It's just like summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have forgotten to say it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it from the orchard with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery. There are some people of penurious emotions and speech, like the Drumtochty farmer in Ian Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of this iteration. They would find it wasteful and frivolous. They do not understand that we go on saying it over and over again, like the birds, for the sheer joy of saying it. Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice. There he goes skipping from branch to branch and twig to twig, and after each skip he pauses to say, “It's just like summer,” and from a neighbouring tree his mate twitters confirmation in perfect time. I've listened to them for half an hour and they've talked about nothing else. In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully and tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well aired before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows his score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has only one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the world, but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer, and not a conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who seems never to forget the listening world. In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer. There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along the turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football match, I fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the cheerful outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens and the fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of hammering; from the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor voice that comes up from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I have not heard it for four years or more; but it has been heard in many lands and by many rivers from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would rather be singing in the allotment with his young brother Sam (the leader of the trebles in the village choir) than anywhere else in the vide world. “Yes, I've been to Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the 'Oly Land,” he says. “I don't care if I never see the 'Oly Land again. Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far as I'm concerned. This is good enough for me—that is, if there's a place for a chap that wants to get married to live in.” Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. “Well, this is all right, ain't it, mother?” “Yes,” says the old lady, “it's just like summer.” “And to think,” continues the voice, “that there was a thick layer o' snow a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't wonder if there's more to come yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring according to the calendar, and it stands to reason summer ain't really come yet, you know, though it do seem like it, don't it?” “Yes, it's just like summer,” repeats the old lady tranquilly. There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we are here. Weather in town is only an incident—a pleasurable incident or a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella, whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or outside. It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your visit to the theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for this reason the incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as an acquaintance of a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he is in a good humour and locked out when he is in a bad humour. But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven. It is politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual diversion. You study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and watch the change of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the mood of the public. When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a fine day, or has been a cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a conventional civility. It is the formal opening of the discussion of weighty matters. It involves the prospects of potatoes and the sowing of onions, the blossoms on the trees, the effects of weather on the poultry and the state of the hives. I do not suppose that there is a moment of his life when Jim is unconscious of the weather or indifferent to it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not care what happens to the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands and secular interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is a stem Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the chapel in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold wi' work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. “I don't hold wi' work on Sundays,” he would repeat inflexibly. 0197m |