In front, a tall beechen hill closes up the gulf that runs out of the valley into the heart of the chalk down. The hill fills nearly half the sky, and just above it stands the white full moon, as one who looks over his lands. It warms the low, pale, curdled sky, but does not disturb the darkness of the beeches. All its light seems to fall and settle, as if it would dwell there for ever in the cherry trees on either hand. All are blossoming, and in their branches the nightingales sing out of the blossom, dispersing what ruins remain of the world of yesterday, and building rapidly those tall watch towers that last until dawn, which men may climb and from their summits see what may make them out of love with the earth. The past day is long past, the day of fighting, digging, buying, selling, writing; and if there are still men on the earth they are all equal in the trances of passion or sleep; the day to come is not to be thought of. The moon reigns; you rule. The centuries are gathered up in your hand. You and the moonlight and the nightingale and the cherry blossom have your own way with them all night long. It is true then that Virgil, Catullus, Crashaw, Burton, Shelley ... live still, and Horace, Racine, Bishop Beveridge ... never lived. You exult because you are alive and your spirit possesses this broad, domed earth. Poor thing as you are, you have somehow gained a power of expression like the nightingale’s, a pure translucency like the petals of the flowers; and as never before to man or woman you open your eyes widely and frankly, even the limbs move with the carelessness of the animals, the features lose the rigidity that comes of compromise and suppression. Walking slowly thus, with a bowed head, you find an image of yourself and the universe in a shallow pool among the trees. The pool is your own mind. The flowers at its edge—hyacinth, primrose, marsh-marigold, and all the trees and their foliage—are the intimate and permanent companions of your life, and they are clearly mirrored in the water. An oak draws a long, snaky shadow from side to side, with the head and neck of a sitting dove among the leaves. And there, too, are the stars and the moon, brought down into that homely company of trees and flowers by the shining water, and preserved there in strangely woven patterns; just as in your mind you mingle visions of the world, the past, the imaginary, with your own domestic surroundings and acts, and a changing mood, like a puff of wind across the pool, erases them. How sovereign and proud your own form plunged among these mirrored stars and leaves! On such a night an uncourageous lover, who sat at the edge with his mistress, was lured to a strange boldness by long gazing at the two blissful figures down there among the clouds. “See how fair they are,” he said, “and how happy and close. Let us make them kiss.” And the shadows kissed in the bosom of the pool.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE FOX HUNT We had driven ten miles through a country that rose and fell with large, stormy lines of hillock and hill. A March sun was bright, but a sharpness lingered in the air from last night’s frost, like a cold spring in a warm lake. Over the hazy, genial oak woods on the hills sailed slow white gulls all crying, “wheel whill” with a shrillness that suited the high blue sky. Sowers went across the long red fields, casting dark seeds that flew in curved clouds before them at each second step and vanished in the wind. On the steep roads the dust whirled in curves as of perfect dancers, which the kestrel repeated on a grand scale high overhead. Thrushes sang at ash tops and in hedges. And we four talked, making such harmonious music to a fine day as men may, with jest and recollection and anticipation of the meet of the fox hounds to which we were going, two to ride and two to follow afoot. Within a mile of the meet we got down at a farmhouse, where the horses were awaiting their owners and the yeoman was to join us. The farm-buildings made almost a complete quadrangle with the side of the house—stables, cow stalls, a granary of ancient stone, a barn with a low-arched Tudor doorway like a broad back ready to receive a weight, and ladders and lengths of oak leaning against the walls. There stood the horses, nodding by their grooms, with restless fetlocks; a red calf flung up its heels amongst the flying, yellow straw; the fowls were stately and fluttered by turns. The house was all white, except for the roof of stone “slats” and the large dark windows. Close to it, away from the farm buildings, lay the crooked orchard. We passed through the shrubbery, without offending its warbling blackbirds, and across a lawn to the door. The yeoman was of a noble, antique type; of medium height; straight, but mobile, and stooping gently as he listened, with moderate, neat, large-featured head; reticent, slow but beautiful of speech, ready with laughter. He made me think of the last Roman who spoke the speech of Virgil and CÆsar quite pure. He was in his prime, past thirty, the last of his family, and still holding their few hundred acres, a bachelor who had not long since