47 While Ploughing
Meanwhile the tractor-pulled plough is a very good second best. The exhilaration is not quite of the same kind, but it is exhilarating none the less. It is absurd to denigrate our own amazing creativity. To have a great metal horse in front of you, over which you have complete control, knowing that it will take that steep rise in the field in its stride, while you look back and watch the three waves falling on your ribbed and rolling beach – who could tire of that?
Ever since one memorable day, when standing on a rise in Devon, I saw in a field below the white leaves blowing round a ploughman, I have looked out for seagulls following a plough, for there are few more pleasing sights. I frequently saw them following Harold. Now they would come to me.
But this was anticipating. They did not seem keen on coming in my direction. Instead, I got numerous starlings, rooks, and crows, brown and black birds in whom I had no interest. However, one day the seagulls were kind enough to come over. They didn’t do a great deal of swirling round me. But when I reached the end of my row on one occasion I looked back and saw the whole lot of them standing in the furrow right across the field, in perfect line, dressed by the right. I was satisfied with this parade.
Indeed I was well satisfied in every way on this work. The day was too short. Sometimes I had to attend to Harold and give him assistance, for he was ploughing up the Down over the hedge, and occasionally went right into a hole and could not get out. I had to go over with my tractor and pull him out. Otherwise I carried on happily without any interruption. Here would I gladly remain, I said to myself, islanded from that world which is too much with us; let all men, all women, and all children, do what they like, I’ve got my tractor, my plough, my field, and am content. Having wandered in the realms of thought, I could bring the roving mind to rest; having journeyed between New York and Warsaw across the countries of the world, I could now discover one patch of ground at home; not had I any need of games – for here my work was play, my play was work.
This field was on a considerable rise. I could see the village below and a long way across the land. We plan our habitations; we design; and the result is sometimes good. Yet how often one is struck by the beauties that are undesigned, where there was no prearranged pattern, yet all is pattern. We planned the position of the Manor House; but we could not have hoped to arrange matters so that the red creeper would climb just to catch that last sunset ray, nor so arrange the growth of yellow flowers that they would lean against the high green field beyond. We planned the position of the church, but now it is locked in Nature’s arm. I looked down and saw the double beauty of man’s deliberations clothed in all the careless forms of earth.
More often I looked upwards at the great cathedral piles of cloud that passed along the winter sky, extravagant and erring shapes radiantly rimmed or quite ensilvered by the sun. Once, a broad shaft of light, let out from the clouds, beamed down upon the distant land. It lit up the ground on which it fell and slowly moved from field to field, from hedge to hedge, as if looking for something – like a giant searchlight reversed. Then it went out suddenly, as if switched off. The clouds above increased in splendour. Ah, it is a land, a land up there, that does belong to us though raised so high! token of some great happiness that yet shall be fulfilled, the hope and promise written in every heart!
When the dusk fell and I could go on no longer, I often caught the sharp whiff of smell coming from the upturned earth. Scent is a mighty marvel. What it is I do not know. But I knew what this smell was, which is the most intoxicating of all. It was – Fertility: it was life itself coming across to me in pure sensation – the odour of eternal resurrection from the dead.
48 View of the Whole
The mornings were cold and dim now as I cycled through the village, past the copper-beech and the chestnut trees. Their way of life had fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, and then, obedient to the later ruling, no leaves at all. The clawing fingers of the ash, the bare pale branches of the beech, the high tracery of the elms, all spoke of winter. And for us this meant threshing, and lots of it. We must now take down the ricks again.
Put like that, by the way, it does make the combine seem rather obvious, doesn’t it? The whole-hogging anti-combiner would have to say that the proper thing to do is to put up ricks in order to take them down. It is the actual logic of that view, I fear. We cannot say that the goal of life is work when the work is not necessary: otherwise, as I think Dr Maude Royden once remarked, instead of getting ten men to dig a trench with spades you could get a hundred to do so with spoons . . . But let me not fall into further speculation on this, but discretely tiptoe, as Donald McCullough would say, on to the next.
