THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 Light and Twilight
 
 By the same Author 
 
 REST AND UNREST 
 
 ROSE ACRE PAPERS 
 
 LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFEKIES 
 
 THE HEART OF ENGLAND 
 
 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 
 
 FEMININE INFLUENCE ON THE POETS
 
 Light and Twilight 
 
 By 
 
 Edward Thomas 
 
 London 
 
 Duckworth (Si Co. 
 
 3 Henrietta Street. W.C, 
 
 1911
 
 AU rights rttervcd
 
 TO 
 
 A. Y. H. 
 1891-1911
 
 Note 
 
 ALL the papers in this book, except "Winter Music," 
 have been published in periodicals, and for permission 
 to reprint them I thank the Editors of The English 
 Review, The Nation, The Saturday Review, The 
 Nationalist, and The Thrush,
 
 Contents 
 
 PA.GZ 
 
 THE FLOWER-GATHERER .... 1 
 
 A GROUP OF STATUARY .... 10 
 
 HOME 24 
 
 THE STILE 46 
 
 THE END OF A DAY 52 
 
 THE ISLAND 58 
 
 WINTER Music 69 
 
 JULY 96 
 
 HAWTHORNDEN 117 
 
 THE ARTIST 130 
 
 BARQUE D' AMOUR 140 
 
 OLWEN 150 
 
 THE ATTEMPT 160 
 
 THE CASTLE OF LOSTORMELLYN . . . 174
 
 The Flower-Gatherer 
 
 " Herself a fairer flower." MILTON. 
 
 So strong was the young beauty of the year, 
 it might have seemed at its height were it 
 not that each day it grew stronger. The 
 new day excelled the one that was past, only 
 to be outshone by the next. Day after day 
 the sun poured out a great light and heat 
 and joy over the earth and the delicately 
 clouded sky. The south wind flowed in a 
 river straight from the sun itself, and divided 
 the fresh leaves with never-ceasing noise of 
 amorous and joyful motion. So mighty was 
 the sun that the miles of pale new foliage 
 shimmered mistily like snow, yet each leaf 
 was cool and moist with youth, and the 
 voices of the birds creeping and fluttering 
 among the branches were as the souls of that 
 
 A I
 
 The Flower-Gatherer 
 
 coolness and moistness and youth. If one 
 moment the myriad forms of life and happi- 
 ness intoxicated the delighted senses, at 
 another a glimpse of the broad mild land 
 stretched out below, and of the sun ruling it 
 in the blue above, gave also a calm and a 
 celestial dignity and simplicity to the whole. 
 One after another the pools, the rivers and 
 rivulets, the windows or glass roofs of the 
 vale, caught the sun and sparkled as if 
 Vega and Gemma and Arcturas and Sirius 
 and Aldebaran and Algol had fallen among 
 the meadows and woods. 
 
 On some days the sense of oneness, of wide 
 power and splendour uniting earth and sky, 
 of infinite simplicity, triumphed. On others 
 the spirit was content to bathe and half lose 
 itself in numbers, exuberance, complexity, in 
 the odours and colours and forms, one by one, 
 in the rich rising flood of the grass, in the 
 hurrying to and fro of preparation that was 
 nevertheless not over much troubled about 
 the end. 
 2
 
 The Flower-Gatherer 
 
 The children seemed to be trying to gather 
 all the flowers. It was their way of striving 
 to grasp the infinite. They were scattered 
 over the hillside, where the pale sward was 
 made an airy or liquid substance by the in- 
 numerable cowslips nodding upon its surface, 
 as upon a lake, that held their small shadows 
 each quite clear. All day they gathered 
 flowers, and threw them away, and gathered 
 more, and still there were no less. The earth 
 continued to murmur with blissful ease, as 
 if, like the wandering humble bee, it were 
 drowsed with the warmth and the abundance. 
 
 One child separated herself from the rest, 
 moving down instead of across or up the 
 hill. Often she went on her knees among 
 the flowers, with bent eyes that saw only 
 the hundreds close at hand. But from time 
 to time she raised her head, her delicately 
 browned and yet more rosy face, her gleamy 
 hair, that was as pale as barley on her 
 temples but elsewhere golden brown as 
 wheat, her round and calm yet lively eyes, 
 
 3
 
 The Flower-Gatherer 
 
 her restless happy lips and looked steadily 
 for a moment at the whole of earth and sky, 
 and grew solemn, only to return to the other 
 pleasure of the hundred cowslips just at her 
 feet, the crystal and emerald wings among 
 them, the pearly snails, the daisies and the 
 chips of chalk like daisies. Tighter grew her 
 hand round the swelling bunch. She slipped ; 
 the flowers fell and not all were picked up 
 again ; and so there was yet room for blue- 
 bells when she reached the wood below. 
 In the moister fields still lower there were 
 kingcups of gold and cuckoo flowers pink 
 and white, looking as if they had fluttered 
 down from the sky; and for these also a 
 place had to be found. The stitchworts of 
 a hedge side lured and piloted her to the 
 hollow, hardly larger than a great hall, where 
 a brook ran straight, for once in its life. 
 
 By the slow stream forget-me-nots made 
 
 a continuous haze on either bank. She was 
 
 now quite alone, under the old cherry tree 
 
 of the forsaken garden at the water's edge. 
 
 4
 
 The Flower-Gatherer 
 
 Six or eight huge crooked branches rising out 
 of the rocky trunk bore up a dome that was 
 all flowers. They were in rounded clusters 
 as of bubbling snow, and close as honeycomb. 
 The lovely freckled white smelt bitter and 
 sweet at once. The flowers hummed with 
 bees, and between the clusters were streaks 
 and wedges of the blue. The child looked 
 up suddenly at this glorious roof, and her 
 smile of surprise passed into what would 
 have been indifference, because the blossoms 
 were inaccessible, if she had not caught 
 sight of the forget-me-nots when the flight 
 of a cuckoo that had been calling out of the 
 cherry-tree carried her eyes away to where 
 he skimmed the water. He did not fly far, 
 nor cease to call while he was flying, or 
 when he was seated on one of the alders by 
 the brook. She looked at him as she was 
 plucking the forget-me-nots. This narrow 
 hollow was his room, she thought. Yet it 
 was full of other songs. There were black- 
 birds hidden in the hazels, or clearly defined 
 
 5
 
 The Flower-Gatherer 
 
 against the may flower or the bronzed flower- 
 ing oaks. Thrushes talked and called out to 
 her a hundred times : " Did she do it ? Did 
 she do it ? Did she ? Did she ? She did, 
 she did ! " and she laughed. A swallow 
 flew over his image in the water as if about 
 to dive in after it, and then rose up and 
 curved away. Smaller unfamiliar birds 
 sang rillets and minute cascades of hurrying 
 song. The gold-crest repeated a tune like 
 the unwinding of a tiny sweetly-creaking 
 winch, like the well-winch at home. But 
 the lazy cuckoo was lord of all. 
 
 Now she had filled both hands, and each 
 time she grasped a new stalk some of the 
 old fell out. So presently she laid them 
 down in the grass to rearrange them. But 
 she now noticed the tall sedges of the brook 
 and wanted some. She looked round to see 
 if anyone could see her doing this forbidden 
 thing, and then went to the edge and 
 stretched out her hand : they were too far. 
 The water was gliding under her, flashing 
 6
 
 The Flower-Gatherer 
 
 like brandished steel, and yet as clear as air 
 over the green stars of its bed. Everything 
 had always been kind to her, and this water 
 was one of the kindest, so playful and bright, 
 so pure that sometimes they came far to fetch 
 some of it in a pail for the house. She 
 leaned out, and even moved one foot as if 
 to step towards the green sedge. She lost 
 her footing and fell, not quite reaching the 
 blades as she splashed. She was scolded for 
 getting wet, but never much, and she used 
 to laugh as they were dressing her in fresh 
 clothes ; and to-day it was so warm. ... It 
 was an adventure. But her hair was all 
 wet ; she did not like that : and the water, 
 though so pure, was not pleasant in mouth, 
 nostrils, eyes, and ears, nor could she get rid 
 of it. Her hands touched the green stars ; 
 she could see them ; but the sky was gone. 
 She was surprised, indignant, anxious to 
 be out. Why this cruelty ? It was not a 
 game to go on like this. She was angry 
 . . . terrified . . . numbed. She could see 
 
 7
 
 The Flower-Gatherer 
 
 nothing but water, she heard, smelt, breathed, 
 tasted, touched water everywhere. Who 
 could have done it ? Something is cruel ! . . . 
 Why ? . . . See could not bear it. No ! No ! 
 Where were her flowers ? Where was her 
 mother ? 
 
 She rose up a little, and saw the sun, and 
 the cuckoo on the branch through the waves, 
 and heard the man calling to his horses in 
 the next field. Then solitude : all pleasure 
 gone, love, light, warmth, movement was 
 nothing, was over there, was past, or never 
 had been, would never be again. It was better 
 now. Sleep, sleep. But in the sleep, songs, 
 visions of the house, forms and faces moving 
 to and fro, and herself going in and out 
 amongst them, far away, long ago, over there, 
 in that other place. She was hurrying faster 
 and faster, running too fast for her legs, 
 carried away off them into the air, but sway- 
 ing and rising easily and more easily now. 
 She sighed as she seemed to float higher and 
 lighter into soft darkness, into utter darkness, 
 8
 
 The Flower-Gatherer 
 
 into nothing at all, where there was never 
 anything or will be anything. The mud 
 settled down. The stream flowed clear and 
 sweet. The sun had not so much to do but 
 that he could wilt the flowers lying on the 
 bank. Life went on exuberant, joyous, 
 august, looking neither to the right nor to 
 the left. The cuckoo called. The birds' 
 songs became so drowsy that they were not 
 missed when they ceased, and only its own 
 echo replied to the cuckoo. The child's 
 Avhite forehead was just above the water, 
 and a fly perched on it and preened his 
 diamond wings. A quarter of a mile away 
 the dinner bell at home was swung merrily 
 again and again by a strong arm that enjoyed 
 the task.
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 I HAD walked several miles through streets 
 whose high, flat-fronted buildings made me 
 feel as if I were at the bottom of a well, or 
 in a deep, weedy river-bed with cliffy banks, 
 from which it was impossible to climb out, 
 though I could turn aside into many tribu- 
 taries even more narrow and as deep. The 
 sky was stagnant and dull ; the fever and 
 heat of the air came not so much from the 
 sun as from underground, and from the walls 
 on either side a volcanic fire out of the 
 earth's depths and the hearts of men. The 
 plaited streams of men and women were 
 restless. Their bodies were glad of the heat, 
 but the gladness was repressed, and could 
 show itself only in a darkly burning eye, a 
 caged smile, a beautiful contrast of colours, 
 a restlessness that knew not its own cause, 
 10
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 far less a means of satisfying itself. They 
 thought of the country, of the sea, of leisure, 
 of resting on the grass, of sleep, of dreaming, 
 of love ; of everything which the prison made 
 impossible, or of nothing at all, merely un- 
 dulating with the waves of vague desire and 
 discontent. Thousands of faces and figures 
 passing me by were full of capacities, of 
 strength and love. They were like weapons, 
 swords, spears, axes and daggers, slender 
 scimitars and curious twisted edges, hanging 
 on the walls of a museum. They had the 
 same look of being unnatural and out of 
 place as objects in a museum. If only they 
 were to begin taking them down, trying their 
 edges, brandishing them ! 
 
 One such street led me at last out into a 
 wide pool. A score of streets opened into it, 
 yet it was broad and almost empty. It was 
 dotted with islands where people could take 
 refuge from the stream ; only there was no 
 stream ; and the islands also were empty. 
 It was a grey flat space, surrounded by 
 
 n
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 many-windowed buildings of a grey that 
 was almost black, a chapel, a factory, a school, 
 public-houses, at the several corners, and all 
 of this same hue. It was shapeless, like a 
 natural pool. It was far larger than the 
 largest cathedral in the world, and it allowed 
 a view of the sky, both overhead, and on 
 every side above the roofs and between the 
 walls of the streets running into it. The 
 islands were girt by low, thick posts. On 
 some there were pillars surmounted by lamps. 
 They were wonderfully silent and still, as if 
 detached in some way from the conditions of 
 the surrounding world. 
 
 The largest of the islands, lying at one 
 corner of the pool, was shaded by three plane 
 trees ; or rather, being trees, and retaining a 
 few colourless, dusty leaves, they suggested 
 the thought of shade. At first sight, the 
 trees, the emptiness, the space, the quiet, 
 gave the place a rustic or cloistral air as of 
 a cathedral or market town ; bullocks in 
 rows, sheep and pigs, crates of geese, farmers 
 12
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 going slowly to and fro would have been in 
 keeping with it or a priest walking at ease 
 with a fine lady. But under the trees there 
 were seats without backs, and the flagged 
 pavement was irregularly worn into many 
 hollows, and plastered with dust and 
 moisture in blotches. On the seats were 
 figures which few could have had difficulty in 
 recognising at a short distance as those of 
 human beings no longer young. It was they 
 who spread round about them the silence 
 which possessed the islands. 
 
 Even more fitting than a market or ecclesi- 
 astical group was this assembly under the 
 planes. For like a market group, in a 
 market square, it had a look of entire fit- 
 ness, as if it could not have been changed, as 
 if it had been there from the beginning. The 
 dull, grey figures might have risen up out of 
 the city soil, with some of it still clinging to 
 them, rude and shaggy after the effort of 
 birth, to sun themselves and look about. 
 Their greyness was wintry, the rasping 
 
 13
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 greyness of north-east wind that turns dry 
 roads, asphalt, flagstone, plough-land, and 
 meadow in the country, within the mind, to 
 one grey, the colour of ashes. Nothing in 
 them responded to the heat out of the sky. 
 They were of the dark earth. 
 
 Before the discovery that they had faces 
 with eyes and lips and hair, it might have 
 been seen that they were men and women, 
 and that for two reasons : first, they wore 
 clothes which subtly suggested those of the 
 people in the crowd, without in the least 
 resembling them ; second, they were miser- 
 able. I think that the clothes alone, the 
 misfits and cast-offs of scarecrows, would 
 have betrayed them, but I am not sure ; I 
 cannot separate the clothes from them, and 
 not them or their clothes from misery. By a 
 swift intuition the spirit penetrated those 
 recumbent or propped-up frameworks of old 
 black clothing, and divined their humanity 
 penetrated the clothing straight to the spirit, 
 without thinking of the flesh. For in these 
 14
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 abjects, as in the sumptuously apparelled, 
 there is something terrible about the mere 
 naked flesh, and it needs the inhuman ironist 
 to think of it with serenity. Of all those 
 who, full of meat and hope, or one of its 
 equivalents, passed by that island, and turned 
 an eye for a vacant second upon those under 
 the planes, not one failed to recognise that 
 these were of one species with themselves. 
 Not one got so far beyond that profound 
 truism as to think of them and to see them 
 naked, merely human, in their approxima- 
 tion to the appearance of a child bathing, a 
 beloved woman a-dream on a summer morn- 
 ing, or a quoit-thrower poised. Had anyone 
 so beheld them he would have stood thinking 
 half the day over it, or he would have run 
 away and stopped his eyes against the siren- 
 sphinx : I saw neither the thinker nor the 
 fugitive. 
 
 For all of us it was the clothing that had 
 a meaning, the clothing of other men and 
 other women. The clothes were the human
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 things. The clothes held them together and 
 made them the men and women they were, 
 and these upon the benches had a look as if 
 they would have crumbled away had they 
 been divested of their rags. The body be- 
 neath was unconsciously known and feared 
 as something diabolical or divine. The 
 Master Sculptor had wrought them daily 
 throughout a lifetime, and somebody had 
 always come to their rescue on the day when 
 the drapery had seemed no longer to perform 
 its part sufficiently. One man, it is true, 
 lay half along a seat with his head and 
 shoulders in the lap of a woman whose head 
 had fallen forward so as to hide his face with 
 her hair, and his trouser leg had rolled up 
 and disclosed a yellow bone. But the chances 
 of ordinary life do frequently bring to 
 sight a man's bare arm, breast, or foot, 
 though usually it is whitish and something 
 more than bone. This was a yellow bone. 
 Still, it might pass. There was nothing 
 here to outrage those who were not only 
 16
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 full-fed but rightly and confidently expecting 
 to remain so. Had it been a woman. 
 . . . Apparently there are always enough 
 black stockings left in the poor world to 
 cover the yellow bones of the distressed 
 mothers, sisters, wives, casual mistresses, 
 and daughters of Englishmen ; if not a loaf, 
 yet a black stocking. There were men and 
 women lying men and women doubled up 
 as the cavemen used to sleep and die men 
 and women with folded arms, and faces 
 looking down or straight over the grey pool 
 at nothing on the warm seats under the 
 planes. There was not an attitude that 
 could not be equalled among birds on a 
 frosty branch, and, for all that it was not 
 designed for them, their clothing was like 
 a natural covering of plumage or fur, but 
 mangy and soiled. 
 