won his captivity from the pale, fair-haired beauty at his side, to judge by her commanding smiles from time to time. They were sure of a fox, he said; not so sure to kill, because the ground was dry again in spite of last night’s frost, and scent bad. As we stood round the room eating sandwiches—there was yet half an hour before the meet—one asked him if he knew anything of an old house in a valley some miles away. All the doors and walls were panelled with mirrors amidst their bright oak, and as you sat there you saw your party repeated as if through the walls in the neighbouring rooms. He had not time to answer when an old bent and pallid man, his uncle, who had sat unobserved, began to speak in a feeble, singing voice, strangely laughing at times. “I know the house with the mirrors. The Merediths lived there for three hundred years, and I knew the last of them well. She was Arabella. She had no brothers, and there is no child. I was a young man then, and though you may not easily believe it, when you see this arm, I was a fine, strong man. Ha! ha! ha!” He stopped to chuckle abstractedly, with ambiguous irony at the contrast between his early lustihood and the decrepitude which had coffined it. Perhaps his nephew winced at the garrulity and such irony as the thick laughter disclosed to him, but he did nothing to divert the talk, nor did Enid, his betrothed, when she filled a glass with whisky and water for the old man, who did but admire it with a sudden satisfaction, and then continued:— “Well, I was about the age of my nephew yonder, and I had never known what pain or misery was, except when I was nearly beaten by a gipsy in running down Mowland Hill. I farmed and I hunted, and it was understood that I was to marry an amiable and pretty young woman whom my father admired so much that he was willing that nobody should be my wife if not she. But I was in no haste, and indeed I was not fond of women. Others I knew seemed stupid or frivolous. This one was chiefly busy with the church and the poor. I respected her, and I believe now that she would have looked after me well in my old age. She understood me; we had known one another since we were children, and I used to delight to stop my horse to speak to her on a fine day when I was feeling fresh and gay. At last it was agreed that we were soon to be married, and I did not know why to draw back.” Enid glanced quickly at my host, all the command having left her meek smile, and as quickly dropped her eyes. It seemed to me that the glance betrayed a slender fear or anticipation which she was ashamed of immediately. By his over-rigid tranquillity it may be that her lover gave a similar sign, the only one, and lost on her. “No,”—the old man paused, as though he would still have liked to unearth some excuse which he might, fifty years back, have made for breaking his troth. “No,” he said, questioningly, “I did not know why to draw back. But one day a woman I had sometimes heard of—she had been away at school and with friends almost continually—came and joined our hunt for the first time—Arabella Meredith. She was over one bank before me, and I thought that Edith would never have done that. We had a good day and a long one. As I was riding back I was pretty well satisfied when with great clatter Miss Meredith rode up to me. She had had a long day and she was hot with her gallop, and yet as she came alongside, I turning my horse so that both curvetted together in the narrow road, she was as fresh as if it had been raining and she just out to take the air, as fresh as a young lime leaf and as clean and, if you understand me, as inhuman in a way, at least I thought so that evening when I was alone. When I saw her eyes, as I soon did, they seemed to belong to somebody else hiding there, and not the woman I had seen jumping. “‘Mr. Arnold,’ she said, ‘I hear you are to be married....’ “‘Yes,’ I said. “‘Then you will marry me,’ she said. “In a mazy way I said that I would think about it, and she replied instantly,— “‘Please ride as far as our house with me—not but that I can look after myself, though it is fifteen miles away, and the roads bad and dark—and you will have plenty of time to think about it.’ “I rode home with her, and I did not think at all, and I did not speak; nor did she, except to the horse; and at the end I said that I would marry her if she were willing. “‘I will think about it,’ she said, ‘good-night,’ and I turned my horse to do the ten miles that divided the house with the mirrors from this. It was an extraordinary thing to do, I think. The next day I told Edith that I could not marry her because I wanted to marry Miss Meredith. There was trouble, but it is a long time ago. Edith never married, but continued to help the church and the poor in another part of the country. She was a good woman.” Enid had flushed—was it angrily?