The Worm Forgives the Plough

by John Stewart Collis

  11 Ode to the Sun and to Idleness

  It is true that at times I sought to pierce the mystery and to grasp the truth that seemed within my reach. But very often I refrained from thinking as much as possible, wishing just to receive what was given and glory in it. I certainly set myself against irrelevant thoughts, and against evil thoughts and thoughts of bitterness or annoyance concerning the outside world, which often pursued me into the wood like loathsome hounds. To think such things here would be fearful waste of time, I felt – the precious moments must not be lost. Here there was no need to think evil or to do evil, just as there was no chance of seeing evil. It was enough merely to sit in the sun.

  To sit in the sun. This is still one of the greatest experiences of life for us in the West. And it is free. No millionaire can buy up the sun and sell it to us. All the inventions through all the centuries have added nothing to this gladness, nor may any frantic folly take it away. The poor deluded multitude, dungeoned and depraved by lunatics and magnates, may prefer artificial sunshine, but the real thing is there all the same, and cannot be taken down.

  Pardon me if on this theme I speak with some slight intemperance. I am not quite normal in my love of the sun. It has always been a passion with me, I cannot call it less. To this day I remember the feeling of outrage I experienced when, in the schoolroom, on the sun shining in, the schoolmaster would get up and draw down the blind. I remember thinking the man must be crazy. ‘Already I began to love the sun; a boy I loved the sun, Not as I since have loved him, as a pledge And surety of our earthly life,’ said Wordsworth, ‘But for this cause, that I had seen him lay His beauty on the morning hills.’ Thus also have I loved the sun: because of his pledge, and because of his light upon the hill; but also because he transforms me – within no less than without.

  Especially in March. Then the air is still chilly, but the sun is warm again – February’s feeble ray is suddenly doubled, and sometimes if we can shelter from the cold wind we can get really warm. We are cold, and when the black cloud passes across, we shiver. Then the sun emerges from the silvered margin, the glowing ball comes out and blazes down upon us. At this moment I give myself to the experience. I close my eyes, and it is as if a warm velvet glove were laid across my face, an invisible blanket wrapped around me. We call it heat. But what is that? Am I taken in the arms of God? Everything is transformed, this is holy ground, even I am holy, my heart is purged of sin, I forgive everything, I love all things, I am lifted up; and in understanding I pass beyond all theory, all system, resting utterly content in this blessing and this sign – worshipping the sun as if it were God himself, or at least his regent chaired beside the throne.

  I have said I sat in the sun, but more often I lay in it – sideways, head on haversack (I cannot lie on my back). As a matter of fact I often take up this position – lying sideways – when I’m intellectually stuck over something and want to concentrate. But here I often did it because I wanted to sleep. The thing was to get as tired as possible, either by going to bed late or through strenuous work, and then lie in the sun – again especially in March or April – and go to sleep. I chose some particular spot at the foot of an ash to which the sun came and at each side of which I had placed drifts. At the chosen moment I lay down, curled up, and closed my eyes while the sun shone on my face. Often a strong, chilly wind blew, but it didn’t come near me, I received only the sun. Then I entered my own special, simple paradise. I was absolutely tucked away from the world – several miles in all directions from it – I was totally hidden from sight of mortal soul, and no one knew where I was nor would be coming anywhere near me. I was free from the entire turmoil of the world. I lay there, almost sinking into, melting into the earth, waiting for sleep to come and take me right down – wondering if death in reality is more than such a joyous sinking down as this. But truly now I indulged in no thoughts, no metaphysical speculations, I became little higher than an animal – and no lower. I laughed to think what a reprehensible sight I would have made to any busy man who came upon me there, a sloping slacker, an untoiling son of earth! But I felt no need to offer up apologies to the unreproving Beings around. Let the world outside carry on, I would say, let them dash hither and thither, let them kill one another wholesale, let them go to hell, I’m wrapped in the embrace of Nature and filled with peace and love! And like any dog, like any savage, I lay there enjoying myself, harming no man, selling nothing, competing not at all, thinking no evil, smiled on by the sun, bent over by the trees, and softly folded in the arms of the earth.

  12 Birds and Animals in the Wood

  On such occasions I became so much part of the general furniture of the wood that my presence was not noticed by bird or animal. One day I was disturbed by a loud hammering on the oak tree. It came from a very small bird with a large beak. Then it flew to an ash, took up a position on a dead-looking branch and began hammering again – real hard strokes of the beak, not pecking but hitting. Then up to another place, a junction of branches and out of sight, from where I heard more hammering, and then in sight again higher up – exactly as if the bird was on business as a carpenter come to test the tree and knock in a few nails where necessary. It sometimes flew up, but more often walked up. After having made a thorough examination it descended the trunk, walking down backwards the whole way, quite oblivious of Newton’s law, and knocking as it went along just as if it considered the decorative lichen needed some nailing down.

