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THE HEART OF ENGLAND




THE HEART OF ENGLAND SERIES


This Series opens with a new work by Mr. EDWARD THOMAS, that curious
and enthusiastic explorer of the English Countryside, whose prose
style gives him a claim to be regarded as the successor, as he is the
biographer, of Richard Jefferies. The Series includes a new edition
of Mr. THOMAS’S other work, “The Heart of England,” and Mr. HILAIRE
BELLOC’S “The Historic Thames.” These two volumes were originally
issued in limited editions at one Guinea net per volume.


 =THE SOUTH COUNTRY.= By EDWARD THOMAS. Small crown 8vo. =3s. 6d.= net.

Mr. Thomas in this new book gives his impressions of a year’s
wanderings afoot as the seasons change through Kent, Sussex, Hampshire,
Wiltshire and Cornwall. It is a prose-poem of the most beautiful
counties in England.


 THE HEART OF ENGLAND. By EDWARD THOMAS. Small crown 8vo. =3s. 6d.= net.


 THE HISTORIC THAMES. By HILAIRE BELLOC, M.P. =3s. 6d.= net.


_Prospectus of above Books sent post free on application._

  J. M. DENT & CO.
  29-30, BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.




[Illustration]




[Illustration:

  THE HEART OF
  ENGLAND

  _by Edward Thomas_

  LONDON
  _J. M. DENT & CO._

  _1909_
]




_All rights reserved_




  TO
  HENRY W. NEVINSON




CONTENTS


  PART I.
  LEAVING TOWN

  CHAP.                                             PAGE
  I. LEAVING TOWN                                      1

  PART II
  THE LOWLAND
  II. FAUNUS                                          21
  III. NOT HERE, O APOLLO!                            26
  IV. WALKING WITH GOOD COMPANY                       28
  V. NO MAN’S GARDEN                                  31
  VI. MARCH DOUBTS                                    37
  VII. A DECORATED CHURCH                             41
  VIII. GARLAND DAY                                   44
  IX. AN OLD WOOD                                     49
  X. IN A FARMYARD                                    52
  XI. MEADOWLAND                                      56
  XII. AN OLD FARM                                    64
  XIII. POPPIES                                       69
  XIV. AUGUST                                         73
  XV. OLD-FASHIONED TIMES                             77
  XVI. ONE GREEN FIELD                                83
  XVII. THE BROOK                                     88
  XVIII. AN AUTUMN GARDEN                             93
  XIX. THE WALNUT TREE                                97
  XX. A GOLDEN AGE                                   100
  XXI. THE VILLAGE                                   103
  XXII. ST. MARTIN’S SUMMER                          118
  XXIII. THE PRIDE OF THE MORNING                    121
  XXIV. THE METAMORPHOSIS                            124
  XXV. EARTH CHILDREN                                126
  XXVI. NOVEMBER RAIN                                138
  XXVII. JANUARY SUNSHINE                            140
  XXVIII. THE BARGE                                  143
  XXIX. A WINTER MORNING                             146

  PART III
  THE UPLAND
  XXX. CHERRY BLOSSOM                                153
  XXXI. THE FOX HUNT                                 155
  XXXII. APPLE BLOSSOM                               166
  XXXIII. A LITTLE BEFORE HARVEST                    170
  XXXIV. AUTUMN BELLS                                174
  XXXV. SUNDAY                                       176

  PART IV.
  THE MOUNTAINS
  XXXVI. THE FIRST DAFFODILS                         183
  XXXVII. THE MIRROR                                 192
  XXXVIII. UNDER THE MOOR                            198
  XXXIX. A HARVEST MOON                              202
  XL. THE INN                                        205

  PART V
  THE SEA
  XLI. A MARCH HAUL                                  211
  XLII. FISHING BOATS                                214
  XLIII. CLOUDS OVER THE SEA                         216
  XLIV. THE MARSH                                    220
  XLV. ONE SAIL AT SEA                               223
  XLVI. THE CASTLE OF CARBONEK                       225




NOTE


Of the five songs printed at the end of this book, only “La Fille du
Roi” has been published before, I believe. “The Holm Bank Hunting Song”
and “Poor Old Horse” were sung by competitors for folk-song prizes
at the annual Westmoreland Musical Festival, and I owe them to the
kindness of Mr. George Rathbone. “The Mowing Song” and “Mary, come into
the Field,” were given to me by friends.

  EDWARD THOMAS.




PART I

LEAVING TOWN




THE HEART OF ENGLAND




CHAPTER I

LEAVING TOWN


Sunday afternoon had perfected the silence of the suburban street.
Every one had gone into his house to tea; none had yet started for
church or promenade; the street was empty, except for a white pigeon
that pecked idly in the middle of the road and once leaned upon one
wing, raised the other so as to expose her tender side and took the
rain deliciously; so calm and unmolested was the hour.

The houses were in unbroken rows and arranged in pairs, of which one
had a bay window on the ground floor and one had not. Some had laurels
in front; some had names. But they were so much alike that the street
resembled a great storehouse where yards of goods, all of one pattern,
are exposed, all with that painful lack of character that makes us wish
to rescue one and take it away and wear it, and soil it, and humanise
it rapidly.

Soon a boy of nine years old came out of one house and stood at the
gate. At first he moved briskly and looked in every direction as if
expecting to see some one whom he knew; but in a little while he paused
and merely looked towards the pigeon, so fixedly that perhaps he
saw it not. The calm silenced him, took him into its bosom, yet also
depressed him. Had he dared, he would have shouted or run; he would
have welcomed the sound of a piano, of a dog barking, of a starling
coldly piping. While he still paused an old man rounded the corner of
the street and came down in the roadway towards him.

The old man was small and straight, and to his thin figure the remains
of a long black coat and grey trousers adhered with singular grace.
You could not say that he was well dressed, but rather that he was in
the penultimate stage of a transformation like Dryope’s or Daphne’s,
which his pale face had not altogether escaped. His neglected body
seemed to have grown this grey rind that flapped like birch bark. Had
he been born in it the clothing could not have been more apt. The eye
travelled from these clothes with perfect satisfaction--as from a
branch to its fruit--to his little crumpled face and its partial crust
of hair. Yet he walked. One hand on a stick, the other beneath a basket
of watercress, he walked with quick, short steps, now and then calling
out unexpectedly, as if in answer to a question, “Watercresses!” No one
interrupted him. He was hungry; he nibbled at pieces of cress with his
gums, and so kneaded his face as if it had been dough. He passed the
boy; he stooped, picked up a rotten apple, and in the act frightened
the pigeon, which rose, as the boy saw, and disappeared.

The boy raised his head and watched. He saw the old man--as in an
eloquent book and not with his own usually indolent eyes--and thought
him a traveller. Yes! that was how a traveller looked--a strange,
free man, hatless, walking in the road, ignoring puddles, talking
carelessly to himself; from the country--such was his stick and the
manner of his clothes; with something magnificent and comely in his
hoariness; sleeping the boy knew not where, perhaps not at all, but
going on and on, certainly not to church, but perhaps to places with
mountains, icebergs, houses in the branches of trees, great waters,
camels, monkeys, crocodiles, parrots, ivory, cannibals, curved swords.
And the boy flushed to think that the quiet street was an avenue to all
the East, the Pole, the Amazon ... to dark men who wondered about the
sunlight, the wind, the rain, and whence they came ... to towns set
down in the heart of forests and lonely as ships at sea. But whatever
he was, the old man was more blessed than any one whom the boy had ever
seen.

The old man was gone out of sight. The boy started to run and follow;
but he stumbled and fell and uttered his intolerable longing in a fit
of grave tears, while the street began to be bright and restless again.

I thought to follow him myself. But the next day I was still in that
grey land, looking at it from a railway train.

The hundreds of streets parallel or at angles with the railway--some
exposing flowery or neglected back gardens, bedrooms half seen through
open windows, pigeon houses with pigeons bowing or flashing in flight,
all manner of domesticities surprised--others a line of shop fronts
and gorgeous or neat or faded women going to and fro--others, again,
a small space that had been green and was still grassy under its
encumbrance of dead trees, scaffolding and bricks--some with inns
having good names--these streets are the strangest thing in the
world. They have never been discovered. They cannot be classified.
There is no tradition about them. Poets have not shown how we are to
regard them. They are to us as mountains were in the Middle Ages,
sublime, difficult, immense; and yet so new that we have inherited
no certain attitude towards them, of liking or dislike. They suggest
so much that they mean nothing at all. The eye strains at them as at
Russian characters which are known to stand for something beautiful
or terrible; but there is no translator: it sees a thousand things
which at the moment of seeing are significant, but they obliterate one
another. More than battlefield or library, they are dense with human
life. They are as multitudinous and painful and unsatisfying as the
stars. They propose themselves as a problem to the mind, only a little
less so at night when their surfaces hand the mind on to the analogies
of sea waves or large woods.

Nor at the end of my journey was the problem solved. It was a land of
new streets and half-built streets and devastated lanes. Ivied elm
trunks lay about with scaffold poles, uprooted shrubs were mingled with
bricks, mortar with turf, shining baths and sinks and rusty fire grates
with dead thistles and thorns. Here and there a man in a silk hat or a
little girl with neat ankles and high brown boots stepped amidst the
deeply rutted mud. An artist who wished to depict the Fall and some
sympathy with it in the face of a ruined Eden might have had little to
do but copy an acre of the surviving fields.

A north wind swept the land clean. In the hedges and standing trees,
it sobbed at intervals like a bitter child forcing himself to cry; in
the windowless houses it made a merrier sound like a horn. It drove
workmen and passers-by to spend as much time as possible in “The
King’s Head,” and there the medley of the land was repeated. Irish and
Cockney accents mingled with Kentish; Americans would have been out of
place. No one seemed to dislike the best room in the inn, where there
was a piano, a coloured picture of Lord Roberts and of the landlord
as a youth, an old print of snipe-shooting, some gaudy and fanciful
advertisements of spirits, and no fire to warm the wall-paper which had
once had a pattern characteristic of poor bathrooms.

I felt a kind of exalted and almost cheerful gloom as I stepped out and
saw that it was raining and would go on raining. O exultation of the
sorrowful heart when Nature also seems to be sorrowing! What strange
merriment is this which the dejected mind and the wind in the trees are
making together! What high lavolt of the shuffling heels of despair! As
two lovers wounded and derided will make of their complainings one true
joy that triumphs, so will the concealing rain and the painful mind.

The workmen had gone; faint lights began to appear through the blinds
of the finished houses. There was no sunset, no change from day to
night. The end of the day was like what is called a natural death in
bed; an ill-laid fire dies thus. With the darkness a strange spirit of
quiet joy appeared in the air. Old melodies floating about it on that
mourning wind. The rain formed a mist and a veil over the skeletons
round about, but it revealed more than it took away; Nature gained
courage in the gloom. The rain smoothed her as it will wash away
tears on the lonely hills. The trees were back in Eden again. They
were as before in their dim, stately companies. The bad walking was no
annoyance. Once I came upon a line of willows above dead reeds that
used to stand out by a pond as the first notice to one walking out of
London that he was in the country at last; they were unchanged; they
welcomed and encouraged once more. The lighted windows in the mist had
each a greeting; they were as the windows we strain our eyes for as
we descend to them from the hills of Wales or Kent; like those, they
had the art of seeming a magical encampment among the trees, brave,
cheerful lights which men and women kept going amidst the dense and
powerful darkness. The thin, incompleted walls learned a venerable
utterance.

The night grew darker. The sound of pianos mingled with the wind. I
could not see the trees--I was entrapped in a town where I had once
known nothing but fields and one old house, stately and reticent among
the limes. A sense of multitude surged about and over me--of multitudes
entirely unknown to me--collected by chance--mere numbers--human faces
that were at that moment expressing innumerable strange meanings with
which I had nothing to do. Had I said to one who entered an adjacent
house that I was retrospectively a lodger of his, since I had once
hidden for half a day in the hollow oak in his front garden, he would
have stared. Here were people living in no ancient way. That they
supped and slept in their houses was all that was clear to me. I
wondered why--why did they go on doing these things? Did they ever
sit up thinking and thinking, trying to explain to themselves why they
were there, and then fall asleep in their chairs and awake still with
the same goalless thought and so go shivering to bed? The window lights
were now as strange to me and as fascinating as, to a salmon swaying
by a bridge, the lights and faces of the poachers on the bank. As if
it were new came back to me the truism that most men are prisons to
themselves. Here was a city imprisoned deep, and I as deep, in the
rain. Was there, perhaps, joy somewhere on account of those thousands
of prisoners and lighted windows?

I left London that night on foot. By way of preparation, I stayed until
after midnight to listen to a sweet voice that drew upon all the gloom
and jangle of London the sweet patterns of some old country melodies.
Strange and pleasant it was to look out upon the London night of
angry-ridged, tumultuous roofs, and then, sharply drawing a curtain, to
live upon a cadence, a melody--

    “As I walked forth one Midsummer morning
    A-viewing the meadow and to take the air ...”

A pure rose upon a battlefield, a bright vermeil shell upon a
slatternly sea-shore after storm, would not be of a more piercing
beauty than those songs just there.

Then I set out and began to stain the immense silence of the city with
the noise of my heels and stick. A journalist or two went by; a fat
man and his fat dog straying from the neat bar of a Conservative Club
homewards without precipitancy; a few pleasure-seekers with bleared or
meditative eye; a youth with music in his steps, fresh from some long
evening of talk and song, perhaps his first. Here was a policeman
stern and expectant in a dark entry, or smoking a pipe; there stood or
sat or leaned or lay men and women who no more give up their secrets
than the blinded windows and the doors that will not be knocked at for
hours yet. How noble the long, well-lighted streets at this hour, fit
with their smooth paved ways for some roaring game, and melancholy
because there is no one playing. The rise and fall of the land is only
now apparent. In the day we learn of hills in London only by their
fatigue; in the night we can see them as if the streets did not exist,
as they must have appeared to men who climbed them with a hope of
seeing their homes from the summits or of surprising a stag beneath.
The river ran by, grim, dark and vast, and having been untouched by
history, old as hills and stars, it seemed from a bridge, not like a
wild beast in a pit, but like a strange, reminiscential amulet, worn
by the city to remind her that she shall pass. How tameless and cold
the water, alien, careless, monstrous, capable of drowning in a little
while the uttermost agony or joy and making them as if they had never
been. I passed by doors where lived people whom I knew, but it was two
o’clock in the morning; they could not know me. I wondered which of
them I could safely disturb. With what expression would they come down
from their warm beds and oblivion, with dull, puzzled eyes, and slowly
recall those things which--even the pleasant ones--our lonely lives
so often reduce to mere entries in a tedious chronicle. I left the
question unanswered.

Now I saw a tall, stiff crane surmounting the houses and nodding in
the sky, itself simple, strong, direct, weighing the city against the
heavens in an enormous balance with Rhadamanthine solemnity.

Endless were the vast caves and deserts of the streets, most strange
the unobserved, innumerable things prepared for the eyes of men on the
coming day--glittering windows of cutlery, food, drugs, sadlery--the
high walls with coloured advertisements of beer, medicine, food,
actors, newspapers, corsets, concerts, pickles. The dark windows, the
windows lit to serve some purpose unknown, seemed to make it necessary
to cry out, to raise an alarm, to make sure that the darkness or
light meant only the usual things. Now and then several streets ran
towards one another and left a square or irregular space at their
meeting, surrounded by an inn with a sign, a stone trough, an old
eighteenth-century house, its windows emphasised by white paint, a row
of pollarded limes, a scrap of orchard--once perhaps the heart of a
village. Or for almost a mile the streets ran straight, with branches
at right angles, and suddenly a large house stood back and its garden
of limes and lawn broke the monotone. The names of the streets were an
epitome of the world and time, commemorating famous and unknown men,
battles, conspiracies, far-off cities and rivers, little villages known
to me, streams and hills now buried by houses; the names of the inns
were as rich as the titles of books in an old library, suggested many
an inn by wood and mill and meadow and village square, but all confused
as if in a marine store. And as I walked through old and new villages,
rents, courts, alleys, lanes, rises, streets, buildings, roads,
avenues, I seemed to be travelling through the Inferno and Purgatorio,
but before the first man had entered them and without a guide. It was
immense, sublime, but its purposes dark and not to be explained by the
policemen here and there in charge. Nor, passing through Battersea,
did I meet the famous man who has threaded this mystery. He, at least,
would have taken me to a housetop and have unravelled space; but I
expected him at street corners and on commons in vain. But presently I
reached a sign-post that stood boldly up with undoubted inscriptions,
one of them to London, and away from that I set my face, though I saw
market-carts going the way I had come, with drowsy carters, one lamp,
and horses whose shadowy muscles quivered in the electric light. That
sign-post seemed to make all things clear. Like a prophet it rose up,
who after an age of darkness says that the path of life and goodness
is plain, that he knows it, and that all who follow him will be saved.
Not for him hesitation and qualification; but to all men perplexed by
definitions, testimonies, other prophets and their own thoughts, he
cries: “This is the way.”

    “The world may find the Spring by following her.”

I followed and needed only a good marching song. By chance I lighted on
one which was first sung by countrymen. It is not triumphant--the mind
wearies of a triumphant song in solitude and at night--but it persists
and acknowledges no end. It was made by feeble, mighty-limbed men who
knew what it is to go on and on for ends which they do not entirely
apprehend. It matches the hurrying feet of the lover or the limp of the
hungry man at dawn. It begins--

    “With one man, with two men,
    We mow the hay together;
    With three men, with four men,
    We mow the hay together:
    With four, with three, with two, with one, no more,
    We mow the hay and rake the hay and take it away together.”

It goes on--

    “With five men, with six men,
    We mow the hay together;
    With seven men, with eight men,
    We mow the hay together;
    With eight, with seven, with six, with five, with four,
    with three, with two, with one, no more,
    We mow the hay and rake the hay and take it away together.”

It goes on until a hundred is reached, proceeding after twenty by
tens. And so, gradually, as the song went on, the houses opened apart,
and the road ahead was a simple white line. On either hand thousands
of lights showed valleys and hills; but ahead there was a promising
darkness, and out of it came the Watercress Man with a basket of wild
flowers on his back.

“Sir,” said he, setting down his flowers slowly, “the price of a pint
of ale won’t hurt you, I suppose? I have drunk nothing since yesterday
morning.”

“But have you eaten anything?” I asked, ready to admire him for asking
first for drink.

“No,” said he, “I have neither eaten nor drunken. I drink four ale.”

“Thank you,” he said, when I had given him twopence for drink and
twopence for food. “We are all sons of one mother. You can’t get away
from that.”

“Then we are brothers,” said I.

“Certainly, if you will.”

“I should like to know you.”

“With pleasure, if you can.”

“What are you by profession?”

“A hard question. I profess nothing. By conviction I am an ill-used
man, and for the moment I am a seller of flowers.”

He showed me his flowers--kingcups, cuckoo flowers, primroses from the
moist woods.

“I will buy your flowers,” I said.

“No! I think I shall keep those,” and he put them in a horse trough
close by. I asked him if he would return into the country with me.

“No,” he replied, “it would be sunrise before we got into the country,
and I never spend the daytime in the country if I can avoid it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“As we are brothers,” he said, “I will tell you that I paint
landscapes. I like nothing on earth so well as the country. I was
dragged up in the Borough. The country for me! But the lover of Nature
and the gamekeeper and the farmer and the landowner spoil it by day.
The people are stupid, brutal. The women are not at all beautiful.
Their cowsheds are the only things they have not spoilt: they are still
sweet. As a lad I read the pastoral poets, and I know that these things
were once far different. So I live in London and paint landscapes at
sixpence a-piece, sometimes four or five of them in a morning, so that
I live well. I usually put a few red flowers in with the sixpennyworth.
I am sixty-eight; my son will succeed me, but badly--badly.”

“How is that?”

“Because he says that he paints Nature as she is, which is impossible.
I make no such mistake, as you shall see----I aim for suggestion.
Here,” he said, producing one from his pocket (a brown field sloping up
to a ridge of trees, painted black, against a silvery sky, and in that
a few rooks). “Do you not hear there the wild, angry charm of hundreds
of blackbirds and thrushes and larks? They sometimes make me lie down
and cry before the sun rises, because I am not worthy; I do not own a
little farm and drive my own plough and cause the envy of kings at my
happiness.”

“Is that clump of trees right?” I asked (in need of something to say).

“Right? But the feeling is there. Is it not cold and pure and wild? I
felt great as I did that. But see here again!”

Here he brought out another, also in three colours, of a landscape at
dawn. Three black firs stood at the top of a steep down, and from them
went a pair of dark birds out along a silver sky.

“I never put figures in my landscapes,” he explained, “but is not the
spirit of a small sweet Amaryllis in it? _Ah! lovely as thou art to
look upon, ah, heart of stone, ah, dark-browed maiden!_ Does she not
hide somewhere out of the picture; and does not a shepherd, seated
perhaps under those fir trees, look for her coming? Is not the Golden
Age in that sky?”

“I am glad,” said I, “that you believe in a Golden Age. Literature and
art are continually recreating it for us.”

“Modern literature,” he said scornfully, “is by those who have not seen
for those who do not care. What answer has literature to this?” Here
he showed a third sketch.

“I know nothing of literature,” I said; “I am a journalist.”

He sighed with relief, and pointed to a yellow thatched house with
windows open on to the sea, and behind the house the usual dark trees
and silver sky.

“There,” he exclaimed, “literature does not believe in or understand
the honest life, bound up with the seasons and beauty which is
expressed by that simple scene. See, there, equal laws, harmony, aims
unspotted by the world, not fearing nor loving kings. Any thoughtful
man living in a scene like that would be wiser, and it would be
impossible for him to err. I myself would venture to be a Daphnis or
Menalcas again there. I can hear the one living pastoral poet saying in
that cottage by the sea--

    “Come, pretty Phyllis, you are late!
    The cows are crowding round the gate.
    An hour or more, the sun has set;
    The stars are out; the grass is wet;
    The glow-worms shine; the beetles hum;
    The moon is near--come, Phyllis, come!

    The black cow thrusts her brass-tipped horns
    Among the quick and bramble thorns;
    The red cow jerks the padlock chain;
    The dun cow shakes her bell again,
    And round and round the chestnut tree,
    The white cow bellows lustily.” ...

He knew all four verses by heart.

“Your aims are wonderful,” I stammered. “If I could only see you at
work, if you would only show me the scenes which inspire such antique
and lofty emotions....”

“See! this is London--nothing but trees--I have seen it so as I came
home. But I cannot go with you. I return to think about the Golden Age.”

He tied the flowers round the pole of a signboard that stood on a harsh
courtyard of gravel strewn with dirty paper, and pursued his homeward
road, eager for “The Old Angel” or “The Chequers” where he could vivify
his vision of the Golden Age.

In the sky, the distant dawn sent up to the clouds a faint dream of
light that made their shapes just visible. A hedge-sparrow awoke in the
furze beside the road, twittered clearly and became silent again; on
the other side, in some invisible trees high up, a few rooks began to
talk. Then, for a little while as I went on, the darkness was complete,
and the silence also, except that the telegraph wires forced a faint
complaint out of the light wind.

As the clouds filled with that dream of light and the road began
visibly to lengthen out, I left London behind or recognised it only
in the blue bowls and copper-ware gleaming through the windows of
new houses round about. Beyond them rolled a ploughed country of
such abounding and processional curves that it seemed almost to move
and certainly to rejoice; here and there the curves dimpled suddenly
and made a hollow, where elm or beech sprang up in the midst of the
ploughland, in a small consistory, grave, shining, fair. To right and
left, where the curves of the land rose to the sky, the white foam of
orchards half buried rosy farmhouses and their own dark boughs. The
dense thorn hedges gleamed all wet, compelling the wind to dip deep
into them and taste their fragrance, coolness, moistness, softness all
together, envying not the earnest bee, or the dallying butterfly, or
even the insect that was drowning in a dewy flower. How the dew washed
away the night! I thought that the old man had spoken truly when he
said that the Golden Age comes again with every dawn. The dew gave
the eyes a kind of fitness and worthiness to behold the white fruit
blossom and the sudden hills of horse-chestnut green. It washed out
London as the old man’s brush had done. See! the world is but a brown
and fragrant cloud decorated with dark boles, green foliage, white
bloom, and here and there a soul akin to them; it turns the wilful
mind into a garden neat and fine, of red and white, with green lawns
between, which the bee Fancy sucks at and combines. For a minute only,
in one shadowed wood that faced the departing night, all the birds
sang together stormily and hardly moving from the sprays on which they
slept, with something of night in their voices. But as I entered the
wood, already the most of them had gone hither and thither, and only
on high twigs one or two blackbirds and thrushes sang, and hidden wood
pigeons cooed. The young hazel boughs bent at the top with fresh leaves
that were so beautiful and frail that they seemed but just to have been
persuaded to stay and give up a winged life. The low wych elm twigs
had been dipped in leaves. Wild cherry leaves and flowers mingled like
lovers so young that the boy rivals the girl in tenderness. There was
no path, and pushing through hazel and cornel and thorn, I saw the
eyes of sitting birds gleam with a little anger through the lustrous
green. Presently the stems were less dense; a little river ran through
freshly cut underwood of hazel and ash and oak, their wounds still
flashing. There pale primroses and the last celandines ran in sharp
gulfs into the heart of bluebell and orchis and cuckoo-flower, and
the orange-tipped butterfly tripped over them. The mosses on the ash
and hazel roots gleamed darkly gold and green. In the rivulet itself
broad kingcups swayed and their leaves sank into darkness and rose into
light as the ripples fluctuated. The blackbird, fed on golden hours,
sang carelessly, time after time, the two opening phrases of an old
Highland melody. Close by, in the cool, sombre, liquid air between the
new-leaved boughs of beech sang a cuckoo, and his notes seemed not to
die but to nestle and grow quiet among the leaves overhead and the
flowers underfoot, and some of them even to find their embalming in the
little round hawthorn clouds that sailed high above in a deep stream of
blue.

Suddenly my mind went back to the high dark cliffs of Westminster
Abbey, the blank doors and windows of endless streets, the devouring
river, the cold gloom before dawn, and then with a shudder forgot them
and saw the flowers and heard the birds with such a joy as when the
ships from Tarshish, after three blank years, again unloaded apes and
peacocks and ivory, and men upon the quay looked on; or as, when a man
has mined in the dead desert for many days, he suddenly enters an old
tomb, and making a light, sees before him vases of alabaster, furniture
adorned with gold and blue enamel and the figures of gods, a chariot of
gold, and a silence perfected through many ages in the company of death
and of the desire of immortality.




PART II

THE LOWLAND




CHAPTER II

FAUNUS


How nobly the ploughman and the plough and three horses, two chestnuts
and a white leader, glide over the broad swelling field in the early
morning! Under the dewy, dark-green woodside they wheel, pause and go
out into the strong light again, and they seem one and glorious, as if
the all-breeding earth had just sent them up out of her womb--mighty,
splendid and something grim, with darkness and primitive forces
clinging about them, and the night in the horses’ manes.

The ship, the chariot, the plough, these three are, I suppose, the most
sovereign beautiful things which man has made in his time, and such
that were his race to pass away from the earth, would bring him most
worship among his successors.

All are without parallel in nature, wrought out of his own brain by
unaided man; and yet, during their life, worthy by their beauty, their
purpose and their motion to challenge anything made by the gods on the
earth or in the sea; and after their life is done, sublime and full
of awe, so that when we come upon them neglected and see their fair,
heroic curves, the dirge at their downfall passes inevitably into a
pæan to their majesty. And they are very old. Probably the beasts and
the birds, the winds and waves and hills know us as the creatures who
make the ship, the chariot and the plough. These three things, as they
go about their work, must have become universal symbols, so that when
a man comes in sight, the other inhabitants of the earth say: Here is
he who sails in ships and drives the chariot and guides the plough. And
the greatest of all is the plough. It is without pride and also without
vanity. The ship and the chariot have sometimes tried to conceal their
ancient simplicity, though they have never done without it. But the
plough is the same--in shape like a running hound, with tail uplifted
and muzzle bowed to the scent.

Richard the ploughman is worthy of his plough and team. He moves
heavily with long strides over the baked yellow field, swaying with the
violent motion of the plough as it cuts the stubborn and knotty soil,
and yet seeming to sway out of joy and not necessity. He is a straight,
small-featured, thin-lipped man, red-haired and with blue eyes of a
fierce loneliness almost fanatical. Hour after hour he crosses and
recrosses the field, up to the ridge, whence he can see miles of hill
and wood; down to the woodside where the rabbits hardly trouble to hide
as he appears, or to the thick hedge with marigolds below and nearly
all day the song of nightingales. The furrow is always straight; he
could plough it so asleep, and sometimes perhaps he does. The larks
sing invisible in the white May sky. The swallows and woodlarks and
willow wrens and linnets, with their tenderest of all mortal voices,
flit and sing about him. Partridges whirr and twang. A fox steals along
the hedge, a squirrel glows and ripples across a bay of the field. And
for a little time he notices these things in a mild complacency. He
has even formed a theory that there is another finch like a chaffinch,
but not such a singer, and he calls it a piefinch. He likes the bright
weather, and his cheerful greeting leaves the passer-by feeling stupid
because he cannot equal it; few sounds can equal it, except the shout
of a cuckoo and the abandoned clamour of a deep-voiced hound. He never
becomes tired; at noon and evening in the tavern, he drinks standing,
with one hand on the high door latch and the other holding the tankard,
and talking all the time at the rate of one phrase to a minute, with
serious mouth and distant eyes which must be symbols to help out the
words, for certainly if those words mean no more than they would in
another man’s mouth, they convey little but the apparent _ennui_ of all
those long hours walking to this oak or that hawthorn spray.

At first sight the ploughman’s task seems to be one which ought
rightly to be set only to some well-balanced philosopher, who could
calmly descend into himself during the many lonely hours and think
of nature and man in orderly thoughts. To the ordinary man, with his
drug-habit of taking to reverie during any long spell of solitude,
such a task would seem fatal. In fact, it is pretty certain that many
a plain fellow must be turned into a fool by the immense monotony
of similar furrows and the same view repeated exactly every quarter
of an hour. When he is still a boy, he goes about even in the four
hours’ darkness of the winter mornings with always a song amidst the
sleet or the silent frost. At lunch he can look for nests or nuts or
hunt a stoat. When work is over he looks forward to songs at “The
Chequers” with those of his own age, or to a shamefaced walk with a
girl, or to fishing for tench and eels, or even to a game of cricket.
But when he is married all that is past. He leads his horses down to
the plough, having some simple thought, a grievance, a recollection,
perhaps a hope, running confusedly in his head, and all day he turns
it over, repeating himself, exaggerating, puzzling over the meaning of
someone’s words, floundering in digressions, fitting new words to the
wood-pigeon’s talk, trying to keep straight and to make up his mind,
justifying himself, condemning another, cursing him. Now and then he
lifts his eyes to the sky or the wooded hills and his mind catches at
an impression which never becomes a thought, but something between a
picture and a tune in the head, and its half oblivion is pleasant, when
suddenly the plough leaps forward from his relaxing grasp, he shouts
“Ah, Charley!” to the leader, mutters a little and settles down again
to the grievance or the recollection or the hope, to be disturbed on
lucky days by the hounds, perhaps, but otherwise to go on and on;
and at noon and evening he takes his horses back to the stable and
confronts men with the same simple ejaculations as before, after the
last glass possibly reviving his lonely thoughts, but ineffectually.
“How Bill does talk!” they say. What wonder that the rustic moralist
marks an infant’s tomb with the words--

    “When the archangel’s trump shall blow
      And souls to bodies join,
    Millions shall wish their lives below
        Had been as brief as thine.”

But Richard is no ordinary man, for he is happy and proud, and
somewhere in the fields or in the clouds that roll before him as his
plough comes to the top of the ridge, he has found that draught of
excellent grace--

    “Few men but such as sober are and sage,
    Are by the gods to drink thereof assigned;
    But such as drink, eternal happiness do find.”

There is little of wisdom in his words except moderation; but his
garden is luckier, his kitchen sweeter than all the rest in the hamlet,
and of all his tasks--ploughing, harrowing, rolling, drudging, reaping,
mowing, carting faggots or corn or hay or green meat or dung--he likes
none better than the others, because he likes them all well as they
come. And ah! to see him and his team all dark and large and heroic
against the sky, ploughing in the winter or the summer morning, or to
see him grooming the radiant horses in their dim stable on a calm,
delaying evening, is to see one who is in league with sun and wind and
rain to make odours fume richly from the ancient altar, to keep the
earth going in beauty and fruitfulness for still more years.




CHAPTER III

NOT HERE, O APOLLO!


It was a clay country of small fields that rose and fell slightly,
not in curves, but in stiff lines which ended abruptly in the low,
dividing hedges. Here and there we passed small woods of oak, hardly
more than overgrown hedges, where keepers shot the jays. There were few
streams--and those polluted. North and south the land rose up in some
pomp to steep hills planted with oak and beech and fir, and between
these, broad meadows and hop gardens, which now and then caught the
faint light on their dry brown or moist green and gleamed desirably.
The wind was in the north; it had rained in the night, and yet the
morning was dull and the sun white and small. There was some vice
in the wind or in the foliage or in the grass that now began to be
long--some vice that made the land sad and cold and unawakening, with
the surliness of a man who cannot sleep and will not rise.