—at the first mention of Arabella. She was become serious and very still, and looked no more at her neighbour who was apparently studying some drawings of spaniels. Seeing the gentle girl’s pain I was sorry that I had not helped her in the attempt to check the old man. But that was impossible now. “Arabella was wonderful,” he exclaimed, his old voice slowing to a stronger tone and a new solemnity. “Arabella was wonderful. I believed then that for a man to live as I had lived for so long, and then to see her all suddenly, was the best thing in the world. I used to look at her, and even when I did not see her face, but only her neck and hair and dress and feet, it was just like—like it used to be looking up on a day like this at the blossoming tops of tall elms right in the sky, and hearing the cuckoo’s mate up there. “Twice a week I used to walk over to her house or to some place near by to see her. I don’t know which was best—the fine weather or the wet—when I went, for in the rain I used to shut out the noise of the rain with my singing all kinds of songs, and sometimes I used to run and whoop as if the hounds had just killed a fox. It was a long way to walk, and sometimes, especially at night, I used to go almost mad with thinking of all the dense space and time and other people, intervening between her and me. Yet I always refused to ride if a farmer stopped his cart, and took footpaths to avoid them. The train to London which I saw all bright on winter evenings used to give me an odd joy and envy—thinking of all those unknown people as if they were hurrying faster than I to see their sweethearts. I did think her beautiful. When I saw Edith in those days, it was somehow painful, like seeing a lamb lying aside dead in a ditch.” Enid had turned her face away to the window and the lawn. Just so pitiful might she seem were she passed over by her lover. “I am not going to tell you,” the old lover went on, looking at nothing visible, “what we did when we met. I think sometimes now that we were not wise. But we used to walk and walk, and she would tell me about girls and the ways of girls, and her childhood, so that I wished I had been a boy with her. She would praise me and say that if ever anything happened to me so that I was hurt and maimed, or if I should die, she would not go on living. The thought of such a thing made her angry and she would stop, and, without looking at me and seeming to forget me, would lift her arms and say confused things that sounded fierce which I could not hear, and then suddenly turn to me quite happy again. “It was the finest day in my life, when, one May day we fished together, and cooked some fresh caught trout by the riverside over a fire of oak branches, and ate them together in the morning, just as the sun grew hot. “Every day I wished to marry her, especially when she spoke suddenly after being silent, or when I could only smell her lovely breath and see the pale skin under her little ear in the dark. “She did extraordinary things and she made me do extraordinary things. “One day as we were walking we heard the sound of the Fair, and Arabella said that we must go. As quick as thought she knocked some walnuts off a tree and we stained our faces with the juice of the rind, and at a friendly cottage borrowed a rude disguise, for we went as gipsies. Arabella told fortunes, first, and I had to tell some too. Then she wanted me to play on a flute while she danced; but instead I kept somewhere near while she danced, to see that all was as it should be; and as it was, I nearly had to knock down a little Welshman whose harp she began dancing to; for while he played and she danced I hardly knew what was happening; it was as if I had gone into a church with rich windows out of a dark night. She danced all the way home, sometimes with her right hand just touching my right shoulder and looking up at me—Ah! Perhaps she thought I was a little careless at seeing her as much in love with me as I with her, and suddenly taking her hand off my shoulder she said quite fiercely that I must do something to show that I would do anything for her.” Here the old man stopped and laughed and drank his whisky and seemed disinclined to go on. The yeoman rose hastily and we had to follow at once, all but Enid, the old man and the boldest and worst horseman who was taking some more “jumping powder” with an air; and then, when all had mounted in the farmyard, I found courage to equal my curiosity and asked the yeoman for the end of the story. He stopped his impatient horse and said,— “One night in November, when the river was in flood, my uncle remembered what Miss Meredith had said, and in his clothes he swam over instead of going round by the bridge. It was a long and difficult swim and he got bruised on the rocks; but he got through and then went to meet Miss Meredith. I do not know what happened that evening, but the next day his life was in danger from fever, and for many days he was ill. As soon as she heard, Miss Meredith came over and saw him when he was at his worst; I think someone told her that he would recover, being so vigorous a man. Some days later they picked her out of the river, and they say she had drowned herself. My uncle says that as he lay ill he was proud, and did not even ask for Miss Meredith lest she should see him as he was. But when he got downstairs and felt well and was growing stronger, they told him that she was buried in Mowland