Peter finally quartered himself upon a lonely farm in Worcestershire. The estate was large and wild, running down steep hills and banks to a brook and tiny falls of water. The family who owned it scraped a livelihood from odds and ends of country employment. They had some orchard, and pasture for half a dozen cows. But there was no arable, and they made up a yearly deficit by receiving visitors from the town.
Peter had the place to himself, and the peace of it was deeply refreshing. The house stood high, whence the shapely hills of the country were visible—Malvern hanging like a small cloud on the horizon. For many days he lay in the June sun, listening to the stir of leaves, watching with curiosity the lives of small creatures he could not name. In deepest luxury he sat day by day on a fallen trunk across the stream, grateful after the blazing descent of a broken hill for the cool shade of trees meeting overhead, watching a fish lying under the bank or rising to snap at a fly. Or he would be buried in grass, softly topped by the light wind, diverted after long, empty moments by the appearance of a rabbit or a bird not suspecting him. Peter dreamed away whole days, utterly vacant of thought, recording things. He counted[Pg 146] the number of times a glossy black cow, munching beside him, masticated her food between each return of the cud. There was a horse which had brought his trunk to the house who always stood with his head thrust through a gap in the hedge. Peter watched the flies collect upon his eyelids, and waited lazily for the blink which regularly dispersed them in a tiny cloud. Peter, in reaction from the fruitless activity of his last months in London, rested and was pleased. It seemed as he lay upon the earth that the scent of the grass was life enough; that reality, humming in wings of the air, in the splashing of water, in noises of the cattle, was sufficient for his uninquiring day. He took an enormous pleasure in small material things—the spiriting of warm milk into the pail; the breath of an old dog as he stood, watchful and erect, in the cold morning; the slow, graceful sweeping of a scythe; the shining of the first star after sunset; the clipping of hot fingers into the brook; the odour of ham frizzling in the farmer's pan.
At night, with the curtains drawn, and by the light of an oil lamp whose smell was ever after associated in Peter's mind with these rustic days, he played with the books which Marbury had packed for him. Among them was Burton's Arabian Nights and Urquhart's Rabelais. Marbury had well chosen. Peter had never felt before the wonder of Rabelais. Here, alone with the beasts and with people whose lives were taken[Pg 147] up with their feeding and breeding, Peter smelt in Rabelais the fresh dirt and sweat of the earth. He squarely received between his shoulders the hearty slap of a laughter broad as mankind. Rabelais was the evening chorus of his day in the fields. The voices of the hearty morning, the slow noon, and the quiet evening sounded between the lines where Grangousier warmed his great bulk by the fire and Gargantua thrived to enormous manhood.
It was only after many days that Peter looked into Burton. He wondered why Marbury should have included a book he knew only as a series of pretty tales. Then he found that beside his Rabelais upon the shelf was the greatest song of the flesh yet uttered.
After his first night with Burton, Peter flung wide his window to the air. A cat slunk cautiously into the garden and away. The farmer and his wife came out for a moment to read the sky, and stood in the light of the door. The old man lifted his face, and was moulded clearly in silhouette—a face beaten hard with weather, but untroubled after seventy years of appetites healthily satisfied. He was sagacious as befitted his high species; he had eaten and drunk for sixty-five years, and had bred of his kind. All this he had inevitably done as a creature with his spade in the earth and his hand heavy upon the inferior beasts.
Mere flesh and blood was good, and it endured.[Pg 148] Peter's heart was pulsing now with a song older than an English farmer—a song of man who was tickled under an Eastern sun and laughed, who was pricked with absolute lust—who found his flesh not an obstacle between himself and heaven, but his heritage and expression.
Peter was not thinking. He idly looked and received a faint rain of impressions from the still night and from memories of a tale. A barrier of fresh earth mounted between him and his troubles of the year. He was content to rest and dream. He turned from the window, weary with air and sun, stretching his elbows in an agreeable yawn. He felt the clean flexion of the muscles of his arm. He stretched again, repeating a healthy pleasure, and yawned happily to bed.
Haymaking under a burning sun began on the following day, and Peter offered help to the farmer. The old man looked favourably at Peter's broad shoulders and friendly eyes. Then there were long back-breaking hours in the open field. Peter learned why there was leisure and grace in the movements of his companion, and tried to imitate, under pleasant chaff, the expert's artful economy of power.