The woods became more dense as we walked; not far ahead the oaks closed
in and expounded the contours of the land by their summits. But our
path led away from them, and we were about to lose sight of them when,
gently as the alighting of a bird, the sunlight dropped among the
tops of the oaks, which were yellow and purple with young leaves, and
blessed them. We turned. There was the sun held fast among the fresh
leaves and green trunks, as if Apollo had changed into a woodland god,
and forsaken the long lonely ways of heaven, and resolved no more to
spend a half of his days in the under world. How the nymphs clapped
their hands at this advent, abandoning Pan, and bringing to the new
lord all choicest herbs and highest fair grasses and golden flowers
that should make him content to be away from the clouds of sunset and
dawn, and blue flowers on which his feet should tread without envy of
the infinite paths of the sky, and white flowers that should suffice
for his shepherding in place of the flocks of the high desolate noon!
How they drove up grey dove and green woodpecker to shake their wings
and shine about the new god’s head as they flew among the branches!
How Pan himself, that does not heed dark hours, crept away from his
light-hearted nymphs and hid in the sombre reeds! “Ever-young Apollo!
Eternal Apollo! Young Apollo!” were the cries. “Why have we ever served
a goat-foot god?” And so they made haste to serve him with the clearest
honey of the wild bees, the cream from the farm that was most clean,
the fruits that yet preserved flavours of a past summer and autumn in
the granary close by, and fresh cresses from the spring; nor would some
of the little satyrs forget the golden ale and amber bread and cheese
of the colour of primroses; and all seemed assured that never again
would Apollo forsake the red and yellow leaves of the full oaks or the
mid-forest grasses or the lilied pools standing among willow and alder
and ash. And we saw that the light was passing in triumph slowly, and
accompanied by the cooing of doves, along the wood from oak top to oak
top.




CHAPTER IV

WALKING WITH GOOD COMPANY


The lightning grows upon the sky like a tumultuous thorn tree of fire.
The thunder grumbles with interrupted cadences, and then, joyful as a
poet, hits the long, grave, reverberating period at last, repeats it
triumphantly, and muttering dies away. The pheasants in the woods have
got over their alarm and have ceased to crow, and for a time the heavy
perpendicular rain submerges the meadow and farmhouse and mid-field oak
and the steep downs with their cloudy woods; the birds are still.

Then the rain wastes away. I can count the drops on the broad burdock
leaves; and the evening sun comes through horizontally; and it is good
to be afoot and making for something remote, I know not why. Each
meadow shines amid its encircling hedges like a lake of infinitely
deep emerald. On the dark red ploughland the flints glitter with
constellated or solitary lights. In the sweet copses, where the willow
wren sings again in the highest branches, the thorn foliage is so
bright that the dark stems are invisible. The purple oak tops reach
wonderfully into the sombre, bluish sky, and over them the wood pigeons
turn rapidly from darkness to splendour--from splendour to darkness,
as they wheel and clap their wings. The cuckoos shout again; first
one, so far off that the character, without the notes, of the song is
recognised; then another with a wild clearness in its voice as if the
rainy air aided it; and then one just overhead, in the luminous grey
branches of an oak, so that it can be heard trying hard and enjoying
its own strength. The hills rejoice with long shadows and yellow light;
the tall hares stretch themselves and gallop. The little pools hum
pleasantly as the rain drips from their overhanging brier and bramble
into the leaden water with bright splash. And in our own muscles and
hearts the evening strives to form an aspiration that shall suit the
joy of the hills, the meadows, the copses and their people. We will go
on, they say; we will go on and on, through the beeches on the hill
and up over the ridge and down again through the grey wet meadows and
to the old road between hawthorn and guelder-rose at the foot of the
downs; and still on, not as before, but out of time and space, until
we come--home--to some refuge of beauty and serenity in the heart of
the immense evening. And so we will, though we shall be wise to find
our achievement in the rapture of walking, or in the short rest upon a
gate where we may surprise the twilight at her consecrating task. It is
well, too, to talk, not to walk silently and weave such dreams as will
make our host to-night intolerable; or if not to talk, then to sing
some old song whose melody finds a strange fitness to our minds, in
spite of the words, as for example--

    “There’s not a drunkard lives in our town
    Who is not glad that malt is gone down--
        Malt is gone down, malt is gone down,
        From an old angel to a French crown.” ...

Or,

    “The fox jumped over the hedge so high.” ...

Or,

    “Orientis partibus adventavit asinus.” ...

(Sung to the tune of the Welsh New Year’s Eve Song.)

Or,

    “There was a farmer’s son kept sheep upon the hill,
    And he went forth one May morning to see what he could kill,
    Sing blow away the morning dew, the dew, and the dew,
    Blow away the morning dew; how sweet the winds do blow.” ...

Or,

    “Quand le marin revient de guerre--
                          Tout doux--
    Quand le marin revient de guerre--
                          Tout doux--
    ‘Tout mal chaussé, tout mal vêtu,
    Pauvre marin! d’où reviens-tu?--
                          Tout doux.’”

Then perhaps we will lazily inquire why songs about the price of malt,
or the coming of a Beautiful Ass out of the East should stir and
uplift and compose the hearts of men dreaming of an ideal beauty on an
April evening, and so to more songs and then to bed, finding at the
last moment the serene and beautiful, perhaps, in the glimpse of holy
evening landscape rich in unseen nightingales as we fall asleep.




CHAPTER V

NO MAN’S GARDEN


For a mile, alongside a bright high-road, runs a twelve-foot strip of
grass and clover and buttercups, with cinquefoil’s golden embroidery in
the turf at the edge. Little circular heaps of silver wood ash mark the
cold fires of tramps, here and there. Here also they sleep in the sun,
in summer and autumn, and in winter lean in the dense hedge that keeps
the north wind away. The hedge is rich and high, of thorn overgrown
by traveller’s joy and bryony; and at its feet, stitchwort, campions,
vetchlings and bird’s-foot trefoil grow luxuriantly.

This is no man’s garden. Every one who is nobody sits there with a
special satisfaction, watching the swift, addle-faced motorist, the
horseman, the farmer, the tradesman, the publican, go by; for here he
is secure as in the grave, and even as there free--if he can--to laugh
or scoff or wonder or weep at the world.

As I was trying to persuade some buoyant bryony strands with snaky
heads to return to the hedge from which they had wandered into danger,
a tramp came up.

“Have you seen my old woman?” he asked.

“Not know her? She is the cursedest, foulest-mouthed old woman in the
country, fond of too much drink, and she has just been spending the
winter in prison--she prefers it to the workhouse which I have just
left. But she just suits me. There is no one like her. They often tell
me to take another instead of her, but I never will....

“I don’t know that you would like to see her. She is not a beauty, and
she is not dressed up well. She is as crooked as an oak branch, and she
has one leg longer than the other, and as to her face I could make a
better one myself with a handful of dirt. She drags as she walks, what
with keeping up with me all these years. You may know her, because she
is always smoking. She cannot eat; she lives on tobacco and beer....

“Oh, I see you are one of these antiquarian gents. If you would really
like to see her....

“Well, if you are curious, how would you like to hear of the murder I
did twenty years ago? I tell it to everybody, and they don’t seem to
believe me, so I will tell it to you....

“I spent a night in the workhouse and when I got out in the afternoon
I was so hungry that I could have eaten the master, if he hadn’t been
the ugliest fellow I ever saw, like a fancy potato. Walking didn’t
cure my appetite, and all that day and night I didn’t have a bite.
Perhaps I got a bit queer and I went on walking until I got near to
Binoll in Wiltshire where I was born. That is a fine country. My old
woman and I have slept in violets there many a time in April. When I
got there early in the morning on the second day I thought I would
go into a copse I knew and pick some bluebells there, partly for old
remembrance sake and partly to make a penny or two in Swindon, but I
didn’t much care what. Well, as I was picking them--God! how everything
did smell and I felt like a little boy, I was enjoying it so, and
putting my hand into all the nests and feeling the warm eggs--Lord!
what a fool I be--I thought I would go to sleep. There was such a nice
bit of moon in the sky, with the rim of the cup of it uppermost, which
means that it keeps the rain from falling, but if it is upside down it
lets the water out and you may know it will rain. There was a regular
old-fashioned English thrush saying: ‘Bit, bit, slingdirt, slingdirt,
belcher, belcher, belcher,’ and I went on picking the flowers. All of
a sudden I saw two fellows sitting just outside the wood with their
backs to me. One of them was a big fellow and we passed the time of day
and he said he had done a job lately and was not in a hurry to do any
more. The other was a little white-faced man such as I can’t away with,
and he said he was looking for a job and trying to get his strength up
a bit. The big fellow motioned to me, meaning that the other had got
money about him; so I agreed, and nodded, and he stepped back and hit
the little fellow a good blow on the head. I threw away the flowers
and we dragged him into the wood. He had ten shillings on him and we
took half each. He looked very bad, so the other fellow said: ‘We had
better put him away,’ and I said; ‘Yes, he may be in awful pain, such
a white-faced fellow as he is.’ So we knocked the life out of him, and
the other fellow went off Marlborough way and I went into Swindon and
had such a dinner as I hadn’t had for weeks, rabbit and new potatoes
and a bit of curry.... Did you ever hear about that?

“Get on my mind? Why, I never meant the fellow any harm and I filled my
belly.

“Can you tell me where there is a lone road where I can make a bit of
fire? I don’t like the dust and noise of these motor cars.” ...

Away he went, halting a little, and yet, from behind, having an absurd
resemblance to a child, which his cheerfulness reinforced.

Later in the evening, I found him just awakened from his first sleep,
near a dead fire that had been no bigger than a pigeon’s nest.

“What a country this is,” he said indignantly, but with good humour.

“There are not enough sticks in this wood to warm the only man who
wants them. I suppose they use all the firing to keep the pheasants
warm. Hark at them! If I was a rich man I wouldn’t keep such birds....

“England is not such a place as it was when I was a young man. It is
not half the size for one thing. Why, when I was a young man, you
could go up a lane with a long dog or two and pick up a bit of supper
and firing and nothing said. The country seemed to belong to me in
those days, but now I might as well be in Africa. I am worse off than
the labourers now, except that I have got more sense than they have,
singing their silly old songs, like this.” Then he sang with perhaps
mock sentimentality a frail little peasant song, full of the smallness
of lonely, small lives:--

    “Mary, come into the field
    To work along of I,
    Digging up mangold wurzels,
    For they be a-growing high.

        Dig ’em up by the roots,
        Dig ’em up by the roots,
        Put in your spade,
        Don’t be afraid,
        Dig ’em up by the roots.

    Our master is a hard one,
    He pays us very small;
    And if we stop a moment
    We hear his voice to call--
        ‘Dig ’em up by the roots,’ etc.

    We work all day together,
    Till all the light is past;
    And only going homewards
    Do we join hands at last.
        ‘Dig ’em up by the roots,’ etc.

    For many years we’ve been sweethearts
    And worked the fields along,
    And sometimes even now
    Mary will sing the old song--
        ‘Dig ’em up by the roots,’ etc.

“What is that to the song about ‘the swift and silly doe’ my old father
used to sing to us, or about ‘Gentle Jenny’ the mare that threw the
fellow that wasn’t going to pay for her hire. No, there is no room
in England now for toe-rags like me and you; if you wanted to, you
couldn’t sleep on Bearsted Green to-night.”

Later in the year, on August Bank holiday, I found him at an inn, where
a farm bailiff was treating the labourers to much ale. The landlord had
a young relative down from London, who sang a song in the bar about a
skylark who was to take a message to his mother in heaven. At this the
tramp melted a little: the pale face of the singer and the high shrill
voice made an entrance somewhere, and he tried to join in the song. But
towards evening he was to be found sticking pins through his cheek and
ears and into his arms, and offering, for a small sum, to stick them
into any part whatsoever; or, lying on his back and twisting his head
back--the muscles in his throat croaking all the time like frogs--to
pick up with his teeth a penny that lay on the floor. The bailiff had
caught him. He did odd jobs about the farm, and lived in a forgotten
cottage, too far away from anywhere to keep pigs in. But he slept in
the cottage only on one or two nights in the seven. During the rest of
the week he was to be found at night under the edge of a copse, beside
a little fire, reminding himself of the old, roomy England which he
used to know.




CHAPTER VI

MARCH DOUBTS


All day the winter seemed to have gone. The horses’ hoofs on the moist,
firm road made a clear “cuck-oo” as they rose and fell; and far off,
for the first time in the year, a ploughboy, who remembered spring and
knew that it would come again, shouted “Cuckoo! cuckoo!”

A warm wind swept over the humid pastures and red sand-pits on the
hills and they gleamed in a lightly muffled sun. Once more in the
valleys the ruddy farmhouses and farm-buildings seemed new and fair
again, and the oast-house cones stood up as prophets of spring, since
the south wind had turned all their white vanes towards the north, and
they felt the sea that lay--an easy journey on such a day--beyond the
third or fourth wooded ridge in the south. The leaves of goose-grass,
mustard, vetch, dog’s mercury, were high above the dead leaves on hedge
banks. Primrose and periwinkle were blossoming. Like flowers were the
low ash-tree boles where the axe had but lately cut off the tall rods;
flowerlike and sweet also the scent from the pits where labourers
dipped the freshly peeled ash poles in tar. In the elms, sitting
crosswise on a bough, sang thrush and missel thrush; in the young
corn, the larks; the robins in the thorns; and in all the meadows the
guttural notes of the rooks were mellowed by love and the sun.

Making deep brown ruts across the empty green fields came the long
waggons piled high with faggots; the wheels rumbled; the harness
jingled and shone; the horses panted and the carters cracked their
whips.

Soon would the first chiff-chaff sing in the young larches; at evening
the calm, white, majestic young clouds should lie along the horizon
in a clear and holy air; and climbing a steep hill at that hour, the
walker should see a window, as it were, thrown open in the sky and hear
a music that should silence thought and even regret--as when, on the
stage, a window is opened and some one invisible is heard to sing a
heavy-laden song below it.

But as I walked and the wind fell for the sunset, the path led me under
high, stony beeches. The air was cool and still and moist and waterish
dark, and no bird sang. A wood-pigeon spread out his barry tale as he
ascended perpendicularly to a hidden place among the branches, and
then there was no sound. The waterish half-light seemed to have lasted
for ever and to have an eternity ahead. Through the trees a grassy,
deeply rutted road wound downwards, and at the edge the ruts were
broad and full of dark water. Still retaining some corruption of the
light of the sky upon its surface, that shadowed water gave an immense
melancholy to the wood. The reflections of the beeches across it were
as the bars of a cage that imprisoned some child of light. It was but
a few inches deep of rain, and yet, had it been a legendary pool, or
had a drowned woman’s hair been stamped into the mud at its edge and
left a green forehead exposed, it could not have stained and filled
the air more tragically. The cold, the silence, the leaflessness found
an expression in that clouded shining surface among the ruts. Life
and death seemed to contend there, and I recalled a dream which I had
lately dreamed.

I dreamed that someone had cut the cables that anchored me to such
tranquillity as had been mine, and that I was drifted out upon an
immensity of desolation and solitude. I was without hope, without even
the energy of despair that might in time have given birth to hope. But
in that desolation I found one business: to search for a poison that
should kill slowly, painlessly and unexpectedly. In that search I lost
sight of what had persuaded me to it; yet when at last I succeeded, I
took a draught and went out into the road and began to walk. A calm
fell upon me such as I had sometimes found in June thunderstorms on
lonely hills, or in midnights when I stepped for a moment after long
foolish labours to my door, and heard the nightingales singing out
from the Pleiades that overhung the wood, and saw the flower-faced owl
sitting on the gate. I walked on, not hastening with a too great desire
nor lingering with a too careful quietude. It was as yet early morning,
and the wheat sheaves stood on the gentle hills like yellow-haired
women kneeling to the sun that was about to rise. Now and then I passed
the corners of villages, and sometimes at windows and through doorways,
I saw the faces of men and women I had known and seemed to forget,
and they smiled and were glad, but not more glad than I. Labouring in
the fields also were men whose faces I was happy to recognise and see
smiling with recognition. And very sweet it was to go on thus, at ease,
knowing neither trouble nor fatigue. I could have gone on, it seemed,
for ever, and I wished to live so for ever, when suddenly I remembered
the poison. Then of each one I met I begged a remedy. Some reminded me
that formerly I had made a poor thing of life, and said that it was
too late. Others supposed that I jested. A few asked me to stay with
them and rest. The sky and the earth, and the men and women drank of
the poison that I had drunken, so that I could not endure the use of
my eyes, and I entered a shop to buy some desperate remedy that should
end all at once, when, seeing behind the counter a long-dead friend in
wedding attire, I awoke.

Even so in the long wet ruts did the false hope of spring contend with
the shadows: even so at last did it end, when the dead leaves upon the
trees begin to stir madly in the night wind, with the sudden, ghastly
motion of burnt paper on a still fire when a draught stirs it in a
silent room at night; and even the nearest trees seemed to be but
fantastic hollows in the misty air.




CHAPTER VII

A DECORATED CHURCH


Out of the midst of pale wheat lands and tussocky meadow, intersected
by streams which butter bur and marigold announce, and soared over by
pewit and lark and the first swallows with their delicate laughter,
rises the grim, decorated church, of the same colour as the oak trees
round about. White and grey headstones, some of great age, bow to it
in the churchyard, and seem mutely to crave for the shelter from the
north-east wind. There is much room within. All the headstones and
those whom they commemorate might find places and not crowd out the
little congregation. In one transept a knight and lady are taking their
ease in stone, and looking up at the gaudy arms above them. They came
early to the church. From the memorial inscriptions on pavement and
walls, it would seem that the church belongs to a later great family,
still living near. Soldiers, sailors, landowners, clergymen even, they
take possession at their death; from 1623 they have flocked here, and
the names of their virtues live after them; tyrants perhaps in their
lifetime, they have the air of being idols now, and they outnumber the
prophets on the window-glass. The service proceeds in the accustomed
decent manner, with nasal lesson and humming prayer. Then comes the
hymn:--

    “Through all the changing scenes of life”--

One woman’s ambitious, shrill treble voice that seems ever about
to fall and yet continues to maintain its airy height, leads the
congregation to unusual adventures of song. The church is dense with
emotion; ordinary gentlemen, shopkeepers, labourers and their wives,
men and women of all degrees of endurance, chivalry, good intention,
uncertain aims, sentimental virtuousness, hypocrisy not dissevered from
hardship, vanity not ignorant of tenderness, hard ambition, the desire
to be respected,--men and women throw all kinds of strange meaning,
heartfelt and present, imaginative, retrospective, expectant, into the
vague words of the hymn. I can see one strong man shouting it with an
expression as if he were pole-axing a bull. His neighbour, a frail,
tearful woman, sings as if it absolves her from the tears with which
she marred not only her own life. One aged woman made it clearly an
expression of the nothingness of mankind, a ridicule and blasphemy of
life, as if she had repeated the words of the old play:--

    “Where is now Solomon, in wisdom so excellent?
    Where is now Samson, in battle so strong?
    Where is now Absalom, in beauty resplendent?
    Where is now good Jonathan, hid so long?
    Where is now Cæsar, in victory triumphing?
    Where is now Dives, in dishes so dainty?
    Where is now Tully, in eloquence exceeding?
    Where is now Aristotle, learned so deeply?
    What emperors, kings, and dukes in times past,
    What earls and lords, and captains of war,
    What popes and bishops, all at the last
    In the twinkling of an eye are fled so far?
    How short a feast is this worldly joying?
    Even as a shadow it passeth away,
    Depriving a man of gifts everlasting,
    Leading to darkness and not to day!
    O meat of worms, O heap of dust,
    O like to dew, climb not too high.”

Other faces express complacency, hope, the newness of a solution of
this thing life, grim, satisfied despair, even a kind of vanity.
All these men and women might agree at a political meeting; here
they differ each from the rest, and every one of the gods in all the
mythologies must be gladdened or angered at some part of the hymn by
the meaning of this or that worshipper; Odin, Apollo, Diana, Astarte,
the Cat, the Beetle, and the rest revive, in whatever Tartarus they are
thrust, at these strange sounds.

The last of the congregation left, but I could still hear the hymn
wandering feebly among the tall arches and up and about, apparently
restless, as if it sought to get out and away, but in vain. The high
grey stone and those delicate windows made a cage; and the human voices
were as those of Seifelmolouk and his memlooks, when the giant king
kept them in cages because the sound of their lamentation seemed to him
the most melodious music, and he thought them birds. Inexorably, the
fancy held me that some gaunt giant, fifty cubits high, kept men and
women in this cage because he loved to hear their voices expressing
moods he knew nothing of. Not more caged are the five brown bells
in the tower, with mute, patient heads like cows, their names being
Solitude, Tranquillity, Duty, Harmony, Joy.




CHAPTER VIII

GARLAND DAY


The sun had not risen though it had long been proclaimed, when the
old road led us into a moist wood that grew on the hillside, and here
and there overhung a perpendicular chalk cliff. The soil was black
and crisp with old beech mast, and out of it grew the clear, grave,
green leaves of anemone and dog’s mercury and spurge and hyacinth and
primroses, in places so dense that the dim earth below them seemed to
be some deep lake’s water. All the anemones were bowed and rosy. The
blue bells were plated with rain. The dark spurge leaves were crowned
by pale green flowers. The primroses grew, twenty in a cluster, on
long flushed stalks; each petal was perfect, and down their leaves the
raindrops slid and glittered or gleamed duskily. Arching above these,
the low brier branches carried sharp green young foliage. A shadowed
pool in one of the hollows was hardly to be distinguished from the dark
earth, except that it was covered with white crowfoot flowers as with
five minutes’ snow.

From among the flowers ascended straight stony rods of ash, their
ancient stoles bossy and hollowed like skulls, and covered with moss;
and from the purple encrusted ash-flowers wood-pigeons shook the rain
down to the leaves beneath. Amongst the ash trees were hazels, new
leaved, their olive stems gloomily shining.

Over all, the ancient beeches stood up with hard sculptured holes
supporting storey after storey of branch and shade which were traversed
at the top and at the fringes by fair fresh leaves. The rain had run
down the main trunks for generations, and made paths of green and black
that tried to gleam. Here and there, low down, the beeches extended
long priestly branches clothed in leaf, still and curved, to call for
silence in the cool, shadowy, crystal air.

Far away among the branches whitened the chalk cliffs. On this side
and on that, immense mossy boulders made tables for thrushes and cast
perfect shadows.

High up in the beeches, the invisible wood-wrens sang, and their songs
were as if, overhead in the stainless air, little waves of pearls
dropped and scattered and shivered on a shore of pearls. Below them the
wood-pigeons began to coo--with notes that were but as rounded bubbles
emerging from the silence and lost again. Just within hearing, in the
hawthorn hedge of the wood, blackbirds were singing: they opened with
the most high, arrogating notes that slowly rolled on to noble ends,
when suddenly they laughed and ceased; again and again they began so,
and again and again they laughed, as if they had grown too wise to
believe utterly in noble things. As we went deeper into the wood they
ceased, and those moist shades welcomed us as if they held what we
desired.

The trees were very old; their leaves were fresh and wet as when beauty
and joy shed a few tears. The soil was centuries deep in black beech
mast; the herbage seemed to have been born from it in that very hour.
The boulders had stood among the primroses so long that the thrushes
had chiselled shallow cups in them as they fed there in the mornings;
they were embossed with the most tender green and golden moss. The
shadows were as solemn and imperturbable as to a child a cathedral,
when he first steps into its solitude alone, and a god is created
anew out of his marvelling; and yet the hems of their mantles, where
they swept the ground, disclosed a flashing underside of crystals
newly-born. And for ourselves--we seemed to be home from a long exile,
and the pains of it, such as they were, turned like the shadows into
crystal. Here, then, was the land to which had fled those children who
once bore our names, who were our companions in the days when sunshine
was more than wine had ever been since, and they left us long ago, not
suddenly, but so strangely, that we knew not that they were far off;
hither those children had fled, and their companions of that time; here
they had been hiding these many years; abiding here they had become
immortal in the green-fledged antique wood, and we had come back to
them. Perhaps they recognised us: perhaps they re-entered these bodies
of ours. For once more the cuckoo was clear, golden, joyous. When we
heard the blackbird again we did not quarrel with the laugh at his own
solemnity, since it was not there. It was not memory, nor hope. Memory
perished, and hope that never rests lay asleep; and winds blew softly
from over Lethe and breathed upon our eyelids, coming as delicate
intercessors between us and life. We forgot that ours had been the sin
of Alcyone and Ceyx who, in their proud happiness, called one another
_Zeus!_ and _Here!_ and for that were cast down by the gods. Once again
we did so, for this was the wood of youth, and in the old streets of
the soul where the grass grows among the long-untrodden stones, and in
the doorways of deserted homes, the sound of footsteps and the click of
a frequented latch was heard.

And yonder is the wide prospect again, and the dawn,--the green hedges
starred with white stitchwort flower, misty with the first hawthorn
clusters, a-flutter with whitethroat, wild with the warbling of the
blackcap in their depths; wide, lustrous meadows dimmed by cuckoo
flowers, and at the edges of them the oaks beginning to bud and their
branches like great black brands about to break into golden flame;
and about the oaks that stood in the midst of them the grass waving
in the sun like brooks plunging from their roots; farmhouses known
only by their encircling apple trees all in bloom; radiant pools where
the sand-piper laughed; woods where the oak and ash waded deep in the
translucent green of the undergrowth’s rising tide and even then glowed
with brown and unborn greens, and the nightingale sang far withdrawn,
and at the edge the hurdle-maker worked by his thatched cote; and ridge
beyond ridge of hills cloudily wooded; and over all the low sky like a
blue bowl just emptied of its cream.

And as we sat at breakfast the village children came up the path
between borders dense with tall yellow leopard’s bane and red honesty
and sang by the windows--

    “Please to remember the first of May,
    For the first of May is Garland Day.”

And they carried garlands of ivy entwined among bluebells and cowslips
from the moist warm copses and the meadows.

On the twin vanes of the oasts, one pointing east, one north, the south
wind and the west wind were asleep in one another’s arms.




CHAPTER IX

AN OLD WOOD


The chestnut blossom is raining steadily and noiselessly down upon
a path whose naked pebbles receive mosaic of emerald light from the
interlacing boughs. At intervals, once or twice an hour, the wings of
a lonely swallow pass that way, when alone the shower stirs from its
perpendicular fall. Cool and moist, the perfumed air flows, without
lifting the most nervous leaf or letting fall a suspended bead of the
night’s rain from a honeysuckle bud. In an indefinite sky of grey,
through which one ponderous cloud billows into sight and is lost again,
no sun shines: yet there is light--I know not whence; for the brass
trappings of the horses beam so as to be extinguished in their own
fire. There is no song in wood or sky. Some one of summer’s wandering
voices--bullfinch or willow-wren--might be singing, but unheard, at
least unrealised. From the dead nettle spires, with dull green leaves
stained by purple and becoming more and more purple towards the crest,
which is of a sombre uniform purple, to the elms reposing at the
horizon, all things have bowed the head, hushed, settled into a perfect
sleep. Those elms are just visible, no more. The path has no sooner
emerged from one shade than another succeeds, and so, on and on, the
eye wins no broad dominion.

It is a land that uses a soft compulsion upon the passer-by, a
compulsion to meditation, which is necessary before he is attached
to a scene rather featureless, to a land that hence owes much of its
power to a mood of generous reverie which it bestows. And yet it is a
land that gives much. Companionable it is, reassuring to the solitary;
he soon has a feeling of ease and seclusion there. The cool-leaved
wood! The limitless, unoccupied fields of marsh marigold, seen through
the trees, most beautiful when the evening rain falls slowly, dimming
and almost putting out the lustrous bloom! Gold of the minute willows
underfoot! Leagues of lonely grass where the slow herds tread the
daisies and spare them yet!

Towards night, under the sweet rain, at this warm, skyless close of the
day, the trees, far off in an indolent, rolling landscape, stand as if
disengaged from the world, in a reticent and pensive repose.

But suddenly the rain has ceased. In an old, dense wood the last
horizontal beams of the sun embrace the trunks of the trees and they
glow red under their moist ceiling of green. A stile to be crossed at
its edge, where a little stream, unseen, sways the stiff exuberant
angelica that grows from it, gives the word to pause, and with a rush
the silence and the solitude fill the brain. The wood is of uncounted
age; the ground on which it stands is more ancient than the surrounding
fields, for it rises and falls stormily, with huge boulders here and
there; not a path intrudes upon it; the undergrowth is impenetrable to
all but fox and bird and this cool red light about the trunks of the
trees. Far away a gate is loudly shut, and the rich blue evening comes
on and severs me irrevocably from all but the light in the old wood
and the ghostly white cow-parsley flowers suspended on unseen stalks.
And there, among the trees and their shadows, not understood, speaking
a forgotten tongue, old dreads and formless awes and fascinations
discover themselves and address the comfortable soul, troubling it,
recalling to it unremembered years not so long past but that in the end
it settles down into a gloomy tranquillity and satisfied discontent, as
when we see the place where we were unhappy as children once. Druid and
devilish deity and lean wild beast, harmless now, are revolving many
memories with me under the strange, sudden red light in the old wood,
and not more remote is the league-deep emerald sea-cave from the storm
above than I am from the world.




CHAPTER X

IN A FARMYARD


We waited to let the forty cows go past, each of them pausing to
lick the forehead of the strawberry cow that leaned over the gate
of her stall and lowed continually concerning her newly-born white
calf. But so slow they were in their wanton, obedient movement to the
milking-shed that we turned and found another path, and thus surprised
a pond lying deep among tansy flowers, grey nettles and billows of
conquering bramble and brier.

The farmyard was always dusty, or deep with ridgy mire, from the
trampling of men and horses and cows in the streets that wound
among its cart-lodges, stables, stalls, milking-sheds and barns all
glowing with mature tiles, and ricks gleaming with amber thatch. But
in a corner lay unused, older than them all, the long-headed and
snaky-bodied pond. We learned to know that pond.

Sometimes, when summer has honoured the water with a perfect suit
of emerald green, that pond shows itself to be a monstrous, coiled,
primæval thing, lying undisturbed, and content to be still and
contemplative. Often has the monster been driven away--by draining;
often has it returned, still a green, coiled, primæval being that
disappears suddenly in November and leaves a soft, dark pool. Some
have ventured to intrude upon the monster, to fish for the sleepy carp
which are found when it has been driven from its nest of purple mud;
but they fish in vain.

The solitary, dying ash tree at the edge of the pond seems, by day,
when the monster is powerful there in the summer, to be but the
skeleton of an old victim; or, in the winter, the sad and twisted
nymph of the water. But every night, like any dreaming child or musing
lover, though not perhaps so happily, is it let into a varied, strange,
exalted paradise.

You may see it--on still evenings when the mist prevails over all
things except the robin’s song, and makes even that more melancholy--or
when the songs of many nightingales besiege, enter and possess the
house and the deserted farmyard--or when the cold and entirely silent
air under a purple November sky chills the blood, so that friendship
and hope and purposes are all in vain as in an opiate dream--then you
may see the ash-tree take heart. It has the air of one going home upon
a lonely road that will not end in loneliness. Those bare and stiff,
decaying branches are digits pointing homeward through the sky; the
tree forgets the monster at its feet and the children who laugh and
the supremacy of the buildings round about. It might seem, with those
extended branches, to be a self-torturing and aspiring fanatic who had
endured thus for uncounted days and nights, and has his vision at last.
For, when night is perfect, the tree exults, and though it is perhaps
not joyous, it is as one of those great sorrowful temperaments--of
soldier, or explorer, or humorist--so active and inexorable that they
may claim kinship with the truly joyous ones. If it is still sad, it
is “endiademed with woe.” How large and satanic it is beside the heavy
rounded oaks and the stately, feminine elms and the lovely limes.

Even so might a philosopher heighten and lord it, travelling in
Charon’s ship along with deflated tyrants and rhetoricians and bold and
crimson animals born to eat provinces and to poison worms; even so,
Ossian and Arthur and Cuchullain and Achilles triumph over men that
were yesterday on thrones and chariots.

Often have I seen the tree, and it alone, giving character to the whole
valley and filling the land as a bell fills a cathedral or as the
droning of a bee fills a lily.

                “With him enthroned
    Sat sable-vested night, eldest of things,
    The consort of his reign.”

My little thoughts seem to be drawn up among the black branches like
twittering birds going to rest in some high cliff that is a chief
pillar of the fabric of the night. Half dead and threatened though it
be, surely the spirit of it, which is to many a broad and tragical
night as the arm of a great painter to his picture, will survive not
only me and my words but the tree itself. I have approached it on
some moonlit midnights, when the sky was so deep that the tall oaks
were as weeds at the bottom of an unfathomed sea, and it has stood
up erect and puissant, as if it were the dreamer at one with all he
sees, in a world of blind men with open eyes. Then, as the autumn dawn
arrived it was still looking towards Orion; defrauded, indeed for a
time of its vision, but not of its glory. The swaying cows wandered
to the milking-sheds. The little bats ran to and fro in the air and
made their little snipping and drumming sounds. It was light; but the
ash tree was not utterly cast down; it still walked in the way of the
stars; it was inscribed in solemn characters upon the sun that rode up
red in the mist.




CHAPTER XI

MEADOWLAND


This is one of the tracts of country which are discovered by few except
such as study the railway maps of England in order to know what to
avoid. On those maps it is one of several large triangular sections
which railways bound, but have not entered. All day long the engines
scream along their boundaries, and at night wave fiery arms to the
sky, as if to defend a forbidden place or a sanctuary. Within there
is peace, and a long ancient lane explores it, with many windings and
turnings back, as if it were a humble, diffident inquirer, fortunately
creeping on, aiming at some kind of truth and not success, yet without
knowing what truth is when he starts. Here it hesitates by a little
pool, haunted, as is clear from the scribbled footprints on the shore,
only by moorhen and wagtail, and, in the spindle trees beside it, by a
witty thrush; there it goes joyously forward, straight among lines of
tall oaks and compact thorns; then it turns to climb a hill from which
all the country it has passed is visible first, meadow and withy copse
and stream, and next the country which it has yet to pass--a simple
dairy land with green grass, green woods, and stout grey haystacks
round the pale farms. But in a little while it winds, confused again
under high maple and dogwood hedges, downhill, as if it had already
forgotten what the hilltop showed. On the level again the hollow wood
which the willow wren fills with his little lonely song has to be
penetrated; the farmyard must be passed through, and the spirit of the
road looks in at the dairy window and sees the white discs of cream
in the pans and the cool-armed maid lifting a cheese; and yet another
farmyard it loiters in, watching the roses and plume-poppy and lupin
of the front garden, going between the stables and the barn, and there
spreading out as if it had resolved to cease and always watch the idle
waggon, the fair-curved hay-rakes leaning against the wall, and the
fowls which are the embodiment of senseless reverie--when lo! the path
goes straight across wide and level pastures, with a stream at its
side. Seen afar off, losing itself among the elms that watch over the
hill-side church, the little white road is as some quiet, hermit saint,
just returned from long seclusion, and about to take up his home for
ever and ever in the chancel; but when we reach the place, he is still
as far away, still uncertain in the midst of the corn below. At the
charlock-yellow summit the road seems to lead into the sky, where the
white ladders are let down from the sun.