churchyard. Then he laughed terribly with long laughs, so that they say my grandmother heard him in London, and went on laughing at the magnificent jest of that beautiful woman being underground. “She was small, with fair skin and brown hair that was pure gold where it was rolled up behind her ear, and she had a deep clear voice. Her skill in dancing was great, and as a rider only my uncle excelled her. She was generous and tender, but courageous and unforgiving, never losing either friend or enemy. “He has quite recovered now. It is wonderful what things a man will recover from. He does not mind telling the story; I think he is even a little ashamed of his infatuation. All the women who were born in that house, at least all the Merediths, are said to have been odd, and they were all beautiful.” “It is well for all of us,” said one, “that there are not many Arabellas in the world.” “There are not many,” said the yeoman; and he was about to follow the rest when I saw Enid, a little anxious and it may have been apologetic, at the door. “Good-bye, Arabella,” he called, with quiet raillery. “No!” she stamped her foot impatiently, but gently even so. He kissed her hand and looked at her; and as he rode away, I saw that she was at peace again. He shouted that they would see us by the gorse. And so those three rode away and we walked to the meet. All the labourers on the farm where the hounds met had a holiday, and all the children too, enough of them to drown the music of the hounds. There were about twenty men and women riding, three in pink, two or three rich men and as many rich women, a lawyer, a doctor and many farmers and their boys; and everyone talked with everyone. They found a fox in the long, tumbling hill of gorse that ran almost to the river’s edge; but the scent was bad, and after running backwards and forwards for some time, they drew several little covers and there were some rapid bursts with merry music, and flying of dust on the ploughland and halloos here and there, and laughter and chatter of boys, and slow comment from the labourers. But soon all was quiet except that a child was telling a blind farmer where the hounds were and which way they were going. The river ran at our feet in one large curve, and among banks not so steep but that it shone continually. Just below us the lover must have swum, landing in the tall oaks that came to the edge. On the farther side a road went up from the low bridge and over the hill and then, but out of sight, down to the house with the mirrors. Ten miles away, above the river, with its church tower against the sky in a manner that commanded everyone who could walk, was the little town where they still hold a Michaelmas Fair. Beyond that, faint and delicate, small and beautiful as the lines in an oyster shell, were great hills all but invisible in haze.
CHAPTER XXXII
APPLE BLOSSOM The stream going helpless and fast between high banks is gloomy until it is turned to bright, airy foam and hanging crystal by the mill; over the restless pool below hangs a hawthorn all white and fragrant and murmurous with bloom. Above the mill, to the north, the land rises in long, lustrous, melodiously swelling lawns of perfect green to the dark borders of a beech wood, where the sweet, thick air fills the hollows among the virginal foliage with blue. In one place the beeches have parted and made a broad avenue for the eye to travel towards a noble stone house, many-angled, many-windowed, grey, discreet, holding, or on such a day seeming to hold, human life worthy to walk upon the long lawns to the mill, where now nothing moves except the divine sunlight and, in the hollows, its little cloudy elves. Below the mill, to the south, is a land of tall trees standing in conclaves of woods, in whispering groups, or solitary, each in its sovereignty of shade and shining grass; of apple orchards and farmhouses that lie, amidst their haystacks and ricks of straw, in gulfs among the trees; and here and there the yellow skeleton of an oak, encircled by its bark and twigs in piles, thrusts its sharp appealing lines through the neighbouring green. There is the tall, stony beech, its bole as fair as human shoulders and flanks, lighted and shadowed changefully, its topmost branches curving over as if with the weight of birds alighting, and doves and wood-wrens among the leaves; the twisted birch’s misty, moving foliage as of a pensive fountain; the oak, whose dark branches only yesterday were interwoven like the flight of many bats at twilight, now an enchanted hill of glowing bronze; the straight, lean, athletic ash, like a young prince in short hunting tunic; the calm, feminine sycamore whose fresh foliage hangs in folds as of smoke; the pollard willow, along the stream, an ancient, neglected, grotesque deity, reluctantly assuming its green garlands for yet another spring. These things and many more the eye sees delightedly, and having ranged, finds its chief joy in some narrow tract of the large land, like the first field below the mill. It is but an acre or two of sweet, undulating pasture, bounded on two sides by tall hawthorn hedges, on the third by an ash