There was certainly enough threshing for us to do, several months’ work in fact, after all that harvesting. Thus again we assembled the famous rig-out and got going on the work of separation. Once more we unlocked the elaborate cupboard and took out the bread. Once more the untiring jaw was fed, and the bags bulged behind – ten, twenty, forty, eighty. When the actual day’s threshing was over, it didn’t mean that we had finished. The machine still went on for a long time dealing with the remaining bits, while we fiddled about clearing up, the lack of a definite thing to do being sometimes quite maddening. I was always glad when we got down to the formidable business of lifting the rows of sacks on to the lorry. As a solo sack-lifter I’m not only bad but a shirker: but in partnership with a mate I count myself as adept at it – and so never minded this heavy finish.
One morning I accompanied Jimmy in the lorry to the neighbouring town’s railway station where we deposited a load of sacks. It was pleasant to find myself amongst the cheerful workers in the station yard and see the place from that inner angle. It was good to put the sacks in the truck. Where are they going? I asked. No one knew. Nor cared. Nor did I. But I was glad to connect them with the truck and have in my mind’s eye the continuity from seed to truck and the number of operations that take place between that beginning and this ending when these sacks go away into the blue.
Robert, though rick-maker in general, was after all the shepherd, and it was not convenient for him to come out in the mornings if there was anyone else to do the work. So it happened that I started building the straw-ricks myself. Being an unpractical man, I am at intervals more practical than the practical, and I made a good job of it. Thus Robert didn’t need to come out, and when he did late in the afternoon, he didn’t interfere with me, but fed the thresher, subordinating the carter to string-cutter.
I was very pleased with this arrangement, of course. I had no assistant on the rick; but it is a fallacy to suppose that two are necessary for straw, just as it is an illusion to suppose that eleven men or even eight are really necessary for threshing. We started with the barley and finished it off first. Very short, light, slippery stuff, but I managed without mishap and without props. Robert, looking at one, said – ‘No one could say you can’t build a rick now, I allow.’ A remark which he need not have made, and which endeared him to me. (Next summer he put no opposition in the way of my making a corn-rick – and this time there was no question of failure from start to finish.)
There were some stoppages owing to something going wrong with the thresher. The chief members of the company went down on all fours under it, pushing and grappling with its inner mysteries, all quite beyond me. The good of being on the rick was that I didn’t have to busy myself with something or pretend to look wise. Ejaculations would come up from below – ‘Let it bide’ or ‘Leave very well alone’ or ‘That’s some of it, I expect’ – this last from ’E. ‘That’s some of it’ was a favourite expression of his. In thus suggesting that some of the trouble had been located, he not only encouraged further research but showed a proper scepticism about it being all of it.
The barley finished, we went for the wheat. After a couple of ricks we began to use a trusser. The trusser is a machine which, placed between the thresher and the elevator, ties up the straw into fair-sized sheaves, after which th
ey proceed up the elevator. You can sell straw better that way than loose – (and better still, I believe, when it is baled, that is, parcelled into two-hundredweight bricks). This called for a new technique and ’E expressed doubt as to whether I could do it properly. This put me on my mettle, and I soon got hold of the idea, found it in fact a good deal easier in the end than ricking loose wheat-straw, and up went my buildings, still unpropped. I derived what may seem a childish pleasure in looking round the fields and saying to myself – I put that there; and that; and that. It gave me particular pleasure to see them from the road on a bus when coming back from a visit to London and its vastly different scene. And I wondered whether those who journey up and down the roads notice how today there are two ricks on a field and tomorrow only one in a different place, larger and more light in colour. In days gone by I would not have noticed it. But from henceforth, wherever I go, through whatever land, I shall know what is going on beyond the hedge, beyond the railway line, and I shall realize the ardours that have been bestowed upon the silent scene by the unwitnessed workmen of the fields.