The ways of such a road--when the June grass is high and in the sun
it is invisible except for its blueness and its buttercups, and the
chaffinch, the corn-bunting and yellowhammer, the sleepiest voiced
birds, are most persistent--easily persuade the mind that it alone is
travelling, travelling through an ideal country, belonging to itself
and beyond the power of the world to destroy. The few people whom we
see, the mower, the man hoeing his onion-bed in a spare half-hour at
mid-day, the children playing “Jar-jar-winkle” against a wall, the
women hanging out clothes,--these the very loneliness of the road has
prepared us for turning into creatures of dream; it costs an effort
to pass the time of day with them, and they being equally unused to
strange faces are not loquacious, and so the moment they are passed,
they are no more real than the men and women of pastoral:--

    “He leads his Wench a Country Horn-pipe Round,
    About a May-pole on a Holy-day;
    Kissing his lovely Lasse (with Garlands Crownd)
    With whooping heigh-ho singing Care away;
    Thus doth he passe the merry month of May:
      And all th’ yere after in delight and joy,
      (Scorning a King) he cares for no annoy.”

The most credible inhabitants are Mertilla, Florimel, Corin, Amaryllis,
Dorilus, Doron, Daphnis, Silvia and Aminta, and shepherds singing to
their flocks--

    “Lays of sweet love and youth’s delightful heat.”

Yonder the road curves languidly between hedges and broad fringes
of green, and along it an old man guides the cattle in to afternoon
milking. They linger to crop the wayside grass and he waits, but
suddenly resumes his walk and they obey, now hastening with tight
udders and looking from side to side. They turn under the archway
of a ruined abbey, and low as if they enjoy the reverberation, and
disappear. I never see them again; but the ease, the remoteness, the
colour of the red cattle in the green road, the slowness of the old
cowman, the timelessness of that gradual movement under the fourteenth
century arch, never vanish.

Of such things the day is made, not of milestones and antiquities.
Isolated, rapt from the earth, perhaps, by the very fatigue which
at the end restores us to it forcibly, the mind goes on seeing and
remembering these things.

Here the cattle stand at the edge of a pond and the tench swim slowly
above the weeds amongst them as they stand. The sun strikes down upon
the glassy water, but cannot take away the coolness of the reeds about
the margin. Under the one oak in the meadow above, the farmer sits with
his dog, so still that the dabchick does not dive and the water vole
nibbles the reed, making a small sound, the only one.

There five little girls play the lovers’ game on a green in front of
their cottages. One of them kneels down and cries quietly; the others
hold hands and circle round her, singing--

    “Poor Mary sits a-weeping, a-weeping, a-weeping,
    Poor Mary sits a-weeping, by the bright shining shore.

    “Oh tell us what you’re weeping for, weeping for, weeping for,
    Oh tell us what you’re weeping for, by the bright shining shore.”

Then the little “poor Mary,” with her face still in her apron, takes up
the singing, the others still moving round her:--

    “I’m weeping for my true love, my true love, my true love,
    I’m weeping for my true love, by the bright shining shore.”

Then the others sing to her--

    “Get up and choose a better one, a better one, a better one,
    Get up and choose a better one, by the bright shining shore.”

At this, Mary rises, and chooses one of those from the ring, and the
two stand in the middle, holding each other’s hands crossed, while the
others sing--

    “Your true love is a shepherd’s cross, a shepherd’s cross, a
        shepherd’s cross,
    Your true love is a shepherd’s cross, by the bright shining shore.”

So Mary now takes her place in the ring; her true love becomes “poor
Mary,” and chooses another lover amidst the same song; and at last,
when all have been Marys and true lovers, with resolute faces, they
scatter carelessly and forget. Finding some marbles in a roadside
crevice, I ask one child to play, but she says that marbles are not
played after Good Friday. A white cow rests beside, so much in love
with peace that it grazes lying down. On the other side of the road the
bacon hisses and smells from a farmhouse whose mountainous thatch makes
a cool cave of tranquillity; on the sunny slopes the starlings who have
honeycombed the thatch, whistle or creep in with food or straw. Not one
path disturbs the unfrequented verdure of the green, though the road
winds lazily round it.

Yonder, up a steep field, goes a boy birdnesting in a double hedge,
stooping to the nettles for the white-throat’s eggs, straining high
among the hawthorns for a dove’s. He does not hasten. Now and then he
calls “cuckoo,” not a timorous note, but lusty like the bird’s own: and
now he lies down to suck a thrush’s egg. He will not take the robin’s
eggs, “or I shall get my arm broken,” he says. A cruel game, but so
long as he loves it with all his heart perhaps it is forgiven him, and
in a few years he will never again go slowly up that field, forgetful
of schoolmaster, father and mother and the greatness of man.

At noon there is a hamlet in front. On one side of it the church
thrusts a golden weathercock high into the blue sky, and with his proud
and jolly head uplifted towards the north the bird flames and exults;
on the other side, tall beeches give out the sleepy noise of rooks.
Straight ahead “The White Hart,” a white inn with heavy, overhanging
thatch, divides the road in two. Those white walls can never cease to
glow; they have persuaded the sun to sleep under those eaves for ever
like the carter on the bench. The sign-board hangs silent, but the
sign has melted away. A waggon stands by the door; the waggoner holds
a chestnut mare with one hand, with the other he slowly tilts the
glittering tankard and shows all of his brown throat throbbing; the
hostess watches.

The low white kitchen is cut in two by a tall, semi-circular settle,
to which the hostess returns, and with a round elm table between her
and the fire she lops fine greens into a pail. A tenanted fireplace is
better than a cold one on any day of the year, and it is cool in the
window seat between the ale and the wind. Outside lies the little road,
waiting for me. And now we go on together, the road having still the
advantage of me, though it has poured no libation.

All through the long afternoon that land offers symbols of peace,
security and everlastingness. Tall hedges half hidden in a rising tide
of long, starry herbage, ponds where the probing carp make the lily
leaves rise and flap, wide meadows where the cows wander half a mile
an hour, vast green cumulus clouds with round summits here and there
disclosing infinite receding glooms of blue--these with their continual
presence store the mind, giving it not only the poignant joy in which
half consciously we know that never again shall we be just here and
thus, but the joy, too, of knowing that we take these things along with
us to the end--

                  “Then whate’er
    Poor laws divide the public year,
    Whose revolutions wait upon
    The wild turns of the wanton sun;
    There all the year is love’s long spring,
    There all the year love’s nightingales shall sit and sing.”

On that poem of Crashaw’s to his ivory-handed mistress runs my thought
as the road, towards evening, once more progresses without any hedges
between it and the fields, when a broad double hedge or narrow copse of
oak and ash, departs at a right angle from the way. Up to the briers
and thorns at the hem of the trees comes the close, cool yellow grass
and obtains a shadow there. Out on to that grass the blackbirds have
strayed and are straying farther and farther; the rabbits, too, are
well away from shelter, hopping a few steps and crouching. In the hedge
itself a hedge-sparrow just once lets loose its frail dewy song, a
nightingale utters one phrase of marvelling and is still. The musky
wild roses star all the hedge and the scent begins to wander in the
moist air with the scent of honeysuckle and of shadowy grasses. Under a
now misted sky that makes the light seem to dwell no longer in it but
in the grass, the flat, yellow field running to the little wood is a
place impregnable and inaccessible. Invisible walls shut me off, though
no hedge intervenes; no dreadful barrier could do it more effectually.
It would be as easy to step into the past as into this candid field, a
withdrawn world with its own sun.

A mile farther a little town stands upon the edge of this enclosed
land. A brook runs down to its edge and half encircles it. Clean and
fair, shining with linen, the meadows come right up to the town which
turns its back upon them, with long rows of beans and peas dividing
the yellow houses from one another. The chimney smoke rises above the
criss-cross roofs of stone and thatch and then travels round the church
tower, which emerges from the houses like some grave schoolmaster out
of his children, most of them thronging close and others wandering
in wedge or line into the fields. In the town the road loses itself,
bewildered among islands made by inns and groups of cottages, the
church and the shops. Among these pour a flock of sheep, swelling as
the streets enlarge, contracting as they contract, and always filling
them. Within the town there is not a blade of grass, nor a garden, nor
a tree; and yet the richly burning roofs, the grey or white walls,
the sign of “The Spotted Cow,” or the sign of “The Sun,” make not an
interruption but a diversion in the fields, when suddenly, between two
white walls, shines the green evening land, and across it a busy train
rushes and vanishes with long, delicious, dying reverberations among
the dark woods and rosy clouds at the horizon.




CHAPTER XII

AN OLD FARM


The sun rose two hours ago, but he is not to be found in the sky.
Rather he seems to have disembodied himself and to be lazily concealed
in the sweet mist that lies white and luminous over the half-mile of
level meadows at the foot of this hill. Those meadows are brown with
yet untouched grasses, grey and silken with the placid ruffled waves of
yesterday’s new swathes, and liquid emerald where the hay has already
been carted; and now the brown, now the grey, now the emerald warms and
becomes visible under the feet of the light that dwells in the mist.
Beyond the level rises a low but sudden hill of large, round-topped,
colourless, misty trees, known by their outline alone, and in the heart
of them a moving gleam as of sudden surf now and then, for there also
the sun is wandering and hiding himself but not his light. I turn my
head and, looking again, the sun is once more in the sky, the mist
has gone. The vast, hunched, hot, purring summer country is clearly
enjoying the light and warmth. The swallows flying are joyous and vivid
in colour and form as if I had the eyes of some light-hearted painter
of the world’s dawn. Where the gleam was, that haunt of the sun’s, that
half-hour’s inn to which he turns from the long white road of the sky
to rest, is seen to be the white farm house that stands in the midst
of woods and ricks.

Yet, though so clear, the house, half a mile off, seems to have been
restored by this fair and early light and the cooing of doves to the
seeming happy age in which it was built. The long, tearing crow of the
cock, the clink of dairy pans, the palpitating, groaning shout of the
shepherd, _Ho! ho! ho! ho! ho!_ now and then, even the whirr of the
mowing machines, sound as if the distance that sweetens them were the
distance of time and not only of space. They set a tune on this fair
morning to “What a dainty life the milkmaid leads” or that old song:--

    “Pack clouds away, and welcome day!
    With night we banish sorrow.
    Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft
    To give my love good morrow.
    Wings from the wind to please her mind,
    Notes from the lark I’ll borrow:
    Bird, prune thy wing, nightingale, sing,
    To give my love good morrow.
    To give my love good morrow,
    Notes from them all I’ll borrow.

    Wake from thy nest, robin redbreast!
    Sing, birds, in every furrow,
    And from each bill let music shrill
    Give my fair love good morrow.
    Blackbird and thrush in every bush,
    Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow,
    You pretty elves, amongst yourselves
    Sing my fair love good morrow.
    To give my love good morrow,
    Sing, birds, in every furrow.”

In those days when the house was built the poets were mainly townsmen,
preferring the town. Of the modern sad passion of Nature they had
nothing: they loved the fields in their season. They went out into
the country and in their _fêtes champêtres_ there was something gay
and foreign from us, the thought of which calls up a vision of fields
more unspoiled than they are now. There were elves in those days;
country people saw them, if poets failed. If you were returning home
after nightfall, from a day’s shooting, you might see the torches among
the oaks that lit the king of the cats to his grave. The country had
always been there and was to be there for ever. Men greeted it and
smiled as once they greeted Helen, not thinking of her immortality.
And there--yonder, half a mile away--lingers that age. I see it in the
green and silver wheat, and its glimmering, rustling hurry, and in
the bright path beside; the very noises of a gun rolling and breaking
up and embedding themselves in the dense wood cannot mutilate it, but
rather hint that somewhere, where the echoes last play, a spirit of
mirth is in hiding still.

The farmer himself confirms the superstition. Though nearly seventy,
he is staunch and straight, and spending most of his day on horseback,
with his calm, large-featured, sandstone face, filling easily and
handsomely with clear-souled anger and delight, he suggests the thought
of a Centaur, an impossible, noble dream of horse and man created by
a god dissatisfied with man and beast. Thirty centuries ago such a
man, so marvellously in harmony with the earth, would have gone down
in men’s memories as a demi-god or the best-loved of the fauns. His
voice rings over the meadows or across the table at the inn as strong
as a cow’s, as deep and humming and sweet as a bee’s in a chimney. When
he passes by men look at him, I think, as if he cast no shadow, so
compact of light is he. He has known sorrow, he has known pains that
threaten to crack the brain, but never melancholy. There is a kind of
gaiety in his sorrow even as in his joy; for sorrow changes him only
as a shadow changes a merry brook. He breathes of a day when men had
not so far outstripped the lark and nightingale in heaviness as we have
done. His jesting bathes the room or the lane in the light of a Golden
Age and the freshness of all the May days we can never recover. Nor do
I know anything human more pleasant than his grave smiling as he stands
in the newly reaped cornfields under the last light and sees the large
purple land and takes it all unto himself, and then turns without a
sigh and, drawing a long draught of his own cider in the cool granary,
drinks deep. He rises early and yet is as cheerful when he goes first
afield as when he goes to bed.

His house, dark with panelling and heavy furniture of every generation
since it was built, would be gloomy were it not for his blithe
sentiment about the past. He speaks of the long-dead generations not
as if they were names, but so that they are known certainly to have
lived and worked and enjoyed. That one planted the spreading oak,
that globed green world of nightingale and willow-wren and dove; that
added the knolled pasture and cut the deep, stony lane that leads to
it through the brook; another built the fruit wall and bought the copy
of _Tristram Shandy_ that stands with a hundred other books in the
dining-room. The books themselves are good to look at, all of them
original or early editions. There is _The Whole Duty of Man_ and many
sermons, Prior, _The Spectator_, Thomson’s _Seasons_, Fielding, _The
Rambler_, _The Task_, _The Deserted Village_, _The Waverley Novels_,
Dickens, and nothing later than _In Memoriam_; at that the family seems
to have stopped buying books. He knows them shrewdly enough, but it is
as what the family has approved and lived on that he values them. Never
was a man who seemed to take his mortality so happily and naturally.
One day, showing me a small board of ancient things, he brought out
a tray of coins, none earlier than Charles II., but each connected
with one or another of the family. Amongst them was a modern sixpence.
That was his third deposit, after the guinea and the groat, and he was
too much pleased with these slender memorials not to do his own part
in continuing them. “What,” he said carelessly, “would they think of
me in a hundred years’ time if I had not put a sixpence in?” And he
smiled lightly as if he had been on a hill and seen the long tracts of
time ahead and his farm and strangers of his own blood working in its
fields.




CHAPTER XIII

POPPIES


The earliest mower had not risen yet; the only sign of human life was
the light that burned all night in a cottage bedroom, here and there;
and from garden to garden went the white owl with that indolent flight
which seems ever about to cease, and he seemed to be the disembodied
soul of a sleeper, vague, homeless, wandering, softly taking a dim
joy in all the misty, dense forget-me-not, pansy, cornflower, Jacob’s
ladder, wallflower, love-in-a-mist and rose of the borders, before the
day of work once more began.

So I followed the owl across the green and past the church until I
came to the deserted farm. There the high-porched barn, the doorless
stables, the cumbered stalls, the decaying house, received something
of life from the owl, from the kind twilight or from my working mind.
Above the little belfry on the housetop the flying fox of the weather
vane was still, fixed for ever by old age in the south, recording not
the hateful east, the crude and violent north, the rainy west wind.
Whether because the buildings bore upon their surfaces the marks of
many generations of life, all harmoniously continuous, or whether
because though dead and useless they yet seemed to enjoy and could
speak to a human spirit, I do not know, but I could fancy that,
unaided, they were capable of inspiring afresh the idea of immortality
to one who desired it. Mosses grew on the old tiles and were like
moles for softness and rotundity. A wind that elsewhere made no sound
talked meditatively among the timbers. The village Maypole, transported
there a generation ago, stood now as a flagstaff in the yard, and had
it burst into leaf and flower it would hardly have surprised. Billows
of tall, thick nettle, against the walls and in every corner, were a
luxuriant emblem of all the old careless ease of the labourers who,
despite their sweat and anxiety and hopelessness, yet had time to lean
upon their plough or scythe or hoe to watch the hounds or a carriage
go by. Tall tansy and fleabane and hawkweeds and dandelions, yellow
blossoms, stood for the bright joys of the old life. The campions on
the hedge, the fumitory in the kitchen garden, meant the vague moods
between sorrow and joy, speaking of them as clearly as when from out of
the church flows the litany, charged with the emotion of those who hear
it not though lying near. Had the wise owner admitted these things and
for their sake obeyed the command of the will which bade him leave the
Green Farm untouched? He might well have done so had he seen the birth
of colour after colour in the dawn.

At first, when doves began to coo and late cuckoos to call in invisible
woods beyond, I thought that the green of grass was alive again; but
that was only because I knew it was grass and could translate its grey.
The green trees were still black above a lake of white mist far off
when the yellows of hawkweed and tansy rose up. The purple fumitory,
the blue of speedwells, came later. And then, as I turned a shadowy
corner and came out into the broad half light just before sunrise, I
saw the crimson of innumerable poppies that had a thought of mist pearl
enmeshed amongst them.

They were not fifty yards away--they were in a well-known place--and
yet there towered high walls and gloomed impassable moats between
them and me, such was the strangeness of their beauty. Had they been
reported to me from Italy or the East, had I read of them on a supreme
poet’s page, they could not have been more remote, more inaccessible,
more desirable in their serenity. Something in me desired them,
might even seem to have long ago possessed and lost them, but when
thought followed vision as, alas! it did, I could not understand their
importance, their distance from my mind, their desirableness, as of a
far-away princess to a troubadour. They were stranger than the high
stars, as beautiful as any woman new-born out of summer air, though
I could have reaped them all in half an hour. A book in a foreign,
unknown language which is known to be full of excellent things is a
simple possession and untantalising compared with these. They proposed
impossible dreams of strength, health, wisdom, beauty, passion--could
I but relate myself to them more closely than by wonder, as a child to
a ship at sea which, after all, he may one day sail in, or of a lover
for one whom he may some day attain. I was glad and yet I fatigued
myself by a gladness so inhuman. Did men, I asked myself, once upon a
time have simply an uplifting of the heart at a sight like this? Or
were they destined in the end to come to that--a blissful end? Had
I offended against the commonwealth of living things that I was not
admitted as an equal to these flowers? Why could they not have vanished
and left me with my first vision, instead of staying and repeating that
it would be as easy to draw near to the stars as to them?

And yet the mind is glad, if it is troubled, of an impossible, far-away
princess. She deceives the mind as Columbus deceived his weary sailors
by giving out at the end of each day fewer knots than they had truly
travelled, in order that they should not lose courage at the immensity
of the voyage.

And still the poppies shone and the blackbird sang from his tower of
ivory.




CHAPTER XIV

AUGUST


I have found only two satisfying places in the world in August--the
Bodleian Library and a little reedy, willowy pond, where you may enjoy
the month perfectly, sitting and being friendly with moorhen and
kingfisher and snake, except in the slowly recurring intervals when you
catch a tench and cast only mildly envious eyes upon its cool, olive
sides. Through the willows I see the hot air quiver in crystal ripples
like the points of swords, and sometimes I see a crimson cyclist on a
gate. Thus is “fantastic summer’s heat” divine. For in August it is
right to be cool and at the same time to enjoy the sight and perfume of
heat out of doors. In June and July the frosts and east winds of May
are so near in memory that they give a satisfaction to the sensation
of heat. In September frosts and east winds return. August, in short,
is the month of Nature’s perfect poise, and I should like to see it
represented in painting by a Junonian woman, immobile, passionless and
happy in a cool-leaved wood, and looking neither forward nor backward,
but within.

Far off I see a forest-covered hill that says “Peace” with a great,
quiet voice. From the pool and towards the hill runs a shining road,
with some of its curves visible for miles, which I have not followed
and dare not follow, because it seems to lead to the Happy Fields.

Between the pool and the road is a house built squarely of white stone.
A tiled roof, where the light is always mellow as sunset in the various
hues that sometimes mix and make old gold, slopes from the many-angled
chimneys and juts out beyond and below the wall of the house. In that
shadowy pocket of the eaves the martins build, and on a day of diamond
air their shadows are as rivulets upon the white wall. Four large
windows frame a cool and velvety and impenetrable gloom. Between them
stand four still cypresses.

A footpath skirts the pool, and on one side tall grasses rise up, on
the other thorns and still more grasses, heavy with flowers and the
weight of birds. The grasses almost meet across the path, and a little
way ahead mix in a mist through which the white-throat and the dragon
fly climb or descend continually. The little green worlds below the
meeting grasses are full of the music of bright insects and the glow
of flowers. The long stems ascend in the most perfect grace; pale
green, cool, and pleasant to the touch, stately and apparently full of
strength, with a certain benignity of shape that is pleasant to the eye
and mind. Branched, feathered, and tufted heads of flower top the tall
grass, and in the clear air each filament divides itself from the rest
as the locks of the river-moss divide on the water’s flow. All bend in
trembling curves with their own fulness, and the butterflies crown them
from time to time. When wind plays with the perfectly level surface
of the grasses their colours close in and part and knit arabesques in
the path of the light sand martins. Sometimes the mailed insects creep
along the pennons of the grass leaves to sun themselves, other insects
visit the forget-me-nots in the pool. Every plant has its miniature
dryad.

Nearer, and sometimes in the water, the branched meadow-sweet mingles
the foam of its blossom and the profuse verdure of its leaves with
willow herb, blue brooklime, white cresses, and the dark purple
figwort. A mellow red, like that of autumn oaks or hawthorn at the
first touch of spring, tinges the meadow-sweet. The disposition of
its flowers is so exquisite that they seem to have been moulded to
the shape of some delicate hand; every bud takes part in the effect.
The lithe meanders of the stems are contrasted with the intricacy of
the goose-grass and the contortion of the forget-me-nots. Both in the
midst of the long stalk and in the plume of flowers the branching is
so fine and the curves rely so intimately upon one another that a
simple copy on paper is cool and pensive after the vanity of cultivated
curiousness. Hardly anywhere is there a visible shadow; at most there
is a strange tempering of pure light that throws a delicate bloom upon
the cattle and the birds, and a kind of seriousness upon the face or
flower within its influence. A dark insect of clear wings alights
upon the new hawkweed flower, and sits probing deliciously in its
deep heart; but, although the petals are in the midst of grasses and
under thorns, the fly perches unshadowed, and throws no shade beyond
a moistening of the flower’s gold. The close purple flowers of the
vetches are scarcely duller in the recesses, where the plant begins to
climb, than at the summit where the buds bear a fine down. The fish
gleam deep in the pool. The dark ivy shines in the innermost parts of
the wood.

But these are merely the things that I see beside the pool, and here,
more than anywhere else, the things that are seen are the least
important. For they are but the fragments of the things that are
embroidered on the hem of a great garment, which gathers the clouds
and mountains in its folds; and in the hair of the wearer hang the
stars, braided and whorled in patterns too intricate for our eyes. The
Junonian woman is a little ivory image of the figure which I think of
by the pool. She is older than the pool and the craggy oak at its edge,
as old as the stars. But to-day she has taken upon herself the likeness
of one who is a girl for lightness and joy, a woman for wisdom, a
goddess for calm. Last month she seemed to laugh and dance. Next month
she will seem to have grey in her hair. To-day she is perfect.




CHAPTER XV

OLD-FASHIONED TIMES


The road curves gently but goes almost east and west; on the north side
is a bank surmounted by dense thorns; on the south is a low hedge,
over which can be seen two broad meadows, with oaks here and there,
running up in shining bays among tall woods, and above and beyond
those woods several wooded ridges, hunched and blue, on the last of
them a windmill like a stag’s antlered head that somehow hints at
the sea beyond. His back thrust into the northern hedge, an old man
leans all the year through, whenever the faint sun draws him forth,
or he (as it seems) draws forth the sun, for when the sun is out he
is there, and he moves round the curve of the road as the sun moves.
Coral-faced, white-haired, he is still straight and tall, though his
eyes, that resemble shellfish, seem dissolving in rheum, and his face
is stamped with wrinkles like brookside mud where wagtails have played.
Apollo, when he disguised himself as an old man, must have looked so.
Most of all he loves to lean at the corner from which the windmill is
clearliest seen; and thither he looks, though he cannot see it, with a
serene satisfaction. For not only did he pass his best manhood close to
that hill, but there, as he joyfully recalls, he once climbed an ash
tree for a sparrowhawk’s nest, and in descending, the miller wrapped a
stinging whip about his legs, so that he fell violently and in so doing
broke the miller’s nose; and that is why he looks towards the windmill
affectionately.

What times those were! Wages were low, but then a labourer got many
things cheap which others got dear; for the making of a linen smock he
paid a woman half-a-crown, while a farmer had to pay four shillings,
and the smocking was the same. Also, in his worst days, if he and his
family had nothing on the table but turnip and bread, he had given
away two hundred seed potatoes to a man who praised them. Besides,
those were the “old-fashioned times,” and in fifty or sixty years of
toil, suffering and, at length, some leisure, he has proved to himself
that they were good. “Some think,” said a passer-by to him, “that the
old-fashioned times were better than these?”

“Think!” said he, “I know they were.” For surely they were, since it
was then that he used to drive a glorious coach twice a week to London
and now he does not; and in those days there were “good people” in
the little town under the mill, and you knew who they were and their
grandfathers too, but who are they now?

And yet, he says, there used to be a great deal less pride. In his
young days the farmers and their sons went to church and sang in
the choir in their clean white smocks; but now the church is like a
gentleman’s conservatory. “And, lord! where are the gentlemen now?
Many a gentleman looks like an ordinary man about here, and there’s
many an ordinary man looks like a gentleman. That means a lot of
awkwardness for those that care. Now, in the old-fashioned times, we
knew a gentleman as soon as we could walk. There was the old squire!
He used to expect us to sing carols outside his windows on Christmas
Eve! then he would ask us into the hall and give us good mulled ale and
a shilling apiece--and how he did give it! Not like a fellow putting
a halfpenny into the collection, nor like your good old lady’s giving
you a pair of gloves too small for you and a tract, as much as to say
it is more blessed to give than to receive; but his look was as good as
his shilling and made you want to sing, and I believe the old gentleman
could no more have done without us than we could do without him.”

He is simply a memory with a voice, both of them slightly aided by a
present of whisky from an old employer, and in the sun of April he
sprouts like any cottager’s garden with alyssum and tulips.

Food is a great subject with him, and especially roast pork, from which
it is perhaps fair to conclude that it was not often to be had. One
bout of it he often recalls. He was still in his prime, a big man of
fifty, and though he had been threshing all the morning--“it is a good
many ups and downs of the flail to a pound of pork,” he says--he had
eaten no food and he had none by him and there was none in the house.
Presently hunger so far mastered him that he stopped work and took a
walk round the farmyard. There he saw a fat pig lying on his side,
heavy and making bacon rapidly. In a short time he had laid his plans:
lifting up his flail he began to thresh the pig, and shouting above
its screams: “Son of a fool, I’ll teach you to eat my dinner.” Nor did
he cease to beat the pig and to upbraid it for stealing his dinner
until the farmer came out and, pitying his case, sent him out a dish
of roast pork to make amends. Then he tells a story to celebrate the
incomparable joys of such a dish. An old woman had died and two young
wives came to lay her out. After doing their work, they sat down on the
bed, talking of many matters. Soon they fell to discussing pork. One
said that it was best in the middle of the day; the other that it was
best at night; and the debate was hot and threatened to be long, when
the corpse rose straight up in the bed and said in a gentle voice that
it was good at all times, then lay back in peace and never moved again.

But it was wonderful how much could be done without pork. He and two
other men had mowed a seven-acre field of grass, all but a bit,--and a
good crop,--in one long day, eating nothing but bread and cheese, and
drinking two gallons of new ale apiece. They began at half-past two
in the morning, one of them having cleared the edges the night before
with an old scythe, because the ground was rough there with sticks
and stones. They moved in _échelon_ up the field, he as the strongest
mower coming last in the row, so that he could always keep them up to
their work; for they had to keep ahead of him lest his swathes should
fall over their unmown grass. At five they had the first meal, hardly
sitting down to it, for fear of losing time; then again at nine they
ate, and so on through the day. The rule for eating and drinking was
never to wait until they were really hungry or thirsty, thus avoiding
the necessity for a heavy meal and some rest. At first, he said,
they talked all the time, especially when they were carrying back
their scythes to begin a fresh swathe at the bottom of the field; but
gradually their talk grew less and less, and they finished in silence
at half-past nine. He recalled with pride that when he first mowed
barley, being a strong man, he used to take three more drills in his
swing than the other man, but in a day’s work he had lost ground and he
had to give up the conceit.

But he is proudest of his coaching years and especially of one day.
It was a very fine April. The snakebirds or wrynecks were screaming
all along the road as he set out. The horses were all shining, the
white windmills were turning with mad, downward plunges “fit to make
you mad.” So at the first stop, which was ten minutes, off he went,
and sure enough in the first shaw he came to he heard the cuckoo, and
as there was a big shallow pond in the heart of the trees, all warm
with sun, he stripped and bathed, rejoicing all the time with the
thought that he would be able to drive the horses as fast as he liked
to make up for the delay. He could have ridden a cow that day. He
felt so proud that he wanted to run down some foxhounds that crossed
the road before him, and all the way to London the horses’ hoofs beat
out his name--“Peter Durrant! Peter Durrant!”--as they had never done
before. Nowadays, he says, there is not a pair of horses, that does
not clatter: “Poor pluck to-day! Poor pluck to-day!” which is what a
team of plough horses used to sing in his day, as they went home in
the afternoon. But so strong is his belief in the old days--to which
he belonged--from which he is an exile in a foreign field--that he is
never sad as he sits in the sun. He condescends to live on with just
such an air as when an old man lays his hand on a boy’s shoulder and
encourages him. From his conspicuous life he is rather well known,
and it happened once that a poet with a command of large margins once
made some verses after some misfortune had befallen him and recited
them to the old man by the wayside. “That is wonderful,” said Peter,
“wonderful! How ever did you think of all those things about a poor old
man like me? But ’tis lucky, sir, that you were not the sufferer, or
those beautiful things would never have been written, for I could never
have thought of them myself.”

For the rest, he collects herbs and with the help of Culpeper and
some little experiment concocts fragrant ointments and dark, painful
draughts in which a dozen flavours conflict; nor has he ever killed
a man: he takes them himself. He will bury his nose in a fragrant
posy brought home by the children and say gravely, and I think with
some dark wisdom, “Why, they must be good for something,” and deeply
inhaling, he continues, “At least they are good for old age.” And his
own old age he attributes to the diet of living tadpoles which he used
against a decline, fifty years ago.




CHAPTER XVI

ONE GREEN FIELD


Happiness is not to be pursued, though pleasure may be; but I have
long thought that I should recognise happiness could I ever achieve
it. It would be health, or at least unthwarted intensity of sensual
and mental life, in the midst of beautiful or astonishing things
which should give that life full play and banish expectation and
recollection. I never achieved it, and am fated to be almost happy in
many different circumstances, and on account of my forethought to be
contemptuous or even disgusted at what the beneficent designs of chance
have brought--refusing, for example, to abandon my nostrils frankly
to the “musk and amber” of revenge; or polluting, by the notice of
some trivial accident, the remembrance of past things, both bitter and
sweet, in the company of an old friend. Wilfully and yet helplessly
I coin mere pleasures out of happiness. And yet herein, perhaps, a
just judge would declare me to be at least not more foolish than those
men who are always pointing out the opportunities and just causes of
happiness which others have. Also, the flaw in my happiness which
wastes it to a pleasure is in the manner of my looking back at it when
it is past. It is as if I had made a great joyous leap over a hedge,
and then had looked back and seen that the hedge was but four feet
high and not dangerous. Is it perhaps true that those are never happy
who know what happiness is? The shadow of it I seem to see every day in
entering a little idle field in a sternly luxuriant country.

It is but five grassy acres, and yet as the stile admitting you to it
makes you pause--to taste the blackberries or to see how far the bryony
has twined--you salute it in a little while as a thing of character.
Many of the fields around are bounded by straight-ruled hedges, as if
they had been cut up by a tyrant or a slave, with only a few of such
irregularities as a stream or a pond may enforce. Not one of the five
hedges of this field makes a straight line. The hedge up to your right
from the stile is of a noble and fascinating unruliness. So winds a
mountain stream down its ladders of crag in Cardigan; into some such
form would the edge of a phalanx be worn by long swaying in the height
of battle. The other hedges are equally fretted. Here, there is a deep
indentation where the cattle lie and wear the blackthorn stems until
they are polished for ever; and there the knitted stoles and roots
of ash jut out and encroach, fierce and antique and stony, like a
strange beast left there to lie in the sweet grass--like a worn effigy
over a grave where knight and hound have become mingled in monstrous
ambiguity. The surface of the field is of the same wildness. It does
not rise and fall in a few sea-like heavings, or in many little waves,
nor is it level or in one long, gradual slope, but rising sleepily
from west to east it is broken by sudden hollows and mounds. In one
place the furze on a mound makes a little world for two or three pairs
of linnets and white-throats, and there are the largest and sweetest
blackberries; there also a hundred young stems of brier spend spring
and summer in perfecting the curves of their long leaps--curves that
are like the gush of water over a dam, and yet crossing in multitudes
without crowding, in all ways without discord, like the paths of the
flight of swallows when they embroider the twilight air. In another
place it is always marshy, the home of marigold and reed. One corner
used to be dominated by a tall tented oak, of so majestic balance
that when sawn through it stood long in the wind; there the pheasants
are proud among bugle or centaury flowers. Here and there a smooth
boulder protrudes, guarded by hundreds of blue scabious flowers which
welcome butterflies of their own hue, and sometimes a peacock butterfly
displays himself on the naked stone.