copse, on the other by an orchard of apple trees. The grass is pure green, revealing here and there a purple orchis or dog violet or blue self-heal, except where the crystal brook rushes through it and gathers white and gold about its banks. Here no shadow falls, or if it does the dew and blossoms break it up. The leaning and interwoven apple trees make a white and wine-filled sky by their dense clots of bloom. The swallows embroider the air with their songs and their blue flight. A farmhouse walls are dusky red between the trunks. Overhead, the dim blue sky lets a white cloud roll out at intervals like lilies from a pool. And the blackbird perfects his song indolently; the thrush thinks clearly, sharply aloud, with nothing long drawn out; and the willow wren happily complains for ever—a voice that has wings and must revolve continually through the land to express for one or another the vague pains or pleasures of spring day. The hedges and the orchard and the copse shut out everything except that, through the ash stems, there is the dim, white sea far off, gentle, like a fantastic tale of men and women that never were, in countries where no discoverer’s keel has ever shrieked upon the beach, to which the eye wanders now and then, returning again to the apple blossom and the grass with an added security. Over the green grass walks the farmer’s daughter in a white dress, on her head a mushroom-shaped straw hat that reveals black hair curving like the wings of a dove over the half moon of her brow, and like smoke above her golden nape. She stands still like a straight birch in heavy snow—her form and her dress one and yet separate, and definitely female in rise and fall. She walks like a summer cloud, except that her feet, clad in shining black, take firm hold upon the grass and spurn it strongly, yet with the light short steps of a proud bird. Her left hand carries purple orchis and white stitchwort, and carefully, but fantastically and unnecessarily, raises the hem of her skirt to the height of the tallest dandelions. Her right hand is free to gather flowers, to feel the growth of the young greenfinches in the nest, to arrange and disarrange her hair. Her small round head is lifted up, her eyes fully round, her lips too much curved to meet very often yet, her nose clear and straight, and the fair, wing-like curve of bone from ear to chin seeming to be born of the shadow which it creates upon her neck. Her childhood has passed, her maturity has not come. She is a Lady May, careless, proud, at ease. On her lips, indeed, is a childish song; but she has become more strange and distant to children than older women are, for the moment—perhaps for to-day only, since to-morrow she may meet a man and stay late in the lanes. She is as strange as the silver water that gushes among green grass and marigold in the copse, or as the blue swallow slanting down the sunny red wall. To look at her is to take deep breaths as at the savour of warm bread, of honeysuckle, of cows when they come from the meadows into a dusty road. A speech that should be all sapphires and pearls would not be worthy of her—to-day. She is at the altar of Aphrodite “full of pity”—to-day. She has been carried far in the goddess’s dove-drawn chariot over mountains and seas, and has bathed in the same fountain as Aphrodite, nor yet been seen of men—to-day. Delay, sun, above the sea; wait, moon, below the hills; sing, birds; rustle, new-leaved beeches; for to-morrow and the day after and for ever until the end this will be but a memory and may be all she has. She walks hardly faster than the shadows over the fair grass: and you, Time, O Woodman! set not your axe at the foot of this tree, lean not upon it with your strong hands. See! the crest nods and the air trembles; let it not fall to-day.
CHAPTER XXXIII
A LITTLE BEFORE HARVEST Summer is perfect now. The wheat says so, when in the dawn it drips with half-an-hour’s rain and gleams like copper under the fresh, dim sky; it cries aloud the same when it crackles in the midday sun, and the golden sea of it washes murmurously to the feet of the hills. In the hedges and fields the agrimony wands and mullein staves, the climbing vetch, the cushioned bird’s-foot lotus, the myriads of ragwort and sow thistle, are golden too. The meadowsweet and honeysuckle flowers and the wild carrot seeds give out sweet scents, but not so strong as not to be drowned, when the wind blows, by a thousand lesser scents from field and wood and farmyard. Wood pigeons coo in the high-shaded storeys of the beeches and in the wet willow copses where bushes and herbage have grown so dense that hardly a bird’s-nester or a lover would care to penetrate them. In the dark wood alleys, all day long, hang insects whose wings seem to be still in their swiftness, like golden lamps. The gardens have amber lilies, fuchsia trees, phloxes, poppies, hollyhocks, carnations, snap-dragons, rockets and red flax rising above rose of Sharon and lemon-scented balm and yellow stone-crop, where the tortoise-shell butterflies worship with opening wings. And on the garden walls the purple plums ooze and heave in the sun with yellow