Again I rejoiced to rise on my pedestal and have a view of the whole. When I was fairly high up I could see over the greater portion of the farm. And as I gazed across, I realized that I had had dealings with every field: there I had harrowed and rolled, there couched, there hoed, there made hay, there drilled, there ploughed – and here now were my ricks. I did not feel a beginner or amateur any longer. I was well on the inside of the wall. I would no longer make idiotic mistakes: not now would I leave a prong lying on the ground or throw it down the wrong way up from a rick; nor walk on the wrong side of a horse and take a gate-post away; nor fail to examine the plugs of a tractor that wouldn’t start; nor be absent-minded about implements I was using; nor drop things as I went across the farm; nor try and lift sacks in the wrong way and put them down untidily; nor start hiling up and down instead of round the field – nor wear shoes! Standing there with the straw waterfall well in hand, I could look down on the company below feeling very much part of the proceedings and by no means an outsider.
I could see from where I stood the changing scene of the unchanging motion of the year. That hay-rick over there, like a great cake carefully sliced, had been already half-cut for the cows. That straw-rick in the next field, left over from last year, was steadily getting lower, and like a punctured balloon was shrinking every month more and more until it was but a shadow of its former self. The potatoes had been lifted and cramped beside their field. The mangold field was half-pulled, the once thin red roots were now bulging balls in tinted red and yellow shades that no potter ever could come near. Beyond that hedge the winter wheat was shining now, so fair, so green against the dark leafless trees and the pale blue winter sky. And in a field of stubble a crop of clover was rising fresh and strong. It was good to see it there, bright witness of the rapid round – green youth beside the stumped and paupered stalks of age; new life climbing on the knees of death; the never resting tireless toil of earth. Down below me the sacks were filling fast. In my mind’s eye it was only yesterday that we had sown this field – then the green light, then the yellow; then the brown; and so the fall. Now seeds were pouring out, many times more numerous than those which had been sown. Thus the Circle, thus the Order, confined within the little space before me – type of all of Nature’s vast, relentless roll.
And as I stood upon my pile, this year, and the next year looking across the land, I looked also across the centuries. This was the eternal tale. This did not alter and would not stop. The historical tapestries hung across the streets of fame, figuring the pride of kings, the frenzy of tyrants, the clash of nations, and the fall of empires, held no meaning here. The same work went on in each country regardless of whatever drama was being staged by the men in cities. So it would continue as surely as Nature continues to unfold in spite of all the roaring wrack beyond the fence. Those men below at work upon the thresher, whom I have not sought to glorify – yet are they not glorified in these natural tasks? – support the conditions for the theatre of history, but they work outside the drama. Civilizations rise, fluctuate, and fall, men reaching out for expression now in one direction, now in another; at one time, turning their gaze towards the perfect commonwealth, the greatest good, the glory of thought, and the rose of art, they raise a noble culture; and at another time riding recklessly on into the bitter darkness of their own night and the cold bleakness of massacre and crime, they are driven shamefully back along the fields of their pride. But here is the thing that remains constant. Here is the order that does not break. Here shall the husbandmen of all the world, using this device or that, this machine or another, remain obedient to the increase and faithful to the unfolding, from generation to generation and from age to age.
From this lofty stool on which I stood, I looked down upon the Great Highway that led from the cities to the sea. It ran beside our largest field for some distance. All day long and every day the Military dashed past in lorries, in jeeps, in tanks – ceaselessly every day. The clatter of the tanks was something awful. They passed in long lines, these the chariots of our day, their helmeted riders aloft in the turrets. I sometimes lifted my hand in friendly salute, but there was not much response. The division between us was too great for communication. Only a thin fence, but what a gulf! On this side was life everlasting: and over there – History roaring past. It simply passed us by. We were bound upon the field: and their only freedom was the hard, long, ribbon of road, their destiny and their doom. They could not possibly leap the fence and join us. They could not pause in their trampling nor turn aside from their path. They could not break from the bonds of history. They could not pass from that which was temporal to this which was eternal. On and on they clattered, making for the beaches and the sea, for danger, destruction, torment, death. From the field it seemed appalling, fantastic. But the charioteers were not appalled. Truly we are such stuff as dreams are made on, entracingly protected from the agony of truth! Already crowned with the laurels and the bays of sacrifice, they were lifted up into the realm of a dream, raised high above the material world and the earthly clods of care . . . Marvelling at Mankind, I turned my gaze back to the Earth. And presently as often happened late in the afternoon, this traffic ceased. We worked on in the sudden silence. Militarism had faded out – as if it had never been.
