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Title: The Happy-go-lucky Morgans

Author: Edward Thomas

Release date: September 22, 2020 [eBook #63268]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
        produced from images generously made available by The
        Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY-GO-LUCKY MORGANS ***




Produced by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)









  THE HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
  MORGANS




_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_


  LIGHT AND TWILIGHT
  REST AND UNREST
  ROSE ACRE PAPERS


_Small Octavo. 2s. 6d. net_




[Illustration]




  THE HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
  MORGANS

  “But now--O never again”

  THOMAS HARDY’S _Julie-Jane_

  BY

  EDWARD THOMAS

  [Illustration]

  LONDON

  DUCKWORTH & CO.

  3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.




  TO

  MY FATHER AND MY MOTHER




CONTENTS


  CHAP.                                                               PAGE

     I. ABERCORRAN STREET                                                1
    II. THE MORGANS OF ABERCORRAN HOUSE                                 12
   III. THE WILD SWANS                                                  30
    IV. HOB-Y-DERI-DANDO                                                38
     V. AURELIUS, THE SUPERFLUOUS MAN                                   44
    VI. OUR COUNTRY                                                     63
   VII. WOOL-GATHERING AND LYDIARD CONSTANTINE                          76
  VIII. ABERCORRAN AND MORGAN’S FOLLY                                   92
    IX. MR TORRANCE, THE CHEERFUL MAN                                  112
     X. THE HOUSE UNDER THE HILL                                       128
    XI. MR STODHAM, THE RESPECTABLE MAN, AND THE DRYAD                 154
   XII. GREEN AND SCARLET                                              177
  XIII. NED OF GLAMORGAN                                               186
   XIV. THE CASTLE OF LEAVES, AND THE BEGGAR WITH THE LONG WHITE BEARD 207
    XV. MR STODHAM SPEAKS FOR ENGLAND--FOG SUPERVENES                  220
   XVI. THE HOUSE OF THE DAYS OF THE YEAR                              232
  XVII. PHILIP AND THE OUTLAWS OF THE ISLAND                           240
 XVIII. WHAT WILL ROLAND DO?                                           254
   XIX. THE INTERLUDE OF HIGH BOWER                                    263
    XX. THE POET’S SPRING AT LYDIARD CONSTANTINE                       280




THE HAPPY-GO-LUCKY MORGANS




CHAPTER I

ABERCORRAN STREET


My story is of Balham and of a family dwelling in Balham who were more
Welsh than Balhamitish. Strangers to that neighbourhood who go up
Harrington Road from the tram must often wonder why the second turning
on the right is called Abercorran Street: the few who know Abercorran
town itself, the long grey and white street, with a castle at one end,
low down by the river mouth, and an old church high up at the other,
must be delighted by the memories thus recalled, but they also must
wonder at the name. Abercorran Street is straight, flat, symmetrically
lined on both sides by four-bedroomed houses in pairs, and it runs at
right angles out of Harrington Road into another road which the pair
of four-bedroomed houses visible at the corner proclaim to be exactly
like it. The only external variety in the street is created by the
absence from two of the cast-iron gates of any notice prohibiting the
entrance of hawkers and canvassers.

When I myself first saw the white lettering on a blue ground of
ABERCORRAN STREET I was perhaps more surprised than most others have
been who paid any attention to it. I was surprised but not puzzled.
I knew very well why it was called Abercorran Street. For I knew
Abercorran House and the Morgans, its inhabitants, and the dogs and
the pigeons thereof. Who that ever knew the house and the people could
ever forget them? I knew the Morgans, the father and mother, the five
sons, the one daughter Jessie. I knew the house down to the kitchen,
because I knew old Ann, the one permanent--I had almost written
immortal--servant, of whom it was said by one knowing the facts, that
they also rule who only serve and wait. I knew the breakfast room
where breakfast was never finished; the dark Library where they had
all the magazines which have since died of their virtues; the room
without a name which was full of fishing-rods, walking-sticks, guns,
traps, the cross-bow, boxes of skins, birds’ eggs, papers, old books,
pictures, pebbles from a hundred beaches, and human bones. I knew
the conservatory crowded with bicycles and what had been tricycles. I
knew as well as any one the pigeon-houses, the one on a pole and the
one which was originally a fowl-house, built with some idea or fancy
regarding profit. I knew that well-worn square of blackened gravel
at the foot of the back steps, where everybody had to pass to go to
the conservatory, the pigeon-houses, and the wild garden beyond, and
where the sun was always shining on men and children and dogs. This
square was railed off from the rest of the garden. That also I knew,
its four-and-twenty elms that stood about the one oak in the long
grass and buttercups and docks, like a pleasant company slowly and
unwillingly preparing to leave that three-acre field which was the
garden of Abercorran House and called by us The Wilderness--a name now
immortalised, because the christener of streets has given it to the one
beyond Abercorran Street. Under the trees lay a pond containing golden
water-lilies and carp. A pond needs nothing else except boys like us
to make the best of it. Yet we never could fish in it again after the
strange girl was drawn out of it dead one morning: nobody knew who she
was or why she had climbed over into the Wilderness to drown herself;
yet Ann seemed to know, and so perhaps did the tall Roland, but both
of them could lock up anything they wished to keep secret and throw
away the key. I knew the elms and the one oak of the Wilderness as
well as the jackdaws did. For I knew them night and day, and the birds
knew nothing of them between half-past five on an October evening and
half-past five the next morning.

To-day the jackdaws at least, if ever they fly that way, can probably
not distinguish Abercorran Street and Wilderness Street from ordinary
streets. For the trees are every one of them gone, and with them the
jackdaws. The lilies and carp are no longer in the pond, and there is
no pond. I can understand people cutting down trees--it is a trade
and brings profit--but not draining a pond in such a garden as the
Wilderness and taking all its carp home to fry in the same fat as
bloaters, all for the sake of building a house that might just as well
have been anywhere else or nowhere at all. I think No. 23 Wilderness
Street probably has the honour and misfortune to stand in the pond’s
place, but they call it LYNDHURST. Ann shares my opinion, and she
herself is now living in the house behind, No. 21 Abercorran Street.

Ann likes the new houses as well as the old elm-trees, and the hundreds
of men, women, and children as well as the jackdaws--which is saying
a good deal; for she loved both trees and birds, and I have heard her
assert that the birds frequently talked in Welsh as the jackdaws used
to do at the castle of Abercorran; but when I asked her why she thought
so and what they said, she grew touchy and said: “Well, they did not
speak English, whatever, and if it was Welsh, as I think, you cannot
expect me to pervert Welsh into English, for I am no scholar.” She is
keeping house now for the gentleman at 21 Abercorran Street, a Mr Henry
Jones. She would probably have been satisfied with him in any case,
since he is the means by which Ann remains alive, free to think her own
thoughts and to bake her own bread; to drink tea for breakfast, tea for
dinner, tea for tea, tea for supper, and tea in between; to eat also at
long intervals a quart of cockles from Abercorran shore, and a baked
apple dumpling to follow; and at night to read the Welsh Bible and a
Guide to the Antiquities of Abercorran. But Ann is more than satisfied
because Mr Jones is Welsh. She admits his claim in spite of her
unconcealed opinion that his Dolgelly Welsh, of which she can hardly
understand a word, she says, is not Welsh at all. Of his speech as of
the jackdaws she can retort: “He does not speak English, whatever.”

Ann will never leave him unless he or she should die. She is untidy;
she has never decided what is truth; and she has her own affairs as
well as his to manage; but, as he says himself, he has entertained an
angel unawares and she is not to be thrust out. He covers his inability
to command her by asking what she could do at her age if she had to
leave. It is not likely that Mr Henry Jones could get the better of a
woman whom--in spite of the fact that she has never decided what is
truth--he has called an angel. For he did not use the word as a mere
compliment, as much as to say that she was all that a woman should be
when she is in domestic service. She is not; she is excellent only at
pastry, which Mr Jones believes that he ought never to touch. He has
been heard to call her “half angel and half bird”; but neither does
this furnish the real explanation, though it offers an obvious one. For
Ann is now--I mean that when we were children she seemed as old as she
seems now; she limps too; and yet it might partly be her limp that made
Mr Jones call her “half bird,” for it is brisk and quite unashamed,
almost a pretty limp; also she is pale with a shining paleness, and
often she is all eyes, because her eyes are large and round and dark,
looking always up at you and always a little sidelong--but that alone
would not justify a sensible man in calling her “half angel.” Nor would
her voice, which has a remarkable unexpectedness, wherever and whenever
it is heard. She begins abruptly in the middle of a thought without
a word or gesture of preparation, and always on an unexpectedly high
note. In this she is like the robin, who often rehearses the first
half of his song in silence and then suddenly continues aloud, as if
he were beginning in mid-song. Well, Mr Henry Jones, as I have said,
once called her “half angel and half bird,” and declared that he had
entertained an angel unawares in Ann, and I believe that he is right
and more than a sensible man. For he has grasped the prime fact that
she is not what she seems.

For my part I can say that she is such a woman that her name, Ann
Lewis, has for those who connect it with her, and with her alone, out
of all the inhabitants of earth, a curious lightness, something at
once pretty and old with an elfish oldness, something gay and a little
weird, also a bird-like delicacy, as delicate as “linnet” and “martin.”
If these words are useless, remember at least that, though half bird,
she is not a mere human travesty or hint of a winged thing, and that
she is totally unlike any other bird, and probably unlike any other
angel.

An ordinary bird certainly--and an ordinary angel probably--would have
pined away at 21 Abercorran Street after having lived at Abercorran
House and at Abercorran itself. But Ann is just the same as when I
last saw her in Abercorran House. She alone that day was unchanged.
The house, the Wilderness, the conservatory, the pigeon-houses, all
were changed; I was changed, but not Ann. Yet the family had then newly
gone, leaving her alone in the house. It was some years since I had
been there. They had been going on as ever in that idle, careless, busy
life which required a big country house and an illimitable playground
of moor and mountain for a full and fitting display. Gradually their
friends grew up, went to a university, to business, or abroad, and
acquired preferences which were not easily to be adapted to that
sunny, untidy house. At first these friends would be only too glad to
go round to Abercorran House of an evening after business, or a morning
or two after the beginning of the vacation. Perhaps they came again,
and after a long interval yet again. They said it was different: but
they were wrong; it was they themselves were different; the Morgans
never changed. In this way young men of the neighbourhood discovered
that they were no longer boys. They could no longer put up with that
careless hullabaloo of lazy, cheerful people, they took offence at the
laziness, or else at the cheerfulness. Also they saw that Jessie, the
girl, was as frank and untidy at seventeen as she had always been, and
it took them aback, especially if they were wanting to make love to
her. The thought of it made them feel foolish against their will. They
fancied that she would laugh. Yet it was easy to believe that Jessie
might die for love or for a lover. When somebody was pitying the girl
who drowned herself in the Wilderness pond, Jessie interrupted: “She
isn’t a _poor girl_; she is dead; it is you are poor; she has got what
she wanted, and some of you don’t know what you want, and if you did
you would be afraid of cold water.” The young men could see the power
of such words in Jessie’s eye, and they did not make love to her. Some
took their revenge by calling her a slut, which was what Ann used to
call her when she was affectionate, as she could be to Jessie only.
“Come on, there’s a slut,” she used to say. It was too familiar for
the youths, but some of them would have liked to use it, because they
felt that the phrase was somehow as amorous as it was curt, a sort of
blow that was as fond as a kiss. Even when, in their hard hats at the
age of twenty or so, they used the term, in condemnation, they would
still have given their hats for courage to speak it as Ann did, and
say: “Come on, Jessie, there’s a slut”; for they would have had to kiss
her after the word, both because they could not help it, and for fear
she should misunderstand its significance. At any rate, I believe that
nobody but Ann ever addressed that term of utmost endearment to Jessie.

Thus was there one reason the less for boys who were growing up,
ceasing to tear the knees of their trousers and so on, to frequent
Abercorran House. I lingered on, but the death of one there had set me
painfully free. After a time I used to go chiefly to honour an old
custom, which proved an inadequate motive. Then year after year, of
course, it was easier to put off revisiting, and one day when I went,
only Ann was left. She had her kitchen and her own room; the rest of
the house had no visible inhabitants. Yet Ann would not have it that it
was sad. “It does a house good,” she said, “to have all those Morgans
in it. Now they have gone back again to Abercorran in the county of
Caermarthen, and I am sure they are all happy but the mistress, and she
was incurable; that was all; and there was an end of it at last.” Ann
herself was staying on as caretaker till Abercorran House was let or
sold.




CHAPTER II

THE MORGANS OF ABERCORRAN HOUSE


In spite of old Ann and her kitchen fire I did not stay long in the
house that day. The removal which had left it deserted and silent had
made it also a little sordid: the family’s ways, for example, had not
agreed with the wall-paper, and they had been no enemies to spiders.
So I went out into the yard. There were no dogs; all had gone with the
Morgans to Abercorran. The only life was a single homeless blue pigeon
flying about in search of the home which had been sold. Ann said that
almost every one of the birds had returned in this way, and she called
the traveller into the kitchen to wait until its purchaser came in
search of it. She told me who he was, and much more about the sale,
which I forgot or never heard, because the sun shone very warmly into
the yard just then, and I could not help seeing them all again, Jack
and Roland, Lewis and Harry, and Jessie, and Philip, too, as he was at
sixteen, and the dogs,--Ladas the greyhound, Bully the bull-terrier,
Granfer the dachshund, Spot the fox-terrier, and pigeons here and there
among them, and some perched on roof and chimneys, some flying so high
that they were no bigger than larks--and Mr Morgan at the top of the
steps looking at it all and seeing that it was good. Often had I come
upon them in this pattern, not knowing at first whether to join this
group or that, the busy or the idle.

In those days Abercorran House stood at the end of a short, quiet
street which had only six houses in it, all on the right-hand side
going up, all roomy and respectable, monuments of Albert the Good’s
age, well covered with creepers, screened by a continuous line of
lime-trees and in most cases by laurel, lilac, and balsam in compact
shrubberies. Opposite the houses a high wall ran along until, at
Abercorran House, the street was cut short by an oak fence. Behind that
fence, and occupying as much ground as all the other houses and gardens
together, lay the Abercorran garden, the Wilderness, which was bounded
and given its triangular shape by a main road--now Harrington Road--and
a farm lane. Impenetrable hedges and unscaleable fences protected the
garden from the world.

I cannot say how it had come about that these three acres became
attached to the house which so well deserved them. From the outside
nobody would have suspected it. Abercorran House was in no practical
respect superior to its neighbours; presumably the land beyond the
fence was another property, or it would not have been allowed to cut
short the street. But so it was. You entered the carriage gate on
your right--there was no carriage--passed round the right side of the
house into the yard at the back, turned to the left across it and went
between the conservatory and the pigeon house out into the Wilderness.

The house was distinguished, to the casual eye, by the lack of coloured
or white curtains, the never-shut gate, the flourishing, untended lilac
hiding the front door and lower windows except in winter. But for me
it is hard to admit that Abercorran House had anything in common,
except building material, with the other five--The Elms, Orchard Lea,
Brockenhurst, and Candelent Gate, and I forget the other. The street
was called Candelent Street; God knows why, but there may be someone
who knows as much about Candelent Gate as I do of Abercorran House.

These houses showed signs of pride and affluence. Their woodwork
was frequently painted; the gravel was renewed; the knockers and
letter-boxes gleamed; their inhabitants were always either neat or
gaudy; even the servants were chosen half for their good looks, and
were therefore continually being changed. At the Elms lived several
people and a great Dane; at Orchard Lea a wire-haired terrier with a
silver collar; at Candelent Gate a sort of whippet; at the house whose
name I have forgotten, three pugs. These dogs all liked the Morgans’
house for one reason or another: men and dogs and food were always
to be found there. The dogs’ owners never got so far up the street
as that, though they sometimes sent to ask if Bunter the wire-haired
terrier, or Lofty the Dane, or Silvermoon the whippet, were there, or
to complain about one of some score of things which they disliked,
as, for example, the conduct of the dogs (especially Bully, who was
damned at first sight for his looks), the use of the hundred yards of
roadway as a running ground, Jessie’s entering the races in a costume
which enabled her to win, the noise of boys whistling at the pigeons,
the number of the pigeons, the visits of almost verminous-looking
strangers who had forgotten the name of the house and tried The Elms,
or Candelent Gate, or Orchard Lea, or Brockenhurst, before discovering
the Morgans. In return, Mr Morgan regretted the nature of things and
the incompatibility of temperaments, and he forbade racing in the
street; but as races were always an inspiration, they recurred. As for
Jessie’s clothes, his opinion was that his neighbours, being fools,
should look the other way or pull down their blinds. He did not see why
Godiva should complain of Peeping Tom, or Peeping Tom of Godiva. As for
the difficulty in remembering the name of the house, he saw no reason
for changing it; all his friends and his children’s friends could see
instantly that neither The Elms, nor Orchard Lea, nor Brockenhurst, nor
Candelent Gate, nor the other house, was his, and he could not think of
consulting those who were not his friends.

Abercorran House was honoured by four martins’ nests under the eaves,
placed at such regular intervals that they appeared to be corbels for
supporting the roof. Not one of the other houses in the street had a
martin’s nest. But the distinguishing feature of the Morgans’ house
was that you could see at a glance that it was the Morgans’. The
front garden was merely a way round to the yard and the Wilderness.
Altogether the front of the house, facing east, must have looked to a
stranger uninhabited. Everything was done on the other side, or in the
yard. Bounded on the east by the house, on the north or Brockenhurst
side by a high wall (built by Mr Brockenhurst, as we called him), and
on the west or lane side by a split oak fence, but separated from the
Wilderness and the south only by the conservatory and the pigeon-house
and some low railings, the yard of Abercorran House was a reservoir
of sun. The high south wall was occupied, not by fruit trees, but
by cascades of ivy and by men and boys standing or sitting in the
sun, talking, watching the jackdaws coming and going in the elms of
the Wilderness, and also by dogs gnawing bones or sleeping. There
was no cultivated garden, but several of the corners had always some
blossoms of wall-flower, sweet-rocket, or snapdragon, that looked after
themselves: in the pocket between the fence and the pigeon house half
a dozen sunflowers invariably found a way of growing eight feet high
and expanding enormous blossoms, every one of them fit to be copied and
stuck up for a sign outside the “Sun” inn.

Nobody could mistake Abercorran House; but in case anybody did, Mr
Morgan had a brass plate with “T. Ll. Morgan” on it at the foot of
his front steps, in a position where to see it from the road was
impossible. This plate was always bright: the only time when I saw
it dim was when Ann was alone in the deserted house. A succession of
active, dirty, little maids employed in the house agreed upon this
one point, that the name-plate must be polished until it reflected
their cheeks as they reflected its never-understood glory. No
vainglorious initial letters followed the name, nor any descriptive
word. The maids--Lizz, Kate, Ellen, Polly, Hannah, Victoria, and the
rest--probably knew no more than I ever did why the name was there.
For it was perfectly clear that Mr Morgan never did or wished to do
anything. The name might just as well have been that of some famous man
born there a hundred years before: in any case it had nothing to do
with that expression the house had of frankness, mystery, untidiness,
ease, and something like rusticity. In the yard behind, the bull
terrier stood for frankness, the greyhound for rusticity, the cats for
mystery, and most things for untidiness, and all for ease.

Indoors it was a dark house. Windows were numerous, but it was
undoubtedly dark. This was in part due to comparison with the outer
air, where people lived as much as possible, and especially with the
sunlit yard. The house had, however, a dark spirit, aided by the folds
of heavy curtains, the massive, old, blackened furniture, and the
wall-paper of some years before. You wandered as you pleased about it,
alone or with Philip, Lewis, or Harry. Most of the rooms were bedrooms,
but not conspicuous as such when strewn with cases of butterflies,
birds’ eggs and nests, stuffed animals, cages containing foreign birds,
several blackbirds, a nest of young thrushes, an adder and some ringed
snakes and lizards, a hedgehog, white and piebald rats and mice,
fishing-rods and tackle, pistols and guns and toy cannon, tools and
half-made articles of many kinds, model steam-engines, a model of the
“Victory” and a painting of the “Owen Glendower” under a flock of sail,
boxing gloves, foils, odds and ends of wood and metal, curiosities from
tree and stone, everything that can be accumulated by curious and
unruly minds; and then also the owners themselves and their friends,
plotting, arguing, examining their property, tending the living animals
or skinning the dead, boxing, fencing, firing cannon, and going to and
fro.

The kitchen, the Library, and Mrs Morgan’s room were silent rooms. In
the kitchen Ann ruled. It smelt of an old Bible and new cakes: its
sole sound was Ann’s voice singing in Welsh, which was often stopped
abruptly by her duties coming to a head, or by something outside--as
when she heard Lewis overtaxing Granfer in teaching it a trick and
flitted out, saying: “Don’t use the dog like that. Anyone might think
he had no human feelings.” She must have been, in a sense, young in
those days, but was unlike any other young woman I have seen, and it
never occurred to me then to think of her as one; nor, as certainly,
did it seem possible that she would grow old--and she has not grown
old. When she left her kitchen it was seldom to go out. Except to do
the household shopping, and that was always after dark, she never went
beyond the yard. She did not like being laughed at for her looks and
accent, and she disliked London so much as to keep out the London air,
as far as possible, with closed windows.

I do not remember ever to have seen Ann talking to her mistress, and
no doubt she did without her. Mrs Morgan was not to be seen about the
house, and her room was perfectly respected. She sat at the window
looking on to the yard and watched the boys as she sewed, or read, or
pretended to read. Sometimes Jessie sat with her, and then I have seen
her smiling. She had large eyes of a gloomy lustre which looked as if
they had worn their hollows in the gaunt face by much gazing and still
more musing. The boys were silent for a moment as they went past her
door. I do not know when she went out, if she ever did, but I never
saw her even in the yard. Nor did I see her with Mr Morgan, and it
was known that he was never in her sitting-room. She seemed to live
uncomplaining under a weight of gloom, looking out from under it upon
her strong sons and their busy indolence, with admiration and also a
certain dread.

Jessie was the favourite child of father and mother, but I used to
think that it was to avoid her father that she was so often in her
mother’s room. Why else should such a child of light and liberty
stay in that quietness and dark silence which breathed out darkness
over the house? Outside that room she was her brothers’ equal in
boldness, merriment and even in strength. Yet it once struck me with
some horror, as she sat up at the window, that she was like her
mother--too much like her--the dark eyes large, the cheeks not any too
plump, the expression sobered either by some fear of her own or by the
conversation; it struck me that she might some day by unimaginable
steps reach that aspect of soft endurance and tranquilly expectant
fear. At fifteen, when I best remember her, she was a tall girl with
a very grave face when alone, which could break out with astonishing
ease into great smiles of greeting and then laughter of the whole soul
and body as she was lured to one group or another in the yard. She
mixed so roughly and carelessly with every one that, at first, I, who
had false picture-book notions of beauty and looked for it to have
something proud and ceremonious in itself and its reception, did not
see how beautiful she was. She took no care of her dress, and this
made all the more noticeable the radiant sweetness of her complexion.
But I recognised her beauty before long. One Saturday night she was
shopping with Ann, and I met her suddenly face to face amidst a pale
crowd all spattered with acute light and shadow from the shops. I did
not know who it was, though I knew Ann. She was so extraordinary that
I stared hard at her as people do at a foreigner, or a picture, or
an animal, not expecting a look in answer. Others also were staring,
some of the women were laughing. There could be no greater testimony
to beauty than this laughter of the vulgar. The vulgar always laugh
at beauty; that they did so is my only reason for calling these women
by that hateful name. Jessie did not heed them. Then she caught sight
of me, and her face lightened and blossomed with smiles. I shall not
forget it, and how I blushed to be so saluted in that vile street.
There was another reason why I should remember. Some of the big boys
and young men--boys just leaving the Grammar School or in their first
year at an office--winked at her as they passed; and one of them, a
white-faced youth with a cigarette, not only winked but grinned as if
he were certain of conquest. Jessie’s face recovered its grave look,
she gave Ann her basket, and at the fullness of his leer she struck him
in the mouth with all her force, splashing her small hand and his face
with blood. I trembled and winced with admiration. Jessie burst into
tears. The crowd was quiet and excited. Everybody seemed to be looking
for somebody else to do they could not tell what. The crush increased.
I saw Ann wiping Jessie’s hand. They were saved by a big red-faced
working woman, who had a little husband alongside of her. She pushed
very slowly but with great determination through the crowd, using her
husband rather as an addition to her weight than as a brother in arms,
until she came to the cluster of moody youths. Between us and them she
stood, and hammering in her words with a projecting chin, told them
to “Get home, you chalk-faced quill-drivers, and tell your mothers
to suckle you again on milk instead of water. Then you can ask leave
to look at girls, but not the likes of this beautiful dear, not you.
Get home....” They laughed awkwardly and with affected scorn as they
turned away from that face on fire; and it was laughing thus that they
realised that they were blocking the traffic, and therefore dispersed
muttering a sort of threats, the woman keeping up her attack until it
could not be hoped that they heard her. As we hurried home we were
hooted by similar boys and by some of the young women who matched them.

We were proud of Jessie in this attitude, which made her father call
her “Brynhild” or “Boadicea.” When she was with her mother she was
“Cordelia:” when she nursed a cat or fed the pigeons she was “Phyllis,”
by which I suppose he meant to express her gentleness. From that
Saturday night I admired everything about her, down to her bright
teeth, which were a little uneven, and thus gave a touch of country
homeliness to her beauty. Very few girls came to Abercorran House to
see Jessie, partly because she was impatient of very girlish girls,
partly because they could not get on with her brothers. And so, with
all her sweet temper--and violence that came like a tenth wave--she was
rather alone; just as her face dropped back to gravity so completely
after laughter, so I think she returned to solitude very easily after
her romps. Was it the shadow of London upon her, or of her mother’s
room? She went back to Wales too seldom, and as for other holidays, the
charming sophisticated home-counties were nothing to the Morgans, nor
the seaside resorts. Jessie should have had a purer air, where perhaps
she would never have sung the song beginning, “O the cuckoo, she’s a
pretty bird,” and ending with the chorus:

    “Oh, the cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird, she singeth as she flies:
    She bringeth good tidings, she telleth no lies.”

Sometimes she was willing to sing all three verses and repeat the first
to make a fourth and to please herself:

    “Oh, the cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird, she singeth as she flies:
    She bringeth good tidings, she telleth no lies:
    She sucketh sweet flowers, for to keep her voice clear;
    And the more she singeth cuckoo, the summer draweth near.”

When she came to those last two lines I looked at her very hard,
inspired by the thought that it was she had sucked dew out of the white
flowers of April, the cuckoo-flower, the stitchwort, the blackthorn,
and the first may, to make her voice clear and her lips sweet. While
she sang it once Mr Stodham--a clerk somewhere who had seen a naked
Dryad--bent his head a little to one side, perfectly motionless, the
eyes and lips puckered to a perfect attention, at once eager and
passive, so that I think the melody ran through all his nerves and his
veins, as I am sure he was inviting it to do. I heard him telling Mr
Morgan afterwards that he wanted to cry, but could not, it was not in
his family.

That was in Mr Morgan’s own room, the library, the largest room in the
house, where Mr Stodham had gone to escape the boys for a time. When
Mr Morgan was not at the top of the steps which led down to the yard,
smoking a cigar and watching the boys, the dogs, and the pigeons,
and looking round now and then to see if Jessie would come, he was
in the library sitting by the big fire with a cigar and a book. If
anyone entered he put the book on his knee, shifted the cigar to the
middle of his mouth, removed his spectacles, and looked at us without
a word. Then with a nod he replaced book, cigar, and spectacles, and
ignored us. We spoke in whispers or not at all as we coasted the high
book-shelves lining every part of each wall, except in one corner,
where there were several guns, an ivory-handled whip, and a pair of
skates. The books were on the whole grim and senatorial. We felt them
vaguely--the legal, the historical, and the classical tiers--to be our
accusers and judges. There were also many sporting books, many novels,
plays, poems, and romances of

    “Old loves and wars for ladies done by many a lord.”

If we took some of these down they were not to be read in the library.
We laid one on our knees, opened a page, but glanced up more than once
the while at Mr Morgan, and then either replaced it or put it under an
arm and ran off with it on tiptoe. “Stay if you like, boys,” said Mr
Morgan as we reached the door; and immediately after, “Shut the door
quietly. Good-bye.”

At most gatherings and conversations Mr Morgan listened in silence,
except when appealed to for a fact or a decision, or when he
laughed--we often did not know why--and dropped his cigar, but caught
it in some confusion at his waist. He was a lean man of moderate height
and very upright, a hawk’s profile, a pointed brown beard, cheeks
weathered and worn, and the heaviest-lidded eyes possible without
deformity. He stood about with one hand in his coat pocket, the other
holding a newspaper or an opened book. The dogs loved him and leaped
up at him when he appeared, though he took small notice of them. When
we met him in the street he always had a slow horseman’s stride, was
wrapped in a long overcoat and deep in thought, and never saw us or
made any sign. At home, though he was a severe-looking man of grave
speech, he accepted the irregularities and alarums without a murmur,
often with a smile, sometimes, as I have said, with laughter, but
that was a little disconcerting. It was on questions of sport and
natural history that he was most often asked for a judgment, which he
always gave with an indifferent air and voice, yet in a very exact
and unquestionable manner. But they were the frankest family alive,
and there was nothing which the elder boys would not discuss in his
presence or refer to him--except in the matter of horse-racing. Jack
and Roland, the two eldest sons, betted; and so, as we all knew, did Mr
Morgan; but the father would not say one word about a horse or a race,
unless it was a classical or curious one belonging to the past.




CHAPTER III

THE WILD SWANS


One day as I was passing the library door with a pair of swan’s wings
belonging to Philip, Mr Morgan stepped out. The look which he gave to
the wings and to me compelled me to stop, and he said:

“You have a pair of wild swans there, Arthur.”

I said I had.

“Swan’s wings,” he repeated. “Swan’s wings;” and as he uttered the
words his body relaxed more than ordinary, until the middle of his back
was supported against the wall, his feet and face stuck out towards me.

“Did you know,” said he, “that some women had swan’s wings with which
to fly?”

Now I had heard of swan maidens, but he distinctly said “women,” and
the tone of his voice made me feel that he was not referring to the
flimsy, incredible creatures of fairy tales, but to women of flesh and
blood, of human stature and nature, such women as might come into the
library and stand by Mr Morgan’s fire--only, so far as I knew, no women
ever did. So I said “No.”

“They have,” said he, “or they had in the young days of Elias
Griffiths, who was an old man when I was a lad.”

Here he sighed and paused, but apologised, though not exactly to me, by
saying: “But that”--meaning, I suppose, the sigh--“is neither here nor
there. Besides, I must not trespass in Mr Stodham’s province.” For Mr
Stodham was then passing, and I made way for him.

Mr Morgan continued:

“It was on a Thursday....”

Now I held Mr Morgan in great respect, but the mention of Thursday at
the opening of a story about swan maidens was too much for me.

“Why Thursday?” I asked.

“I agree with the boy,” remarked Mr Stodham, leaving us and the talk of
swan maidens and Thursday.

Thursday was a poor sort of a day. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, were all
noticeable days in some way, though not equally likeable. Friday, too,
as, ushering in Saturday and the end of the week, had some merit.
Wednesday, again, was a half holiday. But least of all was to be said
for Thursday. Mr Morgan’s answer was:

“I said it was on a Thursday, because it was on a Thursday and not on
any other day. I am sorry to see that the indolent spirit of criticism
has resorted to you. Pluck it out, my boy.... Give me those wings....
They are beautiful: I expect the ferryman shot the swans in the estuary
at Abercorran.... However, they are not large enough....”

He was looking carefully at the wings, thinking things which he could
not say to me, and I said nothing. Then, handing me back the wings, he
went on:

“It was on a Thursday, a very stormy one in December, that two young
men who lived with their old mothers a mile or two inland went down to
the rocks to shoot with their long, ancient guns. They shot some trash.
But the wind for the most part snatched the birds from the shot or the
shot from the birds, and they could not hold their guns still for cold.
They continued however, to walk in and out among the rocks, looking for
something to prevent them saving their gunpowder. But they saw nothing
more until they were close to a creek that runs up into the cliff and
stops you unless you have wings. So there they stopped and would have
turned back, if one of them had not gone to the very edge of the creek
wall and looked down. He levelled his gun instantly, and then dropped
it again. His companion coming up did the same. Two white swans--not
gray ones like this--were just alighting upon the sand below, and
before the eyes of the young men they proceeded to lay aside their
wings and entered the water, not as swans, but as women, upon that
stormy Thursday. They were women with long black hair, beautiful white
faces and--Have you seen the statues at the Museum, my boy? Yes, you
have; and you never thought that there was anything like them outside
of marble. But there is. These women were like them, and they were not
of marble, any more than they were of what I am made of.” His own skin
was coloured apparently by a mixture of weather and cigar smoke. “These
women were white, like the moon when it is neither green nor white.
Now those young men were poor and rough, and they were unmarried. They
watched the women swimming and diving and floating as if they had been
born in the sea. But as it began to darken and the swimmers showed
no signs of tiring, the young men made their way down to the swans’
wings to carry them off. No sooner had they picked up the wings than
the two women hastened towards them into the shallow water, crying out
something in their own tongue which the men could not even hear for the
roar of winds and waters. As the women drew nearer, the men retreated
a little, holding the wings behind them, but keeping their eyes fixed
on the women. When the women actually left the water the men turned and
made for home, followed by the owners of the wings. They reached their
cottages in darkness, barred the doors, and put away the wings.

But the wingless ones knocked at the doors, and cried out until the old
mothers heard them. Then the sons told their tale. Their mothers were
very wise. Fumbling to the bottom of their chests they found clothes
suitable for young women and brides, and they opened their doors. They
quieted the women with clothes for wings, and though they were very
old they could see that the creatures were beautiful as their sons had
said. They took care that the wings were not discovered.

Those young men married their guests, and the pairs lived happily. The
sons were proud of their wives, who were as obedient as they were
beautiful. Said the old women: Anybody might think they still had
their wings by their lightsome way of walking. They made no attempt to
get away from the cottages and the smell of bacon. In fact, they were
laughed at by the neighbours for their home-keeping ways; they never
cared to stay long or far from home, or to see much of the other women.
When they began to have children they were worse than ever, hardly ever
leaving the house and never parting from their children. They got thin
as well as pale; a stranger could hardly have told that they were not
human, except for the cold, greenish light about them and their gait
which was like the swimming of swans.

In course of time the old women died, having warned their sons not to
let their wives on any account have the wings back. The swan-women grew
paler and yet more thin. One of them, evidently in a decline, had at
length to take to her bed. Here for the first time she spoke of her
wings. She begged to be allowed to have them back, because wearing
them, she said, she would certainly not die. She cried bitterly for the
wings, but in vain. On her deathbed she still cried for them, and took
no notice of the minister’s conversation, so that he, in the hope of
gaining peace and a hearing, advised her husband to give way to her. He
consented. The wings were taken out of the chest where they had been
exchanged for a wedding garment years before; they were as white and
unruffled as when they lay upon the sand. At the sight of them the sick
woman stood up in her bed with a small, wild cry. The wings seemed to
fill the room with white waves; they swept the rush-light away as they
carried the swan out into the wind. All the village heard her flying
low above the roofs towards the sea, where a fisherman saw her already
high above the cliffs. It was the last time she was seen.

