you return you will find them exactly in the same position. Some black cattle are scattered about on the high ground in the mist, which thickens beyond them, and fills up the immense hollow of the valley.
In the street of booths there are the roundabouts, the swings, the rifle galleries--like shooting into the mouth of a great trumpet--the shows, the cakes and brown nuts and gingerbread, the ale-barrels in a row, the rude forms and trestle tables; just the same, the very same, we saw at our first fair five-and-twenty years ago, and a hundred miles away. It is just the same this year as last, like the ploughs and hurdles, and the sheep themselves. There is nothing new to tempt the ploughboy's pennies--nothing fresh to stare at.
The same thing year after year, and the same sounds--the dismal barrel organs, and brazen instruments, and pipes, wailing, droning, booming.
How melancholy the inexpressible noise when the fair is left behind, and the wet vapours are settling and thickening around it! But the melancholy is not in the fair--the ploughboy likes it; it is in ourselves, in the thought that thus, though the years go by, so much of human life remains the same--the same blatant discord, the same monotonous roundabout, the same poor gingerbread.
The ploughs are at work, travelling slowly at the ox's pace up and down the hillside. The South Down plough could scarcely have been invented; it must have been put together bit by bit in the slow years--slower than the ox; it is the completed structure of long experience. It is made of many pieces, chiefly wood, fitted and shaped and worked, as it were, together, well seasoned first, built up, like a s.h.i.+p, by cunning of hand.
None of these were struck out--a hundred a minute--by irresistible machinery ponderously impressing its will on iron as a seal on wax--a hundred a minute, and all exactly alike. These separate pieces which compose the plough were cut, chosen, and shaped in the wheelwright's workshop, chosen by the eye, guided in its turn by long knowledge of wood, and shaped by the living though hardened hand of man. So complicated a structure could no more have been struck out on paper in a deliberate and single plan than those separate pieces could have been produced by a single blow.
There are no machine lines--no lines filed out in iron or cut by the lathe to the draughtsman's design, drawn with straight-edge and ruler on paper. The thing has been put together bit by bit: how many thousand, thousand clods must have been turned in the furrows before the idea arose, and the curve to be given to this or that part grew upon the mind as the branch grows on the tree! There is not a sharp edge or sharp corner in it; it is all bevelled and smoothed and fluted as if it had been patiently carved with a knife, so that, touch it where you will, it handles pleasantly.
In these curved lines and smoothness, in this perfect adaptability of means to end, there is the spirit of art showing itself, not with colour or crayon, but working in tangible material substance. The makers of this plough--not the designer--the various makers, who gradually put it together, had many things to consider. The fields where it had to work were, for the most part, on a slope, often thickly strewn with stones which jar and fracture iron.