 One of the women was doing up her dusty 
 
 hair. She had laid her black bonnet on her 
 
 knees, and her locks fell to the pavement 
 
 as she drooped her head to one side and 
 
 B 17
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 combed them with her fingers, her eyelids 
 closed, for there was no mirror. It was a 
 touch of nature. The gesture is always 
 pensively beautiful, and could never fail to 
 remind one of his mother when he was yet 
 a child, and another of his young wife but 
 there was nobody near, neither were there 
 any windows or private houses looking that 
 way. No one of them spoke, or wept, or 
 sighed. The woman who was doing up her 
 hair coughed now and then. The man with 
 his head in a woman's lap turned over once 
 to spit he was wide awake. As he once 
 more made his head comfortable the woman 
 revealed her eyes. There was nothing else 
 of her save rags, and the eyes seemed hardly 
 to belong to her. They expressed no private 
 grief or hope or fear, any more than do the 
 eyes in the portraits of Christ. It was a jest 
 of gamesome providence to light those lamps 
 in her face unknown to her, a jest like that 
 of a small boy who chalks another's back. 
 She bore about with her those beautiful 
 18
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 brown eyes, and, save that no doubt men 
 would kiss her for them, they served no 
 purpose which is not served by the eyes of 
 a weasel or crow. In a musician, now, in 
 a lovely woman living among mountain lakes 
 such eyes would have done many missions 
 for the soul. They were like wild-voiced 
 nightingales in their silence. But in this 
 cage. . . . Had they really belonged to her, 
 it was inconceivable that she should have 
 been content to git in that dusty retreat under 
 the planes. A musician or a poet with such 
 eyes would have told us subtle, remote, 
 lustrous things, and, if we had not listened 
 in his lifetime, yet, when he was dead and 
 known to all, his eyes would still be 
 remembered. A passer-by, seeing these eyes, 
 would have been startled, but would have 
 controlled himself by reflecting that they 
 could be matched in a cow's or Irish terrier's, 
 and he would have gone on to remember 
 even with amusement what very foolish 
 people have glorious eyes ; it is the inner eye 
 
 19
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 and the soul that count ; indeed, what better 
 proof of this could be given than this vision 
 on the bench in the dusty heart of the city, 
 in a corner where refuse had been swept up 
 and left to lie, as by a careless housemaid, 
 because nobody would notice it in such an 
 out-of-the-way place. A girl passing dropped 
 a paper bag opposite to the woman with the 
 eyes, and they saw it. She raised the man's 
 head in her hands, and looking to learn if 
 any of the others had seen, let his head down 
 on the bench. She rose and walked to the 
 bag. First she put her foot gently upon it 
 to make sure that she was right in thinking 
 that it was not paper alone. She was right. 
 She picked it up, thrust in her hand, filled 
 her mouth with something, and putting 
 the bag in her pocket, returned to her 
 seat. Since she saw nothing more that was 
 unfamiliar, or in any way new or worth 
 attention, nothing which she could not see 
 as well without them, she closed her 
 eyes. 
 20
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 All were now still. They absorbed the 
 dry, dull heat. 
 
 The pool and its islands appeared to be 
 empty. For no one notices the statuary of 
 London unless it is made for display or to 
 divide the traffic, not to form a decoration 
 appropriate to a particular site, as in the case 
 of these figures under the planes. In all the 
 city there was no group so perfectly in 
 keeping with its greatness and aridity. I 
 had seen equestrian figures, symbolic groups, 
 nudes, semi-nudes, figures in frock coats, 
 in stone or bronze; thousands of living 
 creatures, joyous or beautiful or tragic in 
 their capacity for joy, in harmony with the 
 burning sun, yet having nothing to do with 
 this city which was the work of the giants, 
 the heaven-besieging giants, not the gods- 
 But these thirteen or fourteen recumbent, 
 leaning, seated, and bowed figures, in their 
 dignified dismay, forming neither a circle 
 nor a square, but a group as of a herd or 
 flock, were in their place, thoroughly native, 
 
 21
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 children of the city clay fit lords of the 
 scene, if they had but known perfect 
 citizens of no mean city. Why should it 
 trouble to house Grecian marbles when it 
 had these eternal ones wrought with its own 
 hands ? Could they have been petrified at 
 that moment, and duly proclaimed as the 
 costly work of the most famous living 
 sculptor, none would have denied their pre- 
 eminence. One by one the alien transitory 
 crowd in the surrounding streets, after 
 venturing up to glance at the wondrous 
 art, would have slunk away and have left 
 the city in their possession as theirs by right 
 and theirs only. 
 
 It was very still. The sun in the sky was 
 the one thing that moved. I dreamed that 
 this exodus had taken place. I was a 
 traveller in a desert city whose sons had 
 all been dead thousands of years, but were 
 known still to the stranger by these mighty 
 marbles among which the planes had taken 
 root. The tradition of the dead race was so 
 
 22
 
 A Group of Statuary 
 
 powerful that not a bird or beast or any wild 
 thing cared to visit this memorial of it, except 
 curious men. And I was a man. I consulted 
 the learned authorities and found them 
 divided between two theories. One was 
 that it was a group of that ancient people 
 preserved in their natural attitudes, " while 
 the flesh was yet between their teeth, ere it 
 was chewed " by a petrifying plague. The 
 other was that these were their gods, whose 
 uncouth names I was not skilled to interpret. 
 It seemed to me that the second theory was 
 the better of the two, and, except Stone- 
 henge, I had seen nothing approaching its 
 sublimity in my wanderings.
 
 Home 
 
 A LITTLE square sitting room, not very 
 high, and hardly wider than it was high, 
 yellow-lit by a brass lamp in the centre, 
 and shutting out the visible world by three 
 walls of a pleasant dull gold and indis- 
 tinguishable pattern, and by three narrow 
 curtains of a ruddiness that was dreamily 
 heavy and sombre. On the walls, five 
 pictures at the same height above the tops 
 of the dark chairs, the mantelpiece and the 
 sideboard ; and on one, three shelves of 
 books. A very still, silent room ; and in it, 
 motionless as in amber, a man standing 
 before the books, and a woman with raised 
 eyebrows and stiff but unquiet hands, dove- 
 tailed together, staring into the black-crusted 
 fire. The man, chin on one hand, elbow on 
 the other, tall and upright and dark like a 
 24
 
 Home 
 
 pinnacle of black rock, looking sternly out 
 of kind eyes at the books as at children. 
 The woman, trying to drowse herself through 
 her eyes by the fire and through every pore 
 of her body by the silentness, yet aware all 
 the time of the husband between her and 
 the windows, as though his shadow blackened 
 her instead of half the books. These two, 
 separate and careful not to look at one 
 another. Had they been utterly alone they 
 would hardly have looked thus. They were 
 not alone. In the stillness and silence, 
 despite the walls and curtains, there was 
 another presence, and a greater than they. 
 It was London, a presence as mighty as 
 winter, though as invisible. Its face was 
 pressed up against the window; its spirit 
 was within. And there was yet another, 
 almost invisible, and as frail as the other 
 was mighty the spirit of the one who saw 
 the room and felt the enchantment of London 
 upon it. Neither the man nor the woman 
 knew what was this second spirit in their 
 
 25
 
 Home 
 
 room, yet the room was its home. It was 
 the spirit of a young soldier dying in a far 
 land. He was calm and easy now, without 
 pain and without motion. Only his dark 
 eyes told that he lived. As still was he, 
 with bright fixed eyes, as a bird sitting on 
 its nest. One had just left him who had 
 spoken a few words intended to comfort 
 him ; but all the words had faded as soon 
 as spoken, just as wavelets on a burning 
 sand which they do not even stain, all 
 except " for your country." He had heard 
 these before without considering them, 
 though he would have struck the man who 
 mocked at them. This time they remained 
 because they instantly recalled the first time 
 he had heard them used, eighteen years 
 before. His father had said to him one 
 morning, " Johnny, I am going to take you 
 to see your country, to-morrow." His pale 
 mother had smiled her patient, weary smile 
 with some gentle ridicule added at these 
 words. Then she looked admiringly at her 
 26
 
 Home 
 
 husband, the big, gaunt wry-faced man, 
 whose eyes laughed so under his black 
 brows. She had no country. She was born 
 in the great city where they lived, where 
 Johnny was born, and she had never left 
 it. Nearly everything outside her home 
 inspired her with wonder, awe, or fear, and 
 she held her husband in awe because he had 
 a country of which he frequently talked, 
 where they spoke a different language, had 
 queer names, different food, different ways 
 and, as she dimly conjectured, a kind of 
 common life as of one big family. Her 
 husband had told her often that he had only 
 to take a train to his country and get out 
 at any station over the border, and some- 
 body, most likely a cousin, would step up 
 as if he had been waiting, and say, with his 
 face all cut up by a smile, " And how are 
 you, David John, this long time ? " But 
 somehow he never went until this April. 
 He had had to be content with talking, 
 with taking the boy on his lap and singing 
 
 27
 
 Home 
 
 the songs of his country, grand wailing 
 songs that would often make him happy 
 for the rest of the evening, merry, quick 
 songs that made him tap the ground with 
 his toes and yet brought tears into his eyes, 
 so that he set the child down and went 
 out into the street and came home, bitterly, 
 hours afterwards to the dark house and the 
 meek waiting wife. 
 
 But now he was really going to his 
 country. "To-morrow," he said, "we will 
 take the train at midnight, and before noon 
 we will be finding a curlew's nest on the 
 moor just by where the old battle was." 
 
 " What battle, father ? " said the boy. 
 
 "Why, one of the old battles when we 
 beat the English, I suppose," said he. 
 
 " But what was the name of it, and when 
 was it fought ? " 
 
 " Ah, I cannot tell you that now : it is 
 
 not in the history books. But the river 
 
 there is called the River with the Red 
 
 Voice, and there is a battle mound. The 
 
 28
 
 Home 
 
 air is so clean there that a collar lasts you 
 a fortnight." 
 
 " Dear me," said his mother, waking with 
 a start from her musing. 
 
 Then the boy fell a-dreaming about his 
 father picking up mottled eggs among dead 
 men's bones by a river that ran red with 
 blood. 
 
 Those bright eyes in the hospital tent 
 saw now the railway station like a huge 
 palace, sprinkled with lights and paved 
 with multitudes of men and women, and 
 good silent trains stretched out among them 
 which the people had caught by a hundred 
 handles and were mounting, to persuade 
 them to carry them far off into the black 
 night beyond, the unmapped black night 
 with its timorous lines of small lights. He 
 and his father entered the multitude and 
 crept in and out alongside the train ; and it 
 was very wonderful, but many of the groups 
 who talked were talking in the tongue in 
 which his father used to sing, and he looked 
 
 29
 
 Home 
 
 up at their pallid faces and black hair and 
 agitated smiles and boldly moving lips, and 
 was inclined to be afraid, but remembering 
 that they were his father's people he was 
 not afraid, but filled with wonder and 
 admiration. Even some very little children, 
 smaller than himself, were chattering in 
 that same tongue quite easily ; it seemed to 
 Johnny that they were very clever little 
 children. How kind everybody looked now ! 
 He had never seen so many people smiling 
 and talking friendly before. 
 
 " Where is our country now ? " said 
 Johnny, and as soon as he had sat down 
 with his face towards the land of his desire, 
 the train was gliding out past a hedge of 
 white faces and white lifted hands into the 
 darkness. 
 
 The carriage was full, and the boy liked 
 pressing up against his countrymen on both 
 sides and touching their boots with his 
 toes, and watching the thoughts on their 
 faces and the books and papers they were 
 30
 
 Home 
 
 reading, and how they would sometimes 
 let their books and their papers fall on their 
 laps, and look out at the wild-starred night 
 seriously as if, perhaps, "it had come . . . 
 their country." In a corner opposite sat a 
 young woman, and next her a young man. 
 He was reading. She was doing nothing 
 but thinking, with her eyes turned towards 
 Johnny. Soon the man closed his eyes ; 
 his head sank upon the woman's shoulder, 
 but she did not move, only took away the 
 book lest it should fall, and she offered 
 Johnny a sweet, but he was too busy 
 looking at her, and would not take it. 
 The young woman's brown eyes fixed on 
 him softly, and, his father's arm round 
 him, he began to dream ; and he awoke, 
 surprised that he had been asleep, at a 
 cold glittering station with a few faces 
 staring in from the platform, looking for 
 seats. " Is this ? " He was going to ask 
 his father if they had arrived, but he saw 
 the name of a well-known town on the 
 
 31
 
 Home 
 
 seats and lamps and again closed his eyes ; 
 the others also had looked and immediately 
 closed their eyes. Then nothing tiny 
 lamps in the darkness nothing again 
 then over a hill a large moon began to 
 light a watery sky, black cloud and blacker 
 earth, and looked afraid of the huge world 
 over which she reigned. Another stop, a 
 well-known name on the lamps, and then 
 sleep to the sound of the train expressing 
 steadiness, determination, and content in its 
 rhythm and hope in its speed. If he opened 
 his sleepy lids he saw the young woman's 
 soft eyes, and the earth now grey and not 
 black, and the moon high, without a cloud 
 around or below, with groups of houses 
 lost as it seemed in the night and 
 cowering under the trees, here and there 
 a light burning where someone, perhaps, 
 was enviously watching the train on its 
 march of discovery and conquest; or, still 
 later, a pale sky lit from below and behind, 
 as well as from the now invisible moon 
 32
 
 Home 
 
 above, a river gleaming, a horse knee-deep 
 in white mist looking up at the train, a 
 church upon a hill that seemed awake but 
 alone, small contemptible stations where 
 they did not stop. 
 
 The fixed bright eyes in the bed saw 
 these stations again in their dreariness, and 
 saddened with the dream that he now 
 was upon such a station, and the lighted 
 train was rushing by and forgetting him, 
 with its proud freight of living men looking 
 ahead towards their country. 
 
 Nodding awake again, he saw the girl 
 eating an orange, a wide water like a sea 
 and the pale moon shrivelled beyond it, a 
 farm and its cattle streaming out under a 
 hill covered with crooked oaks, and the 
 cattle were bowed under the weight of their 
 long horns. "It is near," whispered his 
 father : he slept. 
 
 When he awoke he was upon his father's 
 knee, and both with cheeks together were 
 looking, over frosty meadows and blown 
 C 33
 
 Home 
 
 trees, at sand hills and sea beyond, and 
 on the other side at hills crimsoned with 
 bracken, their summits invisible, so steep 
 were they. "This is it," said the father. 
 " Yes," whispered the son, and both looked 
 through and beyond the mountains and the 
 sea to their country, the country of their 
 souls, so that the child's first thought that 
 this was not what he had expected never 
 appeared again, until now in the tent. 
 When a gap in the near hill showed them 
 greater giants beyond that appeared to have 
 descended out of the sky, and only half 
 descended as yet, for their crests were in 
 the clouds, the two were not more moved ; 
 they could see, far beyond these distances, 
 greater hills, a land even more free. 
 
 They stopped, and there were wizard 
 faces waiting, and the strange tongue that 
 was the boy's own was spoken, and they 
 seemed to welcome him. He began to step 
 down from his father's knee to get out 
 but no, not yet. 
 34
 
 Home 
 
 They stopped again where there was only 
 a black-bearded, tall man and a sheep-dog 
 waiting. They could hear the thrushes 
 sing, under the clear blue and the lightless 
 moon, from out of dark thickets in a hollow 
 rushy, land, backed by the sea and the 
 orange sails of vessels that caught the 
 dawn. " Over there," said his father, point- 
 ing beyond the ships, " is the land we have 
 come from." It was as faint and grey and 
 incredible in the distance as his own land 
 was clear and true ; and he sighed with 
 happiness and security, and also with an- 
 ticipation of the further deeps that were 
 to be revealed, the battlefield, the curlew's 
 eggs, the castles, the harps, the harpers 
 harping all the songs of his father. He 
 had got so used to the faces of the men, 
 which were like his father's, that when his 
 father asked him whether they were not 
 different from the English, he said "No," 
 and was scolded for it. 
 
 The sun and the bright world dazzled his 
 
 35
 
 Home 
 
 eyes. He slept. Then, a black barren land, 
 a host of tall black chimneys between hills 
 and sea, fountains of black smoke, sheaves 
 of scarlet flame, red-hot caves. . . . Young 
 men crowded into the carriage and burst 
 out into a song. It was in the language 
 that Johnny spoke, but the beauty of their 
 voices in harmony made it different from 
 anything he had heard before that day. 
 
 A marsh and a thousand sheep, gaunt 
 hills on one side, sea on the other, and the 
 young men singing a war march in their own 
 tongue at his father's request. It made him 
 afraid at first. Then he fancied that the 
 battlefield was not far off, and they were 
 going to it, and the song was sung to 
 hearten a host of which he was one. He 
 felt grim, but glad and bold as he looked 
 at the dark young men and thought of 
 " his country." 
 
 "My country," muttered the dreamer 
 lying still, and blinked his eyes as the 
 tent flapped and he saw outside the sun 
 36
 
 Home 
 
 of another country blazing and terrible as 
 a lion above the tawny hills. The country 
 that he had been fighting for was not 
 this solitude of the marsh, the mountains 
 beyond, the farms nestling in the beards 
 of the mountains, the brooks and the great 
 water, the land of his father and of his 
 father's fathers, of those who sang the 
 same songs, the young men and the old, 
 and the women who had looked kindly 
 on him. Where were those young men 
 scattered? Where had their war march 
 on that April morning led them? 
 