Peter soon found in his new friend a surprising fund of wisdom painfully gathered. The farmer's knowledge was limited, but very sure. He had learned life for himself, with scraps inherited from his father and collected from his friends. His prejudices, even when absurd, were rooted in[Pg 149] the earth. Peter felt he would exchange all his books for a blank mind where Nature could write in so firm a hand.
His wife brought cider and cheese to them in the field, and they sat under a hedge contemplating the morning's work in the pauses of a rough meal.
"Plenty to do yet," said Peter, looking at the large field with a sense of labour to come.
"Matter o' twenty-four hours."
The old man paused on the rim of his mug, and narrowed his eyes at the blue sky. "We can be gentle with the work. You'll find it pays to be gentle."
Peter drank gratefully at the cool cider.
"Thirsty, sir?" The old man filled Peter's mug and watched him drink it.
"That's good liquor. Forty years she's brewed it." He jerked his thumb towards the house.
"Your wife?" asked Peter most politely.
"Married forty years," nodded the old man. "It's well to marry when you're lusty. Nature's kind when you live natural, but, if you thwart her, she turns you a beast in the end. Married yourself?" he suddenly asked, surveying Peter as a likely young animal.
"I'm only twenty-one," said Peter, with a shocked inflexion.
"Not too young for marriage," grossly chuckled the old man. "There's many uneasy lads of your age and less would do well to be married. The devil tickles finely the members of a young lad."
[Pg 150]
Peter had heard these things discussed in a public hall, but the language had been decently scientific or medical. How vulgar and timid seemed these late evasions under the burning sun! Peter was ashamed not to be able frankly to meet an old man who talked clearly of nature without picking his words.
Peter sweated through the day, and in the evening sat happily tired at the window. His day's work had brought him nearer yet to the earth. The faint smell of the drying grass, and a dim line of the field where the green blade met the grey, was witness of a day well spent. Manual labour was delightful after lounging weeks of mental work with nothing to show. There was something ultimate and real about physical expenditure. Could anything in the world be finer than to be just a very sagacious animal?
A low, gurgling song—it seemed the voice of a woman—came and went among the trees of the garden. Then there was silence. Soon there were footsteps, and two figures appeared in the shadow of some bushes beside the gate which gave upon the lawn beneath him. The figures stood close, and a man's voice, pleading, alternated with low laughter in the tone which previously had been the tone of the song. At last the man moved forward, and the woman, still laughing, allowed herself to be kissed. As Peter drew instinctively back he heard her laughter muted by the man's[Pg 151] lips. The incident stirred Peter more than he cared to acknowledge. He heard his heart beating, and saw his hand tremble on the sill.
He angrily shut the window, and, lighting the lamps, took down his books from the shelf. But the books would not hold his brain. The stifled laugh of the woman by the gate echoed there. He caught himself staring at the page, restless, feeling that the room oppressed him. It seemed that life was beating at the window, that the room in which he sat was unvisited, and that he was holding the visitor at bay.
He gave up all pretence of reading, and again let in the air. He stared into the garden, which now seemed the heart of the world. The figures by the gate had vanished, but Peter fancied he heard, from the dark, whiffs of talk, and breathing movements.
At last there were steps unmistakable, and the same low song Peter had first heard. This time the woman was alone. She carried a hat in her hand. She stood by the gate a moment, and pushed the pins into her hair. Then she came over the lawn into the light of the house window, walking free and lithe. She paused at the window and looked mischievously in upon the old couple below. Clearly she had come to surprise them. She opened the door upon them in a gleam of sly excitement. Peter saw with a renewed beating of the heart how full were the smiling lips he had[Pg 152] heard stifled into silence. His mind threw back the girl, as she stood in the light, into the shadow of a man's embrace.
A clamour of greeting from below scattered his thoughts.
"Why, if it isn't Bess!" he heard the old man say. Then there was a hearty kissing, and the door was shut on a murmur of welcoming talk.
Peter lay long into the night, listening to the clatter of tongues over a meal below. Bess was clearly a favourite. When the kitchen door opened, and the family tramped to bed, he heard once more the low vibrating voice of the girl.
"Good night, grandpa!"
Then he heard the women above him in the attic, making up a bed. One of them came down, and the house dropped into silence save for the quiet movements of the girl upstairs.