At the eastern and higher end the field becomes so narrow that it is
like a lane, through which the hunt gloriously decants itself among the
knolls. It is narrowed still more by a small pond, and round that a
tall holly of solid shadow with glancing edges, an oak, an overhanging
thicket of bramble and thorn and three old butts of ash, where the
fairy gold of toadstools is scattered abundantly as if sown by one
sweep of a generous hand. The pond is the home of one moorhen, which
is always either swimming there or hastening to it from the field. It
is but as large as a farmhouse kitchen, and yet the moorhen will not
desert it, finding the eaves among the roots as pleasing as attics
to a boy; content with her seeming security though the road passes
just above, and rich in her share of sun and moon and stars. To see
the moorhen swimming in the narrow pond on a silent and misty autumn
morning is to think, now with joy, now with pain, of solitude, but
always with a reverie at last that is entangled among the dim, late
stars--she possessing the solitary pond, in the solitary autumn country
on a planet that is but an element in the solitude of the infinite; and
her liquid hoot dwells long in the brain.

It is worth while to watch the pool at dawn, because, though it might
seem to be but one of the myriad waters that light candles of adoration
and celebration to every dawn, it has then the air, as the mist drips
and tingles at the edge, of being a grey priest who has not yet done
serving other gods than the dawn, and, until it puts on its white
robes and glimmers altogether, it makes with the oak tree a group of
pathetic revolt against the day--the oak might be a Saturn or a Lear,
the pool in its gradual surrender to the light a Druid sheltering dear
and unprosperous mysteries yet a little longer from the proud sun. Then
the thrush sings on the holly crest with such blitheness as cannot,
nevertheless, excel the water’s glory in the fully risen light.

But whatever conversion the little pond undergoes on dawn after dawn,
the field as a whole retains the same antiquity, which it announces
so powerfully that I knew it on first crossing the stile. Perhaps the
lawless shape of the field, its unusual undulations, its unkemptness in
the midst of a land all rich with crops--perhaps these things suggested
antiquity; but I think not--at least they do not explain it for it was
then strange, and now with all its familiarity it has rather gained
than lost its power. It is the same when its outlines are concealed
by mist and all I can see is the clover rough with silver dew, white
mushrooms, and perhaps one red yoke of maple in the hollow air, and
when the snow covers all but the myriad thistles blossoming with blue
tits. Enter it in spring--the linnets sprinkle a song like audible
sunlight--and yet the field is old. But November is its notable month.
Its trees are all oaks and they have hardly lost a leaf; the leaves are
falling continually from those smouldering sunset clouds of foliage,
which, kingly rich, look as if they would never be poor. One skylark
sings high over the field in the rainy sky. The blue rooks unsheathe
themselves heavily from the branches and shine silverly and caw with
genial voices. A pheasant explodes from a grass tussock underfoot. The
air smells like the musky white wild rose; coming from the west it
blows gently, laden with all the brown and golden savours of Wales and
Devon and Wiltshire and Surrey which I know, and the scent lifts the
upper lip so that you snuff deeply as a dog snuffs. A stoat goes with
uplifted tail across the field. But the field itself--was there a great
house here once and is it dead and yet vocal? Are its undulations and
rude edges all that remain of an old wood? Or was there a battle here,
and is the turf alive with death? Certainly there is death somewhere
speaking eloquently to mortal men. It is not alive, but it laments
something, and where there is sorrow there is life.

For just one day in September the goldfinches come and twitter, and are
happy among the thistles, and fly away.




CHAPTER XVII

THE BROOK


The brook rises in a clear, grey, trembling basin at the foot of
a chalk hill, among flowers of lotus and thyme and eyebright and
rest-harrow. Here the stone curlew drinks, and above is the gently
rounded encampment, ancient, and yet still young compared with the
dusky spring which has something gnomish and earthy about it, though it
takes the sun. It drops in thin, bright links over the chalk, and then
for a time loses its way in playing with cresses and marsh marigolds,
spreading out so finely that hardly will the ladybird drown that falls
therein--falling at length in a cascade from one dead leaf to another
down a hedge bank. Below, it nourishes the first forget-me-nots, by a
gateway where it slips across the lane, and is dew-fed by the vetches
and clovers that swaddle the posts of the gate. Now it is unheard and
unseen in the darkness underneath dog’s mercury leaves until it has
gained its first treble voice as, pausing by an interrupting branch,
it fills a hollow and pours over in icy fingers to the ditch beneath.
Here it has cuckoo flowers and creeping jenny and butterbur to feed;
thrushes drink of it; beetles dart across it like scullers that dream
now and then upon their sculls. It learns now to sway the cress, to
bow the brooklime, to brighten the sides of the minnows; the fledgling
of the robin that falls into it dies. It floats the catkin down, and
out of it rises the azure dragon fly. Sometimes it muffles its going
in moss, but in a little while it gushes through drains and falls and
falls with a now unceasing noise in a land where all the hollows are
full of apple trees, rough grey with dewy clover, and through all
the hollows winds the brook, dappled by blossom, leaned over by the
bee-cradling, sleepy, meadow cranesbill flower; in its green bed the
watervoles wear their submerged pathways. Now men have laid a slab of
elm or of rude stone across it, and from those they lean to drink at
haymaking or harvest; the children float on it pinnaces of bent reed,
or set it to turn waterwheels of ash bark, or dip their cans in it for
curving minnow or twisting tadpole or the little black circlers that
meet and divide and pursue for a few April days. Already it has ranged
along its margin rough, leaning willows garlanded by purple ivy; and
their leaves that dip to the surface it will never allow to rest. The
briers still overleap it in their long dreaming curves. The kingfisher
sits over it and the small trout nestle in its bed. It enters many an
ash copse and fills it with willow herb and meadowsweet and all juicy
plants, figwort and iris and orchis and hyacinth and reed, with osiers
and their mists of crimson and gold. Nymph-like the brook brightens and
curves its crystal flesh and waves its emerald hair under the bridges
at field corners, where the brambles dip their blossoms, and the
nightingale sings and the sedgewarbler has its nest. For it the lonely
willows in the flat fields shed their yellow leaves most pensively,
like maidens casting their bridal garlands off. Three flowering
apple trees in one islanded angle on a lawn of perfect grass, a most
dream-worthy place, fit for the footprints of the beautiful,

    “White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,”

seem all its own; for there it first makes a deep sound in falling
over a ledge among its own curded, quivering and moonlit yellow foam.
Thereafter it opens wide between broad low banks from which the cattle
can step and stand among the reeds under serene tall ashes, and the
lily petals float upon it that catch against the branches and against
the hearts of men in distant towns. There, too, among the lilies the
brook first takes the stars into its heart, but gaily with all its
flowers and thick herbage and its rippling fall never still amidst the
arrow-headed reed. It moves like the high autumn wain, followed by many
children, who have time to leave it and gather flowers and are yet
never left behind. The heron comes to it at dawn, knowing from afar the
dark pool where it curves under a steep bank and grim oak roots, and
slopes down to it solemn and eager and alone in the winter morning. The
sand-martin and wagtail often pause in their flight and hover above
the placid water and the cool, reflected reeds and watermint. Where it
is all of one depth, between straight banks of cowslip, the boys sit
and let their feet waver in the flood and then roll or plunge in, with
shouts and gurgling talk, while in the reeds, the dabchick waits with
head just above water, trembling for her eggs or cheeping young. On
Sunday the country lover, cruel all the week, brings his maid to the
brook and, suddenly tender and a little proud, shows her the moist,
weed-covered nest and delights in her melting eyes. Fed now by other
brooks, from its own hills and from little woodland springs, the brook
consents to spread into a pool in an old garden, and in the sweet
imprisonment of lily and rose and iris and oleander lies as if asleep,
an indolent Leda contented with the white swan, and yet escaping
all the time, its wild soul rejoicing yonder beneath the heavily
overhanging honeysuckled thorns of the wide meadows again. Under the
white highway the brook runs and lures men to lean from the parapet
by the milestone and look at the water and take up some coolness and
some bitterness from it when they return to the blinding miles. Its
course is marked by alders and willows, shaping cornfield and pasture
in divine meanders that seem to have learnt rather to be contented
with travelling than to be eager for the goal. Could a man but wander
in that way once more, like the child in the field of flowers so
multitudinous that she did not know what to do, but closed her eyes and
was happy yet! Now the otter plays there, and where the ash roots twist
into many a cave. Through leagues of country the brook runs, passing
high, silent woods and misty, hot, luxuriant, flowering thickets and
wet, cloudy copses full at evening of confused birds’ singing, which no
one sees except the brook and the milk-white heifer who crowns herself
in white roses in the shade as she stands in tall, moist, sumptuous
angelica and watches her crowned image looking out of that fair sky in
purest waters; then, suddenly emerging from this lowly country it falls
into a river and is lost or seems to be lost in the turbid, serious
flow that is soon to know the sea.




CHAPTER XVIII

AN AUTUMN GARDEN


The cottage gardens are ceremonious and bright with phlox and sunflower
and hollyhock; the orchards are yellow with apple, and of all sunburnt
hues with plum; in the descending lane you wade in a world of
ragwort, knapweed and Canterbury-bell, with your head in the world of
honeysuckle; and, parting the hazel branches to seek their branching
clusters, you see now and then in the valley a farmhouse on whose walls
and roofs the hues of fruit and flower all meet harmoniously. They
meet as the colours of many pictures meet in some ancient palette,
or as Plato and Catullus and Sidney and Shelley meet in some grey
schoolmaster.

In every Autumn the farmhouse, with its old tiles and new and its
glowing bricks (suppressing easily a few of a putrid blue scattered
here and there), seems, in spite of its age, to be a great new flower.
It is the royal flower of autumn. It expresses at once all that fruit
and flower upon the hill have been expressing laboriously and word by
word.

Perfect gay youth and sage antiquity are mingled in the aspect of the
house; just as, in an autumn dawn, the gradual veiled golden pomp of
serene victory speaks, to one mood, of the happy and mellow antiquity
of the world, but, to another mood, speaks of the sublime, insurgent
youth which all nights nourish and equip and send forth over the land.
In winter it is old; it has apparently been long fortifying itself
against the foreign cold of the landscape, snowy white or windy grey.
In spring it is old; the green garlands it as in tender mockery. In
summer it is old; it is impatient of the bragging rose on its walls and
the multiplication of leaf and flower. But in September it is at home,
as if after an exile; it remembers only pleasant things--the autumns
of two centuries, their harvest, their fruit, their blossom, their
hedgerow vintages of bryony and cornel and thorn, their ruddy moons.
Gathered about it are the farm buildings of the same colour, stacks of
dark hay, sharp-breasted ricks of corn, maternal, warm oast-houses and
orchard and garden, all of the same family.

In the misty days, when no gleam falls from the warm sky on grass or
water or fruit, you would say that the sun had stalled his horses for
a season within the farmhouse walls; so much they glow; so glorious
are they. I have seen the radiant cart-horses coming with grave nods
through the farmyard at dawn as if they were to be yoked to the chariot
of the sun; the red-haired carter was at least a Phaeton, a son of
Apollo if not Apollo himself.

The garden borders are discreetly furnished, so that they are now
as clouds in the neighbourhood of the sun, doing it honour by their
liveries. They are populous with sun-flowers, hollyhocks (tall,
solemn halberds at evening, guarding the outmost edge and held up
mysteriously), red-hot pokers rising out of a lake of rose of Sharon
and nasturtium, into which run promontories and peninsulas of
snap-dragon, rocket, Shirley poppy, carnation and phlox of every hue
that white and red confederate can invent; here and there fuchsia trees
in rivers of autumn crocus, great poppies and evening primrose, and at
their feet, like long, coloured shadows stretching away, red flax and
pansies and the recurved stone-crop which the tortoise-shell butterfly
loves. These bodies of colour change year by year--in one autumn the
pansies made a long, curled purple dragon among all the rest; but
always the taller flowers look as if stopped short in the mazes of a
dance which is soon to be resumed. Between these two borders are two
little lawns divided by a path, whereon the fanciful might see a little
beam of the house’s influence in the peacock butterfly that returns
continually to one stone, settling there as the wanton light cast on
ceiling and wall by a raised glass settles when the glass is put down.

It is not a rich or choice garden, though a fitting one. Yet an earlier
head of the farmer’s family--a student of allegorical prints and
emblems, the designer of at least one, in which his own garden had
notoriously served as a model for the Eden--was so much enamoured of
the flowers and the house that he came, towards the end of his life,
to think himself over-worldly in his esteem of them, but failed to
overcome it, and, a little before his death, in the free wanderings of
his mind, announced that he saw Paradise, and that it was even as his
garden was, “nasturtiums and all, Jacob” (which was a thrust at the
said son, a disliker of those flowers)--except that the vainglorious
new carnations were not there.

Travelling beyond the garden, the house declares its lordship over
four limes that stand before it, in the home field, at just such a
distance that the flying blackbird, frightened from the garden, will
stop there instead of going to the hedge beyond. As far as to these
trees the house sends out its light and virtue. Approaching them from
the hills, the eye of the wayfarer first salutes the out-buildings,
the ricks and the elms; it turns to the house and gratefully pauses
there; and last it glides to the limes and is at rest, delighted by
that one lyric effort, yet with a slight gravity--even a sigh--at the
accomplishment of its sweet toil. Then it is to be seen how noble
is the order of the four trees. They are not in circle, square or
line; they make no figure, except that they are in a sharp curve,
straightening out as it nears you, so that they have a power as of
the first ships of a fleet, coming into sight round a promontory and
suggesting majestic numbers. At nightfall the swallows twitter among
the topmost branches, sweetly, trippingly, one at a time, or in pairs
and companies, for a little while. Suddenly lamps are lit within the
house.




CHAPTER XIX

THE WALNUT TREE


The immense, solitary, half-veiled autumn land is hissing with the
kisses of rain in elms and hedgerows and grass, and underfoot the
tunnelled soil gurgles and croaks. Secret and content, as if enjoying a
blessed interval of life, are the small reedy pools where the moorhens
hoot and nod in the grey water; beautiful the hundred pewits rising
in ordered flight as they bereave the grey field and, wheeling over
the leagues that seem all their own, presently make another field all
a-flower by their alighting; almost happy once more is the tall, weedy
mill by the broken water-gates, dying because no man inhabits it, its
smooth wooden wheels and shoots and pillars fair and clean still under
the red roof, though the wall is half fallen.

And in the heart of this, set in the dense rain, is a farm-house far
from any road; and round it the fields meet with many angles, and the
hedges wind to make way, here, for a pond, deep underneath alders;
there, for some scattered parcels of hayrick, on a grassy plot,
encircling a large walnut tree; and for another pond, beside an apple
orchard, whose trunks are lean and old and bent like the ribs of a
wreck. A quadrangle of stalls, red tiled, of grey timber--trampled
straw in their midst--adjoins the house, which is a red-grey cube,
white-windowed, with tall, stout chimneys and steep, auburn roof, and
green stonecrop frothing over its porch. In and out goes a rutted,
grassy track, lined by decapitated and still-living remains of many
ancient elms.

In the overhanging elm branches flicker the straws of the long-past
harvest, and the spirits of summers and autumns long-past cling to
grass and ponds and trees.

The walnut tree among the ricks is dead. Against its craggy bole rest
the shafts of a noble, blue waggon that seems coeval with it; long
ladders are thrust up among its branches; deep in the brittle herbage
underneath it lean or lie broken wheels, a rude wooden roller, the
lovely timber of an antique plough, a knotted and rusted chain harrow,
and the vast wooden wedge of the snow-plough that cleared the roads
when winters were still grim. In the soft, straight rain these things
are a buried world, the skeletons of a fair-seeming old life mingled
with a sort of pleasant tranquillity as on the calm dim floor of a
perilous main.

Half of the fruit trees are dead, save for their lichen and moss and
their nests in fork and niche and the robin musing in the branches.

The duck pond, deep below, is all in shadow. The alders lean over it.
Some have fallen, and the moorhens have built on them, and the round
vole sits there or drops off with the suddenness of fruit; but he
cannot dive, for a million dead leaves are sunk or floating in the
purple shallows.

Over all is the stillness of after harvest. Long ago the gleaners
went home under the frosty moon, and the last wain left its memorial
wisps in the elms. The rain possesses all, and a strange, funereal
evocation calls up the bronzed corn again, and the heavy waggon and
the grim, knitted chests of the bowing horses as they reach the
bright-fruited walnut tree. The children laugh and run--who remember it
in the workhouse now--and in a corner of the field the reaper slashes
hatefully at the last standing rows. The harvest-queen sits on the
topmost sheaves. They dance in the barn. Their voices are blithe and
sweet; for the rain has washed away their flesh and quieted them now
and recalls only golden hours, which linger in this idle autumn place
and do not die but only hide themselves as sunlight hides itself in
yellow apples, in red roses, in crystal water, in a woman’s eyes.




CHAPTER XX

A GOLDEN AGE


Almost at the end of a long walk, and as a small silver sun was leaving
a pale and frosty sky, we began to ascend a broad, heaving meadow which
was bordered on our right, on its eastern side, by a long, narrow
copse of ash trees. At the top of the meadow, hardly a quarter of a
mile away, was a little red farmhouse--yet not so little but that it
rose with a maternal dignity among and above the sheds and stables,
its children, and, like it, of antique red. The home and dependencies
gave out a sense of solidity, independence and seclusion. Our hearts
acknowledged at once that it was desirable, saluted it, and were calmly
glad at the sight.

At that moment the tumult of a windy day was entirely gone. The north
wind now lay dead upon the long white clouds in the east. The smoke
from the farmhouse chimneys flowed southward along the top of the ash
trees in a narrow, motionless rivulet in the calm air. Far off the
hoofs of the returning hunt clattered decently, and combined with the
dim memory of the wind in trees and sedge to give to the great meadow
an emphasised tranquillity like that which fills an invalid’s room when
others are just audibly busy about and below. We walked more and more
slowly up the meadow. The red house was clear and hard in the grey
air, yet with a richness and implicated shadow as of things submerged.
Something which it gave out abundantly filled our minds that had for
hours played with casual and untraceable thoughts and images--descended
like an enthusiasm among criticisms. In a minute the house was
beautiful; it seemed to flower with the happiness of men and women and
little children living melodiously; there, we thought, must be minds
and bodies which, without carelessness and without stupidity, found in
life what some expect from the future and some feign to remember in the
past; there was character and beauty and strength, which time flowed
over in vain. Hither, it seemed, had drifted upon Lethe’s stream all
the hopes and wishes and recollections and unaccomplished dreams of
unhappy men, and had formed at last a blossoming island in the waste.

And some were enjoying that island now. The very smoke from the
chimneys had goodness in it. Even as we walked we turned the moment
past into a Golden Age, except that, whenever we looked up towards the
house, we knew that all was not yet lost, and that a golden age might
still succeed the last. Overhead sailed some little rosy clouds that
were part of the blossom of that house.

Then suddenly a fearless child ran into the garden and blew a horn and
disappeared. Then we knew that the past moments had been as when, in
the old tale, men saw an anchor let down out of the clouds and rooted
in the ground, and, looking up saw a rope shaken as if to dislodge the
anchor, and heard the voices of sailors aloft in the sky, and then saw
a man clambering down the rope and dying at last, as if he had been
drowned in the air which they breathed easily, and the voices aloft
were heard no more.




CHAPTER XXI

THE VILLAGE


I

The village stands round a triangular, flat green that has delicate
sycamores here and there at one side; beneath them spotted cows, or
horses, or a family of tramps; and among them the swallows waver.
On two sides the houses are close together. The third, beyond the
sycamores, is filled by a green hedge, and beyond it an apple
orchard on a gentle hill, and in the midst of that a farmhouse and
farm-buildings so happily arranged that they look like a tribe of quiet
monsters that have crawled out of the sandy soil to sun themselves.
There the green woodpecker leaps and laughs in flight. Down each side
of the green run yellow roads that cross one another at the angles,
two going north, two going south, and one each to the east and west.
Along these roads, for a little way, stand isolated cottages, most of
them more ancient and odd than those in the heart of the village, as if
they had some vagrant blood and could not stay in the neat and tranquil
community about the green. Thus, one is built high above the road and
is reached by a railed flight of stone steps. The roof of another
slopes right to the ground on one side in a long curve, mounded by
stonecrop and moss, out of which an elder tree is beginning to grow;
and it has a crumbling tiled porch, like an oyster shell in colour and
shape. One has a blank wall facing the road, and into the mortar of
it, while it was yet fresh, the workmen have stuck fragments and even
complete rounds of old blue and white saucers and plates. In others
the mortar is decorated by two strokes of the trowel forming a wedge
such as is found on old urns. In the ruinous orchard by a fourth, among
nettles and buttercups, there is always a gipsy tent and white linen
like blossom on the hedge. One of these houses seems to have strayed
on to the green. Years ago someone pitched a tent there, and in course
of time put an apple pip into the ground close by and watched it grow.
The codling tree is now but a stump, standing at the doorway of a black
wooden cottage named after it. Between it and the village pond go the
white geese with heads in air.

Off one of those roads the church lifts a dark tower along with
four bright ash trees out of a graveyard and meadow which are all
buttercups. On three of the others there are plain, square, plastered
inns, “The Chequers,” “The Black Horse,” “The Four Elms,” where tramps
sit on benches outside, and within the gamekeepers or passing carters
sit and wear a little deeper the high curved arm-rests of the settles.
But the chief inns stand opposite one another at one corner of the
green, “The Windmill,” and “The Rose,” both of them rosy, half-timbered
houses with sign boards; the one beneath a tall, rocky-based elm which
a wood-pigeon loves, the other behind a row of straight, pollarded
limes; and opposite them is a pond on the edge of the green. In these
inns the wayfarer drinks under the dark seventeenth-century beams;
the worn pewter rings almost like glass; moss and ivy and lichen, and
flowers in the windows, and human beings with laughter and talk and
sighs at parting, decorate the ancient walls. The lime trees run in a
line along the whole of one side of the green, and at their feet still
creeps a stream whose minnows hover and dart, and the black and white
wagtail runs. Behind the trees are half the cottages of the village,
some isolated among their bean rows and sunflowers, some attached in
fantastic unions. Most are of one storey, in brick, which the autumn
creepers melt into, or in timber and tiles perilously bound together by
old ivy; in one the Jacobean windows hint at the manor house of which
other memory is gone; all are tiled. Their windows are white-curtained,
with geranium or fuchsia or suspended campanula, or full of sweets,
and onions, and rope, and tin tankards, and ham, and carrot-shaped
tops, dimly seen behind leaded panes. Between the houses and the limes,
the gardens are given up to flowers and a path, or they have a row
of beehives: in one flower-bed the fragment of a Norman pillar rests
quietly among sweet rocket flowers. Instead of flower gardens, the
wheelwright and the blacksmith have waggons, wheels, timber, harrows,
coulters, spades, tyres, or fragments, heaped like wreckage on the
sea floor, but with fowls and children or a robin amongst them, and
perhaps, leaning against the trees, a brave, new waggon painted yellow
or red or all blue.

On the other populous side of the green the houses are of the
same family, without the limes; except that far back, among its
lilac and humming maple foliage and flower, is the vicarage, a
red, eighteenth-century house with long, cool, open windows, and a
brightness of linen and silver within or the dark glimmer of furniture,
and a seldom disturbed dream of lives therein leading “melodious days.”
Of how many lives the house has voicelessly chronicled the days and
nights! It is aware of birth, marriage, death; into the wall is kneaded
a record more pleasing than brass. With what meanings the vesperal
sunlight slips through the narrow staircase window in autumn, making
the witness pause! The moon has an expression proper to the dwellers
there alone, nested among the limes or heaving an ivory shoulder above
the tower of the church.

From one side to the other the straight starlings fly.

Along the roads go waggons and carts of faggots, or dung, or mangolds
in winter; of oak bark in spring; of hay or corn in summer; of fruit or
furniture in autumn.

A red calf, with white hind legs and white socks on her forelegs,
strays browsing at the edge of the road. A close flock of sheep surges
out of the dust and covers the green.


II

We were twelve in the tap of “The Four Elms.” Five tramps were on one
side; on the other, six pure-blooded labourers who had never seen
London, and a seventh. A faggot was burning in the hearth, more for
the sake of its joyful sound and perfume than for its heat. The sanded
floor, cool and bright, received continually the red hollowed petals
that bled from a rose on the table. The pewter glimmered; the ale
wedded and unwedded innumerable shades of red and gold as it wavered
in the mystic heart of the tankard. The window was held fast, shut by
the stems of a Gloire de Dijon rose in bloom, and through it could be
seen the gloom of an ocean of ponderous, heaving clouds, with a varying
cleft of light between them and the hills which darkened the woods and
made the wheat fields luminous.

Now and then a labourer extended his arm, grasped the tankard, slowly
bent his arm whilst watching a gleam on the metal, and silently drank,
his eyes lifted as if in prayer; then slowly put it back and saw a
fresh circle being formed around it by the ale that was spilled.

The tramps leaned on a walnut table, as old as the house, polished so
that it seemed to be coated with ice, here and there blackened with
the heat transferred to it by a glass bottle standing in the sun.
They looked at one another, changed their attitudes and their drinks,
gesticulated, argued, swore and sang. They became silent only when one
of their number hammered a tune out of the reluctant piano. They were
of several ages and types, of three nationalities, and had different
manners and accents. One was a little epicurean Spanish skeleton who
loved three things, his own pointed beard, a pot of cider, and the
saying of Sancho Panza: “I care more for the little black of the nail
of my soul than my whole body.” He was a grasshopper in the fields
of religion, scandal and politics, and wore his hat scrupulously on
one side. Another was a big, gentle Frenchman, with heavy eyelids, but
a fresh boy’s laugh. Early in the evening he scourged the republic;
later he laughed at the monarchy, the consulate and the empire; and as
he went to sleep touched his hat and whispered “Vive la France!” His
neighbour was fat, and repeated the Spaniard’s remarks when they had
been forgotten. It was to be wondered when he walked, what purpose his
legs were made to serve. At the inn it was to be seen that they were
a necessary addition to the four legs of a chair. He wanted nothing
but a seat and not often wanted that. He was, I may say, made to be a
sitting rather than a sapient animal, and had been lavishly favoured
by Nature with that intention. The fourth, a pale, sour anarchist,
hardly ever spoke, but was apparently an honest man, whom his indignant
fellows called “parson.” The last was one that been born a poet, but
never made one. He sang when he was asked, and later when he was asked
not to sing; very quietly and very bitterly he cried when he had sung,
indulging in a debauch of despair. Before we parted, the twelfth man
sang all the sixteen verses of “Sir Hugh of Lincoln,” in the hope of
quenching their love of interminable songs. “Heaven and Hell!” said the
tramp, “ye make me feel as if I was like Sir Hugh and Lady Helen and
the Jew’s daughter all in one. Curse ye! bless ye!”

Half way through the evening the tramps were asleep. The labourers were
as they were at the beginning. They sat a-row according to age, and
nothing but age distinguished them. Their opinions were those of the
year in which they were born; for they were of that great family which,
at the prime of life or earlier, seems to begin growing backwards,
to quote “grandfather,” more often, and thus to give the observer a
glimpse of the Dark Ages. Life to them was at once as plain and as
inexplicable as the patterns on their willow cups or toby jugs. The
eldest had a gift of dumbness that sometimes lasted nearly half a
century, but once set going and wandering from ploughs to horses, and
from horses to the king, his loyalty brought this forth:--

“If that Edward wasn’t king he ought to be.” Advancing to the subject
of hay with a digression on the church, “Which,” said the youngest,
“which came first, parson or hay?”

“What,” said the eldest in a short speech that occupied an hour of
time, without interruption from the rest, who drank through his
periods and sat watching him while he drank in the intervals by way of
semi-colon. “What is church for but rector to pray in? The parson prays
for--for a good season, and a good season means a good hayrick like a
church; well, then, Robert, George, Henry, and Palmston, I say that the
day after they first wanted a rick they put up a church and put rector
in to pray. I,” continued he, growing confident, “remember the Crimea.
I had but four boys then, but bad times they were. But we had tea, we
had tea; the wife used to grate up toast and pour boiling water on it.”

“We called that coffee,” said the youngest, a lover of truth.

As the evening darkened and pipes went out and the scent of carnations
came in with the wind, their speech became slower, with long intervals,
as if they spoke only after ploughing a furrow. One by one they seemed
to go out like the candles overhead, were silent, but never slept. The
oldest, reddest and roundest of face, with white hair, looked like the
sun at a mountain crest. The next seemed to be the spirit of beneficent
rain, pale, vague, with moist eyes and tangled grey beard. The third
was as the south wind, mild, cheerful, pink-faced, with a great rose in
his button-hole. The fourth was the west wind, that lifts the hay from
the level fields into the clouds at a breath, that robs the harebell of
its dew and stores it with rain--a mighty man with head on breast, and
small hands united, and flowing hair. And the youngest was the harvest
moon, glowing, with close hair and elusive features, a presence as
he sat there rather than a man. So they were in the twilight, like a
frieze on the white wall.

“Well, us have had fun, haven’t us, George?” said the harvest moon. He
received no answer as we passed out of “The Four Elms,” for all but he
had left the world where words are spoken and opinions held; and the
hazel lane seemed to be a temple of the mysterious elements that make
the harvest and the apple crop and the glory of the hops.


III

Walking in a country churchyard it is often hard to think of it as
a place of death. The children play among the tombs. At Easter the
village girls bring hither primroses from the woods, planting some,
scattering others. Labourers meet and talk there, for the footpaths
all converge towards the church. Lovers walk there. The gravedigger
is indeed often busy there, but you may go many times and not find
him at a grave, and it is seldom but he is planting flowers, pruning
bushes, or mowing grass. On the tombs themselves, in epitaph or in
lack of epitaph, is written the corporate wisdom of the village, its
philosophy and its history half transmuted into poetry. Fancy can
never be quiet as the eye passes from Mary to Rebecca, from John to
David, whose record let no one interpret untenderly. I have seen on
an afternoon many a novel that shall never be written save as it is
written here, deep without gloom, bitter without scandal, on those
tablets that have kept their legends too long to be altogether fair.
Even the harshest brevity has its fitness, as if it were penned by the
right hand of Fate. And here, as in some other matters, we have made an
insignificant advance upon our ancestors. The chief records of early
races are their tombs. We know not so much that they lived as that they
are dead. We guess at their lives from their dead bones. A tool, a
weapon, a trinket, a favourite beast, is buried with them, conferring
a life in death. In some ancient graves the bodies are found in a
sitting posture, and if conjecture be just, we may suppose that the
dead man once slept thus and dreamed, daring not to lie down, because
no clothes kept off the frost or rain. So the endeavour to provide for
an after life by utensils and food has not been wholly in vain. But
“Tombs,” said the poet, “have their life and death.” The headstone is
heir to the deceased and out in the world seeks a fortune, which is
commonly bad. The fates of tombs have seldom been traced. The history
of the epitaph has never been written. Thus is much common philosophy
hidden away. Probably no body of literature could be found that is more
fertile in homely truth and fancy. But collections of epitaphs either
have no plan, or are intended to show only what is curious, brilliant,
or very old.

In this little churchyard a chapter or two of history and progress
is easily seen. At the middle of the eighteenth century the sexton
wrote the epitaphs, dealing out eulogy and fact with a generous hand.
After him came a series of nonentities, whose epitaphs are as like one
another as Windsor chairs. Honest regret, or “smiling through tears,”
was ousted by complacent joy at the celestial lot of the deceased.
Decent friendship was replaced by encomiastic fraud. Like all fashions
it was feeble, but like all fashions it had some good; it produced
models of accurate expression of “not what he was, but what he should
have been.” Then in the nineteenth century followed a silent age.
“He was alive, and is dead;” tombstones with such inscriptions are
like men who do not speak in company, and unlike them, they never
disappoint. They say, at anyrate, not more than is written of honest
men in heaven. The children of those silent people did little but
irrelevantly quote or paraphrase the Bible and Dr. Watts. The epitaphs
were now thought worthy of a clear, large type; the fashion at least
taught children to spell. Some there were who gained no small village
reputation by a diligent study of these sentences. Even the wiser
pillars of the village, whether they could read or not, were sure of
awe and admiration among their audience, if their speeches--political,
religious, or scandalous--were launched by “As the great Dr. Watts
wrote ...” or “In the words of Amos, whom you may know....” Not of this
period, but first notorious then, was the epitaph on Sir ----, Bart.
His family, being still one of splendour and influence, everything
connected with it was held in esteem. It was, therefore, not unnatural
that the admirers of an aged spinster should put upon her tomb the
epitaph that was picked out with letters of gold on that of the young
baronet--

    “The good die young.”

Strangers are apt to wonder first at the longevity common in the
parish--then at the humour of the thing--and go away both contented
and deceived. For some time it was not uncommon to quote a grave
passage from Shakespeare, with decent omission of the author’s name;
when, however, a revolutionist not only published “Shakespeare” on a
headstone, but “Romeo and Juliet” too, the vicar was approached, the
sexton ran a risk every day, the inn-keeper, the J.P. was approached.
The bereaved person had in the meantime erased the offending words, and
until recently you might read--

    “God rest his soul! He was a merry man,”

beneath which the curious eye may still discover “Kings iii.” placed
there in homage to parish prejudice. The storm almost raised by the
introduction of two lines by Robert Burns--“a poet as well as a
drunkard,” according to village rumour--is still remembered. The parish
clerk having doubted whether it was in “Ancient and Modern” took refuge
in the book of Ecclesiastes, until a confidant (a fearless thinker and
a friend of Chartists) swore it was written by a lord. The vicar was
questioned. Opening a book whose cover was well known to the doubter,
and repeating with nasal unction the offending words, he drew tears and
apologies from the man. After that comparative freedom of choice was
enjoyed, and some went bravely back to

    “Afflictions sore long years I bore,”

as recently as 1885. Tennyson was in favour at that time; no one
grumbled since he was the author of

    “That good man, the clergyman.”

