Within a fortnight the pigeons were beginning to lay, and as one of the nests contained the four useless eggs of an imbecile pair of hens, we tasted thus early the pleasure of blowing one egg in the orthodox manner and sucking three. This being Septuagesima Sunday, nothing would satisfy us but an immediate visit to Our Country, where the jays’ nests and others we had robbed seven months before were found with a thrill all but equal to that of May, and always strictly examined in case of accidents or miracles. For there had now been a whole week of spring sun shining on our hearts, and on the plumage of the cock pheasant we stalked in vain. The thrush sang. The blackbird sang. With the Conversion of St Paul came rain, and moreover school, Thucydides, Shakespeare’s ‘Richard the Second,’ and other unrealities and afflictions, wherein I had to prove again how vain it is ‘to cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast’ at old Gaunt’s command. But Quinquagesima Sunday meant rising in the dark and going out with Philip, to watch the jays, always ten yards ahead of our most stealthy stepping — to climb after old woodpigeons’ nests, to cut hazel sticks, to the tune of many skylarks. Alas, a sprained foot could not save me from school on Monday. But now the wild pigeons dwelling about the school began to coo all day long and to carry sticks for their nests. Out on the football field, in the bright pale light and the south-west wind the black rooks courted — and more; the jackdaws who generally accompanied them were absent somewhere. What then mattered it whether Henri Quatre or Louis Quatorze were the greatest of the Bourbon kings, as some of my schoolfellows debated? Besides, when February was only half through, Aunt Rachel formally invited Philip and me to Lydiard Constantine for Easter. This broke the winter’s back. Frost and fog and Bright’s ‘History of England’ were impotent. We began to write letters to the chosen three or four boys at Lydiard Constantine. We made, in the gas jets at Abercorran House, tubes of glass for the sucking of bird’s eggs. We bought egg drills. We made egg-drills for ourselves.... The cat had kittens. One pair of Higgs’ pigeons hatched out their eggs. The house-sparrows were building. The almond-trees blossomed in the gardens of ‘Brockenhurst’ and the other houses. The rooks now stayed in the football field until five. The larks sang all day, invisible in the strong sun and burning sky. The gorse was a bonfire of bloom. Then, at last, on St David’s day, the rooks were building, the woodpigeons cooing on every hand, the first lambs were heard.
Day after day left us indignant that, in spite of all temptations, no thrush or blackbird had laid an egg, so far as we knew. But all things seemed possible. One day, in a mere afternoon walk, we found, not far beyond a muddle of new streets, a district very beautiful and quiet’, says the diary. Losing our way, we had to hire a punt to take us across the stream — I suppose, the Wandle. Beautiful and quiet, too, was the night when Philip scaled the high railings into the grounds of a neighbouring institution, climbed one of the tall elms of its rookery — I could see him up against the sky, bigger than any of the nests, in the topmost boughs — and brought down the first egg. It was the Tuesday before an early Easter, a clear blue, soft day which drove clean out of our minds all thought of fog, frost, and rain, past or to come. Mr Stodham had come into the yard of Abercorran House on the way to his office, as I had on my way to school. Finding Aurelius sitting in the sun with Ladas, he said in his genial, nervous way: ‘That’s right. You are making the best of a fine day. Goodness knows what it will be like to-morrow.’
‘And Goodness cares,’ said Aurelius, almost angrily, ‘I don’t.’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Mr Stodham, hastily lighting his pipe. ‘All right,’ said Aurelius, ‘but if you care about to-morrow, I don’t believe you really care about to-day. You are one of those people, who say that if it is not always fine, or fine when they want it, they don’t care if it is never fine, and be damned to it, say they. And yet they don’t like bad weather so well as I do, or as Jessie does. Now, rain, when it ought not to be raining, makes Jessie angry, and if the day were a man or woman she would come to terms with it, but it isn’t, and what is more, Jessie rapidly gets sick of being angry, and as likely as not she sings “Blow away the morning dew,” and finds that she likes the rain. She has been listening to the talk about rain by persons who want to save Day and Martin. I prefer Betty Martin.... Do you know, Arthur tells me the house martins will soon be here?’ We looked up together to see if it was a martin that both of us had heard, or seemed to hear, overhead, but, if it was, it was invisible.