 A grim, black-bearded face was bending 
 over him, with smiles deeply entrenched all 
 over it. He was lifted straight into a cart 
 behind a chestnut pony with his father 
 and the man. 
 
 The sun was hot. They climbed up high 
 among the hedgeless and pathless mountain, 
 always up. The larks sang. The mountain 
 lambs skipped before the cart. 
 
 They alighted by a solitary cottage under 
 
 37
 
 Home 
 
 the road, whence a maid brought ale for 
 the men and milk for the boy. They sat 
 down among gorse bushes and ate apple tart 
 and cheese, wafers of oat and currant cakes. 
 The men talked. Johnny wandered up 
 from the road with a girl of the cottage. 
 And there with the rough strange mountain 
 boys they set fire to the gorse and dead 
 bracken. The flames leapt up like the genii 
 out of the imprisoning jar in the Arabian 
 tales, and he drew back. The earth was 
 crowded with little flickering plants of fire 
 spreading this way and that. Huge whirls 
 and rounds of the yellow- white smoke soared 
 up against the milky sky. The smell of the 
 smoke heated by fire and sun was delicious. 
 When the earth was black they moved on ? 
 while some sent the grey boulders galloping 
 downward till they bounded over the road 
 with a hero leap, and struck sparks out of 
 other boulders or plunged into the gorse. 
 The boys roared, the girls shrieked. All 
 disappeared. But all day they could see 
 38
 
 Home 
 
 the smoke of one conflagration pouring 
 upwards before the wind in a great river, 
 lost awhile in the hollows, seen again con- 
 tinually surging towards the high crests mile 
 after mile, like a gigantic engine smoking 
 wildly over the wilds. 
 
 Outside one cottage there stood a little 
 old man, naked to the waist, washing 
 himself and talking to three foxes chained 
 up to a shed. The foxes seemed to under- 
 stand his tongue and he theirs, and neither 
 heeded the cart as it drove on. And now, 
 careless of waterfalls thundering among low 
 woods beneath the road, of flames and 
 smoke clouds hunting upwards over the 
 moor, and of mountains such as he had 
 dreamed lying across their course a day 
 ahead, Johnny fell asleep, content, not even 
 rousing himself to make sure whether that 
 was the cuckoo he heard upon the hillside. 
 
 The dream of the fixed open eyes wreathed 
 and wavered. Was it the same day it 
 was morning and about noon when he 
 
 39
 
 Home 
 
 stood by the door of a long white inn 
 fronting the sun ? The wide courtyard, 
 bounded on one side by the road and on the 
 other by a green hedge, was dotted with 
 fowls pecking idly or lying down. In the 
 midst rose a brown oak, very thick and stiff 
 and well stricken in years, and at its side a 
 very tall gentleman with a fishing-rod was 
 mounting a trap ; and the boy watching him 
 and thinking of his wealth and happiness 
 was happier than he. On the hot white 
 pavement by the door all the dogs were lazy 
 in the sun. Each one, except the big, 
 smooth pointer, had a bone, and each snarled 
 as the pointer strolled past. There was a 
 greyhound, a spaniel, a sheep-dog with one 
 eye almost white, a mongrel, resembling 
 both the spaniel and the pointer, and a 
 fox-hound. From time to time the spaniel's 
 puppies pure spaniels broke in among the 
 fowls, and the mother raised her head and 
 left the bone under her paws until the 
 pointer re-appeared. It seemed to Johnny 
 40
 
 Home 
 
 that the sun was always full upon that white 
 inn, that the dogs were always lying down 
 there in the sun, and that it had been so 
 and would be so for all time. He longed 
 to have an inn with a white wall facing 
 the sun, and many dogs to take the sun 
 upon the pavement in front. The fisher- 
 man drove away. 
 
 The father and son walked in a solitary 
 wood upon the side of a steep hill, and at 
 the foot of it was a green vale that wound 
 with the windings of a broad stream running 
 fast, and at the top of the hill, where it 
 was a precipice, hung a castle with trees 
 growing in its crevices, and its windows 
 looked out through ivy thicker than its vast 
 walls down at several miles of the green vale 
 on either hand, at the sun-bathed gloom of 
 the oakwoods of the opposite slope, at the 
 other castles, bleached crags which could 
 be recognised as the work of men only 
 because they were even bolder and more 
 gaunt than the natural crags round about. 
 
 41
 
 Home 
 
 Sometimes it rained, sometimes the sun 
 shone, and the father and son were glad of 
 both as they gathered blue violets and white 
 sorrel in the dripping and glistening woods. 
 Under the castle wall they sat down, and 
 the father brought out a book and read : 
 " King Arthur was at Caerlleon upon Usk 
 ..." and Johnny began to think of bow- 
 men shooting through the ivy about the 
 windows, of king and queen walking in the 
 grassy courts within the walls, whose roof 
 was the sky. His father told him that the 
 book was written by his countrymen about 
 the heroes of his country, and the child 
 made over to those heroes the glories that 
 had once been Aladdin's, and the Marsh 
 King's, and King Solomon's. . . . 
 
 The dark eyes gleamed like a thrush's 
 upon her nest when she is watched. 
 
 They saw more mountains, and the cart 
 
 creeping over them and among them, small 
 
 as a stone upon the road. And by and by 
 
 they got down by a brook and began to 
 
 42
 
 Home 
 
 travel upward towards the source. There 
 were clear and dark pools in the brook where 
 the trout darted and the man with them said : 
 " The fish runs away, who knows that man 
 has sinned." They were among steep woods 
 of oak trees as dense almost as grass, all 
 twisted and grey as if made of stone and 
 very old, but based in greenest leaves and 
 flowers of white, of gold, of golden green. 
 The blackbird sang, and the brook gushed, 
 but they did not speak, except that as they 
 left, the strange man said : " This is the 
 Castle of Leaves." Now, there was no longer 
 a path, and the way was over whistling dead 
 grass and grey stones, like ruins of a palace 
 that must have been lofty as the heavens, 
 and when they had gone further still the 
 man said it was " The Castle of the Wind." 
 And now the mist washed over all and hid 
 everything but silvered stones and dead grass 
 blades underfoot, and the rain that was like 
 bent grass blades of crystal, through which 
 for a moment a sheep crept up and crept 
 
 43
 
 Home 
 
 away again, or a hare, grey as the grass, 
 but blackened as if by fire, leaped up and 
 dived into the wind, the mist, and the rain. 
 Stumbling still among the ruins of the 
 wind's castle, they continued to climb, until 
 the rocks, now tall as a man and so dense 
 that some had to be scaled, came to an end 
 at the shore of a lake which they surrounded 
 "The Shepherd's Lake." The cry of a 
 raven repeated at intervals from the same 
 spot high up above told them that the 
 mountains rose higher yet and in a precipice. 
 The boy sat upon a rock while the two men 
 went out of sight to the other side ; his father 
 to bathe, as he had done twenty years before 
 when a young man. The wind hissed as 
 through closed lips and jagged teeth. The 
 mist wavered over the polished ripples of 
 the lake that resembled a broad and level 
 courtyard of glass among the rough hills. 
 The men were silent, and the sounds of their 
 footsteps were caught up and carried away 
 in the wind. The boy was thoughtless 
 44
 
 Home 
 
 and motionless, with a pleasure that was 
 astonished at itself. He could not have 
 told how long he had been staring at nothing 
 over the lake when, at his feet, his father's 
 head was thrust up laughing out of the 
 water, turned with a swirl, and disappeared 
 again into the mist. He had not ceased to 
 try to disentangle that head from the mist 
 when once more he heard that wailing song 
 that used to make his father so glad, and he 
 himself sang back such words as, without 
 knowing their meaning, he remembered; 
 his brain full of the mists, the mountains, 
 the rivers, the fire in the fern, the castles, 
 the knights, the kings and queens, the 
 mountain boys at cricket, the old man with 
 the foxes, the inn dogs lying in the sun . . . 
 the sun . . . the mist ... his country . . . 
 not the country he had fought for ... the 
 country he was going to, up and up and over 
 the mountains, now that he was dying . . . 
 now that he was dead. 
 
 45
 
 The Stile 
 
 THREE roads meet in the midst of a little 
 green without a house or the sign of one, and 
 at one edge there is an oak copse with un- 
 trimmed hedges. One road goes east, another 
 west, and the other north ; southward goes 
 a path known chiefly to lovers, and the stile 
 which transfers them to it from the rushy 
 turf is at a corner of the copse. 
 
 The country is low, rich in grass and 
 small streams, mazily sub-divided by crooked 
 hedgerows, with here and there tall oaks 
 in broken lines or, round the farm houses, in 
 musing protective clusters. It is walled in 
 by hills on every side, the higher ones bare, 
 the lower furred with trees, and so nearly 
 level is it that, from any part of it, all these 
 walls of hills, and their attendant clouds can 
 be seen. 
 46
 
 The Stile 
 
 I have known the copse well for years. It 
 holds an acre of oaks two or three genera- 
 tions old, the roots of ancient ones, and an 
 undergrowth of hazel and brier which is 
 nearly hidden by the high thorn hedge. 
 
 One day I stopped by the stile at the 
 corner to say good-bye to a friend who had 
 walked thus far with me. It was about 
 half an hour after the sunset of a dry, hot 
 day among the many wet ones in that July. 
 We had been talking easily and warmly 
 together, in such a way that there was no 
 knowing whose was any one thought, be- 
 cause we were in electrical contact and each 
 leapt to complete the other's words, just as 
 if some poet had chosen to use the form of 
 an eclogue and had made us the two shep- 
 herds who were to utter his mind through 
 our dialogue. When he spoke I had already 
 the same thing in the same words to express. 
 When either of us spoke we were saying 
 what we could not have said to any other 
 man at any other time. 
 
 47
 
 The Stile 
 
 But as we reached the stile our tongues 
 and our steps ceased together, and I was 
 instantly aware of the silence through which 
 our walking and talking had drawn a thin 
 line up to this point. We had been going 
 on without looking at one another in the 
 twilight. Now we were face to face. We 
 wished to go on speaking but could not 
 My eyes wandered to the rippled outline of 
 the dark heavy hills against the sky, which 
 was now pale and barred with the grey ribs 
 of a delicate sunset. High up I sa w Gemma ; 
 I even began trying to make out the bent 
 star bow of which it is the centre. I saw 
 the plain, now a vague dark sea of trees and 
 hedges, where lay my homeward path. 
 Again I looked at the face near me, and 
 one of us said : 
 
 "The weather looks a little more settled." 
 The other replied : "I think it does." 
 I bent my head and tapped the toe of 
 my shoe with my stick, wishing to speak, 
 wishing to go, but aware of a strong un- 
 48
 
 The Stile 
 
 known power which made speech impossible 
 and yet was not violent enough to detach 
 me altogether and at once from the man 
 standing there. Again my gaze wandered 
 dallying to the hills to the sky and the 
 increase of stars the darkness of the next 
 hedge the rushy green, the pale roads and 
 the faint thicket mist that was starred with 
 glow-worms. The scent of the honeysuckles 
 and all those hedges was in the moist air. 
 Now and then a few unexpected, startled 
 and startling words were spoken, and the 
 silence drank them up as the sea drinks 
 a few tears. But always my roving eyes 
 returned from the sky, the hills, the plain to 
 those other greenish eyes in the dusk, and 
 then with a growing sense of rest and love 
 to the copse waiting there, its indefinite 
 cloud of leaves and branches and, above that, 
 the outline of oak tops against the sky. It 
 was very near. It was still, sombre, silent. 
 It was vague and unfamiliar. I had for- 
 gotten that it was a copse and one that 
 D 49
 
 The Stile 
 
 I had often seen before. White roses like 
 mouths penetrated the mass of the hedge. 
 I found myself saying " good-bye." I 
 heard the word " good-bye " spoken. It was 
 a signal not of a parting but of a uniting. In 
 spite of the unwillingness to be silent with 
 my friend a moment before, a deep ease and 
 confidence was mine underneath that unrest. 
 I took one or two steps to the stile and, 
 instead of crossing it I leaned upon the 
 gate at one side. The confidence and ease 
 deepened and darkened as if I also were 
 like that still, sombre cloud that had been 
 a copse, under the pale sky that was light 
 without shedding light. I did not dis- 
 turb the dark rest and beauty of the earth 
 which had ceased to be ponderous, hard 
 matter and had become itself cloudy or, 
 as it is when the mind thinks of it, spiritual 
 stuff, so that the glow-worms shone through 
 it as stars through clouds. I found myself 
 running without weariness or heaviness of 
 the limbs through the soaked overhanging 
 SO
 
 The Stile 
 
 grass. I knew that I was more than the 
 something which had been looking out all 
 that day upon the visible earth and thinking 
 and speaking and tasting friendship. Some- 
 where close at hand in that rosy thicket or 
 far off beyond the ribs of sunset I was 
 gathered up with an immortal company, 
 where I and poet and lover and flower and 
 cloud and star were equals, as all the little 
 leaves were equal ruffling before the gusts, or 
 sleeping and carved out of the silentness. 
 And in that company I had learned that I 
 am something which no fortune can touch, 
 whether I be soon to die or long years away. 
 Things will happen which will trample and 
 pierce, but I shall go on, something that is 
 here and there like the wind, something un- 
 conquerable, something not to be separated 
 from the dark earth and the light sky, a 
 strong citizen of infinity and eternity. The 
 confidence and ease had become a deep joy ; 
 I knew that I could not do without the 
 Infinite, nor the Infinite without me. 
 
 Si
 
 The End of a Day 
 
 TOWARDS evening of that tempestuous day 
 the west began to clear and brighten under 
 a swaying heavy curtain of cloud, and the 
 primroses to shine with a cold light out of 
 the black earth, as I left the road to cross a 
 corner of the moor. Before me and moving 
 athwart my path in the slant rain was a 
 young girl. Though the rain was in her eyes 
 and hair, and the wind enveloped her with 
 its cold kisses, she was young and proud. 
 Her head was lifted up and her lips parted 
 with pleasure at the rain upon them. She 
 had come out at the sight of the brightening 
 west and was walking towards it. She was 
 lightly dressed as knowing that the rain was 
 spent, or not caring, and she had not gone 
 many steps before me when it ceased. The 
 dark woods behind her still roared with the 
 52
 
 The End of a Day 
 
 dying wind and the dripping rain, yet upon 
 the moor there was a walled-in silence 
 through which she walked, and upon her and 
 the dead grass fell a watery cold light out of 
 the white pane that widened every moment 
 more radiantly in the western sky. And to 
 me, losing all memory of the storm and the 
 peace-making, it was as if the day had led up 
 to this, as if a long resounding avenue had 
 led to a still glimmering lawn as broad as the 
 earth and mingling with the bright heavens. 
 I had emerged out of the darkness and mist 
 into an immeasurable and wondrously open 
 world, and across it moved the figure of the 
 girl. My steps became slower and slower. 
 I no longer drove my heels into the ground. 
 My lips ceased to murmer all manner of songs, 
 poems, fragments of tunes, hunting cries, 
 fantastic exclamations remembered or in- 
 vented. In a minute or two I sat down on 
 a boulder in the grass, and leaned forward 
 wearily with hands and chin upon the handle 
 of my stick. 
 
 53
 
 The End of a Day 
 
 The girl was beautiful. Breasting the 
 rain at first, and now facing the restful and 
 splendid west, any springy maid might have 
 painted herself upon my brain for an hour 
 or so. But she so raised my thought that 
 suddenly at this noble end of a great day I 
 felt myself weary, at once weary and very 
 glad. Had she leaped out of the earth or 
 out of the sky to express in human shape the 
 loveliness of the hour, she could not have 
 been made otherwise by a sculptor god 
 solemn and joyous and proud with the pride 
 of things that are perfect and know it not, 
 yet have as it seems attendant spirits offering 
 them praise and courtliness wherever they 
 go. No princess barbarically and multi- 
 tudinously escorted could have walked with 
 greater magnificence than this girl thinking 
 her thoughtless thoughts. She now was the 
 triumphant one, as I had been when I looked 
 over plain and hill and saw them faint and 
 quiet as in a tale. Not for one moment, but 
 all the time of watching her, I felt as though 
 54
 
 The End of a Day 
 
 I were looking out of a grave where I lay 
 stiff and still but with wide eyes and untired 
 spirit, and with those eyes and that spirit 
 saluted and loved the beautiful living creature 
 passing by regardless. 
 
 I watched her plant her feet firmly and 
 rise up lightly as one might do to whom 
 these things were impossible and marvellous. 
 She had a slightly swaying motion which, 
 graceful in itself, was fascinating, partly 
 because it suggested how much more so it 
 would have been had she been utterly un- 
 encumbered by dress. This swaying from 
 hip to heel was the most obvious expression 
 of the indolence which went side by side 
 with her force, and was one with it, since it 
 showed how much of that force was subdued 
 in the effortless exercise of walking. She 
 could have run, she could have leapt and 
 climbed, almost it seemed that she could 
 have flown, yet she but walked steadily across 
 the moor. She was perfectly at peace, untried 
 by pain and strife and sorrow, or passion. 
 