The other swan-wife lingered for a year or two. A sister of her
husband’s kept house in her place. Whether this woman had not heard
the story or did not believe it, I do not know. One day, however, she
discovered the wings and gave them to the children to play with. As one
child came in soon afterwards crying for his mother and the wings at
the same time, it was certain that she also had taken flight to some
place more suitable for wild swans. They say that two generations of
children of these families were famous for the same beautiful walking
as their mothers, whom they never saw again....” Here Mr Morgan paused
for a moment then added: “I wonder why we never hear of swan-men?”

I was not much impressed at the time by the story and his dry way of
telling it. What I liked most was the idea that two ordinary men went
shooting on a Thursday in mid-winter and caught swan-maidens bathing in
a pool on the Welsh coast and married them. So I said to Mr Morgan:

“Why did you ever leave Wales, Mr Morgan?”

He put a new cigar severely between his teeth and looked at me as if he
did not know or even see me. I ran off with the wings to Philip.




CHAPTER IV

HOB-Y-DERI-DANDO[1]


[Footnote 1: i.e. _Hey-derry-down_, or _Upsa-daisy-dando_.]

I alone was listening to the swan story, but it would have been more
in accordance with the custom of the house if it had been told in a
large company out in the yard--in one of the bedrooms--in the library
itself--or in the dining-room (where there was a vast sideboard bearing
a joint, cheese, bread, fruit, cakes, and bottles of ale, to which the
boys or the visitors resorted, for meals without a name, at all hours
of the day). Most often the yard and the steps leading down to it were
the meeting-place. The pigeons, the conservatory, with its bicycles, a
lathe and all sorts of beginnings and remains, the dogs, above all the
sun and the view of the Wilderness, attracted everyone to the yard as a
common centre for the Morgans and those who gathered round one or other
of them. Thus, for example, the pigeons did not belong to the Morgans
at all, but to one Higgs, who was unable to keep them at his home.
He was always in and out of the yard, frequently bringing friends who
might or might not become friends of the family. Everyone was free to
look at the pigeons, note which had laid and which had hatched, to use
the lathe, to take the dogs out if they were willing, to go upstairs
and see the wonders--the eggs of kites, ravens, buzzards, curlews, for
example, taken by Jack and Roland near Abercorran--and to have a meal
at the sideboard or a cup of tea from one of Ann’s brews in the kitchen.

Jack and Roland in themselves attracted a large and mixed company.
Jack, the eldest, was a huge, brown-haired, good-natured fellow, with
his father’s eyes, or rather eyelids. He was very strong, and knew all
about dogs and horses. He was a good deal away from the house, we did
not know where, except that it was not at an office or other place
where they work. Roland was tall, black-haired, dark-eyed like his
mother, and as strong as Jack. He was handsome and proud-looking, but
though quick-tempered was not proud in speech with us lesser ones. His
learning was equal to Jack’s, and it comprised also the theatre; he
was dressed as carefully as Jack was carelessly, but like Jack would
allow the pigeons to perch anywhere upon him. Both wore knickerbockers
and looked like country gentlemen in exile. Jack smoked a clay pipe,
Roland cigarettes. They were very good friends. Though they did no
work, one or other of them was often at the lathe. They boxed together
while we stood round, admiring Jack because he could never be beaten,
and Roland because no one but his brother could have resisted him. They
were sometimes to be seen looking extremely serious over a sporting
paper. Lewis and Harry were a similar pair many years younger, Lewis,
the elder, broader, shorter, and fairer of the two, both of them stiff
and straight like their elders. They also had begun to acquire trains
of adherents from the various schools which they had irregularly and
with long intervals attended. They treated the streets like woods, and
never complained of the substitute. Once or twice a year they went to a
barber to have their black and brown manes transformed into a uniform
stubble of less than half an inch. Midway between these two pairs came
Philip, and a little after him Jessie.

These six attracted every energetic or discontented boy in the
neighbourhood. Abercorran House was as good as a mountain or a
sea-shore for them, and was accessible at any hour of the day or
night, “except at breakfast time,” said Mr Stodham--for there was no
breakfast-time. Mr Stodham was a middle-aged refugee at Abercorran
House, one for whom breakfast had become the most austere meal of
the day, to be taken with a perfectly adjusted system of times and
ceremonies, in silence, far from children and from all innovation,
irregularity, and disorder. Therefore the house of the Morgans was
for him the house that had no breakfast-time, and unconsciously he
was seeking salvation in the anarchy which at home would have been
unendurable. Mr Stodham was not the only client who was no longer a
boy, but he and the few others were all late converts; for, as I have
mentioned, boys forsook Abercorran House as they grew up. Parents,
too, looked foul-favouredly on the house. The family was irregular,
not respectable, mysterious, in short unprofitable. It may have got
about that when Mr Morgan once received a fountain-pen as a gift, he
said he did not want any of “your damned time-saving appliances.” Of
course, said he, some people could not help saving time and money--let
them--they were never clever enough to know what to do with them,
supposing that their savings were not hidden out of their reach like
their childhood--but it had not occurred to him to do either, so he
gave the pen to the little milk-boy, advising him to give it away
before it got a hold on him. This child had delighted Mr Morgan by
coming up the street every day, singing a filthy song. It was a test of
innocence, whether the words of it did or did not make the hearer wish
that either he or the singer might sink instantaneously into the earth.
Mr Morgan did not like the song at all. The words were in no way better
than those of a bad hymn, nor was the tune. But he liked what he called
the boy’s innocence. Ophelia only sang “By Gis and by Saint Charity”
under cover of madness. At the worst this boy made no pretence. Mr
Morgan argued, probably, that one who had such thoughts would not have
the impudence to sing so except to a select audience; he had no doubt
of this when the boy sang it once on being asked to in the Library.
I do not know what happened, beyond this, that Mr Morgan looked as
if he had been crying, and the boy never sang it again. If this got
about, few could think any better of the Morgans at Abercorran House.
Moreover, the window frames and doors were never painted, and the
front gate remained upright only because it was never closed; and on
any sunny day a man passing down the lane was sure of hearing men and
boys laughing, or Jessie singing, and dogs barking or yawning, pigeons
courting, over the fence.




CHAPTER V

AURELIUS, THE SUPERFLUOUS MAN


We recalled many memories, Ann and I, as we stood in the empty and
silent, but still sunlit yard, on my last visit. At one moment the past
seemed everything, the present a dream; at another, the past seemed
to have gone for ever. Trying, I suppose, to make myself believe that
there had been no break, but only a gradual change, I asked Ann if
things at Abercorran House had not been quieter for some time past.

“Oh no,” said she, “there was always someone new dropping in, and
you know nobody came twice without coming a hundred times. We had
the little Morgans of Clare’s Castle here for more than a year, and
almost crowded us out with friends. Then Mr--whatever was his name--the
Italian--I mean the Gypsy--Mr Aurelius--stayed here three times for
months on end, and that brought quite little children.”

“Of course it did, Ann. Aurelius.... Don’t I remember what he was--can
it be fifteen years ago? He was the first man I ever met who really
proved that man is above the other animals _as an animal_. He was
really better than any pony, or hound, or bird of prey, in their own
way.”

“Now you are _talking_, Mr Froxfield--Arthur, I _should_ say.”

“I suppose I am, but Aurelius makes you talk. I remember him up in
the Library reading that Arabian tale about the great king who had
a hundred thousand kings under him, and what he liked most was to
read in old books about Paradise and its wonders and loveliness. I
remember Aurelius saying: And when he came upon a certain description
of Paradise, its pavilions and lofty chambers and precious-laden trees,
and a thousand beautiful and strange things, he fell into a rapture so
that he determined to make its equal on earth.”

“He is the first rich man I ever heard of that had so much sense,” said
Ann. “Perhaps Aurelius would have done like that if he had been as rich
as sin, instead of owing a wine-and-spirit merchant four and six and
being owed half-a-crown by me. But he does not need it now, that is, so
far as we can tell.”

“What, Ann, is Aurelius dead?”

“That I cannot say. But we shall never see him again.”

“Why frighten me for nothing? Of course he will turn up: he always did.”

“That is impossible.”

“Why?”

“He promised Mr Torrance he would write and wait for an answer every
Midsummer day, if not oftener, wherever he might be. He has now missed
two Midsummers, which he would not do--you know he could not do such a
thing to Mr Torrance--if he was in his right mind. He wasn’t young, and
perhaps he had to pay for keeping his young looks so long.”

“Why? How old could he be?” I said quickly, forgetting how long ago it
was that I met him first.

“I know he is fifty,” said Ann.

I did not answer because it seemed ridiculous and I did not want to be
rude to Ann. I should have said a moment before, had I been asked, that
he was thirty. But Ann was right.

“Where was he last heard of, Ann?”

“I went myself with little Henry Morgan and Jessie to a place called
Oatham, or something like it, where he last wrote from. He had been
an under-gardener there for nearly two years, and we saw the man
and his wife who let him a room and looked after him. They said he
seemed to be well-off, and of course he would. You know he ate little,
smoked and drank nothing, and gave nothing to any known charities.
They remembered him very well because he taught them to play cards
and was very clean and very silent. ‘As clean as a lady,’ she said
to Jessie, who only said, ‘Cleaner.’ You know her way. The man did
not like him, I know. He said Aurelius used to sit as quiet as a book
and never complained of anything. ‘He never ate half he paid for, I
will say that,’ said he. ‘He was too fond of flowers, too, for an
under-gardener, and used to ask why daisies and fluellen and such-like
were called weeds. There was something wrong with him, something on his
conscience perhaps.’ The squire’s agent, a Mr Theobald, said the same
when he came in. He thought there was something wrong. He said such
people were unnecessary. Nothing could be done with them. They were no
better than wild birds compared with pheasants, even when they could
sing, which some of them could do, but not Aurelius. They caused a
great deal of trouble, said my lord the agent of my lord the squire,
yet you couldn’t put them out of the way. He remarked that Aurelius
never wrote any letters and never received any--that looked bad, too.
‘What we want,’ said he--‘is a little less Theobald,’ said Jessie, but
the man didn’t notice her. ‘What we want is efficiency. How are we
to get it with the likes of this Mr What’s-his-name in the way? They
neither produce like the poor nor consume like the rich, and it is by
production and consumption that the world goes round, I say. He was
a bit of a poacher, too. I caught him myself letting a hare out of a
snare--letting it out, so he said. I said nothing to the squire, but
the chap had to go.’ And that’s all we shall hear about Aurelius,” said
Ann. “He left there in the muck of February. They didn’t know where he
was going, and didn’t care, though he provided them with gossip for a
year to come. The woman asked me how old he was. Before I could have
answered, her husband said: ‘About thirty I should say.’ The woman
could not resist saying snappily: ‘Fifty’....”

Aurelius was gone, then. It cannot have surprised anyone. What was
surprising was the way he used to reappear after long absences. While
he was present everyone liked him, but he had something unreal about
him or not like a man of this world. When that squire’s agent called
his under-gardener a superfluous man, he was a brute and he was wrong,
but he saw straight. If we accept his label there must always have been
some superfluous men since the beginning, men whom the extravagant
ingenuity of creation has produced out of sheer delight in variety,
by-products of its immense processes. Sometimes I think it was some of
these superfluous men who invented God and all the gods and godlets.
Some of them have been killed, some enthroned, some sainted, for
it. But in a civilisation like ours the superfluous abound and even
flourish. They are born in palace and cottage and under hedges. Often
they are fortunate in being called mad from early years; sometimes
they live a brief, charmed life without toil, envied almost as much
as the animals by drudges; sometimes they are no more than delicate
instruments on which men play melodies of agony and sweetness.

The superfluous are those who cannot find society with which they
are in some sort of harmony. The magic circle drawn round us all at
birth surrounds these in such a way that it will never overlap, far
less become concentric with, the circles of any other in the whirling
multitudes. The circle is a high wall guarded as if it were a Paradise,
not a Hell, “with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms”: or it is no
more than a shell border round the garden of a child, and there is no
one so feeble but he can slip over it, or shift it, or trample it down,
though powerless to remove it. Some of these weaker ones might seem to
have several circles enclosing them, which are thus upset or trampled
one by one as childhood advances. Everybody discovers that he can cross
their borders. They do not retaliate. These are the superfluous who are
kept alive to perform the most terrible or most loathsome tasks. Rarely
do their tyrants see their eyes gleaming in their dungeons, and draw
back or hurl a stone like a man who has almost trodden upon a fox.

But the superfluous are not always unfortunate; we who knew Aurelius
would never call him unfortunate. There are some--and more than ever in
these days when even the strongest do not condemn outright, and when
deaths less unpleasant to the executioner have been discovered--some
who escape the necessity to toil and spin for others, and do not spend
their ease in manacles. Many of the women among the hunted are not
slaughtered as soon as caught. They are kept in artfully constructed
and choicely decorated cages where their captors try to force them
to sing over and over again the notes which were their allurement
at first; a few survive to wear white locks and trouble with a new
note the serenity of the palaces where their cages are suspended. The
superfluous have been known to learn the ways of their superiors, to
make little camps unmolested in the midst of the foreign land, to enjoy
a life admired of many and sometimes envied, but insincerely.

Some of the captives enslave their masters. Aurelius was one. From my
earliest days Aurelius and rumours of him were much about me. Once he
earned his bread in a great country house by looking after the books
and writing letters. They lodged, fed, and clothed him, and gave him a
small wage--he came from no one knew where, except that it must have
been a gutter or a ditch, as he said, “between the moon and Mercury.”
But he would tell children that he was begotten out of the moonlight
by an owl’s hooting, or that he was born in a tent in the New Forest,
where there were more leaves than money. It was a sort of grievance
against him that he could always buy what he wanted, as a book for
himself or a toy for a child.

He can have been of little use as a letter-writer, as I see now. His
writing looked as unfamiliar as Persian, and must have been laborious.
It was suited to the copying of incantations, horoscopes, receipts
for confectionery. It must often have startled the reader like a line
of trees or flight of birds writing their black legend on the dawn
silver. There was nothing in the meaning of his sentences, I think,
to correspond with the looks of them. A few of his letters survive,
and some notes on accessions to the library, etc.; but it is clear
that they were written in a language foreign to the man, a loose
journalistic English of the moment, neither classic nor colloquial, and
they have no significance.

Some people called him a little man, but in his size as in other things
he seemed rather to be of another species than a diminutive example of
our own. He was smaller than a man, but not unpleasantly small, neither
were his hands too long and delicate, nor were they incapable of a
man’s work. In every way he was finely made and graceful, with clear
large features, curled dark-brown hair and beard almost auburn. His
clothes were part of him, of a lighter brown than his hair and of some
substance which was more like a natural fur than a made cloth. These
clothes, along with his voice, which was very deep, his hair, and his
silent movements, increased his pleasing inhumanity. He sat among many
people and said trivial things, or more often nothing, looking very far
away and very little, turning all light somehow to moonlight, his dark
eyes full of subdued gleaming; and both speech and silence drew upon
him an attention which gave the casual observer an excuse for calling
him vain. Children liked him, though he never troubled to show a liking
for children, and while we sat on his lap or displayed a book for him
he would be talking busily to others, but without offending us. He did
not often tell us tales or play games with us, but he had a swift,
gentle way of putting his hand on our heads and looking at us which
always seemed an honour.

I recall chiefly, in connection with Aurelius, an evening near the end
of winter at the great house. There had been a week of frost, some
days silent and misty, others loud and clear with a north-east wind.
Then came the west wind, a day’s balmy sun, and at last rain. This
day I recall was the next. It was full of goings to and fro of loose
cloud, of yellow threatenings on the hills. The light was thin and
pale, falling tenderly over green fields and their fresh sprinkling
of mole-heaps. But the rain would not descend, and as we got to the
big house for tea the sky cleared, and in the twilight blackbirds
were chinking nervously before sleep and now and then hurrying across
the dim grass between the dark hedges and copses. A robin sang at
the edge of a holly, and a thrush somewhere remote, and the world
had become narrow and homely, the birds sounded secure like happily
tired boys lazily undressing, and evidently they did not expect men.
Three-quarters of a moon hung at the zenith, cold and fresh and
white like an early spring flower. We grew silent, but at tea were
particularly noisy and excited, too excited and near to tears, when
I rushed upstairs. In the library I found Aurelius reading, with his
back to the uncurtained window, by a light that only illuminated his
face and page. Running at first to the window, I pressed my face on
the pane to see the profound of deepening night, and the lake shining
dimly like a window through which the things under the earth might
be seen if you were out. The abyss of solitude below and around was
swallowing the little white moon and might swallow me also; with terror
at this feeling I turned away. “What?” said Aurelius, without even
looking round, but apparently aware of my feeling. Seated in his lap,
he took hardly more notice of me, but I was comforted. His silence was
not a mere absence of words. It was not the peevish silence of one
too cautious or too fearful to speak; nor the silence of one who has
suddenly become isolated and feels it, yet cannot escape. Up out of
the silence rose the voice of Aurelius reading out of the book before
him. Over my shoulder came the rustling of ivy, and the sighing of
trees, and the running of the brook through the coomb; the moon, close
at hand, out in the black garden, pressed her face against the window
and looked in at me. Aurelius was reading of that great king who had
under him a hundred thousand kings, and whose chief delight was in
ancient books telling of the loveliness of Paradise: “And when he met
with this description of the world to come, and of Paradise and its
pavilions, its lofty chambers, its trees and fruits, and of the other
things in Paradise, his heart enticed him to construct its like on
earth....” The world extended to a vastness that came close up to me
and enfolded me as a lake enfolds one swan. Thus at the building of
that Paradise I easily imagined doorways that would have admitted Orion
and the Pleiades together. And at last, at the cry of destruction,
though I was sorry, I was intensely satisfied with both the sadness and
the splendour. I began to dream in the following silence. I dreamed I
was lying at the edge of an immense sea, upon a rock scarcely raised
above the water of the colour of sapphires. I saw go by me a procession
of enormous seals whose backs swelled out of the wavelets like camels,
and as they passed in deep water, a few yards away, each one cast on me
his dark soft eyes, and they were the eyes of Aurelius. There were more
coming behind when I awoke. Aurelius lighted another lamp. I went over
again to the window and looked out. In a flash I saw the outer vast
world of solitude, darkness, and silence, waiting eternally for its
prey, and felt behind me the little world within that darkness like a
lighthouse. I went back to the others. Aurelius for all I knew went to
the kingdoms of the moon.

Many times again he read to us after I had on some pretext brought him
to Abercorran House, a year or two later.

Yet older people said that Aurelius had no perception of religion,
or beauty, or human suffering. Certainly he talked of these things,
as I see now, with a strange and callous-seeming familiarity, as a
poultry-farmer talks of chickens; but our elders did not explain it
when they called it in scorn artistic. I suspect it was in scorn,
though they said it was to humanise him, that they helped to get him
married to a “nice sensible” girl who never came near Abercorran House.
Like many other women, she had been used to petting him as if he were
an animal. He responded with quaint, elaborate speeches and gestures,
kneeling to speak, calling her by different invented names, but perhaps
with a mock-heroic humorous gleam. He married her, and all I know is
that he slipped away from the charming flat where the kindness of
friends had deposited them, and never reappeared in the neighbourhood
except at Abercorran House. He sent her money from time to time which
he earned as trainer to a troupe of dogs in a travelling circus, as a
waiter, as a commercial traveller of some sort. It was said that he
had been to sea. In any case, to hear him sing

    “Along the plains of Mexico”

was better than sailing in any ship we had ever been in or imagined.
I am sure that he could not have improved his singing of “Along the
Plains of Mexico” by sailing from Swansea to Ilfracombe or round Cape
Horn, or by getting a heart of oak and a hand of iron. He brought
nothing back with him from his travels. He had no possessions--not a
book, not a watch, not an extra suit of clothes, not a lead pencil.
He could live on nothing, and at times, it was said, had done so. For
his hardiness was great, and habitually he ate almost nothing. Man,
God, and weather could not harm him. Of course he was sometimes put
upon, for he would not quarrel. For having treated him better than he
appeared to have expected, some people could hardly forgive themselves
until they learned to take it as creditable. One tremendous tradesman,
for instance, explained his comparative civility to Aurelius on a
trying occasion by blustering: “You never know where you are with
these Gypsies:” he came, however, to regard himself as a benefactor.
A minister of the gospel who was tricked by Aurelius’ innocence had
to fall back on accusing him of concealing his age and of being a
Welshman. Everyone thought him a foreigner.

It was a remarkable thing that nobody except a few children and Mr
Torrance the schoolmaster--for actually one schoolmaster frequented
Abercorran House--liked to be alone with Aurelius. I never heard this
spoken of, and I believe nobody consciously avoided being alone with
him. Only, it so happened that he was welcomed by a company, but not
one member of it was likely to stay on long if at last he found himself
and Aurelius left behind by the others. Meeting him in the street, no
one ever stopped for more than a few words with him. Some awkwardness
was feared, but not in Aurelius, who was never awkward. Unsympathetic
people called him a foreigner, and there was something in it. In no
imaginable crowd could he have been one of the million “friends,
Romans, countrymen!” Perhaps even at Abercorran House he was not quite
one of us. Yet in a moment he was at home there. I can see him holding
a pigeon--in the correct manner--spreading out one of its wings and
letting it slip back again, while he was talking, as luck would have
it, to Higgs the bird-chap who cared for nothing but pigeons. Higgs
was so taken aback by the way the new-comer talked and held the bird--a
man whom he would instinctively have laughed at--that he could not say
a word, but escaped as soon as possible and blundered about saying: “I
like the little chap.... You can see he’s used to birds--who would have
thought it?--and I wondered what it was young Arthur was bringing in.”
Higgs was so pleased with his own discernment, his cleverness in seeing
good in that unlikely place, that he really exaggerated his liking for
Aurelius. However, let it be set down to Higgs’ credit that he knew a
hawk from a handsaw, and hailed Aurelius almost at first sight.

As I have mentioned, Aurelius had asked me to take him to Abercorran
House, because I had attracted his fancy with something I had said
about the Morgans or the house. It was a lucky introduction. For all
liked him, and he was soon free to stay at the house for a night or
a month, at pleasure. It was one of his virtues to admire Jessie. He
must have felt at once that she was alone among women, since he never
knelt to her or made any of his long, lofty speeches to her as to
other fair women whom he met elsewhere, as at my home. She saw his
merit instantly. To please him she would go on and on singing for him
“The Cuckoo,” “Midsummer Maid,” “Hob-y-deri-dando,” “Crockamy Daisy
Kitty-alone.”

When for a time he was a bookseller’s assistant in London, it was
Jessie discovered him, as she was passing with her mother at night.
She said he was standing outside like one of those young men in
“The Arabian Nights” who open a stall in a market at Bagdad because
they hope to capture someone long-lost or much-desired among their
customers. But he soon wearied of dry goods, and was not seen after
that for over a year, though Mr Torrance brought word that he had
written from Dean Prior in Devonshire, where (he said) a great poet
lived who would have been sorry to die in 1674 if he had known he
was going to miss Aurelius by doing so. Which may be absurd, but Mr
Torrance said it, and he knew both Herrick and Aurelius extremely well.
He did try to explain the likeness, but to an audience that only knew
Herrick as the author of “Bid me to live” and as an immoral clergyman,
and at this distance of time I cannot reconstruct the likeness. But it
may have been that Aurelius wrote verses which Mr Torrance, in the
kindness of his heart, believed to resemble Herrick’s. I know nothing
of that. The nearest to poetry I ever saw of his was a pack of cards
which he spent his life, off and on, in painting. Jessie was one of the
Queens, and rightly so. That this pack was found in the cottage where
he stayed before he finally disappeared, proves, to me at any rate,
that he regarded this life as at an end.




CHAPTER VI

OUR COUNTRY


“It was a good day, Arthur, that first brought you to Abercorran
House,” said old Ann, as she went to the door to deliver the stray
pigeon to its owner.

“Yes,” I said, a little pathetically for Ann’s taste and with thought
too deep for tears, at least in her company. I looked round the
kitchen, remembering the glory that was Abercorran ... Philip ...
Jessie ... Roland ... Aurelius.... It was no unselfish memory, for
I wished with all my heart that I was fifteen again, that the month
was April, the hour noon, and the scene the yard of Abercorran House
with all the family assembled, all the dogs, Aurelius, and Mr Torrance
(there being still some days left of the Easter holidays), yes, and
Higgs also, and most certainly the respectable Mr Stodham.

“Yes, it was a good day,” continued Ann, returning, “if it had not been
for you we should never have known Aurelius.”

This was so like the old Ann that I was delighted, with all my conceit.
I remembered that first visit well, limping into the yard the day after
the paper-chase, and seeing big Jack (aged then about twenty) and tall
Roland (less than two years younger) discussing a greyhound with a
blackguard in an orange neck-tie, Jessie (my own age) surrounded by
pigeons, Mr Morgan and Mr Torrance at the top of the steps looking on,
and away on the pond under the elms little Harry and Lewis crying for
help to release their craft from the water-lilies of that perilous sea.
When the limper was introduced as “Arthur,” Mr Torrance said:

    “Not that same Arthur, that with spear in rest
    Shot through the lists at Camelot and charged
    Before the eyes of ladies and of kings,”

and Mr Morgan roared with laughter, as having no cigar he was free
to do at the moment, and everyone else joined in except the Gypsy,
who appeared to think he was the victim; such laughter was a command.
Before the roar was over Ann came up to me and said: “Will you please
to come into the kitchen. I have something for that poor leg of yours.”
Pity was worse than ever, but to escape the laughter, I followed
her. “There you are,” she said as we entered, pointing to a broad
blackberry tart uncut, “that will do your leg good. It is between you
and Philip.” And with that she left me and at another door in came
Philip, and though there was nothing wrong with his leg he enjoyed the
tart as much as I did.

We were then friends of twenty-four hours standing, my age being
ten, his twelve, and the time of the year an October as sweet as its
name. We had been for six months together at the same school without
speaking, until yesterday, the day of the paper-chase. After running
and walking for more than two hours that sunny morning we found
ourselves together, clean out of London and also out of the chase,
because he had gone off on a false scent and because I ran badly.

I had never before been in that lane of larches. It was, in fact, the
first time that I had got out of London into pure country on foot.
I had been by train to sea-side resorts and the country homes of
relatives, but this was different. I had no idea that London died in
this way into the wild.

Out on the broad pasture bounded by a copse like a dark wall, rooks
cawed in the oak-trees. Moorhens hooted on a hidden water behind the
larches. At the end of a row of cottages and gardens full of the
darkest dahlias was a small, gray inn called “The George,” which my
companion entered. He came out again in a minute with bread and cheese
for two, and eating slowly but with large mouthfuls we strolled on, too
busy and too idle to talk. Instead of larches horse-chestnuts overhung
our road; in the glittering grass borders the dark fruit and the white
pods lay bright. So as we ate we stooped continually for the biggest
“conquers” to fill our pockets. Suddenly the other boy, musing and
not looking at me, asked, “What’s your name?” “Arthur Froxfield,” I
answered, pleased and not at all surprised. “It doesn’t suit you,” he
said, looking at me. “It ought to be John something--

    ‘John, John, John,
    With the big boots on.’

You’re tired.”

I knew his name well enough, for at twelve he was the best runner in
the school. Philip Morgan.... I do not suppose that I concealed my
pride to be thus in his company.

For an hour we were separated; we hit upon the trail, and off he went
without a word. At a limping trot I followed, but lost sight of Philip
and soon fell back into a walk. I had, in fact, turned homewards when
he overtook me; he had been forced to retrace his steps. I was by this
time worn out, and should have given up but for my self-satisfaction
at the long run and the pleasure of knowing that he did not mind my
hanging on his arm as on we crawled. Thus at last after an age of
sleepy fatigue I found myself at home. It had been arranged that on the
next day I was to go round to Abercorran House.

Again and again Philip and I revisited that lane of larches, the long
water-side copse, the oak wood out in the midst of the fields, and all
the hedges, to find moorhen’s eggs, a golden-crested wren’s, and a
thousand treasures, and felicity itself. Philip had known this country
for a year or more; now we always went together. I at least, for a long
time, had a strong private belief that the place had been deserted,
overlooked, forgotten, that it was known only to us. It was not like
ordinary country. The sun there was peculiarly bright. There was
something unusual in the green of its grass, in the caw of its rooks
in April, in the singing of its missel-thrushes on the little round
islands of wood upon the ploughland. When later on I read about those
“remote and holy isles” where the three sons of Ulysses and Circe ruled
over the glorious Tyrrhenians, I thought, for some reason or another,
or perhaps for no reason, of those little round islands of ash and
hazel amidst the ploughland of Our Country, when I was ten and Philip
twelve. If we left it unvisited for some weeks it used to appear to
our imaginations extraordinary in its beauty, and though we might be
forming plans to go thither again before long, I did not fully believe
that it existed--at least for others--while I was away from it. I have
never seen thrushes’ eggs of a blue equalling those we found there.

No wonder Our Country was supernaturally beautiful. It had London
for a foil and background; what is more, on that first day it wore
an uncommon autumnal splendour, so that I cannot hope to meet again
such heavily gilded elms smouldering in warm, windless sunshine, nor
such bright meadows as they stood in, nor such blue sky and such white
billowy cloud as rose up behind the oaks on its horizon.

Philip knew this Our Country in and out, and though his opinion
was that it was not a patch on the country about his old home at
Abercorran, he was never tired of it. In the first place he had been
introduced to it by Mr Stodham. “Mr Stodham,” said Philip, “knows more
about England than the men who write the geography books. He knows High
Bower, where we lived for a year. He is a nice man. He has a horrible
wife. He is in an office somewhere, and she spends his money on
jewellery. But he does not mind; remember that. He has written a poem
and father does not want him to recite it. Glory be to Mr Stodham. When
he trespasses they don’t say anything, or if they do it is only, ‘Fine
day, sir,’ or ‘Where did you want to go to, sir,’ or ‘Excuse me, sir, I
don’t mind your being on my ground, but thought you mightn’t be aware
it is private.’ But if they catch you or me, especially you, being only
eleven and peagreen at that, we shall catch it.”

Once he was caught. He was in a little copse that was all blackthorns,
and the blackthorns were all spikes. Inside was Philip looking for what
he could find; outside, and keeping watch, sat I; and it was Sunday.
Sunday was the only day when you ever saw anyone in Our Country.
Presently a man who was passing said: “The farmer’s coming along
this road, if that’s any interest to you.” It was too late. There he
was--coming round the bend a quarter of a mile off, on a white pony.
I whistled to Philip to look out. I was innocently sitting in the same
place when the farmer rode up. He asked me at once the name of the boy
in the copse, which so took me by surprise that I blabbed out at once.
“Philip Morgan,” shouted the farmer, “Philip Morgan, come out of that
copse.” But Philip was already out of it, as I guessed presently when
I saw a labourer running towards the far end, evidently in pursuit.
The farmer rode on, and thinking he had given it up I followed him.
However, five minutes later Philip ran into his arms at a gateway,
just as he was certain he had escaped, because his pursuer had been
outclassed and had given up running. In a few minutes I joined them.
Philip was recovering his breath and at the same time giving his
address. If we sent in five shillings to a certain hospital in his
name, said the farmer, he would not prosecute us--“No,” he added,
“ten shillings, as it is Sunday.” “The better the day the better the
deed,” said Philip scornfully. “Thank you, my lad,” said the giver
of charity, and so we parted. But neither did we pay the money, nor
were we prosecuted; for my father wrote a letter from his official
address. I do not know what he said. In future, naturally, we gave
some of our time and trouble to avoiding the white pony when we were
in those parts. Not that he got on our nerves. We had no nerves. No:
but we made a difference. Besides, his ground was really not in what
we called Our Country, _par excellence_. Our own country was so free
from molestation that I thought of it instantly when Aurelius read to
me about the Palace of the Mountain of Clouds. A great king had asked
his counsellors and his companions if they knew of any place that no
one could invade, no one, either man or genie. They told him of the
Palace of the Mountain of Clouds. It had been built by a genie who had
fled from Solomon in rebellion. There he had dwelt until the end of
his days. After him no one inhabited it; for it was separated by great
distances and great enchantment from the rest of the world. No one
went thither. It was surrounded by running water sweeter than honey,
colder than snow, and by fruitful trees. And there in the Palace of the
Mountain of Clouds the king might dwell in safety and solitude for ever
and ever....

In the middle of the oak wood we felt as safe and solitary as if we
were lords of the Palace of the Mountain of Clouds. And so we were.
For four years we lived charmed lives. For example, when we had
manufactured a gun and bought a pistol, we crawled over the ploughed
fields at twilight, and fired both at a flock of pewits. Yet neither
birds nor poachers suffered. We climbed the trees for the nests of
crows, woodpeckers, owls, wood-pigeons, and once for a kestrel’s, as
if they were all ours. We went everywhere. More than once we found
ourselves among the lawns and shrubberies of big houses which we had
never suspected. This seems generally to have happened at twilight. As
we never saw the same house twice the mysteriousness was increased. One
of the houses was a perfect type of the dark ancient house in a forest.
We came suddenly stumbling upon it among the oaks just before night.
The walls were high and craggy, and without lights anywhere. A yew tree
grew right up against it. A crow uttered a curse from the oak wood. And
that house I have never seen again save in memory. There it remains,
as English as Morland, as extravagantly wild as Salvator Rosa. That
evening Philip must needs twang his crossbow at the crow--an impossible
shot; but by the grace of God no one came out of the house, and at this
distance of time it is hard to believe that men and women were actually
living there.

Most of these estates had a pond or two, and one had a long one like
a section of a canal. Here we fished with impunity and an untroubled
heart, hoping for a carp, now and then catching a tench. But often
we did not trouble to go so far afield. Our own neighbourhood was by
no means unproductive, and the only part of it which was sacred was
the Wilderness. None of the birds of the Wilderness ever suffered at
our hands. Without thinking about it we refrained from fishing in the
Wilderness pond, and I never saw anybody else do so except Higgs, but
though it seemed to me like robbing the offertory Higgs only grinned.
But other people’s grounds were honoured in a different way. Private
shrubberies became romantic at night to the trespasser. Danger doubled
their shadows, and creeping amongst them we missed no ecstasy of which
we were capable. The danger caused no conscious anxiety or fear,
yet contrived to heighten the colour of such expeditions. We never
had the least expectation of being caught. Otherwise we should have
had more than a little fear in the January night when we went out
after birds, armed with nets and lanterns. The scene was a region of
meadows, waiting to be built on and in the meantime occupied by a few
horses and cows, and a football and a lawn-tennis club. Up and down
the hedges we went with great hopes of four and twenty blackbirds or
so. We had attained a deep and thrilling satisfaction but not taken a
single bird when we were suddenly aware of a deep, genial voice asking,
“What’s the game?” It was a policeman. The sight acted like the pulling
of a trigger--off we sped. Having an advantage of position I was the
first to leap the boundary hedge into the road, or rather into the
ditch between hedge and road. Philip followed, but not the policeman.
We both fell at the jump, Philip landing on top of me, but without
damage to either. We reached home, covered in mud and secret glory,
which made up for the loss of a cap and two lanterns. The glory lasted
one day only, for on the next I was compelled to accompany my father to
the police-station to inquire after the cap and lanterns. However, I
had the honour of hearing the policeman say--though laughing--that we
had taken the leap like hunters and given him no chance at all. This
and the fact that our property was not recovered preserved a little of
the glory.

