CHAPTER XXVIII

IN WHICH WE LOSE A FEW CENTURIES AND FIND A LIVING-PICTURE BY SIR DAVID WILKIE

The Director in his search for primitive English music had tidings of two old Morris dancers in an Oxfordshire village, survivals from the past when the whole of that county fostered the art, and he took me to see them. Never have I spent a more curious evening.

We left the train at Bicester late on a golden afternoon, and were driven to a little hamlet a few miles distant where the old fellows lived. They were brothers: one a widower of seventy, still lissom, and the other a bachelor of sixty-seven, bent and stiff; and with them when we arrived was another elderly man, a little their junior, blowing and beating away at his pipe and tabor as though dear life depended upon it.

Unfamiliar music these ancient instruments give forth, and I defy anyone hearing it to keep his feet still. They are not the drum and fife by any means, although those are the nearest things to them to-day, nor are they like the old magic drum and pipes of the "Punch and Judy" man (never to be heard again, alas, with a beating heart); but something between the two, with a suggestion of rollick or even madness added. I heard the sounds while we were still approaching the cottage and had no notion what they were; and the strangeness of their melody was increased by the player's total disregard of our entry, although it was a tune that might have ended anywhere. The pipe and tabor have now passed into the limbo of musical archaisms, but it was absurd to allow them to do so. There are certain effects on the stage that no other instruments could so well achieve, and their invitation to the dance is in a simpler way not less commanding than Weber's.

The old fellow played both instruments simultaneously; his left hand at once fingering the three holes of the pipe and supporting the string to which the tabor was suspended, while his right held the little stick with which he unceasingly beat it. For the twain are never separated.

Upon his stopping at last--and I for one could have heard him, uninterfering, for hours--we had a little talk as to his repertory and so forth, until, having changed their boots, the venerable capering brethren were ready. The elder one, Eli, was bright of eye and still very light on his feet; but the younger, Jack, creaked a little. Eli had a gentle smile ever on his curved lips, and as he danced his eyes looked into the past; Jack kept a fixed unseeing gaze on the musician. Together, or alone, they went through several of the old favourites--"Shepherds, Hey," "Maid of the Mill," "Old Mother Oxford," "Step back," "Lumps of Plum-pudding," "Green Garters"--and it was strange to sit in that little, flagged Oxfordshire kitchen, with its low ceiling and smoky walls, and watch these simple movements and hear those old tunes. More than strange; for as they continued, and the pipe and tabor continued, I became conscious of a new feeling. For the Morris dance is like nothing else. It is as different from the old English dance as that is different from the steps of the _corps de ballet_. It is the simplest thing there is, the most naïve. Or, if you are in that mood, it is the most stupid; jigging rather than dancing, and very monotonous. But after a little while it begins to cast its spell, in which monotony plays no small part, and one comes in time to hope that nothing will ever happen to interrupt it and force one back into real life again.

The feeling became positively uncanny when old Jack, the bent one, jigging alone, still with his eyes fixed on the musician, but seeing nothing nearer than 1870, began to touch his body here and there in the course of the movements of the dance, every touch having a profound mystical meaning, of which he knew nothing, that probably dated from remotest times, when these very steps were part of a religious or ecstatic celebration of fecundity. Odd sight for a party of twentieth century dilettanti in an Oxfordshire kitchen!

The occasion was not only curious but pathetic too; one saw after a while not these dancers, so old and past the joy of life, but the dancers as once they were, when, forty years ago, they would set out in a team every Whitsuntide, six in all, to dance the Morris in other villages, and sleep in a barn all so jolly, and drink the good ale provided by the farmers, and each strive to be the most agile and untiring for the sake of a pair of pretty Oxfordshire eyes.

Forty years ago!

Asked if there were any others who still remembered the steps, they said no. "We be the last, us be," said Eli, in his soft, melancholy voice. "All the others be dead."

The brothers described, each fortifying the other and helped by the promptings and leading questions of the Director, the ritual of the Morris as they remembered it. A lamb would be led about by a shepherd, and behind this lamb they danced. At night the lamb was killed and the joints distributed. Most was eaten, but portions were buried in the fields. Why, the old men had no notion; they had never heard. But the Director knew, although he did not explain.

For upwards of an hour these energetic enthusiasts continued to dance, sometimes without a hitch, and then again with hesitations and arguments as to the next step or movement. What thoughts were theirs, I wondered. Since he had last danced Eli had married, had had children, had seen his children grow up and his wife die. Yet I am certain that as he skipped and capered on those flagstones in the cottage where he was born, his personality was that rather of a young man than an old. And then the music stopped and he ceased to wave his handkerchief and spring from foot to foot, and he sank into a chair and the light left his face and wistful old age settled over it again.

I congratulated him on his sprightliness, and again asked his age, to make sure.

"Seventy," he said. "I shall be seventy-one in July if I live. If I live," he added, after a while.

"Of course you'll live," I said. "You're good for many years yet and many more dances."

He shook his head.

That he thinks of his end a good deal, I am sure; but never morbidly, or with any affectation of sadness, but with the peasant's quiet acceptance of the fact. All his life he has been a tiller of the soil: the same soil, year after year, turning it afresh, sowing it afresh, gathering the harvest afresh, and then beginning all over again--the best school for patience and acceptivity.

And so, after some ale had been brought, we said good-night and drove away, for Oxford and London again, or, in other words, for the twentieth century.