 55
 
 The End of a Day 
 
 The unaccomplished hours hovered about 
 her as she went. She might some day be 
 a Helen, a Guinevere, a Persephone, an 
 Electra, an Isoud, an Eurydice, an Antigone, 
 an Nimue, an Alcestis, a Dido, a Lais, a 
 Francesca, a Harriet. She was a violet- 
 eyed maid walking alone. Yet these were 
 the spirits that attended her. Helen 
 whispered to her of Theseus, Menelaus, Paris, 
 Ulysses, of calm Lacedaemon, and burning 
 Troy ; Persephone of the lone Sicilian 
 meadows, and the dark chariot and Dis; 
 Dido of Carthage and yEneas and the sweet 
 knife of despair ; Eurydice of Orpheus and 
 Hades and the harp and silence ; Isoud of 
 Tristram and the ship and joyous Gard ; Lais 
 of many lovers, and not one love ; Electra 
 of her brother ; Alcestis of her spouse and 
 death ; Harriet of the poet, and the water 
 that quenched love. And there were many 
 more upon the grass under the western light. 
 They were tempting, guarding, counselling, 
 warning, wailing, rejoicing, vaguely whisper- 
 56
 
 The End of a Day 
 
 ing. They waited on her, some wistful, some 
 imperious, but all drawn after her whither- 
 soever she went, all praising her for her sweet 
 lips, her long brown hair and its gloom and 
 hidden smouldering fires, her eyes and her 
 eyelids that were as the violet opened flower 
 and the white closed bud, her breath sweet 
 as the earth's, her height, her whiteness, her 
 swift limbs, and her rippling arms and wrists 
 and hands, made for love and for all fair 
 service ; her straightness, that was as the 
 straightness of a tulip on the best day of 
 spring ; and for her life, because it was all 
 before her, pale and mysteriously lit, without 
 stars yet with the promise of stars like the 
 sky which had now dismissed all clouds but 
 one dark bar, and was expanding around 
 and above without a bound. Into that sky, 
 into the gorse of the moor and a wild 
 multitude of birds, she slipped out of my 
 sight ; and I rose up, and knew that I was 
 tired, and continued my journey. 
 
 57
 
 The Island 
 
 FOR several miles two rough brooks from 
 the moorland, gradually approaching one 
 another between rocks that are crowned 
 with forest, assume a kind of sobriety and 
 maturity as they widen and feel the sea. 
 The dividing forest descends precipitously 
 in a great wedge to the heron-haunted flats 
 of the confluence. The valley now rapidly 
 grows narrow, and its sides more steep and 
 bare, until vertical rock walls form a gate- 
 way for the river out to the sea. Around 
 the harbour, on the steep sides and floor of 
 the vast chamber between the confluence 
 and this gateway, the town is built. The 
 principal shops, a group of public offices, 
 and an hotel on one side, a few dwellings, 
 a line of warehouses, and a low-towered 
 church on the other, stand in broken rows 
 58
 
 The Island 
 
 along the water ; and all these are of 
 grey stone with greenish -grey slated roofs. 
 Above and behind these the houses are 
 either perched upon horizontal ledges or 
 appear to be in the act of scrambling up or 
 down to them ; they also are of stone, some 
 grey, many white or yellow, and the spaces 
 between them are filled by the green of their 
 precipitous little gardens or the yellow of 
 rock blossoms. Higher still, upon the brink 
 of the valley, are the edges of the pasture 
 and the cornland, and the grey or the 
 stained white walls of one or two farms. 
 
 It is low tide. The naked fishing boats 
 or small trading craft lean high out of the 
 clear and unruffled green water, the bronzed 
 weeds, and the white and grey and silver 
 and blue minute pebbles below the quay. 
 Many white gulls float on the water, others 
 are rising or descending, some coil in and 
 out among the masts and above them con- 
 tinually, and are joined by ones and twos 
 and small companies arriving at a great 
 
 59
 
 The Island 
 
 height from inland or low down from the sea. 
 Those that float are silent, those rising or de- 
 scending or wheeling are crying to one another 
 with sea voices among sharp white pinions. 
 
 Near one side of the harbour men in 
 blue jerseys sit or stand in knots, or walk 
 this way and that very slowly among the 
 drying brown nets and the casks and boxes. 
 On the opposite side a few carts or foot 
 passengers follow the roadway along the 
 edge of the water until it comes to a 
 multitude of oak trunks lying in giant loose 
 bundles. Over these children are always 
 climbing, or hiding amongst them; and, if 
 there be sun, one or two of the oldest men 
 are sitting on the warm timber. To pass 
 the trees the road curves outward a little 
 and then back again to cross a low, long 
 bridge to the little shelterless, empty railway 
 station. Beyond that are the mud flats and 
 the stilted herons, the wedge of oaks, the two 
 valleys and their jackdaws shouting, and, 
 farther still, moorland, moorland, moorland, 
 60
 
 The Island 
 
 like a dim, cloud-bank that never moves 
 and is yet never the same. Seaward, this 
 road fringes one of the vertical rock walls 
 of the river gateway, passes round between 
 the sea and a dozen large new houses and 
 private hotels, and where they end becomes 
 a rude track climbing to one grey farm and 
 then another upon the sky-line, where it 
 disappears under a bunch of sycamores. 
 
 Opposite the hotels and new houses and 
 their many white-painted window frames, 
 between road and sea, is a waste patch 
 covered with bramble and gorse, thistle and 
 tall grass, where a little-voiced bird perches 
 on the top sprigs and twitters with his head 
 turned out to the sea that drowns his song. 
 Up from the waste all day long a meadow 
 pipit rises into the air and slants, singing 
 its wild and delicate song, down past the 
 windows of the hotel. The brambles over- 
 hang a short dip of yellow sand down to a 
 narrow daisied sward and then the beach. 
 There the low western light turns the 
 
 61
 
 The Island 
 
 crumbling grey rocks to gold and brightens 
 the white gulls standing each on a fragment 
 of rock just disappearing under the tide. 
 The water is of an effervescing, infinitely 
 rippled grey blue, but silver at the rock edges 
 where the black weeds heave and unroll. 
 
 The sea is idle except on the shore, where 
 it plunges up sighing as if weary of inaction, 
 and in this sigh spends itself as with a broken 
 resolve, so that but a trickle of the wave runs 
 up among the gorgeous weed-quilted rocks. 
 
 The coast is a long curve of grey sand and 
 dark rocks, ending on one hand several 
 miles away in a green headland with a sheer 
 fall like a chin down to the sea; on the 
 other in a grey promontory, so far off that 
 its hazy prostrate line is always upon the 
 utmost boundaries of sight when it is not 
 apparently floating between sky and sea, an 
 invention of fancy, something not of this 
 earth, or such a seaward place as the 
 ancients supposed to be the abode of dead 
 men's spirits. For the most part the sea 
 62
 
 The Island 
 
 between these two extremities is divided 
 from the inland by unscaleable scarred red 
 cliffs, to the edge of which the earth is green 
 with corn or grass, except at one point close 
 to the harbour mouth, where it is yellow 
 with charlock like a perpetual sun-stain. 
 Once or twice this wild sea wall is broken 
 for the outlet of a small stream, and there 
 the sand widens, and above is the horizontal 
 white streak of a hamlet. Not more often 
 there is a white spot above the cliffs 
 a solitary farm. The sea is aflower with 
 little sails, white, old gold, ruddy brown, 
 apparently motionless ; but you turn away 
 and look again and they are scattered wide, 
 and two black steamers point towards the 
 promontory ; and yet again, the sea is bare, 
 but in the still air the smoke of the vanished 
 steamers hangs in two enormous uplifted 
 wings across a quarter of the sky. 
 
 But men, gulls, ships, the enchanted dis- 
 tant promontory, cannot long keep the eyes 
 away from a round island lying almost 
 
 63
 
 The Island 
 
 opposite the harbour mouth, beyond a chain 
 of surf. It is a green hill based upon grey 
 sands. Half of the slopes are grass, the 
 other half is a wood of dark evenly grown 
 pine, whose outer boles take the light like 
 pillars of rosy marble or gold. The blunt 
 summit of the island is clean over the pines. 
 Upon the grass, near the sea and the edge 
 of the wood, is a small white house and a 
 green irregular enclosure with a white wall. 
 There are times, solitary, cold spring 
 dawns summer nights of transubstantiating 
 air twilights of autumn, foreboding but 
 very calm glistering winter afternoons, 
 when the island, and the white house and 
 wall, the clear pines, the fringe of pale sand 
 and its lace of foam, are but a very little 
 way across the sea, when a lover would 
 wish, and wish so boldly, and with so 
 mighty and fierce a happiness that it seemed 
 possible, to leap, to fly, to travel swiftly 
 as thought over the waves and possess the 
 island for ever with his beloved to walk 
 
 64
 
 The Island 
 
 to and fro among the trees of noblest poise, 
 whose sound never can cross the sea's 
 whisper or tumult, to lie upon that green 
 grass, to race upon that pale sand, to swim 
 in that sapphire water, to kiss in that bright 
 house to live, to enjoy, to love, to be for- 
 gotten by all the world save only that one 
 beloved for ever. And suddenly the island 
 is gone, somehow swallowed up by rain, 
 mist, snow, or a jealous god. 
 
 Though near enough for such a lover's 
 leap the island is not too near the shore. 
 No one ever swims out to it. Now and 
 then a little boat makes towards it for a 
 long time, but turns back, because it is not 
 any more near. The windows of the white 
 house are but shapeless dots, which it is 
 hard to number. No one is ever seen upon 
 the pale beach under the low cracked cliff, 
 or in the green enclosure between the white 
 walls. The smoke of the stout chimney 
 ascends blue against the pines like that of 
 another house, and yet with a more divine 
 
 E 65
 
 The Island 
 
 tranquillity, and as if by magic, for it seems 
 that the house can hardly be inhabited by 
 men. Thus at most hours and to most men 
 the island seems inaccessible. To sail near 
 it is always like being carried by fate past an 
 hour, a place, a person, out of which an alto- 
 gether strange and perfect happiness might 
 have been gained. The mild grey and white 
 of the cloudland overhead is broken up by 
 blue pits and clefts ; the oily, placid sea 
 sways and sways, now blue and now grey, 
 over the reflected azure, in mounded swells 
 without ridges and without foam ; discs and 
 patines and rounded long shapes of light 
 upon the water waver amid frames of 
 darker grey and blue, interchanging with 
 them continually ; a bird of ebony slips by ; 
 between sea and sky there is nothing but 
 your own brooding and dismayed spirit. 
 To land on the grey sand and dismiss the 
 ship . . . but it is never accomplished. 
 The surf bristles upon its girdle of rocks. 
 And presently the island is far away and 
 66
 
 The Island 
 
 irrecoverable and grim against the low sun, 
 a barbarous, barren, uninhabited, dark land. 
 
 Or a man goes down to the rocks through 
 a soft wind that is all grey rain. A wreath 
 of little birds pipes by and drifts rapidly 
 into nothing. The earth under him is being 
 dissolved into something vague and desolate, 
 into a mist like the sea and sky. A heron 
 detaches itself from the dark rock and pale 
 pool, where it was unseen, and flaps heavily 
 into the enfolding rain without a sound, 
 towards the island, which is invisible before, 
 as the mainland, the beach, the sand wall, 
 the long curve of coast behind are also 
 invisible. He can see nothing but the near 
 rocks, their weedy crevices, the still pools 
 on the shelves, as he climbs and stumbles 
 and zigzags onward and outward, until the 
 gossamer rain seems to begin to shape out 
 of itself a mound a cone a shadow the 
 island which disappears as it is completed ; 
 and out of this the curlews are crying. 
 
 The island is not too near or too far to 
 
 67
 
 The Island 
 
 be the finished idea of an island. In spring 
 it is greener than the most verdurous 
 coombes ; among the shadows of the forlorn 
 end of autumn it is the most shadowy. It 
 can be clearly seen, yet it cannot be compre- 
 hended. It is beautiful, and it has an air 
 of being inviolate and imperishable. It is 
 sweet and delicate ; it is wild also and free. 
 It is far enough to be of another substance 
 than the earth under our feet. A mist 
 sighing out of space unbuilds it : the moon 
 builds it again and delivers it up. It is 
 near enough to be a blissfully exalted and 
 perfected portion of this earth under our 
 feet. It is not out of reach, yet it is never 
 attained. It is not forbidden, and never- 
 theless something withholds or indefinitely 
 delays it. Some day somehow we shall 
 be there and not leave it again ; but not 
 yet. It beckons, it waves back, it with- 
 draws itself, it reappears, it expects, it 
 refuses ; but evermore it awaits. It is the 
 place for a bridal or for a grave. 
 68
 
 Winter Music 
 
 IT was the end of the first warm day in 
 February, of the first day when you might 
 lie on a southern slope and do nothing but 
 look into the air as into a well and see 
 the larks looking like minute beetles on 
 the surface of the blue. 
 
 The night had been frosty and still, and 
 the dawn was yet more still. The sky was 
 of a misty pale blue tending to violet, but 
 fading to an ash-coloured haze low down 
 that hid the hills five miles away on the 
 horizon, though all else was clear. On the 
 eastern and south-eastern blue were thin 
 fragments of distant-looking white clouds, 
 so thin that they might have been painted 
 on the sky from which they hardly stood 
 out at all. Myriads of starlings flew by, 
 straight onward from west to east, midway 
 
 69
 
 Winter Music 
 
 between earth and sky, and made a black 
 net which entangled the slim wan moon in 
 the south-west like a mermaid caught by 
 fishermen. A kestrel was perched motion- 
 less on an ash-tree top, black against the 
 east. The rime was thick on the grass, but 
 thrushes sang clear. 
 
 As the sun rose behind the kestrel and 
 the tree, blotting them both out, a little 
 wind was born. Light filled the sky, but 
 with no colour except palest and tenderest 
 gold, and the breasts of the singing birds 
 were golden towards the dawn. The sun 
 itself was a ring, not a disc, of silver, just 
 visible in its own fierce blaze. All the oaks 
 on eastward hillsides showed pale trunks, 
 tier above tier, all the old orchard trees 
 were clothed in gold. In the retired hollows 
 of the near hills the frost was bluish and 
 gave them a far-away look as if they were 
 sky instead of earth. 
 
 And now the chaffinches began to sing. 
 Their fresh yet sleepy and invariable tune is
 
 Winter Music 
 
 appropriate to warm still air, and in this 
 wind over the rime so early in the year they 
 could not deliver their full song, but at first 
 only the three or four opening notes, and 
 then broke off as if they had forgotten and 
 resented it ; even when they got past these 
 notes their hesitating song among the apple 
 branches, often repeated in the sun, was like 
 the swallow's trill. 
 
 Until nightfall I walked slowly it was 
 the first day when you could walk slowly 
 since October. The sky was milky blue, 
 with now and then a few passing faint 
 clouds like foam. The woods of beech or 
 oak in the upper parts of the rising land 
 were dry and warm ; at their lower edges 
 the ploughlands undulated with grey long 
 waves as smooth as if planed, and seeming 
 almost to roll onward in faint shadow and 
 light. On the turf of the pasture the flints 
 shone as if they were white flowers. The 
 larches in the plantations seemed to have been 
 dipped in pale fire. White gulls wavered
 
 Winter Music 
 
 over the green corn and rose to fly clear 
 of the isolated beech-surrounded group of 
 farm-buildings and stacks, but alighted on 
 the roof of a little flint church, with a low 
 sharp spire standing out in the middle of a 
 pasture and utterly removed from any other 
 congregation. 
 
 The undulations of ploughland and pasture 
 died away in a low, level country of pine and 
 oak forest, paved with the pale leaves of 
 chestnut undergrowth, and pierced by straight 
 yellow roads, and once or twice interrupted 
 by orange gravel pits. Here and there the 
 roof of a solitary house glowed with tiles of 
 olive and ochre and orange amid rough 
 tussocky grass at the edges of the forest. 
 An old grey-bearded man in a greasy, 
 patched, once-white smock was spreading 
 dung, while the larks sang high above and 
 the sparrows scattered low in the dusty 
 gusts around him ; then solitude ; then 
 another old man alone. In the roadside 
 moss, and among the roots of hazel and 
 72
 
 Winter Music 
 
 thorn, a primrose peeped, half-opened and 
 with no stalk, or a daisy drooped in the 
 shadowed, unmelted rime, the yellow and 
 the white flower very tender like a yet 
 unborn beauty of spring, forerunners lost on 
 their way. 
 
