Hubert Crackanthorpe

April 15

The English Midlands, sluggishly effluent, a massy profusion of well-upholstered undulations; Normandy, coquettish, almost dapper, in its discreet rusticity, its finikin spruceness, its distinguished reticence of detail; the plains of Lombardy in midsummer, all glutted with luscious vegetation; Switzerland, tricked out in cheap sentimentality, in a catchpenny crudity of tone; Andalucia, savagely harsh, with its bitter, exasperated colouring....

In every country there links a personality, and the contemplation of the memories of the lands where one has lived, of the books one has cherished, of the women one has loved, brings with it a strange sense of the incomprehensible promptings of caprice.

With the fluctuations of mood, Musset seems puerile or passionate; Amiel, lachrymose or exquisitely perceptive; Baudelaire, macabre or impassively statuesque; Pater, tortuous or infinitely dexterous; Meredith, irksome or gorgeously prismatic.

There are women whom we worshipped years ago, who would certainly fail to move us to-day; books that enthralled us in our childhood, which we hesitate to open again; places we had read of with delight, and for that reason shrink from surveying.

And so to-night, beneath the lime-tree, by the dog-rose hedge, whilst the grasshoppers scrape their ceaseless chorus, and the flies roam like specks of gold, and the fawn-coloured cattle stalk home from the pastures, I wonder dreamily how I have come to love so steadfastly the whole wayward grace of this country-side—the melancholy of its wide plains, burnt to dun colour by the Southern sun; the desolate silence of those dark, endless pine forests that lie beyond; the hesitating contours of wooded slopes; the distant Pyrenees, a long, ragged, snow-capped wall; the dazzling-white roads, stretching between their tall, slim poplars, straight towards the horizon; the tumble-down, white-faced villages, huddled on the hilltops; their battered, sloping roofs, tilted all awry, like loose-fitting, peaked caps of faded-red tiles; the farmyards, strewn with dingy ox-bedding, and littered with a decrepit multitude of objects, which, it seems, can never have been new—broken earthenware pots, rickety, rush-bottomed chairs, stacks of dead branches, still rustling their brown, winter leaves; the slow-paced oxen ploughing the land; the peasants, men, women, and children, swaying in line as they sow the maize, with the poultry pecking behind; the jangling bells of the dilapidated, yellow-wheeled courier; the market-days, the sea of blue bÉrets, the press of blue blouses, the incoherent waving of ox-goads, the bristling of curved horns, the shifting mass of sleek, fawn-coloured backs; the narrow, ramshackle streets of the town; the line of plane-trees on the place d’armes, beneath which groups of grave bourgeois are for ever pacing; and the Gave, spurting over the rocks, under the old Norman bridge....

The sun slips behind a bank of inky cloud, slowly trailing its pale-green stain, and the old, penetrating charm of this tiny corner of the earth returns, and the old longing to bind myself to it, to have my place in its life, always, through the years to come....

The oxen have gone their way along the road; the lengthy twilight shadows steal across the garden; from the church-spire up on the hill the Angelus rings out; quite near at hand a tree-frog starts piping his shrill, clear note, and the cockchafers their angry whirling; and then, of a sudden, the violet night has fallen, wrapping all earth and sky in her mysterious, impenetrable blackness....