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 beauti
ful 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.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 17