 But it was one of those days when what 
 meets the eye is far less than what is appre- 
 hended, when a man may spend all the 
 hours of light out of doors and see nothing 
 and hear nothing and yet be profoundly 
 blessed. The birds, the trees, the houses, 
 the few flowers, may indeed be seen, and 
 the songs heard from branch and sky, but 
 all these little things are dwarfed, and, in 
 the memory, sometimes quite shut out by 
 the sense of the presence of earth itself, the 
 huge, quiet, all-sustaining earth mutely com- 
 muning with the sun. And so it was this 
 day. When at last the sun had set with 
 as little colour and stir as at dawn, and I 
 sat down under a roof, I remembered little, 
 thought of nothing, but I glowed and was 
 
 73
 
 Winter Music 
 
 at ease, trembling and tingling from the 
 indescribable intimate contacts of the day. 
 I sat still in a darkening room, whose low 
 long window showed the cliffy wall of the 
 last house of a town, a blurred shrubbery, 
 and, on a rising ground beyond, one cedar 
 whose black storeys of motionless foliage 
 filled half of the pallid sky. The wind had 
 gone away with the sun. Alt was still, all 
 silent. The sound of the last carriage and 
 foot passenger had passed away from the 
 road running at the foot of the sharp cliff, 
 it seemed, an eternity ago. So silent was 
 it that, though in a town, it was not the 
 mere absence of traffic that awed the brain. 
 All sound had disappeared and was replaced 
 by a beautiful soft silence, omnipresent and 
 omnipotent. This was the perfect state. 
 Never again could it be troubled. All 
 wheels and feet had gone out long ago 
 through the pale gateways of the west, 
 where sun and wind had passed out, and 
 they had gone for ever. The tower was 
 74
 
 Winter Music 
 
 empty. That rigid cliff of wall was dead : 
 it seemed even that it was maintained by 
 the silence, and that if that should be 
 broken it would crumble at the same time to 
 nothing. The great tree against the sky was 
 exalted. I had seen it many times but 
 never thus. It seemed the source of the 
 silence, and out of its caves flowed continu- 
 ally, as a river, the power that was taking pos- 
 session of all the earth as the crepuscular light 
 subsided. This was that great silence, the 
 first of things and the last, on which life has 
 intruded for a little while, that great silence 
 which is all about us, and over the edge of 
 it we may step anywhere and at any time, 
 perhaps never to return. Its empire is 
 eternity. Therefore it is very patient, very 
 gentle, very grave, so that the bird or the 
 trumpet knows not the unfathomable ocean 
 into which the sound of its love or its in- 
 solence has fallen. As a rule, when we 
 are aware of it, the frontier of it is elusive 
 and moves with us ; now it is yonder, across 
 
 75
 
 Winter Music 
 
 the river, and again it is beyond that lift in 
 the twilight road. But this evening it swept 
 on majestically. The door, a few paces away, 
 opened into the heart of it. The fire burnt 
 low and stirless, because it was on every 
 side. The nearest things, the flowers on the 
 table at my side, the pictures on the wall, 
 were already caught up in it and looked 
 unlike themselves, poor and unboasting, 
 touched as if by death, that most pompous 
 and most venerated of the servants of silence. 
 The tenth wave rose high as the violet 
 heavens and the first star, and were it to 
 plunge all would be overcome. The room 
 was extending indefinitely, and the farther 
 walls fading away under the menacing eave 
 of the wave, when from out of the cedar, as it 
 seemed, a strain of music crept interceding, 
 and the wave did not fall but retired in- 
 perceptibly into the tide. The opening 
 notes were slow and musing and delicate, 
 and at any moment they might have ceased, 
 so timorous were they after the silent storm 
 76
 
 Winter Music 
 
 that had lately withdrawn before it. Even 
 so the last few leaves of winter mutter in the 
 preluding breath of spring in which they 
 must die. They were dying away soon, 
 like the leaves, they would have fallen to rest 
 and close at hand that great tide was 
 approaching again. The music was almost 
 silent ; the notes, the withered leaves, had 
 touched the earth when they began to 
 flutter, to trip, to whirl up ; they muttered 
 again, still soft and hesitating, but now not 
 hesitating for fear of death, but because they 
 were not yet sure of their destiny. The 
 sounds were behind a veil like the fragrant 
 coloured flower within the brown bud, or 
 the painted bird in the egg. They paused, 
 moved slowly forward, more softly, coiling 
 now, writhing serpent-like, making for the 
 light which they could not see. These were 
 treble notes more than infantine, innocent, 
 frail, grave, dimly, very dimly, aware of the 
 mighty or terrible things of good and evil to 
 come. Then a deep chord. The light. A 
 
 77
 
 Winter Music 
 
 glimmer seen underground through the veil, 
 the sheath, the shell, but still a glimmer of 
 light, and the music had seen it far away 
 and was starting in pin-suit, more loudly but 
 gradually. It saw the light, but not what 
 was beyond. It stole away as if in a few 
 moments it would lose itself in what it 
 sought and be gone. But now it was clear, 
 advancing yet more loudly, even with pride, 
 as of arching instep, and hair tossing, but 
 smoothly as over velvet. All went so easily 
 that I thought it would be over and done 
 in a song. The notes, set free, seemed to 
 have forgotten the dreams of a strange 
 destiny. Now, surely, now all is achieved, 
 the music will end swiftly in the flush of 
 childhood, ignorant and careless of itself. 
 But there was a pause, and another grave 
 chord, a cloud summoned above the horizon 
 into the stainless blue. Again there were 
 antenatal whisperings. The crumpled, half- 
 opened primrose by the wayside was not 
 more diffident. The music had gone back 
 78
 
 Winter Music 
 
 into the womb again. That was not the 
 light but the dream of it in the sleep of one 
 who had never seen the light. Again the 
 coiling, the writhing, the little sounds that 
 chipped at the shell in darkness. It was 
 after all to die ere it was born, and the notes 
 wailed, wailed without knowing why, with- 
 out knowing what they had missed. It 
 asked, Why ? and the wail ceased. The 
 music continued, but now it seemed that 
 another creature moved within it formless, 
 vast, reluctant. The notes were bass and 
 long and slow as of a monstrous bulk 
 stirring in sleep and unwilling to awaken. 
 Soon he slept, and the notes just heaved. 
 
 Then it was as if a little bird alighted 
 above the monster, and sang so that he 
 followed the song dreamily in his sleep with 
 a moan of his own dark throat. Still, bird- 
 like, the music swelled as with an innumer- 
 able choir, and the sleeper was all but 
 forgotten. Sweet and wild and swift the 
 birds sang melodies that were threshed by 
 
 79
 
 Winter Music 
 
 the wind, washed by the dew. They 
 sang as if they had never sung before, and 
 as if they were to sing for ever, so eagerly 
 and happily. I knew that multitudinous 
 song, emparadised, remote, serene, only it 
 had never before been so fair, nor had thus 
 changed all the desires and joys of the flesh 
 into this aerial sweetness on keys of ivory 
 and crystal, pipes of reed and gold, strings 
 of gossamer, wreathed horns of exquisite 
 shell, warm throats of beauty, of love, of 
 youth, and of joy. It could not know 
 change. It would build fair towers, soaring 
 high into dawn and into evening, and from 
 their windows would beckon all the lovers 
 of the world, and all the minstrels, glad 
 and at ease in eternity. Yes, it was so. 
 The triumph, the expectation. The music 
 trembled and swayed, delighted and fearless 
 on the perilous edge as when a flower 
 hangs down almost to the earth with dew. 
 Almost, I feared. . . . Was it sinking, and 
 to what ? Could it rise higher ? and if not, 
 80
 
 Winter Music 
 
 must it not fail ? Not to triumph yet more 
 was to fail. Surely those towers knew not 
 weariness and could have never enough, nor 
 those lovers don robes of penitence, regret, 
 despair. ... It sank no more. The dew 
 was spilt by a gale and the flower mounted 
 up. The music was awed and hushed, but 
 could not be saddened, for such a time as a 
 bee dwells in one crocus, and then once more 
 the music expanded, leaped up mightily into 
 the speed of the birds' song and the power 
 of the bulk below, of a dragon, enormous, 
 many coloured, glittering. The dragon 
 shouldered himself out of the ground with 
 a great earthquake, and stood for a moment 
 sniffing the air of the mountains, and then 
 bounded up and forward with lightnings on 
 feet as of a stag, and uplifted wings as of 
 eagles. The great plumes winnowed the 
 air with azure and gold and uncounted 
 green, that shone like stars, leaves, and 
 waves, or glowed like flowers. His proud 
 limbs bent under the flanks that were 
 F 81
 
 Winter Music 
 
 rippled like the sea; his hoofs lit fires in 
 the rocks beneath. His breast of emerald 
 mail took the sun like a broad hill facing 
 the summer south ; it yearned forward like 
 a proud ship launched into a sapphire sea 
 and air of crystal. His mouth opened with 
 a dazzle of pearl, and breathing forth a 
 gentle fire he filled the clouds with rose 
 and the earth with music of rivers of 
 content. As his wings towered, the large 
 feathers whistled wild, the lesser tenderly 
 as the linnet or swallow sings ; and as 
 they fell they swept the dew softly from 
 leaf and blossom into the grass. He planted 
 his feet upon the crags, upon the tree- 
 tops, upon the shining waters, upon the 
 cross of the sword of Orion in the west. 
 As mild as he was vast, his footprints 
 soiled not a flower. The music, now ever 
 more loud, was gamesome and stately by 
 turns, but even when stately it was half 
 shy of itself, and the purple and gold were 
 all blossomy and the uttermost of the 
 82
 
 Winter Music 
 
 pageant was a rainbow arched from forest 
 to forest over a placid sky. He leapt, 
 he ran, he soared, and always under his 
 feet the illimitable grass and flowers flowing 
 out along his path like a river and many 
 rivulets. His motion was as that of a 
 mountain river mounded and roaring in 
 flood ; or sometimes as of a stag running 
 without fear ; sometimes as of a birch tree 
 waving. He fed upon the air of the 
 summits and drank their starry springs. 
 Though he went winding like water in a 
 land of hills he went ever forward. The 
 music rose and fell, galloped and thundered ; 
 it trotted quietly on rock that gave back a 
 clamour as of many cuckoos to his feet ; 
 and it promised never to cease, as how 
 should it do, linked as it was to this 
 mild everlasting dragon ? 
 
 Nevertheless his ardour had a little abated 
 since he extruded himself from the rocks. 
 Fed on blue air and liquid crystal, his 
 nature changed. The music was sinking, 
 
 83
 
 Winter Music 
 
 recalling the earlier hour when the dragon 
 was but listening in sleep to the bird on 
 the branch. Would he sleep in this 
 luxuriance of infinite songs and flowers ? 
 He ran more slowly and always within 
 the corridors of a wood of green and gold 
 foliage among the ranges of the south. 
 Sometimes he paused or turned aside to 
 gaze at thickets never yet trodden by men. 
 Here the birds' songs were less but the 
 flowers more than ever, nodding above the 
 highest crests of the trees, descending from 
 them in silent cascades to the floor of gold 
 and purple and white upon green. Into one 
 of these thickets he glided and lay down, 
 letting his legs sink under him and his 
 pinions fold under the flowers, until at last 
 the only movement was of his breathing and 
 of the dew which it unloosed from petal and 
 leaf. The radiant and hardy mail, the soar- 
 ing melodious plume, the limbs of speed, the 
 breast of great power, were buried in a mound 
 of leaves, hidden from the sun save here and 
 84
 
 Winter Music 
 
 there a glance of burnished azure or gold as 
 of a flower. Over him curved the sky, pale 
 as a forget-me-not and without a cloud ; the 
 branches of oaks barred it above his head. 
 Behind him the glades through which he had 
 come were deserted save by the flowers he 
 had sown in the prints of his footsteps and 
 the wind that had borne his wings. He 
 slept and no bird of his escort kept 
 watch. Only the woodpecker laughed as 
 he bounded through the air between the 
 glades. 
 
 But as before it was a dreaming sleep : 
 only, now, the dreams were not of hope, 
 however uncertain, but of dread. His lair 
 was no palace but a prison, guarded, bolted 
 and barred, by his own fear. Languid but 
 discontented was the music, soft but anxious ; 
 and when for a moment it faded it was not 
 because the fear and the discontent rolled 
 away, but because the dragon held his breath 
 to hear. What could he hear ? These new 
 notes were but the whisper of the flowers 
 
 85
 
 Winter Music 
 
 released and rising up after the spilling of 
 the dew the wings, perhaps, of a few birds 
 who had ventured after the dragon into the 
 solitude of these glades of the winds released 
 from the wings of their lord. " Hoo-hoo " 
 murmured the wind in the hollow of its 
 hand : or was it a bell perhaps, a bell of 
 marriage or funeral so remote that its 
 meaning could not be known ? There was 
 a sighing pause. "Hoo-ohoo-hoo." The 
 notes had something wintry ; they had 
 travelled fields of the frost of winters to 
 come, maybe so wintry that the dragon 
 stirred. An island of azure and gold rose 
 among the flowers : he was awake, though 
 the notes were still so distant and low that 
 they were not yet in this world. But again 
 " ohoo-ohohee-ohohee." This time it must 
 have been from a hunter's horn. It might 
 seem a trick of the north wind's, but the 
 dragon was not deceived. The music 
 crashed as he rose confidently upon his fore- 
 legs, raised his wings, and slid forward 
 86
 
 Winter Music 
 
 to a knoll without a tree. He watched with 
 suspended pinion. " Ohoo-ohohee-hoo-oo- 
 oo." It was no longer a moan, but the 
 cruel exultant call of a hunter's horn, not 
 yet hungry and keen, but again and again 
 repeated in careless joy to be mounted and 
 afield under the sun. 
 
 Once more the dragon advanced on wings 
 and feet together. He did not fly from an 
 enemy, for he knew none ; nor did he go up 
 against an enemy. He felt fear, but it was 
 for the first time, and he knew not that fear 
 may have a cause without. It was some- 
 thing within, awakened by the winding of 
 the horn, that drove him swiftly in wide circles 
 over the land. He was trying his speed and 
 strength and the terror of his roaring plumes, 
 and so great was the speed and the terror 
 and the strength that he ran and soared 
 faster and faster as if he had terrified himself, 
 until at last feeling joyous and confident he 
 stood still at the edge of the precipice that 
 blackened the forest river, in perfect pride, 
 
 87
 
 Winter Music 
 
 oblivious of his fear and the cause of his 
 awakening. 
 
 But the wrathful horn broke in upon 
 the growing silence and serenity. He 
 moved towards it ; he circled ; he ran, and 
 this time away from the sound, anywhere 
 away from that " ohee-ohohee " sweeping the 
 opulent solitude as with a scythe. Never 
 had his speed and the thunder and terror of 
 it been so great as now ; it must have borne 
 down any foe in front no matter how 
 bold. But the foe was behind. The horn 
 ceased. So near were the hunters that the 
 crying of their hounds was heard now in 
 a torrent of joy. The hunters were gathered 
 together. They heard the quarry and their 
 myriad trampling quickly supplanted the 
 dragon's thunder. They foamed into 
 his glades, over the flowers of his lair 
 and along the edge of the river precipice. 
 White and black horses, with solemn eager 
 extended faces, men in scarlet flying mantles, 
 in mail of silver and gold, bearing plumes of 
 88
 
 Winter Music 
 
 many colours and lances set, there was a 
 horse and a man to every tree in the forest. 
 The hounds streamed amongst them like one 
 dappled life, so closely were they packed and 
 so matched their voices. The azure of the 
 dragon beamed for a moment on a hill-top 
 and the music rippled over with ecstasy. 
 Now he and the hunters made one clamour 
 together, as if he were no longer fleeing, but 
 pursuing with them an invisible, inaudible 
 prey. 
 
 Sternly they galloped, the white beards, 
 the black and the golden beards and the 
 beardless. He who was first remained 
 first, and he that was next kept the same 
 place, unless he was trampled down, and 
 ever the last rider was the same and he was 
 as swift as the leader. The music that had 
 gloried in the dragon's birth now climbed 
 yet more loftily in the anticipation of his 
 doom. 
 
 They rode and he soared and ran as 
 creatures who had found the right way, and 
 
 89
 
 Winter Music 
 
 followed it with eyes closed to all that lay 
 on this hand or that, bent only on the clatter- 
 ing track and the motion. Oh ! joy to hunt, 
 to be hunted, for ever. The chase was all, 
 the end nothing. Regardless of the quarry, 
 they dropped their lances one by one. The 
 music was cruel no more. It was superbly 
 sweet, with a titanic ease. Moor and sea 
 and river and mountain and forest, and 
 again forest and mountain and river and sea 
 and moor. White clouds hunted with them 
 over the blue glades of the majestic sky. 
 Many were the cavernous narrow valleys full 
 of loose stones between the stems of ancient 
 trees long dead, and at their lower end the 
 sea, and at their upper end the forest rising 
 and falling with the mountains which sent 
 down many rivers along those valleys into 
 the sea. Sometimes the chase filled several 
 of these valleys together and was entangled 
 there ; or it followed the ridges between them, 
 either seaward to the cliffs, lest the dragon 
 should be among the chasms ; or inland and 
 90
 
 Winter Music 
 
 upward to the forest and the mountains and 
 the peaks where the trees could not climb, 
 but whence the hunters, disturbing the sleep, 
 that had looked eternal, of the eagles, could 
 see the dragon deep down and far off in the 
 still ocean of trees below. The river song was 
 drowned by the hooves in the valleys of ever- 
 sliding stones, but the mountain forests were 
 mossy and the crying of the eagles could be 
 heard. The melodies of the hooves were 
 poems and their deep immortal footprints 
 would brim with tales. The music wavered, 
 but only as a cataract wavers that never 
 abates ; still vaunting and sonorous it told 
 not of changing hopes, but of ardour always 
 the same, without a doubt or a fear or a re- 
 gret, without even expectation. 
 