But when I brush aside the leaves and flowers of herb honesty, growing
by the older graves, although I am willing to admit that the village
view of death has become more solemn, I cannot but wish back again the
author of

    “This world has lost old John the sexton,
    What business has he in the next one?”

Where are the robuster views of which this is a late reminder? The
gay, the fanciful, the calmly elaborate epitaphs seem to have gone for
ever, and in the newer portion of the churchyard it is hard not to
think of death, unless we turn to the unnamed little mounds that rise
and fall like summer waters, so calm, so soft, so green, that fancy
cannot make them aught save pillows for the weary. I have seen a tramp
sleeping there and envied him his unconscious return to the good old
_insouciance_ which was warm with the thought that in the midst of
death we are yet alive.


IV

From the churchyard run twelve footpaths; some ending at farmhouses
close by; some losing themselves in the nearest road; one leading
nowhere, nor of any use to-day, since the house which drew it thither
across the wheat is under the cow-parsley and grass; one going on
without end, touching here and there a farmhouse, crossing a road,
passing in at the door of an inn and out through the garden, as if some
friendly man had made the path by following his heart’s desire. Most of
the paths led up on to the hills among which the village is set. From
the highest part, in spring, the warmth and life of the scene below
contrast strangely with its immense age, as the new brazen leaves of
the oak with their ancient trunk. The houses are old, the church older,
the farm wall yonder is partly the remains of a castle of Norman date.
The hedges twist so fantastically because they also are old, marking
ancient paths, the edges of departed woods, the gradually advancing
line of men’s camp fires overcoming the wilderness. In that hollow
the gemote used to sit. Here a company of cavalry charged down the
hill and to a man went over the chalk pit to the road and to death.
There stood an abbey, now speaking only through a curve added to the
undulations of the land. In the next village a poet was born. A dolmen
rises out of the wheat in one field, like a quotation from an unknown
language in the fair page of a book. The names of the places are in
the same language, and yet how smoothly they issue from the lips. The
little roads, so old, wind among the fields timidly as if they marked
the path of one creeping with difficulty through forest coeval with
the world. Some roads have disappeared--there where the wheat grows
thin in a narrow band across the field. Another is disappearing; worn
to the depth of some feet below the surrounding fields by the feet
of adventurers, lovers, exiles, plain endurers of life, its end is
to become a groove full of hazels and birds, the innermost kernel of
the land, because nobody owns and nobody uses it. In contrast with
those, how certain of its aim the great road running east and west,
the road of conqueror, pilgrim, merchant, the embodiment of will
and opportunity; and that, too, so old that heron and rook seem to
recognise it as they go over at nightfall. There is no age that does
not play its part in the symphony of this June scene. And yet, standing
still upon the ridge commanding it, when the roads are overhung by
the blythe new green of beech leaves and paved with their ruddy
chaff, these things become a part of the silence and clear air which
they trouble and enrich as do the storied pavements and walls of a
cathedral, thrilling the ear and shaming the powers of the eye, so that
in the end the mind vibrates with the strangely interwoven melodies of
joy in the life that still triumphs within us, and of acquiescence in
the death which will leave of us not so much trace as can add to the
silence and clear air one tone audible to mortal men.




CHAPTER XXII

ST. MARTIN’S SUMMER


In November I returned for a day to a lonely cottage which I had known
in the summer; and all its poppies were gone. Here and there, in the
garden, could be found a violet, a primrose, a wood sorrel, flowering;
the forget-me-nots and columbines had multiplied and their leaves were
dense in the borders; the broad row of cabbages gleamed blue in a
brief angry light after rain; the black currant leaves were of pure,
translucent amber at the ends of the branches. In the little copses the
oaks made golden islands in the lakes of leafless ash, and the world
was very little in a lasting mist.

Yet it was not impossible to reach greedily ahead to spring, and I
was doing so, in spite of the incredibly early fall of night amid the
whirling and crying of lapwings, when, suddenly, a dead elm tree spoke
of the summer that was past. Dead, it had been worn by the summer
landscape as a memorial, as a “reminiscential amulet.” It alone was now
still the same, and strangely it spoke of the summer which it had not
shared; and I recalled swiftly a night and daybreak of July.

All night we had sat silent with our books. There was no other company
within a mile save that of the tall clock, with a face like a harvest
moon, which did not tick, but stood silent with hands together
pointing at twelve o’clock, seeming to rest, and to be content with
resting, at the tranquil and many-thoughted midnight which it had so
often celebrated alone until we came. But we were glad of the clock.
It allowed us to measure the rich summer night only by the changing
enchantments of Burton’s and Cervantes’s and Hudson’s page, and by the
increasing depth of the silence which the owl and restless lapwing
broke no more than one red ship breaks the purple of a wide sea. It
is a commonplace that each one of us is alone, that every piece of
ground where a man stands is a desert island with footprints of unknown
creatures all round its shore. Once or twice in a life we cry out that
we know the footprints; we even see the boats of the strangers putting
out from the shore; we detect a neighbouring island through the haze,
and creatures of like bearing to ourselves moving there. On that night
a high tide had washed every footprint away, and we were satisfied,
raising not a languid telescope to the horizon, nor even studying the
sands at our feet.

Not less strangely or sweetly than it creeps in among dreams, came in
the whisper of the first swallows of the dawn among our books; and
Cleopatra, the cat, slipped out through the window and left me.

But it happened that I rose and drew a curtain aside to see whether she
went to the woods or to the barn. The night was over. The pool at the
bottom of the garden was glazed and dim and slightly crumpled, like the
eye of a dead bird; and all its willows were grim.

In the garden there was a bee. A little wind broke up the poppies petal
by petal, so that they vanished like fair children in the midst of
their perfections--cut off, and marked in the memory chiefly by the
blank they leave, and not by an abundance such as older people entail
upon us to mimic life. Hardly had I ceased to watch them than it was
day. The cattle in a distant meadow stood still at the edge of their
own shadows as if at the edges of pools. The dead elm tree seemed
but a skull-capped, foolish jester who set a sharper edge upon our
appetite for summer and the sun. The corn, the woods, rejoiced. The
green woodpecker laughed and shone in his flight, which undulated as
if he had been crossing invisible hedges. A south-west wind arose and
rain fell softly, yet not so soothingly but that an odd thought thrust
itself into my mind.

I thought of how Cervantes was not enjoying it, and in a moment I saw
him and Burton and Wordsworth and Charles Lamb close by, crouching and
grey, as if they had been buried alive, under knotted cables of oak
root, deep under the earth which was then bearing carnation and wild
rose. The wind found out the dead elm tree and took counsel in its
branches and moaned, although the broad light now reigned steadfastly
over leagues of shining fields.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE PRIDE OF THE MORNING


The sun has been up for an hour without impediment, but the meadows
are rough silver under a mist after last night’s frost. The greens in
cottage gardens are of a bright, cold hue between blue and grey, which
is fitter for the armour of heaven, or the landscape of some strong
mystic, than for one who loathes to leave his bed. The blackbirds are
scattering the frost, and they live in glittering little hazes while
they flutter in the grass.

But the sky is of an eager, luminous pale blue that speaks of health
and impetuousness and success. Across it, low down, lie pure white
clouds, preserving, though motionless, many torn and tumultuous forms;
they have sharp edges against the blue and invade it with daggers of
the same white; they are as vivid in their place in that eager sky as
yews on a pale, bright lawn, or as lightning in blue night. If pure
and hale intelligence could be visibly expressed, it would be like
that. The eyes of the wayfarer at once either dilate in an effort
for a moment at least to be equal in beauty with the white and blue,
clear sky, or they grow dim with dejection at the impossibility. The
brain also dilates and takes deep breaths of life, and casts out stale
thought and coddled emotion. It scorns afterthought as the winds are
flouting the penitent half moon.

A squadron of wild fowl races through the crystal air; the mind expands
with their speed, and tries to share it, and believes that it succeeds.
A heron goes over solemnly, high up, and as if upon some starry
business in that profound, bright air; the mind at once attunes itself
to that majesty and directness and simplicity--

    “And each imagined pinnacle and steep
    of godlike hardship.”

A starling sits on the weathercock with ruffled feathers watching
the sky with one eye and then with the other, and his form and voice
are sharp and pure as they joyfully pierce the air. The weathercock
itself shines like Mars. Together, they speak of the cold and vigour
and health and beauty which abide somewhere in the sky to-day and not
inaccessibly.

High above me, here and there upon the road, stand oast-houses, with
their conical roofs ruddy against the sky, and over them the newly
painted white cowls point eastward, and in their whiteness seem to have
been set as a signal to say that it is the west wind after frost that
has made the world what it is; they point out a road which, if I could
follow it, would lead to the very court of mind and beauty, yonder,
afar off, where the wind and the heron and the wild ducks are going.
There I might learn to realise the long, joyous curves in which thought
and action and life itself sweep onward to their triumphs....

But I know well that long hopes and wide, vaulting thoughts are not
usually nourished by lane and footpath and highway, on and on; and
probably I shall stop at “The Black Horse” over the next hill, where a
man may always lighten his burden on a Tuesday by hearing the price of
beasts.




CHAPTER XXIV

THE METAMORPHOSIS


As the sun rose I watched a proud ash tree shedding its leaves after a
night of frost. It let them go by threes and tens and twenties; very
rarely, with little intervals, only one at a time; once or twice a
hundred in one flight. Leaflet--for they fall by leaflets--and stalk
twirled through the windless air as if they would have liked to fall
not quite so rapidly as their companions to that brown and shining and
oblivious carpet below. A gentle wind arose from the north and the
leaves all went sloping in larger companies to the ground--falling,
falling, whispering as they joined the fallen, they fell for a longer
time than a poppy spends in opening and shedding its husk in June.
But soon only two leaves were left vibrating. In a little while they
also, both together, make the leap, twinkling for a short space and
then shadowed and lastly bright and silent on the grass. Then the tree
stood up entirely bereaved and without a voice, in the silver light
of the morning that was still young, and wrote once more its grief in
complicated scribble upon a sky of intolerably lustrous pearl.

But by the next day the grief was healed, for what was clearest about
its branches was the swiftness and downward rushing and curving flight
which they suggested--as of birds stooping in lines to their tree-top
nests--as of divers at the moment when their descent mingles with their
ascent--as of winged Greek gods and goddesses slanting to earth with
wave-like breasts.




CHAPTER XXV

EARTH CHILDREN


I

Their house is a small russet cave of three dim compartments--part
of a farmhouse, the rest having fallen to ruin, and from human hands
to the starlings, the sparrows, and the rats. No one will live in
it again. Inside, it is held together by the solid poetry of their
lives, by gay-coloured, cheerful, tradesmen’s pictures of well-dressed
children and blooming horsewomen, and the dogs of gentlemen, memorial
cards of the dead, a few photographs, some picture post-cards pasted
over flaws in the wall, and the worn furniture of several disconnected
generations. The old man’s tools in the kitchen are noble--the heavy
wrought iron, two-toothed hoe, that falls pleasantly upon the hard clay
and splits it without effort and without jarring the hand, its ash
handle worn thin where his hand has glided at work, a hand that nothing
will wear smooth; the glittering, yellow handled spades and forks; the
disused shovel with which he boasts regretfully that he could dig his
garden when he lived on deep loam in a richer country than this; and
still the useless “hop-idgit” of six tynes--the Sussex “shim”--which he
retains to remind others, and perhaps himself, that he was a farmer
once. He had twenty or thirty acres and a few cows. The cows all died
in one year and he became a labourer.

His wife remembers those days. She was a tall woman and stooped at the
doorway thatch: now she cannot rise to it. For every day she went many
times to the sweet brook, a quarter of a mile away, rather than take
the grey liquor of the pond for her cows. That is how she came to be
bent like an oak branch on which children swing, or like a thorn that
knows the west wind on the hill or the shore. Now she cannot carry
a pail, for it would sweep the ground. She cannot see the apples in
autumn until they have fallen to her feet. Her flesh seems to have
assumed an animal sweetness, for her bees will cluster on the brown
hands. Birds and beasts take to her as to an old tree, though she has
pity for them, but no love. Sometimes as she sits at her door the
robins come fearlessly close to her--hedge-sparrows, too, if there
is nobody else near, and even the partridges that come for the ants
in the old dock roots. She watches them with her dull eye and seems
easily to have found a Franciscan friendliness when, as if angry with
the creatures for seeing her frailty, she stamps her feet and drives
them away. Then she relents and tries her power, as if she has half
persuaded herself that it is a happy talent. She will crush a mouse in
her fingers, and yet they still run over her in their merry business
night or day, as they would over a tree that has fallen, and proved
fatal to some of them in its death. Yet, in spite of her apparent
indifference, I think that she knows the animals more than we who
patronise them. Left alone with a cat, she shows, indeed, none of the
endearments of a civilised woman, but quietly concedes and demands
concessions very much as when a horse and some cows are sheltering from
the heat together in a limited shade.

She speaks hardly ever, except with animals. But in church her lips
move long after others are tired of “have mercy upon us.”

“Lord!” she says, “you are very kind, but your children are very many.
All the sparrows in my garden have to be tended, and I suppose the
mice, the moles, the worms, the lizards, the shining things that run
and fly and crawl, and all the flowers, trees and birds. Oh! Lord,
I had seventeen children and among so many you seemed not to notice
some, and they died just anyhow in their happiness, and perhaps then
you have forgotten me altogether, and I shall not even be taken away.
I have heard that the good shall prosper. You have said it yourself.
But I know not what is good or what is prosperity. For what am I? I
am willing to learn, yet I am not taught. Am I good? Am I prospering?
Lord! what am I to do? There are thousands and thousands of strong and
rich and beautiful and happy things in the world, but as for me, I seem
to crawl about among them in darkness like a mole. Nevertheless, glory
to God the father, Lord of all, though you have done some things that
I would not have done, and as to the weather ... but I know not your
designs. Glory to the Son though he has long been dead, he was a good
man. Glory to the Holy Ghost, which I do believe in, though they say
there are no ghosts really. I am a poor old woman, born in Scotland,
and a Scotswoman still. My name is Margaret Helen Page, and I live at
the Hoath Cottage in the wood, at the end of the lane, where you turn
up by ‘The Blue Anchor,’ in going to Horsmonden. There I shall abide
and am to be found there, except on Sunday evening in fine weather,
when I come to this holy place. Oh, come, Lord, when you have looked
after all the sparrows, some day, and take me.”

“If,” she said once, “if God’s a Christian man, I do not know what he
means by this weather.”

“I reckon he manages about as well as could be expected in such a funny
world,” replied her husband. “Remember old Farmer King who used to
swear at the weather so. One day when he had got his hay dry at last
and saw it coming on to rain, he picks up a handful and stuffs it into
his pocket, and says he will carry that much home dry at any rate, but
if he didn’t fall into the brook on his way back and get wet to the
skin. Such are the ways of God.”

But she was not convinced, for, with all her feebleness of body and
conversation, she proves that man is older than Christ and Buddha,
than Jehovah and Jupiter, and that not even such presences on the
earth have left behind footpaths in which he can wander in security.
She compels us to realise, if we have not done so before, that if we
could isolate the child of Christian parents on a solitary island away
from all religious influences, he would grow into something curiously
different from a Christian, and something marvellously ancient too.
Her language, stripped of its tattered and scanty Christianisms, and
her acts, without that Sunday journey, reveal the multitude’s eternal
paganism, which religions ruffle and sink into again--the paganism
of the long-lived, most helpless, proudest and loneliest of animals,
contending with winter and bad weather, with accident and disease
and strange fears; rejoicing in fine weather, in strength, in the
appetites; hating decay; distrusting the inhumanity of the heavens
and animals and men from other climates; uncertain, troubled, and
thinking little, about the future. For her the world is a flat place,
decorated with a pattern of familiar and other fields, with hills,
rivers, houses, a sea, a London, a Highland valley of children and
old-fashioned ways, and infinitely far off towards the sunset, lands
of tigers, monkeys, snakes, strange trees and flowers and men, with
earthquakes, volcanoes, huge storms, all lit by sun and moon and
stars--and a heaven also and a hell. Very real to her is the snow
and the thaw-drip from the roof, the dry heat of summer, the apple
blossom, the coming of the swallows, the growth of carrots, potatoes,
cabbages and weeds, the coming home of her husband sober or drunk,
the use of a few silver coins week by week, the announcement that old
Mrs. Fuller is dead or that Mrs. Rixon has another child, the cold at
four o’clock on a January morning and the warmth all night in July
as she sits sleeping, because of her doubled back, like the corpse
of a caveman in his grave, the endlessness of days when she is alone
and has nothing to do but to remember and try to remember. She has no
hopes, no purposes. I have seen her picking up oak branches in May
after the fall of the great trees, and she will go on after her arms
are filled, adding to the pile from above, and at the same time losing
others from the sides, until at last it is dark and she goes home. Even
so she does in life, accumulating memories and affairs, and letting
them fall, until the end. Yet it is a little hard that there should be
no kindly god or goddess to deceive her and receive her prayers and
sanctify her little unnecessary acts, that the very wood at night,
round about the house, is merely dark and full of sounds and no home
for her. The beautiful Jewish stories told to her by clergymen of some
birth and education, though she will gladly listen to them, are little
better than ribands for oak faggots--for, though a Pagan, she has no
gods. The gods of this part of the earth have long been hurled into
Tartarus and bolted there in that grotesque company which the prophets
of the ages have gathered together. And so she goes through life, like
a child in a many-windowed house, looking on sea and barren land, and
full of corridors, resounding and silent by hours, with dim, enormous
apartments, bolted doors, and here and there a picture, a skeleton, an
old toy, a reminiscent voice....


II

Compared with Margaret Helen Page, her husband, Robert, is a citizen
of the world. He knows all the farmers in the neighbourhood, thatching
for one, haymaking for another, gardening, woodcutting, washing
or pole-pulling in the hop-garden for others. He can even make the
beautiful, five-barred gates, with their noble top bars, tapered and
shaped like a gun-stock and barrel. All the inns are known to him, and
the labourers and wayfaring men who resort to them. He will gossip, and
the rich do not disdain to listen to the fabrications and selections
which he mixes charmingly for them alone. The workhouse or death is
not more than a few years ahead of him, for he stoops with difficulty
and will make haste for no man; yet he will cheerfully quarrel with a
farmer in the middle of the winter, pick up his coat, take his wages
and go off to the inn and drink all that he has; if the farmer grumbles
in September that Robert has been taking merely an honest bushel of
hops from the pickers he will not give way to the extent of a handful.
No one can thatch as he can. His tall haystacks look like churches when
they are new, and so they remain. The roofs of his cornricks are shaped
like breasts, with convex curves that make the same lines against the
sky as you walk round. His vegetable plots are invariably as flat as
lawns, their sides evenly sloping to the paths. He stops in the midst
of his work and smokes and thinks; and he expects to be paid for his
thinking. In the spring he catches moles, hanging them up on the briers
or thorns with great care, twisting the twigs round them so that they
stay until fur and bone are indistinguishable and break up into dust.

At the inns he hears the gossip of the universe, heaping up as in a
marine store the details of murders, swindles, divorces, expensive
pictures of Venus, etc., horse races, cricket matches, letters from
archbishops and literary men, distant wars, new foods and diseases
and cures, automobiles, the cost of rich men’s dinners, how to live
happily, the extravagance of the poor, how to feed on a shilling a
week. These things are “in print” and therefore true. But he utters
no opinion of his own. He consents to exchange his recollections and
to accept others; then he sinks into the happy silence of those who
have not the gift of ratiocination. What dark, undisturbed depths of
personality are his--immense depths yielding to the upper world, now
and then, an ejaculation, as Gilbert White’s well yielded a black
lizard at times.

“I wonder,” he ejaculated once, “I wonder what God did with himself
before he made such a kettle of fish as this world.”

Again, “Now supposing that all these things in the Bible about Adam and
the beginning had never been written down, and we had not been told
that God did it, what should we have done? Should we have found out
these things for ourselves?”

Once he related a dream:--

“Sometimes when I am all alone, and my old girl says the same, it
seems to me that I am not of much account; it is as if I had been
forgotten and left off the register, and how will it be at the Judgment
Day? Sometimes I think to myself, It will be fine sleeping and never
hearing the blessed trumpet and getting into that crowd. But one
night I dreamed that I had died and was up above, and that an angel
woke me up and asked me to take his trumpet, because he wanted a bit
of sleeping after waiting ever since Adam’s time, and I was to blow
it at twelve o’clock and then it would be Judgment Day. Well, as he
looked like a gentleman, I said I would and I took the trumpet and
stared at it a bit, because it was that trumpet that was to wake the
dead for the Judgment Day. I was wide awake and I could see the dead
all round me, more of them than there are mangolds in twenty acres.
Close to me were the angels, and they were all asleep, worn out with
waiting so long, I suppose. They had wings like peacocks and owls and
orpingtons--beautiful! I enjoyed myself. But when it got near to twelve
o’clock I got a bit anxious. The angel was fast asleep and I did not
see why I should wake him up, or anybody else. Once or twice I put the
trumpet to my lips, but I thought--No, I would sleep myself and there
would be no Judgment Day. But I could not sleep for thinking of the
keeper who used to kill my old girl’s cats as fast as they grew up and
went into the woods at night; and, without thinking what I was at, I
blew the trumpet and what with the terrible noise and the sight of all
these poor people waking up I awoke myself and my old girl said that
I had made a noise like a trumpet in my sleep. But it did seem a pity
that they should all wake up just as if they had to go to ploughing and
all that again.”

But Bacchus is his only god, who has already given him many gifts.
On Friday nights he is as a child upon the throne, holding himself
wonderfully straight on the settle at the inn, never letting go of the
tankard except to have it filled, and smiling delicately with weary
eyes, as he drinks the six ale--

    “Much more of price and of more gratious powre
    In this, then that same water of Ardenne,
    The which Rinaldo drunck in happie howre,
    Described by that famous Tuscan penne:
    For that had might to change the hearts of men
    From love to hate, a change of evil choise:
    But this doth hatred make in love to brenne,
    And heavy heart with comfort doth rejoyce.
    Who would not to this vertue rather yeeld his voice?”

At such times he speaks little, except a few words of nonsense to
strangers who come in; but he smiles continually, as if he had forgiven
all things, and even as if he silently preached forgiveness to all the
world. His tenderness to children and animals is wonderful. He would
pass as a saint, an angelic doctor, or even something higher. To some,
indeed, he might seem to be the original from which field artists
have everywhere modelled the scarecrow. The young men recognise the
resemblance and smile. The older men perhaps see in him an apotheosis
of themselves, more twisted, more starved, greener in the hat and coat,
and they do not smile. He has a lean, acorn-coloured face, adorned with
relenting blue eyes, small hawk nose, clear-cut shrivelled lips and
chin, and fresh brown hair hanging like a lion skin over his head and
neck, and curling sumptuously.

I can fancy him a lesser god in some mythology. To him come the weak
and ashamed; the shamefaced female tramp who went hungry, having asked
for a direction to Maidstone instead of for food, because the farmer’s
voice was hard and he was young and strong and her skirt was old and
her breast shrunken; and he who looked through the hedge at some fair
children playing and then, because one of them screamed at catching
sight of him in searching for a nest, raised a hideous cry and sent
them terrified away; the curst, scandalous lean maid who melts with
momentary tenderness over her starved and piebald cat, and calls him
“Prettiest”; all such as are foolish and slow of thought and slower of
speech, and laugh at what they love because others do and then weep
in solitude; those who, unable to care for anything much, grow ardent
in a simulated affection and blush when a cruel strong one finds them
out; those who know not what they desire except a little tranquillity
before the end and know that they shall not obtain it; the drunken and
obscene who are without graces, but also without repentance; those
who vainly complain and fret about the evils which they have deserved
and cannot endure; those who cannot keep up with life because of one
beautiful or terrible thing in the past; those who mourn, they know
not why; the little base ones who admire good and lovely things, and
fear to hurt them by approval. And they should come to this god,
Robert, as one in whom each saw his little unknown virtue and should
be lifted up thereat. They should bring to his altars sour bread and
rotten flesh and fruit fallen before its time, and worn-out, shattered
things; and his priests, leprous, and scrofulous, and squint-eyed
all, should rejoice then and tell the worshippers to be no more cast
down, because in this, their god, were to be found all their little
virtues, and behold! he endured for ever and looked upon them pitifully
and interceded continually with the high gods. Then would they drink
until they were thoroughly drunken, and the god would tell them that
death came soon, and that their sleep would be heavier than they could
dream of, for no king, or judge, or policeman, or clergyman, could ever
disturb their sleep, though armed with sharpest swords and most cruel
words.




CHAPTER XXVI

NOVEMBER RAIN


Close, perpendicular, quiet rain came upon me when I was ten miles
from last night’s shelter and ten miles from my end. Shelter was not
near, nor indeed to be thought of in an untrodden lane which had been,
for some time, and seemed to go on for ever, winding through the
delicious, vacant country of a late autumn Sunday, while it was yet
early in the day and yet not so early but that the milking was over,
and the milk carts gone, and the cattle satisfied and slow after their
first questing in the fields. The rain was so dense, and the light so
restrained, and the drops hung so about my eyes, and the sound and the
sweetness of it made my brain so well contented with all that umber
country asleep, that what I saw was little compared with what reached
me by touch and by darker channels still. I rarely see much in the
country--a few herbs underfoot, the next field, the horizon woods,
some brief light that shows only its departing hem; for, like others,
I always carry out into the fields a vast baggage of prejudices from
books and strong characters whom I have met. My going forth, although
simple enough to the eye, is truly as pompous as that of a rajah who
goes through the jungle on a tall and richly encrusted elephant, with
a great retinue, and much ceremony and noise. As he frightens bird
and beast, and tramples on herb and grass, so I scatter from my path
many things which are lying in wait for a discoverer. There is no
elephant more heavy-footed and no rifle more shattering than the egoism
of an imitative brain. And thus the little thing I saw was an unusual
discovery.

It was a triangular, six-acre wood below me, across a bare and soaking
ploughland. The wood was mainly of ash and the myriad stems were a grey
mist, only denser and a little clearer than the rain itself. Out of
them rose half a hundred oaks which were exuberant in foliage of hues
so vigorous and splendid in their purple that it was impossible to
think of it as on the edge of death, but easy to think of it as in a
deathless prime. One thrush sang heartily somewhere deep among the ash
trees, and that was the only sound, for the sound of the rain was but
a carpet on which that song walked forth, delicate footed, haughty and
beautiful....

When I had walked another mile, the wood was out of sight, the thrush
unheard. The wood is now purple immortally, for ever that song emerges
from its heart, as free from change as one whom we remember vividly
in the tip-toe of his exulting youth, and dying then has escaped
huskiness, and a stoop, and foul breath, and a steady view of life.




CHAPTER XXVII

JANUARY SUNSHINE


It is a quiet valley in which moist fields of meadow, mowing grass,
mangold, and stubble are bounded from one another by deep ditches and
good hedges of maple, thorn and hazel, with here and there an oak, or
by oak woods that rise above an undergrowth of grey ash. Every half
mile there is a tiled farmhouse with low-pitched roof and low, square
windows, their frames painted white, and between them rose trees
climbing; in the gardens of most, two plots of lawn are surrounded
by rich dark borders and divided by a path; and each has a careless
shrubbery of Portuguese laurel, lilac, syringa and elder, hardly cut
off from the orchard that grows as it will above grey rank grass, and
close by at least two ponds. One little stream winds through the valley
and gains at times much glory of speed and sound and foam from the rain
off the hillside. A few grey, smooth roads cross the valley.

It is January, and the predominant grass is green and shining in the
sun. The rusty oaks and the farmhouse roofs glow. The bare clean hedges
glitter with all their stems of olive hazel, silver oak and ash and
white thorn, and blackthorn ruddy where the cattle have rubbed. A lark
rises and sings. A flock of linnets scatters and drops little notes
like a rain of singing dew, and over all is a high blue sky, across
which the west wind sets a fleet of bright white clouds to sail; into
this blue sky the woods of the horizon drive their black teeth.

In the immense crystal spaces of fine windy air thus bounded by blue
sky, black woods and green grass, the jackdaws play. They soar,
they float, they dance, and they dive and carve sudden magnificent
precipices in the air, crying all the time with sharp joyous cries that
are in harmony with the great heights and dashing wind. The carter’s
boy raises his head from the furrow and shouts to them now and then,
while the brass furnishings of his horses gleam, their shoulders grow
proud and their black tails stream out above the blue furrow and the
silver plough.

Suddenly a pheasant is hurled out of a neighbouring copse; something
crosses the road; and out over a large and shining meadow goes a fox,
tall and red, going easily as if he sailed in the wind. He crosses that
meadow, then another, and he is half a mile away before a loud halloo
sounds in the third field, and a mile away before the first hound
crosses the road upon his scent.

Run hard hounds, and drown the jackdaws’ calling with your concerted
voices. It is good to see your long swift train across the meadow and
away, away; on such a day a man would give everything to run like
that. Run hard, fox, and may you escape, for it would not be well to
die on such a day, unless you could perchance first set your fair
teeth into the throats of the foolish ones who now break through the
hedge on great horses and pursue you--I know not why--ignorant of the
command that has gone forth from the heart of this high blue heaven, Be
beautiful and enjoy and live!




CHAPTER XXVIII

THE BARGE


Spring and summer and autumn had come--flowing into one another with
that secrecy which, as in the periods of our life, spares us the pain
of the irretraceable step--and still a golden tree stood here and there
in the hollowed lawns.... Snow fell on singing thrushes and golden
trees, and when it was over a half moon of untouched grass under a
dense hawthorn was as a green shadow on the white land.... Then the
year paused; there was a swallow still here and there; but again there
was snow....

The world had been black and white for many days. The cygnet-coloured
sky had been low from dawn to sunset; rarely a cloud dimly appeared in
it, seen and lost and seen again, like a slow fish in rippling water.
By night the iron firmament had been immense and remote.

Out of doors, as we walked, it was a source of faint satisfaction that
we were clothed and fed; and it was easy to think of a less happy
condition. We were in a primitive world. In those short days the world
seemed to have grown larger; distance was more terrible. A friend
living thirty miles off seemed inaccessible in the snow. The earth
had to be explored, discovered, and mapped again; it was as it had
been centuries ago, and progress was not very real to our minds. Only
when we saw a great fire at an inn, a red face or two, a copper vessel
thrust in among the coals to warm the ale, did there appear to be much
being done to fight winter and to subjugate this primitive world. We
saw the birds around us for what they were--little, tender, hungry
things, entirely sorrowful, easily killed, and not mere melodious
attendants upon our delight.

A train crawling along the valley at a distance was very feeble in our
eyes. The strength and purpose were concerted. It was like a thought
which is without the implements for action--pathetic and impotent, it
was absorbed easily by the vast white land. It shrieked and was lost in
a tunnel.

There were only two real things--the cold and the thought of man. The
cold expressed itself easily by the whiteness and the leaden shade,
the great power of distance, the obliteration of colours, footpaths,
landmarks, the silence. Thought was not equally vigorous. It could not
sustain itself alone. Men had to walk hard, to talk and even then to
change the subjects rapidly, especially if they were abstract. Thus to
compare the ham of Wiltshire with that of South Wales was pleasant and
easy for a time; but to discuss the nature of love or style or virtue
was not long possible.

Under the ice of a pond lay the last summer’s nest of a grebe among the
rotten reeds. High and low in the hedges, old nests were as the jetsam
of summer’s wreck--as if a galleon should be represented by a boot on
the shore.

Through the land went a dusky river, and in it a black barge with
merrily painted prow. It was guided by a brown woman wearing a yellow
scarf and she stood boldly up. In the midst of it a man played on a
concertina and sang. The barge was light and high in the water; lonely
and unnoticed, it threaded the long curves and still the concertina
lamented and the tall woman stood boldly up. As it disappeared the
dolorous air began to darken and I knew why that barge stood so high
and light--because its cargo was merely all the flowers and the birds
and the joys and pains of spring, the contentments of summer, the
regrets of autumn, of all men and women who had lived through the now
dying year; and no one claimed them, no one sought them, no one stood
on the bank to salute them.




CHAPTER XXIX

A WINTER MORNING


Night was soon to pass into a winter day as I looked out of the window
to see what kind of a world it was that had been, since I began to
read, shutting me off effectually from everything but my book.

    “And but the flitter-winged verse must tell,
    For truth’s sake, what woe afterwards befell,
    ’Twould humour many a heart to leave them thus,
    Shut from the busy world of more incredulous.”

The words were still fresh in my brain.

But, outside, the trees and barns and shed were quiet and dim, and as
much submerged and hidden from the air in which I had been living as
the green streets of motionless lily and weed at the bottom of some
lonely pool where carp and tench go slowly. The road went straight away
from the window to the invisible beyond; hard and dry, it was trying
to shine, as if it recalled the sunlight. Half way along, at one side,
under a broad oak, there was a formless but pregnant shadow. The farm
buildings that lay about the road were huddled, dark, colourless and
indistinguishable because of their shadows; they might have been heaped
up by a great plough, of which the road was the shining furrow; they
were not so much the vague wreckage of what I had known yesterday, as
a chaos out of which perhaps something was to be born. Yet the outside
world was vaster than it had seemed when I could see three ranges of
hills and guess at the sea beyond; and strange it was when the words--

    “She saw the young Corinthian Lycius
    Charioting foremost in the envious race
    Like a young love, with calm, uneager face,
    And fell into a swooning love of him”--

came back to me. How frail and perilous and small was the poet’s
shielded world! The outside world threatened it as the smooth
escarpment of tall, toppling water threatens the little piping
sea-bird. And yet this poet’s world was for the time being my life.
Beyond his words there were, perhaps, the gay, the dear, the beautiful
persons whom I knew; Nobby, the tinker, and many more; but probably
they slept; they were vain if they were not fictitious; if they could
be supposed to live, my only proof of it was that somehow they were
connected with a very distant light that refused to go out among the
westward copses. They were hardly more credible than the words of a
stale preacher talking of charity, or an artful poet writing of love.

