The Complete Essays | Page 9

From time to time the little damsel
offered each shearer a jug and glass, but no man drank till he had
finished his sheep; then he would get up, stretch his cramped muscles,
drink deep, and almost instantly sit down again on a fresh beast. And
always there was the buzz of flies swarming in the sunlight of the open
doorway, the dry rustle of the pollarded lime-trees in the sharp wind
outside, the bleating of some released ewe, upset at her own nakedness,
the scrape and shuffle of heels and sheep's limbs on the floor, together
with the "click-clip, click-clip" of the shears.
As each ewe, finished with, struggled up, helped by a friendly shove,
and bolted out dazedly into the pen, I could not help wondering what
was passing in her head--in the heads of all those unceremoniously
treated creatures; and, moving nearer to the postman, I said:
"They're really very good, on the whole."
He looked at me, I thought, queerly.
"Yaas," he answered; "Mr. Molton's the best of them."
I looked askance at Mr. Molton; but, with his knee crooked round a
young ewe, he was shearing calmly.
"Yes," I admitted, "he is certainly good."
"Yaas," replied the postman.
Edging back into the darkness, away from that uncomprehending youth,
I escaped into the air, and passing the remains of last year's stacks
under the tall, toppling elms, sat down in a field under the bank. It
seemed to me that I had food for thought. In that little
misunderstanding between me and the postman was all the essence of

the difference between that state of civilisation in which sheep could
prompt a sentiment, and that state in which sheep could not.
The heat from the dropping sun, not far now above the moorline, struck
full into the ferns and long grass of the bank where I was sitting, and
the midges rioted on me in this last warmth. The wind was barred out,
so that one had the full sweetness of the clover, fast becoming hay, over
which the swallows were wheeling and swooping after flies. And far up,
as it were the crown of Nature's beautiful devouring circle, a buzzard
hawk, almost stationary on the air, floated, intent on something
pleasant below him. A number of little hens crept through the gate one
by one, and came round me. It seemed to them that I was there to feed
them; and they held their neat red or yellow heads to one side and the
other, inquiring with their beady eyes, surprised at my stillness. They
were pretty with their speckled feathers, and as it seemed to me, plump
and young, so that I wondered how many of them would in time feed
me. Finding, however, that I gave them nothing to eat, they went away,
and there arose, in place of their clucking, the thin singing of air
passing through some long tube. I knew it for the whining of my dog,
who had nosed me out, but could not get through the padlocked gate.
And as I lifted him over, I was glad the postman could not see me--for I
felt that to lift a dog over a gate would be against the principles of one
for whom the connection of sheep with good behaviour had been too
strange a thought. And it suddenly rushed into my mind that the time
would no doubt come when the conduct of apples, being plucked from
the mother tree, would inspire us, and we should say: "They're really
very good!" And I wondered, were those future watchers of
apple-gathering farther from me than I, watching sheep-shearing, from
the postman? I thought, too, of the pretty dreams being dreamt about
the land, and of the people who dreamed them. And I looked at that
land, covered with the sweet pinkish-green of the clover, and
considered how much of it, through the medium of sheep, would find
its way into me, to enable me to come out here and be eaten by midges,
and speculate about things, and conceive the sentiment of how good the
sheep were. And it all seemed queer. I thought, too, of a world entirely
composed of people who could see the sheen rippling on that clover,
and feel a sort of sweet elation at the scent of it, and I wondered how
much clover would be sown then? Many things I thought of, sitting

there, till the sun sank below the moor line, the wind died off the clover,
and the midges slept. Here and there in the iris- coloured sky a star
crept out; the soft-hooting owls awoke. But still I lingered, watching
how, one after another, shapes and colours died into twilight; and I
wondered what the postman thought of twilight, that inconvenient state,