  I wondered why it pecked so hard, since it would surely be difficult to catch hold of an insect that way. But bird authorities say that the insect in question is well behind the rotten bark and the beak has to pierce its way there. But how then does it see the insect to be picked up? The bird was obviously a woodpecker, I thought. But no, it was a nuthatch, a near relation. For the method of descending the tree, walking down either backwards or head first, distinguishes it: this mode of descent is evidently reserved for the nuthatch alone. Moreover, the woodpecker is inclined to make less of a hammering noise than a rattling; once when I heard one doing its stuff it sounded like a tractor-driver changing gear badly.

  I know very little about birds, and I do not attempt to sort them out at all extensively, being content to watch them fly. The centuries pass, but we are just as fascinated as ever by these creatures who don’t know what it is to fall, but go from the top of one tree to another upon the roads of air. They must be happy up there, we feel, housed in nests on trees, and able to pass along not in an aeroplane but as an aeroplane. But no one should even superficially compare a bird with an aeroplane: to figure such a thing one would have to imagine a bird whose outspread wings have got permanently stuck, and whose beak is a propeller. Yet the aeroplane shares this with birds – that it is a lover of woods. It is strange how pilots cannot resist the temptation to swoop down low over the tree-tops. On one particular occasion, a truly enormous and dark aeroplane passed just touching the tops of the trees above me: first the sudden thundering roar, then the flashing past of the huge structure. It was so colossal, so extreme a case, that I was driven right back across the centuries and saw myself as an Early Man in the jungle startled by the miraculous appearance of a flying monster, and dashing off to join the amazed and affrighted tribe.

  I have nothing new to impart about either the birds or the animals in the woods. The usual performances were gone through here in the usual way. An agonizing screech at intervals broke the sylvan utopianism as intimated by the gentle cooing of the dove: but I could never be sure whether the cry was of death or love, pain or pleasure. The sudden loud flapping of unseen wings within the shades often startled me. The cuckoo made its appearance in due course, uttering its throaty gurgle while on the wing, and its famous announcement when in the tree. Occasionally a crow flew across, not as the crow is supposed to fly, but with sudden slight turnings and sharp hesitations as if it had remembered something too late. Sometimes, though very seldom, a peewit appeared, lover not of the woods but of the field and the wide desolate place dedicated to
history and slow time, into which that plaintive cry, those mournful numbers, flow and melt away.

  The birds which most often – late in the year – provided me with entertainment were the starlings. An immense force had taken up residence quite close, and towards evening they carried out extensive manoeuvres. Suddenly I would hear a noise from above as if a gale were blowing up, and I would see a black cloud moving much faster than a cloud; and as it moved, this composition of birds closed to the size of a football, then opened in the shape of a fan, closed again and now became a snake a hundred yards long twirling about in the air, then a carpet being shaken by invisible hands – each transformation being carried out with great celerity. Every bird went perfectly in wing with all the rest, so that however much the gathering twisted and turned it looked more like a single strange creature than a company – the few stragglers like feathers that had been blown off the body owing to the violence of the movement. What the purpose of all these operations was, I don’t know. It gave all the appearance of being without utilitarian motive, and is, ten to one, pure joie de vivre, play, art for art’s sake.

  As for animals, I very often heard a sudden nervous chortle followed by a scampering noise, and looking up saw a red or grey squirrel, the creature that always delights us by the beauty of its tail and the strength of those paws that turn the perpendicular into the flat. Immediately my dog would bark, and it would dash higher up. Yet its behaviour was curious. It was as safe as a church in those branches; but it didn’t think so, and leapt frantically from tree to tree, accomplishing jumps which made me nervous, and then coming to a very wide jump, failed to make it, landed on the ground uninjured, and scuttled into the undergrowth. It could have remained at ease in the first tree it went up. The species to which it belongs has had centuries behind it of practising in thus escaping from the earthbound beasts. Why has it not learnt to stay put in the security of the lofty boughs? Why does it lose its head?

  The deer had more sense in using their legs. There were quite a few of these wonderful animals in the Chase, and the barks of the trees had suffered accordingly, for deer have a partiality for the barks of young trees. I did not see very many. Occasionally when I was making no noise, one appeared and came quite close. If I remained silent and absolutely still it did not observe me. For animals do not see with their eyes. Not that they are blind, it is that objects are not individually separated by a governing intelligence. This extraordinary fact has saved many a man’s life in the jungle, and made close observation of animals possible for the naturalist. Then if I stepped on a breaking twig or deliberately clapped my hands it would leap away through the wood with that aristocracy of speed and grace that makes these creatures the queens of the forest. On an early morning in the half-light at a particularly lonely part of the Chase I saw a whole drove of them, and on another occasion at the same hour my dog gave chase to a solitary deer. It stopped and gave battle, and to my astonishment it looked as if my dog was getting the best of it. I called him off. Afterwards I was sorry that I had done so, for I might have witnessed a truly jungle scene.