 The hunters were spreading out in a longer 
 and longer chain that was presently no longer 
 a chain, so that the first knew not whether 
 he hunted alone or not, and those behind 
 saw him on his black horse for a moment 
 only when they rose clear on the cliffs above
 
 Winter Music 
 
 the sea, or at the crest of a mountain 
 descended, or while his horse climbed out of 
 a lake as they plunged in. Of the hounds 
 a few clung to the leader in a wedge ; their 
 late companions appeared singly in the 
 ravines howling for a moment ere they dis- 
 appeared. Not even the leader saw the 
 dragon. Only now and then the sliding of 
 stones in the great distance reached him 
 from the valleys and the laugh of the 
 woodpeckers when the eagles were gone. 
 A wind was rising, and the strength of the 
 music was renewed by storm, by rain and 
 surging forests, and waters round the hidden 
 peaks and the returning eagles, and rivers 
 hunting to the sea. The chase rode on, but 
 no longer knew east from west, nor saw the 
 leader on any summit, nor heard one hound. 
 And some rode east, some west, some north, 
 some south, and all madly, silently, when the 
 clouds began to be seen through the rain, 
 and the blue between the clouds, and in the 
 blue the first stars. Now the horn sounded 
 92
 
 Winter Music 
 
 again and was answered. One by one over 
 many ridges and up from the sea, and from 
 many ravines, those that could hear and ride 
 were returning. 
 
 They were in the forest of the dragon's 
 lair again and there were now two chases, 
 for the echoes began among the mountains ; 
 and both were phantoms. The forest 
 or night or the echo was troubling the 
 hunters. They scattered, they paused and 
 turned every way. A horn was blown, and 
 another. They were calling one another yet 
 seemed to remain separate like stars. No 
 one saw anything now but the sky overhead 
 and the nearest tree, and the calling grew 
 fainter and the intervals longer. One by 
 one they feared lest they should meet the 
 dragon. The horn ceased, afraid of the long 
 echoes sinking and sinking into the leagues 
 of hills. There was no noise of hoof or cry of 
 horseman. A branch cracked and a silence 
 followed as the rider stood still, afraid. They 
 hunted no more. They lit separate tires 
 
 93
 
 Winter Music 
 
 among the trees and the crimson flame slit 
 the black night, then fell, and the glow was 
 like the hollow of a huge mouth in the gloom. 
 The bold hunters were lying down to sleep 
 beside their fires ; the less bold leaned on 
 their elbows or stood with backs to the fire ; 
 and sleeping or awake, they watched con- 
 tinually. At times the glow or a flicker 
 lighted up a leaf, or a brilliant bird, or a wave 
 of the river; and, awake or asleep, the watcher 
 started. But he did not start, nor stir, nor 
 breathe, nor shut nor open an eyelid, when 
 the light showed not a leaf or a bird, but the 
 mail of the dragon as he glided amongst 
 them, and down to the river to drink under 
 the precipice. Past the fires of the hunters 
 he descended, careless of the sleepers and 
 the dreamers who watched. Once more he 
 peered into the thicket where he had slept, 
 but his flowers were gone and the leaves lay 
 on the earth instead of moving against the sky. 
 He mounted the knoll ouce more and looked 
 round. He listened. The hoot of an owl 
 94
 
 Winter Music 
 
 wandered like a dream of the hunters among 
 the mountains to the moon. The dragon 
 slowly unfurled his wings and launched 
 himself above the waves of the tree-tops and 
 rising in tranquil circles vanished beyond the 
 moon. 
 
 And as the music died away and the 
 silence yet did not return, I saw that the 
 lamps were lit, that the curtains were drawn 
 to shut out the cedar tree, the stars, the 
 silence and the gentle words of the owl that 
 were as bubbles out of the silence. 
 
 95
 
 July 
 
 THERE were certain periods in Lawrence 
 Garlon's past life, some of them but a few 
 days, others several months long, which had 
 become in his memory foreign countries, 
 each with a sky, an air, and physical 
 character of its own ; and as he had much 
 leisure he returned to these countries the 
 country of January to October 1875 for 
 example, the country of May 1888 every 
 year several times. Year after year they 
 changed and rose or fell slightly in his 
 favour. Sometimes, as he well knew, the 
 changes were made in imperceptible ways 
 by himself. But a few he could have sworn 
 were the work of other powers than his own. 
 The most changeful and alluring of all 
 these lands was the nearest, the country of 
 January to October, 1885, to which he was 
 96
 
 July 
 
 admitted by a score of diverse gateways, 
 and the gateway he most used was that of 
 July. The partner of his journey was 
 always the same, a girl of his own age. 
 And the day was her twentieth birthday, 
 his own being then not many days past. 
 He was so much fascinated by this land 
 that he would at times do the forbidden 
 thing knock, and having no answer, force 
 open the gate into it; but that meant 
 misery, and he could see the desired only in 
 fragments like trees and haystacks above 
 level mist, and she showed him only 
 glimpses of her smiles, her tears, her white 
 dress fluttering among endless trees that 
 engulfed her as night does the solitary 
 wandering bird. But if there was one time 
 when the bolts were more likely than at any 
 other to be self-drawn and to disclose the 
 vision, it was the first day in January when 
 change from frost and north-east wind and 
 cold rain to warmth, blue sky, white clouds 
 of gracious form and golden light among 
 G 97
 
 July 
 
 naked trees, relaxes the sinews, and, while 
 inviting men to some unusual effort, re- 
 fuses the energy. It was on such a day 
 that he had the journey which completely 
 changed him, by making of him no longer a 
 melancholy but a sad man ; nor did he ever 
 think afterwards of knocking impatiently at 
 the gate of July. 
 
 The afternoon had been silent, but now, 
 though several thrushes were singing, the 
 silence had become a strong and austere 
 spirit which nothing could disturb. A 
 traction engine struggled up the road that 
 threaded the beech-wood upon the hills, 
 but its sound was outside the sphere of the 
 silence. He looked from hill to hill, to the 
 twenty-mile distant headland carving the 
 farthest silver in the south-east, from cloud 
 to cloud, and from star to star. He fol- 
 lowed the flight of a crow until it seemed 
 to descend into the ashes of the west. He 
 listened to the voices of some children in 
 the wood and clang to them almost fear- 
 98
 
 July 
 
 fully as they went farther and farther away 
 fading deep into that other world beyond 
 the enveloping silence. And he sighed as 
 he walked slowly in this quiet, unearthly 
 world. He sighed, too, as he sat down by 
 his own fire, and the gateway of the July 
 country was opened to him. The gateway 
 was opened, but he could not, as he had 
 always been used to do, pass over the 
 threshold. He could only look in and see 
 wandering there another self, the self of 
 July in that lost year, and that wraith was 
 enjoying Margaret as he had done once 
 upon a time. 
 
 At the side of this wraith he saw 
 Margaret, whose world this also was, and, 
 for ah 1 he knew, her only world, for she 
 was dead long ago. And was not that one 
 of the dead walking with her? He was 
 equally distant and out of reach and recall, 
 and in the sunlight of that land his eyes 
 could not distinguish the ghost of the living 
 from the ghost of the dead. 
 
 99
 
 July 
 
 She was tall and carried herself with 
 gentleness and at the same time an animal 
 freedom of movement and gesture ; her 
 strength and energy had so far found no 
 way to express itself, except in exquisite 
 grace, buoyant head, bright eyes, and a 
 habit of interrupting her walk by running 
 or tripping unconsciously for a few steps ; 
 and few could have looked at her without 
 thinking what noble children she might 
 bear, or without a sigh that she could not 
 be thus everlastingly. He at her side was 
 taller, fair-haired and more frail, and it was 
 only his passion that for the moment made 
 him worthy to be with her; already the 
 weakness might have been detected that 
 made him fitter to lament her loss in a 
 study than to reign as her lover. 
 
 As she used to do, years before, she 
 flowed beside him swiftly, and with a 
 motion as if she trod not upon the earth, 
 but upon the south wind that was always 
 blowing in that land. Her brows and the 
 
 100
 
 July 
 
 dark brown hair crowning them were on 
 a level with his eyes and often did he look 
 at them. 
 
 At first there was a long ascending road, 
 broad and dry, but with a dryness that 
 could be enjoyed, as one of the truest 
 pledges of summer, from the shade of the 
 hawthorns alongside. The dew was still 
 on their leaves, and on the grass of un- 
 tenanted gardens seen betwixt the stems. 
 The two looked together at these solitudes 
 and smiled, knowing that there were others 
 more deep, more cool, and fuller of sunlight, 
 beyond. Sometimes the two looked in one 
 another's eyes and hardly waited to kiss, 
 he laying his two hands on her two cheeks, 
 and she pressing his hands so tightly with 
 hers that her lips pouted under the kisses, 
 and she would slip one of his arms about 
 her neck, and keep it there while they 
 walked, their heads erect, in the green 
 gloom of old trees that were the mansions 
 of other lovers, invisible, melodious, but 
 
 101
 
 July 
 
 heeding them not. Or she looked at him, 
 but he at the trees ahead, trying hard not 
 to notice her for a little time, but knowing 
 well that a smile was already forming on 
 her lips, and delaying for its perfect flourish- 
 ing till he should turn and behold, which, 
 not too late, he did, and turned two smiles 
 into one kiss. More seldom it was that 
 both looked ahead, and that he was the 
 first to turn, and every time she also turned 
 and caught his eyes just as they were 
 settling on cheeks or shoulders with butterfly 
 glances. He could not have said why they 
 walked on and on, why their lips ever 
 deserted one another, or their arms dis- 
 entwined themselves, or their eyes shook 
 off one another's magnetism, why they did 
 not stop and demand an eternity of embraces. 
 Yet rarely did they pause in their walk for 
 more than a moment, for longer than a 
 bird's song or than a bee's visit to one 
 flower. 
 
 But Laurence knew the watcher, and 
 1 02
 
 July 
 
 not the lover and he stared nevertheless 
 more and more eagerly as if to know what 
 they would do. 
 
 When they wished to feed their eyes or 
 lips more boldly, she stooped for some 
 purple or golden flowers out of the grass 
 and asked him to fasten them at her throat, 
 or, those being withered, she stood on tiptoe 
 and plucked a rose and carried it, or he cut 
 a long strand of bryony and wound it as 
 a crown in her hair. While they were 
 passing one of the gardens she stayed behind 
 actually he went on two steps without 
 her and she unfastened her hat, sending 
 both hands bird-like to the back of her 
 head on the errand, thus tempting him 
 to pounce upon her lips while they were 
 without the pretence of protection. She 
 took off her hat and covered it up with 
 nettles until they should return, and so all 
 day long he had to wind fresh crowns of 
 bryony and wild hops to shield her head, 
 or when they sat he covered it with a huge 
 
 103
 
 July 
 
 burdock leaf, bespangled with spray from the 
 rivulet just as the watcher had done 
 twenty years before. These were the same 
 roses, roses twenty years old, so cool to 
 the finger-tips, yet glowing and misty warm 
 with love and summer, their golden or dark 
 hearts moist with dew, pure and fresh and 
 sweet, yet not more pure or fresher or 
 sweeter than her fingers that gathered them, 
 or her throat against which they pressed 
 their petals as she strained for the topmost. 
 Over their heads was bent an immortal 
 sky. Not all the years could stain the blue 
 of that sky. Lofty, and based upon in- 
 finitely far-off hills, it was nevertheless their 
 sky : it was good and kind to them, and 
 blessed their love and their spring lust : out 
 of it had descended so many resplendent 
 days that those before were forgotten and 
 those yet to come were inexhaustible : like 
 the floor of this their palace of the earth it 
 seemed to have been built to receive them, 
 and they saw it with a sense of possession, 
 104
 
 July 
 
 and, measureless though it was, it was less 
 so than their love, their joy, their hope, 
 their immortal life. 
 
 The fire cracked and crumbled at the 
 watcher's side with a noise prophesying frost; 
 he shivered as he looked into the summer land 
 where the south wind blew. And now they 
 were alone upon a wide moor. 
 
 Margaret walked among the purple 
 heather and the yellow gorse. The blue 
 sky praised her white form, her green- 
 coronetted brows. The black flashes of her 
 eyes lightened at her lover's out of the pale 
 rose of her cheeks. When she was looking 
 he could not keep his eyes away from hers, 
 and they fenced together as if the aim 
 of love was to prolong that airy bickering. 
 When she was not looking, for a moment 
 only, his eyes wandered to the divinely warm 
 and tender skin like a flower under her ear 
 and her looped hair, but not often dared to 
 kiss it because it was too sweet. He was as 
 happy, though the thought never came into 
 
 105
 
 July 
 
 his head, when he was gazing away, straight 
 ahead, not even holding her hand, as when 
 it seemed impossible for them ever to end 
 their embrace or love's silent duel of eyes. 
 
 Why, thought the watcher, why does he 
 ever look away ? Why will he not consume 
 her with kisses and not wait so timorously ? 
 It is not many days before she is to die. 
 Why will he let her go on staring piercingly 
 in front of her, as though her eyes saw 
 through the blue and through the forest now 
 gathered about and before them in groups 
 and masses and solitary trees ? For, look, 
 the smile almost dies from her lips and 
 cheeks ; if she looks a moment longer she 
 will perhaps discover the spectre with that 
 burning glance. Ah, he has kissed her ; she 
 has detached her eyes from the horizon as 
 if she had not seen anything all the time 
 but his face, and smiles as if she had been 
 wilfully looking away. 
 
 At the edge of the forest, where the golden 
 light was melting but never surrendering to 
 1 06
 
 July 
 
 the golden gloom, the lover knelt down, 
 keeping one of her hands in both of his and 
 covering his face with it, while she laid her 
 other fingers upon his head and watched 
 him with trembling lips and eyes in which 
 the fires looked as if they could not shine 
 brightly and tenderly enough without some 
 tears.- Fiercely he pressed her hand upon 
 his eyes to shut out all sight and thought 
 now, even now, why will they not make an 
 end or the earth swallow them up ? but, 
 presently, stung perhaps by the fragrance of 
 her flower-gathering hand, he rose again, and, 
 not turning to her, as if some thought had 
 come to him that was not for her and yet 
 that was impossible he led her on by the 
 finger-tips to the deeps of the forest, a forest 
 as old as the earth itself, and wearing its age- 
 heavily and with groans and a lowering 
 aspect. But those two descended into it 
 without fear, joyfully and exultantly. Its 
 only limit was the sea, which they never saw 
 but heard all day long making a sound like 
 
 107
 
 July 
 
 the murmur with which silence fills too 
 wakeful ears. To those lovers the sound 
 was only part of their realm of light and 
 fragrance and melody. Perhaps he would 
 say, "It is the sea," and she reply, "Yes." 
 But neither said, or even thought, " Let us go 
 to the sea." For the sea was beyond, away 
 from them, and it was where they were that 
 love dwelt with joy, and they were not in 
 search of anything that they knew, and 
 therefore the sea was as a poet's tale. 
 
 To the watcher it was not the sea, at least 
 not any earthly sea of sunlit sapphire and 
 foam. To him it was the sound of the flight 
 of time, which, never ceasing but heard often- 
 est at night or in solitude, is for ever lying in 
 wait to spoil men's singing when those songs 
 are not made so that the refrain may be 
 droned by time. If it was a sea, it was that 
 " unfathomable sea whose waves are years " 
 of which the poet speaks. Could those 
 two not tell the difference between the un- 
 dying moan of those waves and the sound 
 1 08
 
 July 
 
 of ocean ? He at least knew that if a man 
 listened curiously he could disentangle out of 
 that seeming senseless murmur the lamenta- 
 tion of his own death bell. M-m-m-m sh 
 ah ! They heard it not, or only once she said, 
 " That is the waves, yet there is no wind." 
 
 If they did not hear the moan of the 
 unearthly sea, it was as certain that they 
 did see him who was peering upon them 
 out of the twilight gate, out of a desolate 
 heart, nor hear the footsteps which tracked 
 theirs as they floated on or as they paused 
 to kiss. He strove within himself to tell 
 them, to warn, to bid them haste; to let 
 them know something; but he was not 
 sure what to do, for sometimes he saw that 
 their joy was unshadowed, and for a moment 
 dreaded lest they should detect him ; but 
 more often he wished them to know their 
 happiness, to make more of it, not to 
 linger so upon the way as if it would 
 never end any more than they would ever 
 weary. 
 
 109
 
 July 
 
 He sings! He is singing of the most 
 pitiful sorrow 
 
 O bonnie, bonnie was her mouth, 
 
 And cherry were her cheeks, 
 And clear, clear was her yellow hair, 
 
 Whereon the red blood dreeps. 
 
 Then wi' his spear he turn'd her owre ; 
 
 gin her face was wan ! 
 
 He said, " Ye are the first that e'er 
 
 1 wished alive again." 
 
 It was the ballad of Edom o' Gordon 
 that tells of a castle long ago surrounded 
 by enemies, when the lady of it and her 
 children, but not the lord, were within ; and 
 the enemies set fire to it and waited ; and 
 the smoke was smothering the mother and 
 children on the battlements, and she let her 
 fair daughter down, rolled in a sheet let 
 her down on to the enemy's spear so 
 that he turned away from his victim, and 
 said 
 
 I cannot look on that bonnie face 
 As it lies in the grass. 
 