In these meadows, in the grounds which their owners never used at
night, and in Our Country, Philip and I spent really a great deal of
time, fishing, birds-nesting, and trying to shoot birds with cross-bow,
pistol, or home-made gun. There were intervals of school, and of
football and cricket, but these in memory do not amount to more than
the towns of England do in comparison with the country. As on the map
the towns are but blots and spots on the country, so the school-hours
were embedded, almost buried away, in the holidays, official,
semi-official, and altogether unofficial. Philip and I were together
during most of them; even the three principal long holidays of the year
were often shared, either in Wales with some of Philip’s people, or at
Lydiard Constantine, in Wiltshire, with my aunt Rachel.




CHAPTER VII

WOOL-GATHERING AND LYDIARD CONSTANTINE


One day at Abercorran House I heard Aurelius, Mr Morgan, and Mr
Torrance in the Library, talking about wool-gathering. “Since Jessie
told us about that river in Essex with the Welsh name,” said Mr Morgan,
laughing, “we have travelled from Gwithavon to Battersea Park Road and
a fishmonger’s advertisement. Such are the operations of the majestic
intellect. How did we get all that way? Do you suppose the cave-men
were very different, except that they did not trouble about philology
and would have eaten their philologers, while they did without
fishmongers because fish were caught to eat, not to sell, in those
days?”

“Well!” said Aurelius, “we could not live if we had nothing in common
with the cave-men. A man who was a mere fishmonger or a mere philologer
could not live a day without artificial aid. Scratch a philologer
sufficiently hard and you will find a sort of a cave-man.”

“I think,” continued Mr Morgan, “that we ought to prove our
self-respect by going soberly back on our steps to see what by-ways
took us out of Gwithavon to this point.”

“I’m not afraid of you at that game,” said Aurelius. “I have often
played it during church services, or rather after them. A church
service needs no further defence if it can provide a number of boys
with a chance of good wool-gathering.”

“Very true,” said Mr Torrance, who always agreed with Aurelius when it
was possible. A fancy had struck him, and instead of turning it into
a sonnet he said: “I like to think that the original wool-gatherers
were men whose taste it was to wander the mountains and be before-hand
with the nesting birds, gathering stray wool from the rocks and thorns,
a taste that took them into all sorts of wild new places without
over-loading them with wool, or with profit or applause.”

“Very pretty, Frank,” said Aurelius, who had himself now gone
wool-gathering and gave us the benefit of it. He told us that he had
just recalled a church and a preacher whose voice used to enchant his
boyhood into a half-dream. The light was dim as with gold dust. It was
warm and sleepy, and to the boy all the other worshippers seemed to be
asleep. The text was the three verses of the first chapter of Genesis
which describe the work of creation on the fifth day. He heard the
clergyman’s voice murmuring, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the
moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth
in the open firmament of heaven.”

“That was enough,” said Aurelius, “for me it was all the sermon. It
summoned up before me a coast of red crags and a black sea that was
white where the waves got lost in the long corridors between the crags.
The moon, newly formed to rule the night, stood full, large, and white,
at the top of the sky, which was as black as the sea and cloudless.
And out of the water were rising, by twos and threes, but sometimes
in multitudes like a cloud, the birds who were to fly in the open
firmament of heaven. Out of the black waste emerged sea-birds, one at
a time, their long white wings spread wide out at first, but then as
they paused on the surface, uplifted like the sides of a lyre; in a
moment they were skimming this way and that, and, rising up in circles,
were presently screaming around the moon. Several had only risen a
little way when, falling back into the sea, they vanished, there, as
I supposed, destined by the divine purpose to be deprived of their
wings and to become fish. Eagles as red as the encircling crags came
up also, but always solitary; they ascended as upon a whirlwind in one
or two long spirals and, blackening the moon for a moment, towered out
of sight. The little singing birds were usually cast up in cloudlets,
white and yellow and blue and dappled, and, after hovering uncertainly
at no great height, made for the crags, where they perched above the
white foam, piping, warbling, and twittering, after their own kinds,
either singly or in concert. Ever and anon flocks of those who had
soared now floated downward across the moon and went over my head with
necks outstretched, crying towards the mountains, moors, and marshes,
or sloped still lower and alighted upon the water, where they screamed
whenever the surface yawned at a new birth of white or many-coloured
wings. Gradually the sea was chequered from shore to horizon with
birds, and the sky was throbbing continually with others, so that the
moon could either not be seen at all, or only in slits and wedges. The
crags were covered, as if with moss and leaves, by lesser birds who
mingled their voices as if it were a dawn of May....”

In my turn I now went off wool-gathering, so that I cannot say how the
fifth day ended in the fancy of Aurelius, if you call it fancy. It
being then near the end of winter, that vision of birds set me thinking
of the nests to come. I went over in my mind the eggs taken and to be
taken by Philip and me at Lydiard Constantine. All of last year’s were
in one long box, still haunted by the cheapest scent of the village
shop. I had not troubled to arrange them; there was a confusion of
moor-hens’ and coots’ big freckled eggs with the lesser blue or white
or olive eggs, the blotted, blotched, and scrawled eggs. For a minute
they were forgotten during the recollection of a poem I had begun to
copy out, and had laid away with the eggs. It was the first poem I
had ever read and re-read for my own pleasure, and I was copying it
out in my best hand-writing, the capitals in red ink. I had got as
far as “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest.” I tried to repeat
the verses but could not, and so I returned to the eggs. I thought
of April when we should once again butt our way through thickets of
stiff, bristling stems, through thorn and briar and bramble in the
double hedges. We should find the thrushes’ nests in a certain copse
of oak and blackthorn where the birds used hardly anything but moss,
and you could see them far off among the dark branches, which seldom
had many leaves, but were furred over with lichens. We would go to
all those little ponds shadowed by hazels close to the farms, where
there was likely to be a solitary moorhen’s home, and up into the
pollard willow which once had four starling’s eggs at the bottom of a
long narrow pocket. In all those spring days we had no conscious aim
but finding nests, and if we were not scrambling in a wood we walked
with heads lifted up to the trees, turned aside to the hedges, or bent
down to the grass or undergrowth. We were not curious about the eggs;
questions of numbers or variation in size, shape or colour, troubled
us but fitfully. Sun, rain, wind, deep mud, water over the boots and
knees, scratches to arms, legs, and face, dust in the eyes, fear of
gamekeepers and farmers, excitement, dizziness, weariness, all were
summed up by the plain or marked eggs in the scent box; they were all
that visibly remained of these things, and I valued them in the same
way and for the same reason as the athlete valued the parsley crown.
The winning of this one or that was recalled with regret, sometimes
that I had taken more than I should have done from the same nest,
sometimes that I had not taken as many as would have been excusable;
I blushed with annoyance because we had not revisited certain nests
which were unfinished or empty when we discovered them--the plough-boys
doubtless had robbed them completely, or they had merely produced young
birds. How careless the country boys were, putting eggs into their hats
and often forgetting all about them, often breaking them wantonly. I
envied them their opportunities and despised them for making so little
use of them.

I thought of the flowers we tramped over, the smell and taste of
cowslips and primroses, and various leaves, and of the young brier
shoots which we chewed and spat out again as we walked. I do not know
what Aurelius might have been saying, but I began to count up the
Sundays that must pass before there would be any chance of finding
rooks’ eggs, not at Lydiard, but at the rookery nearest to Abercorran
House. Thus I was reminded of the rookery in the half-dozen elms of
a farm-house home field, close by the best fishing-place of all at
Lydiard. There the arrow-headed reeds grew in thick beds, and the water
looked extraordinarily mysterious on our side of them, as if it might
contain fabulous fish. Only last season I had left my baited line out
there while I slipped through the neighbouring hedge to look for a
reed-bunting’s nest; and when I returned I had to pull in an empty line
which some monster had gnawed through, escaping with hooks and bait. I
wonder Philip did not notice. It was just there, between the beds of
arrow-head and that immense water dock on the brink. I vowed to try
again. Everybody had seen the monster, or at least the swirl made as
he struck out into the deeps at a passing tread. “As long as my arm, I
daresay,” said the carter, cracking his whip emphatically with a sort
of suggestion that the fish was not to be caught by the like of us.
Well, we shall see.

As usual the idea of fishing was connected with my aunt Rachel. There
was no fishing worth speaking of unless we stayed with her in our
holidays. The water in the ponds at Lydiard Constantine provoked
magnificent hopes. I could have enjoyed fishing by those arrow-heads
without a bait, so fishy did it look, especially on Sundays, when sport
was forbidden:--it was unbearable to see that look and lack rod and
line. The fascinating look of water is indescribable, but it enables me
to understand how

    “Simple Simon went a-fishing
    For to catch a whale,
    But all the water he had got
    Was in his mother’s pail.”

I have seen that look in tiny ponds, and have fished in one against
popular advice, only giving it up because I caught newts there and
nothing else.

But to my wool-gathering. In the Library, with Aurelius talking, I
could see that shadowed water beside the reeds and the float in the
midst. In fact I always had that picture at my command. We liked the
water best when it was quite smooth; the mystery was greater, and we
used to think that we caught more fish out of it in this state. I hoped
it would be a still summer, and warm. It was nearly three quarters of
a year since last we were in that rookery meadow--eight months since
I had tasted my aunt’s doughy cake. I can see her making it, first
stoning the raisins while the dough in a pan by the fire was rising;
when she thought neither of us was looking she stoned them with her
teeth, but this did not shock me, and now I come to think of it they
were very white even teeth, not too large or too small, so that I
wonder no man ever married her for them alone. I am glad no man did
marry her--at least, I was glad then. For she would probably have given
up making doughy cakes full of raisins and spices, if she had married.
I suppose that what with making cakes and wiping the dough off her
fingers, and wondering if we had got drowned in the river, she had
no time for lovers. She existed for those good acts which are mostly
performed in the kitchen, for supplying us with lamb and mint sauce,
and rhubarb tart with cream, when we came in from birds-nesting. How
dull it must be for her, thought I, sitting alone there at Lydiard
Constantine, the fishing over, the birds not laying yet, no nephews
to be cared for, and therefore no doughy cakes, for she could not be
so greedy as to make them for herself and herself alone. Aunt Rachel
lived alone, when she was without us, in a little cottage in a row, at
the edge of the village. Hers was an end house. The rest were neat and
merely a little stained by age; hers was hidden by ivy, which thrust
itself through the walls and up between the flagstones of the floor,
flapped in at the windows, and spread itself so densely over the panes
that the mice ran up and down it, and you could see their pale, silky
bellies through the glass--often they looked in and entered. The ivy
was full of sparrows’ nests, and the neighbours were indignant that she
would not have them pulled out; even we respected them.

To live there always, I thought, would be bliss, provided that Philip
was with me, always in a house covered with ivy and conducted by an
aunt who baked and fried for you and tied up your cuts, and would clean
half a hundred perchlings for you without a murmur, though by the end
of it her face and the adjacent windows were covered with the flying
scales. “Why don’t you catch two or three really big ones?” she would
question, sighing for weariness, but still smiling at us, and putting
on her crafty-looking spectacles. “Whew, if we could,” we said one to
another. It seemed possible for the moment; for she was a wonderful
woman, and the house wonderful too, no anger, no sorrow, no fret, such
a large fire-place, everything different from London, and better than
anything in London except Abercorran House. The ticking of her three
clocks was delicious, especially very early in the morning as you lay
awake, or when you got home tired at twilight, before lamps were lit.
Everything had been as it was in Aunt Rachel’s house for untold time;
it was natural like the trees; also it was never stale; you never came
down in the morning feeling that you had done the same yesterday and
would do the same to-morrow, as if each day was a new, badly written
line in a copy-book, with the same senseless words at the head of every
page. Why couldn’t we always live there? There was no church or chapel
for us--Philip had never in his life been to either. Sunday at Lydiard
Constantine was not the day of grim dulness when everyone was set free
from work, only to show that he or she did not know what to do or not
to do; if they had been chained slaves these people from Candelent
Street and elsewhere could not have been stiffer or more savagely
solemn.

Those adult people were a different race. I had no thought that Philip
or I could become like that, and I laughed at them without a pang, not
knowing what was to save Philip from such an end. How different from
those people was my aunt, her face serene and kind, notwithstanding
that she was bustling about all day and had trodden her heels down and
had let her hair break out into horns and wisps.

I thought of the race of women and girls. I thought (with a little
pity) that they were nicer than men. I would rather be a man, I mused,
yet I was sure women were better. I would not give up my right to be a
man some day; but for the present there was no comparison between the
two in my affections; and I should not have missed a single man except
Aurelius. Nevertheless, women did odd things. They always wore gloves
when they went out, for example. Now, if I put gloves on my hands, it
was almost as bad as putting a handkerchief over my eyes or cotton wool
in my ears. They picked flowers with gloved hands. Certainly they had
their weaknesses. But think of the different ways of giving an apple. A
man caused it to pass into your hands in a way that made it annoying to
give thanks; a woman gave herself with it, it was as if the apple were
part of her, and you took it away and ate it in peace, sitting alone,
thinking of nothing. A boy threw an apple at you as if he wanted to
knock your teeth out with it, and, of course, you threw it back at him
with the same intent; a girl gave it in such a way that you wanted to
give it back, if you were not somehow afraid. I began thinking of three
girls who all lived near my aunt and would do anything I wanted, as
if it was not I but they that wanted it. Perhaps it was. Perhaps they
wanted nothing except to give. Well, and that was rather stupid, too.

Half released from the spell by one of the voices in the Library, I
turned to a dozen things at once--as what time it was, whether one of
the pigeons would have laid its second egg by now, whether Monday’s
post would bring a letter from a friend who was in Kent, going about
the woods with a gamekeeper who gave him squirrels, stoats, jays,
magpies, an owl, and once a woodcock, to skin. I recalled the sweet
smell of the squirrels; it was abominable to kill them, but I liked
skinning them.... I turned to thoughts of the increasing row of books
on my shelf. First came The Compleat Angler. That gave me a brief entry
into a thinly populated world of men rising early, using strange baits,
catching many fish, talking to milkmaids with beautiful voices and
songs fit for them. The book--in a cheap and unattractive edition--shut
up between its gilded covers a different, embalmed, enchanted life
without any care. Philip and I knew a great deal of it by heart, and
took a strong fancy to certain passages and phrases, so that we used
to repeat out of all reason “as wholesome as a pearch of Rhine,” which
gave a perfect image of actual perch swimming in clear water down the
green streets of their ponds on sunny days.... Then there were Sir
Walter Scott’s poems, containing the magic words--

    “And, Saxon, I am Rhoderick Dhu.”

Next, Robinson Crusoe, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the Iliad, a mass of
almost babyish books, tattered and now never touched, and lastly The
Adventures of King Arthur and the Round Table. I heard the Lady of the
Lake say to Merlin (who had a face like Aurelius) “Inexorable man, thy
powers are resistless”: moonlit waters overhung by mountains, and crags
crowned by towers, boats with mysterious dark freight; knights taller
than Roland, trampling and glittering; sorceries, battles, dragons,
kings, and maidens, stormed or flitted through my mind, some only as
words and phrases, some as pictures. It was a shadow entertainment,
with an indefinable quality of remoteness tinged by the pale Arthurian
moonlight and its reflection in that cold lake, which finally suggested
the solid comfort of tea at my aunt’s house, and thick slices, “cut
ugly,” of the doughy cake.

At this point Jessie came in to say that tea was ready. “So am I,” said
I, and we raced downstairs. Jessie won.




CHAPTER VIII

ABERCORRAN AND MORGAN’S FOLLY


Once or twice I joined Philip on a holiday in Wales, but not at
Abercorran. It was years later that I found myself by chance at
Abercorran and saw enough of it to spoil somewhat the beautiful
fantastic geography learned from a thousand references by Philip,
Jessie, and old Ann. The real place--as it may be seen by anyone who
can pay the railway fare--is excellent, but I think I should never have
gone there had I foreseen its effect on that old geography. Having
seen the place with these eyes I cannot recover perfectly the original
picture of the castle standing at the meet of two small rivers and
looking over their wide estuary, between the precipices of enormous
hills, to the sea; the tiny deserted quay, the broken cross on the open
space glistening with ever-renewed cockle shells, below the castle; the
long, stately street leading from the church down to the castle, named
Queen Street because an English queen once rode down it; the castle
owls and the inexhaustible variety and the everlasting motion of the
birds of the estuary. To see it as the Morgans once made me see it you
must be able to cover the broad waters with glistening white breasts,
at the same moment that its twin precipices abide in gloom that has
been from the beginning; you must hear an undertone of the age of
Arthur, or at least of the great Llewelyn, in the hoots of the castle
owls, and give a quality of kingliness to a street which has a wide
pavement on one side, it is true, but consists for the most part of
cottages, with a castle low down at one end, and at the other a church
high up.

The Morgans’ old house, far above the townlet of Abercorran, had
windows commanding mountains behind as well as sea in front. Their
tales had given me, at the beginning, an idea of mountains, as distinct
from those objects resembling saw teeth by which they are sometimes
represented. They formed the foundation of my idea of mountains. Then
upon that I raised slowly a magnificent edifice by means of books of
travel and of romance. These later elements were also added unto the
Welsh mountains where Jack found the kite’s nest, where Roland saw an
eagle, where Philip had learnt the ways of raven, buzzard, and curlew,
of badger, fox, and otter. My notions of their size had been given to
me by Ann, in a story of two men who were lost on them in the mist. For
three days the men were neither seen nor heard in their wanderings; on
the fourth they were discovered by chance, one dead, the other mad.
These high solitudes, I thought, must keep men wild in their minds, and
still more I thought so after hearing of the runaway boy from Ann’s own
parish. He lived entirely out of doors--without stealing, said Ann--for
a year and a half. Every now and then someone caught sight of him, but
that was all the news. He told nothing when he was arrested on the
charge of setting fire to a rick. Ann said that if he did this it was
an accident, but they wanted to get rid of the scandal of the “wild
boy,” so they packed him off to a training ship until he was sixteen.
“He would have thought it a piece of luck,” said Ann, “to escape from
the ship, however it was, for he thought it worse than any weather
on the mountains; and before he was sixteen he did escape--he fell
overboard by some mercy, and was never seen again on sea or land, my
children.”

But above all other tales of the mountains was the one that had David
Morgan for hero. David Morgan was the eldest brother of the Morgans
of Abercorran House. He had been to London before ever the family
thought of quitting their Welsh home; in a year’s time he had returned
with an inveterate melancholy. After remaining silent, except to his
mother, for some months, he left home to build himself a house up in
the mountains. When I was at Abercorran, Morgan’s Folly--so everybody
called it--was in ruins, but still made a black letter against the
sky when the north was clear. People imagined that he had hidden gold
somewhere among the rocks. He was said to have worshipped a god who
never entered chapel or church. He was said to speak with raven and
fox. He was said to pray for the end of man or of the world. Atheist,
blasphemer, outlaw, madman, brute, were some of the names he received
in rumour. But the last that was positively known of him was that,
one summer, he used to come down night after night, courting the girl
Angharad who became his wife.

One of his obsessions in solitude, so said his mother when I travelled
down with her to see the last of him, was a belief in a race who had
kept themselves apart from the rest of men, though found among many
nations, perhaps all. The belief may have come from the Bible, and this
was the race that grew up alongside the family of Cain, the guiltless
“daughters of men” from whom the children of the fratricides obtained
their wives. These, untainted with the blood of Cain, knew not sin or
shame--so his belief seems to have been--but neither had they souls.
They were a careless and a godless race, knowing not good or evil. They
had never been cast out of Eden. “In fact,” said Mrs Morgan, “they must
be something like Aurelius.” Some of the branches of this race had
already been exterminated by men; for example, the Nymphs and Fauns.
David Morgan was not afraid of uttering his belief. Others of them,
he said, had adopted for safety many of men’s ways. They had become
moorland or mountain men living at peace with their neighbours, but not
recognised as equals. They were to be found even in the towns. There
the uncommon beauty of the women sometimes led to unions of violent
happiness and of calamity, and to the birth of a poet or musician who
could abide neither with the strange race nor with the children of
Adam. They were feared but more often despised, because they retained
what men had lost by civilisation, because they lived as if time was
not, yet could not be persuaded to believe in a future life.

Up in his tower Morgan came to believe his own father one of this
people, and resolved to take a woman from amongst them for a wife.
Angharad, the shy, the bold, the fierce dark Angharad whose black eyes
radiated light and blackness together, was one of them. She became his
wife and went up with him to the tower. After that these things only
were certainly known; that she was unhappy; that when she came down to
the village for food she was silent, and would never betray him or fail
to return; and that he himself never came down, that he also was silent
and with his unshorn hair looked like a wild man. He was seen at all
hours, usually far off, on the high paths of the mountains. His hair
was as black as in boyhood. He was never known to have ailed, until one
day the wild wife knocked at a farm-house door near Abercorran, asking
for help to bring him where he might be looked after, since he would
have no one in the tower but her. The next day Mrs Morgan travelled
down to see her son. When she asked me to accompany her I did so
with some curiosity; for I had already become something of a stranger
at Abercorran House, and had often wondered what had become of David
Morgan up on his tower. His mother talked readily of his younger days
and his stay in London. Though he had great gifts, some said genius,
which he might have been expected to employ in the study, he had
applied himself to direct social work. For a year he laboured “almost
as hard,” he said, “as the women who make our shirts.” But gradually he
formed the opinion that he did not understand town life, that he never
could understand the men and women whom he saw living a town life pure
and simple. Before he came amongst them he had been thinking grandly
about men without realising that these were of a different species. His
own interference seemed to him impudent. They disgusted him, he wanted
to make them more or less in his own image to save his feelings, which,
said he, was absurd. He was trying to alter the conditions of other
men’s lives because he could not have himself endured them, because
it would have been unpleasant to him to be like them in their hideous
pleasure, hideous suffering, hideous indifference. In this attitude,
which altogether neglected the consolations and even beauty and glory
possible or incident to such a life, he saw a modern Pharisaism whose
followers did not merely desire to be unlike others, but to make others
like themselves. It was, he thought, due to lack of the imagination
and sympathy to see their lives from a higher or a more intimate point
of view, in connection with implicit ideals, not as a spectacle for
which he had an expensive seat. Did they fall farther short of their
ideals than he from his? He had not the power to see, but he thought
not; and he came to believe that, lacking as their life might be in
familiar forms of beauty and power, it possessed, nevertheless, a
profound unconsciousness and dark strength which might some day bring
forth beauty--might even now be beautiful to simple and true eyes--and
had already given them a fitness to their place which he had for no
place on earth. When it was food and warmth which were lacking he never
hesitated to use his money, but beyond satisfying these needs he could
not feel sure that he was not fancifully interfering with a force which
he did not understand and could not overestimate. Therefore, leaving
all save a little of his money to be spent in directly supplying
the needs of hungry and cold men, he escaped from the sublime,
unintelligible scene. He went up into the tower that he had built on a
rock in his own mountains, to think about life before he began to live.
Up there, said his mother, he hoped to learn why sometimes in a London
street, beneath the new and the multitudinous, could be felt a simple
and a pure beauty, beneath the turmoil a placidity, beneath the noise a
silence which he longed to reach and drink deeply and perpetuate, but
in vain. It was his desire to learn to see in human life, as we see in
the life of bees, the unity, which perhaps some higher order of beings
can see through the complexity which confuses us. He had set out to
seek at first by means of science, but he thought that science was an
end, not a means. For a hundred years, he said, men had been reading
science and investigating, as they had been reading history, with the
result that they knew some science and some history. “So he went up
into his tower, and there he has been these twelve years,” said Mrs
Morgan, “with Angharad and no comforts. You would think by his letters
that his thoughts had become giddy up there. Only five letters have I
had from him in these twelve years. This is all,” she added, showing
a small packet in her handbag. “For the last six years nobody has
heard from him except Ann. He wished he had asked Ann to go with him
to the tower. She would have gone, too. She would have preserved him
from being poetical. It is true he was only twenty-five years old at
the time, but he was too poetical. He said things which he was bound
to repent in a year, perhaps in a day. He writes quite seriously, as
actors half seriously talk, in tones quite inhumanly sublime.” She
read me scraps from these old letters, evidently admiring as well as
disapproving:

“I am alone. From my tower I look out at the huge desolate heaves of
the grey beacons. Their magnitude and pure form give me a great calm.
Here is nothing human, gentle, disturbing, as there is in the vales.
There is nothing but the hills and the silence, which is God. The
greater heights, set free from night and the mist, look as if straight
from the hands of God, as if here He also delighted in pure form and
magnitude that are worthy of His love. The huge shadows moving slowly
over the grey spaces of winter, the olive spaces of summer, are as
God’s hand....

“While I watch, the dream comes, more and more often, of a Paradise
to be established upon the mountains when at last the wind shall blow
sweet over a world that knows not the taint of life any more than of
death. Then my thought sweeps rejoicing through the high Gate of the
Winds that cleaves the hills--you could see it from my bedroom at
Abercorran--far off, where a shadow miles long sleeps across the peaks,
but leaves the lower wild as yellow in the sunlight as corn....

“Following my thought I have walked upwards to that Gate of the Winds,
to range the high spaces, sometimes to sleep there. Or I have lain
among the gorse--I could lie on my back a thousand years, hearing
the cuckoo in the bushes and looking up at the blue sky above the
mountains. In the rain and wind I have sat against one of the rocks in
the autumn bracken until the sheep have surrounded me, shaggy and but
half visible through the mist, peering at me fearlessly, as if they had
not seen a man since that one was put to rest under the cairn above; I
sat on and on in the mystery, part of it but not divining, so that I
went disappointed away. The crags stared at me on the hill-top where
the dark spirits of the earth had crept out of their abysses into the
day, and, still clad in darkness, looked grimly at the sky, the light,
and at me....

“More and more now I stay in the tower, since even in the mountains as
to a greater extent in the cities of men, I am dismayed by numbers,
by variety, by the grotesque, by the thousand gods demanding idolatry
instead of the One I desire, Whose hand’s shadow I have seen far off....

“Looking on a May midnight at Algol rising from behind a mountain, the
awe and the glory of that first step into the broad heaven exalted me;
a sound arose as of the whole of Time making music behind me, a music
as of something passing away to leave me alone in the silence, so that
I also were about to step off into the air....”

“Oh,” said Mrs Morgan, “it would do him good to do something--to keep
a few pigeons, now. I am afraid he will take to counting the stones in
his tower.” She continued her quotations:

“The moon was rising. The sombre ranges eastward seemed to be the
edge of the earth, and as the orb ascended, the world was emptied and
grieved, having given birth to this mighty child. I was left alone. The
great white clouds sat round about on the horizon, judging me. For
days I lay desolate and awake, and dreamed and never stirred.”

“You see,” said Mrs Morgan, “that London could not cure him. He says:

“‘I have visited London. I saw the city pillared, above the shadowy
abyss of the river, on columns of light; and it was less than one of
my dreams. It was Winter and I was resolved to work again in Poplar.
I was crossing one of the bridges, full of purpose and thought, going
against the tide of the crowd. The morning had a low yellow roof of
fog. About the heads of the crowd swayed a few gulls, inter-lacing
so that they could not be counted. They swayed like falling snow and
screamed. They brought light on their long wings, as the ship below,
setting out slowly with misty masts, brought light to the green and
leaden river upon the foam at her bows. And ever about the determined,
careless faces of the men swayed the pale wings, like wraiths of evil
and good, calling and calling to ears that know not what they hear.
And they tempted my brain with the temptation of their beauty: I went
to and fro to hear and to see them until they slept and the crowd had
flowed away. I rejoiced that day, for I thought that this beauty had
made ready my brain, and that on the mountains at last I should behold
the fulness and the simplicity of beauty. So I went away without seeing
Poplar. But there, again, among the mountains was weariness, because I
also was there.’”

“Why is he always weary?” asked Mrs Morgan plaintively, before reading
on:

“But not always weariness. For have I not the company of planet
and star in the heavens, the same as bent over prophet, poet, and
philosopher of old? By day a scene unfolds as when the first man spread
forth his eyes and saw more than his soul knew. These things lift up my
heart sometimes for days together, so that the voices of fear and doubt
are not so much in that infinite silence as rivulets in an unbounded
plain. The sheer mountains, on some days, seem to be the creation of my
own lean terrible thoughts, and I am glad: the soft, wooded hills below
and behind seem the creation of the pampered luxurious thought which I
have left in the world of many men....

“Would that I could speak in the style of the mountains. But language,
except to genius and simple men, is but a paraphrase, dissipating and
dissolving the forms of passion and thought....

“Again Time lured me back out of Eternity, and I believed that I longed
to die as I lay and watched the sky at sunset inlaid with swart forest,
and watched it with a dull eye and a cold heart....”

“And they think he is an atheist. They think he has buried gold on the
mountain,” exclaimed Mrs Morgan, indignantly.

Little she guessed of the nights before her in the lone farmhouse with
her bewildered son and the wild Angharad. While he raved through his
last hours and Angharad spent herself in wailing, and Mrs Morgan tried
to steady his thoughts, I could only walk about the hills. I climbed to
the tower, but learnt nothing because Morgan or his wife had set fire
to it on leaving, and the shell of stones only remained.

On the fourth morning, after a night of storm, all was over. That
morning once more I could hear the brook’s murmur which had been
obliterated by the storm and by thought. The air was clear and gentle
in the coomb behind the farm, and all but still after the night of
death and of great wind. High up in the drifting rose of dawn the
tall trees were swaying their tips as if stirred by memories of the
tempest. They made no sound in the coomb with the trembling of their
slender length; some were never to sound again, for they lay motionless
and prone in the underwood, or hung slanting among neighbour branches,
where they fell in the night--the rabbits could nibble at crests which
once wavered about the stars. The path was strewn with broken branches
and innumerable twigs.

The silence was so great that I could hear, by enchantment of the ears,
the departed storm. Yet the tragic repose was unbroken. One robin
singing called up the roars and tumults that had to cease utterly
before his voice could gain this power of peculiar sweetness and awe
and make itself heard.

The mountains and sky, beautiful as they were, were more beautiful
because a cloak of terror had been lifted from them and left them free
to the dark and silver, and now rosy, dawn. The masses of the mountains
were still heavy and sombre, but their ridges and the protruding tower
bit sharply into the sky; the uttermost peaks appeared again, dark with
shadows of clouds of a most lustrous whiteness that hung like a white
forest, very far off, in the country of the sun. Seen out of the clear
gloom of the wood this country was as a place to which a man might
wholly and vainly desire to go, knowing that he would be at rest there
and there only.

As I listened, walking the ledge between precipice and precipice in the
coomb, the silence murmured of the departed tempest like a sea-shell.
I could hear the dark hills convulsed with a hollow roaring as of an
endless explosion. All night the trees were caught up and shaken in the
furious air like grasses; the sounds on earth were mingled with those
of the struggle in the high spaces of air. Outside the window branches
were brandished wildly, and their anger was the more terrible because
the voice of it could not be distinguished amidst the universal voice.
The sky itself seemed to aid the roar, as the stars raced over it among
floes of white cloud, and dark menacing fragments flitted on messages
of darkness across the white. I looked out from the death room, having
turned away from the helpless, tranquil bed and the still wife, and saw
the hillside trees surging under a wild moon, but they were strange
and no longer to be recognised, while the earth was heaving and
be-nightmared by the storm. It was the awe of that hour which still
hung over the coomb, making its clearness so solemn, its silence so
pregnant, its gentleness so sublime. How fresh it was after the sick
room, how calm after the vain conflict with death.

The blue smoke rose straight up from the house of death, over there in
the white fields, where the wife sat and looked at the dead. Everyone
else was talking of the strange life just ended, but the woman who
had shared it would tell nothing; she wished only to persuade us that
in spite of his extraordinary life he was a good man and very good to
her. She had become as silent as Morgan himself, though eleven years
before, when she began to live with him on the mountain, she was a
happy, gay woman, the best dancer and singer in the village, and had
the most lovers. Upon the mountain her wholly black Silurian eyes had
turned inwards and taught her lips their mystery and Morgan’s. They
buried him, according to his wish, at the foot of the tower. Outraged
by this, some of the neighbours removed his body to the churchyard
under the cover of night. Others equally enraged at putting such a one
in consecrated ground, exhumed him again. But in the end it was in the
churchyard that his bones came to rest, with the inscription, chosen by
Ann:

    “Though thou shouldest make thy nest as high as the eagle,
    I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord.”

Angharad married a pious eccentric much older than herself, and in a
year inherited his money. She lives on in one of those gray houses
which make Queen Street so stately at Abercorran. She keeps no company
but that of the dead. The children call her Angharad of the Folly, or
simply Angharad Folly.

“She ought to have gone back to the tower,” said Mr Torrance in some
anger.

“She would have done, Mr Torrance,” said Ann, “if she had been a poet;
but you would not have done it if you had been through those eleven
years and those four nights. No, I really don’t think you would.... I
knew a poet who jumped into a girl’s grave, but he was not buried with
her. Now you are angry with him, poor fellow, because he did not insist
on being buried. Well, but it is lucky he was not, because if he had
been we should not have known he was a poet.”

“Well said, Ann,” muttered Aurelius.

“Ann forgets that she was young once,” protested Mr Torrance.

“No,” she said, “I don’t think I do, but I think this, that you forget
you will some day be old. Now, as this is Shrove Tuesday and you will
be wanting pancakes I must go make them.”

“Good old Ann,” whispered Mr Torrance.




CHAPTER IX

MR TORRANCE THE CHEERFUL MAN


Mr Torrance openly objected to Ann’s epitaph for David Morgan,
preferring his own choice of one from Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”:

    “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
    If to the human mind’s imaginings
    Silence and solitude were vacancy?”

“But” said Mr Morgan, “Shelley was born only a hundred years ago, and
died at thirty, I think that in the matter of mountains an older man is
better.”

“But, father,” said Roland, “how do you know that Jeremiah was not
drowned at thirty with a copy of ‘Ecclesiastes’ clasped to his bosom?”

“You read and see, my son,” answered Mr Morgan. “Shelley could not pass
himself off as an old man, though you know he did once claim to be
eighty-nine, and Jeremiah would not have pretended to be thirty. That
is only my opinion. I prefer the prophet, like Ann.”

Mr Torrance muttered that anyone who preferred Jeremiah to Shelley had
no right to an opinion. It was just like Mr Torrance. He was always
saying foolish things and fairly often doing them, and yet we felt, and
Mr Morgan once declared, that he had in him the imperishable fire of a
divine, mysterious wisdom. After walking the full length of the Abbey
Road, where he lived, to discover him smiling in his dark study, was
sufficient proof that he had a wisdom past understanding.

