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 fireplaces, 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 th
e 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 tonight 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 woodfolk (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 tomorrow, 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’...
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 28