BOOK TWO
DOWN TO EARTH
Reading through this book of mine, and subsequent ones of the same kind, I see that my approach has the merit of being highly unoriginal. This is a great asset for me. I need never go out of fashion. For I have never been in the fashion. I am always with it. I came upon the following only a few days ago by John de Dondis, a fourteenth-century sage, who after declaring that he was disinclined to attach too much importance to wholly explicable relationships, added:
I have learned from long experience that there is nothing that is not marvellous and that the saying of Aristotle is true – that in every natural phenomenon there is something wonderful, nay, in truth, many wonders. We are born and placed among wonders and surrounded by them, so that to whatever object the eye first turns, the same is wonderful and full of wonders, if only we will examine it for a while.
John SteWart ColliS, 1973
PREFACE
THE BOOK OF Nature lies closed before us. We look round, and everything seems more or less incomprehensible. At least that is my experience. I have come to the stage when, awake at last to the actual existence of the visible world, I also realize the shortness of life, and hasten to acquaint myself with a few of the facts before it is too late and I am dead before I have ever been alive.
The good of it is we can open the book if we choose. That company of devoted and gifted men, called scientific specialists, has placed a great many facts at our disposal. The time has come for me to take advantage of their labours. For many years my approach had been from the other end. For many years I sought for truth, or if you like, God. I did not find it. I found beauty instea
d. I then understood what was meant by the saying that beauty is truth and truth beauty. I had come to see the whole. Then I was ready to see the part. Now, today, I seek the part so as to enhance my vision of the whole. Facts have become my chief stimulus.
I never really got down to the facts until I got down to the earth. I date my resolve and my practice from the time when I became a labourer on the land. It cannot possibly be necessary for everyone, but for me it was essential to come in contact with a thing through work before I could actually see it! Finding myself confronted with the worm or the potato, with the ant or the seed, I was forced to ask myself how much I really knew of these mysteries. Not until I did ask this was I aware that I could hardly answer the simplest question. There may be some others in a like case. If so, they might care to join me.
But I must not pretend that facts are the chief thing about this book, either for myself or for the reader. Quite the contrary. As I have hinted above, facts are fascinating to me only because they heighten my sense of significance. I do not believe in ‘the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake’. That phrase strikes me as silly. My pursuit of facts is for the sake of imagination. I always want to relate my physics with metaphysics. This is being very philosophical, you may say. Certainly, Philosophy is the only thing I am fundamentally interested in. For what is a philosopher? Only a man who likes to see the whole. Only a man who refuses to keep things in watertight compartments, and who seeks to relate his knowledge with a vision of life. If this is the poetic attitude also, let us not quarrel with words. There are many facts in this volume – but already I have forgotten most of them. I couldn’t pass an examination on them. That doesn’t worry me; it is merely a question of memory – which can be refreshed at any minute. The point is I have grasped the facts (and of course I do remember the chief ones). Having grasped them, then thought followed, and emotion followed, and I drew nearer to the mystery. Surely synthesis should be our aim now, and in the future. Only the specialists should specialize. There are now huge wads of knowledge about most things. We should learn to digest it. It is time we learnt to relate our knowledge organically and to see the significance of facts. Knowledge for its own sake is not more worth acquiring than bread for its own sake.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 23