So I clung to Keats, the reality, until the road grew almost white,
and under that broad oak some rational, nay, beautiful outlines begin
to appear, which the shadow enveloped like a cocoon. The outlines were
hardly built until they were seen to be a waggon, and its birth out of
the shadow was a mighty thing that shared the idiom of stately trees
and the motions of great waters and of cliffs that look on sunset and
a noble sea. Dimly, uncertainly, powerfully, never quite expressing
itself in any known language--as was natural in what seemed to belong
to an early brood of the giant earth--the waggon emerged, with
ponderous wheels and slender, curving timbers and trailing shafts. The
chariot of Dis coming up to Persephone looked thus majestic. Yet the
waggon suggested nothing definite, at least no history. It had no such
articulate power. But antiquity played about it as, an hour before, it
had played about my shelves and books. It was simply the richer for
its long life, like a violin or a wise man; and, like them, it neither
carried its legend on its exterior nor encouraged anything more than
joyful surmise.

It was the one clearly visible piece of man’s work among all those
potent shadows and uncertain forms of roof and wall; it was crowned by
the last stars. Becoming clearer as morning came, it was an important
part of the recreation of the world, and involved in it, just as a
brazen image may seem to be part of the good fortune or calamity
which follows prayer to it. It filled the white road with emotion.
It was more intelligible than some men are when they say “I worship”
or “I love.” Keats left my mind. From my memory, I added melodies of
voice and harp and reed, and noise of seas and winds in forests and
houses by night, and organ music, with its many demons blithe and
terrible, exploring the skiey roof of some cathedral and knocking at
the clerestory to get out, floating, sad or happy, about the aisles,
and settling at last to make the old purples and greens and blues in
the glass more solemn than before; and yet I could not reproduce the
melody or anything like it, with which the old waggon pervaded the
farmyard. Slowly the light came, and the world was filled with it
as imperceptibly as the brain with a great thought. It fell upon the
spokes of the waggon wheel, and they seemed to move. Then all was over.

The clear face of things which it is so hard to enjoy was back again.
The determined starlings flew swift and straight overhead. The clouds
about the risen sun went stately upon their errands through the sky.




PART III

THE UPLAND




CHAPTER XXX

CHERRY BLOSSOM


In front, a tall beechen hill closes up the gulf that runs out of the
valley into the heart of the chalk down. The hill fills nearly half
the sky, and just above it stands the white full moon, as one who
looks over his lands. It warms the low, pale, curdled sky, but does
not disturb the darkness of the beeches. All its light seems to fall
and settle, as if it would dwell there for ever in the cherry trees on
either hand. All are blossoming, and in their branches the nightingales
sing out of the blossom, dispersing what ruins remain of the world of
yesterday, and building rapidly those tall watch towers that last until
dawn, which men may climb and from their summits see what may make them
out of love with the earth.

The past day is long past, the day of fighting, digging, buying,
selling, writing; and if there are still men on the earth they are all
equal in the trances of passion or sleep; the day to come is not to be
thought of. The moon reigns; you rule. The centuries are gathered up
in your hand. You and the moonlight and the nightingale and the cherry
blossom have your own way with them all night long. It is true then
that Virgil, Catullus, Crashaw, Burton, Shelley ... live still, and
Horace, Racine, Bishop Beveridge ... never lived. You exult because
you are alive and your spirit possesses this broad, domed earth. Poor
thing as you are, you have somehow gained a power of expression like
the nightingale’s, a pure translucency like the petals of the flowers;
and as never before to man or woman you open your eyes widely and
frankly, even the limbs move with the carelessness of the animals, the
features lose the rigidity that comes of compromise and suppression.

Walking slowly thus, with a bowed head, you find an image of yourself
and the universe in a shallow pool among the trees. The pool is your
own mind. The flowers at its edge--hyacinth, primrose, marsh-marigold,
and all the trees and their foliage--are the intimate and permanent
companions of your life, and they are clearly mirrored in the water.
An oak draws a long, snaky shadow from side to side, with the head
and neck of a sitting dove among the leaves. And there, too, are the
stars and the moon, brought down into that homely company of trees and
flowers by the shining water, and preserved there in strangely woven
patterns; just as in your mind you mingle visions of the world, the
past, the imaginary, with your own domestic surroundings and acts, and
a changing mood, like a puff of wind across the pool, erases them. How
sovereign and proud your own form plunged among these mirrored stars
and leaves! On such a night an uncourageous lover, who sat at the edge
with his mistress, was lured to a strange boldness by long gazing at
the two blissful figures down there among the clouds. “See how fair
they are,” he said, “and how happy and close. Let us make them kiss.”
And the shadows kissed in the bosom of the pool.




CHAPTER XXXI

THE FOX HUNT


We had driven ten miles through a country that rose and fell with
large, stormy lines of hillock and hill. A March sun was bright, but
a sharpness lingered in the air from last night’s frost, like a cold
spring in a warm lake. Over the hazy, genial oak woods on the hills
sailed slow white gulls all crying, “wheel whill” with a shrillness
that suited the high blue sky. Sowers went across the long red fields,
casting dark seeds that flew in curved clouds before them at each
second step and vanished in the wind. On the steep roads the dust
whirled in curves as of perfect dancers, which the kestrel repeated on
a grand scale high overhead. Thrushes sang at ash tops and in hedges.
And we four talked, making such harmonious music to a fine day as men
may, with jest and recollection and anticipation of the meet of the fox
hounds to which we were going, two to ride and two to follow afoot.

Within a mile of the meet we got down at a farmhouse, where the horses
were awaiting their owners and the yeoman was to join us.

The farm-buildings made almost a complete quadrangle with the side of
the house--stables, cow stalls, a granary of ancient stone, a barn
with a low-arched Tudor doorway like a broad back ready to receive a
weight, and ladders and lengths of oak leaning against the walls. There
stood the horses, nodding by their grooms, with restless fetlocks; a
red calf flung up its heels amongst the flying, yellow straw; the fowls
were stately and fluttered by turns. The house was all white, except
for the roof of stone “slats” and the large dark windows. Close to
it, away from the farm buildings, lay the crooked orchard. We passed
through the shrubbery, without offending its warbling blackbirds, and
across a lawn to the door.

The yeoman was of a noble, antique type; of medium height; straight,
but mobile, and stooping gently as he listened, with moderate, neat,
large-featured head; reticent, slow but beautiful of speech, ready with
laughter. He made me think of the last Roman who spoke the speech of
Virgil and Cæsar quite pure. He was in his prime, past thirty, the last
of his family, and still holding their few hundred acres, a bachelor
who had not long since won his captivity from the pale, fair-haired
beauty at his side, to judge by her commanding smiles from time to time.

They were sure of a fox, he said; not so sure to kill, because the
ground was dry again in spite of last night’s frost, and scent bad.

As we stood round the room eating sandwiches--there was yet half an
hour before the meet--one asked him if he knew anything of an old house
in a valley some miles away. All the doors and walls were panelled with
mirrors amidst their bright oak, and as you sat there you saw your
party repeated as if through the walls in the neighbouring rooms. He
had not time to answer when an old bent and pallid man, his uncle,
who had sat unobserved, began to speak in a feeble, singing voice,
strangely laughing at times.

“I know the house with the mirrors. The Merediths lived there for three
hundred years, and I knew the last of them well. She was Arabella. She
had no brothers, and there is no child. I was a young man then, and
though you may not easily believe it, when you see this arm, I was a
fine, strong man. Ha! ha! ha!”

He stopped to chuckle abstractedly, with ambiguous irony at the
contrast between his early lustihood and the decrepitude which had
coffined it. Perhaps his nephew winced at the garrulity and such irony
as the thick laughter disclosed to him, but he did nothing to divert
the talk, nor did Enid, his betrothed, when she filled a glass with
whisky and water for the old man, who did but admire it with a sudden
satisfaction, and then continued:--

“Well, I was about the age of my nephew yonder, and I had never known
what pain or misery was, except when I was nearly beaten by a gipsy in
running down Mowland Hill. I farmed and I hunted, and it was understood
that I was to marry an amiable and pretty young woman whom my father
admired so much that he was willing that nobody should be my wife if
not she. But I was in no haste, and indeed I was not fond of women.
Others I knew seemed stupid or frivolous. This one was chiefly busy
with the church and the poor. I respected her, and I believe now that
she would have looked after me well in my old age. She understood me;
we had known one another since we were children, and I used to delight
to stop my horse to speak to her on a fine day when I was feeling fresh
and gay. At last it was agreed that we were soon to be married, and I
did not know why to draw back.”

Enid glanced quickly at my host, all the command having left her meek
smile, and as quickly dropped her eyes. It seemed to me that the glance
betrayed a slender fear or anticipation which she was ashamed of
immediately. By his over-rigid tranquillity it may be that her lover
gave a similar sign, the only one, and lost on her.

“No,”--the old man paused, as though he would still have liked to
unearth some excuse which he might, fifty years back, have made for
breaking his troth. “No,” he said, questioningly, “I did not know why
to draw back. But one day a woman I had sometimes heard of--she had
been away at school and with friends almost continually--came and
joined our hunt for the first time--Arabella Meredith. She was over one
bank before me, and I thought that Edith would never have done that. We
had a good day and a long one. As I was riding back I was pretty well
satisfied when with great clatter Miss Meredith rode up to me. She had
had a long day and she was hot with her gallop, and yet as she came
alongside, I turning my horse so that both curvetted together in the
narrow road, she was as fresh as if it had been raining and she just
out to take the air, as fresh as a young lime leaf and as clean and,
if you understand me, as inhuman in a way, at least I thought so that
evening when I was alone. When I saw her eyes, as I soon did, they
seemed to belong to somebody else hiding there, and not the woman I had
seen jumping.

“‘Mr. Arnold,’ she said, ‘I hear you are to be married....’

“‘Yes,’ I said.

“‘Then you will marry me,’ she said.

“In a mazy way I said that I would think about it, and she replied
instantly,--

“‘Please ride as far as our house with me--not but that I can look
after myself, though it is fifteen miles away, and the roads bad and
dark--and you will have plenty of time to think about it.’

“I rode home with her, and I did not think at all, and I did not speak;
nor did she, except to the horse; and at the end I said that I would
marry her if she were willing.

“‘I will think about it,’ she said, ‘good-night,’ and I turned my horse
to do the ten miles that divided the house with the mirrors from this.
It was an extraordinary thing to do, I think. The next day I told Edith
that I could not marry her because I wanted to marry Miss Meredith.
There was trouble, but it is a long time ago. Edith never married,
but continued to help the church and the poor in another part of the
country. She was a good woman.”

Enid had flushed--was it angrily?--at the first mention of Arabella.
She was become serious and very still, and looked no more at her
neighbour who was apparently studying some drawings of spaniels. Seeing
the gentle girl’s pain I was sorry that I had not helped her in the
attempt to check the old man. But that was impossible now.

“Arabella was wonderful,” he exclaimed, his old voice slowing to a
stronger tone and a new solemnity. “Arabella was wonderful. I believed
then that for a man to live as I had lived for so long, and then to see
her all suddenly, was the best thing in the world. I used to look at
her, and even when I did not see her face, but only her neck and hair
and dress and feet, it was just like--like it used to be looking up on
a day like this at the blossoming tops of tall elms right in the sky,
and hearing the cuckoo’s mate up there.

“Twice a week I used to walk over to her house or to some place near
by to see her. I don’t know which was best--the fine weather or the
wet--when I went, for in the rain I used to shut out the noise of the
rain with my singing all kinds of songs, and sometimes I used to run
and whoop as if the hounds had just killed a fox. It was a long way to
walk, and sometimes, especially at night, I used to go almost mad with
thinking of all the dense space and time and other people, intervening
between her and me. Yet I always refused to ride if a farmer stopped
his cart, and took footpaths to avoid them. The train to London which
I saw all bright on winter evenings used to give me an odd joy and
envy--thinking of all those unknown people as if they were hurrying
faster than I to see their sweethearts. I did think her beautiful. When
I saw Edith in those days, it was somehow painful, like seeing a lamb
lying aside dead in a ditch.”

Enid had turned her face away to the window and the lawn. Just so
pitiful might she seem were she passed over by her lover.

“I am not going to tell you,” the old lover went on, looking at nothing
visible, “what we did when we met. I think sometimes now that we were
not wise. But we used to walk and walk, and she would tell me about
girls and the ways of girls, and her childhood, so that I wished I had
been a boy with her. She would praise me and say that if ever anything
happened to me so that I was hurt and maimed, or if I should die, she
would not go on living. The thought of such a thing made her angry and
she would stop, and, without looking at me and seeming to forget me,
would lift her arms and say confused things that sounded fierce which I
could not hear, and then suddenly turn to me quite happy again.

“It was the finest day in my life, when, one May day we fished
together, and cooked some fresh caught trout by the riverside over a
fire of oak branches, and ate them together in the morning, just as the
sun grew hot.

“Every day I wished to marry her, especially when she spoke suddenly
after being silent, or when I could only smell her lovely breath and
see the pale skin under her little ear in the dark.

“She did extraordinary things and she made me do extraordinary things.

“One day as we were walking we heard the sound of the Fair, and
Arabella said that we must go. As quick as thought she knocked some
walnuts off a tree and we stained our faces with the juice of the
rind, and at a friendly cottage borrowed a rude disguise, for we went
as gipsies. Arabella told fortunes, first, and I had to tell some
too. Then she wanted me to play on a flute while she danced; but
instead I kept somewhere near while she danced, to see that all was
as it should be; and as it was, I nearly had to knock down a little
Welshman whose harp she began dancing to; for while he played and she
danced I hardly knew what was happening; it was as if I had gone into
a church with rich windows out of a dark night. She danced all the way
home, sometimes with her right hand just touching my right shoulder
and looking up at me--Ah! Perhaps she thought I was a little careless
at seeing her as much in love with me as I with her, and suddenly
taking her hand off my shoulder she said quite fiercely that I must do
something to show that I would do anything for her.”

Here the old man stopped and laughed and drank his whisky and seemed
disinclined to go on. The yeoman rose hastily and we had to follow at
once, all but Enid, the old man and the boldest and worst horseman who
was taking some more “jumping powder” with an air; and then, when all
had mounted in the farmyard, I found courage to equal my curiosity and
asked the yeoman for the end of the story. He stopped his impatient
horse and said,--

“One night in November, when the river was in flood, my uncle
remembered what Miss Meredith had said, and in his clothes he swam over
instead of going round by the bridge. It was a long and difficult swim
and he got bruised on the rocks; but he got through and then went to
meet Miss Meredith. I do not know what happened that evening, but the
next day his life was in danger from fever, and for many days he was
ill. As soon as she heard, Miss Meredith came over and saw him when
he was at his worst; I think someone told her that he would recover,
being so vigorous a man. Some days later they picked her out of the
river, and they say she had drowned herself. My uncle says that as he
lay ill he was proud, and did not even ask for Miss Meredith lest she
should see him as he was. But when he got downstairs and felt well and
was growing stronger, they told him that she was buried in Mowland
churchyard. Then he laughed terribly with long laughs, so that they
say my grandmother heard him in London, and went on laughing at the
magnificent jest of that beautiful woman being underground.

“She was small, with fair skin and brown hair that was pure gold where
it was rolled up behind her ear, and she had a deep clear voice. Her
skill in dancing was great, and as a rider only my uncle excelled her.
She was generous and tender, but courageous and unforgiving, never
losing either friend or enemy.

“He has quite recovered now. It is wonderful what things a man will
recover from. He does not mind telling the story; I think he is even a
little ashamed of his infatuation. All the women who were born in that
house, at least all the Merediths, are said to have been odd, and they
were all beautiful.”

“It is well for all of us,” said one, “that there are not many
Arabellas in the world.”

“There are not many,” said the yeoman; and he was about to follow
the rest when I saw Enid, a little anxious and it may have been
apologetic, at the door. “Good-bye, Arabella,” he called, with quiet
raillery.

“No!” she stamped her foot impatiently, but gently even so. He kissed
her hand and looked at her; and as he rode away, I saw that she was at
peace again. He shouted that they would see us by the gorse.

And so those three rode away and we walked to the meet. All the
labourers on the farm where the hounds met had a holiday, and all the
children too, enough of them to drown the music of the hounds. There
were about twenty men and women riding, three in pink, two or three
rich men and as many rich women, a lawyer, a doctor and many farmers
and their boys; and everyone talked with everyone. They found a fox
in the long, tumbling hill of gorse that ran almost to the river’s
edge; but the scent was bad, and after running backwards and forwards
for some time, they drew several little covers and there were some
rapid bursts with merry music, and flying of dust on the ploughland
and halloos here and there, and laughter and chatter of boys, and slow
comment from the labourers. But soon all was quiet except that a child
was telling a blind farmer where the hounds were and which way they
were going.

The river ran at our feet in one large curve, and among banks not so
steep but that it shone continually. Just below us the lover must have
swum, landing in the tall oaks that came to the edge. On the farther
side a road went up from the low bridge and over the hill and then,
but out of sight, down to the house with the mirrors. Ten miles away,
above the river, with its church tower against the sky in a manner
that commanded everyone who could walk, was the little town where they
still hold a Michaelmas Fair. Beyond that, faint and delicate, small
and beautiful as the lines in an oyster shell, were great hills all but
invisible in haze.




CHAPTER XXXII

APPLE BLOSSOM


The stream going helpless and fast between high banks is gloomy until
it is turned to bright, airy foam and hanging crystal by the mill; over
the restless pool below hangs a hawthorn all white and fragrant and
murmurous with bloom.

Above the mill, to the north, the land rises in long, lustrous,
melodiously swelling lawns of perfect green to the dark borders of a
beech wood, where the sweet, thick air fills the hollows among the
virginal foliage with blue. In one place the beeches have parted and
made a broad avenue for the eye to travel towards a noble stone house,
many-angled, many-windowed, grey, discreet, holding, or on such a day
seeming to hold, human life worthy to walk upon the long lawns to the
mill, where now nothing moves except the divine sunlight and, in the
hollows, its little cloudy elves.

Below the mill, to the south, is a land of tall trees standing in
conclaves of woods, in whispering groups, or solitary, each in
its sovereignty of shade and shining grass; of apple orchards and
farmhouses that lie, amidst their haystacks and ricks of straw, in
gulfs among the trees; and here and there the yellow skeleton of an
oak, encircled by its bark and twigs in piles, thrusts its sharp
appealing lines through the neighbouring green.

There is the tall, stony beech, its bole as fair as human shoulders and
flanks, lighted and shadowed changefully, its topmost branches curving
over as if with the weight of birds alighting, and doves and wood-wrens
among the leaves; the twisted birch’s misty, moving foliage as of a
pensive fountain; the oak, whose dark branches only yesterday were
interwoven like the flight of many bats at twilight, now an enchanted
hill of glowing bronze; the straight, lean, athletic ash, like a young
prince in short hunting tunic; the calm, feminine sycamore whose fresh
foliage hangs in folds as of smoke; the pollard willow, along the
stream, an ancient, neglected, grotesque deity, reluctantly assuming
its green garlands for yet another spring.

These things and many more the eye sees delightedly, and having ranged,
finds its chief joy in some narrow tract of the large land, like the
first field below the mill.

It is but an acre or two of sweet, undulating pasture, bounded on two
sides by tall hawthorn hedges, on the third by an ash copse, on the
other by an orchard of apple trees. The grass is pure green, revealing
here and there a purple orchis or dog violet or blue self-heal, except
where the crystal brook rushes through it and gathers white and gold
about its banks. Here no shadow falls, or if it does the dew and
blossoms break it up. The leaning and interwoven apple trees make a
white and wine-filled sky by their dense clots of bloom. The swallows
embroider the air with their songs and their blue flight. A farmhouse
walls are dusky red between the trunks. Overhead, the dim blue sky
lets a white cloud roll out at intervals like lilies from a pool. And
the blackbird perfects his song indolently; the thrush thinks clearly,
sharply aloud, with nothing long drawn out; and the willow wren happily
complains for ever--a voice that has wings and must revolve continually
through the land to express for one or another the vague pains or
pleasures of spring day.

The hedges and the orchard and the copse shut out everything except
that, through the ash stems, there is the dim, white sea far off,
gentle, like a fantastic tale of men and women that never were, in
countries where no discoverer’s keel has ever shrieked upon the beach,
to which the eye wanders now and then, returning again to the apple
blossom and the grass with an added security.

Over the green grass walks the farmer’s daughter in a white dress, on
her head a mushroom-shaped straw hat that reveals black hair curving
like the wings of a dove over the half moon of her brow, and like smoke
above her golden nape. She stands still like a straight birch in heavy
snow--her form and her dress one and yet separate, and definitely
female in rise and fall. She walks like a summer cloud, except that
her feet, clad in shining black, take firm hold upon the grass and
spurn it strongly, yet with the light short steps of a proud bird. Her
left hand carries purple orchis and white stitchwort, and carefully,
but fantastically and unnecessarily, raises the hem of her skirt to
the height of the tallest dandelions. Her right hand is free to gather
flowers, to feel the growth of the young greenfinches in the nest, to
arrange and disarrange her hair. Her small round head is lifted up,
her eyes fully round, her lips too much curved to meet very often yet,
her nose clear and straight, and the fair, wing-like curve of bone
from ear to chin seeming to be born of the shadow which it creates
upon her neck. Her childhood has passed, her maturity has not come.
She is a Lady May, careless, proud, at ease. On her lips, indeed, is a
childish song; but she has become more strange and distant to children
than older women are, for the moment--perhaps for to-day only, since
to-morrow she may meet a man and stay late in the lanes. She is as
strange as the silver water that gushes among green grass and marigold
in the copse, or as the blue swallow slanting down the sunny red
wall. To look at her is to take deep breaths as at the savour of warm
bread, of honeysuckle, of cows when they come from the meadows into
a dusty road. A speech that should be all sapphires and pearls would
not be worthy of her--to-day. She is at the altar of Aphrodite “full
of pity”--to-day. She has been carried far in the goddess’s dove-drawn
chariot over mountains and seas, and has bathed in the same fountain as
Aphrodite, nor yet been seen of men--to-day. Delay, sun, above the sea;
wait, moon, below the hills; sing, birds; rustle, new-leaved beeches;
for to-morrow and the day after and for ever until the end this will be
but a memory and may be all she has. She walks hardly faster than the
shadows over the fair grass: and you, Time, O Woodman! set not your axe
at the foot of this tree, lean not upon it with your strong hands. See!
the crest nods and the air trembles; let it not fall to-day.




CHAPTER XXXIII

A LITTLE BEFORE HARVEST


Summer is perfect now.

The wheat says so, when in the dawn it drips with half-an-hour’s rain
and gleams like copper under the fresh, dim sky; it cries aloud the
same when it crackles in the midday sun, and the golden sea of it
washes murmurously to the feet of the hills.

In the hedges and fields the agrimony wands and mullein staves, the
climbing vetch, the cushioned bird’s-foot lotus, the myriads of ragwort
and sow thistle, are golden too.

The meadowsweet and honeysuckle flowers and the wild carrot seeds give
out sweet scents, but not so strong as not to be drowned, when the wind
blows, by a thousand lesser scents from field and wood and farmyard.

Wood pigeons coo in the high-shaded storeys of the beeches and in the
wet willow copses where bushes and herbage have grown so dense that
hardly a bird’s-nester or a lover would care to penetrate them. In the
dark wood alleys, all day long, hang insects whose wings seem to be
still in their swiftness, like golden lamps.

The gardens have amber lilies, fuchsia trees, phloxes, poppies,
hollyhocks, carnations, snap-dragons, rockets and red flax rising above
rose of Sharon and lemon-scented balm and yellow stone-crop, where the
tortoise-shell butterflies worship with opening wings.

And on the garden walls the purple plums ooze and heave in the sun with
yellow wasps that give a touch of horror to the excellent and abounding
life of perfect summer.

These things and many more the eye notes carelessly. We are so rich
that we do not count our treasure. We record them as contented
worshippers their beads. They are but as dust above the corn when the
thresher twists his oaken flail. The mother or master of them all seems
to be the line of the chalk hills.

The corn sweeps to these hills, and on the strand which divides
them is a hamlet of six thatched cottages and a farmhouse, and new
haystacks round these, fine and sharp-angled, and old ones carved in
steps and supported by props of ash. The cream pans and the churns
glitter outside the house. A girl kneels at the brook that flows past
and dips a jug among the cresses, trying to catch a trout at the same
time. The eye dwells on these for a little while, saying that it could
be content there never to wander again, and then rises to the downs,
and away it goes, soaring as at the sound of organ or harp. For how
proud-thoughted are these long, curving downs, whether they make a
highway at noon for round white clouds or at night for the large moon.
They uplift and allure and lead far away the eye. The mind follows the
eye as the streaming wake follows the ship and is naught without it.
Those curves suggest to the mind, confused and languid after long
summer days in the lowland, that it also might follow such curves that
lead on--surely--to noble thoughts and high discoveries, though without
them it will be happy merely in following with joyous undulations to
the windy beeches on the furthest height. To see them close by with our
last glance before entering an inn is good, or, far off, on a midsummer
night when we are to watch the sun rise from the encampment which makes
one of them, or to fancy them by the winter fire; but to see them thus,
in full summer, when day is separate from day only by brief, perfumed
nights of stars, stimulates like a page of saga or history or a perfect
rhyme, setting the heart free. “Let us be brave,” says a shepherd of
these hills.

    “In lofty numbers let us rave ...
    I’ll borrow Phœbus’ fiery jades,
    With which about the world he trades
      And put them in my plough.

    I’ll to great Jove, hap good, hap ill,
    Though he with thunder threat to kill,
      And beg of him a boon.

    To swerve up one of Cynthia’s beams,
    And there to bathe thee in the streams
      Discover’d in the moon....

    And to those indraughts I’ll thee bring,
    That wondrous and eternal Spring,
      Whence the ocean hath its flowing.

    We’ll down to the dark House of Sleep,
    Where snoring Morpheus doth keep,
      And wake the drowsy groom.”

And at evening, when the rooks go over, quietly expounding space in
the rosy sky, they do not, as in other countries they do, torment the
mind; for the ridge of the downs travels the same way and is at the
same moment here, just above us, and yonder in the bosom of the sunset,
and it gives rest and satisfaction as, but a few hours ago, it gave
infinite adventure and happiness therewith.




CHAPTER XXXIV

AUTUMN BELLS


From this beechen hill I can see into and across a long pastoral
valley at my feet; its gentle sides running east and west are clothed
in wood, and at the western end, where the valley leads straight out
into the western sky, a stone city lies. Beyond this valley to the
south are the misty, wooded ridges that hint at other valleys. The
sunset light has made the landscape immense, but with the help of
autumn it has made it simple too; and the sound of bells in the city
seems to have created it, rounded and mellow in outline and hue. The
little rounds of hedge-tops and knolls in the meadows and gorse in the
higher slopes harmonise and run into the larger rounds of the single
oaks in the middle distance, and the still larger rounds of the hills
and their cloudy woods, and the clouds above them. A hawk in the air
might seem to be carving the outlines of some perfect palm tree as he
flies. The white steam also of a slow train far away bubbles up in the
moist and gentle air and hangs there long in delicately changing and
merging mounds that mock the clouds and woods. The amber wheat stacks
are of the same family of form, lying in a half circle at one side of
a hunched farmhouse that lifts up a dome of mossy thatch,--near it a
garden of shadowed wallflower, snapdragon, roses, in clouds beyond
clouds, with a burning edge of hollyhock, sunflower, red-hot poker and
chrysanthemum.

The sound of the city bells continues to overflow in bubbles from the
valley, up and up, to the round, golden clouds. As if filled with the
sound, the city smoke ascends and takes on the colours of the sunset.

The sun is now low between the final walls of hill, where the valley
ends, and it seems to belong to the city below, as if it were the
city’s god descending there for once in answer to some especially
rich altar or noble deed. The towers and their bells are as maidens
pensively embroidering, and now and then dropping their embroidery to
sing a melody of something far away; and long after the sun has gone
and the city has disappeared their song is repeated in the fragrant and
noiseless abysses of the far-stretched night.




CHAPTER XXXV

SUNDAY


The morning air of autumn smelt like the musky, wild white rose. The
south wind had carried hither all the golden and brown savours from
Devon and Wiltshire and Surrey; and the strong sweetness made the
walker snuff deeply at it, with uplifted upper lip. Church bells two
miles away, deep among the woods that lay around narrow gulfs of meadow
on every side, called and called, as if they had wedded this perfume
and all the gold and brown of the wide land. Not the last willow wren
in the oak, nor the cooing dove, spoke more melodiously of autumn and
repose than the bells. So when I came to the church, under a cavernous
beech wood, I paused beneath the low tower and sate in the cool nave.

Parts of the windows were still rich with old colour, the rest might
seem to have flown into the woods as the sounds from the genial bells
were still flying thither and through the autumn land. The church was
the lovely home of the dead of several fair families still living
near. A helmet with motionless crest jutted over the nave. Several
bright, crude effigies flaunted their crimson and blue in one aisle.
The walls were still half covered by paintings of varying clearness.
Here and there a sword stood out quite clear, or the head of a woman or
a youth, a coat of armour, an aureole that some head had lost, a curve
of vesture, or a mere whisper of colour, red like old blood, or a few
words, such as “olim magnificus pulcherrimus”--“periit”--“resurget”;
things that survived there much as events in human memories, and as
incidents and expressions may actually survive our death, and painfully
strive for integration in a dim world of fragments that shall be
strangely arrayed again.

The clerk stood looking out of a little open window that revealed a
piece of green meadow and yellow maple that might have belonged to the
ancient glass.

One by one the men came in, two old labourers past work, a neighbouring
farmer, his cowman and carter, a gamekeeper, and the women and children
in twos and threes, and lastly the squire--perhaps twenty-five
altogether. In hymn and psalm and prayer all voices save those of the
rector and one sweet-voiced child were so faint that the church was
undisturbed. The old men were still, the young restless, the women and
children interested in one another; but they were fainter than the
figures on the wall, being so like thousands of others, all but a red
and fair-haired man of fifty who might have been a Bacchus hastily
metamorphosed for some jolly purpose.

With the sermon the silence became immense, as if it must flower
suddenly or crumble away in a roar. The preacher spoke slowly as one
who scorned time, and in the intervals could be heard the masticating
of horses in the meadow outside. He spoke of the necessity of “drawing
near to God”--by a life of piety, by private prayer, by communion, by
worshipping in this house. His rich, gentle voice saying murmurous
things fell upon me as one of sleep’s forerunners, and I had just heard
him asking the squire and the Bacchus and the rest whether they had
not, at the Communion, had visions of “those tabernacles above,” when I
began to dream a dream which the parson could not have inspired without
the help of some very different elf who now lay under the pavement of
the nave, or was painted on the wall, or had sat among the rushes when
the church was beautiful and young as a country bride. For it seemed
that I saw these men and women in a kind of heaven where all day long
for ever they did those things which had pleased or most taken hold of
them in life. I saw them like the figures painted on the wall, some
bright and clear, some dim or broken, some known by hardly more than a
defacement of the large light that dwelt there.

There the grave and cheerful carter went home at evening, looking
ahead steadily, without sorrow, or alarm, or lassitude, and sometimes
turning to his undulating team, noting their still bright harness and
speaking to them by name: “Ho! Violet”--“Smiler”--“Darling”--“Swallow.”
He was even now hungry, a little tired, thinking of his inn at
nightfall. Heaven had caught him and made of him a picture of strength,
contentment and evening which, in that luminous land, was pleasing yet
to mortal men.

There the cowman was leading out the bull, and making the ring jar in
its nostrils. Still his back and knees were bent as he cursed out
“Jimmy,” his face still moulded and unmoulded by faint-hearted lust,
vexation, fear, perplexed by the home where his eleven children were,
with his pigs and his fledgling magpies.

His wife was near, but almost invisible, and as it were a wraith of
pitiful maternity, neither bitter nor glad, but bearing her burdens,
one still beneath her girdle, one in her arms, and others demanding her
anxiety, winning her tenderness, on this side and on that.

The gamekeeper stood, with smoking gun barrels, and a cloud of jay’s
feathers still in the air and among the May foliage about him. Pride,
stupidity, servility clouded his face as in his days of nature, and
above him in the oaks innumerable jays laughed because beauty, like
folly, was immortal there.

The squire, more faint, and whether to his joy or not I could not
discern, was standing under a bough on which hung white owls, wood
owls, falcons, crows, magpies, cats, hedgehogs, stoats, weasels, some
bloody, some with gaping stomachs, some dismembered or crushed, some
fleshless, some heaving like boiling fat, and on them and him the sun
shone hot.

The red-faced man sat drinking ale, and with him it seemed always
evening, and his stomach fathomless.

Five boys--four of them with blackened faces and sticks or swords,
and one of them dressed as a woman and carrying a bag--played the
Pace-Egging Play in blue Easter weather in a daffodil lane before a
ripe grey farmhouse.

A little girl nursed something musingly, whether a mole or a cluster of
rags I could not tell.

The farmer sat on his cream pony, brow-beating a birdnesting boy by a
gate.

A young woman waited by a stile and did up her hair.

And still the parson threw back his head and closed his eyes, and
with an action as of washing his hands, talked melodiously and with
satisfaction, saying, at last, “It is well for us to draw near unto the
Lord.”




