Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas

by Edward Thomas

  ‘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 blacktailed 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 innkeeper 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 overgrown 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 tri
ed 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 nev
er 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.