 HO
 
 July 
 
 In their fond happiness the two lovers dwelt 
 long upon these verses, and he must needs 
 repeat them that he might see her turn to 
 hide her tears and kiss them away. 
 
 " Do you cry because the verses are sad ? " 
 he asked. 
 
 " Oh, no, but because they are beautiful," 
 she replied. 
 
 They were now deep in the forest, and 
 the third saw them go many paces silent 
 as the trees, sunk into the great silence, a 
 happy part of it, and then emerging from 
 it and glad to see one another again as if 
 newly met. The youth's hands were warm 
 from the sun, but one was warmer where it 
 lay over her shoulder or curved under her 
 further arm to her bosom ; and almost it 
 appeared once or twice that she could not 
 support that bliss, for she put his hand 
 away and let her head sink back upon his 
 breast so that he kissed her throat where it 
 was hot from hiding in her dress and from 
 the turbulence of her heart, and his lips 
 
 in
 
 July 
 
 dwelt upon the strands of flesh that heaved 
 under them with sighs. 
 
 The footpath was over level ground, upon 
 mossy turf or dead leaves, and so narrow that 
 one of them was always brushing a foot 
 through the dark foliage of dog's mercury 
 that enclosed the path as in straight banks 
 where the beeches forbade anything else to 
 grow : it wound in and out, clear cut like 
 the flat bed of a streamlet, the earth pressed 
 firm but not sunken. A little way ahead and 
 behind it was invisible, so that it seemed to 
 open for their passing and then to close over 
 it again. And yet myriads had trodden it : 
 the leaves were not more numerous than their 
 vanished footsteps or their words. Nor was 
 the watcher the only ghost hovering in that 
 amorous and mortal air, though it was he 
 alone that beheld the others. One less in- 
 timate with that wood might have thought 
 the hovering forms born from the suggestion 
 of knot-holes or scars on the tree trunks, or 
 curious arrangements of branches and of 
 
 112
 
 July 
 
 dancing insects or shadows. To him they 
 were a thicket of the phantoms of living 
 and dead, upon whom these lovers trod, 
 through whom they wafted their gossamer 
 way, who looked down at them from trees 
 and up from grass and fern and whirled like 
 vapours feebly and without purpose. But 
 Laurence and Margaret saw these faces no 
 more than they heard the sea or saw the 
 spectator of all sitting with blood yet 
 warm and watching beside the dying clicks 
 and sighs of the fire. He shivered as he 
 saw the two come now through bunches of 
 meadow-sweet and wild mint that had to be 
 crushed underfoot, down to a wide pool, half 
 in shade and half burnished by the sun, 
 surrounded by tall reeds and reflecting the 
 reeds, the branches of the forest, the clouds, 
 and their two faces but not those of their 
 companions. 
 
 The two bent to drink. They bathed their 
 hands. They sat upon a boulder and dipped 
 their feet into the water and laughed together 
 H 113
 
 July 
 
 for the first time, as the cool touch of the 
 element set them free from the net of all but 
 too much love which their kisses had woven. 
 They were now perfectly still in the 
 midst of those dim whirling multitudes 
 and perfectly silent, girdled in that dense 
 summer murmur, inaudible to the full 
 brain or fancy, through which crept the 
 deeper noise of the sea. The forest came 
 right up to them and stretched its roots 
 out into the water at their feet ; but on 
 either side and in front of them the mossy- 
 footed beeches had drawn back a little way 
 from the mirror leaving, however, their 
 images down to which there was a slope 
 of turf ; between these enormous trees 
 could be seen the long green corridors to be 
 travelled at evening. Those two sat confident, 
 as if enthroned, in the heart of this majesty. 
 Here, for their observer, culminated the 
 exuberance of beautiful human and natural 
 life, in this repose. Beyond, perhaps not 
 many steps beyond, was the precipice or 
 114
 
 July 
 
 I 
 
 slow descent ; for it is the careless prodigality 
 of happy life that makes possible death 
 and the tragedy of death ; it can ascend 
 no farther, yet it cannot pause; a touch, 
 therefore, and the precipice is under the 
 leaping foot. Life paused for its rhyme to 
 meet it death. The maiden laughed. 
 
 The watcher fixed his eyes upon her in 
 suspense that he might watch every step. 
 But the smile was still upon her eyes and 
 lips when she and her lover and the pool 
 and all the July land ceased to be visible, 
 and had given place to a low, grey winter 
 sky and a flat white winter land, and in the 
 midst of it, under a yew tree, a man, shoulder 
 deep in the ground, casting up dark earth on 
 to the snow at a grave's edge. Of the other 
 land nothing remained save the moaning 
 girdle of that invisible sea ; the ghosts had 
 gone. The man paused from his work to 
 say, " 'Tis a beautiful day for a funeral ; 'tis 
 a maid, and she has a white day for her 
 burying. ..."
 
 July 
 
 "Imbecile!" the watcher tried to say 
 while rushing forward to bury the grave- 
 digger in his own pit, but his hand struck 
 against the cold arm of his chair, he opened 
 his eyes and saw only black branches stirring 
 in the pale south where the moon quivered, 
 now white and very small and half way 
 through her climb. 
 
 116
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 HAWTHORNDEN was always home to tea, 
 except once, and it was a significant 
 exception. 
 
 When he was about thirty-five Hawthorn- 
 den moved out into the country, partly 
 because rents were less and he could have 
 a governess for his three children, and so 
 put off for some years the difficulty of 
 choosing a school ; and partly, but this 
 was unconsciously, because he had few 
 friends left. As a young man, clever above 
 the common, reckless (within certain 
 limits) and open-handed, he had attracted 
 men of very "different types, both at the 
 university and in his bachelor lodgings. 
 But after he married, at twenty-eight, his 
 friends never came to see him, except when 
 they were definitely asked to dinner, though 
 
 117
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 his wife was charming and clever and 
 anxious to meet them, and though he was 
 not too fond of her to attend to them. He 
 seemed to have stiffened and chilled. His 
 smile began to have an awkward catch in 
 it. It was so awkward that it ought to 
 have been dignified, but was not quite. 
 And at the same time as his friends were 
 neglecting him he was not making any 
 progress in domesticity. He had decided 
 against entering a profession, and as he 
 could live on his private means, he was at 
 home very much. But there he gave him- 
 self up chiefly to solitary reading, and saw 
 his wife chiefly at meals, and, on evenings 
 when he wished to go early to bed, after 
 dinner. He had thought of writing, but 
 he was squeamish and touchy, and had 
 destroyed his early verses and prose with 
 great care, burning them in his room one 
 summer evening, with a tense, red face, and 
 then, by an after-thought, preserving the 
 ashes in a small cherrywood box. He read 
 118
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 many books of almost every kind, except 
 criticism. Criticism he had taught himself 
 to hate, because it seemed to him absurd 
 that the writing class should not only 
 produce books, but circulate its opinion of 
 them among people occupied like himself 
 with the business of living at first hand, 
 not at second hand. In the days before 
 criticism life and literature had both been 
 finer things. It was the men with no 
 standards of taste at all who made the arts 
 of the great periods. When there was no 
 one to tell men what to put on their walls, 
 how to build their houses, what to wear 
 and what to read, the glorious things were 
 being created which men instructed at every 
 turn in these matters were content to 
 imitate. Hawthornden sought to recover 
 this freedom by allowing no middleman 
 between art and himself as a human being. 
 As it was, however, physically impossible 
 to keep pace with modern literature 
 without a guide, he neglected it without 
 
 119
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 noticing that this was a concession ; and as 
 the old literature had been well sifted by 
 the efforts of the very criticism he despised, 
 he had little left but to enjoy, and he dis- 
 covered, with some annoyance, that he read 
 and thought so far as he could express 
 himself very much like everybody else. 
 Nevertheless, he continued to read abund- 
 antly, and for the sake of books put off year 
 by year the problems which his own life 
 offered him. He got out of touch with his 
 wife, ignored her friends, and only by an 
 insincere though, determined effort, from 
 time to time, succeeded in quieting her 
 hysteria and relieving her melancholy. 
 As to his children, he made spasmodic and 
 more and more conscious efforts at pleasing 
 and understanding them, and, observing 
 that they could do without him, he plumed 
 himself upon their ingratitude, and left 
 them to the natural methods of his wife, of 
 which he expressed his disapproval from 
 time to time. Yet he was fond of the 
 1 20
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 poetry of passion. He would look up from 
 a poem sometimes and see his wife reading 
 or embroidering, and then take his eyes 
 away with a sigh and only the faintest 
 dissatisfied recognition that he was be- 
 coming more and more incapable of being 
 passionate himself and of meeting the 
 passion of another. He also continued to 
 sigh for the simple antique attitudes of the 
 emotions in their liberty, and cursed a time 
 when they could only be seen travestied on 
 the stage. It was literature, nevertheless, 
 and the stage, that had given him the 
 standard which he unconsciously applied to 
 scenes in life which he thought should have 
 been heroical, for example, and were not. 
 Nor was he shaken from his dim-pinnacled 
 citadel of unreality by his one experience of 
 something near tragedy at home. His wife 
 rushed at him one day, with stiff, drawn, 
 red-spotted face and staring eyes, and a 
 shrill voice he had never heard before, to 
 tell him that one of the children was 
 
 121
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 injured. He drew her head to his breast 
 and kissed her hair, and felt at first a kind 
 of shame, then an instinctive disgust at the 
 stains and rude prints of her grief. The 
 same with beauty. He could not have 
 defined it, but he had a standard which he 
 applied to loveliness like a yard-wand, and 
 never suspected that it was the standard 
 that was wanting. It was expression that 
 he feared in living beauty. He wanted 
 the calm of antiquity of death of the 
 photographs of celebrated women. A dark 
 face, burning and wrenched with eagerness 
 or delight, disturbed him, and was not 
 beautiful, because he had been at the 
 trouble of putting aside the expression, and 
 observing that the nose was too small, the 
 eyes unequal, the lips too full, and so on. 
 
 He was fond of reading fairy tales and 
 books for and about children, and had 
 acquired strong opinions as to what they 
 needed and liked. He was a great lover of 
 liberty, of liberalism, of freedom for thought 
 122
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 and action. He could be heard late at night 
 reading aloud in a deep voice poems on 
 liberty, and even at breakfast would relieve 
 himself by muttering impressively 
 
 And in thy smile and by thy side 
 
 Saintly Camillas lived and stern Atilius died. 
 
 The children looked up and said, " What did 
 you say, father ? " or '' Do say some more 
 like that " ; but he stirred his tea, and made 
 haste to leave the table for the study. He 
 admired books of curious character and 
 adventure, such as Borrow's and adored the 
 strange persons who frequented once upon 
 a time, and perhaps even now, the inns and 
 roads of England. He was indignant with 
 civilisation which threatened to extinguish 
 such men, and used to cut from newspapers 
 passages describing the efforts to chain up 
 gypsies and tramps. 
 
 When he moved into the country he was 
 prepared for adventures. Gypsies should be 
 allowed to camp near his house and he 
 would be familiar with them. He would 
 
 123
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 invite the tramps into his study for a talk and 
 a smoke. He used to sit by the roadside, 
 or in the taproom of an inn, waiting for 
 what would turn up. But something always 
 stood in the way himself. He grew tired 
 of paying for a tramp's quart, and was dis- 
 concerted, now by too great familiarity and 
 now by too great respect. When a tramp 
 came to the back door, his maids or his wife 
 reported it to him, and they sometimes had 
 interesting fragments of a story to relate ; 
 for the women had human sympathies along 
 with unquestioning commonplace views of 
 social distinctions. Sometimes he saw the 
 man coming or going, and formed romantic 
 conjectures which made him impatient of 
 what he actually heard. He thought at one 
 time that perhaps his mistake was in keep- 
 ing too near home ; he would walk far over 
 the hills, and stay away for a night or two. 
 But it was always the same. He dressed 
 negligently and carried a crooked stick, and 
 when he complained of his failure to get at 
 124
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 the heart of the wayfaring man, his wife 
 flattered him by saying that any one could 
 see what he really was, whatever his dis- 
 guise; he liked the flattery, and remained 
 discontented. 
 
 Perhaps his whole plan was wrong. He 
 had bought many maps, special walking 
 clothes and boots, compact outfits, several 
 kinds of knapsacks, rucsacs, haversacks, sat- 
 chels, uncounted walking sticks, just as in 
 other departments of his life he found him- 
 self buying pipes suitable for this purpose or 
 that, half a dozen different species of lamps, 
 pens, razors, hats and so on. He tried sim- 
 plicity for a while, but this also meant a new 
 outlay, and he was soon unfaithful. 
 
 Among the people of the neighbourhood 
 he received a reputation for unconvention- 
 ality. He was said to know the country 
 and the people better than anyone. He was 
 mistaken for a genius, a poet, an artist, a 
 Bohemian, an eccentric millionaire, especi- 
 ally as he had a genuine dislike to parties 
 
 125
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 and picnics and to the sound of men and 
 women trying to put emotion into the words, 
 " Isn't the weather perfectly glorious ? " by 
 drawling them or emphasising one word 
 or each word in turn. He liked the 
 mistake. 
 
 But one thing, above all others, gradually 
 disturbed him. He was always home to tea. 
 
 He liked a certain kind of tea the milk 
 or cream of a precise quantity poured out 
 first into his cup and then the tea on top of 
 it, to scald it and produce a colour and 
 flavour otherwise impossible. Then the 
 sweet home-made cakes. . . . Once or twice 
 he went into cottages for tea, to chat with 
 the poor and see them au naturel. But he 
 saw nothing, and was therefore keenly alive 
 to the fact that the tea was bad, and the 
 cakes all but uneatable so that he had a 
 second tea when he arrived home. Mrs 
 Hawthornden was glad of this ; she liked 
 him to enjoy himself, and to praise her cakes. 
 She made cakes regularly, and saw that they 
 126
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 were of the kinds he preferred. When he 
 started early for a long walk, she used to 
 ask him when he would be back. "Oh, I 
 cannot possibly say ! " he retorted at once ; 
 but added, on/econsideration, " But perhaps 
 by four or five." He was rarely later than 
 four, and she smiled. He made special 
 efforts not to be back by five dreading the 
 habit and yet at last walked so hard as to 
 tire himself in the effort to reach home at 
 that time. So at last, when his wife asked 
 the question, " When shall I expect you 
 back ? " he used to say, sometimes smilingly, 
 sometimes with a submissive despair, some- 
 times with irritation, " Oh, I am always 
 home to tea ! " When he was not punctual, 
 he was proud but regretted the cakes and 
 read Borrow with greater relish. But the 
 next day he would find himself home again 
 to tea, and eating too many cakes with 
 equanimity. He knew they were too many, 
 and the thought at length prevented him 
 from enjoying them, but not quite from 
 
 127
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 eating them ; there was a relic of virtue in 
 this inability to enjoy them, though he knew 
 that it might have been greater. At times, 
 in an ancient cathedral or in the midst of a 
 tragic tale, he started with the thought that 
 he was almost forgetting his tea, and then 
 his pleasure was at an end. Lying awake 
 at night, he reproached himself, " You are 
 always home to tea." He was haunted by 
 it, as men of noble families of old time were 
 haunted by their fate, and in his moments of 
 complacency it crept suddenly upon him. 
 
 One day he went out to a distant part of 
 the county to explore a ruin. It was a fine 
 August day, and he spent most of it in 
 the castle. He left it late in the afternoon, 
 and then began to run. There were several 
 trains that he might have caught ; never- 
 theless, he ran. That day he did not 
 return to tea. His wife looked out a train, 
 and expected him first by one and then by 
 another. It grew dark, and he was not 
 back. The afternoon had been hot, and he 
 128
 
 Hawthornden 
 
 had run too fast for a man of his build. He 
 was found lying beside the path. He had 
 achieved his ambition. He had not only 
 not come home to tea, but had ceased to 
 think about tea, so far as can be known. 
 He was dead. 
 
 129
 
 The Artist 
 
 THIS, said Adams to himself, staring strangely 
 at the dry brushes and blank paper before 
 him, this was the fairest day of the whole 
 year, the youngest child of a long family of 
 days, each fairer than its elder. First, there 
 were two days following suddenly, hot and 
 cloudless, upon weeks of storm, of sullenness, 
 and of restless wind and rain vexing the new 
 leaves and scattering the blossoms ; and at 
 the end of the second a thunderstorm out of 
 the east ascended lightly and travelled rapidly 
 away without silencing the birds, though the 
 trees were but as reeds in the current of the 
 wildly streaming, visible wind. The night 
 was cloudless, but with few stars. The day 
 after emerged hazy and moaning, but grew 
 slowly into a prime of breadth and splendour 
 without blemish, and sank into a night of 
 130
 
 The Artist 
 
 steady raining. The next day, and another 
 and a third, were the same, saving that they 
 developed with different rapidity and by 
 unequal stages of mist, breeze, and again 
 mist, before their triumphs of burning 
 brilliance in the sky and joyful multitudin- 
 ous profusion crowding upon the earth. The 
 nights were misty and troubled over the days 
 which they entombed and cradled. Adams 
 found himself waiting day after day for 
 the end and crown of this energy and 
 change. 
 