PART IV

THE MOUNTAINS




CHAPTER XXXVI

THE FIRST DAFFODILS


It was one of those early March days in a mountainous country when
a warmly clothed man, in good health and walking rapidly, can just
foretaste the spring. The icy dark water in stony brooklets shone
golden whenever it could find the sun. This gold seemed a brand upon
the winter that marked it for death. There was gold also on the
turf between the walls and the roadways, for there were hundreds of
celandine flowers: it was to be found also in the miniature forests of
the moss that made detached and placid worlds upon every stone of the
walls; in the little hollow woods, or steep and craggy orchard plots,
where the first daffodils were unveiled; in the rickyards where fowls
scattered the gleaming straw; in the fur of the squirrel that moved as
if the swirling wind dissolved and shaped it again continually; in the
warm ale at “The White Hart.”

But when the eye grew proud and the wind rose and every half hour the
horizontal snow put out everything of the world except its noises--the
cry of the curlew, the buzz of pewits’ wings, the song of the missel
thrush that came through the storm like a mere ode to liberty in the
midst of revolution--then it was winter still, and the rustling oak
leaves talked of December. And when the snowfall ceased with a rush
as if upon the wings of a peregrine, those small signs of spring were
no more than a child’s sand castles on a vast sea shore, and not so
noticeable as the thick suds and flakes of snow hanging from the hedges
on the walls and turned to mists by the restless robins.

On one side, for some miles, ran a large fell that was a home and
playground of winds, steep and long to be crossed, and all white and
grim, shutting out home and the pleasures that are found among men. On
the other side, steep also and widely shaped with small, precipitous
crags and angry surf of heather and here and there haggish thorns, lay
a moor. Between these two the road rose and fell over lesser but steep
hills, and from one hilltop I could see the sea beyond the moor. It was
grey, without light, with long quivering lines that never ended, but
insubstantial; it seemed rather the grisly offspring of a mind made
pregnant by the wintry melancholy. The mountains came down to the edge
of it, like lions to drink, ten miles away. Not a house was visible,
and on the sea the few ships were like the water itself, inventions of
my own, as it were, which I had launched upon that infinite desolation
for sport.

All day, ahead and always at the same distance, rose high mountains,
with crude outlines as of heavy and frosty land fresh turned by the
plough; the long ravines of snow upon their sides made their peaks more
sharp and their heights more sudden. They haunted the day.

Now and then the snow fell, and in the weak sunshine that followed, the
light struck up from the snow and made the white breasts of the gulls
seem opal lanterns full of flame, and the hazel thickets were nets of
silver and crystal branches, invisible in their own splendour.

I descended to a small deep river that ran, with noble curves of power,
solemn and full of some inhuman simple purpose. For a moment the
sunlight fell on one curve of it and the windy waves were now a stately
glittering cavalcade, and now a dance of fairies into which some
ass-headed Bottom suddenly intruded with a gust from a cloud, making
them whirl faster and then disappear. But the river was careless of the
light; it went on as before, unchanged even when for another moment all
that grim, serious water was changed into white spray and light by a
fall.

And there still were the mountains ahead. Their painful distances of
long, white, houseless steeps made the mind suffer the body’s agony of
toiling there, of being lost there in storm, of being there on a still,
dark night. They bred--by means of natural, human sympathy with the
difficulty of life among such heights, by the horror of the distance,
the coldness, the whiteness--a languor out of which emerged infinite
admiration and awe, a sense of beauty even, and unquestionably a kind
of pride in the powers of the human spirit that can dwell upon the
earth and be the equal of these things, sharing with them the sunlight
and the darkness, enduring like them vicissitudes, decay, violent
disaster, and like them disbelieving in the future and in death, except
for others. So when at nightfall the snowy hills made a semicircle
round the head of an enormous grey estuary, and couched there ten
and fifteen and twenty miles away as if the sweep of a puissant arm
had made them in clearing a space for the water, they were purely
beautiful, while over them a large, simple sunset threw a golden bridge
between towering, white, still clouds.

Then, at length, a hamlet on a hill; first, a farmyard on one side
of the road and a farmhouse on the other; then four or five stone
cottages; lastly an inn where I thought to sleep. Hardly had I sat
down than a pedlar came in and sat beside me. He was a tall, grave man
of a gritty, brown complexion and big, straight features; from his
simple, heroic face, that seemed an animated piece of crag from his
native hills, his blue eyes looked at me with that glance, fearless of
any return, which the ordinary man gives to a dog or a labourer, but
presently became more modest as I looked up and down the blue gaberdine
which he wore down to his knees.

The gaberdine was of the stoutest linen, heavy and warm. It opened
for about six inches down from the neck, back and front, and was
fastened with small bone buttons. On each side of these openings it was
smocked in an elaborate pattern nine inches deep; the wide, turn-down
collar almost covered the embroidered shoulder straps and was itself
adorned with seven rows of feather stitching. The sleeves were smocked
both at the shoulders and the wrists, and were finished with broad,
feather-stitched cuffs. He wore it because it was decent, and he would
always wear one so long as the woman lived who could make it.

I asked him about his trade, and he said that he pursued it among these
hills and valleys all the winter, setting it aside for work in the
fields during the summer months. He was born in one of the cottages
close by; so was his father before him and so were his children after
him. They were happy there. Death alone disturbed them now and then;
and death, he said, was incurable and to be expected. In the spring he
spent less on candles and his orchard bloomed, and there was a marriage
or two in the church and the ewes dropped their lambs. In the summer it
was warm without fires, and they needed no candles, and he had what he
desired--what that was he did not say. In the autumn he remembered that
things were coming round again, winter soon and then spring again. In
the winter his cottage walls were thick, and if the days were short he
had always had a fire and some food, and had never yet refused a beggar
something; there were songs also: and as to his trade, of course he
liked it, and he did not think people could do without him.

“And now, young man,” he said, “who are you, what have you seen, and
what is your country?”

He looked at me with something like the benignity of a child accepting
a spoonful of honey; but for that joy and expectancy I might have
spoken easily. I hesitated between the truth, which was difficult and
perhaps to him unintelligible, my own view of the truth, which would
be so confused by reservations and after-thoughts that it could not
please, and the picturesque. So I said:--

“I am a poor, modern man”--which was true--“I have seen nothing”--which
was my view of the truth--and finally, “the great city of London is my
country”--which was picturesque.

“What?” said he, not angrily, not pityingly, but inquiringly, “what
do you mean by a ‘poor, modern man,’ and how is it that you have seen
nothing?”

A thousand things crowded to my brain and contended on my lips. This
was an opportunity, but too great a one, too sudden. I stifled my
designs and decided to say nothing. He was kind; he nodded gracefully
and continued,--

“Tell me about London.”

He did not say, “Do me an essay of fifteen hundred words by next week.”
That might have been easy; writing--possibly even good writing--is
comparatively easy; because the writer is alone while he writes and is
not present while his work is read, and he can therefore withhold what
seems difficult to express and he deceives without appearing deceitful;
moreover, he writes at his ease, or should do, what is probably read in
haste. But in conversation with an aged blue-eyed man, in a majestic
blue gaberdine, who has an evening’s leisure and desires the truth,
asking simply: “Tell me about London,” the difficulties in the way of a
simple man are enormous. I said something about a book called _The Soul
of London_; but he could not read. He wished again to be informed what
the soul of a city was. Again I failed him.

“But you have actually lived in London,” he repeated, encouraging me.

“Yes.” He seemed to be proud, as who should say, “I sit with one who
has lived in the most famous city in the world.”

I remembered that there are said to be five millions of human beings in
London, and that its streets on end would reach to the moon.

Also I thought of the old song and the verse:--

    “There be kings and queens in London town
    A-sitting all of a row.”

In despair I actually ventured to tell him that there were five million
people there. But he seemed to be poor at arithmetic and he was frank.

“I beg you,” he said, “to speak simply and not all at once to a poor,
remote old man. The evening is young yet,” he continued without heat
and as if he were making all clear.

“There is a king there, is there not?” he said.

“There is.”

“And a queen?”

“Yes.”

“And a palace?”

“There are several palaces.”

“Then tell me about the king,” he said.

I have never seen the king, and I longed for the power of the Tempter
to tell the old man of--

    “Prætors, proconsuls to their provinces
    Hasting, or on return, in robes of state;
    Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power;
    Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings;
    Or embassies from regions far remote,
    In various habits, on the Appian road,
    Or on the Æmilian”--

But still his questions came. How did the ships come up and unlade
again? What were the army and the navy like? Had I seen the famous
men? Were the people noble as became a metropolitan race? Achilles
questioning Ulysses in Hades could not have spoken more magnificently
than this old man questioning me, though I seemed the ghost and he
the visitor to the underworld. Yet in some sort his great questions,
elevating his soul, seemed to supply him, if not with an answer, at
least with some satisfaction. I would have spoken, if I could. But
how short the evening! myself how unprepared and inadequate! I would
have told him of Pimlico and Battersea which were not entirely unknown
to me. I would have said that there were sorrowful and happy men
there--thousands of both, unknown to me and unknown to one another;
thousands of houses, beautiful, stately, pompous, indifferent, ugly,
sublimely squalid; that upon them as upon him and his neighbours fell
rain and sun and snow and the wind beat and death came suddenly,
desired or undesired; that the city was as vast as Time, which had made
it, and that to know it a man must live and die the lives and deaths of
all that had ever lived and died there. But he ceased to regard me. He
entered into talk with others that came in. One sang this ballad and
he, like the rest, joined the chorus:--

    “My clothing was once of the linsey woolsey fine,
    My tail it grew at length, my coat likewise did shine;
    But now I’m growing old, my beauty does decay,
    My master frowns upon me; one day I heard him say--
                  Poor old horse, poor old horse.

    Once I was kept in the stable snug and warm,
    To keep my tender limbs from any cold or harm;
    But now, in open fields, I am forcèd for to go,
    In all sorts of weather, let it be hail, rain, freeze or snow,
                  Poor old horse, poor old horse.

    Once I was fed on the very best corn and hay
    That ever grew in yon fields, or in yon meadows gay;
    But now there’s no such doing can I find at all;
    I’m glad to pick the green sprouts that grow behind yon wall.
                  Poor old horse, poor old horse.

    You are old, you are cold, you are deaf, dull, dumb and slow,
    You are not fit for anything or in my team to draw;
    You have eaten all my hay, you have spoilèd all my straw;
    So hang him, whip him, stick him, to the huntsman let him go.
                  Poor old horse, poor old horse.

    My hide unto the tanners, then I would freely give
    My body to the hound dogs, I would rather die than live;
    Likewise my poor old bones that have carried you many a mile
    Over hedges, ditches, gates and bridges, likewise gates and stiles.
                  Poor old horse, poor old horse.”

Terrible, noble old man! No doubt he expected me to speak as simply
as that, so I slipped away from him and went to the next inn. A high,
cloudy night hung over me, like a great yew tree in March, with stars
instead of flowers. With those reticent, dark silences and spaces I
tried to console myself.




CHAPTER XXXVII

THE MIRROR


There are a hundred little landscapes on the walls by the roadside--of
grey or silver or golden stone, embossed and fretted and chequered by
green and gold-pointed mosses, frosty lichens, pale round penny-wort
leaves and the orange foliage of cranesbill. At their feet are the
young leaves of the larger celandine and the lustrous blossoms of
the lesser, still swaddled in dead leaves where mice and squirrels
are questing. On top, thorns and ash trees trail horizontally in
many dragon shapes, and purple brambles overhang. Or there are low
thorns which make way at intervals for straight hollies, spared by the
billhook, or even carved by it into pagoda-like shapes. Sometimes even
a thorn has been thus spared and honoured, but here they are not each
knotted into impenetrable globes of twigs or interlaced in pairs as
elsewhere. What fantasy persuades men to make those little wayside and
even railwayside suggestions of a mild tree worship surviving yet? In
places the walls are interrupted and replaced by a smooth, blue sheet
of natural rock based in grass and making a home for vertebrate ferns,
and stamped by white and yellow and green algæ which look as if they
were the stains of a sunshine too strong to be wiped out. Some of the
ash tree boles are heavily draped in a fur woven inextricably of dark
green and fine-leaved ivy, pale green moss over which hover pendulous
drops of gold, silver lichen, and ferns green and amber. Out of rock or
wall gushes bright, crystal water, losing itself in moss and herbage
below, or received into small stone tanks, and turned into a darkly
gleaming, golden creature that throbs under the rain.

Between such walls the road winds into many valleys and over many fells
towards the mountains. On either hand rise and fall many hollowed
tawny meadows, with boulders embedded in heather and flowering gorse,
and over them the pewits plunge and soar and modulate their crying by
their speed. Here and there a family of oak or beech stands up in the
midst of the fields. Between the meadows there are copses of hazel and
oak, and snowdrops underneath, or a crisp, untrodden carpet of old
leaves of many dying golds and browns and reds; or an arable field
intervenes. The plough climbs the hill, turning the dry, grey soil to
purple and brown that is dappled by rooks and gulls. Some of the gulls
slide overhead against the wind, inclining their wings this way and
that, rising and descending slightly, as if they could by tacking and
delaying avoid the streamy wind.

The steeper hills are the home of oak and ash and birch and larch. The
grey larch woods waver in colour like a dying trout, as the wind and
the sunshine pass over them. In a five-minute shower the rainbow sets
her foot among the trees before she leaps across the sky, and while yet
her colours are uncertain among the luminous branches makes a small,
fairy, remote world that speaks to the eye like the young moon on a
fair evening or Cassiopeia when it crowns a sapphire night.

In ten miles there is an inn. “Pretty Polly” and “Sceptre” are on the
walls, with notices of sales and advertisements of spirits. The hostess
sings the cosmic melody of “Blue Bell” as she goes about her work--that
marvellous melody over which farmboys become romantic and even cheerful
at four o’clock on wild and sleety mornings in January as they go about
their work. But the host has good ale, and he can sing the Holm-bank
Hunting Song:--

    “One morning last winter to Holm-bank there came
    A noble, brave sportsman, Squire Sandys was his name,
    Came a-hunting the fox, bold Reynard must die,
    And he flung out his train and began for to cry
        Tally-ho, tally-ho! Hark forward, away, tally-ho!

    The season being frosty, and the morning being clear,
    A great many gentlemen appoint to meet there;
    To meet with Squire Sands with honour and fame
    And his dogs in their glory to honour his name.

    There Gaby the huntsman with his horn in his hand,
    It sounded so clear and the dogs at command,
    Tantive! Tantive! the horn it did sound,
    Which alarmed the country for above a mile round.

    It’s hark dogs together, while Jona comes in,
    There’s Joyful and Frolic, likewise little Trim,
    It’s hark unto Dinah, the bitch that runs fleet,
    There’s neat little Justice, she’ll set ’em to reet.

    There’s Driver and Gamester, two excellent hounds,
    They’ll find out Bold Reynard if he lies above ground;
    Draw down to yon cover that lies to the south,
    Bold Reynard lies there, Trowler doubles his mouth.

    Three times round low Furness they chased him full hard,
    At last he sneaked off and through Urswick churchyard,
    He listened to the singers as I’ve heard them say,
    But the rest of the service he could not well stay.

    The dogs coming up made Reynard look sly,
    Then he marked out his tricks for to give ’em the by;
    They being bred to their business they managed their cause
    And they made him submit to their attention close.

    Through Kirkby and Woodland they nimbly passed,
    Broughton and Dunnerdale they came to at last,
    Then down across Duddon to Cumberland side,
    And at Grass-gards in Ulpha, bold Reynard he died.

    Since Reynard is dead he’ll do no more ill,
    He hadn’t much time for to make a long will,
    He has left all his states to his survivor and heir,
    He has a right to a widow for she’ll claim her share.

    Of such a fox chase as never was known,
    The horsemen and footmen were instantly thrown,
    To keep within sound didn’t lie in their power,
    For the dogs chased the fox eighty miles in five hours.

    You gentlemen and sportsmen wherever you be,
    All you that love hunting draw near unto me,
    Since Reynard is dead, we have heard of his downfall,
    Here’s a health to Squire Sands of High Graythwaite Hall.
        Tally-ho, tally-ho! Hark forward, away, tally-ho!”

The road has turned away into a valley. The mountains are close ahead,
and the billowy moorland prepares me for them, with hawks in all its
hollows, and small ponds, the silent sport of winds that roar in crags
and hiss in grasses, and then at length a long, blue pool, edged by
yellow reeds and receiving the shadow of a steep oak wood. There the
wind is lured into many metamorphoses among the ripples--at one moment
a writhing, hundred-headed snake, at another the wraith perhaps of a
swift skater who was once drowned in the water, and again a swarm of
dark bees. At first sight this blue expanse, with narrow ends running
into the moorland, and its edge of shivering reed, lays hold upon the
mind. All day, unseen of any but the shepherd, the water reflects
the birds and the clouds, and all night the stars, until it might be
supposed to have acquired a symbolic sadness and tranquillity by thus
keeping watch on all the nights and days since it began. There, in its
depths, hang the mountain clouds and the immense spaces of sky, with
something added by the reflecting water, as if it were some gloomy
opiate personality that turned all things to its own tune. Even the
joyous, golden fleece of the perfect summer morning are rendered by
the pool with touches of wizardry and night, and when a little breeze
erases them for a moment it is like a breath of delight sweeping over
an immortal pain. The nearest mountain, too, is there. The highest
summit, engraved with snow, shows in the depths like a bleached skull
emerging from ridgy tracts of dark sand. There, also, are the long,
tawny and olive flanks of the ascent, inlaid with purple and blue by
precipices and cloud-shadows, with grey and ruddy woods below, and the
silver wounds of birches. Now and then my own shadow flits among them,
as if a magician had compelled me to wander in that giddy profound of
water and sky. As I look down I seem to see what men have made of the
universe in the past, with the help of poet and priest, by plunging it
in the sorrows and uncertainties of their own heart and brain. There is
superstition, there religion and poetry, confining the great heavens
and the hills with sun and moon and stars, within these few acres of
desolate mountain water. There are the stories of the gods and of a
heaven that overhung mortals with hideous aspect. There, also, the
eager courage of man’s soul when first he tried to burst “the strong
bars of Nature’s gateways”--while the sun and wind contend upon the
water--and set out upon the adventure which has made us “equal with
heaven.” Looking up, away from the pool, there still are the mountains
and the sky, just as they were, still inscrutably holding out in one
hand laughter and in one hand tears for us to choose from. I look down
and the singing lark, against a white cloud, is singing high and wise
things in some contemplative poet’s verse. I look up and, behold! the
new joy of the spring, unintelligible, and for the moment not asking
to be understood, but to be shared; and as we climb happily the pool
no longer imposes its version of life, for yonder is the True upon the
hills, and the eyes dilate and the nostrils and the lungs accept the
air and the “darling of men and gods ... mistress of the nature of
things” takes her place with us.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

UNDER THE MOOR


It was June, but it had been like March for many miles upon the rough
moor until, with the dawn, I came to a lowland where there were mossy
fields with clear rain pools among the flowering gorse; and meadows cut
into two planes by small, perpendicular cliffs of stone, so that on one
the cattle were already feeding in the early light and on the other
still lying down; and wheat fields that had islands of stone in their
midst; and then at last an immense meadow sloping down towards fresh
oak woods and the sea, and rising out of it rounded beechen knolls
which, Druid-like, preserved the night under their domes of foliage,
though all the grass was flooded by the slow tides of dawn. The white
cow-parsley flowers hovered around me on invisible stems and gave out
the thick summer flavours of nettles and myriad grasses. And lying down
and sleeping in the sun until morning was hot, I awoke and seemed to
hear a tale of the south as the air grew mazy with the scent of elder
and thyme and the colour of bird’s-foot lotus and all the grass, and
the sky leaned down upon the earth in milky purples. It was just such
a change from the poor land to the rich as is expressed in the ancient
tale of Cherry of Zennor told by Hunt in his _Popular Romances of the
West of England_.

The girl, Cherry of Zennor, could not contentedly put up with her life
at home, because her parents were poor, living on potatoes and fish,
and she, though she was pretty and could run like a hare, had never a
ribbon for her curls nor a new frock to go to church or to fair in. So
she set out to get a servant’s place somewhere in the “low countries.”

The road was long and she was homesick by the time she had reached a
four-went way. There she sat down and cried, but had scarcely recovered
when she saw a gentleman coming up to her. He bade her “good-morning”
and asked her whither she went; and when she said that she was off to
look for a servant’s place, he told her that he was in search of just
such a clean and handsome girl for his own house. So Cherry went off
with him, to milk his cow and look after his child; and she was to have
good clothes when she got there.

They went down and down for a long way; the road was clouded over by
trees and was growing darker and darker, when suddenly the man opened
a gate in a wall and told her that there it was that he lived. She had
never seen a garden so rich in fruit and flowers and singing birds. Was
it enchanted? But no, the man was no fairy; he was too big. Presently
his child appeared, a boy with piercing and crafty eyes, and an old
hag, called “Aunt Prudence,” who prepared a choice supper for the girl;
and she ate of it heartily. Cherry slept with the child at the top of
the house and was told that, even if she could not sleep, she was to
keep her eyes shut up there and not to speak to the boy; at dawn she
was to wash him at a spring in the garden and rub his eyes--never her
own--with an ointment; then she was to milk the cow and give the boy a
bowl of the last milk; she was at all times to avoid curiosity.

All this she did until it came to milking the cow. But Cherry saw no
cow and was calling “Pruit! Pruit! Pruit!” when out she came from
among the trees as if from nowhere. All day, but it was easy work, she
scalded milk, made butter, cleaned platters and bowls with water and
sand, picked the fruit, weeded the garden. Sometimes the man kissed her
for her pains.

A year passed. Aunt Prudence was sent away because she took Cherry into
one of the forbidden rooms, where the floor was like glass and it was
full of people turned to stone. Sometimes the master went away and left
Cherry alone with the child.

The ointment was still a puzzle--but surely it made the child’s eyes
see many things! So one day she anointed her own eyes with it. It
burned her painfully, and running to the spring to wash it away she
learned its power. For there, at the bottom of the water, was a world
of little people at play and among them her master; and looking up she
saw that the branches of the trees and the flowers and the grass were
crowded with the same joyous people. Another day she looked through the
keyhole of one of the forbidden rooms and saw her master there, and
many ladies too, all singing, and one of these who looked like a queen
he kissed. So when, as they were fruit gathering some time afterwards,
the master leaned forward to kiss her, she struck him on the face,
saying, that he might kiss the small people under the water. Next
morning very early he called her from her bed, led her by the light of
a lantern up the dark lane for a long way, and then disappeared, after
telling her that at times she would still be able to see him on the
hills; and when she had recovered from her sorrow she went home.




CHAPTER XXXIX

A HARVEST MOON


The first steep cornfield under the edge of the red moor lay all rough
and warm with stubble in the evening light. The corn sheaves themselves
were of a shining gold and leaned together in shocks that made long,
low tents and invited the wayfarer to shelter and sleep. We had come
over the moor for hours and this field was the beginning of a deep
valley that stretched to the sea. Yonder was the sea, ten miles away,
with a row of lights running out upon a nose of land far into it. The
valley held one village half way towards the sea and several white
farmhouses which sent the smoke of supper to explore the neighbouring
ash trees.

A stream running straight from the moor gave us water and we ate our
supper leaning against a corn shock. Our pipes soon went out, what with
fatigue and indulgence in the warmth and the pleasant valley, brimming
with summer haze and golden still.

We had been alone when, just as the light was going, two farm boys
and a girl came into the field without noticing us. The girl sat at
the top of the field and the boys took off their coats and laid them
beside her. She arranged their folds and then sat straight up to watch.
For down the field ran the boys, striding heavily side by side, each
leaping the same shock until they had reached the bottom wall almost at
the same time, where they argued and made claims to victory in broken
voices. They walked quickly up again to the girl and threw themselves
down panting, close to her, arguing together as much as they could
without breath.

The girl laughed and said something; then they rose up and raced again,
the heavier one this time encouraging himself with groans at each leap
over the sheaves, flinging himself over with so much ferocity that he
tumbled at the end well in front.

“You can jump, no mistake,” said the girl to the winner. “But what’s
the matter with you?” she asked the other, putting a foxglove between
her lips. Both were too much out of breath to speak, but in a few
minutes started again. They ran faster than ever; they leapt well over
the tops of the shocks, so high as to stumble at each descent. The
winner of the last race could only just keep level with the other,
and seemed about to collapse at each thundering jump, when his rival,
beginning a great leap too early, fell in the middle of the shock and
lost the race. They returned, the winner first, and lay sprawling,
panting full in the girl’s face.

“Well, Luke, you have won, and there’s your kiss,” she said to the
heavier lad.

“And, John, you have been beaten; we did not say what the loser should
have, so here’s two for you,” she went on, this time taking the flower
out of her mouth. “And now, lads, race again!”

This time the race was never in doubt. John took each leap as if he
aimed at the harvest moon that rose before him. Luke tripped at
several sheaves, and, at the bottom, climbed over the stone wall and
disappeared. As to John, he came back and began racing and leaping
alone, until the girl, feeling cold or in need of some company, went
off and left the proud fellow to the moon and the line of shocks.




CHAPTER XL

THE INN


The night was dark and solid rain tumultuously invested the inn. As
I stood in a dim passage I could see through the bar into the cloudy
parlour, square and white, surrounded by settles, each curving about
a round table made of one piece of elm on three legs. A reproduction
of “Rent Day” and a coloured picture of a bold Spanish beauty hung on
the wall, which, for the rest, was sufficiently adorned by the sharp
shadows of men’s figures and furniture that mingled grotesquely. All
the men but one leaned back upon the settles or forward upon the
tables, their hands on their tankards, watching the one who sang a
ballad--a ballad known to them so well that they seemed not to listen,
but simply to let the melody surge about them and provoke what thoughts
it would.

At some time, perhaps many times in his life, every man is likely
to meet with a thing in art or nature or human life or books which
astonishes and gives him a profound satisfaction, not so much because
it is rich or beautiful or strange, as because it is a symbol of a
thing which, without the symbol, he could never grasp and enjoy. The
German archers making a target of Leonardo’s sculptured horse and
horsemen at Milan; the glory of purple that has flown from a painted
church window and settled upon a peasant’s shoulders for an hour;
the eloquence, as of an epigram rich in anger and woe, of one bare
branch that juts out from a proud green wood into the little midnight
stars and makes them smaller with its splendid pang; a woodman felling
one by one the black and golden oak trees in the spring and slaying
their ancient shadows; or, in a discreet and massive crowd, one jet
of laughter, so full of joy or defiance or carelessness that it seems
to cut through the heavy air like the whistle of a bullet--the world
is one flame of these blossoms, could we but see. Music has many of
them in her gift. Music, the rebel, the martyr, the victor--music, the
romantic cry of matter striving to become spirit--is itself such a
symbol, and there is no melody so poor that it will not at some time
or another, to our watchful or receptive minds, have its festal hour
in which it is crowned or at least crucified, for our solemn delight.
“Dolly Gray” I have heard sung all day by poor sluttish women as they
gathered peas in the broad, burning fields of July, until it seemed
that its terrible, acquiescent melancholy must have found a way to the
stars and troubled them.

And of all music, the old ballads and folk songs and their airs are
richest in the plain, immortal symbols. The best of them seem to be
written in a language that should be universal, if only simplicity were
truly simple to mankind. Their alphabet is small; their combinations
are as the sunlight or the storm, and their words also are symbols.
Seldom have they any direct relation to life as the realist believes it
to be. They are poor in such detail as reveals a past age or a country
not our own. They are in themselves epitomes of whole generations,
of a whole countryside. They are the quintessence of many lives and
passions made into a sweet cup for posterity. A myriad hearts and
voices have in age after age poured themselves into the few notes and
words. Doubtless, the old singers were not content, but we, who know
them not, can well see in their old songs a kind of immortality for
them in wanderings on the viewless air. The men and women--who hundreds
of years ago were eating and drinking and setting their hearts on
things--still retain a thin hold on life through the joy of us who
hear and sing their songs, or tread their curving footpaths, or note
their chisel marks on cathedral stones, or rest upon the undulating
churchyard grass. The words, in league with a fair melody, lend
themselves to infinite interpretations, according to the listener’s
heart. What great literature by known authors enables us to interpret
thus by virtue of its subtlety, ballads and their music force us to
do by their simplicity. The melody and the story or the song move us
suddenly and launch us into an unknown. They are not art, they come to
us imploring a new lease of life on the sweet earth, and so we come
to give them something which the dull eye sees not in the words and
notes themselves, out of our own hearts, as we do when we find a black
hearthstone among the nettles, or hear the clangour of the joyous wild
swan, invisible overhead, in the winter dawn.

In the parlour of the inn the singer stood up and sang of how a
girl was walking alone in the meadows of spring when she saw a ship
going out to sea and heard her true love crying on board; and he
sailed to the wars and much he saw in strange countries, but never
came back; and still she walks in the meadows and looks out to sea,
though she is old, in the spring. He sang without stirring, without
expression, except in so far as light and darkness from his own life
emerged enmeshed among the deep notes. He might have been delivering
an oracle of solemn but ambiguous things. And so in fact he was. By
its simplicity and remoteness from life the song set going the potent
logic of fancy which would lead many men to diverse conclusions. It
excluded nothing of humanity except what baseness its melody might make
impossible. The strangeness and looseness of its framework allowed each
man to see himself therein, or some incident or dream in his life, or
something possible to a self which he desired to be or imagined himself
to be, or perhaps believed himself once to have been. There were no
bounds of time or place. It included the love of Ruy Blas, of Marlowe,
of Dante, of Catullus, of Kilhwch, of Swift, of Palomides, of Hazlitt,
of Villon.... And that little inn, in the midst of mountains and
immense night, seemed a temple of all souls, where a few faithful ones
still burnt candles and remembered the dead.




PART V

THE SEA




CHAPTER XLI

A MARCH HAUL


The white houses on the hill are whiter than ever before in the early
light and the south wind from over the sea. The soft, wheat-coloured
sand is inscribed far from the water by the black scrawl of the
overpast storm. But now the sea is broken by sliding ripples so small
that they seem only the last, discontented efforts of the wind to
make the surface one perfect floor of glass. The curving, foamy lines
waver and swirl and are about to disappear and leave the desired level
when others are born unnoticeably. The black hulls of the leaning
ships gleam and darken the water, and by their reflections give
it an immeasurable depth which contrasts strangely with its lucid
tranquillity and the drowned roses of the departing dawn, for in the
high blue sky some of the sunrise clouds have lost their way and hang,
still rosy, near the zenith, round the transparent moon. The mist over
the sea at the horizon is golden.

Sea and shore are at rest, all but one group of men who are welcoming
a little ship that comes in upon the tide, fragrant and stately and a
little weary, as with folded arms, solemn also as if she were invading,
or perhaps bringing mysterious gifts for the ancient, wintry land.

And now they are hauling in the deeply-laden boat that seems on this
fair morning to have brought the spring out of the sea; and that is why
they strain grimly to have her safe on the storm-strewn shore. She is
laden with flowers, with anemones and primroses for the woods, violets
for the banks, marigolds for the brooks and the ungrazed, rushy corners
of long fields, daffodils for the stone walls and the short turf at the
edges of copses, stitchwort for the hedgerows, bittersweet may for the
hawthorns, gold for the willows, white and rosy blossom for the old
orchards among the hills, mezereon, jonquils, rockets, plume poppies
and snapdragons and roses for the gardens; and the men heave and groan
as if they feared lest the sea should still rob them of some.

All the leaves are there--the sweet hawthorn green which the children
chew, the dewy, pensile leaves of hazel and beech and lime, the palmy
ash leaves still misty with purple flower, the oak leaves bronzed or
gilded among their rosy galls, and the streamers of the willow, and
all the grasses and reeds, and the tall young adder-headed bracken for
the moor, and ferns for the dripping ledges of the waterfall; and the
men heave without resting, lest any should escape and so cheat them of
shaded ways for rest and sport and love.

There also are the birds--the gentle martins, swallows that will seem
the perfect flower of the home sweetness in stern cottages on the
heights and warm farmhouses in the valleys, the chiffchaffs that shall
sing in the ash and the larch, the delicate wrens of the woodland
crests and the tempestuous nightingales of the thick-budded copses,
silent fly-catchers for the plum trees on southern walls, cuckoos to
shout over the dim water-meadows and in the pearly lichened oak woods,
ousels to flash on the moors, skiey swifts, doves to fill the green
caverns of the beeches, and all the chatterers that hide in blackthorn
and cornel thickets when it is best to walk among them; and the men
heave, for they are coming to the land even now.

Very near now are the lizards of the drowsy nettle-beds, snakes to curl
and uncurl upon the sunlit moss, and blue sylphs for the rivulets. All
are coming in from this placid sea; and so the men heave, and the white
houses begin to glitter, and the golden mist over the sea promises that
days shall again be long, and men shall sit carelessly on gates and
sleep under the hedge at noon and adventure and make plans in the pure
mornings that are at hand.




CHAPTER XLII

FISHING BOATS


The tide moves the river northward, towards me, under the bridge on
which I stand. On both sides it is lined for a little way by houses:
on the east in a flat, straight front, on the west in irregular rocky
masses. Those on the east are coldly stained with light from the
western sky; those opposite are vaguely shadowed and have an airiness
and gloom--not a light yet appearing--as of the other side of Lethe.
The river is of noble breadth.

Against the eastern houses rise up the masses of seven fishing boats in
a row, with only such movement as makes the shadow run into the brown
and gold, or the gold and brown into the shadow of the sails slowly,
like the unfolding of poppies: and under their sides the shadows are
profound as if they trailed black velvet mantles that hid the water.
For, away from the boats, the unrippled surface of the motionlessly
gliding river is of that lugubrious silver that seems to be, not water,
but some trick of light upon mere air, such as is seen above summer
meadows in the heat.

And over all is bent a pale, soft, empurpled sky, and in it a crescent
moon.