Abbey Road was over two miles long. At its south end was a double
signboard, pointing north “To London,” south “To Forden, Field, and
Cowmore”; at its north end it ran into pure London. Every year the
horse-chestnut branches had to be shortened in May because their new
leaf smothered the signboard. As if anyone who had reached that point
could wish to be directed to London! Almost as few could wish to know
the way in order to avoid it. But the horse-chestnut had to suffer. It
was fortunate in not being cut down altogether and carried away. The
cemetery saved it. The acute angle between the Abbey Road and another
was filled by a large new cemetery, and the tree was the first of a
long line within its railings. Even had the signboard been on the
other side of the road it would have been as badly off among the tall
thorns and stunted elms of the hedges. Behind this hedge was a waste,
wet field, grazed over by a sad horse or two all through the year;
for on account partly of the cemetery, partly of the factory which
manufactured nobody quite knew what except stench, this field could
not be let or sold. Along its far side ran a river which had no sooner
begun to rejoice in its freedom to make rush and reed at pleasure
on the border of the field than it found itself at the walls of the
factory. Northward, past the cemetery and the factory, began the houses
of Abbey Road, first a new house, occupied but with a deserted though
not wild garden, and next to it a twin house, left empty. Then followed
a sluttery of a few pairs or blocks of small houses, also new, on both
sides of the road--new and yet old, with the faces of children who are
smeared, soiled, and doomed, at two. They bordered on the old inn,
“The Woodman’s Arms,” formerly the first house, having a large kitchen
garden, and masses of dahlias and sunflowers behind. It lay back a good
space from the road, and this space was gravel up to the porch, and in
the middle of it stood a stone drinking trough. Often a Gypsy’s cart
and a couple of long dogs panting in the sun were to be seen outside,
helping the inn to a country look, a little dingy and decidedly
private and homely, so that what with the distance between the road
and the front door, and the Gypsy’s cart, the passer-by was apt to go
on until he came to an ordinary building erected for the sale of beer
and spirits, and for nothing else. Such a one lay not much further
on, beyond a row of cottages contemporary with “The Woodman’s Arms.”
These had long narrow gardens behind wooden posts and rails--gardens
where everything tall, old-fashioned, and thick grew at their own
sweet will, almost hiding the cottages of wood covered in creeper. You
could just see that some were empty, their windows smashed or roughly
boarded up, and that others were waiting for some old woman to die
before they also had their windows smashed or boarded up. The dahlias,
the rose-of-Sharon, the sweet rocket, the snow-on-the-mountains, the
nasturtiums, the sunflowers, flourished too thick for weeds to make
headway, and so probably with small help from the inhabitants, the
gardens earned many a wave of the whip from passing drivers. The row of
cottages meant “the first bit of country,” with a sweep at one end, a
rat-catcher at the other, announced in modest lettering. Between the
last of them and the new public-house a puddled lane ran up along old
and thick, but much broken, hedges to the horse-slaughterer’s. “The
Victoria Hotel” was built in the Jubilee year of that sovereign, and
was a broad-faced edifice of brick with too conspicuous stone work
round the windows and doorways and at the corners. The doors were many
and mostly of glass. The landlord of “The Victoria” had no time to
stand on his doorstep--whichever was his--like the landlord of “The
Woodman”; moreover, all his doorsteps were right on the road, and he
could have seen only the long row of cottages, by the same builder,
which looked as if cut off from a longer, perhaps an endless row, with
a pair of shears; while from the old inn could be seen grass sloping
to the willows of the river, and a clump of elms hiding the factory
chimneys. All the glass and brass of the “Victoria” shone spotless as
if each customer out of the regiments in the crowded straight streets
gave it a rub on entering and leaving.

Beyond the “Victoria” the road straightened itself after a twist, and
was now lined by a hundred houses of one pattern but broken by several
branch streets. These were older houses of gray stucco, possessing
porches, short flights of steps up to the doors, basements, and the
smallest of front gardens packed with neglected laurel, privet,
marigold, and chickweed. At the end of the hundred--at No. 367--a man
walking “To London” would begin to feel tired, and would turn off the
pavement into the road, or else cross to the other side where the
scattered new shops and half-built houses had as yet no footway except
uneven bare earth. On this side the turnings were full of new houses
and pavements, and admitted the eye to views of the welter of slate
roofs crowding about the artificial banks of the river which ran as
in a pit. Of the branch streets interrupting the stucco hundred, one
showed a wide, desolate, untouched field of more and more thistles in
the middle, more and more nettles at the edge, and, facing it, a paltry
miracle of brand-new villas newly risen out of a similar field; the
second was the straight line of a new street, with kerb-stones neat
and new, but not a house yet among the nettles; another, an old lane,
was still bordered by tender-leafed lime trees, preserved to deck the
gardens of houses to come. The lane now and then had a Gypsy’s fire in
it for a few hours, and somebody had told the story that Aurelius was
born under one of the trees; to which Aurelius answered, “The trees and
I were born about the same time, but a hundred miles apart.”

The stucco line gave way to a short row of brick houses, low and as
plain as possible, lying well back from the road behind their split-oak
fences, thorn hedges, laburnums and other fancy trees. Ivy climbed
over all; each was neat and cheerful, but the group had an exclusive
expression. Yet they had to look upon half-built shops and houses,
varied by a stretch of tarred and barbed fence protecting the playing
ground of some football club, whose notice board stood side by side
with an advertisement of the land for building on leasehold; over the
fence leaned an old cart-horse with his hair between his eyes.

There followed repetitions and variations of these things--inhabited
houses, empty houses, houses being erected, fields threatened by
houses--and finally a long, gloomy unbroken cliff of stained stucco.
The tall houses, each with a basement and a long flight of steps up to
a pillared porch, curved away to the number 593, and the celebrated
“Horse-shoe Hotel” next door, which looked with dignity and still more
ostentation, above its potted bay-trees, on the junction of Abbey Road
and two busy thoroughfares. Opposite the tall stucco cliff a continuous
but uneven line of newish mean shops of every kind and not more than
half the height of the private houses, curved to a public-house as
large as the “Horse-shoe” which it faced.

As each rook knows its nest among the scores on the straight uniform
beeches, so doubtless each inhabitant could after a time distinguish
his own house in this monotonous series, even without looking at the
number, provided that there was light and that he was not drunk. Each
house had three storeys, the first of them bay-windowed, above the
basement. Probably each was divided between two, or, like No. 497,
between three, families. Who had the upper storeys I never knew, except
that there was an old woman who groaned on the stairs, a crying baby
and its mother, and some men. I heard them speak, or cry, or tread
the stairs lightly or heavily, but never happened to see any of them,
unless that woman was one who was going to enter the gate at the same
time as I one evening, but at the sight of me went past with a jug of
something half hid under her black jacket. The basement, the floor
above, and the garden, were rented to one family, viz., Mr Torrance,
his wife and four children.

The garden was a square containing one permanent living thing, and one
only, an apple tree which bore large fluted apples of palest yellow on
the one bough remaining green among the grey barkless ones. All round
the tree the muddy gravel had been trodden, by children playing, so
hard that not a weed or blade of grass ever pierced it. Up to it and
down to it led two narrow and steep flights of steps, the lower for the
children and the mother ascending from the kitchen or living room, the
upper for Mr Torrance who used to sit in the back room writing books,
except in the mornings when he taught drawing at several schools.
He wrote at an aged and time-worn black bureau, from which he could
sometimes see the sunlight embracing the apple tree. But into that room
the sunlight could not enter without a miracle, or by what so seldom
happened as to seem one--the standing open of an opposite window just
so that it threw a reflection of the late sun for about three minutes.
Even supposing that the sunlight came that way, little could have
penetrated that study; for the French windows were ponderously draped
by tapestry of dark green with a black pattern, and on one side the
bureau, on the other a bookcase, stood partly before the panes. No
natural light could reach the ceiling or the corners. Instead of light,
books covered the walls, books in a number of black-stained bookcases
of various widths, all equal in height with the room, except one that
was cut short by a grate in which I never saw a fire. The other few
interspaces held small old pictures or prints in dark frames, and
a dismal canvas darkened, probably, by some friendly hand. Most of
the books were old, many were very old. The huge, blackened slabs of
theology and drama emitted nothing but gloom. The red bindings which
make some libraries tolerable had been exorcised from his shelves by
the spirits of black and of darkest brown.

The sullen host of books left little room for furniture. Nevertheless,
there was a massive table of ancient oak, always laden with books,
and apparently supported by still other books. Six chairs of similar
character had long succeeded in retaining places in front of the books,
justifying themselves by bearing each a pile or a chaos of books. Dark
as wintry heather were the visible portions of the carpet. The door was
hung with the same black and green tapestry as the windows; if opened,
it disclosed the mere blackness of a passage crowded with more books
and ancestral furniture.

Yet Mr Torrance smiled whenever a visitor, or his wife, or one or
all of his children, but, above all, when Aurelius entered the room.
No doubt he did not always smile when he was alone writing; for he
wrote what he was both reluctant and incompetent to write, at the
request of a firm of publishers whose ambition was to have a bad,
but nice-looking, book on everything and everybody, written by some
young university man with private means, by some vegetarian spinster,
or a doomed hack like Mr Torrance. Had he owned copies of all these
works they would have made a long row of greens and reds decorated by
patterns and lettering in gold. He did not speak of his work, or of
himself, but listened, smiled, or--with the children--laughed, and
allowed himself at worst the remark that things were not so bad as
they seemed. He was full of laughter, but all clever people thought
him devoid of humour. In his turn, he admired all clever people, but
was uninfluenced by them, except that he read the books which they
praised and at once forgot them--he had read Sir Thomas Browne’s
“Quincunx,” but could not say what a Quincunx was. Aurelius used to
tease him sometimes, I think, in order to prove that the smile was
invincible. Mr Torrance was one of the slowest and ungainliest of men,
but he was never out of love or even out of patience with Aurelius,
the most lightsome of men, or of the superfluous race. He had fine
wavy hair like silk fresh from the cocoon, and blue eyes of perfect
innocence and fearlessness placed well apart in a square, bony, and
big-nosed face that was always colourless. As he wrote, one or all of
the children were likely to cry until they were brought into his study,
where he had frequently to leave them to avoid being submerged in the
chaos set moving by their play. He smiled at it, or if he could not
smile, he laughed. If the children were silent for more than a little
time he would go out into the passage and call downstairs to make sure
that all was well, whereupon at least one must cry, and his wife must
shriek to him in that high, sour voice which was always at the edge of
tears. Often she came before he called, to stand at his door, talking,
complaining, despairing, weeping; and though very sorry, Mr Torrance
smiled, and as soon as she had slammed the door he went on with his
exquisite small handwriting, or, at most, he went out and counted
the apples again. One or more of the children was always ill, nor was
any ever well. They were untidy, graceless, and querulous, in looks
resembling their mother, whose face seemed to have grown and shaped
itself to music--a music that would set the teeth of a corpse on edge.
She was never at the end of her work, but often of her strength. She
was cruel to all in her impatience, and in her swift, giddy remorse
cruel to herself also. She seemed to love and enjoy nothing, yet she
would not leave the house on any account, and seldom her work. Whatever
she did she could not ruffle her husband or wring from him anything but
a smile and a slow, kind sentence. Not that he was content, or dull,
or made of lead or wood. He would have liked to dress his wife and
children as prettily as they could choose, to ride easily everywhere,
anywhere, all over the world if it pleased them, seeing, hearing,
tasting nothing but what they thought best on earth. But save in verse
he never did so. It was one of his pains that seldom more than once or
twice a year came the mood for doing what seemed to him the highest
he could, namely, write verses. Also he had bad health; his pipe, of
the smallest size, half filled with the most harmless and tasteless
tobacco, lay cold on the bureau, just tasted and then allowed to go
out. Ale he loved, partly for its own sake, partly to please Aurelius,
but it did not love him. It was one of the jokes concerning him, that
he could not stand the cold of his morning bath unless he repeated the
words,

    “Up with me, up with me, into the sky,
    For thy song, lark, is strong.”

He said them rapidly, and in an agony of solemnity, as he squeezed the
sponge, and though this fact had become very widely known indeed, he
did not give up the habit. Had he given up every kind of food condemned
by himself or his doctors, he would have lived solely on love in that
dark, that cold, that dead room. He was fond of company, but he knew
nobody in all those thronged streets, unless it was an old woman or
two, and their decrepit, needy husbands. He was a farmer’s son, and
knew little more of London than Ann, since he had moved into Abbey
Road shortly after his first child was born, and had not been able to
extricate himself from the books and furniture.

I see him, as soon as I have sat down by the window, swing round in his
chair and look grim as he lights his tobacco with difficulty--then
smile and let the smoke pour out of his mouth before beginning to
talk, which means that in a few minutes he has laid down the pipe
unconsciously, and that it will remain untouched. The children come
in; he opens the French windows, and goes down the steps to the apple
tree, carrying half the children, followed by the other half. Up he
climbs, awkwardly in his black clothes, and getting that grim look
under the strain, but smiling at last. He picks all of the seven apples
and descends with them. The children are perfectly silent. “This one,”
he begins, “is for Annie because she is so small. And this for Jack
because he is a good boy. And this for Claude because he is bad and we
are all sorry for him. And this for Dorothy because she is so big.” He
gives me one, and Dorothy another to take down to her mother, and the
last he stows away.

Mr Torrance was often fanciful, and as most people said, affected,
in speech. He was full of what appeared to be slight fancies that
made others blush uncomfortably. He had rash admirations for more
conspicuously fanciful persons, who wore extraordinary clothes or
ate or drank in some extraordinary manner. He never said an unkind
thing. By what aid, in addition to the various brown breads to which he
condemned himself, did he live, and move, and have his being with such
gladness?

His books are not the man. They are known only to students at the
British Museum who get them out once and no more, for they discover
hasty compilations, ill-arranged, inaccurate, and incomplete, and
swollen to a ridiculous size for the sake of gain. They contain not one
mention of the house under the hill where he was born.




CHAPTER X

THE HOUSE UNDER THE HILL


Though he did not write of it, Mr Torrance would gladly talk of the
house under the hill where he was born, of the surrounding country
and its people. “I can only hope,” he would say, “I can only hope
that when I am old, ‘in this our pinching cave,’ I shall remember
chiefly the valley of the river Uther where I was born, and the small
old house half encircled and half-shadowed by an enormous crescent of
beech-covered hills. That is my world in spite of everything. Those
fifteen or twenty square miles make the one real thing that I know and
cannot forget, in spite of a hundred English scenes wantonly visited
and forgotten, in spite of London unforgotten and unintelligible.

“A brook ran out of the hills where they were nearest to us, about half
a mile away. Dark trees darkened the two springs of crystal, and the
lightest wind made a sad sound in the leaves above them. Before it had
travelled a quarter of a mile the brook had gathered about itself a
brotherhood of huge trees that always seemed to belong to it, and gave
it pomp and mystery together, if the combination is possible. These
were sunny trees, a line of towering tall black poplars that led out
from the hills to the open agricultural land, a group of the mightiest
wych-elms I have ever seen, and one ash-tree standing alone at the
water’s edge, the only one of its kind in the neighbourhood. Three
miles from its source the brook ran into the main stream of the river
Uther, and beyond that I knew nothing except by rumour and guessing.
A line drawn between the two ends of the crescent of hills would pass
through the junction of brook and river and enclose the country which
was mine entirely. The long line of hills far off on the other side of
the valley--bare, rounded, and cloud-like hills, whose curving ridges
seemed to have growth and change like clouds--was the boundary of the
real world, beyond which lay the phantasmal--London, the ocean, China,
the Hesperides, Wineland, and all the islands and all the lands that
were in books and dreams.

“The farm-houses of my country, and also the manor-house, stood on
either side of the brook, low down. There was a mill and a chain of
ponds, hardly a mile from the source. Both the ponds and the running
water were bordered thickly with sedge, which was the home of birds far
more often heard than seen.

“The brook wound among little hills which were also intersected by
rough roads, green lanes, footpaths, and deserted trackways, watery,
and hollow and dark. As the roads never went on level ground all were
more or less deeply worn, and the overhanging beeches above and the
descending naked roots made them like groves in a forest. When a road
ran into another or crossed it there was a farm. The house itself was
of grey-white stone, roofed with tiles; the barn and sheds, apparently
tumbling but never tumbledown, were of dark boards and thatch, and
surrounded by a disorderly region of nettles, remains of old buildings
and walls, small ponds either black in the shadow of quince bushes,
or emerald with duck-weed, and a few big oaks or walnuts where the
cart-horses and their foals and a young bull or two used to stand. A
moorhen was sure to be swimming across the dark pond with a track of
ripples like a peacock’s tail shining behind it. Fowls scuttered about
or lay dusting themselves in the middle of the road, while a big
black-tailed cock perched crowing on a plough handle or a ruined shed.
A cock without a head or a running fox stood up or drooped on the roof
for a weather-vane, but recorded only the wind of some long past year
which had finally disabled it. The walls of outhouses facing the road
were garrulous with notices of sales and fairs to be held shortly or
held years ago.

“At a point where one lane ran into another, as it were on an island,
the inn with red blinds on its four windows looked down the road. The
inn-keeper was a farmer by profession, but every day drank as much as
he sold, except on a market or fair day. On an ordinary day I think
he was always either looking down the road for someone to come and
drink with him, or else consoling himself inside for lack of company.
He seemed to me a nice man, but enormous; I always wondered how his
clothes contained him; yet he could sit on the mower or tosser all day
long in the June sun when he felt inclined. On a market or fair day
there would be a flock of sheep or a lot of bullocks waiting outside
while the drover smoked half a pipe and drank by the open door. And
then the landlord was nowhere to be seen: I suppose he was at the
market or up in the orchard. For it was the duty of his wife, a little
mousy woman with mousy eyes, to draw the beer when a customer came to
sit or stand among the empty barrels that filled the place. It was
Called ‘The Crown.’ They said it had once been ‘The Crown and Cushion,’
but the cushion was so hard to paint, and no one knew why a crown
should be cushioned or a cushion crowned, and it was such a big name
for the shanty, that it was diminished to ‘The Crown.’ But it had those
four windows with crimson blinds, and the landlady was said to be a
Gypsy and was followed wherever she went by a white-footed black cat
that looked as if it was really a lady from a far country enchanted
into a cat. The Gypsy was a most Christian body. She used to treat with
unmistakeable kindness, whenever he called at the inn, a gentleman who
was notoriously an atheist and teetotaler. When asked upbraidingly why,
she said: ‘He seems a nice gentleman, and as he is going to a place
where there won’t be many comforts, I think we ought to do our best to
make this world as happy as possible for him.’

“Opposite to the inn was a carpenter’s shop, full of windows, and I
remember seeing the carpenter once at midnight there, working at a
coffin all alone in the glare in the middle of the blackness. He was
a mysterious man. He never touched ale. He had a soft face with silky
grizzled hair and beard, large eyes, kind and yet unfriendly, and
strange gentle lips as rosy as a pretty girl’s. I had an extraordinary
reverence for him due to his likeness to a picture at home of the
greatest of the sons of carpenters. He was tall and thin, and walked
like an over-grown boy. Words were rare with him. I do not think
he ever spoke to me, and this silence and his ceaseless work--and
especially that one midnight task--fascinated me. So I would stare for
an hour at a time at him and his work, my face against the window,
without his ever seeming to notice me at all. He had two dogs, a
majestic retriever named Ruskin who was eighteen years old, and a
little black and white mongrel named Jimmy; and the two accompanied
him and ignored one another. One day as I was idling along towards the
shop, smelling one of those clusters of wild carrot seeds, like tiny
birds’ nests, which are scented like a ripe pear sweeter and juicier
than ever grew on pear-tree, the carpenter came out with a gun under
one arm and a spade under the other and went a short distance down the
road and then into a field which belonged to him. I followed. No sooner
had I begun to look over the gate than the carpenter lifted his gun and
pointed it at the retriever who had his back turned and was burying a
bone in a corner of the field. The carpenter fired, the old dog fell
in a heap with blood running out of his mouth, and Jimmy burst out of
the hedge, snatched the bone, and disappeared. If it had been anyone
but the carpenter I should have thought this murder a presumptuous and
cruel act; his face and its likeness taught me that it was a just act;
and that, more than anything else, made justice inseparable in my mind
from pain and intolerable mystery. I was overawed, and watched him from
the moment when he began to dig until all that was mortal of the old
dog was covered up. It seems he had been ill and a burden to himself
for a long time. I thought it unjust that he should have been shot when
his back was turned, and this question even drowned my indignation at
the mongrel’s insolence.

“I knew most of the farmers and labourers, and they were and are as
distinct in my mind as the kings of England. They were local men with
names so common in the churchyard that for some time I supposed it was
a storehouse, rather than a resting-place, of farmers and labourers.
They took small notice of me, and I was never tired of following them
about the fields, ploughing, mowing, reaping, and in the milking sheds,
in the orchards and the copses. Nothing is more attractive to children
than a man going about his work with a kindly but complete indifference
to themselves. It is a mistake to be always troubling to show interest
in them, whether you feel it or not. I remember best a short, thick,
dark man, with a face like a bulldog’s, broader than it was long, the
under-lip sticking out and up and suggesting great power and fortitude.
Yet it was also a kind face, and when he was talking I could not take
my eyes off it, smiling as it was kneaded up into an enormous smile,
and watching the stages of the process by which it was smoothed again.
When he was on his deathbed his son, who was a tailor, used to walk
over every evening from the town for a gossip. The son had a wonderful
skill in mimicry, and a store of tales to employ it, but at last the
old man, shedding tears of laughter, had to beg him not to tell his
best stories because laughing hurt so much. He died of cancer. No man
could leave that neighbourhood and not be missed in a hundred ways;
I missed chiefly this man’s smile, which I could not help trying to
reproduce on my own face long afterwards. But nobody could forget him,
even had there been no better reasons, because after he died his house
was never again occupied. A labourer cultivated the garden, but the
house was left, and the vine leaves crawled in at the broken windows
and spread wanly into the dark rooms. A storm tumbled the chimney
through the roof. No ghost was talked of. The house was part of his
mortal remains decaying more slowly than the rest. The labourer in
the garden never pruned the vine or the apple-trees, or touched the
flower borders. He was a wandering, three-quarter-witted fellow who
came from nowhere and had no name but Tom. His devotion to the old man
had been like a dog’s. Friends or relatives or home of his own he had
none, or could remember none. In fact, he had scarce any memory; when
anything out of his past life came by chance into his head, he rushed
to tell his master and would repeat it for days with pride and for
fear of losing it, as he invariably did. One of these memories was a
nonsensical rigmarole of a song which he tried to sing, but it was no
more singing than talking, and resembled rather the whimper of a dog in
its sleep; it had to do with a squire and a Welshman, whose accent and
mistaken English might alone have made the performance black mystery.
They tried to get his ‘real’ name out of him, but he knew only Tom.
Asked who gave it to him, he said it was Mr Road, a former employer,
a very cruel man whom he did not like telling about. They asked him
if he was ever confirmed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘they tried, but I could not
confirm.’ He would do anything for his master, rise at any hour of
the night though he loved his bed, and go anywhere. Summer or Winter,
he would not sleep in a house, but in a barn. Except his master’s in
the last illness, he would not enter any house. He was fond of beer
in large quantities, but if he got drunk with it he was ashamed of
himself, and might go off and not return for months: then one day he
would emerge from the barn, shaking himself and smiling an awkward
twisted smile and as bashful as a baby. What a place this modern world
is for a man like that, now. I do not like to think he is still alive
in it. All the people who could understand him are in the workhouse
or the churchyard. The churchyard is the only place where he would be
likely to stay long. No prison, asylum, or workhouse, could have kept
him alive for many days.

“The church was like a barn except that it was nearly always empty,
and only mice ever played in it. Though I went to it every Sunday I
never really got over my dislike of the parson, which began in terror.
He was the only man in the country who invariably wore black from top
to toe. One hot, shining day I was playing in a barn, and the doors
were open, so that I saw a field of poppies making the earth look as
if it had caught fire in the sun; the swallows were coming in and out,
and I was alone, when suddenly a black man stood in the sunny doorway.
The swallows dashed and screamed at him angrily, and I thought that
they would destroy themselves, for they returned again and again to
within an inch of him. I could not move. He stood still, then with a
smile and a cough he went away without having said a word. The next
time I saw him was in the churchyard, when I was about five, and had
not yet begun to attend the Church; in fact I had never entered it to
my knowledge. The nurse-girl wheeled me up to the churchyard wall and
stopped at the moment when the black man appeared out of the church.
Behind him several men were carrying a long box between them on their
shoulders, and they also were in complete black, and after them walked
men, women, and children, in black; one of the older women was clinging
convulsively to a stiff young man. When they had all stopped, the
parson coughed and muttered something, which was followed by a rustling
and a silence; the woman clinging to the young man sobbed aloud, and
her hair fell all over her cheeks like rain. The nurse-girl had been
chatting with a few passers-by who were watching outside the wall, but
as I saw the woman’s hair fall I began to cry and I was hurried away.
Through the lych-gate I saw a hole in the ground and everyone looking
down into it as if they had lost something. At this I stopped crying
and asked the girl what they were looking for; but she only boxed my
ears and I cried again. When at last she told me that there was a man
‘dead’ in the box, and that they had put him into the ground, I felt
sure that the black man was in some way the cause of the trouble. I
remembered the look he had given me at the barn door, and the cough. I
was filled with wonder that no one had attempted to rescue the ‘dead,’
and then with fear and awe at the power of the black man. Whenever I
saw him in the lane I ran away, he was so very black. Nor was the white
surplice ever more than a subterfuge to make him like the boys in the
choir, while his unnatural voice, praying or preaching, sounded as if
it came up out of the hole in the ground where the ‘dead’ had been put
away.

“How glad I was always, to be back home from the church; though dinner
was ready I walked round the garden, touching the fruit-trees one by
one, stopping a minute in a corner where I could be unseen and yet look
at the house and the thick smoke pouring out of the kitchen chimney.
Then I rushed in and kissed my mother. The rest of the day was very
still, no horses or carts going by, no sound of hoes, only the cows
passing to the milkers. My father and my mother were both very silent
on that day, and I felt alone and never wanted to stray far; if it was
fine I kept to the garden and orchard; if wet, to the barn. The day
seems in my memory to have always been either sunny or else raining
with roars of wind in the woods on the hills; and I can hear the sound,
as if it had been inaudible on other days, of wind and rain in the
garden trees. If I climbed up into the old cherry-tree that forked
close to the ground I could be entirely hidden, and I used to fancy
myself alone in the world, and kept very still and silent lest I should
be found out. But I gave up climbing the tree after the day when I
found Mrs Partridge there before me. I never made out why she was up
there, so quiet.

“Mrs Partridge was a labourer’s wife who came in two or three days a
week to do the rough work. I did not like her because she was always
bustling about with a great noise and stir, and she did not like me
because I was a spoilt, quiet child. She was deferential to all of
us, and called me ‘Sir’; but if I dared to touch the peel when she
was baking, or the bees-wax that she rubbed her irons on when she was
ironing, she talked as if she were queen or I were naught. While she
worked she sang in a coarse, high-pitched voice or tried to carry on
a conversation with my mother, though she might be up in the orchard.
She was a little woman with a brown face and alarming glittering eyes.
She was thickly covered with clothes, and when her skirts were hoisted
up to her knees, as they usually were, she resembled a partridge. She
was as quick and plump as a partridge. She ran instead of walking,
her head forward, her hands full of clothes and clothes-pegs, and her
voice resounding. No boy scrambled over gates or fences more nimbly.
She feared nothing and nobody. She was harsh to her children, but when
her one-eyed cat ate the Sunday dinner she could not bear to strike it,
telling my mother, ‘I’ve had the poor creature more than seven years.’
She was full of idioms and proverbs, and talked better than any man has
written since Cobbett. One of her proverbs has stayed fantastically in
my mind, though I have forgotten the connection--‘As one door shuts
another opens.’ It impressed me with great mystery, and as she said
it the house seemed very dark, and, though it was broad daylight and
summer, I heard the wind howling in the roof just as it often did at
night and on winter afternoons.

“Mrs Partridge had a husband of her own size, but with hollowed cheeks
the colour of leather. Though a slight man he had broad shoulders and
arms that hung down well away from his body, and this, with his bowed
stiff legs, gave him a look of immense strength and stability: to this
day it is hard to imagine that such a man could die. When I heard his
horses going by on a summer morning I knew that it was six o’clock;
when I saw them returning I knew that it was four. He was the carter,
and he did nothing but work, except that once a week he went into
the town with his wife, drank a pint of ale with her, and helped her
to carry back the week’s provisions. He needed nothing but work, out
of doors, and in the stables, and physical rest indoors; and he was
equally happy in both. He never said anything to disturb his clay pipe,
though that was usually out. What he thought about I do not know, and I
doubt if he did; but he could always break off to address his horses by
name, every minute or two, in mild rebuke or cheerful congratulation,
as much for his own benefit as for theirs, to remind himself that he
had their company. He had full responsibility for four cart-horses,
a plough, a waggon, and a dung-cart. He cared for the animals as if
they had been his own: if they were restless at night he also lost his
sleep. Although so busy he was never in haste, and he had time for
everything save discontent. His wife did all the talking, and he had
his way without taking the pipe out of his mouth. She also had her
own way, in all matters but one. She was fond of dancing; he was not,
and did not like to see her dance. When she did so on one tempting
occasion, and confessed it, he slept the night in the barn and she did
not dance again. There was a wonderful sympathy between them, and I
remember hearing that when she knew that she was going to have a baby,
it was he and not she that was indisposed.

“Our house was a square one of stone and tiles, having a porch and a
room over it, and all covered up in ivy, convolvulus, honeysuckle,
and roses, that mounted in a cloud far over the roof and projected in
masses, threatening some day to pull down all with their weight, but
never trimmed. The cherry-tree stretched out a long horizontal branch
to the eaves at one side. In front stood two pear-trees, on a piece of
lawn which was as neat as the porch was wild, and around their roots
clustered a thicket of lilac and syringa, hiding the vegetable-garden
beyond. These trees darkened and cooled the house, but that did not
matter. In no other house did winter fires ever burn so brightly or
voices sound so sweet; and outside, the sun was more brilliant than
anywhere else, and the vegetable-garden was always bordered by crimson
or yellow flowers. The road went close by, but it was a hollow lane,
and the heads of the passers-by did not reach up to the bottom of our
hedge, whose roots hung down before caves that were continually being
deepened by frost. This hedge, thickened by traveller’s joy, bramble,
and ivy, entirely surrounded us; and as it was high as well as thick
you could not look out of it except at the sky and the hills--the
road, the neighbouring fields, and all houses being invisible. The
gate, which was reached by a flight of steps up from the road, was
half-barricaded and all but hidden by brambles and traveller’s joy, and
the unkempt yew-tree saluted and drenched the stranger--in one branch a
golden-crested wren had a nest year after year.

“Two trees reigned at the bottom of the garden--at one side an apple;
at the other, just above the road, a cypress twice as high as the
house, ending in a loose plume like a black cock’s tail. The apple-tree
was old, and wore as much green in winter as in summer, because it
was wrapped in ivy, every branch was furry with lichen and moss, and
the main boughs bushy with mistletoe. Each autumn a dozen little red
apples hung on one of its branches like a line of poetry in a foreign
language, quoted in a book. The thrush used to sing there first in
winter, and usually sang his last evening song there, if it was a
fine evening. Yet the cypress was my favourite. I thought there was
something about it sinister to all but myself. I liked the smell of
it, and when at last I went to the sea its bitterness reminded me
of the cypress. Birds were continually going in and out of it, but
never built in it. Only one bird sang in it, and that was a small,
sad bird which I do not know the name of. It sang there every month
of the year, it might be early or it might be late, on the topmost
point of the plume. It never sang for long, but frequently, and always
suddenly. It was black against the sky, and I saw it nowhere else. The
song was monotonous and dispirited, so that I fancied it wanted us
to go, because it did not like the cheerful garden, and my father’s
loud laugh, and my mother’s tripping step: I fancied it was up there
watching the clouds and very distant things in hope of a change; but
nothing came, and it sang again, and waited, ever in vain. I laughed
at it, and was not at all sorry to see it there, for it had stood on
that perch in all the happy days before, and so long as it remained
the days would be happy. My father did not like the bird, but he was
often looking at it, and noted its absence as I did. The day after my
sister died he threw a stone at it--the one time I saw him angry--and
killed it. But a week later came another, and when he heard it he
burst into tears, and after that he never spoke of it but just looked
up to see if it was there when he went in or out of the porch. We
had taller trees in the neighbourhood, such as the wych-elms and the
poplars by the brook, but this was a solitary stranger and could be
seen several miles away like a black pillar, as the old cherry could in
blossom-time, like a white dome. You were seldom out of sight of it.
It was a station for any bird flying to or from the hills. A starling
stopped a minute, piped and flew off. The kestrel was not afraid to
alight and look around. The nightjar used it. At twilight it was
encircled by midges, and the bats attended them for half an hour. Even
by day it had the sinister look which was not sinister to me: some of
the night played truant and hid in it throughout the sunshine. Often
I could see nothing, when I looked out of my window, but the tree and
the stars that set round it, or the mist from the hills. What with
this tree, and the fruit-trees, and the maples in the hedge, and the
embowering of the house, I think the birds sometimes forgot the house.
In the mornings, in bed, I saw every colour on the woodpigeon, and the
ring on his neck, as he flew close by without swerving. At breakfast my
father would say, ‘There’s a kestrel.’ We looked up and saw nothing,
but on going to the window, there was the bird hovering almost above
us. I suppose its shadow or its blackening of the sky made him aware of
it before he actually saw it.

“Next to us--on still days we heard the soft bell rung in the yard
there at noon--was the manor-house, large, but unnoticeable among its
trees. I knew nothing about the inside of it, but I went all over the
grounds, filled my pockets with chestnuts, got a peach now and then
from the gardener, picked up a peacock’s feather. Wonderfully beautiful
ladies went in and out of that old house with the squire. A century
back he would have been a pillar of the commonwealth: he was pure
rustic English, and his white hair and beard had an honourable look as
if it had been granted to him for some rare service; no such beards are
to be found now in country-houses. I do not know what he did: I doubt
if there is anything for such a man to do to-day except sit for his
portrait to an astonished modern painter. I think he knew men as well
as horses; at least he knew everyone in that country, had known them
all when he and they were boys. He was a man as English, as true to the
soil, as a Ribston pippin.

“The woods on the hills were his, or at least such rights as anybody
had in them were his. As for me, I got on very well in them with no
right at all. Now, home and the garden were so well known, so safe, and
so filled with us, that they seemed parts of us, and I only crept a
little deeper into the core when I went to bed at night, like a worm in
a big sweet apple. But the woods on the hills were utterly different,
and within them you could forget that there was anything in the world
but trees and yourself, an insignificant self, so wide and solitary
were they. The trees were mostly beeches and yews, massed closely
together. Nothing could grow under them. Except for certain natural
sunny terraces not easily found, they covered the whole hills from
top to bottom, even in the steepest parts where you could slide, run,
and jump the whole distance down--about half a mile--in two minutes.
The soil was dead branches and dead leaves of beech and yew. Many
of the trees were dead: the stumps stood upright until they were so
rotten that I could overturn them with a touch. Others hung slanting
among the boughs of their companions, or were upheld by huge cables
of honeysuckle or traveller’s joy which had once climbed up them and
flowered over their crests. Many had mysterious caverns at their roots,
and as it were attic windows high up where the owls nested. The earth
was a honeycomb of rabbits’ burrows and foxes’ earths among the bony
roots of the trees, some of them stuffed with a century of dead leaves.

“Where the slope was least precipitous or had a natural ledge, two or
three tracks for timber-carriages had once been made. But these had not
been kept up, and were not infallible even as footpaths. They were,
however, most useful guides to the terraces, where the sun shone and
I could see the cypress and my mother among the sunflowers, and the
far-away hills.

“On my ninth birthday they gave me an old horn that had been a
huntsman’s, and when I was bold and the sun was bright, I sometimes
blew it in the woods, trembling while the echoes roamed among the gulfs
which were hollowed in the hillsides, and my mother came out into
the little garden far off. During the autumn and winter the huntsman
blew his horn in the woods often for a whole day together. The root
caves and old earths gave the fox more than a chance. The horses were
useless. The hounds had to swim rather than run in perpetual dead
leaves. If I saw the fox I tried hard not to shout and betray him, but
the temptation was very strong to make the echo, for I was proud of my
halloo, and I liked to see the scarlet coats, the lordly riders and the
pretty ladies, and to hear the questing hound and horn, and the whips
calling Ajax, Bravery, Bannister, Fury Nell, and the rest. Then at last
I was glad to see the pack go by at the day’s end, with sleepy heads,
taking no notice of me and waving tails that looked clever as if they
had eyes and ears in them, and to hear the clatter of horses dying
round the end of the crescent into the outer world.

