THEFULL PLEASURE OF A. FIELD.
The beginning of knowledge of a field. is the feel of the actual earth,—the solid soil of it underfoot. You cannot come to real terms with earth in a flower-garden, though you may find out something with a spade; and perhaps you cannot reach the best of all knowledge of a field without ploughing it. But you can begin an acquaintance on a field newly ploughed, or better still, being ploughed ; and the first and best know- ledge is the touch of the crumbling furrow, an extraordinary sense of bounty. In a garden you cannot rid yourself of a certain uneasiness, almost a fear of trespass, if you step on a . flower-border, or even if you walk over a vegetable-bed in the kitchen-garden. The gravel path awaits you, clean and yellow, and the only possible scraper is the box edging. But a field is a field, to be crossed with confidence and stamped about with heavy boots. Shoes are no use ; you must have great boots with nails in them, tough and secure over slippery furrows. Every season, almost every month, changes the surface of that solid, restful floor. Flat and dusty on August afternoons, when the reaping-machine has clacked out through the gate and left six acres white with shocked barley ; or dewy with clover springing through short oat-stubble; or crumbling and powdery under September sunshine; or brown and bound and ringing of frost ; or, when it is most earth, ridged and warm and perforate with rain, waiting for the sower,—it will be all these in turn, but with every change reserving and retaining the promise of its strength and kindliness, the supreme, essential stability of ploughed soil.
If the gardener can choose the colours of his flower-beds, and range delphiniums in ordered blues, or pattern out feverfew and pennyroyal, the farmer can choose broader and serener squares and strips of colour for his fields. The very width of his choice alters a field as a garden cannot be altered. This year, perhaps, half the field has been red with ripened wheat, and the lower half divided into an oblong of mangolds and a narrow triangle of cabbages. Mangolds have a certain monotony of glowing greenness ; but no one who has not stood thigh-deep among cabbages knows the beauty of tinting of those noble globes and basins of foliage. Cabbages as great as tubs, with hearts like beehives; cabbages as firm as giants' cricket-balls ; cabbages with pools in them that mirror blue and tilt crystal over your boots ; cabbages that demand an axe to the stem, that should be felled, not cut; and withal lightened and changing through all the keys of mauves and pinks and glaucous emerald; such cabbages should be the food only of glorious cattle. Mr. Meredith's
" Bulls, that walk the pastures in kingly-flashing coats,"
might be worthy of them. Next year, the cabbages will be gone, and the mangolds. Barley, maybe, will be brushing silky spikelets against the springing hazel of the hedge, and after the barley there will be the honeyed fragrance of clover, with Clouded Yellow butterflies dancing over the whole warm field, and swallows hawking after the Clouded Yellows. Or between a crop of tares and the sowing of winter oats the careful farmer who believes in continual- cropping will have intervened with a strip of mustard, perhaps only to be ploughed in to feed the soil. Of all the sounds of living things in summer there is nothing quite like the sound of bees in mustard, and of field scents mustard is one of the sweetest; not the sweetest of all, for that blows from a field of beans.
Hedges vary in friendliness. Not every shrub or bush will build into a good field hedge. It would be impossible, for instance, to be friendly with laurel ; you can realise what a glittering, inhospitable thing a laurel-hedge is when it takes up and continues a line of clipped elm or thorn, as it some- times does near the farmer's house and garden. A friendly hedge must be thick and leafy to the bottom, as compact and closely trimmed as oak and beech and hazel can be, though holly can be friendly, and thorn, if it is not thorn alone. Elder shapes more into a fence than a hedge, with thick stumps and gaps between its roots which, as potential holes, are regarded by rabbits as providential, if not, indeed, compulsory ; and rabbits have little to recom- mend them on a farm except that they bolt out of one hole into another with incredible quickness, and in so doing may teach you a little of the lie of the hedgerow in which they live. Truly much of the knowledge of a hedgerow is in- separable from the uses of a gun. Earlier in the year, when partridges are choosing their nesting-places among the brambles, and a morning's search for their olive eggs leads incidentally to discovery of the largest and palest primroses, or of cowslips grown giants in the tangled grass and cool shadows of the ditch, there is a great deal to be learnt about a field hedge that is worth time in learning. You become aware of what you have learnt only perhaps on an autumn day when you alone beside the keeper (but keepers know everything) know where the guns can find a gap in what looks like solid thorn. One aspect of the hedge the keeper does not know, or at least not so well as others learn to know it. That is the hedge as the shooter watches it when the keeper is some three fields away with the beaters, and between the line of guns and the waving flags rises trimmed holly, or ragged hazel, or high, compact thorn broken by separate trees. Every branch and twig, every unevenness in the clipped line below the empty blue air, every spot of red • berries and loose fern-frond, prints itself deep in the memory of the eye, long after the last covey has broken between the oaks and swept away over the hill.
Somewhere in that old Elizabethan play, The Parliament of Bees, comes one of the prettiest stage directions ever given. . There is a break in the acting, and the stage direction " off " is " Field Music." What would that mean to an Elizabethan ? Shepherds' pipes, perhaps, and perhaps the bleating of sheep ; . but certainly the cuckoo, and possibly a full bird chorus. Modern Corydons, being grizzled and weather-beaten men with bob-tailed dogs, would probably not add much charm to a . farm symphony; but there is no music more distinct and separate than the music of the fields. Gardens and woodlands have their own birds and music ; field music is a voice apart. The mellow indolence of the blackbird's flute belongs to lilac and dewy lawns ; the throbbing passion of the nightingale to moonlit undergrowth and the heart of woods in May; but the lark is the spirit of blue sky and bare ploughs, of buoyant winds and springing corn. He is too free for a garden, too wild to bear the touch of a tree's shadow ; his choir is sunlight and nothing above him. He is arvensis, the bird of arable fields ; and the bird that loves ploughland air next to him, and ploughland itself more even than he, is the plover. Rooks follow the plough with wisdom and solemnities of cawing ; but plovers sit the furrows as if they loved them. The lark must be the leader of all field choruses, to blend his golden singing between the resonance of the rookery and the smallest voices of creatures creeping in the grass. But the plover, who complains if he must rise from the ground, is the bird who assuredly has the friendship of the field. He knows the ploughed soil as the farmer knows it, with the feel of the sole of his foot, crumbling and warm, parched and dusty, or wet as ploughland rejoices to be wet in October rains. He has the secret ; he knows the full pleasure of a field.
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