Chance recently made me for a while the tenant of a
windmill. Not to live in, and unhappily not to grind corn in, but to visit as
the mood arose, and see the ships in the harbour from the topmost window, and
look down on the sheep and the green world all around. For this mill stands
high and white—so white, indeed, that when there is a thunder-cloud behind it,
it seems a thing of polished aluminium.
From its windows you can see four other mills, all like
itself, idle, and one merely a ruin and one with only two sweeps left. But just
over the next range of hills, out of sight, to the northeast, is a windmill
that still merrily goes, and about five miles away to the northwest is another
also active; so that things are not quite so bad hereabouts as in many parts of
the country, where the good breezes blow altogether in vain...
Thinking over the losses which England has had forced
upon her by steam and the ingenuity of the engineer, one is disposed to count
the decay of the windmill among the first. Perhaps in the matter of pure
picture squeness the most serious thing that ever happened to England was the
discovery of galvanized iron roofing; but, after all, there was never anything
but quiet and rich and comfortable beauty about red roofs, whereas the living
windmill is not only beautiful but romantic too: a willing, man-serving creature, yoked to the elements, a whirling monster, often a thing of terror.
No one can stand very near the crashing sweeps of a windmill in half a gale
without a tightening of the heart a feeling comparable to that which comes from
watching the waves break over a wall in a storm. And to be within the mill at
such a time is to know something of sound’s very sources; it is the cave of
noise itself. No doubt there are dens of hammering energy which are more
shattering, but the noise of a windmill is largely natural, the product of wood
striving with the good sou’wester; it fills the ears rather than assaults them.
The effect, moreover, is by no means lessened by the absence of the wind itself
and the silent nonchalance of the miller and his man, who move about in the
midst of this appalling racket with the quiet efficiency of vergers.
In my mill, of course, there is no such uproar; nothing
but the occasional shaking of the cross-pieces of the idle sails. Everything is
still; and the pity of it is that everything is in almost perfect order for the
day’s work. The mill one day some score
years ago was full of life; the next, and ever after, mute and lifeless, like a
stream frozen in a night or the palace in Tennyson’s ballad of the “Sleeping
Beauty.” There is no decay merely
inanition. One or two of the apple-wood cogs have been broken from the great
wheel; a few floor planks have been rotted; but that is all. A week’ s
overhauling would put everything right. But it will never come, and the
cheerful winds that once were to drive a thousand English mills so happily now
bustle over the Channel in vain.
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