wasps that give a touch of horror to the excellent and abounding life of perfect summer. These things and many more the eye notes carelessly. We are so rich that we do not count our treasure. We record them as contented worshippers their beads. They are but as dust above the corn when the thresher twists his oaken flail. The mother or master of them all seems to be the line of the chalk hills. The corn sweeps to these hills, and on the strand which divides them is a hamlet of six thatched cottages and a farmhouse, and new haystacks round these, fine and sharp-angled, and old ones carved in steps and supported by props of ash. The cream pans and the churns glitter outside the house. A girl kneels at the brook that flows past and dips a jug among the cresses, trying to catch a trout at the same time. The eye dwells on these for a little while, saying that it could be content there never to wander again, and then rises to the downs, and away it goes, soaring as at the sound of organ or harp. For how proud-thoughted are these long, curving downs, whether they make a highway at noon for round white clouds or at night for the large moon. They uplift and allure and lead far away the eye. The mind follows the eye as the streaming wake follows the ship and is naught without it. Those curves suggest to the mind, confused and languid after long summer days in the lowland, that it also might follow such curves that lead on—surely—to noble thoughts and high discoveries, though without them it will be happy merely in following with joyous undulations to the windy beeches on the furthest height. To see them close by with our last glance before entering an inn is good, or, far off, on a midsummer night when we are to watch the sun rise from the encampment which makes one of them, or to fancy them by the winter fire; but to see them thus, in full summer, when day is separate from day only by brief, perfumed nights of stars, stimulates like a page of saga or history or a perfect rhyme, setting the heart free. “Let us be brave,” says a shepherd of these hills. “In lofty numbers let us rave ... I’ll borrow Phoebus’ fiery jades, With which about the world he trades And put them in my plough. I’ll to great Jove, hap good, hap ill, Though he with thunder threat to kill, And beg of him a boon. To swerve up one of Cynthia’s beams, And there to bathe thee in the streams Discover’d in the moon.... And to those indraughts I’ll thee bring, That wondrous and eternal Spring, Whence the ocean hath its flowing. We’ll down to the dark House of Sleep, Where snoring Morpheus doth keep, And wake the drowsy groom.” And at evening, when the rooks go over, quietly expounding space in the rosy sky, they do not, as in other countries they do, torment the mind; for the ridge of the downs travels the same way and is at the same moment here, just above us, and yonder in the bosom of the sunset, and it gives rest and satisfaction as, but a few hours ago, it gave infinite adventure and happiness therewith.
CHAPTER XXXIV
AUTUMN BELLS From this beechen hill I can see into and across a long pastoral valley at my feet; its gentle sides running east and west are clothed in wood, and at the western end, where the valley leads straight out into the western sky, a stone city lies. Beyond this valley to the south are the misty, wooded ridges that hint at other valleys. The sunset light has made the landscape immense, but with the help of autumn it has made it simple too; and the sound of bells in the city seems to have created it, rounded and mellow in outline and hue. The little rounds of hedge-tops and knolls in the meadows and gorse in the higher slopes harmonise and run into the larger rounds of the single oaks in the middle distance, and the still larger rounds of the hills and their cloudy woods, and the clouds above them. A hawk in the air might seem to be carving the outlines of some perfect palm tree as he flies. The white steam also of a slow train far away bubbles up in the moist and gentle air and hangs there long in delicately changing and merging mounds that mock the clouds and woods. The amber wheat stacks are of the same family of form, lying in a half circle at one side of a hunched farmhouse that lifts up a dome of mossy thatch,—near it a garden of shadowed wallflower, snapdragon, roses, in clouds beyond clouds, with a burning edge of hollyhock, sunflower, red-hot poker and chrysanthemum. The sound of the city bells continues to overflow in bubbles from the valley, up and up, to the round, golden clouds. As if filled with the sound, the city smoke ascends and takes on the colours of the sunset. The sun is now low between the final walls of hill, where the valley ends, and it seems to belong to the city below, as if it were the city’s god descending there for once in answer to some especially rich altar or noble deed. The towers and their bells are as maidens pensively embroidering, and now and then dropping their embroidery to sing a melody of something far away; and long after the sun has gone and the city has disappeared their song is repeated in the fragrant and noiseless abysses of the far-stretched night.