Up the river came two fishing boats, sleeping, their motion the only
proof of the tide--no man visible on board--no voices--and their sails
of a colour as if they had been steeped in the early hues of the now
vanished sunset, and yet in their folds so dark that they seem to be
bringing with them the night as a cargo from those cloudy black woods
in the south. Beyond the large curve of those woods the shining horn of
the river reaches the unseen sea. The spirit of the sea comes up on the
broad silent water.

The two small, solemn boats still glide in sleep; the others dream at
the quay.

Southward, the dark wood sends out the narcotic night as a gift over
the land, sowing the seeds of it from the wings of the slow sea birds,
from the two incoming boats, silently; and now they have fallen upon
good soil in the seven boats on the quay, in the masses of houses, in
the arches of the bridge and in the hearts of men, and all things drink
oblivion. As I turn away there is a sound of shrill, passionless voices
that may be the souls of the oblivious travelling to content somewhere
in the rich purple night.




CHAPTER XLIII

CLOUDS OVER THE SEA


The high, partridge-coloured heathland rolls southward, with small
ridges as of a sea broken by cross winds, or as if the heather and
the hard gorse cushions had grown over ruins which time had not yet
smoothed into the right curves of perfect death. A gentle wind changes
the grass from silver to green, from green to silver, by depressing or
lifting up the blades. In the dry heather and pallid herbage the wind
sounds all the stops of despair. The note that each produces is faint,
and the combination hardly louder than the sound that fancy makes among
the tombs. Nevertheless, the enchantment of that little noise pours
into the air and heart a sympathy with the thousand microscopic sorrows
and uncertainties of the inanimate world--a feeling that is part of the
melancholy importunately intruding on a day of early spring. The larks
rise, linking earth and sky with their songs, and the stonechats are
restless.

There are no trees. The only house is a little, white, thatched cottage
among some shining dark boats, on the distant rosy shore.

The sea makes no sound. It changes with the sky so often and so subtly
that its variations are to be described, if at all, in terms not of
colour but of thought. All such moods as pass through the mind of
a lonely man, during long hours in a place where the outside world
does not disturb him and he lives on memory and pure reflection, are
symbolised by those changes on the surface of the sea. Now it is one
thing and now another; the growth is imperceptible and those moods
that have passed are as hard to reconstruct as the links of a long,
fluctuating reverie. For the most part it is grey, a grey full of
meditation and discontent.

The heathland changes with the sea. Both take their thoughts and
fancies from the sky. For this is a world of clouds; earth and sea are
made by them what they are. They make the sea, and they make the little
pools, blue, silver or grey, among the gorse. The clouds are always
there; inhabiting a dome that is about fifty miles from the horizon up
and down to the opposite horizon; and yet they are never the same.

Where do the clouds go?

The large white clouds, mountainous and of alabaster and with looks of
everlastingness. I see them in the north at midday, making the hills
seem level with the plain. I turn away my eyes and when next I look
they are gone. They vanish like childish things. One day I made an
appointment with another child to play marbles on the next morning; I
never went; I forgot; I never saw the boy again, and I remember it now,
for I never played marbles after that.

The high white halcyons of summer skies.

The distant, icy ranges of rounded pearl down which, in terrace after
terrace, the sun walks like a king to the sea in May. As I watch
they grow big like roses in the sun, and they change and vanish and
reappear beneath the restless sculptor’s hand. If a man loves what is
passing away, he loves then.

Those little dove-like clouds that for a moment stain the dusky clouds
after an April storm--are they a metamorphosis of the Pleiades? They
are gone like music; for sometimes the memory of them equals the
reality and sometimes they are not to be recalled.

Those Elysian, white sierras in the east, which, at the end of a day
of frowns and humours, stretch far away in still and lucid air, their
bases lost in blue, making the world immense, as if it were to be thus
for ever and the gods to walk again.

The cliffs that hold the moon imprisoned in their clefts and lure the
mind to desire useless things.

The flocks that go down into the sea or behind the mountains, and
thrill the heart with adventurousness and yet never move it to an
adventure, but rather persuade us to care greatly for nothing except to
muse and mesmerise ourselves with that old song--

    “I did but see her passing by
    And yet I love her till I die.”

The parcels of aerial gold which at sunset make one canopy as of a
golden-foliaged tree planted over the world. The night does not believe
that they were ever there.

Those caravans that go down the blue precipices of night intently;
those dragons, lean and black, that prepare the dawn and ruin the
morning star.

They change, they tarry, they travel far, they pass away, they
dissolve, they cannot die. Up there, do they think, or do they watch,
or do they simply act? and is it pleasant simply to act? Have all the
sunsets and dawns and thunderstorms done nothing for them? I suppose
that up there also nothing matters but eternity; that up there also
they know nothing of eternity.




CHAPTER XLIV

THE MARSH


The sun has gone down. Except on one hand, the immense empty marshland
expands to the sea, and where it mingles with the grey water would be
uncertain, but for the clamour of the wading birds and the gleam, now
and then, of a white wing. The low bent thorns, inland, now take on a
strange humanity, as of men who have ventured out into the solitude and
pitched their tents there and none has followed them; they are bent in
alarmed and hurrying attitudes away from the sea, but cannot leave it.
The sea rises steeply up like a vast ploughed field to an uncertain sky
of the same hue. All that greyness takes hold upon the mind like autumn
rain and lures it to we know not what desperate carelessness; and the
siren, that sweet evil of the sea, chants such dissolving melodies as
this:--

    “The woods of Arcady are dead,
    And over is their antique joy;
    Of old the world on dreaming fed;
    Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
    Yet still she turns her restless head;
    But O, sick children of the world,
    Of all the many changing things
    In dreary dancing past us whirled,
    To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
    Words alone are certain good.
    Where are now the warring kings,
    Word be-mockers?--By the Rood
    Where are now the warring kings?
    An idle word is now their glory,
    By the stammering schoolboy said,
    Reading some entangled story:
    The kings of the old time are fled.
    The wandering earth herself may be
    Only a sudden, flaming word,
    In clanging space a moment heard,
    Troubling the endless reverie ...”

But at one hand lies the first house in the world, a little ark of
grey stone, pierced by windows behind which a velvet darkness weaves
a spell and by a gloomy doorway; knock there and at once you will be
barricaded again against the annihilating sea and night. All about it
a trim garden of white and gold and dying red sends up a thin tower of
scent that stands bravely in the salt wind. A tower!--at such an hour,
when the easements of all the senses are opened wide upon eternity,
this perfume not only satisfies the desiring and aspiring sense, but,
with all its unsearched, undiscovered powers, builds for us here upon
the shore a specular tower and, more, a palace lovely and shadowy,
where the mind roves slowly and at ease, saluting vaguely apprehended
shapes, finding now long lost memories of men and things which time
has locked against a thousand keys, and now bold hopes and unexpected
consolations. Content herself lurks here and many a pleasant ghost that
seems immortal because it has died many times, and they may be enjoyed,
until suddenly the night wind, without mercy, overturns the tower and
desolates the palace and leaves us forsaken. Yonder the lighthouse
flashes. The ships go out with wings as of a moth that cannot leave
its chrysalis behind. The church bells moan; the sea birds whimper and
shriek, and the road that goes on so long as we can walk lengthens out
along the marsh and up the hill.




CHAPTER XLV

ONE SAIL AT SEA


This is a simple world. On either hand the shore sweeps out in a long
curve and ends in a perpendicular, ash-coloured cliff, carving the
misty air as with a hatchet-stroke. The shore is of tawny, terraced
sand, like hammered metal from the prints of the retreating waves;
and here and there a group of wildly carved and tragic stones--_unde
homines nati, durum genus_--such as must have been those stones from
which Deucalion made the stony race of men to arise. Up over the
sand, and among these stones the water slides in tracery like May
blossom or silver mail. A little way out, the long wave lifts itself
up laboriously into a shadowy cliff, nods proudly and crumbles, vain
and swift, into a thousand sparks of foam. Far out the desolate,
ridgy leagues vibrate and murmur with an unintelligible voice, not
less intelligible than when one man says, “I believe,” or another
man, “I love,” or another, “I am your friend.” Almost at the horizon
a sharp white sail sways, invisibly controlled. In a minute it does
not move; in half-an-hour it has moved. It fascinates and becomes the
image of the watcher’s hopes, as when in some tranquil grief we wait,
with faint curiosity and sad foretelling, to see how our plans will
travel, smiling a little even when they stray or stop, because we
have foretold it. Will the sail sink? Will it take wing into the sky?
Will it go straight and far, and overcome and celebrate its success?
But it only fades away, and presently another is there unasked, yet
not surprising, and it also fades away, and the night has come, and
still the sea speaks with tongues. In the moonlight one strange flower
glistens, white as a campanula, like a sweet-pea in shape--the bleached
thigh-bone of a rat--and we forget the rest.




CHAPTER XLVI

THE CASTLE OF CARBONEK


The castle stands high among vast, sharp-edged waves of sand at the
edge of a cliff, and looks at the sea and a long, empty shore. At its
feet a little river can be seen running in a narrow valley. A few miles
off it rises in the red moorland, then it falls with many a cascade
down ladders of crag, broadens among willows where long leaves are
all horizontal in the wind, and here by the castle it has reached an
elvish, merry old age already, as it moves clear over the brown stones
and out among the rocks to the sea. Opposite the castle, across the
river, the other side of the valley is clothed in dense and luminous
oak wood. Where the river joins the sea both the castle hill and the
wooded hill break away into a broken multitude of bristling rocks, and
among their alleys and hidden corridors and halls the waves leap with
the motion of a herd of ridgy cattle galloping through narrow gateways.
Beyond, and away for ten miles, the high dark coast sweeps in a curve
which the sea whitens by showing its teeth; and round the headland
at the end the ships come and go at starry intervals. Landward, the
country rises in long, steep, furzy curves, interrupted by sudden
rocks, to the red moor and the autumn evening sky of towering,
tumultuous and yet steady grey cloud.

The castle stands among pale sand and long plumy grasses. The sand
is deep within the hollow and roofless circuit of the broken walls,
through which, here and there, come glimpses of sea or sky disconnected
from any fragment of the land, so that I seem to stand between the sea
and sky. In the summer ivy-leaved toad-flax buds and harebells, most
delicate flowers, whisper from the crevices. But nothing lives here
now. The trunk of an old tree that once grew through the walls is now
so much worn that what it was when it lived is not to be known. Not
only is all human life gone from here, but even the signs of its decay
are invisible. The noble masonry can suffer no more except at the
hands of men; it is too low and too strong. It is a rude crag. Neither
history nor legend speaks intelligently of it. It is but known that
it was raised by hands, and each man that comes to it has to build it
again out of his own life and blood, or it remains not far removed
from nothing. The wayfarer starts at the sight of it, tries in vain,
shuddering at the cliff and the desolate sea, to conceive a life lived
by beings like himself in such a place. To have lived there men must
have had fairy aids or the blood of witches or of gods in their veins.

Here might easily have been builded in a night that phantom palace
and its illusive pomps, where the Corinthian Lycius dwelt with the
phantasmal Lamia until a philosopher’s eye unbuilt it again.

Or on these sands might have stood Myratana and blind Tiriel before the
beautiful palace, and cursed their sons.

Or up in the vanished high bowman’s window the king’s daughter sat and
harped and sang:--

    “There sits a bird i’ my father’s garden,
    An’ O! but she sings sweet!
    I hope to live an’ see the day
    When wi’ my love I’ll meet.”

When the sun has set, and land and sea are dissolved in cold mist, all
but a circle of pale sand and the castle fragment, it seems true that
here, to the foot of the tower that is gone, came the king’s daughter
and wept and sighed and made a great moan: “Ah! he mourns not who
does not mourn for love.” And the good king came and asked her if she
desired to wed, and she answered, “Alas, sir, yes. Ah! he mourns not
who does not mourn for love.”

    “Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour:
    Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour.
      La fille du roi est au pied de la tour,
      Qui pleura et soupire et mène grand dolour.
    Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour:
    Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour.
      Le bon roi lui dit: Ma fille, qu’avez vous?
      Voulez-vous un mari? Hélas! oui, mon seignoux.
    Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour:
    Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour.”

Here, away from earth and sea and sky, apart from men and time and any
care, the melody and the picture are truer than before, suiting that
melancholy wood, in which the heart, seeming to go back easily through
unguessed deeps of time, makes all sorrows its own, airily, not without
delight.

And there are others who abode here or abide here, as for example
those timeless knights of no age or clime--Pelleas, Launcelot,
Pellinore, Palomides, Galahad, whose armour no man pretends to show us,
whom old men’s tongues and poets’ pens have lured into immortality--to
whom this castle gives a home.

When Launcelot had come to the water of Morteise, says Malory, he
slept, and there in a vision he was bidden to rise and put on his
armour and enter the first ship that he found. And he did so, and the
ship moved without sail or oar, and in the ship was great sweetness so
that “he was fulfilled with all things that he thought on or desired.”
There he slept, and when he awoke there was none on board except the
dead sister of Sir Percivale; and the ship went on for more than a
month and Sir Launcelot fed on manna, until at last he touched land
and there met Sir Galahad, his son. For half a year the two sailed
together, and “often they arrived in isles far from folk, where there
repaired none but wild beasts.” But one day at the edge of a forest a
white knight warned Sir Galahad that he should stay with his father
no more. “And therewith Galahad entered into the forest. And the wind
arose, and drove Launcelot more than a month throughout the sea, where
he slept but little, but prayed to God that he might see some tidings
of the Sangreal. So it befell on a night, at midnight, he arrived afore
a castle, on the back side, which was rich and fair, and there was a
postern opened towards the sea, and was open without any keeping, save
two lions kept the entry; and the moon shone clear. Anon Sir Launcelot
heard a voice that said: Launcelot, go out of this ship and enter into
the castle, where thou shalt see a great part of thy desire. Then he
ran to his arms, and so armed him, and so went to the gate and saw the
lions. Then set he hand to his sword and drew it. Then there came a
dwarf suddenly, and smote him on the arm so sore that the sword fell
out of his hand. Then heard he a voice say: O man of evil faith and
poor belief, wherefore trowest thou more on thy harness than in thy
Maker, for He might more avail thee than thine armour, in whose service
thou art set. Then said Launcelot: Fair Father Jesu Christ, I thank
Thee of Thy great mercy that Thou reprovest me of my misdeed; now see I
well that ye hold me for your servant. Then took he again his sword and
put it up in his sheath, and made a cross in his forehead, and came to
the lions, and they made semblaunt to do him harm. Notwithstanding he
passed by them without hurt, and entered into the castle to the chief
fortress, and there were they all at rest. Then Launcelot entered in
so armed, for he found no gate nor door but it was open. And at the
last he found a chamber whereof the door was shut, and he set his hand
thereto to have opened it, but he might not.

“Then he enforced him mickle to undo the door. Then he listened and
heard a voice which sung so sweetly that it seemed none earthly thing;
and him thought the voice said: Joy and honour be to the Father of
Heaven. Then Launcelot kneeled down before the chamber, for well wist
he that there was the Sangreal within that chamber. Then said he: Fair
sweet Father, Jesu Christ, if ever I did thing that pleased Thee, Lord,
for Thy pity ne have me not in despite for my foul sins done aforetime,
and that Thou show me something of that I seek. And with that he saw
the chamber door open, and there came out a great clearness, that the
house was as bright as all the torches of the world had been there. So
came he to the chamber door and would have entered. And anon a voice
said to him: Flee, Launcelot, and enter not, for thou oughtest not to
do it; and if thou enter thou shalt forthink it. Then he withdrew him
aback right heavy. Then looked he up in the middle of the chamber, and
saw a table of silver, and the Holy Vessel, covered with red samite
and many angels about it, whereof one held a candle of wax burning,
and the other held a cross and the ornaments of an altar. And before
the Holy Vessel he saw a good man clothed as a priest. And it seemed
that he was at the sacring of the mass. And it seemed to Launcelot
that above the priest’s hands were three men, whereof the two put the
youngest by likeness between the priest’s hands; and so he lift it up
right high, and it seemed to show so to the people. And then Launcelot
marvelled not a little, for him thought the priest was so greatly
charged of the figure that him seemed that he should fall to the earth.
And when he saw none about him that would help him, then came he to
the door a great pace, and said: Fair Father Jesu Christ, ne take it
for no sin though I help the good man which hath great need of help.
Right so entered he into the chamber, and came toward the table of
silver; and when he came nigh he felt a breath, that him thought it was
intermeddled with fire, which smote him so sore in the visage that him
thought it brent his visage; and therewith he fell to the earth and
had no power to arise; so he was so araged, that had lost the power of
his body, and his hearing, and his seeing. Then felt he many hands
about him, which took him up and bare him out of the chamber door,
without any amending of his swoon, and left him there, seeming dead to
all people. So upon the morrow when it was fair day they within were
arisen, and found Launcelot lying afore the chamber door. All they
marvelled how that he came in, and so they looked upon him, and felt
his pulse to wit whether there were any life in him; and so they found
life in him, but he might not stand nor stir no member that he had.
And so they took him by every part of the body, and bare him into a
chamber, and laid him in a rich bed, far from all folk; and so he lay
four days. Then the one said he was alive, and the other said, nay.
In the name of God, said an old man, for I do you verily to wit he is
not dead, but he is so full of life as the mightiest of you all; and
therefore I counsel you that he be well kept till God send him life
again.

“In such manner they kept Launcelot four-and-twenty days and all
so many nights, that ever he lay still as a dead man; and at the
twenty-fifth day befell him after midday that he opened his eyes, and
when he saw folk he made great sorrow, and said: Why have ye awaked
me, for I was more at ease than I am now. O Jesu Christ, who might
be so blessed that might see openly thy great marvels of secretness
there where no sinner may be! What have ye seen? said they about him.
I have seen, said he, so great marvels that no tongue may tell, and
more than any heart can think, and had not my son been here afore
me I had seen much more. Then they told him how he had lain there
four-and-twenty days and nights. Then him thought it was punishment
for the four-and-twenty years that he had been a sinner, wherefore our
Lord put him in penance four-and-twenty days and nights. Then looked
Sir Launcelot afore him, and saw the hair which he had borne nigh a
year, for that he forthought him right much that he had broken his
promise unto the hermit, which he had avowed to do. Then they asked how
it stood with him. Forsooth, said he, I am whole of body, thanked be
our Lord; therefore, sirs, for God’s love tell me where I am. Then said
they all that he was in the Castle of Carbonek.”

And when the moon is clear, and the tingling sea is vast and alone,
this castle on the sand above the grim coast is Carbonek, meet for all
adventures and all dreams.




SONGS


MOWING SONG

    With one man, with two men, we mow the hay to-gether; ...
    With three men, with four men, we mow the hay togeth-er....
    My four, my three, my two, my one, no more....
    We mow the hay and rake the hay and car-ry it a-way to-geth-er.


THE HOLM BANK HUNTING SONG

    One morning last winter to Holm bank there came
    A brave, no-ble sportsman, Squire Sands was his name,
    Came a hunt-ing the fox, bold Reynard must die,
    And he flung out his train and be-gan for to cry,
    Tally ho! ... tally ho! ...
    Hark, for-ward a-way, tal-ly ho....


POOR OLD HORSE

    My cloth-ing was once of the lin-sey wool-sey fine, ...
    My tail it grew at length ... my coat did likewise shine.
    But now I’m growing old my beauty does de-cay.
    My master frowns up-on me; one day I heard him say,
    Poor old horse, poor old horse.


MARY, COME INTO THE FIELD

    Mary, come into the field ...
    To work a-long of I....
    Digging up man-gel wor-zels,
    For they be a-growing high....
    Dig ’em up by the roots, dig ’em up by the roots,
    Put in your spade, don’t be a-fraid,
    Dig ’em up by the roots....


LA FILLE DU ROI

    Las! Il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour!
    Las! Il n’a nu! mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour!
    La fill-e du roi est au pied de la tour,
    qui pleure et sou-pir-e et mène grand dou-lour.

    Las! Il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour.
    Las! Il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour.
    Le bon roi lui dit: Ma fille, qu’avez-vous?
    Voulez-vous un mari? Hé-las oui, mon sei-gnoux!

    Las! Il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour.
    Las! Il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour.




INDEX


  Achilles, modern, questioning Ulysses, 189

  After-harvest, stillness of, 99

  Aphrodite, 169

  Apollo and Pan, 27

  Apple blossom, 166-169

  Ash-tree, solitary, dying, endiademed with woe, 53, 54;
    how its leaves are shed, 124

  August, 73-76;
    Nature’s perfect poise, 73;
    cool places in, 73;
    the woods in, 75

  Autumn, 176

  Autumn bells, 174, 175

  Autumn garden, an, 93-96, 174, 175;
    farmhouse the royal flower of, 93;
    a farmer’s love of his, 95


  Ballad, a pathetic, described, 207, 208;
    on the horse, 190, 237

  Ballads and folk-songs, 206-208;
    their words and melodies richest in immortal symbols, 206, 207

  Barge, a black, 143-145;
    its strange cargo, 145

  Beech wood, a, 166

  Birdnesting, 60

  “Blue Bell,” the cosmic melody, 194

  Bodleian Library, August in, 73

  Books, a night with, 118

  Boy, long thoughts of, 3

  Brook, the, 88-92;
    its insect, mineral, and plant life, 88-91;
    its meandering course, 91, 92

  Burns, Robert, prejudice against his poetry for epitaphs, 114


  Calm, effect of, 2

  Carbonek, castle of, 225-232;
    now only a ruined crag, 226;
    dreary outlook from, 226;
    and Sir Launcelot’s vision, 229-232

  Cassiopeia, the constellation, 194

  Catullus, love of, song suggestive of, 208

  Centaur, farmer on horse compared to, 66

  Chalk hills, the, 171

  Cherry blossom, 153, 154

  Cherry of Zennor, Hunt’s story of, 198-201;
    her dissatisfaction with home, 199;
    her strange adventure, 199;
    her curiosity and its consequences, 200, 201

  Church bells, 176

  Church, decorated, description of, 41-48;
    service in, 41-43;
    hymn-singing, 42;
    modern worshippers and mythical gods, 43;
    caged bells, 43

  Church, village, description of, 176-178;
    dull worshippers, 177;
    a spiritless sermon, 178;
    dream of an earthly heaven, 178-180

  Clock, a silent, 118, 119

  Clouds on the sea, 216-219;
    their changeableness, 217, 218

  Coach, London, 78

  Company, good, walking in, 28-30

  Country churchyard, a, 111-115;
    village life in, 111;
    life and death in, 111, 112;
    epitaphs, 112-115;
    eighteenth and nineteenth century epitaphs compared, 112

  Country lover, the, 91

  Crashaw’s poem, 62


  Daffodils, the first, 183-191

  Dante, love of, song suggestive of, 208

  Dawn, beauties of nature at, 15, 16;
    a July, 119

  Deucalion stones, 223

  Dis, chariot of, coming to Persephone, 148

  “Dolly Gray,” sung in July fields, 206

  Downs, the, 171-3

  Dream, a strange, 39, 40


  Earth Children, 126-137

  Elves, lingering superstitions regarding, 66

  Epitaph on infant’s tomb, 24

  Epitaphs, 112-115;
    history and progress seen in, 112;
    sources of, 113, 114


  “Fantastic summer’s heat,” 73

  Farm, an old, 64-68;
    relics of its long-dead generations, 67;
    a deserted, 69, 70

  Farmer, his life and habits, 66-68;
    his house, 67;
    his library, 67, 68;
    relics of ancestors and thoughts of posterity, 68

  Farmer’s daughter, the, 168, 169

  Farmhouse, the royal flower of autumn, 93;
    youth and antiquity mingled in the aspect of, 93, 94;
    wayfarer’s first view of, 96;
    a little red, 100;
    life in, 101

  Farmyard, in a, 52-55

  Faunus, 21-25

  Fell and moor, 184

  Field, a green, 84-87;
    antiquity of, 86;
    November the notable month of, 87

  Fields, antiquity of, 86

  Fishing-boats in a tidal river, 214, 215

  Footpaths, ancient, 115

  “Four Elms, The,” typical village inn, 106, 110;
    its old-time furniture, 107;
    tramps and labourers in tap-room, 107-110

  Fox-hunt, 141, 155-165


  Gaberdine, a pedlar’s description of, 186

  Galahad and Launcelot, 228

  Gardens, summer flowers in, 170, 171;
    autumn flowers, 174, 175

  Garland day, 44-48;
    song of, 48

  Gods, ancient, and modern worshippers, 42, 43;
    and heroes, 54

  Golden Age, the, 13, 15, 16, 100-102;
    and modern literature, 14

  Goldfinches happy among thistles, 87

  Good Friday and marbles, 60


  Happiness, pursuit of, futile, 83

  Happy Fields, 73

  Harvest, a little before, 170-173

  Harvest field, a moonlight love-race in, 201-204

  Harvest moon, under a, 202-204

  Haul of spring flowers, a March, 211-213

  Hazlitt, love of, song suggestive of, 208

  Heathland in the wind, 216, 217

  Hedges, unruliness of, 84

  Heroes and gods, 54

  Hill, a tall beechen, 153

  Holm-bank Hunting Song the, 194

  “Hop-idgit,” the, or “shim,” 126

  Horse, ballad on the, 190

  House, white stone, 74

  Hunt’s story of Cherry of Zennor, 198


  Inn, the village, 205-208;
    metamorphosed into a temple of all souls, 208

  Inns, 63, 104, 106, 123, 183, 194;
    a medley, 5;
    roadside, 5, 61


  January sunshine, 140-142

  July night, and dawn, a, reminiscences of a, 118, 119

  Junonian woman, 73, 76;
    best representative of August, 73


  Keats, 147, 148

  Kilhwch, love of, song suggestive of, 208

  King, Farmer, anecdote of his hay, 129


  Labourer, aged, reminiscences of, 77-82;
    a memory with a voice, 79;
    feats of strength and endurance, 80, 81;
    his coaching days, 81;
    disciple of Culpeper, 82

  Lamia and Lycius, 226

  Landscapes on the walls by the roadside, 192

  Lane, an ideal country, 56, 57

  Launcelot, Sir, at the water of Morteise, 228;
    his vision of the Sangreal, 228;
    his adventures, 228-232;
    at the castle of Carbonek, 229-232

  Lethe, 214

  Lethe’s stream, the flotsam on, 101

  Literature, modern, 14

  London, 7, 188;
    midnight walk in, 7;
    pedestrians encountered, 7, 8;
    river, seen from bridge, 8;
    names of streets an epitome of the world and time, 9;
    can it be told? 188, 189;
    _The Soul of London_, 188

  Love-race in a moonlit harvest-field, 201-204

  Lover’s game, children playing at, 59

  Lycius, Corinthian, and Lamia, 226


  Malory’s story of Sir Launcelot and the Sangreal, 228

  Marbles and Good Friday, 60

  March doubts, 37-40

  March haul, a, 211, 213

  Marlowe, love of, song suggestive of, 208

  Marsh, the, 220-222

  “Mary, come into the Field,” a peasant song, 34, 35, 237, 238

  Maypole, the village, 70

  Meadowland, 56-63;
    pastoral inhabitants of, 58

  Meadow-sweet, the, 75

  Men prisons to themselves, 7

  Meredith, Arabella, old man’s love-story concerning, 157-163;
    her prowess in the hunting-field, 158;
    her proposal of marriage, 159;
    at the Fair, 161;
    her lover’s daring swim, 162, 163;
    her death, 163

  Merediths, the, 157

  Metamorphosis of the trees, 124

  Mind, pool an image of the, 154

  Moon, reign of, 153, 154

  Moor and fell, 184

  Moor, under the, 198-201

  Moorhen, the home of the, 85

  Morning, pride of the, 121-123

  Morteise, water of, Sir Launcelot at the, 228

  Mountainous country, scene in, 183

  Mountains haunting the day, 184

  Mowing, extraordinary day’s work at, 80, 81;
    song, 11, 235

  Music, the romantic cry of matter striving to become spirit, 206

  Myratana and blind Tiriel, 226


  Names, of streets, an epitome, 9;
    of inns, rich in suggestion, 9

  Nature, sorrowing, 5;
    a philosopher of, 12;
    beauties of, at dawn, 15, 16, 119

  No man’s garden, 31-36

  November, the notable month of the field, 87;
    rain, 138, 139


  Orchard, an, 167


  Pace-egging Play, 179

  Paganism, eternal, the multitude’s, 130, 131

  Page, Margaret Helen, earth child, 127;
    her better days, 127;
    her Franciscan fondness for bird and beast, 127;
    her Christian-pagan prayer and aspirations, 128-130

  Page, Robert, earth child, 126;
    his home, 127;
    his varied avocations, 131, 132;
    his belief of all things in print, 133;
    his strange dream of the judgment day, 133, 134;
    Bacchus his only god, 134;
    his likeness to a lesser god in mythology, 135, 136

  Palomides, love of, song suggestive of, 208

  Pan and Apollo, 27

  Pastoral inhabitants of meadowland, 58;
    song, 58;
    valley, 174

  Pedlar, a, 186;
    his picturesque dress, 186;
    his birthplace, 186;
    his simple life described, 187;
    his questionings, 187-190

  Pelleas, 228

  Pellinore, 228

  Persephone and the chariot of Dis, 148

  Pleiades, the, and clouds, 218

  Ploughman, the, 22-25;
    his daily task, 23;
    his recreation, 23, 24

  Poetry, pastoral, 14

  Poison, slow, dream-search for, 39, 40

  Pond, a primeval, 52, 53;
    the field, 85;
    its aspect at dawn, 86

  Pond-mirror, the, 192-197;
    reflections on and in, 196, 197

  Pool, beauties of, 73-76;
    an image of the mind, reflections in, 154

  “Poor Mary,” children’s lovers’ game, 59, 60

  Poppies, 71

  _Popular Romances of the West of England_, Hunt’s, 198

  Pork, roast, procuring a dinner of, 79, 80

  Princess, an impossible, 72


  Rain, night walk in, 5, 6

  River, a tidal, fishing-heats in, 214

  Robin’s eggs, superstition regarding, 60

  Ruy Blas, love of, song suggestive of, 208


  Sail, one, at sea, 223, 224;
    image of watcher’s hopes, 223

  St. Martin’s Summer, 118-120

  Sangreal, Sir Launcelot and the, 228, 229

  Sea, clouds on the, 216, 219;
    one sail at, 223, 224

  Seifelmolouk, modern, and his memlooks, 43

  “Shim,” or “hop-idgit” of six tynes, the Sussex, 126

  Sign-post, duty of, 10

  Siren, melody of, 220

  Song, a country marching, 11, 235

  Songs, old, fragments of, 29, 30, 34

  Songs with music: Mowing song, 235;
    Holm-bank Hunting Song, 236;
    Poor old Horse, song of the, 237;
    Mary, come into the Field 237, 238;
    La Fille du Roi, 238

  Soul of London, the, 188

  Sovereign things, three: ship, chariot, plough, 21

  Spring, birds and flowers, 37-40

  Squire of olden days, a, 79

  Streets, as seen from railway carriage, 3, 4;
    a problem, 4;
    at night, 8;
    city, 9;
    names of, an epitome, 9

  Suburban street, a, 1

  Summer garden, 170, 171

  Summer-time, 170

  Sunday, autumn, in country, 176-180

  Sunshine, January, 140-142

  Superstitions: robin’s eggs, 60;
    elves, 66;
    tadpoles, 82

  Swift, love of, song suggestive of, 208

  Symbols that surge and satisfy, 205


  Tadpoles, rustic remedy for “decline,” 82

  Tartarus, 131

  Ten miles drive, 155

  Tennyson’s poetry as source of epitaphs, 114

  Times, old-fashioned, 77-82;
    advantages and disadvantages, 78;
    were they “good”? 78

  Tiriel, blind, and Myratana, 226

  Tombs, only records of early races, 111, 112;
    life and death of, 112;
    various objects in, 111;
    bodies found in sitting posture, 112

  Tower, a spectacular, 221

  Town-leaving, 1-17

  Tramp, a, conversations with, 31-35;
    his wife, 32;
    a murder, 32, 33;
    on Bank-holiday, 35, 36;
    at work, 36

  Tramps of various nationalities, 107;
    strange sleeping-place of, 115

  Tree-worship, mild, suggestion of, 192

  Trees, 6, 16;
    ancient, 42;
    metamorphosis of, 124


  Valley, a quiet, 140

  Village, the, 103-117;
    its ancient cottages, 105;
    its church and churchyard, 104, 111;
    its inns and their frequenters, 104, 106-110;
    flower-gardens, 105;
    its eighteenth-century vicarage, 106;
    longevity of inhabitants, 113;
    its roads and footpaths, 115, 116;
    its archæological and historic remains, 116

  Villon, love of, song suggestive of, 208


  Walnut-tree, the, 97-99

  Watercress-man, 2;
    conversation with, 11-15;
    as philosopher and flower-seller, 12;
    as landscape-painter, 12-13

  Water-mill, deserted, 97

  Wayfarer, the, 121

  Winter morning, a, 146

  Wood at sunrise, 44;
    antiquity of, 46;
    youth of, 47;
    an old, beauties of, 49-51;
    memories evoked by, 51;
    a triangular, 139

  Woodland walk, 26, 27, 44-51

  World, still primitive, the, 143

  Worshipper, modern and ancient gods, 42, 43


  Yeoman of long ancestry, 156;
    and Enid, his betrothed, 157, 160, 164

  Youth, wood of, 47


_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay._




Transcriber's Note


Duplicate headings have been removed.


The following apparent errors have been corrected:

p. 35 "Dig ’em up by the roots, etc." changed to "‘Dig ’em up by the
roots,’ etc."

p. 42 "Through all the changing scenes of life”" changed to "“Through
all the changing scenes of life”"

p. 58 "Aud all" changed to "And all"

p. 65 "Si g, birds,in" changed to "Sing, birds, in"

p. 96 "declares it" changed to "declares its"

p. 243 "his home, 127:" changed to "his home, 127;"

Archaic or inconsistent language has otherwise been kept as printed.