“Nobody took heed of the woods except the hunters. The timber was
felled if at all by the west wind. The last keeper had long ago left
his thatched cottage under the hill, where the sun shone so hot at
midday on the reed-thatched shed and the green mummy of a stoat hanging
on the wall. So I met nobody in the woods. I took an axe there day
after day for a week and chopped a tree half through, unmolested except
by the silence, which, however, wore me out with its protest.

“The woods ended at the top in a tangle of thorns, and it was there
I saw my first fox. I was crawling among some brambles, amusing
myself with biting off the blackberries, when a fox jumped up out of
a tuft and faced me, his eyes on the level with mine. I was pleased
as well as startled, never took my eyes off him, and presently began
to crawl forward again. But at this the fox flashed his teeth at me
with a snap, and was off before I could think of anything to say. High
above these thorns stood four Scotch firs, forming a sort of gateway
by which I usually re-entered the woods. Gazing up their tall stems
that moved slowly and softly like a grasshopper’s horns, as if they
were breathing, I took my last look at the sky before plunging under
beech and yew. There were always squirrels in one of them, chasing one
another clattering up and down the bark, or chattering at me, close at
hand, as if their nerves were shattered with surprise and indignation.
When they had gone out of sight I began to run--faster and faster,
running and sliding down with a force that carried me over the meadow
at the foot, and across the road to the steps and home. I had ten years
in that home and in those woods. Then my father died; I went to school;
I entered an office. Those ten years were reality. Everything since
has been scarcely more real than the world was when it was still cut
off by the hills across the valley, and I looked lazily towards it
from under the cypress where the little bird sang. There is nothing to
rest on, nothing to make a man last like the old men I used to see in
cottage gardens or at gateways in the valley of the Uther.”

“Well,” said Mr Morgan once, “I don’t often agree with Mr Torrance, but
I am very glad he exists.”




CHAPTER XI

MR STODHAM, THE RESPECTABLE MAN, AND THE DRYAD


To Mr Stodham, I think, Mr Torrance’s books were the man. He--perhaps
he alone in England--possessed a full set of the thirty-three volumes
produced by Mr Torrance under his own name in thirteen years. “It is
wonderful,” said Ann once, “that the dancing of a pen over a sheet of
paper can pay the rent and the baker’s bill, and it hardly seems right.
But, still, it appears there are people born that can do nothing else,
and they must live like the rest of us.... And I will say that Mr
Torrance is one of the best of us, though he has that peculiarity.”

Mr Stodham could not trust himself to speak. He really liked Ann:
furthermore, he knew that she was wiser than he: finally, everyone at
that moment had something better to think of, because Jack and Roland
had put on the gloves. Mr Stodham, consequently, quoted George Borrow:

“There’s the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I
would gladly live for ever. Dosta, we’ll now go to the tents and put on
the gloves; and I’ll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to
be alive, brother.”

Jack overheard him, and at the end of the round said, “What was that,
Mr Stodham? say it again.” When the words of Jasper had been repeated,
“Jolly good,” said Jack, “but what puzzles me is how a man who knew
that could bother to write a book. There must have been something the
matter with him. Perhaps he didn’t really believe what he wrote.” And
so they had another round.

Mr Stodham liked everything at Abercorran House. Liking was his chief
faculty, and there it had unstinted exercise. Probably he liked
the very wife whom he escaped by going either to the country or to
Abercorran House. An accident had first brought him among the Morgans.
One day as he happened to be passing down the farm lane a child threw
a ball unintentionally over into the Wilderness. After it went Mr
Stodham in an instant, not quite missing the nails at the top of the
fence. The long grass of the Wilderness and his own bad sight kept
the ball hidden until the child went away in despair, unknown to
him, for he continued the search. There perhaps he would have been
searching still, if the Wilderness had not been built over, and if
Roland had not come along and found man and ball almost in the same
moment. Here the matter could not end. For Mr Stodham, unawares, had
been reduced by a nail in the fence to a condition which the public
does not tolerate. It seems that he offered to wait for nightfall when
Roland had pointed out his misfortune. He was stubborn, to the verge
of being abject, in apologising for his presence, and, by implication,
for his existence, and in not wishing to cause any trouble to Roland
or the family. Gently but firmly Roland lured him upstairs and gave
him a pair of trousers beyond reproach. On the following day when he
reappeared, bearing the trousers and renewed apologies, the family,
out in the yard, was in full parliament assembled. He made a little
speech, cheered by everyone but Higgs. Presumably he was so fascinated
by the scene that the cheering did not disconcert him. He could not get
away, especially as his stick had been seized by Spot the fox-terrier,
who was now with apparently no inconvenience to himself, being whirled
round and round on the end of it by Jack. Ann came out with his own
trousers thoroughly reformed, and she had to be thanked. Lastly, Mr
Morgan carried him off before the stick had been recovered. Next day,
therefore, he had to come again in search of the stick, a priceless
favourite before Spot had eaten it. Mr Morgan consoled him and cemented
the acquaintance by giving him an ash stick with a handle formed by
Nature in the likeness of a camel’s head. Mr Morgan said that the stick
had been cut on Craig-y-Dinas--the very place where the ash stick was
cut, which a certain Welshman was carrying on London Bridge when he was
espied by a magician, who asked to be taken to the mother tree, which
in as long as it takes to walk three hundred miles was done, with the
result that a cave was found on Craig-y-Dinas, full of treasure which
was guarded by King Arthur and his knights, who were, however, sleeping
a sleep only to be disturbed by a certain bell, which the Welshman by
ill luck did ring, with the predicted result, that the king and his
knights rose up in their armour and so terrified him that he forgot the
word which would have sent them to sleep again, and he dropped all his
treasure, ran for his life, and could never more find cave, stick, or
magician for all his seeking. Mr Stodham responded in a sententious
pretty speech, saying in effect that with such a stick he needed no
other kind of treasure than those it would inevitably conduct him
to--the hills, rivers, woods, and meadows of the home-counties, and
some day, he hoped, to Craig-y-Dinas itself.

Thus Mr Stodham came again and again, to love, honour, and obey the
ways of Abercorran House, just as he did the entirely different ways of
Mrs Stodham’s house. He, and no other, taught Philip the way to that
piece of country which became ours. Harry and Lewis, still under ten,
awakened in him a faculty for spinning yarns. What they were nobody but
those three knew; for the performance was so special and select that
the two boys formed the sole audience. They revealed nothing of what
enchanted them. Or was there anything more than at first appeared in
Harry’s musing remark on being questioned about Mr Stodham’s stories:
“Mr Stodham’s face is like a rat,” a remark which was accompanied by a
nibbling grimace which caused smiles of recognition and some laughter?
“Yes,” added Lewis, penitent at the laughter he had provoked, “a _very
good_ rat!” Perhaps the shy, sandy man’s shrunken face was worked up
to an unwonted--and therefore comical--freedom of expression in the
excitement of these tales, and this fascinated the boys and made them
his firm supporters. He was a tall, thin, sandy-haired, sandy-bearded
man with spectacles. As if tobacco smoke had mummified him, his face
was of a dried yellow. He stooped slightly and walked rapidly with long
strides. Nobody had professed to find anything great or good in him,
yet several different kinds of men spoke of him with liking as well as
pity. If there was something exceptional about this most ordinary man,
it was his youthfulness. It had been said that he was too dull to grow
old. But youthful he was, though it is hard to say how, since he truly
was dull, and if he had not been indolent must have been a bore--but
he was too modest for anyone to allow him to bore. As you walked
behind him you had little doubt of his youthfulness. Something in the
loose-jointed lightness and irresponsibility of his gait suggested a
boy, and if you had been following him with this thought, and he turned
round to greet you, the wrinkled, smoky face was a great surprise.
There was something in his nature corresponding to this loose-jointed
walk. The dogs, I think, knew it: they could do what they liked with
him, and for them he carried sugar as a regular cargo.

Thus, Mr Stodham began to be interwoven with that fellowship. I was
perhaps too old for his romantic tales, but I have heard him telling Mr
Morgan what he considered interesting in his own life. Whatever it was,
it revealed his shyness, or his excitability, or his innocence. Once
he gave a long explanation of how he came to set an uncommon value on
a certain book which he was lending to Mr Morgan. Some winters before,
something caused him to wake at midnight and sit up to listen, in spite
of the usual powerful inclination to sleep again. At a sharp noise
on the pane he threw up the window. All the flints of the road were
clear in an unusual light. The white face of a policeman was looking
up at him, and he heard the words “Fire!... Come down.” Rapidly half
dressing as if executing an order which he did not understand, he was
outside on the pavement in a minute. It was next door. The building
was losing all resemblance to a barber’s shop; like mad birds the
flames flew across it and out at the shuttered windows. The policeman
was hammering at the door, to waken those who were in their beds above
the fire. Heavily they slept, and some minutes passed before a man
came down carrying an umbrella, a woman arranging her hair. The shriek
of a cat followed them out of the door, but so also did the flames.
Soon the shop was an oblong box containing one great upright body of
fire, through which could be seen the twisted skeleton remains of iron
bedsteads. Quietly the street had become packed with onlookers--curious
neighbours, passers-by, and a few night-wanderers who had souls above
merely keeping warm by standing against the walls of bakeries. There
were three fire engines. With a low hum the jets of water yielded
themselves to the fire and were part of it. Suddenly a fireman noticed
that Mr Stodham’s own window was lit from within, thought that the
flames had penetrated so far, and was about to direct the hose on it
when Mr Stodham shook off the charm of the tumultuous glare to explain
that he had left a lamp burning. The man went with him into the house,
but could find no fire. Left alone in his room Mr Stodham noticed
that it was hot, pleasantly hot for a January midnight. The wall that
he leaned against was pleasant until he remembered the fire on the
other side. He made haste to save his papers. Instead of sorting them
roughly there, he proposed to remove, not the separate drawers, but
the whole desk. He forgot that it had only entered the house, in the
first place, after having the castors detached, and omitting to do
this now, he wedged it firmly between the walls and so barricaded the
main passage of the house. He took out all the contents of all the
drawers, deposited them with a neighbour whom he had never before seen.
Then he returned to his room. He was alone with his books, and had to
choose among them, which he should take and save. They numbered several
hundred, including a shelf of the very first books he had read to
himself. A large proportion consisted of the books of his youth. Having
been lived through by the eager, docile Stodham, these poems, romances,
essays, autobiographies, had each a genuine personality, however
slight the difference of its cover from its neighbour’s. Another class
represented aspirations, regrets, oblivions: half cut, dustier than
the rest, these wore strange, sullen, ironical, or actually hostile
looks. Some had been bought because it was inevitable that a young man
should have a copy. Others, chiefly volumes in quarto or folio, played
something like the parts of family portraits in a house of one of the
new-rich. An unsuspecting ostentation had gone with some affection to
their purchase. They gave a hint of “the dark backward and abysm of
time” to that small room, dingy but new.... He leaned against the hot
wall, receiving their various looks, returning them. Several times he
bent forward to clutch this one or that, but saw another which he could
not forsake for it, and so left both. He moved up close to the rows: he
stood on tip-toe, he knelt. Some books he touched, others he opened. He
put each one back. The room was silent with memory. He might have put
them all in safety by this time. The most unexpected claims were made.
For example, there was a black-letter “Morte d’Arthur” in olive calf.
He had paid so much for it that he had to keep its existence secret:
brown paper both concealed and protected it. He did, in fact, put this
with a few others, chosen from time to time, on a chair. Only a very
few were without any claims--histories and the like, of which there
are thousands of copies, all the same. The unread and never-to-be-read
volumes put in claims unexpectedly. No refusal could be made without a
qualm. He looked at the select pile on the chair dissatisfied. Rather
than take them only he would go away empty. “You had better look sharp,
sir,” said a fireman, vaulting over the desk. Mr Stodham looked at
the mute multitude of books and saw all in a flash. Nevertheless not
one could he make up his mind to rescue. But on the mantelpiece lay a
single book until now unnoticed--a small eighteenth century book in
worn contemporary binding, an illustrated book of travels in Africa by
a Frenchman--which he had long ago paid twopence for and discontinued
his relations with it. He swiftly picked up this book and was,
therefore, able to lend it to Mr Morgan for the sake of the plates. But
after all he saved all his other books also. The fire did not reach his
house, and the one thing damaged was the desk which the firemen had to
leap on to and over in passing through to the back of the house.

Mr Stodham, in spite of professing a poor opinion of the subject, was
delighted in his quiet way to speak of himself. He was at this time
a nearly middle-aged clerk, disappointed in a tranquil style, and
beginning to regard it as something to his credit that when he had
been four years married he had talked a good deal of going to the
colonies. If only he had gone--his imagination was unequal to the task
of seeing what might have happened if only he had gone. The regret or
pretence of it gave him a sort of shadowy grandeur by suggesting that
it was from a great height he had fallen to his present position in a
suburban maisonette. Here by some means he had secured to himself the
exclusive rights to a little room known as “The Study.” This room was
narrower than it was high, and allowed no more than space for his table
between the two walls of books, when he sat facing the French window,
with the door behind. He looked out on a pink almond-tree, and while
this flowered he could see nothing else but the tree and the south-east
sky above it; at other seasons the hind parts of many houses like his
own were unmistakeable. At night a green blind was let down over the
window before the lamp was lit. In this room, and in no other place but
Abercorran House, he was at home. Seated at that table, smoking, he
felt equal to anything with which his wife or the world could afflict
him. He desired no change in the room, beyond a slowly increasing
length to accommodate his increasing books. He would have liked to open
the windows more often than, being of the French pattern, was deemed
safe. The room was completely and unquestionably his own. For his wife
it was too shabby and too much out of her influence; she would not take
her fingers from the door-handle when she had to enter it. His children
were stiff and awed in it, because in earlier days he had been strict
in demanding silence in its neighbourhood. Much as he wished that they
would forget the old rule they could not; he liked to see them standing
at the door looking towards him and the window, but they made haste to
be off. As to the servant, she dreaded being caught in the room since
the mistress had commanded her to dust it daily, and the master to
leave it to him.

Mr Morgan, Mr Torrance, and in later years myself, he admitted to
the Study. Acquaintances he received with his wife in their clean
and expensive drawing-room. Husband and wife were in harmony when
entertaining a few of those whom Mrs Stodham called their friends. On
these rare occasions the defensive combination of her slightly defiant
pride and his kindly resignation was a model of unconscious tact. If
there was a man--which seldom came about--Mr Stodham would ask him into
the Study. The gas was slowly lighted, the gas-stove more slowly or
not at all. The intruder would remark what a lot of books there were,
and how he never had any time for reading. There was only one chair,
and he was compelled to sit in it and to light a cigarette. Mr Stodham
himself was loth to smoke there in profane company, but dallied with
an unaccustomed cigarette, or, if he took a pipe, soon rapped out on
the stove with it some variation upon the theme of discontent. In
either case his gentle but disturbed presence hung oppressively on the
visitor, who very soon took the hint from that helpless but determined
face, to propose a return to the drawing-room. There Mrs Stodham
frequently made the remark: “What a lot of books John has,” nodding
complacently and with the implication partly that she despised them,
partly that she saw their worth as a family distinction. At the end of
such an evening or after any unpleasantness Mr Stodham would go into
the Study, stick an unlit pipe between his teeth, open a book and read
very slowly, stretching his legs out, for five minutes, then sigh,
stand up and look along the rows of books without seeing them, and go
up to bed before he had defined his dissatisfaction.

The Study was the scene of the most extraordinary thing he had to
relate. Once when he had been lying for several days in bed, weak and
fevered, he had a strong desire to go downstairs to the Study. Darkness
and tea-time were near, his wife and children were out, doubtless the
servant was reading something by the light of the red-hot kitchen
grate. The house was silent. Slowly the invalid went down and laid
his fingers on the handle of his door, which was opposite the foot
of the stairs. An unusual feeling of quiet expectancy had stolen on
him; nothing, he said, could have astonished him at that moment. He
had, however, no idea of what he was expecting until he had opened the
door to its full extent. Thus was disclosed, between his table and the
window, a beautiful female figure, half sitting, half reclining, as if
asleep, among a number of books which had remained on the floor during
his illness. Though he had not put on his spectacles before coming down
he saw perfectly, so clearly, as he said, that she seemed to gleam, as
if it was still full day with her. Her beautiful long black hair was
confined by a narrow fillet of gold, which made clear the loveliness of
her head. He said that only Mr Torrance could describe her properly.
No, he affirmed, if people smiled, it did not occur to him that the
nude looked awkward near a gas-stove. Nor had she any more need of its
warmth than the Elgin Marbles or the Bacchus in Titian’s “Bacchus and
Ariadne.” Yet she was not of marble or paint, but of flesh, though he
had seen nothing of the kind in his life. Her shoulders moved with
her breathing, and this as well as her attitude proclaimed that she
was mourning, some seconds before he heard her sob. He thought that
the figure and posture were the same as those in a Greek statue which
he had seen long before, in London or Paris. They had the remoteness
and austerity of marble along with something delicate, transient, and
alive. But if there could have been a doubt whether she was flesh or
stone, there was none that she was divine. In what way she was divine
he could not tell, but certainly she was, though in no visible way was
she different from the women of pictures and statues. He did not feel
that she would notice him. He was not shocked, or curious, but calm and
still expectant. He drew a deep breath and tried to make his trembling
body stand quite still by leaning against the wall to watch. He did
not suppose that she had come into his room in the ordinary way. He
had, on the other hand, a conviction that she had something to do with
his books, that she had emerged from them or one of them. A gap in the
bottom shelf, where stood the largest books, caught his eye and thrust
itself forward as a cave whence she had come. Yet she was as white as
Aphrodite newly risen from the unsailed ocean, and she diffused a sense
of open air, of space, of the wild pure air, about her, as if she lay
upon a rock at the sea edge or among mountain flowers instead of in
this narrow room. He concluded in a reasonable way that she was one of
the poets’ nymphs whom he had so often read of with lazy credulity.
Actually the words ran into his mind:

      “Arethusa arose
       From her couch of snows
    In the Acroceraunian mountains--
       From cloud and from crag,
       With many a jag,
    Shepherding her bright fountains.”

But he did not accept her as the Sicilian river. Other words crept
through his mind, as of “lorn Urania ... most musical of mourners,” and
of “lost Echo” seated “amid the voiceless mountains.” Still his brain
flew on, next causing him to see in her an incarnation of the morning
star, for from brow to foot she was very bright. But he came back again
to the idea of some goddess, or muse, or grace, or nymph, or Dryad--the
word Dryad recurring several times as if by inspiration; and thereafter
he referred to her as the Dryad.

It seemed to be the sound of the door-handle released some time after
the door was closed that caused her suddenly to become silent and
to raise her sea-gray glittering eyes towards him. She was gasping
for breath. “Air,” she cried, “Air--the wide air and light--air and
light.” Mr Stodham rushed forward past her and threw open one of the
French windows. She turned towards the air, drinking it with her lips
and also with her hands which opened and closed with motions like
leaves under water. Mr Stodham could not open the second window.
“Air,” cried the Dryad. So he thrust steadily and then violently at
the frame with his whole body until the window gave way, splintering
and crashing. Still moving as if drowning and vainly trying to rise,
the Dryad cried out for more of the air which now streamed into the
Study. By stretching out her hands now up and now on either side she
implored to be surrounded by an ocean of air. To Mr Stodham this was
a command. Sideways with head lowered he leaned heavily against both
walls in turn, struggling to overthrow them. He strode backwards and
forwards along the bookshelves, striking fiercely here and there in
the hope that the wall would yield and let in the heavenly air for the
Dryad. When he thought this vain he ran from room to room throwing
open or smashing each window until all had been done. “More air,” he
shouted. The last room was the drawing-room. Its windows having been
smashed, he set about doing what he had run out of his study to do. In
the middle of the drawing-room he began to make a fire. From floor to
ceiling the eager flames leapt at a bound; a widening circle of carpet
smouldered; and Mr Stodham, crouching low, shivering, holding his hands
to the heat, muttered “More air,” like an incantation. “The Dryad must
have more air. We must all have more air. Let the clean fire burn down
these walls and all the walls of London. So there will be more air, and
she will be free, all will be free.” As the carpet began to smoulder
under him he hopped from one foot to another, not muttering now, but
shrieking, “More air,” and at last leaping high as the flames, he ran
straight out into the street. He ran as if he were trying to escape
himself--which he was; for his nightgown and dressing-gown flared out
in sparks behind him, and from these he was running. He twisted and
leapt in his race, as if he had a hope of twisting or leaping out of
the flames....

This scene was regarded by us as humorous--I suppose because we knew
that Mr Stodham had survived it--but by Ann as terrible. She had a
great kindness for Mr Stodham; she even proposed to deliver him from
his wife by providing him with a room at Abercorran House: but if
he was not content with his servitude he could not imagine another
state....

Probably he fell down unconscious from his burns and exhaustion: he
remembered no more when many days later the delirium left him. That he
had attempted to set his house on fire was noted as an extraordinary
frenzy of influenza: Mrs Stodham, suspecting a malicious motive for
starting the fire in her drawing-room, particularly resented it. Such
portions of the story as he betrayed in his delirium drove her to
accuse him of having a shameful and disgusting mind.

On coming down to the Study from the sick room again he saw no Dryad.
He opened wide the new French windows, and stood looking at the dark
bole of the almond-tree, slender and straight, and all its blossom
suspended in one feathery pile against the sky. The airy marble of the
white clouds, the incorporeal sweetness of the flowers, the space and
majesty of the blue sky, the freshness of the air, each in turn and all
together recalled the Dryad. He shed tears in an intense emotion which
was neither pleasure nor pain.

Aurelius had a great admiration for Mr Stodham on the ground that he
did not write a poem about the Dryad. The story appealed also to Ann.
She referred in awe to “Mr Stodham’s statue.” She said: “There was a
statue in that condition in the church at home. Some renowned artist
carved it for a memorial to the Earl’s only daughter. But I could not
abide it in the cold, dark, old place. It wanted to be out under the
ash-trees, or in among the red roses and ferns. I did think it would
have looked best of all by the waterfall. These statues are a sort of
angels, and they don’t seem natural under a roof with ordinary people.
Out of doors it is different, or it would be, though I haven’t seen
angels or statues out of doors. But I have seen bathers, and they look
as natural as birds.”

“You are right, Ann,” said Mr Morgan, “and prettier than birds. The
other Sunday when I was out walking early I found a path that took me
for some way alongside a stream. There was a Gypsy caravan close to the
path, three or four horses scattered about, an old woman at the fire,
and several of the party in the water. I hurried on because I saw that
the swimmers were girls. But there was no need to hurry. Two of them,
girls of about fifteen with coal-black hair, caught sight of me, and
climbed out on to the bank before my eyes to beg. I walked on quickly
to give them a chance of reconsidering the matter, but it was no use.
Sixpence was the only thing that would turn them back. I wish now I had
not been so hasty in giving it. The girl put it in her mouth, after
the usual blessing, and ran back with her companion to the water. They
wanted money as well as air, Stodham. Your visitor was less alive.”

“For shame, sir,” interjected Ann, “she was not a Gypsy. She was an
honourable statue, and there is no laugh in the case at all.”

“Oh, but there is, Ann, and there always will be a laugh for some one
in these matters so long as some one else chooses to be as solemn as a
judge in public about them, and touchy, too, Ann. Don’t let us pretend
or even try to be angels. We have not the figure for it. I think there
is still a long future for men and women, if they have more and more
air, and enough sixpences to let them bathe, for example, in peace.”

“Very good,” concluded Ann, “but a bit parsonified, too.” She would
have added something, but could no longer ignore the fact that close
by stood the tall old watercress-man, Jack Horseman, patiently waiting
for the right moment to touch his hat. His Indian complexion had come
back to the old soldier, he was slightly tipsy, and he had a bunch
of cowslips in his hat. Mr Morgan disappeared. Ann went in with the
watercress for change. Philip and I took possession of Jack, to ask if
he had found that blackthorn stick he had often promised us.




CHAPTER XII

GREEN AND SCARLET


One evening Aurelius was telling Mr Stodham about the “battle of the
green and scarlet.” “It took place in your country,” said he to the
good man, too timid to be incredulous.

“No,” answered Mr Stodham, “I never heard of it.”

“You shall,” said Aurelius, and told the tale.

“The first thing that I can remember is that a tall, gaunt man in green
broke out of a dark forest, leaping extravagantly, superhumanly, but
rhythmically, and wildly singing; and that he was leading an army to
victory. As he carved and painted himself on my mind I knew without
effort what had gone before this supreme moment.

“It was late afternoon in winter. No light came from the misted,
invisible sky, but the turf of the bare hill-top seemed of itself to
breathe up a soft illumination. Where this hill-top may be I know not,
but at the time of which I am speaking I was on foot in broad daylight
and on a good road in the county of Hampshire.

“The green man, the extravagant leaper and wild singer, broke out of
the hillside forest at the head of a green army. His leaping and his
dancing were so magnificent that his followers might at first have been
mistaken for idle spectators. The enemy came, clad in scarlet, out of
the forest at the opposite side of the hill-top. The two were advancing
to meet upon a level plateau of smooth, almost olive turf....

“For days and nights the steep hillside forest had covered the
manœuvres of the forces. Except one or two on each side they had seen
and heard nothing of one another, so dark were the trees, the mists
so dense and of such confusing motion; and that those few had seen or
heard their enemies could only be guessed, for they were found dead.
Day and night the warriors saw pale mist, dark trees, darker earth, and
the pale faces of their companions, alive or dead. What they heard was
chiefly the panting of breathless men on the steeps, but sometimes also
the drip of the sombre crystal mist-beads, the drenched flight of great
birds and their shrieks of alarm or of resentment at the invaders,
the chickadeedee of little birds flitting about them without fear, the
singing of thrushes in thorns at the edges of the glades.

“In the eventless silence of the unknown forest each army, and the
scarlet men more than the green, had begun to long for the conflict,
if only because it might prove that they were not lost, forgotten,
marooned, in the heart of the mist, cut off from time and from all
humanity save the ancient dead whose bones lay in the barrows under the
beeches. Therefore it was with joy that they heard the tread of their
enemies approaching across the plain. When they could see one another
it was to the scarlet men as if they had sighted home; to the green
men it was as if a mistress was beckoning. They forgot the endless
strange hills, the dark trees, the curst wizard mist. It no longer
seemed to them that the sheep-bells, bubbling somewhere out of sight,
came from flocks who were in that world which they had unwillingly and
unwittingly left for ever.

“The scarlet men were very silent; if there were songs in the heads of
two or three, none sang. They looked neither to left nor to right; they
saw not their fellows, but only the enemy. The breadth of the plain was
very great to them. With all their solidity they could hardly endure
the barren interval--it had been planned that they should wait for the
charge, but it was felt now that such a pause might be too much for
them. Ponderous and stiff, not in a straight line, nor in a curve, nor
with quite natural irregularity, but in half a dozen straight lines
that never made one, they came on, like rocks moving out against the
tide. I noticed that they were modern red-coats armed with rifles,
their bayonets fixed.

“The green men made a curved irregular front like the incoming sea.
They rejoiced separately and together in these minutes of approach.
And they sang. Their song was one which the enemy took to be mournful
because it had in it the spirit of the mountain mists as well as of the
mountains. It saddened the hearts of the enemy mysteriously; the green
men themselves it filled, as a cup with wine, with the certainty of
immortality. They turned their eyes frequently towards their nearest
companions, or they held their heads high, so that their gaze did not
take in the earth or anything upon it. The enemy they scarcely saw.
They saw chiefly their leaping leader and his mighty twelve.

“The first love of the scarlet men for the enemy had either died, or
had turned into hate, fear, indignation, or contempt. There may have
been joy among them, but all the passions of the individuals were
blended into one passion--if such it could be called--of the mass, part
contempt for the others, part confidence in themselves. But among the
green men first love had grown swiftly to a wild passion of joy.

“The broad scarlet men pushed forward steadily.

“The tall green hero danced singing towards them. His men leaped after
him--first a company of twelve, who might have been his brethren; then
the whole green host, lightly and extravagantly. The leader towered
like a fountain of living flame. Had he stood still he must have been
gaunt and straight like a beech-tree that stands alone on the crest
of a sea-beholding hill. He was neither young nor old--or was he both
young and old like the gods? In his blue eyes burnt a holy and joyous
fire. He bore no weapon save a dagger in his right hand, so small that
to the enemy he appeared unarmed as he leaped towards them. First he
hopped, then he leaped with one leg stretched forward and very high,
and curved somewhat in front of the other, while at the same time the
arm on the opposite side swung across his body. But, in fact, whenever
I looked at him--and I saw chiefly him--he was high in the air, with
his head uplifted and thrown back, his knee almost at the height of his
chin. He also sang that seeming sorrowful melody of the mountain joy,
accented to an extravagant exultation by his leaping and the flashing
of his eyes.

“If he had not been there doubtless the twelve would have astonished
the scarlet men and myself just as much, for they too were tall, danced
the same leaping dance, sang the mountain song with the same wild and
violent joy, and were likewise armed only with short daggers.

“Suddenly the leader stopped; the twelve stopped; the green army
stopped; all were silent. The scarlet men continued to advance, not
without glancing at one another for the first time, with inquiry in
their looks, followed by scorn; they expected the enemy to turn and
fly. They had no sooner formed this opinion than the tall green leader
leaped forward again singing, the twelve leaped after him, the sea-like
edge of the green army swayed onward. Almost a smile of satisfaction
spread over the stiff faces of their opponents, for there was now but a
little distance between the armies; how easily they would push through
that frivolous prancing multitude--if indeed it ever dared to meet
their onset. This was the one fear of the scarlet men, that the next
minute was not to see the clash and the victory, that they would have
to plunge once more into the forest, the mist, the silence, after a foe
that seemed to them as inhuman as those things and perhaps related to
them.

“Suddenly again the green leader was rigid, his song ceased. The
twelve, the whole green army, were as statues. A smile grew along the
line of the scarlet men when they had conquered their surprise, a smile
of furious pity for such a dancing-master and his dancing-school--a
smile presently of uneasiness as the seconds passed and they could
hear only the sound of their own tread. The silence of all those men
unnerved them. Now ... would the green men turn? Some of the scarlet
men, eager to make sure of grappling with the enemy, quickened their
step, but not all. The green men did not turn. Once again the dance
and the song leaped up, this time as if at a signal from the low sun
which smote across the green leader’s breast, like a shield, and like a
banner. Wilder than ever the dance and the song of the green men. The
scarlet men could see their eyes now, and even the small daggers like
jewels in the hands of the leaders. Some were still full of indignant
hate and already held the dancers firm on the points of their bayonets.
Some thought that there was a trick, they knew not how it might end.
Some wished to wait kneeling, thus to receive the dancers on their
steadfast points. Some were afraid, looking to left and right for a
sign. One tripped intentionally and fell. The line became as jagged as
if it were a delicate thing blown by the wind. The green leader cut
the line in two without stopping his dance, leaving his dagger in the
throat of a rifleman. Not one of the twelve but penetrated the breaking
line in the course of the dance. The whole green army surged through
the scarlet without ceasing their song, which seemed to hover above
them like spray over waves. Then they turned.

“The scarlet men did not turn. They ran swiftly now, and it was their
backs that met the spears of the green men as they crowded into the
forest. The tall, weaponless, leaping singer seemed everywhere, above
and round about, turning the charge and thrust of the green men into a
lovely and a joyous thing like the arrival of Spring in March, making
the very trees ghastly to the scarlet fugitives running hither and
thither silently to their deaths. Not one of the defeated survived,
for the few that eluded their pursuers could not escape the mist, nor
yet the song of the green leader, except by death, which they gave to
themselves in sadness.

“I cannot wonder that the hero’s dancing and singing were not to be
withstood by his enemies, since to me it was divine and so moving that
I could not help trying to imitate both song and dance while I was
walking and dreaming.”

“Nothing like that ever happened to me,” said Mr Stodham. “But I
thought you meant a real battle. It was lucky you weren’t run over if
you were dreaming like that along the road.”

“I suppose I was not born to be run over,” said Aurelius.




CHAPTER XIII

NED OF GLAMORGAN


Long after his celebrated introduction to Abercorran House, and soon
after Philip and I had been asking old Jack again about the blackthorn
stick, Mr Stodham was reminded of the story of the Welshman on London
Bridge who was carrying a hazel stick cut on Craig-y-Dinas. “Do you
remember it?” asked Mr Morgan.

“Certainly I do,” replied Mr Stodham, “and some day the stick you gave
me from that same Craig-y-Dinas shall carry me thither.”

“I hope it will. It is a fine country for a man to walk in with a light
heart, or, the next best thing, with a heavy heart. They will treat you
well, because they will take you for a red-haired Welshman and you like
pastry. But what I wanted to say was that the man who first told that
story of Craig-y-Dinas was one of the prime walkers of the world. Look
at this portrait of him....”

Here Mr Morgan opened a small book of our grandfather’s time which had
for a frontispiece a full-length portrait of a short, old, spectacled
man in knee breeches and buckled shoes, grasping a book in one hand, a
very long staff in the other.

“Look at him. He was worthy to be immortalised in stained glass. He
walked into London from Oxford one day and mentioned the fact to some
acquaintances in a bookshop. They were rather hard of believing, but
up spoke a stranger who had been observing the pedestrian, his way of
walking, the shape of his legs, and the relative position of his knees
and ankles whilst standing erect. This man declared that the Welshman
could certainly have done the walk without fatigue; and he ought to
have known, for he was the philosopher, Walking Stewart.

“It was as natural for this man in the picture to walk as for the
sun to shine. You would like to know England, Mr Stodham, as he knew
Wales, especially Glamorgan. Rightly was he entitled ‘Iolo Morganwg,’
or Edward of Glamorgan, or, rather, Ned of Glamorgan. The name will
outlive most stained glass, for one of the finest collections of
Welsh history, genealogies, fables, tales, poetry, etc., all in old
manuscripts, was made by him, and was named after him in its published
form--‘Iolo Manuscripts.’ He was born in Glamorgan, namely at Penon, in
1746, and when he was eighty he died at Flimstone in the same county.

“As you may suppose, he was not a rich man, and nobody would trouble to
call him a gentleman. But he was an Ancient Briton, and not the last
one: he said once that he always possessed the freedom of his thoughts
and the independence of his mind ‘with an Ancient Briton’s warm pride.’

“His father was a stonemason, working here, there, and everywhere, in
England and Wales, in town and country. When the boy first learnt his
alphabet, it was from the letters cut by his father on tombstones.
His mother--the daughter of a gentleman--undoubtedly a gentleman, for
he had ‘wasted a pretty fortune’--taught him to read from the songs
in a ‘Vocal Miscellany.’ She read Milton, Pope, ‘The Spectator,’ ‘The
Whole Duty of Man,’ and ‘Religio Medici,’ and sang as well. But the boy
had to begin working for his father at the age of nine. Having such
a mother, he did not mix with other children, but returned nightly
to read or talk with her, or, if he did not, he walked by himself in
solitary places. Later on, he would always read by himself in the
dinner-hour instead of going with his fellow-workmen to the inn. Once
he was left, during the dinner-hour, in charge of a parsonage that was
being repaired, and, having his own affairs to mind, he let all the
fowls and pigs in. His father scolded him, and he went off, as the
old man supposed, to pout for a week or two with his mother’s people
at Aberpergwm, near Pont Neath Vaughan. It was, however, some months
before he reappeared--from London, not Aberpergwm. Thus, in his own
opinion, he became ‘very pensive, very melancholy, and very stupid,’
but had fits of ‘wild extravagance.’ And thus, at the time of his
mother’s death, though he was twenty-three, he was ‘as ignorant of the
world as a new-born child.’ Without his mother he could not stay in the
house, so he set off on a long wandering. He went hither and thither
over a large part of England and Wales, ‘studying chiefly architecture
and other sciences that his trade required.’”