CHAPTER XXXV
SUNDAY The morning air of autumn smelt like the musky, wild white rose. The south wind had carried hither all the golden and brown savours from Devon and Wiltshire and Surrey; and the strong sweetness made the walker snuff deeply at it, with uplifted upper lip. Church bells two miles away, deep among the woods that lay around narrow gulfs of meadow on every side, called and called, as if they had wedded this perfume and all the gold and brown of the wide land. Not the last willow wren in the oak, nor the cooing dove, spoke more melodiously of autumn and repose than the bells. So when I came to the church, under a cavernous beech wood, I paused beneath the low tower and sate in the cool nave. Parts of the windows were still rich with old colour, the rest might seem to have flown into the woods as the sounds from the genial bells were still flying thither and through the autumn land. The church was the lovely home of the dead of several fair families still living near. A helmet with motionless crest jutted over the nave. Several bright, crude effigies flaunted their crimson and blue in one aisle. The walls were still half covered by paintings of varying clearness. Here and there a sword stood out quite clear, or the head of a woman or a youth, a coat of armour, an aureole that some head had lost, a curve of vesture, or a mere whisper of colour, red like old blood, or a few words, such as “olim magnificus pulcherrimus”—“periit”—“resurget”; things that survived there much as events in human memories, and as incidents and expressions may actually survive our death, and painfully strive for integration in a dim world of fragments that shall be strangely arrayed again. The clerk stood looking out of a little open window that revealed a piece of green meadow and yellow maple that might have belonged to the ancient glass. One by one the men came in, two old labourers past work, a neighbouring farmer, his cowman and carter, a gamekeeper, and the women and children in twos and threes, and lastly the squire—perhaps twenty-five altogether. In hymn and psalm and prayer all voices save those of the rector and one sweet-voiced child were so faint that the church was undisturbed. The old men were still, the young restless, the women and children interested in one another; but they were fainter than the figures on the wall, being so like thousands of others, all but a red and fair-haired man of fifty who might have been a Bacchus hastily metamorphosed for some jolly purpose. With the sermon the silence became immense, as if it must flower suddenly or crumble away in a roar. The preacher spoke slowly as one who scorned time, and in the intervals could be heard the masticating of horses in the meadow outside. He spoke of the necessity of “drawing near to God”—by a life of piety, by private prayer, by communion, by worshipping in this house. His rich, gentle voice saying murmurous things fell upon me as one of sleep’s forerunners, and I had just heard him asking the squire and the Bacchus and the rest whether they had not, at the Communion, had visions of “those tabernacles above,” when I began to dream a dream which the parson could not have inspired without the help of some very different elf who now lay under the pavement of the nave, or was painted on the wall, or had sat among the rushes when the church was beautiful and young as a country bride. For it seemed that I saw these men and women in a kind of heaven where all day long for ever they did those things which had pleased or most taken hold of them in life. I saw them like the figures painted on the wall, some bright and clear, some dim or broken, some known by hardly more than a defacement of the large light that dwelt there. There the grave and cheerful carter went home at evening, looking ahead steadily, without sorrow, or alarm, or lassitude, and sometimes turning to his undulating team, noting their still bright harness and speaking to them by name: “Ho! Violet”—“Smiler”—“Darling”—“Swallow.” He was even now hungry, a little tired, thinking of his inn at nightfall. Heaven had caught him and made of him a picture of strength, contentment and evening which, in that luminous land, was pleasing yet to mortal men. There the cowman was leading out the bull, and making the ring jar in its nostrils. Still his back and knees were bent as he cursed out “Jimmy,” his face still moulded and unmoulded by faint-hearted lust, vexation, fear, perplexed by the home where his eleven children were, with his pigs and his fledgling magpies. His wife was near, but almost invisible, and as it were a wraith of pitiful maternity, neither bitter nor glad, but bearing her burdens, one still beneath her girdle, one in her arms, and others demanding her anxiety, winning her tenderness, on this side and on that. The gamekeeper stood, with smoking gun barrels, and a cloud of jay’s feathers still in the air and among the May foliage about him. Pride, stupidity, servility clouded his face as in his days of nature, and above him in the oaks innumerable jays laughed because beauty, like folly, was immortal there. The squire, more faint, and whether to his joy or not I could not discern, was standing under a bough on which hung white owls, wood owls, falcons, crows, magpies, cats, hedgehogs, stoats, weasels, some bloody, some with gaping stomachs, some dismembered or crushed, some fleshless, some heaving like boiling fat, and on them and him the sun shone hot. The red-faced man sat drinking ale, and with him it seemed always evening, and his stomach fathomless. Five boys—four of them with blackened faces and sticks or swords, and one of them dressed as a woman and carrying a bag—played the Pace-Egging Play in blue Easter weather in a daffodil lane before a ripe grey farmhouse. A little girl nursed something musingly, whether a mole or a cluster of rags I could not tell. The farmer sat on his cream pony, brow-beating a birdnesting boy by a gate. A young woman waited by a stile and did up her hair. And still the parson threw back his head and closed his eyes, and with an action as of washing his hands, talked melodiously and with satisfaction, saying, at last, “It is well for us to draw near unto the Lord.”
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