Every year such days came — any time in Lent, or even before. I take it for granted that, as an historical fact, they were followed, as they have been in the twentieth century, by fog, frost, mists, drizzle, rain, sleet, snow, east wind, and north wind, and I know very well that we resented these things. But we loved the sun. We strove to it in imagination through the bad weather, believing in every kind of illusory hint that the rain was going to stop, and so on. Moreover rain had its merits. For example, on a Sunday, it kept the roads nearly as quiet as on a week day, and we could have Our Country, or Richmond Park, or Wimbledon Common, all to ourselves. Then, again, what a thing it was to return wet, with a rainy brightness in your eyes, to change rapidly, to run round to Abercorran House, and find Philip and Ann expecting you in the kitchen, with a gooseberry tart, currant tart, raspberry tart, plum tart, blackberry tart, cranberry and apple tart, apple tart, according to season; and mere jam or syrup tart in the blank periods. My love of mud also I trace to that age, because Philip and I could escape all company by turning out of a first class road into the black mash of a lane. If we met anyone there, it was a carter contending with the mud, a tramp sitting between the bank and a fire, or a filthy bird-catcher beyond the hedge.
If the lane was both muddy and new to us, and we two, Philip and I, turned into it, there was nothing which we should have thought out of its power to present in half a mile or so, nothing which it would have overmuch astonished us by presenting. It might have been a Gypsy camp, it might have been the terrestrial Paradise of Sheddad the son of Ad — we should have fitted either into our scheme of the universe. Not that we were blasé; for every new thrush’s egg in the season had a new charm for us. Not that we had been flightily corrupted by fairy tales and marvels. No: the reason was that we only regarded as impossible such things as a score of 2000 in first class cricket, an air ship, or the like; and the class of improbabilities did not exist for us. Nor was this all. We were not merely ready to welcome strange things when we had walked half a mile up a lane and met no man, but we were in a gracious condition for receiving whatever might, fall to us. We did not go in search of miracles, we invited them to come to us. What was familiar to others was never, on that account, tedious or contemptible to us. I remember that when Philip and I first made our way through London to a shop which was depicted in an advertisement, in spite of the crowds on either hand all along our route, in spite of the full directions of our elders, we were as much elated by our achievement as if it had been an arduous discovery made after a journey in a desert. In our elation there was some suspicion that our experience had been secret, adventurous, and unique. As to the crowd, we glided through it as angels might. This building, expected by us and known to all, astonished us as much as the walls of Sheddad the son of Ad unexpectedly towering would have done.
Sometimes in our rare London travels we had a glimpse of a side street, a row of silent houses all combined as it were into one gray palace, a dark doorway, a gorgeous window, a surprising man disappearing.... We looked, and though we never said so, we believed that we alone had seen these things, that they had never been seen before. We should not have expected to see them there if we went again. Many and many a time have we looked, have I alone in more recent years looked, for certain things thus revealed to us in passing. Either it happened that the thing was different from what it had once been, or it had disappeared altogether.
Now and then venturing down a few side streets where the system was rectangular and incapable of deceiving, we came on a church full of sound
or gloomily silent — I do not know how to describe the mingled calm and pride in the minds of the discoverers. Some of the very quiet, apparently uninhabited courts, for example, made us feel that corners of London had been deserted and forgotten, that anyone could hide away there, living in secrecy as in a grave. Knowing how we ourselves, walking or talking together, grew oblivious of all things that were not within our brains, or vividly and desirably before our eyes, feeling ourselves isolated in proud delight, deserted and forgotten of the multitude who were not us, we imagined, I suppose, that houses and other things could have a similar experience, or could share it with us, were we to seek refuge there like Morgan in his mountain tower. The crowd passing and surrounding us consisted of beings unlike us, incapable of our isolation or delight: the retired houses whispering in quiet alleys must be the haunt of spirits unlike the crowd and more like us, or, if not, at least they must be waiting in readiness for such. I recognised in them something that linked them to Abercorran House and distinguished them from Brockenhurst.
Had these favoured houses been outwardly as remarkable as they were in spirit they might have pleased us more, but I am not certain. Philip had his house with the windows that were as the days of the year. But I came only once near to seeing, with outward eyes, such a house as perhaps we desired without knowing it. Suddenly, over the tops of the third or fourth and final ridge of roofs, visible a quarter of a mile away from one of the windows at Abercorran House, much taller than any of the throng of houses and clear in the sky over them, I saw a castle on a high rock. It resembled St Michael s Mount, only the rock was giddier and had a narrower summit, and the castle’s three clustered round towers of unequal height stood up above it like three fingers above a hand. When I pointed it out to Philip he gave one dark, rapid glance as of mysterious understanding, and looked at me, saying slowly:
‘“A portal as of shadowy adamant
Stands yawning on the highway of the life
Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt;
Around it rages an unceasing strife
Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt
The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high
Into the whirlwind of the upper sky.
And many pass it by with careless tread,
Not knowing that a shadowy...,”
A shadowy what, Arthur? At any rate that is the place.’
In those days, Philip was beginning to love Shelley more than he loved Aurelius or me.