“There was a mason,” said Mr Stodham, “such as Ruskin wanted to set
carving evangelists and kings.”

“No. He knew too much, or half-knew too much. Besides, he hated
kings.... Those travels confirmed him in the habit of walking. He was
too busy and enthusiastic ever to have become an eater, and he found
that walking saved him still more from eating. He could start early in
the morning and walk the forty-three miles into Bristol without any
food on the way; and then, after walking about the town on business,
and breaking his fast with bread and butter and tea, and sleeping in a
friend’s chair, could walk back again with no more food; and, moreover,
did so of choice, not from any beastly principle or necessity. He
travelled thus with ‘more alacrity and comfort,’ than at other times
when he had taken food more frequently. He always was indifferent to
animal food and wine. Tea was his vice, tempered by sugar and plenty of
milk and cream. Three or four distinct brews of an evening suited him.
Once a lady assured him that she was handing him his sixteenth cup. He
was not a teetotaller, though his verses for a society of journeymen
masons ‘that met weekly to spend a cheerful hour at the moderate and
restricted expense of fourpence,’ are no better than if he had been a
teetotaller from his cradle:

    “‘Whilst Mirth and good ale our warm spirits recruit,
    We’ll drunk’ness avoid, that delight of a brute:
    Of matters of State we’ll have nothing to say,
    Wise Reason shall rule and keep Discord away.
    Whilst tuning our voices Jocundity sings,
    Good fellows we toast, and know nothing of kings:
    But to those who have brightened the gloom of our lives,
    Give the song and full bumper--our sweethearts and wives.’

At one time he made a fixed resolve not to _sit_ in the public room of
an ale-house, because he feared the conviviality to which his talent
for song-writing conduced. But it is a fact that a man who lives out of
doors can eat and drink anything, everything, or almost nothing, and
thrive beyond the understanding of quacks.

“Iolo walked night and day, and would see a timid gentleman home at any
hour if only he could have a chair by his fireside to sleep. He got to
prefer sleeping in a chair partly because his asthma forbade him to lie
down, partly because it was so convenient to be able to read and write
up to the last moment and during any wakeful hours. With a table, and
pen, ink, paper, and books beside him, he read, wrote, and slept, at
intervals, and at dawn usually let himself out of the house for a walk.
During a visit to the Bishop of St David’s at Abergwili he was to be
seen in the small hours pacing the hall of the episcopal palace, in
his nightcap, a book in one hand, a candle in the other. Probably he
read enormously, but too much alone, and with too little intercourse
with other readers. Besides his native Welsh he taught himself English,
French, Latin and Greek. His memory was wonderful, but he had no power
of arrangement; when he came to write he could not find his papers
without formidable searches, and when found could not put them in an
available form. I imagine he did not treat what he read, like most of
us, as if it were removed several degrees from what we choose to call
reality. Everything that interested him at all he accepted eagerly
unless it was one of the few things he was able to condemn outright as
a lie. I suppose it was the example of Nebuchadnezzar that made him try
one day ‘in a thinly populated part of North Wales’ eating nothing but
grass, until the very end, when he gave way to bread and cheese.

“He had a passion for antiquities.”

“What an extraordinary thing,” ejaculated Mr Stodham.

“Not very,” said Mr Morgan. “He was acquisitive and had little
curiosity. He was a collector of every sort and quality of old
manuscript. Being an imperfectly self-educated man he probably got an
innocent conceit from his learned occupation....”

“But how could he be an old curiosity man, and such an out-door man as
well?”

“His asthma and pulmonary trouble, whatever it was, probably drove him
out of doors. Borrow, who was a similar man of a different class, was
driven out in the same way as a lad. Iolo’s passion for poetry was not
destroyed, but heightened, by his travels. God knows what poetry meant
to him. But when he was in London, thinking of Wales and the white cots
of Glamorgan, he wrote several stanzas of English verse. Sometimes he
wrote about nymphs and swains, called Celia, Damon, Colin, and the
like. He wrote a poem to Laudanum:

    “‘O still exert thy soothing power,
    Till Fate leads on the welcom’d hour,
      To bear me hence away;
    To where pursues no ruthless foe,
    No feeling keen awakens woe,
      No faithless friends betray.’”

“I could do no worse than that,” murmured Mr Stodham confidently.

“He wrote a sonnet to a haycock, and another to Hope on an intention of
emigrating to America:

    “‘Th’ American wilds, where Simplicity’s reign
    Will cherish the Muse and her pupil defend ...
    I’ll dwell with Content in the desert alone.’

They were blessed days when Content still walked the earth with a
capital C, and probably a female form in light classic drapery. There
was Felicity also. Iolo wrote ‘Felicity, a pastoral.’ He composed a
poem to the cuckoo, and translated the famous Latin couplet which says
that two pilgrimages to St David’s are equivalent to one to Rome itself:

    “‘Would haughty Popes your senses bubble,
    And once to Rome your steps entice;
    ’Tis quite as well, and saves some trouble,
    Go visit old Saint Taffy twice.’

He wrote quantities of hymns. Once, to get some girls out of a
scrape--one having played ‘The Voice of Her I Love’ on the organ after
service--he wrote a hymn to the tune, ‘The Voice of the Beloved,’ and
fathered it on an imaginary collection of Moravian hymns. One other
virtue he had, as a bard: he never repeated his own verses. God rest
his soul. He was a walker, not a writer. The best of him--in fact, the
real man altogether--refused to go into verse at all.

“Yet he had peculiarities which might have adorned a poet. Once, when
he was on a job in a churchyard at Dartford, his master told him to go
next morning to take certain measurements. He went, and, having taken
the measurements, _woke_. It was pitch dark, but soon afterwards a
clock struck two. In spite of the darkness he had not only done what he
had to do, but he said that on his way to the churchyard every object
appeared to him as clear as by day. The measurements were correct.

“One night, asleep in his chair, three women appeared to him, one
with a mantle over her head. There was a sound like a gun, and one of
the others fell, covered in blood. Next day, chance took him--was it
chance?--into a farm near Cowbridge where he was welcomed by three
women, one hooded in a shawl. Presently a young man entered with a
gun, and laid it on the table, pointing at one of the women. At Iolo’s
warning it was discovered that the gun was primed and at full cock.

“Another time, between Cowbridge and Flimstone, he hesitated thrice at
a stile, and then, going over, was just not too late to save a drunken
man from a farmer galloping down the path.

“In spite of his love of Light and Liberty, he was not above turning
necromancer with wand and magic circle to convert a sceptic inn-keeper.
He undertook to call up the man’s grandfather, and after some
gesticulations and muttering unknown words, he whispered, ‘I feel the
approaching spirit. Shall it appear?’ The man whom he was intending
to benefit became alarmed, and begged to be allowed to hear the ghost
speak, first of all. In a moment a deep, sepulchral voice pronounced
the name of the grandfather. The man had had enough. He bolted from the
place, leaving Iolo and his confederates triumphant.

“Iolo should have been content to leave it unproved that he was no
poet. But he had not an easy life, and I suppose he had to have frills
of some sort.

“Well, he walked home to Glamorgan. There he took a Glamorgan wife,
Margaret Roberts of Marychurch, and he had to read less and work more
to provide for a family. By the nature of his handiwork he was able to
make more out of his verses than he would have done by printing better
poetry. The vile doggerel which he inscribed on tombstones gained him a
living and a sort of an immortality. He was one of the masons employed
on the monument to the Man of Ross.

“Though a bad poet he was a Welsh bard. It was not the first or the
last occasion on which the two parts were combined. Bard, for him,
was a noble name. He was a ‘Christian Briton and Bard’--a ‘Bard
according to the rights and institutes of the Bards of the Island of
Britain’--and he never forgot the bardic triad, ‘Man, Liberty, and
Light.’ Once, at the prison levee of a dissenting minister, he signed
himself, ‘Bard of Liberty.’ To Southey, whom he helped with much
out-of-the-way bardic mythology for his ‘Madoc,’ he was ‘Bard Williams.’

“Bardism brought him into strange company, which I dare say he did
not think strange, and certainly not absurd. Anna Seward, who mistook
herself for a poet, and was one of the worst poets ever denominated
‘Swan,’ was kind to him in London. He in return initiated her into
the bardic order at a meeting of ‘Ancient British Bards resident in
London,’ which was convened on Primrose Hill at the Autumnal equinox,
1793. At an earlier meeting, also on Primrose Hill, he had recited an
‘Ode on the Mythology of the British Bards in the manner of Taliesin,’
and, since this poem was subsequently approved at the equinoctial, and
ratified at the solstitial, convention, it was, according to ancient
usage, fit for publication. It was not a reason. Nevertheless, a bard
is a bard, whatever else he may or may not be.

“Iolo was proud to declare that the old Welsh bards had kept up a
perpetual war with the church of Rome, and had suffered persecution.
‘Man, Liberty, and Light.’ You and I, Mr Stodham, perhaps don’t know
what he meant. But if Iolo did not know, he was too happy to allow the
fact to emerge and trouble him.

“Of course, he connected the bards with Druidism, which he said they
had kept alive. A good many sectarians would have said that he himself
was as much a Druid as a Christian. He accepted the resurrection of
the dead. He did not reject the Druid belief in transmigration of
souls. He identified Druidism with the patriarchal religion of the Old
Testament, but saw in it also a pacific and virtually Christian spirit.
He affirmed that Ancient British Christianity was strongly tinctured by
Druidism, and it was his opinion that the ‘Dark Ages’ were only dark
through our lack of light. He hated the stories of Cæsar and others
about human sacrifices, and would say to opponents, ‘You are talking
of what you don’t understand--of what none but a Welshman and a British
bard _can possibly_ understand.’ He compared the British mythology
favourably with the ‘barbarous’ Scandinavian mythology of Thor and
Odin. He studied whatever he could come at concerning Druidism,
with the ‘peculiar bias and firm persuasion’ that ‘more wisdom and
beneficence than is popularly attributed to them’ would be revealed.

“In the French Revolution he recognised the spirit of ‘Man, Liberty,
and Light.’ His friends deserted him. He in turn was willing to
leave them for America, ‘to fly from the numerous injuries he had
received from the laws of this land.’ He had, furthermore, the hope of
discovering the colony settled in America, as some believed, by the
mediæval Welsh prince Madoc.”

“That was like Borrow, too,” suggested Mr Stodham.

“It was, and the likeness is even closer; for, like Borrow, Iolo did
not go to America. Nevertheless, to prepare himself for the adventure,
he lived out of doors for a time, sleeping in trees and on the ground,
and incurring rheumatism.

“But though he did not go to America for love of Liberty, he had
his papers seized, and is said to have been summoned by Pitt for
disaffection to the State. Nothing worse was proved against him than
the authorship of several songs in favour of Liberty, ‘perhaps,’
said his biographer, ‘a little more extravagant than was quite
commendable at that inflammatory period.’ They expected him to remove
his papers himself, but he refused, and had them formally restored
by an official. When he was fifty he gave up his trade because the
dust of the stone was injuring his lungs. He now earned a living by
means of a shop at Cowbridge where books, stationery, and grocery were
sold. His speciality was ‘East India Sweets uncontaminated by human
gore.’ Brothers of his who had made money in Jamaica offered to allow
him £50 a year, but in vain. ‘It was a land of slaves,’ he said. He
would not even administer their property when it was left to him,
though a small part was rescued later on by friends, for his son and
daughter. The sound of the bells at Bristol celebrating the rejection
of Wilberforce’s Anti-Slavery Bill drove him straight out of the city.
Believing that he was spied upon at Cowbridge he offered a book for
sale in his window, labelled ‘The Rights of Man.’ He was successful.
The spies descended on him, seized the book, and discovered that it was
the Bible, not the work of Paine.

“He was personally acquainted with Paine and with a number of other
celebrities, such as Benjamin Franklin, Bishop Percy, Horne Tooke, and
Mrs Barbauld. Once in a bookshop he asked Dr Johnson to choose for
him among three English grammars. Johnson was turning over the leaves
of a book, ‘rapidly and as the bard thought petulantly’: ‘Either of
them will do for you, young man,’ said he. ‘Then, sir,’ said Iolo,
thinking Johnson was insulting his poverty, ‘to make sure of having
the best I will buy all’; and he used always to refer to them as ‘Dr
Johnson’s Grammars.’ It was once arranged that he should meet Cowper,
but the poet sat, through the evening, silent, unable to encounter the
introduction.

“The excesses of the Revolution, it is said, drove Iolo to abandon
the idea of a Republic, except as a ‘theoretic model for a free
government.’ He even composed an ode to the Cowbridge Volunteers. Above
all, he wrote an epithalamium on the marriage of George the Fourth,
which he himself presented, dressed in a new apron of white leather
and carrying a bright trowel. His ‘English Poems’ were dedicated to the
Prince of Wales.”

“What a fearful fall,” exclaimed Mr Stodham, who may himself have been
a Bard of Liberty.

“But his business, apart from his trade, was antiquities, and
especially the quest of them up and down Wales.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Mr Stodham, “if the old man hoped
for some grand result from meddling with those mysterious old books
and papers--perhaps nothing definite, health, wealth, wisdom, beauty,
everlasting life, or the philosopher’s stone,--but some old secret of
Bardism or Druidism, which would glorify Wales, or Cowbridge, or Old
Iolo himself.”

“Very likely. He was to a scientific antiquary what a witch is to an
alchemist, and many a witch got a reputation with less to her credit
than he had.

“As a boy he remembered hearing an old shoemaker of Llanmaes (near
Lantwit) speak of the shaft of an ancient cross, in Lantwit churchyard,
falling into a grave that had been dug too near it for Will the Giant
of Lantwit. As a middle-aged man he dug up the stone. It was less
love of antiquity than of mystery, buried treasure, and the like.
He was unweariable in his search for the remains of Ancient British
literature. At the age of seventy, when the Bishop of St David’s
had mislaid some of his manuscripts and they had thus been sold,
Iolo walked over Caermarthenshire, Pembrokeshire, and Cardiganshire,
and recovered the greater part. He took a pony with him as far as
Caermarthen, but would not allow it to carry his wallets until at last
it was arranged that his son should walk on one side and himself on the
other, which made him remark that ‘nothing was more fatiguing than a
horse.’ The horse appears in a triad of his own composition:

“There are three things I do not want. A Horse, for I have a good pair
of legs: a Cellar, for I drink no beer: a Purse, for I have no money.

“He would not ride in Lord Dunraven’s carriage, but preferred to walk.
That he did not dislike the animal personally is pretty clear. For at
one time he kept a horse which followed him, of its own free will, upon
his walks.

“Iolo was a sight worth seeing on the highways and byways of
Glamorgan, and once had the honour of being taken for a conjuror.
His biographer--a man named Elijah Waring, who was proud to have
once carried his wallets--describes him ‘wearing his long grey hair
flowing over his high coat collar, which, by constant antagonism, had
pushed up his hat-brim into a quaint angle of elevation behind. His
countenance was marked by a combination of quiet intelligence and quick
sensitiveness; the features regular, the lines deep, and the grey eye
benevolent but highly excitable. He was clad, when he went to see a
bishop, in a new coat fit for an admiral, with gilt buttons and buff
waistcoat, but, as a rule, in rustic garb: the coat blue, with goodly
brass buttons, and the nether integuments, good homely corduroy. He
wore buckles in his shoes, and a pair of remarkably stout well-set
legs were vouchers for the great peripatetic powers he was well known
to possess. A pair of canvas wallets were slung over his shoulders,
one depending in front, the other behind. These contained a change
of linen, and a few books and papers connected with his favourite
pursuits. He generally read as he walked....’”

“Tut, tut,” remarked Mr Stodham, “that spoils all.”

“He generally read as he walked, ‘with spectacles on nose,’ and a
pencil in his hand, serving him to make notes as they suggested
themselves. Yet he found time also, Mr Stodham, to sow the tea-plant
on the hills of Glamorgan. ‘A tall staff which he grasped at about the
level of his ear completed his equipment; and he was accustomed to
assign as a reason for this mode of using it, that it tended to expand
the pectoral muscles, and thus, in some degree, relieve a pulmonary
malady inherent in his constitution.’

“He did not become a rich man. Late one evening he entered a
Cardiganshire public-house and found the landlord refusing to let a
pedlar pay for his lodging in kind, though he was penniless. Iolo
paid the necessary shilling for a bed and rated the landlord, but
had to walk on to a distant friend because it was his last shilling.
Yet he wrote for the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ and corresponded with
the _Monthly_ and others, so that towards the end he was entitled to
advances from the Literary Fund. An annual subscription was also raised
for him in Neath and the neighbourhood. His last three years he spent
at Flimstone, where he is buried. He was a cripple and confined to the
house, until one day he rested his head on the side of his easy chair
and told his daughter that he was free from pain and could sleep, and
so he died.”

“I will certainly go to Craig-y-Dinas,” said Mr Stodham solemnly, “and
to Penon, and to Cowbridge, and to Flimstone.”

“You will do well,” said Mr Morgan, shutting up Elijah Waring’s little
book and getting out the map of Glamorgan.




CHAPTER XIV

THE CASTLE OF LEAVES AND THE BEGGAR WITH THE LONG WHITE BEARD


Ann was good to all beggars as well as to old Jack, the watercress man,
and when I asked her about it once she told the story of the Castle of
Leaves. This castle was a ruin above the sea near where she was born.
So fragmentary and fallen was it that every November the oak leaves
covered it up. As a little child, Ann was taken up there on a May day
because the hawthorn growing there always blossomed in time, however
backward the season. Sitting among the ruins was an old white-haired
man playing on a harp, and for ever after she loved beggars, said
Aurelius, as if they were all going to have harps and long white beards
in due course. A white-haired beggar, according to tradition, was
infallibly to be found by anyone who went up to the Castle of Leaves on
May day, and the story which connects a beggar with the early days of
the castle might of itself explain why Ann never denied a beggar. Both
Mr Morgan and Ann knew the story, but Mr Morgan had found it written
in a book, with the date 1399, while Ann told it without a date as she
remembered it from the dark ages of her own childhood.

In those old days, if Ann was to be believed, there was nothing but
war. The young men went out to battle and never came back except as
spirits, or as old men, or as worse than either--some of them having
no more legs or arms than a fish, some crawling on their bellies with
their beards in the mud, or flapping along in the wind like a kind
of bird, or as lean and scattered as crickets--so that the children
laughed at them first and then ran away crying to their mothers because
they had such fathers. The mothers did not laugh save those that went
mad, and perhaps they were not the worst off. The women knew that these
strange idols and images crawling and jiggering home were the same that
had marched out to the war as if their sweethearts were in the far
countries before them, instead of behind them at the turnings of the
roads. They would not have loved them so much if they had not gone out
like that. The glorious young men departed; the young women were no
longer beautiful without them; the little children were blossoms of the
grave. The world was full of old men, maimed men, and young men going
to the wars, and of women crying because the soldiers had not come
back, and children crying because they had. And many and many a one had
no more tears left to cry with.

Beggars appeared and disappeared who looked like men, but spoke all
manner of tongues and knew not where their fathers or mothers or
children were, if they had any left, or if ever they had any, which
was doubtful, for they were not as other men, but as if they had come
thus into the astonished world, resembling carrion walking, or rotten
trees by the roadside. Few could till the fields, and it was always a
good summer for thistles, never for corn. The cattle died and there
was nothing to eat the grass. Some said it was a judgment. But what
had the poor cows and sheep done? What had the young men and women
done? They were but mankind. Nor were the great ones the worse for it.
They used to come back from the wars with gold and unicorns and black
slaves carrying elephants’ tusks and monkeys. Whether or not it was a
judgment, it was misery.

But one day there was a white ship in the harbour of Abercorran. A
man named Ivor ap Cadogan had come back who had been away in Arabia,
Cathay, and India, in Ophir and all the East, since he was a boy. No
man knew his family. He was a tall man with yellow hair and a long
beard of gold, and he was always singing to himself, and he was like
a king who has thrown away his crown, nor had he soldiers with him,
but only the dark foreign men who followed him from the ships. All day
long, day after day, they were unlading and carrying up beautiful white
stone from the ship to build a great shining castle above the sea. In
a little while came another ship out of the east, and another, and
another, like swans, coming in silent to the harbour. All were heavy
laden with the white stone, and with precious woods, which men carried
up into the hills above the shore. The sea forgot everything but calm
all through that summer while they were unlading the ships and building.

The finished castle was as huge and white, but not as terrible, as a
mountain peak when the snow has been chiselled by the north wind for
many midnights, and the wood of it smelt round about as sweet as a
flower, summer and winter. And Ivor ap Cadogan dwelt in the castle,
which was at that time called the Castle of Ophir. It had no gates,
no moat or portcullis, for no one was refused or sent away. Its fires
never went out. Day and night in winter the sky over the castle was
bright with the many fires and many lights. Round the walls grew trees
bearing golden fruit, and among them fountains of rustling crystal
stood up glittering for ever like another sort of trees.

People dreamed about the shining, white castle, and its gold, its
music, its everlasting festivals of youths and maidens.

Upon the roads now there were no more incomplete or withered men, or
if they were they were making for the Castle of Ophir among the hills.
It was better, said all men, to be a foreigner, or a monkey, or any
one of the wondrous beasts that wandered in the castle, or any of the
birds that flew round the towers, or any of the fish in the ponds under
the fountains, than to be a man upon the roads or in the villages. No
man now walked up and down until he had to sit, or sat until he had to
lie, or lay until he could rise no more and so died. They went up to
the Castle of Ophir and were healed, and dwelt there happily for ever
after. Those that came back said that in the castle they were just as
happy whether they were working hard or doing nothing: stiff, labouring
men whose chief pleasure used to be in resting from toil, could be
idle and happy in the castle long after their toil had been forgotten.
The charcoal-burners slept until they were clean, and the millers
until they were swarthy, and it seemed to them that the lives of their
fathers had been a huddle of wretchedness between birth and death. Even
the young men ceased going to the wars, but went instead to the castle
and the music and the feasting. All men praised Ivor ap Cadogan. Once
a lord from beyond the mountains sent men against the castle to carry
off gold, but they remained with Ivor and threw their weapons into the
ponds.

From time to time the white ships put out again from Abercorran, and
again returned. When their sails appeared in the bay, it was known that
calm had settled upon the sea as in the first year, and men and women
went down to welcome them. Those summers were good both for man and
beast. The earth brought forth tall, heavy corn which no winds beat
down. Granaries were full: at the castle a granary, as large as a
cathedral, was so full that the rats and mice had no room and so threw
themselves into the sea. And Ivor ap Cadogan grew old. His beard was as
white as the sails of his ships. A great beard it was, not like those
of our day, and you could see it blowing over his shoulder a mile away
as he walked the hills. So some men began to wonder whether one day he
would die, and who would be master then, and whether it would still be
calm when the ships sailed. But Summer came, and with it the ships, and
Autumn and the cramming of granaries and the songs of harvest, and men
forgot.

The next Summer was more glorious than any before. Only, the ships
never came. The sea was quiet as the earth, as blue as the sky. The
white clouds rose up out of the sea, but never one sail. Ivor went
to the high places to watch, and lifted a child upon his shoulders
to watch for him. No ship came. Ivor went no more to the cliffs, but
stayed always on the topmost towers of the castle, walking to and fro,
watching, while down below men were bringing in the harvest and the
songs had begun.

When at last the west wind blew, and one ship arrived, it was not in
the harbour but on the rocks, and it was full of dead men. Ivor and
all the people of the castle went down to see the ship and the dead
men. When they returned at nightfall the wind had blown the leaves from
the castle trees into the rooms so that they were almost filled. The
strange birds of the castle were thronging the air, in readiness to fly
over the sea. The strange animals of the castle had left their comfort
and were roaming in the villages, where they were afterwards killed.
The old men prophesied terrible things. The women were afraid. The
children stood, pale and silent, watching the dead leaves swim by like
fishes, crimson and emerald and gold, and they pretended that they were
mermen and mermaids sitting in a palace under the sea. But the women
took the children away along the road where the old men had already
gone. Led by Ivor, the young men descended to the shore to repair the
ship.

It was a winter of storm: men could not hear themselves speak for
the roaring of sea, wind, and rain, and the invisible armies of the
air. With every tide bodies of men and of the strange birds that had
set out over the sea were washed up. Men were not glad to see Ivor
and his dark companions at last departing in the mended ship. The
granaries were full, and no one starved, but time passed and no more
ships arrived. No man could work. The castle stood empty of anything
but leaves, and in their old cottages men did not love life. The Spring
was an ill one; nothing was at work in the world save wind and rain;
now the uproar of the wind drowned that of the rain, now the rain
drowned the wind, and often the crying of women and children drowned
both. Men marked the differences, and hoped for an end which they
were powerless to pursue. When the one ship returned, its cargo was
of birds and beasts such as had escaped in the falling of the leaves.
Ivor alone was glad of them. He had few followers--young men all of
them--up to the castle. Others came later, but went down again with
loads of corn. It was now seen that the granaries would some day be
emptied. People began to talk without respect of Ivor. They questioned
whence his wealth had come, by what right he had built the castle, why
he had concealed his birth. The young men living with him quarrelled
among themselves, then agreed in reproaching the master. At last they
left the castle in twos and threes, accusing him of magic, of causing
them to forget their gratitude to God. In the villages everyone was
quarrelling except when the talk turned to blaming Ivor. He made no
reply, nor ever came down amongst them, but stayed in the inmost
apartment with his remaining birds. One of the complaints against him
was that he fed the birds on good grain. Yet the people continued to go
up to the granaries at need. The beggars and robbers of the mountains
were beginning to contest their right to it, and blood was shed in many
of the rooms and corridors. No one saw the master. They said that they
did not care, or they said that he was dead and buried up in leaves;
but in truth they were afraid of his white hair, his quiet eye, and
the strange birds and beasts. Between them, the robbers and the young
men who had served him plundered the house. Some even attempted to
carry off the masonry, but left most of it along the roadside where
it lies to this day. At length, nothing worth a strong man’s time had
been overlooked. A few beggars were the latest visitors, cursing the
empty granary, trembling at the footsteps of leaves treading upon
leaves in all the rooms. They did not see Ivor, sitting among leaves
and spiders’ webs. A pack of hounds, hunting that way, chased the
stag throughout the castle but lost it; for it entered the room where
Ivor was sitting, and when the horn was blown under the new moon the
hounds slunk out bloodless yet assuaged, and the hunter thrashed them
for their lack of spirit, and cursed the old man for his magic, yet
ventured not in search of him along those muffled corridors. The very
road up to the castle was disappearing. The master, it was believed,
had died. The old men who had known him were dead; the young men were
at the wars. When a white-haired beggar stumbled into Abercorran from
the hills few admitted, though all knew in their hearts, that it was
Ivor ap Cadogan. For a year or two he was fed from door to door, but
he wearied his benefactors by talking continually about his birds that
he had lost. Some of the rich remembered against him his modesty,
others his ostentation. The poor accused him of pride; such was the
name they gave to his independent tranquillity. Perhaps, some thought,
it was a judgment--the inhabitants of the Castle of Ophir had been
too idle and too happy to think of the shortness of this life and the
glory to come. So he disappeared. Probably he went to some part where
he was not known from any other wandering beggar. “Wonderful long
white beards,” said Ann, “men had in those days--longer than that old
harper’s, and to-day there are none even like him. Men to-day can do a
number of things which the old ages never dreamed of, but their beards
are nothing in comparison to those unhappy old days when men with those
long white beards used to sit by the roadsides, looking as if they had
come from the ends of the earth, like wise men from the East, although
they were so old that they sat still with their beards reaching to the
ground like roots. Ivor ap Cadogan was one of these.”

Mr Morgan once, overhearing Ann telling me this tale, said, “What
the book says is much better. It says that in 1399 a Welshman, named
Llewelyn ab Cadwgan, who would never speak of his family, came from
the Turkish war to reside at Cardiff; and so great was his wealth that
he gave to everyone that asked or could be seen to be in need of it.
He built a large mansion near the old white tower, for the support
of the sick and infirm. He continued to give all that was asked of
him until his wealth was all gone. He then sold his house, which was
called the New Place, and gave away the money until that also was at
an end. After this he died of want, for no one gave to him, and many
accused him of extravagant waste.” With that Mr Morgan went gladly
and, for him, rapidly to his books. Nobody seeing him then was likely
to disturb him for that evening. At his door he turned and said “Good
night” to us in a perfectly kind voice which nevertheless conveyed, in
an unquestionable manner, that he was not to be disturbed.

“Good night, Mr Morgan,” said all of us. “Good night, Ann,” said I, and
slipped out into a night full of stars and of quietly falling leaves,
which almost immediately silenced my attempt to sing “O the cuckoo is a
pretty bird” on the way home.




CHAPTER XV

MR STODHAM SPEAKS FOR ENGLAND--FOG SUPERVENES


Some time after the story of the Castle of Leaves, Mr Morgan took
occasion to point out the difference between Ann speaking of the
“beautiful long white beards” that men grew in those “unhappy old
days,” and Mr Torrance praising the “merry” or “good old” England of
his imagination. He said that from what he could gather they were merry
in the old days with little cause, while to-day, whatever cause there
might be, few persons possessed the ability. He concluded, I think,
that after all there was probably nothing to be merry about at any time
if you looked round carefully: that, in fact, what was really important
was to be capable of more merriment and less ado about nothing. Someone
with a precocious sneer, asked if England was now anything more than
a geographical expression, and Mr Stodham preached a sermon straight
away:

“A great poet said once upon a time that this earth is ‘where we have
our happiness or not at all.’ For most of those who speak his language
he might have said that this England is where we have our happiness or
not at all. He meant to say that we are limited creatures, not angels,
and that our immediate surroundings are enough to exercise all our
faculties of mind and body: there is no need to flatter ourselves with
the belief that we could do better in a bigger or another world. Only
the bad workman complains of his tools.

“There was another poet who hailed England, his native land, and asked
how could it but be dear and holy to him, because he declared himself
one who (here Mr Stodham grew very red and his voice rose, and Lewis
thought he was going to sing as he recited):

    “‘From thy lakes and mountain-hills,
    Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas,
    Have drunk in all my intellectual life,
    All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts,
    All adoration of the God in nature,
    All lovely and all honourable things,
    Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel
    The joy and greatness of its future being?
    There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul
    Unborrowed from my country. O divine
    And beauteous island! thou hast been my sole
    And most magnificent temple, in the which
    I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs,
    Loving the God that made me!’

“Of course, I do not know what it _all_ means,” he muttered, but went
on: “and that other poet who was his friend called the lark:”

    “‘Type of the wise who soar but never roam,
    True to the kindred points of heaven and home.’

Well, England is home and heaven too. England made you, and of you
is England made. Deny England--wise men have done so--and you may
find yourself some day denying your father and mother--and this also
wise men have done. Having denied England and your father and mother,
you may have to deny your own self, and treat it as nothing, a mere
conventional boundary, an artifice, by which you are separated from
the universe and its creator. To unite yourself with the universe and
the creator, you may be tempted to destroy that boundary of your own
body and brain, and die. He is a bold man who hopes to do without
earth, England, family, and self. Many a man dies, having made little
of these things, and if he says at the end of a long life that he has
had enough, he means only that he has no capacity for more--_he_ is
exhausted, not the earth, not England.

“I do not think that a man who knows many languages, many histories,
many lands, would ask if England was more than a geographical
expression. Nor would he be the first to attempt an answer to one that
did ask.

“I do not want you to praise England. She can do without receiving
better than you can without giving. I do not want to shout that our
great soldiers and poets are greater than those of other nations, but
they are ours, they are great, and in proportion as we are good and
intelligent, we can respond to them and understand them as those who
are not Englishmen cannot. They cannot long do without us or we without
them. Think of it. We have each of us some of the blood and spirit of
Sir Thomas More, and Sir Philip Sidney, and the man who wrote ‘Tom
Jones,’ and Horatio Nelson, and the man who wrote ‘Love in the Valley.’
Think what we owe to them of joy, courage, and mere security. Try to
think what they owe to us, since they depend on us for keeping alive
their spirits, and a spirit that can value them. They are England: we
are England. Deny England, and we deny them and ourselves. Do you
love the Wilderness? Do you love Wales? If you do, you love what I
understand by ‘England.’ The more you love and know England, the more
deeply you can love the Wilderness and Wales. I am sure of it....”

At this point Mr Stodham ran away. Nobody thought how like a _very
good_ rat he was during this speech, or, rather, this series of short
speeches interrupted by moments of excitement when all that he could
do was to light a pipe and let it out. Higgs, perhaps, came nearest to
laughing; for he struck up “Rule Britannia” with evident pride that he
was the first to think of it. This raised my gorge; I could not help
shouting “Home Rule for Ireland.” Whereupon Higgs swore abominably, and
I do not know what would have happened if Ann had not said: “Jessie, my
love, sing _Land of my Fathers_,” which is the Welsh national anthem;
but when Jessie sang it--in English, for our sakes--everyone but Higgs
joined in the chorus and felt that it breathed the spirit of patriotism
which Mr Stodham had been trying to express. It was exulting without
self-glorification or any other form of brutality. It might well be
the national anthem of any nation that knows, and would not rashly
destroy, the bonds distinguishing it from the rest of the world without
isolating it.

Aurelius, who had been brooding for some time, said:

“I should never have thought it. Mr Stodham has made me a present of a
country. I really did not know before that England was not a shocking
fiction of the journalists and politicians. I am the richer, and,
according to Mr Stodham, so is England. But what about London fog?
what is the correct attitude of a patriot towards London fog and the
manufacturers who make it what it is?”

Aurelius got up to look out at the fog, the many dim trees, the single
gas lamp in the lane beyond the yard. Pointing to the trees, he asked--

            “‘What are these,
    So withered and so wild in their attire,
    That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ the earth
    And yet are on’t?’

Even so must Mr Stodham’s patriotism, or that of _Land of our Fathers_,
appear to Higgs. His patriotism is more like the ‘Elephant and Castle’
on a Saturday night than those trees. Both are good, as they say at
Cambridge.” And he went out, muttering towards the trees in the fog:

    “‘Live you? or are you aught
    That man may question? You seem to understand me,
    By each at once her choppy fingers laying
    Upon her skinny lips: you should be women,
    And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
    That you are so.’”

For some time we were all silent, until Ann said: “Hark.” “What is it?
another Ripper murder?” said Higgs. “Oh, shut up, Higgs,” said Philip
looking at Ann. “Hark,” said Ann again. It was horrible. Somewhere far
off I could hear an angry murmur broken by frantic metallic clashings.
No one sound out of the devilish babble could I disentangle, still
less, explain. A myriad noises were violently mixed in one muddy,
struggling mass of rumbling and jangling. The worst gramophones are
infinitely nearer to the cooing of doves than this, but it had in it
something strained, reckless, drunken-mad, horror-stricken, like the
voice of the gramophone. Above all, the babble was angry and it was
inhuman. I had never heard it before, and my first thought was that it
was an armed and furious multitude, perhaps a foreign invader, a mile
or so distant.

