Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas

by Edward Thomas

  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 doorhandle 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 denned 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 Torn Urania... most musical of mourners,’ and of Tost 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 manoeuvres 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 somewh
ere out of sight, came from flocks who were in that world which they had unwillingly and unwittingly left for ever.