Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas

by Edward Thomas

  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 grey-hound, 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 anyth
ing. 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 Iadmired 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.