  Some animals alarmed me rather than I them. The tiny weasel pursuing a large rabbit mesmerized to a slow wobbling gait, is a sight most monstrous and intimidating. Indeed, weasels almost paralyse me. Once I sat at a place where three holes abutted a few feet distance from each other. When I sat down there a weasel looked out of one of the holes and spat at me as if delivering a curse, then retired only to appear immediately at the next hole to hiss at me again, after which it drew back its head and shot it out again at the third hole to curse me from that angle. This performance went on for some time: I had to keep turning my head first one way then another as each second the ferocious face looked out of a hole to glare and spit and curse. It seemed to be charged with such potency that I really wouldn’t be surprised if I saw a weasel pursuing an elephant paralysed with fear.

  Another creature that alarmed me was the adder. Now and then I came upon the reptile, even two or three together. In grey scales or in chequered green. Finding one of considerable size, I toed it, and it rushed away through the privet’s undergrowth at extraordinary speed. It didn’t crawl, squirm, or hunch its way forward; but glided along – as astonishing as if you saw a boat dash through the water without oars or screw. I caught it up in my hand by its middle. It turned its visored head round, opened its trap-door of a mouth, and stuck its barbed fang deep into my thick leather glove (which I had carefully slipped on). Once, twice, three times it struck, then gave up and simply kept darting in and out of its mouth that long terrible tongue, shaped at the end like a tiny anchor or arrow-head. Now and then it gave great wrenches with its whole body to escape my grasp. But I held it firmly and gazed steadfastly into its primeval countenance. It is remarkable how utterly baffling such a creature is. One gazes, one tries to concentrate but somehow one cannot take it in. One can hold a conversation with a dog; one could almost shake a horse by the hoof; many a sow is as human to look at as a Victorian lady being amused; a cow often reminds us of some friends; a lamb might be a baby; the birds, like many of us, are vocalists; the monkey shares our secret. But the reptile – I’m afraid no communication is possible. However, I put this one down to pursue its destiny without further hindrance from me, as I felt it had the right to do.

  I shall not add much more to my list, but I loved the owl because of its astonishing silence and lightness of touch; I admired the nightjar which was like an alarm-clock which couldn’t stop; and it would be wrong to forget the pheasant, little pleasure as that poor lumbering bird gives us. Every time I approached the wood it startled me by suddenly springing out of some hidden place on my path with its appalling rattle of a screech and made its straight, blundering, joyless flight away through the wood. That jarring sound is the nearest thing in Nature to something mechanical – as if a machine had been made by mistake. Which reminds me that there is one more animal entitled to a place here. Opposite my wood there was another one belonging to another estate, and rising on a slope so that I commanded a clear view of it. At a given time of the year the partridge and pheasant sportsmen appeared. As they beat their way along through the wood they uttered noises which brought them into such close relation to the brute creation that it is proper to include them here in this short account of animal life found in the woods from time to time.

  13 The Old Woodman

  During some of the summer a woodman and his grandson came from an adjoining estate to make hurdles out of the hazel which I had cut down. And at last, at long last, I came upon the countryman of tradition, the countryman celebrated in books, but who can now only be found in odd corners. He was not a Hardy ‘character’, nor a Wordsworthian ‘leech-gatherer’. Not an ‘amusing’ man, nor quaint, nor given to making ‘wise’ remarks culled from his years, nor in command of a picturesque phrase. Such men can be found in Ireland, and probably in Scotland and Wales. The English equivalent possesses no playboy characteristics, nor love of generalization, nor much sense of humour, nor desire to make an effect; but he is so completely sincere that any remark he does make has the advantage of being genuine.

  He belonged to the generation that had started work sixty-odd years ago at the age of eleven, beginning then to make spar-gads and hurdles such as he is still making now. The passage of years might be written in financial terms: today spar-gads are thirty-five shillings a thousand as against eight shillings a thousand in the old days. Today a man can make £1 per thousand spars while in the former era he got 2s. 6d. – his wages then in the ordinary way being 10s. a week as opposed to the £4 of today. Thus a man of that kind will have seen some material changes.

  Though he was well into the seventies he did not show many signs of being an old man, age had not wearied him; the expression on his face had no sourness in it whatever; his manner of addressing his grandson was extremely pleasant; and he seemed to get on wholly without swearing. He was not a talker, but he enjoyed talking on general topics, and took your point at once (if you did no
t exaggerate).