“Didn’t you know it was Saturday night?” said Higgs. “It is always
worse on Saturdays.”

“What is?” said I.

“That noise,” said Higgs.

“Hark,” said Philip anxiously, and we all held our breath to catch it
again. There.... It was no nearer. It was not advancing. It was always
the same. As I realised that it was the mutter of London, I sighed,
being a child, with relief, but could not help listening still for
every moment of that roar as of interlaced immortal dragons fighting
eternally in a pit. It was surprising that such a tone could endure.
The sea sounds everlastingly, but this was more appropriate to a dying
curse, and should have lasted no more than a few minutes. As I listened
it seemed rather to be a brutish yell of agony during the infliction
of some unspeakable pain, and though pain of that degree would kill or
stupefy in a few minutes, this did not.

“If you like the ‘Elephant and Castle,’” said Mr Morgan, “you like
that. But if you live in London all your lives, perhaps you may never
hear it again.

“For the sound does not cease. We help to make it as we do to make
England. Even those weird sisters of Aurelius out in the Wilderness
help to make it by rattling branches and dropping leaves in the fog.
You will hear the leaves falling, the clock ticking, the fog-signals
exploding, but not London.”

I was, in fact, twenty-one before I heard the roar again. Never since
have I noticed it. But Ann, it seems, used to hear it continually,
perhaps because she went out so seldom and could not become one of
the mob of unquestionable “inhabitants o’ the earth.” But when the
window had been shut, we, at any rate, forgot all about London in
that warm room in Abercorran House, amidst the gleam of china and the
glitter of brass and silver. Lewis and Harry sat on the floor, in a
corner, playing with lead soldiers. The English army--that is to say,
Lewis--was beaten, and refused to accept its fate. On being told,
“But it is all over now,” he burst out crying. Harry looked on in
sympathetic awe. But before his tears had quite come to their natural
end, a brilliant idea caused him to uncover his face suddenly and say:
“I know what I shall do. I shall build a tower like David--a real
one--in the Wilderness.”

“Oh, yes, let’s,” exclaimed Harry.

“Us,” said Lewis, “I like that. It is I that shall build a tower. But I
will _employ_ you.”

“That,” mused Harry slowly, “means that I build a tower and let you
live in it. That isn’t right. Mr Gladstone would never allow it.”

“What has Mr Gladstone got to do with the Wilderness, I should like
to know? We _employ_ him. I should like to see him getting over the
fence into the Wilderness. He does not know where it is. Besides,
if he did, he could _never_, _never_, get into my tower. If he did
I would immediately fling myself down from the top. Then I should
be safe,” shrieked Lewis, before entering another of those vales or
abysses of tears which were so black for him, and so brief. It was not
so agreeable as silence would have been, or as Ann’s sewing was, or
the continuous bagpipe music of a kettle always just on the boil. But
Philip had gone upstairs, and the book on my knee held me more than
Lewis’s tears. This book placed me in a mountain solitude such as that
where David Morgan had built his tower, and, like that, haunted by
curlews:

    “The rugged mountain’s scanty cloak
    Was dwarfish shrubs of birch and oak,
    With shingles bare, and cliffs between,
    And patches bright of bracken green,
    And heather black that waved so high
    It held the copse in rivalry.”

Out of the ambush of copse and heather and bracken had started up at
a chieftain’s whistle--“wild as the scream of the curlew”--a host of
mountaineers, while the Chieftain revealed himself to the enemy who had
imagined him alone:

    “And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu.”

“What is the matter, Arthur?” asked Harry when I came to this line.
I answered him with a look of trembling contempt. The whole scene so
fascinated me--I so thrilled with admiration at everything done by
the Highland chieftain--that his magic whistle at last pierced me to
the marrow with exquisite joy. In my excitement I said the words,
“And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu,” aloud, yet not loud enough to make
anything but a husky muttering audible. I was choking and blushing with
pleasant pains and with a desire to pass them on to another, myself not
lacking glory as the discoverer. Hence my muttering those words aloud:
hence the contempt of my answer to Harry, upon not being instantly
and enthusiastically understood. The contempt, however, was not
satisfying.... I, too, wished that I possessed a tower upon a mountain
where I could live for ever in a state of poetic pain. Therefore I went
out silently, saying no good night, not seeing Philip again.

Fog and cold cured me rapidly. On that wretched night I could no more
go on thinking of a tower on a mountain than I could jump into a pond.
I had to run to get warm. Then I thought of the book once more: I
recovered my pleasure and my pride. The fog, pierced by some feeble
sparkles of lamps, and dim glows of windows from invisible houses, the
silence, broken by the dead leaf that rustled after me, made the world
a shadowy vast stage on which I was the one real thing. The solitary
grandeur was better than any tower, and at the end of my run, on
entering again among people and bright lights, I could flit out of it
as easily as possible, which was more than Morgan could do, since to
escape from his tower he had to die.




CHAPTER XVI

THE HOUSE OF THE DAYS OF THE YEAR


Lewis never did raise a tower in the Wilderness. His towers were in
the air. A wish, with him, was seldom father to any deed. I think he
expected the wish of itself to create; or if not, he was at least
always angered when the nature of things proved to be against him.
He would not have been unduly astonished, and would have been wildly
grateful, if he had seen looming through the fog next morning a tower
such as he desired. But except on paper he never did. As he drew it,
the tower was tall and slender as the tallest and slenderest factory
chimney, more like a pillar for St Simeon Stylites than a castle in
Spain. It would have been several times the height of the elms in the
Wilderness which he had furiously refused to take into his service. It
was to be climbed within by a spiral staircase, each step apparently
having its own little window. Thus it was riddled by windows.

Now, if this idea had come to Philip he would have executed it. As it
was, Lewis’s drawing delighted him. He liked all those windows that
made it look as if it were a dead stem rotting away. “But,” said he, “I
know a house better than that, with a window for every day of the year.
It would be just the thing for you, Lewis, because it is built without
hands, without bricks, stones, cement, or any expense whatever.... It
was only a dream,” he continued, one day as he and I were going down
the long street which took us almost straight out into Our Country. But
he did not really think it no more than a dream. He had seen it many
times, a large, shadowy house, with windows which he had never counted,
but knew to be as many as the days of the year, no more, no less. The
house itself was always dark, with lights in some of the windows,
never, perhaps, in all.

The strange thing was that Philip believed this house must actually
exist. Perhaps, I suggested, it was hidden among the trees of our
woods, like several other houses. No: he dismissed this as fancy.
His house was not a fancy. It lay somewhere in a great city, or at
the verge of one. On his first visit he had approached it by long
wanderings through innumerable, unknown and deserted streets, following
a trail of white pebbles like the children in the fairy tale. In
all those streets he passed nobody and heard no sound; nor did this
surprise him, in spite of the fact that he felt the houses to be
thronged with people. Suddenly out of the last narrow street he came
as it were on a wall of darkness, like night itself. Into this he was
stepping forward when he saw just beneath and before him a broad,
black river, crossed by a low bridge leading over to where, high up,
a light beamed in the window of an invisible building. When he began
to cross the bridge he could see that it was the greatest house he had
ever beheld. It was a house that might be supposed to contain “many
mansions.” “You could not make a house like that one out of this whole
street,” said Philip. “It stretched across the world, but it was a
house.” On the other side of the river it seemed still equally far off.
Birds flying to and fro before it never rose up over it, nor did any
come from the other side. Philip hastened forward to reach the house.
But the one light went out and he awoke.

Philip used to look out for this house when he was crossing the
bridges in London. He scanned carefully the warehouses and factories
rising out of the water, in long rows with uncounted windows, that
made him wonder what went on behind them. With this material, he said,
a magician could make a house like the one he was in search of. Once,
when he got home in the evening from London, he was confident that his
house lay between Waterloo Bridge and Hungerford Bridge, but next time
he was there he was dead against any such suggestion. A factory on the
edge of a tract of suburb waste fulfilled his conditions for an hour at
another time. He had been thrilled, too, by a photograph shown to him
by Mr Stodham--of an ancient palace standing at the foot of a desolate
mountain in the remote South.

When we were walking together towards the country Philip used to look,
as a matter of course, down every side street to right or left, as he
always looked up dark alleys in London. Nor was he content to look
once down any one street, lest he should miss some transformation or
transfiguration. As we began to get clear of London, and houses were
fewer and all had long front gardens, and shops ceased, Philip looked
ahead now and then as well as from side to side. Beyond the wide,
level fields and the tall Lombardy poplars bounding them, there was
nothing, but there was room for the house. Fog thickened early in the
afternoon over our vacant territories, but we saw only the trees and a
Gypsy tent under a hedge.

Next day Philip came home feverish from school, and was put to bed in
the middle of the pale sunny afternoon. He lay happily stretched out
with his eyes fixed on a glass of water near the window. It flickered
in the light.... He saw the black river gleaming as when a candle for
the first time illuminates a lake in the bowels of a mountain. There
was the house beyond the river. Six or seven of its windows were lit
up, one large one low down, the rest small, high up, and, except two of
them, wide apart. Now and then, at other windows here and there, lights
appeared momentarily, like stars uncovered by rapid clouds.... A lofty
central door slowly swung open. A tiny figure, as solitary as the first
star in the sky, paused at the threshold, to be swallowed up a moment
later in darkness. At the same moment Philip awoke with a cry, knowing
that the figure was himself.

After this Philip was not so confident of discovering the house. Yet
he was more than ever certain that it existed, that all the time of
the intervals between his visits it was somewhere. I told him the story
about Irem Dhat El’Imad, the Terrestrial Paradise of Sheddad the son
of Ad, King of the World, which Aurelius had read to me. Philip was
pleased with the part where the geometricians and sages, labourers
and artificers of the King search over all the earth, until they come
to rivers and an illimitable plain, and choose it for the site of the
palace which was three hundred years building. But he said that this
story was not true. His own great house never disappeared, he said;
it was he that disappeared. By this time he had become so familiar
with the house that he probably passed hardly a day without a sight
of it, sleeping or waking. He was familiar with its monotonous front,
the many storeys of not quite regular diminishing windows. It always
seemed to lie out beyond a tract of solitude, silence, and blackness;
it was beyond the black river; it was at the edge of the earth. In
none of his visits could he get round to the other side. Several times
again, as on that feverish afternoon, he saw himself entering through
the lofty doorway, never emerging. What _this_ self (for so he called
it, touching his breast) saw inside the door he never knew. That self
which looked on could never reach the door, could not cross the space
between it and the river, though it seemed of no formidable immensity.
Many times he set out to cross and go in at the other door after the
other self, but could not. Finally he used to imagine that if once he
penetrated to the other side he would see another world.

Once or twice Philip and I found ourselves in streets which he thought
were connected with his first journey, but he vainly tried to remember
how. He even used to say that at a certain number--once it was
197--lived some one who could help. When another dream took him along
the original route of streets he told me that they were now thronged
with people going with or against him. They were still all about him as
he emerged from the streets in sight of the house, where every window
was blazing with lights as he had never seen it before. The crowd was
making towards the light across the hitherto always desolate bridge.
Nevertheless, beyond the river, in the space before the house, he
was alone as before. He resolved to cross the space. The great door
ahead was empty; no other self at least had the privilege denied to
him. He stood still, looking not at the door, but at the windows and
at the multitudes passing behind them. His eyes were fixed on the
upper windows and on each face in turn that appeared. Some faces he
recognised without being able to give a name to one. They must have
been people whom he had encountered in the street, and forgotten and
never seen again until now. Apparently not one of them saw him standing
out there, in the darkness, looking up at them. He was separated from
them as from the dead, or as a dead man might be from the living. The
moment he lowered his head to look towards the door, the dream was over.

More than once afterwards, when Lewis had ceased to think of his tower,
Philip saw the hundreds of windows burning in the night above the
black river, and saw the stream of faces at the windows; but he gave
up expecting to see the house by the light of our sun or moon. He had
even a feeling that he would rather not discover it, that if he were to
enter it and join those faces at the windows he might not return, never
stand out in the dark again and look up at the house.




CHAPTER XVII

PHILIP AND THE OUTLAWS OF THE ISLAND


That winter when Philip was ill, for the first time, I used to spend
every evening at Abercorran House, chiefly upstairs, reading aloud
or talking. I was supposed to entertain him, but he did most of the
entertaining. Out of his own head or out of books he told me hundreds
of tales; in either case they were very much his own. I cannot imitate
him. For example, he would always bring his characters before himself
and his listener by comparing them to persons known to both. When he
was well and out of doors he would pick out a man or woman passing
us, or at a window, for a comparison. “This Palomides,” he would say,
“was like that butcher, but dressed differently: you could see what
good legs he had.” Another was “like my brother Roland, and if he had
been alive now he could have jumped over spiked railings up to his own
shoulder, though he was not a little man.” The Icelandic Thorbeorg was
“like our Jessie: only she would use a knife, and she had fair hair.”
A certain villain was “a scoundrel, _but_ he had a face like Higgs.”
The man who resembled Roland was an Icelander, Haurd by name, whom
Philip called Roland throughout the tale. Thorbeorg was his sister.
This was the tale:

Haurd was a head taller than most men, and he had grand hair. He was
clever, strong, and bold. He swam better than all others, and his
eyesight was wonderful. But he was a touchy man. Not being asked in
the proper manner to his sister Thurid’s wedding feast, he refused
to go when the bridegroom, Illuge, came on purpose to fetch him. Yet
a little after, when Geir, his own foster-brother, asked him to go
just to please him, he went. However, at the feast he treated Illuge
lightly; refused the present of a shield--accepted a ring, but with
the remark that in his opinion being a brother-in-law would not mean
much to Illuge. Hearing Haurd say such things in a lazy way for no
apparent reason and taken aback by it, he did not answer. As soon as
he got home, Haurd gave the ring to his sister, Thorbeorg, bidding her
remember him when he was dead. Soon afterwards, with Geir and his other
foster-brother, Helge, who was a tramp’s son, he left home.

Twenty years before that, when Thorbeorg’s mother Signy was married to
Grimkel, her brother Torfe took offence in the same way, because he was
not consulted. Signy was very fond of him, and it was at his house that
she gave birth to Thorbeorg and died the same day. Grief for his sister
made him hate the child; he cast it out of the house, and chance alone
saved its life. Thus Grimkel had a quarrel with Torfe over Signy’s
marriage portion and the injury to his child, Thorbeorg.

Fifteen years Haurd stayed away from home. He got renown as a fighter.
He won honour, wealth, and an earl’s daughter, Helga, for a wife. This
Helga was as noble a lady as Thorbeorg.

Geir was the first of the exiles to return. He went to take possession
of the farm at Netherbottom, on the death of Grim, his father. Here
now, with Geir, were living his old mother and Thorbeorg, Haurd’s
sister. Perhaps Geir wished to marry Thorbeorg, but he was not the
king of men she wanted, though he was honest and feared nothing; so he
did not win her. She preferred one named Eindride, who came wooing her
once in Geir’s absence. She was not in love with him, but her father,
Grimkel, liked the match, and maybe she expected to be freer. When the
wedding was over Grimkel consulted a witch about the future. Whatever
she answered, it was bad, and the old man died that evening. Until his
son, Haurd, came back, Grimkel’s property fell into the care of the two
sons-in-law, Illuge and Eindride.

Haurd came back with Helge, with Sigrod his uncle, Torfe’s foster-son,
and thirty followers. The quarrel with Torfe and Illuge soon had an
opportunity of growing. In a fit of anger Helge killed a boy for
injuring a horse which belonged to Haurd. Haurd offered to atone for
the crime to Ead, the boy’s father, but too late. Torfe, replied the
man, had already listened to his complaint and was taking up the case.
At this, Haurd drew his sword in fury and hewed the man in two and a
servant with him. He burnt Ead’s homestead, his stores, and two women
who were afraid to come out of hiding.

Haurd would have liked to win over to his part his sister Thorbeorg’s
husband, Eindride, but instead of going himself he sent Helge. If a
good man had come, said Thorbeorg afterwards, things might have turned
out differently. Eindride excused himself on account of an engagement
with Illuge; not content to let this end the matter, he suggested that
Haurd should come over himself. Helge turned upon him and taunted him
with being a craven if he would not break that engagement with Illuge,
but Eindride had nothing to add. All that Helge brought back to Haurd
was that Eindride offered no help.

Everyone being against them, Haurd and Helge were outlawed. They had to
quit the homestead, and rather than leave it for Torfe, they burnt it
and all the hay with it. They and the household took refuge at Geir’s
house, Netherbottom. From here they raided the country on every side,
carrying off whatever they wanted. Before long men gathered together
to subdue them. Geir was for making a fort against the attack. Haurd,
fearing that they would be starved out, proposed retreating to an
impregnable islet which lay not far from land by a river’s mouth. Haurd
prevailed and they took possession. The islet consisted of precipices
surmounted by a single level platform, “not half the size of the
Wilderness,” from which one steep pathway led to the sea. With timber
from Netherbottom, the outlaws built a hall on this platform; and it
had underground passages. The islet was called Geir’s Holm, and they
raided from it as they had done before, both craftily and boldly. Once
on the islet they were safe from any attack. “It was the very place for
Lewis,” said Philip; “only there was no water in it, and no food unless
there were sea-gulls’ eggs.”

Many of the landless and outlawed men of Iceland attached themselves
to Haurd and Geir, swearing to be faithful to these two and to one
another, and to share in all labours. It was a law of Geir’s Holm that
if a man was ill more than three nights he was to be thrown over the
cliffs. The most that were on the island at one time was two hundred,
the least eighty. Haurd, Geir, Sigrod, Helge, Thord Colt, and Thorgar
Girdlebeard, were the chief men. The cruellest of all was Thorgar, and
the readiest for every kind of wrongdoing.

At last men met together to consider how they might stop the raiding.
Thorbeorg would not be left behind by Eindride, though he warned her
that she would hear nothing pleasant at the meeting. The crowd became
silent as she entered, and she spoke immediately to some of the chief
men.... Here, Philip got up out of bed looking very grim while he
uttered the words of Thorbeorg: “I know what you want to do. Very
good. I cannot stop you by myself. But this I can do, and will--I will
be the death of the man who kills Haurd....” Philip stood entranced and
still as a statue at the window, as if he could see her so long as he
remained still. His weakness, however, made him totter, and he got into
bed, saying: “She was magnificent. I would have done anything for her.
She said nothing else. She rode away without waiting for an answer.”
Torfe advised swift and violent measures against the Islanders, but
when Ref suggested that someone should put them off their guard by
pretending that they were free to go where they wished and be at peace
with all men, he thought well of the plan: in fact he said they should
ride that very night to a place out of sight of the Islanders. Next day
they saw Thorgar and Sigrod with twelve other outlaws coming for water.
Twice their number were sent against them. Thorgar and seven others
ran away. He formed a band of his own and was only killed after a long
freedom. Sigrod and those who were left made a hard fight, but all were
killed.

It was not easy to get a man to go next day and play the traitor on
the Holm, although Torfe declared that whoever went would have great
honour. In the end, Ref’s brother, Kiartan, offered to go, if he could
have Haurd’s ring for a reward. He took the boat of Thorstan Goldknop,
both because he disliked that man and because, being his, it would
not excite suspicion. The story he told the outlaws was that, chiefly
through Illuge and his friends, it had been decided that they should be
free to go where they wished and have peace. If they agreed, he himself
would row them ashore. Geir believed Kiartan, especially as he came in
the boat of one who was sworn never to betray them. Many others also
were eager to leave. But Haurd thought that Kiartan did not look like
a man who was bringing good, and he said so. Kiartan offered to swear
that he was speaking truth, and still Haurd told him that he had the
eyes of a man whose word was not worth much. Haurd did not hide his
doubts. Nevertheless, a full boat-load went off with Kiartan, talking
cheerfully. They were landed out of sight of the Holm, and every one of
them was penned in and killed on the spot.

Kiartan returned for a second load. In spite of Haurd’s advice, Geir
now entered the boat. So many followed him that only six were left with
Haurd and Helga and their two sons, and Helge, Haurd’s foster-brother.
Haurd was sad to see the boat going, and Geir and his companions were
silent. When they rounded the spit, out of sight of those on the Holm,
they saw the enemy waiting. Close to land Geir sprang overboard and
swam out along the rocks. A man of Eindride’s company struck him with a
javelin between the shoulders, and he died. This Helga saw sitting on
the Holm; but Haurd, who was with her, saw differently. The rest were
penned in and butchered.

A third time Kiartan rowed out. Haurd bantered him for a ferryman who
was doing a good trade, but still stuck to the opinion that he was not
a true man. If Kiartan had not taunted him with being afraid to follow
his men, Haurd would never have gone in that boat. Helga would not
go, nor let her sons go. She wept over her husband as a doomed man.
Once the boat had put out he was angry with himself. When they came
alongside the rocks and saw the dead body of Geir, Huard stood up in
the boat and clove Kiartan down as far as the girdle with his sword.
The men on shore made friendly signs to the last, but as soon as the
boat touched land all were made prisoners except Haurd, who refused to
be taken until he had slain four men. Eindride, who first laid hands
on him, remembering what Thorbeorg had promised her brother’s murderer,
held out the axe for someone else to slaughter him; but no one would;
and it was Haurd himself that seized the axe, for he burst his bonds.
Helge followed, and they got away, though the ring of enemies was
three deep. Haurd would never have been overtaken, though Ref was on
horseback, if a spell had not been cast on him: moreover, Helge began
to limp with a fearful wound. Even so, Haurd again broke through them,
killing three more. Ref again caught him, yet dared not meddle with
him, though he now had Helge on his back, until the others made a ring
about him with the aid of a spell. There was nothing for it but to drop
Helge and save him from his enemies by killing him. Haurd was enraged
because he knew that a spell was being used on him; he was so fearful
to look at that no one would go for him until Torfe had promised
Haurd’s ring to the man who did. Almost a dozen set on him together to
earn the ring. Six of them had fallen before him when the head flew
off his axe; nor did any one venture even then to close with him. From
behind, however, Thorstan Goldknop, a big red-headed man, but mean,
swung at his neck with an axe, so that he died. He had killed sixteen
men altogether. Even his enemies said now that Haurd--Philip, in tears,
said Roland, not Haurd--had been the bravest man of his time. If he had
not had rogues among his followers he would have been living yet; but
he never had been a lucky man. Thorstan got his ring. At that time he
had not heard of Thorbeorg’s vow; when he did hear he took no pleasure
in the ring.

Sixty of the Islanders had been slain. All the rest had escaped,
except Helga, and the two sons of Helga and Haurd, who had stayed on
the island. It was too late to fetch away those three that evening,
and before the sunrise next day they also had escaped. Under cover of
darkness the mother swam over first with Beorn, who was four, and next
with Grimkel, who was eight. Then carrying Beorn and leading Grimkel by
the hand, Helga climbed over the hills until they came to Eindride’s
house. Under the fence of the yard, Helga sank down with Beorn. Grimkel
she sent up to Thorbeorg to ask her to save them. Haurd’s sister was
sitting alone at the end of the hall, looking so grand and stern that
the child stopped still without a word. “She was like a great queen of
sorrows,” said Philip, “but she had to come down to him.” She led him
outside to the light, she picked him up to take a good look at him, she
asked who he was. He told her that he was Haurd’s son. She asked him
where his mother was, and what had happened. He told her what he could
while they were walking down to the fence. The sister and the wife of
Haurd looked at one another. Thorbeorg gave the three a hiding place in
an out-house, and herself took the key. Not long afterwards Eindride
came home with a number of men. Thorbeorg served a meal for them, and
they related all that had happened; but she said nothing until one
of them told how Thorstan Goldknop had struck Haurd from behind when
he was unarmed. “He was no better than a hangman or a butcher,” said
Philip. Thorbeorg cried that she knew a spell had been cast on her
brother, or they would never have overcome him. That night as they were
going to bed Thorbeorg made a thrust at Eindride with a knife, but
wounded him in the hand only. He asked her if anything he could do now
would satisfy her. “The head of Thorstan Goldknop,” she replied. Next
morning Eindride slew Thorstan and brought back the head. “He deserved
it,” said Philip, “and Thorbeorg kept her vow.” Still she was not
satisfied. She refused to make peace with her husband unless he would
befriend Helga and her sons, should they need it. Eindride, supposing
that they had been drowned, readily promised to do what she asked.
Thorbeorg showed him his mistake. She went out, and came back, leading
Helga and the two boys. Eindride was sorry, because he had sworn
already not to do anything for Haurd’s family, but he had to keep his
oath to Thorbeorg. Nor did men blame him, and they praised Thorbeorg.
Still she was not satisfied. Twenty-four men died in the next months
because of Haurd, and most of them at her instigation. She and Eindride
lived on after that in peace to a great age, leaving behind them good
children and grandchildren, who in their turn had many brave and
honourable descendants. “I am sorry,” said Philip, “that Haurd got that
blow from behind. But he was a man who had to make a story before he
died. And if this had not happened Thorstan might have gone on living,
and have missed his due. Also perhaps Thorbeorg would not have had a
chance of showing what she was good for. Now it is all over. They are
put in a tale. I don’t know what happened to Torfe and Illuge, but
everyone who hears the story either hates them or forgets them: so they
have _their_ reward. If Grimkel and Beorn lived to be men, I am sure
Torfe and Illuge did not die in their beds.”

With a deep sigh Philip stopped. For some minutes he said nothing.
When he broke his silence it was to say: “Perhaps Roland will really
do something like Haurd. He looks like it. He could. Don’t you think
he is one of those people who look as if men would some day have to
tell stories of them to one another? _He_ would not build a tower up
on a mountain for nothing, and live there no better than a man could
live at Clapham Junction.” Here Philip cried, which I never saw him do
before or after that day. It was the beginning of the worst part of
his illness. Not for many weeks was he out of bed, and once more my
companion in the house, in the yard, in Our Country, or at school on
those rare days when he attended.




CHAPTER XVIII

WHAT WILL ROLAND DO?


Roland and Jack were too much my seniors, and yet still too young, to
take notice of me. But I could admire them from afar for their gifts
and opportunities, their good looks, their bodily prowess, liberty,
and apparent lack of all care. Their activities were mostly away from
home, and rumours, probably, were incomplete. Roland ran and jumped at
sports, rode a horse, sometimes into the yard, sometimes out to where
the fox was hunted (a little beyond _our_ range)--bicycled hither
and thither--possessed a gun and used it, doubtless in a magnificent
manner--dressed as he should be dressed--was more than once in trouble
of some kind, I think in debt, and had once been observed by me in
London walking with a dark lady of his own splendid breed, whom I
never heard anything of, or saw again. What I first knew of Roland
was--shortly after I began to frequent Abercorran House--a voice
singing mightily in the bathroom:

    “Foul fall the hand that bends the steel
    Around the courser’s thundering heel,
    That e’er shall print a sable wound
    On fair Glamorgan’s velvet ground.”

Never afterwards did he do anything that fell short of the name Roland,
to which the noble war-song, at that moment, fixed its character for
ever. Jack and he had been to a famous school until they were sixteen,
and did no good there. Indoors they learnt very little more than a
manner extremely well suited to hours of idleness. Out of doors they
excelled at the more selfish sports, at athletics, boxing, sculling,
shooting. So they had come home and, as Mr Morgan had nothing to
suggest, they had done what suggested itself.

You could see Mr Morgan thinking as he watched the two, undecided
whether it was best to think with or without the cigar, which he
might remove for a few seconds, perhaps without advantage, for it
was replaced with evident satisfaction. But he was thinking as he
stood there, pale, rigid, and abstracted. Then perhaps Roland would
do or say something accompanied by a characteristic free, bold, easy
gesture, turning on his heel; and the father gave up thinking, to laugh
heartily, and as likely as not step forward to enter the conversation,
or ask Roland about the dogs, or what he had been doing in the past
week. “Had a good time? ... suits you?... Ha, ha, ... Well, this will
never do, I must be going. Good-bye, good-bye. Don’t forget to look in
and see how mother is.”

He had only gone upstairs to the Library to open one of the new reviews
which, except where they caught the sunshine, remained so new. He and
his two elder sons always parted with a laugh. Either he manœuvred for
it, or as soon as the good laugh arrived he slipped away lest worse
might befall. He saw clearly enough that “they had no more place in
London than Bengal tigers,” as he said one day to Mr Stodham: “They
ought to have been in the cavalry. But they aren’t--curse it--what is
to be done? Why could I not breed clerks?” The immediate thing to be
done was to light the suspended cigar. It was lucky if the weather just
at that time took a fine turn; if Harry and Lewis, for a wonder, were
persuaded to spend all day and every day at school; if Mrs Morgan was
away in Wales; if Jessie’s voice was perfect, singing

    “The cuckoo is a merry bird ...”

I recall such a time. The wall-flower had turned out to be just the
mixture of blood colour and lemon that Mr Morgan liked best. The
water-lilies were out on the pond. The pigeons lay all along under
the roof ridge, too idle to coo except by mistake or in a dream. Jack
and Roland were working hard at some machinery in the yard. The right
horse, it seems, had won the Derby.

On the evenings in such a season Philip and I had to bring to light the
fishing-tackle, bind hooks on gut and gimp, varnish the binding, mix
new varnish, fit the rods together, practise casting in the Wilderness,
with a view to our next visit, which would be in August, to my aunt
Rachel’s at Lydiard Constantine. There would be no eggs to be found so
late, except a few woodpigeons’, linnets’, and swallows’, but these
late finds in the intervals of fishing--when it was too hot, for
example--had a special charm. The nuts would be ripe before we left....
On these evenings we saw only the fishing things, the Wilderness, and
Lydiard Constantine.

This weather was but a temporary cure for Mr Morgan’s curiosity as to
what Jack and Roland were to do. You could tell that he was glad to
see Roland’s face again, home from Canada with some wolf skins after a
six months’ absence; but it was not enough. The fellow had been in an
office once for a much shorter period. The one thing to draw him early
from bed was hunting. Well, but he was a fine fellow. How should all
the good in him be employed? It could not be left to the gods; and yet
assuredly the gods would have their way.

Everybody else did something. Aurelius earned a living, though his
hands proclaimed him one who was born neither to toil nor spin. Higgs,
too, did no one knew what, but something that kept him in tobacco and
bowler hats, in the times when he was not fishing in the Wilderness or
looking after his pigeons in the yard. For it so happened--and caused
nobody surprise--that all the pigeons at Abercorran House were his. Mr
Morgan looked with puzzled disapproval from Higgs to Roland and Jack,
and back again to Higgs. Higgs had arrived and stayed under their
shadow. It was a little mysterious, but so it was, and Mr Morgan could
not help seeing and wondering why the two should afflict themselves
with patronising one like fat Higgs. Once when Roland struck him, half
in play, he bellowed distractedly, not for pain but for pure rabid
terror. He went about whistling; for he had a little, hard mouth made
on purpose. I thought him cruel, because one day when he saw that,
owing to some misapprehension, I was expecting two young pigeons for
the price of one, he put the head of one into his mouth and closed his
teeth.... Whilst I was still silly with disgust and horror he gave
me the other bird. But he understood dogs. I have seen Roland listen
seriously while Higgs was giving an opinion on some matter concerning
Ladas, Bully, Spot, or Granfer; yet Roland was reputed to know all
about dogs, and almost all about bitches.

That did not console Mr Morgan. Wherever he looked he saw someone who
was perfectly content with Roland and everything else, just as they
were, at Abercorran House. Mr Stodham, for example, was all admiration,
with a little surprise. Aurelius, again, said that if such a family,
house, and backyard, had not existed, they would have to be invented,
as other things less pleasant and necessary had been. When rumours
were afloat that perhaps Mr Morgan would be compelled to give up the
house Aurelius exclaimed: “It is impossible, it is disgraceful. Let
the National Gallery go, let the British Museum go, but preserve the
Morgans and Abercorran House.” Mr Torrance, of course, agreed with
Aurelius. He wrote a poem about the house, but, said Aurelius, “It was
written with tears for ink, which is barbarous. He has not enough gall
to translate tears into good ink.” Higgs naturally favoured things as
they were, since the yard at Abercorran House was the best possible
place for his birds. As for me, I was too young, but Abercorran House
made London tolerable and often faultless.

Ann’s opinion was expressed in one word: “Wales.” She thought that
the family ought to go back to Wales, that all would be well there.
In fact, she regarded Abercorran House as only a halt, though she
admitted that there were unfriendly circumstances. The return to Wales
was for her the foundation or the coping stone always. She would not
have been greatly put out if there had been a public subscription or
grant from the Civil list to make Abercorran House and Mr Morgan,
Jessie, Ann herself, Jack, Roland, Philip, Harry, Lewis, Ladas, Bully,
Spot, Granfer, the pigeons, the yard, the Wilderness and the jackdaws,
the pond and the water-lilies, as far as possible immortal, and a
possession for ever, without interference from Board of Works, School
Board inspectors, Rate Collectors, surveyors of taxes, bailiffs and
recoverers of debts, moreover without any right on the part of the
public to touch this possession except by invitation, with explicit
approval by Roland and the rest. It should have been done. A branch of
the British Museum might have been especially created to protect this
stronghold, as doubtless it would have been protected had it included a
dolmen, tumulus, or British camp, or other relic of familiar type. As
it was not done, a bailiff did once share the kitchen with Ann, a short
man completely enveloped in what had been, at about the time of Albert
the Good, a fur-lined overcoat, and a silk hat suitable for a red
Indian. Most of his face was nose, and his eyes and nose both together
looked everlastingly over the edge of the turned-up coat-collar at the
ground. His hands must have been in his coat-pockets. I speak of his
appearance when he took the air; for I did not see him at Abercorran
House. There he may have produced his hands and removed his hat from
his head and lifted up his eyes from the ground--a thing impossible to
his nose. He may even have spoken--in a voice of ashes. But at least on
the day after his visit all was well at Abercorran House with man and
bird and beast. The jackdaws riding a south-west wind in the sun said
“Jack” over and over again, both singly and in volley. Only Higgs was
disturbed. He, it seems, knew the visitor, and from that day dated his
belief in the perishableness of mortal things, and a moderated opinion
of everything about the Morgans except the pigeon-house and Roland. Mr
Morgan perhaps did not, but everybody else soon forgot the bailiff. On
the day after his visit, nevertheless, Philip was still indignant. He
was telling me about the battle of Hastings. All I knew and had cared
to know was summed up in the four figures--1066. But Philip, armed with
a long-handled mallet, had constituted himself the English host on the
hill brow, battering the Normans downhill with yells of “Out, out,”
and “God Almighty,” and also “Out Jew.” For his enemy was William of
Normandy and the Jew bailiff in one. With growls of “Out, out” through
foaming set lips, he swung the mallet repeatedly, broke a Windsor chair
all to pieces, and made the past live again.




CHAPTER XIX

THE INTERLUDE OF HIGH BOWER


Ann must have had the bailiff’s visit in mind when she said, not long
after:

“Philip, what would you give to be back, all of you, at Abercorran?”

“Silly,” he answered, “I haven’t got anything good enough to give, you
know.... But I would give up going to Our Country for a whole year. I
would do anything.... But this isn’t bad, is it, Arthur?”

Depth of feeling was (to me) so well conveyed by those two mean words
that for the life of me I could only corroborate them with a fervent
repetition:

“Not bad.”

The words expressed, too, a sense of loyalty to the remote idea of
Abercorran town itself.