I had not seen that pile before. With little trouble I could have located it almost exactly: I might have known that the particular street had no room for a sublimer St Michael’s Mount. If we passed the spot during the next few days we made no use of the evidence against the tower, which satisfied us in varying degrees until in process of time it took its place among the other chimney clusters of our horizon. I was not disillusioned as to this piece of fancy’s architecture, nor was I thereafter any more inclined to take a surveyor’s view of the surface of the earth. Stranger things, probably, than St Michael’s Mount have been thought and done in that street: we did not know it, but our eyes accepted this symbol of them with gladness, as in the course of nature. Not much less fantastic was our world than the one called up by lights seen far off before a traveller in a foreign and a dark, wild land.
Therefore Spring at Lydiard Constantine was to Philip and me more than a portion of a regular renascence of Nature. It was not an old country marvellously at length arraying itself after an old custom, but an invasion of the old as violent as our suburban St Michael’s Mount. It was as if the black, old, silent earth had begun to sing as sweet as when Jessie sang unexpectedly ‘Blow away the morning dew.’ It was not a laborious, orderly transformation, but a wild, divine caprice. We supposed that it would endure for ever, though it might (as I see now) have turned in one night to Winter. But it did not.
That Spring was a poet’s Spring. ‘Remember this Spring,’ wrote Aurelius in a letter, ‘then you will know what a poet means when he says Spring.’ Mr Stodham, who was not a poet, but wrote verse passionately, was bewildered by it, and could no longer be kept from exposing his lines. He called the Spring both fiercely joyous, and melancholy. He addressed it as a girl, and sometimes as a thousand gods. He said that it was as young as the dew-drop freshly globed on the grass tip, and also as old as the wind. He proclaimed that it had conquered the earth, and that it was as fleeting as a poppy. He praised it as golden, as azure, as green, as snow-white, as chill and balmy, as bright and dim, as swift and languid, as kindly and cruel, as true and fickle. Yet he certainly told an infinitely small part of the truth concerning that Spring. It is memorable to me chiefly on account of a great poet.
For a day or two, at Lydiard Constantine, Philip roamed with me up and down hedgerows, through copses, around pools, as he had done in other Aprils, but though he found many nests he took not one egg, not even a thrush’s egg that was pure white and would have been unique in his collection, or in mine; neither was I allowed to take it. Moreover, after the first two or three days he only came reluctantly — found hardly any nests — quarrelled furiously with the most faithful of the Lydiard boys for killing a thrush (though it was a good shot) with a catapult. He now went about muttering unintelligible things in a voice like a clergyman. He pushed through a copse saying magnificently:
‘Unfathomable sea whose waves are years.’
He answered an ordinary question by Aunt Rachel with:
‘Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs.’
Tears stood in his eyes while he exclaimed:
‘Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
Or they dead leaves.’
Like a somnambulist he paced along, chanting:
‘Earth, Ocean, Air, beloved brotherhood...,’
The sight of a solitary cottage would draw from him those lines beginning:
‘A portal as of shadowy adamant....’
Over and over again, in a voice somewhere between that of Irving and a sheep, he repeated:
‘From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill,
Or piny promontory of the Arctic main,
Or utmost islet inaccessible....’
With a frenzy as of one who suffered wounds, insults, hunger and thirst and pecuniary loss, for Liberty’s sweet sake, he cried out to the myriad emerald leaves:
‘Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle
Such lamps within the dome of this dim world,
That the pale name of Priest might shrink and dwindle
Into the Hell from which it first was hurled...,’
He used to say to me, falling from the heights of recitation:
‘Shelley lived in the time of the Duke of Wellington. He was the son of a rich old baronet in Sussex, but he had nothing to do with his parents as soon as he could escape from them. He wrote the greatest lyrics that ever were — that is, songs not meant to be sung, and no musician could write good enoughmusic for them, either. He was tall, and brave, and gentle. He feared no man, and he almost loved death. He was beautiful. His hair was long, and curled, and had been nearly black, but it was going grey when he died. He was drowned in the Mediterranean at thirty. The other poets burnt his body on the sea-shore, but one of them saved the heart and buried it at Rome with the words on the stone above it, Cor cordium, Heart of hearts. It is not right, it is not right—’
He would mutter, ‘It is not right,’ but what he meant I could not tell, unless he was thus — seventy years late — impatiently indignant at the passing of Shelley out of this earth. As likely as not he would forget his indignation, if such it was, by whispering — but not to me — with honied milky accents, as of one whose feet would refuse to crush a toad or bruise a flower:
‘Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart
Fell like bright Spring upon some herbless plain,
How beautiful and
calm and free thou wert
In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
Of custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,
And walk as free as light the clouds among,
Which many an envious slave then breath’d in vain
From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung
To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long...,’
From Philip’s tone as he continued the poem, it might have been supposed that he, too, had a young and unloved wife, a rebellious father, a sweet-heart ready to fly with him in the manner suggested by some other lines which he uttered with conviction:
‘A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow;
There is a path on the sea’s azure floor,
No keel has ever ploughed the path before;
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 29