“But High Bower was better, wasn’t it,” said Ann, to tease him, and to
remind him of his duty to the old Abercorran.

“Come on, Arthur,” was his reply, “I have got a squirrel to skin.”

High Bower was the place in Wiltshire where the Morgan family had
paused between Abercorran and London. It was not quite a satisfactory
memory to some of them, because there seemed no reason why they should
have left Wales if they were going to live in the country; and,
then, in a year’s time they went to London, after all. Philip never
mentioned High Bower, but Mr Stodham knew it--what did he not know in
Wiltshire?--and one day he asked me to accompany him on a visit. He had
promised to look over the house for a friend.

The village was an archipelago of thatched cottages, sprinkled here
and there, and facing all ways, alongside an almost equal number of
roads, lanes, tracks, footpaths, and little streams, so numerous and
interlaced that they seemed rather to cut it off from the world than
to connect it. With much the same materials to use--thatch and brick,
thatch and half-timber, or tiles for both roof and walls--the builders
of it had made each house different, because thus it had to be, or the
man would have it so, or he could not help it, or thus time had decided
with the help of alterations and additions. All were on one side of
the shallow, flashing river, though it so twined that it appeared
to divide some and to surround others, and no bridges were visible.
Some of the houses were out in the midst of the mown fields with
their troops of tossers, rakers, and pitchforkers, and the high-laden
waggons like houses moving. Others were isolated in the sappy, unfooted
water-meadows full of tall sedge and iris that hid the hooting moorhen.
Remains of the old mill and mill-house, of red, zig-zagged bricks and
black timber in stripes, stood apparently on an island, unapproached
by road or path, the walls bathed and half-buried in dark humid weeds
and the foaming bloom of meadow-sweet. The village had two sounds, the
clucking of fowls disturbed from a bath in the road dust, and the gush
of the river over an invisible leafy weir, and this was no sound at
all, but a variety of silence.

At length I realised that the village was at an end, and before us
was a steep, flowery bank, along which at oblivious intervals a train
crawled out of beeches, looked a little at the world and entered
beeches again, then a tunnel. The train left the quiet quieter, nor
did it stop within five miles of High Bower. The railway, which had
concentrated upon itself at certain points the dwellings and business
of the countryside, left this place, which had resolved to remain where
it was, more remote than before.

As we went under the bridge of the embankment I thought we must have
missed the Morgans’ old house. I wondered if it could have been that
last and best farmhouse, heavy and square, that stood back, beyond a
green field as level as a pool and three chestnut-trees. Horses were
sheltering from the sun under the trees, their heads to the trunks. The
cows had gone to the shade of the house, and were all gazing motionless
towards the impenetrable gloom of the windows. The barns, sheds,
and lodges, were in themselves a village. The last outhouse almost
touched the road, a cart-lodge shadowy and empty but for a waggon with
low sides curving up forward like the bows of a boat, and itself as
delicate as a boat, standing well up on four stout, not ponderous,
wheels, and bearing a builder’s name from East Stour in Dorset. Now
this house and its appurtenances I thought entirely suitable to the
Morgans, and my thoughts returned to them as we went under the bridge.
Well, and there was the house we were making for, at the foot of the
embankment on the other side. It solved a small mystery at once. Our
road, before coming to the railway, had cut through a double avenue
of limes, which appeared to start at the embankment and terminate a
quarter of a mile away at the top of a gentle rise. They were fine
trees, many of them clouded with bunches of mistletoe as big as herons’
nests. What was the meaning of the avenue? At neither end was a house
to be seen. But, there, at the foot of the embankment, separated from
it by two pairs of limes, was the house belonging to the avenue--the
Morgans’ house, New House by name. The railway had cut through its
avenue; a traveller passing could easily have thrown a stone into any
one of the chimneys of New House.

A weedy track led out of the road on the right, along under the
embankment, up to the house. No smoke rose up from it, not a sound
came from the big square windows, or the door between its two pairs of
plain stone columns, or the stable on one hand or the garden on the
other. The sun poured down on it; it did not respond. It looked almost
ugly, a biggish, awkward house, neither native nor old, its walls
bare and weathered without being mellowed. In a window, facing anyone
who approached it from the road, it announced that it was “To be let
or sold” through a firm of solicitors in London. The flower borders
were basely neglected, yet not wild. Cows had broken in.... It was an
obvious stranger, and could only have seemed at home on the main road a
little way out of some mean town. It was going to the dogs unlamented.

As we were opening the door a cottage woman attached herself to us,
eager, as it proved, to be the first villager to enter since the
Morgans, “the foreigners,” had departed. The railway embankment, as
she explained, had driven them out, cut off the sun, and kept away new
tenants. She left no corner unexplored, sometimes alleging some kind
of service to us, but as a rule out of unashamed pure delight, talking
continually either in comment on what was there, or to complete the
picture of the Morgans, as seen or invented during those twelve months
of their residence.

They were foreigners, she said, who talked and sang in a foreign
language, but could speak English when they wanted to. They were not
rich, never entertained. Such ill-behaved children.... No, there was
nothing against them; they didn’t owe a penny.... She admired the big
rooms downstairs, with pillared doorways and mantelpieces--they had
a dingy palatial air. In the same rooms with the shiny columns were
broad, blackened, open fire-places, numerous small irregular cupboards,
cracked and split. Walls and doors were undoubtedly marked by arrows
and pistol-shot; someone had drawn a target in a corner--“Master
Roland,” said the woman. “He was a nice lad, too; or would have been if
he had been English.” The spider-webs from wall and ceiling might have
been as old as the house. “The maids had too much to do, playing with
all those children, to keep the place clean. Ignorant those children
were, too. I asked one of the little ones who was the Queen, and he
said ‘Gwenny....’ I don’t know ... some Jerusalem name that isn’t in
the history books.... I asked an older one what was the greatest city
in the world, and he said ‘Rome.’ They were real gentry, too. But
there was something funny about them. One of them came running into my
shop once and said to me, ‘I’ve found the dragon, Mrs Smith. Come and
see--I’ll protect you. He has four horns of ebony, two long and two not
so long, and two big diamond eyes a long way from his horns. He has a
neck as thick as his body, but smooth; his body is like crape. He has
no legs, but he swims over the world like a fish. He is as quiet as an
egg.’ And he took me down the road and showed me a black slug such as
you tread on by the hundred without so much as knowing it. They had no
more regard for the truth than if they were lying....

“You never saw the like of them for happiness. When I used to stop at
the gate and see them in the grass, perhaps soaking wet, tumbling about
and laughing as if they weren’t Christians at all, I said to myself:
‘Oh, dear, dear me, what trouble there must be in store for those
beautiful children, that they should be so happy now. God preserve
them, if it be his will.’ I whispered: ‘Hush, children, be a bit
more secret-like about it.’ It don’t do to boast about anything, let
alone happiness. I remember one of them dying sudden. She was little
more than a baby; such a child for laughing, as if she was possessed;
pretty, too, a regular little moorhen, as you might say, for darkness
and prettiness, and fond of the water. I saw one of the maids after
the funeral, and took occasion to remark that it was a blessing the
child was taken to a better world so soon, before she had known a
minute’s sorrow. She fired up--she was outlandish, too, as the maids
always were, and talked their tongue, and stood up for them as if they
were paid for it--and she says, looking that wicked, ‘Master says he
will never forgive it, and I never will. If she had been a peevish
child, I don’t say we shouldn’t have been wild because she had missed
everything, but to take away a child like that before she could defend
herself is a most unchristian act’ ... and that sort of thing. Oh,
there was wickedness in them, though they never wronged anybody.”

She pointed to the shot marks in a door, and pronounced that no good
could come to a family where the children did such things. At each
room she made guesses, amounting often to positive asseveration, as to
whose it had been. Few enough were the marks of ownership to untutored
eyes--chiefly the outlines, like shadows, of furniture and of books
that once had leaned against the wall. One door was marked by a series
of horizontal lines like those on a thermometer, where children’s
height had been registered at irregular intervals, the hand or stick
pressing down the curls for truth’s sake.

Upstairs the passages rambled about as in an old house, and when doors
were shut they were dark and cavernous. The rooms themselves were
light almost to dazzling after the passages. The light added to their
monotony, or what would have been monotony if we had known nothing of
their inhabitants. Even so, there were Megan and Ivor whom we had never
known. Ivor came between Roland and Philip, “He was the blackest of the
black,” said Mrs Smith, “brown in the face and black in the hair like a
bay horse. He was one for the water; made a vow he would swim from here
to the sea, or leastways keep to the water all the way. He got over the
second mill-wheel. He swam through the parson’s lawn when there was a
garden-party. But he had to give up because he kept tasting the water
to see how soon it got salt, and so half drowned himself. He came into
my shop just as he was born to remind me about the fireworks I had
promised to stock for Guy Fawkes day, and that was in September. But he
fell out of a tree and was dead before the day came, and, if you will
believe me, his brother bought up the fireworks there and then and let
them off on the grave.”

A wall in one room had on it a map of the neighbourhood, not with the
real names, but those of the early kingdoms of England and Wales. The
river was the Severn. Their own fields were the land of Gwent. Beyond
them lay Mercia and the Hwiccas. The men of Gwent could raid across the
Severn, and (in my opinion) were pleased with the obstacle. Later, the
projected embankment had been added to the map. This was Offa’s Dyke,
grimly shutting them out of the kingdoms of the Saxons. I recognised
Philip’s hand in the work. For his later Saxon fervour was due simply
to hate of the Normans: before they came he would have swung his axe as
lustily against the Saxons. From this room I could just see the tips of
some of the avenue trees beyond the embankment.

We had seen far more of the house than was necessary to decide Mr
Stodham against it, when Mrs Smith begged me to stay upstairs a moment
while she ran out; she wished me to mark for her a window which she
was to point out to me from below. “That’s it,” she said, after some
hesitation, as I appeared at last at the window of a small room
looking away from the railway. Nothing in the room distinguished it
from the rest save one small black disc with an auburn rim to it on
the dark ceiling--one disc only, not, as in the other rooms, several,
overlapping, and mingled with traces of the flames of ill-lighted
lamps. “Mrs Morgan,” I thought at once. Some one evidently had sat
long there at a table by night. “I never could make out who it was had
this room,” said Mrs Smith, coming up breathless: “It used to have
a red blind and a lamp always burning. My husband said it did look
so cosy; he thought it must be Mr Morgan studying at his books. The
milkers saw it in the early morning in winter; they said it was like
the big red bottles in a chemist’s window. The keeper said you might
see it any hour of night. I didn’t like it myself. It didn’t look to me
quite right, like a red eye. You couldn’t tell what might be going on
behind it, any more than behind a madman’s eye. I’ve thought about it
often, trying to picture the inside of that room. My husband would say
to me: ‘Bessy, the red window at New House did look nice to-night as I
came home from market. I’m sure they’re reading and studying something
learned, astrology or such, behind that red blind.’ ‘Don’t you believe
it, James’ says I, ‘learned it may be, but not _according_. If they
want to burn a light all night they could have a black blind. Who else
has got a red blind? It isn’t fit. I can’t think how you bear that
naughty red light on a night like this, when there are as many stars in
the sky as there are letters in the Bible.’ Now, which of them used to
sit here? Somebody sat all alone, you may depend upon it, never making
a sound nor a stir.”

Another room made her think of “Miss Jessie, the one that picked up the
fox when he was creeping as slow as slow through their garden, and hid
him till the hounds found another fox.... Oh, dear, to think what a
house this used to be, and so nice and quiet now ... dreadful quiet....
I really must be going, if there is nothing more I can do for you.”

Downstairs again the sight of the shot marks in the door set Mrs Smith
off again, but in a sobered tone:

“You won’t take the house, I’m thinking, sir? No. I wouldn’t myself,
not for anything.... It would be like wearing clothes a person had died
in. They never meant us to see these things all in their disabill. ’Tis
bad enough to be haunted by the dead, but preserve me from the ghosts
of the living. It is more fit for a Hospital, now, or a Home.... Those
people were like a kind of spirits, like they used to see in olden
time. They did not know the sorrow and wickedness of the world as it
really is. ‘Can the rush grow up without noise? Can the flag grow
without water? Whilst it is yet in his greenness, and not cut down,
it withereth before any other herb.’ Yet you would think they meant
to live for ever by the way they went about, young and old.... One
night I was coming home late and I saw all these windows lit up, every
one, and there were people in them all. It was as if the place was a
hollow cloud with fire in it and people dancing. Only the red blind
was down, and as bright as ever. It called to my mind a story the old
Ann used to tell, about a fellow going home from a fair and seeing a
grand, gorgeous house close by the road, and lovely people dancing
and musicking in it, where there hadn’t been a house before of any
kind. He went in and joined them and slept in a soft warm bed, but in
the morning he woke up under a hedge. I sort of expected to see there
wasn’t any house there next morning, it looked _that strange_.”

While we were having tea in her parlour Mrs Smith showed us a
photograph of “Miss Megan,” an elder sister of Jack and Roland, whom
I had never heard of, nor I think had Mr Stodham. I shall not forget
the face. She was past twenty, but clearly a fairy child, one who,
like the flying Nicolete, would be taken for a fay by the wood-folk
(and they should know). Her dark face was thin and shaped like a
wedge, with large eyes generous and passionate under eyebrows that
gave them an apprehensive expression, though the fine clear lips could
not have known fear or any other sort of control except pity. The face
was peering through chestnut leaves, looking as soft as a hare, but
with a wildness like the hare’s which, when it is in peril, is almost
terrible. I think it was a face destined to be loved often, but never
to love, or but once. It could draw men’s lips and pens, and would fly
from them and refuse to be entangled in any net of words or kisses. It
would fly to the high, solitary places, and its lovers would cry out:
“Oh, delicate bird, singing in the prickly furze, you are foolish, too,
or why will you not come down to me where the valleys are pleasant,
where the towns are, and everything can be made according to your
desire?” Assuredly, those eyes were for a liberty not to be found among
men, but only among the leaves, in the clouds, or on the waves, though
fate might confine them in the labyrinth of a city. But not a word of
her could I learn except once when I asked Ann straight out. All she
said was: “God have mercy on Megan.”

Two years after our visit the New House was taken by a charitable lady
as a school and home for orphans. In less than a year she abandoned it,
and within a year after that, it was burnt to the ground. The fields
of Gwent and the lime avenue may still be seen by railway travellers.
Gypsies have broken the hedges and pitched their tents unforbidden.
All kinds of people come in December for the mistletoe. The place is
utterly neglected, at least by the living.

On the whole, I think, Mr Stodham and I were both sorry for our day at
High Bower. It created a suspicion--not a lasting one with me--that
Abercorran House would not endure for ever. Mr Stodham’s account made
Mr Torrance look grave, and I understood that he wrote a poem about New
House. Higgs remarked that if the Morgans had stayed at High Bower he
could not imagine what he should have done with his pigeons. Aurelius
enjoyed every detail, from the map to Megan’s photograph. Aurelius
had no acquaintance with regret or envy. He was glad of Mr Stodham’s
account of New House, and glad of Abercorran House in reality. He was
one that sat in the sunniest places (unless he was keeping Jessie out)
all day, and though he did not despise the moon he held the fire at
Abercorran House a more stable benefactor. Neither sun nor moon made
him think of the day after to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.
“Aurelius,” said Mr Morgan, “is the wisest man out of Christendom
and therefore the wisest of all men. He knows that England in the
nineteenth century does not allow any but a working man to die of
starvation unless he wants to. Aurelius is not a working man, nor does
he desire to starve. He is not for an age, but for to-day.”




CHAPTER XX

THE POET’S SPRING AT LYDIARD CONSTANTINE


The perfume of the fur of the squirrel we skinned on that January
evening--when Ann teased Philip about High Bower--I well remember. I
liked it then; now I like it the more for every year which has since
gone by. It was one of the years when I kept a diary, and day by day
I can trace its seasons. The old year ended in frost and snow. The
new year began with thaw, and with a postal order from my aunt at
Lydiard Constantine, and the purchase of three yards of cotton wool
in readiness for the nesting season and our toll of eggs. On the next
day snow fell again, in the evening the streets were ice, and at
Abercorran House Philip and I made another drawer of a cabinet for
birds’ eggs. Frost and snow continued on the morrow, compelling us to
make a sledge instead of a drawer for the cabinet. The sledge carried
Philip and me alternately throughout the following day, over frozen
roads and footpaths. The fifth day was marked by a letter from Lydiard
Constantine, eighteen degrees of frost, and more sledging with Philip,
and some kind of attention (that has left not a wrack behind) to
Sallust’s “Catiline”....

Within a fortnight the pigeons were beginning to lay, and as one of
the nests contained the four useless eggs of an imbecile pair of hens,
we tasted thus early the pleasure of blowing one egg in the orthodox
manner and sucking three. This being Septuagesima Sunday, nothing would
satisfy us but an immediate visit to Our Country, where the jays’
nests and others we had robbed seven months before were found with a
thrill all but equal to that of May, and always strictly examined in
case of accidents or miracles. For there had now been a whole week
of spring sun shining on our hearts, and on the plumage of the cock
pheasant we stalked in vain. The thrush sang. The blackbird sang. With
the Conversion of St Paul came rain, and moreover school, Thucydides,
Shakespeare’s “Richard the Second,” and other unrealities and
afflictions, wherein I had to prove again how vain it is “to cloy the
hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast” at old Gaunt’s
command. But Quinquagesima Sunday meant rising in the dark and going
out with Philip, to watch the jays, always ten yards ahead of our most
stealthy stepping--to climb after old woodpigeons’ nests, to cut hazel
sticks, to the tune of many skylarks. Alas, a sprained foot could not
save me from school on Monday. But now the wild pigeons dwelling about
the school began to coo all day long and to carry sticks for their
nests. Out on the football field, in the bright pale light and the
south-west wind the black rooks courted--and more; the jackdaws who
generally accompanied them were absent somewhere. What then mattered it
whether Henri Quatre or Louis Quatorze were the greatest of the Bourbon
kings, as some of my school-fellows debated? Besides, when February
was only half through, Aunt Rachel formally invited Philip and me to
Lydiard Constantine for Easter. This broke the winter’s back. Frost
and fog and Bright’s “History of England” were impotent. We began to
write letters to the chosen three or four boys at Lydiard Constantine.
We made, in the gas jets at Abercorran House, tubes of glass for the
sucking of bird’s eggs. We bought egg drills. We made egg-drills for
ourselves.... The cat had kittens. One pair of Higgs’ pigeons hatched
out their eggs. The house-sparrows were building. The almond-trees
blossomed in the gardens of “Brockenhurst” and the other houses. The
rooks now stayed in the football field until five. The larks sang
all day, invisible in the strong sun and burning sky. The gorse was
a bonfire of bloom. Then, at last, on St David’s day, the rooks were
building, the woodpigeons cooing on every hand, the first lambs were
heard.

Day after day left us indignant that, in spite of all temptations,
no thrush or blackbird had laid an egg, so far as we knew. But all
things seemed possible. One day, in a mere afternoon walk, we found,
not far beyond a muddle of new streets, a district “very beautiful and
quiet,” says the diary. Losing our way, we had to hire a punt to take
us across the stream--I suppose, the Wandle. Beautiful and quiet, too,
was the night when Philip scaled the high railings into the grounds
of a neighbouring institution, climbed one of the tall elms of its
rookery--I could see him up against the sky, bigger than any of the
nests, in the topmost boughs--and brought down the first egg. It was
the Tuesday before an early Easter, a clear blue, soft day which drove
clean out of our minds all thought of fog, frost, and rain, past or
to come. Mr Stodham had come into the yard of Abercorran House on the
way to his office, as I had on my way to school. Finding Aurelius
sitting in the sun with Ladas, he said in his genial, nervous way:
“That’s right. You are making the best of a fine day. Goodness knows
what it will be like to-morrow.” “And Goodness cares,” said Aurelius,
almost angrily, “I don’t.” “Sorry, sorry,” said Mr Stodham, hastily
lighting his pipe. “All right,” said Aurelius, “but if you care about
to-morrow, I don’t believe you really care about to-day. You are one of
those people, who say that if it is not always fine, or fine when they
want it, they don’t care if it is never fine, and be damned to it, say
they. And yet they don’t like bad weather so well as I do, or as Jessie
does. Now, rain, when it ought not to be raining, makes Jessie angry,
and if the day were a man or woman she would come to terms with it, but
it isn’t, and what is more, Jessie rapidly gets sick of being angry,
and as likely as not she sings ‘Blow away the morning dew,’ and finds
that she likes the rain. She has been listening to the talk about rain
by persons who want to save Day and Martin. I prefer Betty Martin....
Do you know, Arthur tells me the house martins will soon be here?”
We looked up together to see if it was a martin that both of us had
heard, or seemed to hear, overhead, but, if it was, it was invisible.

Every year such days came--any time in Lent, or even before. I take it
for granted that, as an historical fact, they were followed, as they
have been in the twentieth century, by fog, frost, mists, drizzle,
rain, sleet, snow, east wind, and north wind, and I know very well
that we resented these things. But we loved the sun. We strove to it
in imagination through the bad weather, believing in every kind of
illusory hint that the rain was going to stop, and so on. Moreover rain
had its merits. For example, on a Sunday, it kept the roads nearly as
quiet as on a week day, and we could have Our Country, or Richmond
Park, or Wimbledon Common, all to ourselves. Then, again, what a thing
it was to return wet, with a rainy brightness in your eyes, to change
rapidly, to run round to Abercorran House, and find Philip and Ann
expecting you in the kitchen, with a gooseberry tart, currant tart,
raspberry tart, plum tart, blackberry tart, cranberry and apple tart,
apple tart, according to season; and mere jam or syrup tart in the
blank periods. My love of mud also I trace to that age, because Philip
and I could escape all company by turning out of a first class road
into the black mash of a lane. If we met anyone there, it was a carter
contending with the mud, a tramp sitting between the bank and a fire,
or a filthy bird-catcher beyond the hedge.

If the lane was both muddy and new to us, and we two, Philip and I,
turned into it, there was nothing which we should have thought out
of its power to present in half a mile or so, nothing which it would
have overmuch astonished us by presenting. It might have been a Gypsy
camp, it might have been the terrestrial Paradise of Sheddad the son
of Ad--we should have fitted either into our scheme of the universe.
Not that we were _blasé_; for every new thrush’s egg in the season
had a new charm for us. Not that we had been flightily corrupted by
fairy tales and marvels. No: the reason was that we only regarded as
impossible such things as a score of 2000 in first class cricket, an
air ship, or the like; and the class of improbabilities did not exist
for us. Nor was this all. We were not merely ready to welcome strange
things when we had walked half a mile up a lane and met no man, but
we were in a gracious condition for receiving whatever might fall to
us. We did not go in search of miracles, we invited them to come to
us. What was familiar to others was never, on that account, tedious or
contemptible to us. I remember that when Philip and I first made our
way through London to a shop which was depicted in an advertisement,
in spite of the crowds on either hand all along our route, in spite
of the full directions of our elders, we were as much elated by our
achievement as if it had been an arduous discovery made after a
journey in a desert. In our elation there was some suspicion that our
experience had been secret, adventurous, and unique. As to the crowd,
we glided through it as angels might. This building, expected by us and
known to all, astonished us as much as the walls of Sheddad the son of
Ad unexpectedly towering would have done.

Sometimes in our rare London travels we had a glimpse of a side street,
a row of silent houses all combined as it were into one gray palace,
a dark doorway, a gorgeous window, a surprising man disappearing....
We looked, and though we never said so, we believed that we alone had
seen these things, that they had never been seen before. We should not
have expected to see them there if we went again. Many and many a time
have we looked, have I alone in more recent years looked, for certain
things thus revealed to us in passing. Either it happened that the
thing was different from what it had once been, or it had disappeared
altogether.

Now and then venturing down a few side streets where the system was
rectangular and incapable of deceiving, we came on a church full of
sound or gloomily silent--I do not know how to describe the mingled
calm and pride in the minds of the discoverers. Some of the very quiet,
apparently uninhabited courts, for example, made us feel that corners
of London had been deserted and forgotten, that anyone could hide away
there, living in secrecy as in a grave. Knowing how we ourselves,
walking or talking together, grew oblivious of all things that were not
within our brains, or vividly and desirably before our eyes, feeling
ourselves isolated in proud delight, deserted and forgotten of the
multitude who were not us, we imagined, I suppose, that houses and
other things could have a similar experience, or could share it with
us, were we to seek refuge there like Morgan in his mountain tower.
The crowd passing and surrounding us consisted of beings unlike us,
incapable of our isolation or delight: the retired houses whispering
in quiet alleys must be the haunt of spirits unlike the crowd and more
like us, or, if not, at least they must be waiting in readiness for
such. I recognised in them something that linked them to Abercorran
House and distinguished them from Brockenhurst.

Had these favoured houses been outwardly as remarkable as they were in
spirit they might have pleased us more, but I am not certain. Philip
had his house with the windows that were as the days of the year. But
I came only once near to seeing, with outward eyes, such a house as
perhaps we desired without knowing it. Suddenly, over the tops of the
third or fourth and final ridge of roofs, visible a quarter of a mile
away from one of the windows at Abercorran House, much taller than any
of the throng of houses and clear in the sky over them, I saw a castle
on a high rock. It resembled St Michael’s Mount, only the rock was
giddier and had a narrower summit, and the castle’s three clustered
round towers of unequal height stood up above it like three fingers
above a hand. When I pointed it out to Philip he gave one dark, rapid
glance as of mysterious understanding, and looked at me, saying slowly:

    “‘A portal as of shadowy adamant
       Stands yawning on the highway of the life
    Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt;
       Around it rages an unceasing strife
    Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt
    The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high
    Into the whirlwind of the upper sky.
    And many pass it by with careless tread,
    Not knowing that a shadowy....’

A shadowy _what_, Arthur? At any rate that is the place.”

In those days, Philip was beginning to love Shelley more than he loved
Aurelius or me.

I had not seen that pile before. With little trouble I could have
located it almost exactly: I might have known that the particular
street had no room for a sublimer St Michael’s Mount. If we passed the
spot during the next few days we made no use of the evidence against
the tower, which satisfied us in varying degrees until in process of
time it took its place among the other chimney clusters of our horizon.
I was not disillusioned as to this piece of fancy’s architecture, nor
was I thereafter any more inclined to take a surveyor’s view of the
surface of the earth. Stranger things, probably, than St Michael’s
Mount have been thought and done in that street: we did not know it,
but our eyes accepted this symbol of them with gladness, as in the
course of nature. Not much less fantastic was our world than the one
called up by lights seen far off before a traveller in a foreign and a
dark, wild land.

Therefore Spring at Lydiard Constantine was to Philip and me more than
a portion of a regular renascence of Nature. It was not an old country
marvellously at length arraying itself after an old custom, but an
invasion of the old as violent as our suburban St Michael’s Mount. It
was as if the black, old, silent earth had begun to sing as sweet as
when Jessie sang unexpectedly “Blow away the morning dew.” It was not
a laborious, orderly transformation, but a wild, divine caprice. We
supposed that it would endure for ever, though it might (as I see now)
have turned in one night to Winter. But it did not.

That Spring was a poet’s Spring. “Remember this Spring,” wrote
Aurelius in a letter, “then you will know what a poet means when
he says _Spring_.” Mr Stodham, who was not a poet, but wrote verse
passionately, was bewildered by it, and could no longer be kept from
exposing his lines. He called the Spring both fiercely joyous, and
melancholy. He addressed it as a girl, and sometimes as a thousand
gods. He said that it was as young as the dew-drop freshly globed on
the grass tip, and also as old as the wind. He proclaimed that it had
conquered the earth, and that it was as fleeting as a poppy. He praised
it as golden, as azure, as green, as snow-white, as chill and balmy,
as bright and dim, as swift and languid, as kindly and cruel, as true
and fickle. Yet he certainly told an infinitely small part of the truth
concerning that Spring. It is memorable to me chiefly on account of a
great poet.

For a day or two, at Lydiard Constantine, Philip roamed with me up and
down hedgerows, through copses, around pools, as he had done in other
Aprils, but though he found many nests he took not one egg, not even
a thrush’s egg that was pure white and would have been unique in his
collection, or in mine; neither was I allowed to take it. Moreover,
after the first two or three days he only came reluctantly--found
hardly any nests--quarrelled furiously with the most faithful of the
Lydiard boys for killing a thrush (though it was a good shot) with a
catapult. He now went about muttering unintelligible things in a voice
like a clergyman. He pushed through a copse saying magnificently:

    “Unfathomable sea whose waves are years.”

He answered an ordinary question by Aunt Rachel with:

    “Away, away, from men and towns,
    To the wild wood and the downs.”

Tears stood in his eyes while he exclaimed:

    “Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
    Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
    Or they dead leaves.”

Like a somnambulist he paced along, chanting:

    “Earth, Ocean, Air, beloved brotherhood....”

The sight of a solitary cottage would draw from him those lines
beginning:

    “A portal as of shadowy adamant....”

Over and over again, in a voice somewhere between that of Irving and a
sheep, he repeated:

    “From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill,
      Or piny promontory of the Arctic main,
    Or utmost islet inaccessible....”

With a frenzy as of one who suffered wounds, insults, hunger and thirst
and pecuniary loss, for Liberty’s sweet sake, he cried out to the
myriad emerald leaves:

    “Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle
      Such lamps within the dome of this dim world,
    That the pale name of _Priest_ might shrink and dwindle
      Into the _Hell_ from which it first was hurled....”

He used to say to me, falling from the heights of recitation:

“Shelley lived in the time of the Duke of Wellington. He was the son of
a rich old baronet in Sussex, but he had nothing to do with his parents
as soon as he could escape from them. He wrote the greatest lyrics that
ever were--that is, songs not meant to be sung, and no musician could
write good enough music for them, either. He was tall, and brave, and
gentle. He feared no man, and he almost loved death. He was beautiful.
His hair was long, and curled, and had been nearly black, but it was
going grey when he died. He was drowned in the Mediterranean at thirty.
The other poets burnt his body on the sea-shore, but one of them saved
the heart and buried it at Rome with the words on the stone above it,
_Cor cordium_, Heart of hearts. It is not right, it is not right....”

He would mutter, “It is not right,” but what he meant I could not tell,
unless he was thus--seventy years late--impatiently indignant at the
passing of Shelley out of this earth. As likely as not he would forget
his indignation, if such it was, by whispering--but not to me--with
honied milky accents, as of one whose feet would refuse to crush a toad
or bruise a flower:

    “Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart
      Fell like bright Spring upon some herbless plain,
    How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
      In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
      Of custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,
    And walk as free as light the clouds among,
      Which many an envious slave then breath’d in vain
    From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung
    To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long....”

From Philip’s tone as he continued the poem, it might have been
supposed that he, too, had a young and unloved wife, a rebellious
father, a sweet-heart ready to fly with him in the manner suggested by
some other lines which he uttered with conviction:

    “A ship is floating in the harbour now,
    A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow;
    There is a path on the sea’s azure floor,
    No keel has ever ploughed the path before;
    The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
    The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles;
    The merry mariners are bold and free:
    Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?”

I have beside me the book which taught Philip this sad bliss, this
wild wisdom. The fly-leaves are entirely covered by copies in his
hand-writing of the best-loved poems and passages. Between some pages
are still the scentless skeletons of flowers and leaves--still more
pages bear the stains left by other flowers and leaves--plucked in that
spring at Lydiard Constantine. The gilding of the covers for the most
part is worn smoothly out; the edges are frayed, the corners broken.
Thus the book seems less the work of Shelley than of Philip. It embalms
that Spring. Yet why do I say embalmed? It is not dead. It lives while
I live and can respond to the incantation of one of the poems in this
little book, beginning:

    “Life of Life, thy lips enkindle,
    With their love the breath between them....”

When I first heard them from Philip, Spring was thronging the land with
delicious odours, colours, and sounds. I knew how nothing came, yet
it was a sweet and natural coming rather than magic--a term then of
too narrow application. As nearly as possible I step back those twenty
years, and see the beech leaves under the white clouds in the blue and
hear the wood wren amongst them, whenever by some chance or necessity
I meet that incantation: “Life of Life, thy lips enkindle,” and I do
not understand them any more than I do the Spring. Both have the power
of magic....

Not magical, but enchanted away from solidity, seems now that life at
Abercorran House, where Jessie, Ann, Aurelius, and the rest, and the
dogs, and the pigeons, sat or played in the sun, I suppose, without us
and Shelley, throughout that April. There never was again such another
Spring, because those that followed lacked Philip. He fell ill and
stayed on at Lydiard Constantine to be nursed by my Aunt Rachel, while
I went back to read about the Hanseatic League, Clodia (the Lesbia
of Catullus), and other phantoms that had for me no existence except
in certain printed pages which I would gladly have abolished. With
Philip I might have come to care about the Hansa, and undoubtedly about
Clodia; but before I had done with them, before the cuckoos of that
poet’s Spring were silent, he was buried at Lydiard Constantine.

At this point the people at Abercorran House--even Jessie and
Aurelius--and the dogs that stretched out in deathlike blessedness
under the sun, and the pigeons that courted and were courted in the
yard and on the roof, all suddenly retreat from me when I come to
that Spring in memory; a haze of ghostly, shimmering silver veils
them; without Philip they are as people in a story whose existence
I cannot prove. The very house has gone. The elms of the Wilderness
have made coffins, if they were not too old. Where is the pond and
its lilies? They are no dimmer than the spirits of men and children.
But there is always Ann. When “Life of Life” is eclipsed and Spring
forgotten, Ann is still in Abercorran Street. I do not think she sees
those dim hazed spirits of men and children, dogs and pigeons. Jessie,
she tells me, is now a great lady, but rides like the wind. Roland
never leaves Caermarthenshire except after a fox. Jack has gone to
Canada and will stay. Lewis is something on a ship. Harry owns sheep
by thousands, and rents a mighty mountain, and has as many sons as
brothers, and the same number of daughters, who have come to the point
of resembling Jessie: so says Ann, who has a hundred photographs. Mr
Morgan is back at Abercorran. When good fortune returned to the Morgans
the whole family went there for a time, leaving Ann behind until the
house should be let. She stayed a year. The family began to recover
in the country, and to scatter. Jessie married and Jack left England
within the year. Ann became a housekeeper first to the new tenant
of Abercorran House, afterwards to Mr Jones at Abercorran Street.
Otherwise I should not have written down these memories of the Morgans
and their friends, men, dogs, and pigeons, and of the sunshine caught
by the yard of Abercorran House in those days, and of Our Country, and
of that Spring and the “Life of Life” which live, and can only perish,
together. Ann says there is another world. “Not a better,” she adds
firmly. “It would be blasphemous to suppose that God ever made any but
the best of worlds--not a better, but a different one, suitable for
different people than we are now, you understand, not better, for that
is impossible, say I, who have lived in Abercorran--town, house, and
street--these sixty years--there is not a better world.”


  PRINTED BY
  TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
  EDINBURGH




Transcriber's Note

The following apparent errors have been corrected:

p. 25 "fed the pigons she" changed to "fed the pigeons she"

p. 56 "they pased in deep water" changed to "they passed in deep water"

p. 68 "rounds islands of ash" changed to "round islands of ash"

p. 120 "time-worm black bureau" changed to "time-worn black bureau"

p. 155 "chief faculty. and there" changed to "chief faculty, and there"

p. 172 "“More air,” he shouted," changed to "“More air,” he shouted."

p. 283 "quiet, says the diary." changed to "quiet, says the diary.”"


Archaic or inconsistent language has otherwise been kept as printed.





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