 There came a lustrous morning early 
 assailed from all quarters of the sky in turn, 
 as if the heavens were besieging the earth, 
 by thunder and after long, brooding intervals, 
 thunder again and again, now with cannon- 
 ading and now one boom or blast followed by 
 no sound except its echo and the challenge 
 of the pheasants. The lark in the sky, the 
 blackbird in the isolated meadow elms, the 
 nightingale in the hazel and bluebell thickets, 
 sang on ; and before the last of the assault
 
 The Artist 
 
 Adams set out, inwardly confident in the 
 day's future. 
 
 He walked steadily, but more and more 
 slowly, into the broadening and deepening 
 beauty of the great day. So hot was it that 
 the heat alone would have made him happy, 
 and yet the east wind urged him to go on 
 and on. He forgot that it had ever been 
 cold ; it no longer seemed possible that it 
 should ever be cold again ; and he was at 
 ease in flesh and spirit, as a creature born 
 for the earth. Now and then he looked at 
 the complicated pale green overflowing the 
 wooded coombes, or at the clouds, stars, or 
 clots of white flowers along the hedges, or 
 at the barley nodding all ways upon already 
 a yard of grey green translucent stalks in the 
 fields above the hollow lanes ; and he looked 
 with the calm, experienced, and (he hoped) 
 not jaded eye of an artist turning forty. But, 
 as a rule, if his eye fed it was in pure and 
 independent wantonness, reporting nothing 
 to the brain but pleasure. His eyes did as 
 132
 
 The Artist 
 
 as they listed, wandering or nesting on this 
 hand and that. Adams, in fact, was a heavy 
 and solid body moving through this luxuriant 
 woodland country of deep lanes, gentle hills 
 and short views, for the benefit of those imps 
 and elves, his two eyes. They delighted, as 
 if they had been but ephemeral creatures and 
 not instruments of an immortal soul, in the 
 silkiness and darkness of the long grass, in 
 the towering of one tree, the forking of 
 another, and the inexplicable ramifications 
 of hundreds ; in the flight of the swift which 
 was as if the arrow and bow had flown away 
 together. Rarely were his ears allowed a 
 little play, to collect the round notes of the 
 cuckoo, the raptures of the nightingales, 
 the calm, easy fluting of the blackbirds. 
 
 But satiated with the earth of morning, 
 noon, and afternoon, his eyes tended more 
 and more to the sky. There in the north, 
 were clouds, farther away than he had ever 
 before seen clouds, the most delicate of 
 toppling marble mountains, grey-white with 
 
 133
 
 The Artist 
 
 a glistening white profile towards the sun, 
 and midway between him and these were a 
 few long, thin strands of a dark blue-grey 
 lying horizontally. Round about the sun 
 itself hung a mass of this blue-grey, edged 
 with fiery gold ; and at times that mass dis- 
 appeared, leaving the sun as if all that cloud 
 were the fuel of its fury a dazzling white 
 conflagration filling a quarter of the sky. 
 He walked as if he were going to walk into 
 the heavens beyond the hills. 
 
 Again, his eyes fell to the earth. For the 
 first time in the day they dwelt on human 
 faces. It was in a short village street ending 
 at a churchyard, a street of uniform old brick 
 cottages with flat fronts right upon the road- 
 way all but one, and that had a tiny bow 
 window which seemed all glass. In this 
 window a white-haired woman stood talking 
 to a dark girl, looking straight at her with 
 eyes and lips together, while the girl's eyes, 
 somewhat abased, looked out on to the street. 
 Adams saw chiefly her white dress and her 
 134
 
 The Artist 
 
 dark eyes, because they were fixed on him 
 and even followed him, yet without the least 
 curiosity or understanding. " Little and 
 brown and lovely is my love," were the 
 words of his thought as he passed by, but 
 he did not know whether they were remem- 
 bered or inspired. It was a good group, 
 quite apart from the fact that the girl was 
 beautiful. 
 
 Past the church, only just out of the sound 
 of the sermon, Adams sat on a gate. The 
 wind had gone away, perhaps up into the 
 sky to comb out the white clouds into curled 
 fleeces ; the air below was still as thought. 
 Lowering his head, he saw nothing nor 
 thought of anything, so far as he knew, for 
 an unmeasured space of time. Suddenly a 
 noise of many cattle running in the field 
 behind drew his eyes that way. They had 
 disturbed whatever was going on in his head, 
 and he got down and was almost past the 
 gateway when he glanced once more into 
 the field, and saw white on the other side of 
 
 135
 
 The Artist 
 
 it a girl in white certainly the girl who 
 had stood in the bay window. A youth in 
 black was leaning beside her over a gate, and 
 stroking some cart-horses. She very soon 
 grew impatient, and for a time stood with 
 her back to them, though they snuffed her 
 hair. But seeing that her companion took 
 no notice, she raised the arm nearer to him 
 and caught his, and tried, without any 
 physical effort, to draw him away from the 
 gate, that they might walk on. At that 
 moment she seemed to Adams to be a little 
 older than her lover, twenty perhaps, while 
 he could not have been more than eighteen. 
 He did not move. Then she took one step 
 away still holding his arm, and with her eyes 
 upon his face, but in vain. So she slid her 
 hand down to his, and made another step 
 away, and a second, still looking up at him ; 
 and thus their two arms were now fully 
 stretched out. At the end of the field, 
 several windows, under white-edged gables, 
 looked at them out of the vicarage, from 
 136
 
 The Artist 
 
 which they had probably come. The youth 
 felt their gaze ; for her, the house might have 
 been swallowed iu the earth, the earth itself 
 might have been swallowed up, without 
 troubling her eyes or her heart. Only when 
 she bent her head and kissed his imprisoned 
 hand did he face her and give way, and begin 
 slowly to walk alongside of her from the 
 gate. The horses thrust their heads far out, 
 and he turned round ; he would have gone 
 back, had she not taken his hand in both 
 of hers, bending as she did so and fastening 
 her eyes upon his, and, as she thought, upon 
 his soul ; whereupon he threw up his arms 
 suddenly, and sent the animals racing away. 
 All her movements were beautiful. By 
 the side of the stiff youth in black she was 
 like a wave lapping at a rock. Adams stood 
 quite still, watching her through the sprays 
 of hawthorn at the edge of his gateway. He 
 had grown happy and breathless in her 
 beauty, and yet sad to see her actions as of 
 one who had given all to one who had not 
 
 137
 
 The Artist 
 
 and could not. It was her lover's dog that 
 had set the cattle running, and when it did 
 so again his shout of command was clear, 
 hard, and controlled. She, Adams knew, 
 could not have shouted so. She was strong, 
 spirited, and without fear, but she was too 
 gentle, he thought. Her yielding gestures 
 were still imperious, and the two were now 
 walking slowly and close-linked she smiling 
 as she took strides equal to his but in a few 
 days, in a year. . . . Yet Adams drew some 
 lines upon paper to remind him of her body 
 bent and head raised when she clasped her 
 lover's hand in both of hers. He watched 
 them receding, and did not take his eyes off 
 them until they had rounded a corner and 
 passed wholly out of sight. 
 
 Starting at length to continue his walk, he 
 looked at the sketch abstractedly. He was 
 not a great or even a much-praised artist ; he 
 was not a vain man ; yet suddenly came into 
 his mind an entirely unforeseen and unfamiliar 
 thought " Perhaps these pencil marks will 
 138
 
 The Artist 
 
 endure until after those two lovers are old 
 and after I am dust." He sighed involun- 
 tarily, and immediately smiled self-consciously 
 at the absurdity and apparent vanity of the 
 thought. Then, while his mind was occupied 
 he knew not where, with a grave look he 
 tore the paper into many pieces, and dropped 
 them into the ditch, so that they should not 
 disfigure the grass. 
 
 139
 
 Barque D'Amour 
 
 A GREAT street organ, adorned with a 
 coloured print of the battle of Waterloo 
 across its upper half, stood opposite a 
 butcher's shop. The organist, dragger and 
 player in one, was with it in the gutter. He 
 did not look in the least musical : his face 
 was small, oblong, and bony, and thickly 
 sprinkled with the gritty beginnings of 
 whiskers, moustache, and beard, of the 
 colour of brick-dust ; his eyes were blue and 
 watery ; his teeth pressed together to silence 
 their chattering in the cold rain ; his thin 
 lips curled into a leer of mixed hate and 
 timidity, in the shadow of a perfectly new 
 check cap like a jockey's. With his left 
 hand he turned the handle of the instru- 
 ment ; his right was deep in the pocket of 
 a blue overcoat which had once belonged 
 140
 
 Barque d'Amour 
 
 to a broad and protuberant gentleman. His 
 eyes roved from window to window in the 
 street, and from back to back of the passers 
 by, returning not to the organ, but to the 
 whole sheep, the joints, and the boxes full 
 of fragments, in the butcher's window. 
 Nevertheless, as he turned the handle the 
 organ emitted the same sounds as if a 
 musician or the original owner of the 
 overcoat had been playing it. 
 
 Many people were passing up and down 
 the street, which was narrow, paved with 
 noisy stones, and lined with small shops of 
 many kinds. It ran diagonally from one 
 important street to another, so that the 
 passengers were half of them poor women 
 and children shopping, and half of them men 
 of all classes taking the short cut and walk- 
 ing rapidly, without looking to right or left. 
 
 Children stopped and stared at the battle 
 of Waterloo and the grandly dressed but 
 but bleeding cavalry, turning now and then 
 to the performer, to envy him the organ and 
 
 141
 
 Barque d' Amour 
 
 yet observe that he was not proud of it, and 
 that he was cold. Sometimes he said to a 
 group sadly, " Oh, go away ! " and after 
 an interval angrily, " Get out of it ! " at 
 which they began to move away, looking 
 back at him at first fearfully, then with 
 resentment growing into hostility, and at 
 last with laughter as they got ready to run. 
 A stout policeman stood for a minute and 
 observed him. The man pretended not to 
 see, and kept his eyes upon an imaginary 
 point in the butcher's window, until the 
 policeman had gone away saying, "Your 
 arm has got to go round a good many times 
 to a pound of mutton ! " The organist's 
 eye followed the broad back to the end of 
 the street, and remained there, fixed with 
 helpless and subdued indignation. He only 
 turned his head again, and that without a 
 change of expression, when a thin woman 
 with a quiet look of anxiety, who had 
 stopped outside the butcher's, gave him 
 a halfpenny. She went on down the street 
 142
 
 Barque d'Amour 
 
 holding a string bag containing a cabbage 
 close to her side : the sound of the playing 
 had not penetrated her thoughts. 
 
 Soon after her a young clerk came along, 
 with a pale spectacled face, dark eyes and 
 moustache, and a look of vacant solemnity 
 and virtue. He heard the music on his way 
 back from the midday meal to his office, 
 and it took entire control over his mind. 
 He ceased to see the row of overcoats hang- 
 ing up like empty skins in the office passage, 
 the white clock and its two hands together 
 at five minutes past one, and the head clerk 
 looking contemptuously from him to the 
 clock. He felt an airiness of exaltation as 
 if he were striding over the housetops of the 
 world in a sublime solitude. He no longer 
 wished vaguely that he was rich, handsome, 
 and clever, but threw his chest forward and 
 lifted his chin complacently, while his heels 
 struck the pavement a little more sharply 
 and with a kind of music. He thought 
 comfortably of several scenes in his life
 
 Barque d'Amour 
 
 which he could always recall with pleasure 
 and some glory a cathedral full of sun- 
 light, of spring, and of easy-walking ladies ; 
 a gorgeous banquet, a long table flashing 
 with white and silver, glowing with fruit 
 and flowers and wine, under many lights ; 
 a theatre, all warmth, and animation and 
 brilliancy, just after the conclusion of a 
 romantic first act. 
 
 These died away before a scene which he 
 did not know. A boundless water with 
 many islands appeared in full sunlight, such 
 as he had never known in any August by 
 the sea. The water sparkled in long strip 
 and shimmered evenly in two or three 
 broad expanses ; at the edges it frothed 
 and hissed like champagne among pebbles 
 of many colours, of gold and turquoise and 
 unknown gems. The islands were more 
 luxuriant than he had ever seen or imagined. 
 They were softly darkened at the water's 
 edge by trees of an infinite variety of form 
 and verdure, and illuminated by blossom in 
 144
 
 Barque d' Amour 
 
 masses and sharp isolated stars. Lawns, 
 of deep grass and of flowers in long friths 
 of white and gold, rose and fell between the 
 masses of trees. Such might have been the 
 islands of the Pacific before man had touched 
 them. Birds of gaudy plumage and arrogant 
 shrill voices floated over the trees or hung 
 upon the branches, and spilled the dew and 
 the rose purple and snow of petals, in ones 
 and twos and in woven showers, down upon 
 the grass and the water. 
 
 The air was clear, and the light of an 
 unearthly purity, like the air and light of 
 imaginary lands in poems and impossible 
 tales. There was nowhere any sign of 
 decay or change. The sea was innocent. 
 The sun could not set from off the islands 
 and waters, for it hung aloft for ever in 
 obedient majesty. All things expressed a 
 calm and certainly immortal bliss. 
 
 What seemed at first another island 
 floating upon the laughing water was a 
 ship, worthy of the utmost pomp of 
 K 145
 
 Barque d'Amour 
 
 Cleopatra. It was overgrown with flowers 
 and leaves, so as to be known for a ship 
 only by its motion and its high, extravagant 
 prow and stern as it advanced slowly among 
 the islands. While it glided, music arose ; 
 and the music seemed that of the innumer- 
 able flowers spiring up or floating down from 
 the exuberant foliage, so soft was it, and of 
 such a nimble and thoughtless kind ; and the 
 swaying and onward rising of the vessel was 
 beautiful of itself, as if it were wafted by 
 the music. Birds flitted among that foliage 
 also, and scattered without diminishing the 
 blossoms. 
 
 With the birds, and as light and careless 
 as they, were human beings ; at least, their 
 forms were like those made known to the 
 young man by Titian and Correggio ; and 
 they were in harmony with the great light 
 in the sky and upon the waters, with the 
 flowers and the music, singing the same 
 joy and untainted tranquillity. These were 
 women ; but high among the leaves were 
 146
 
 Barque d'Amour 
 
 children, immortal children, having wings 
 upon their shoulders. . And in their wreathed 
 motions the women and children smiled 
 and sang melodies as sweet as if they 
 had been, not human, but a kind of god- 
 like birds. Their melodies joined with the 
 mysterious singing of the vessel, and their 
 smiles with the flowers. Some were weav- 
 ing garlands and crowning or discrowning 
 one another, and their shapes and move- 
 ments were as lovely as what he dimly 
 thought of, and imperfectly imagined, when 
 he read : " The Graces and the rosy-bosomed 
 Hours." Some played fantastic musical in- 
 struments, stringed and of the form of shells 
 and blossoms. Others were swimming close 
 to the ship, and thrust up their smiling and 
 golden heads through the leaves trailing 
 upon the ripples. 
 
 These women and cherubs or cupids, the 
 shining water, the verdure and flowers, the 
 birds and the divine presence of the light, 
 were pleasing to the young man beyond any 
 
 147
 
 Barque d' Amour 
 
 of the beautiful or luxurious sights of his 
 lifetime. They represented the utmost ease, 
 loveliness, and exuberance, the perfection of 
 joy and freedom, which his nature could 
 crave. As he watched them he shed every- 
 thing that had once been inconsistent with 
 these qualities and had stood in their way. 
 They beckoned, and their beckoning and his 
 welcome were about to endue him with 
 wings that he might ascend to the ship or 
 one of the islands, that all might be accom- 
 plished according to his desire. The bliss 
 was still far off and strange, but it was 
 within his increasing reach, and expectation 
 and achievement together put fire into his 
 eyes and into his cheeks. He was no longer 
 awkward, hurried, fatigued, ignorant, and 
 without courage. He was the equal of those 
 timeless creatures and a compatriot in that 
 exquisite clime. It was as if he were made a 
 being of divine lineage, with glorified senses, 
 with a voice sweeter than bird, lute, or horn. 
 But stepping forward with blinded eager- 
 148
 
 Barque d'Amour 
 
 ness, he suddenly found himself stopped 
 among the horses of the main street, in a 
 thicket of thronging sound where the organ 
 music was scarce audible even if sought. 
 For some time he had not known that he 
 was listening ; now for a moment he heard 
 it again. The vision was with him still, but 
 in shreds and intermittently. It was more 
 and more like a picture, having neither air 
 nor solidity, and the horses' teeth glittered 
 through it a grin of demons. Not only did 
 the vision become a picture, but a picture 
 painted upon a canvas which swayed a 
 little in the air. The colours dimmed ; the 
 flowers were like artificial roses ; the ship 
 was impossible ; the women and cupids 
 were insipid and absurd. Yes, it was a 
 picture he had seen somewhere a tapestry 
 no, the drop-scene at a theatre, and under- 
 neath it the title "Barque d'Amour." He 
 remembered it perfectly as he once more 
 looked up at the office clock and its two 
 hands together at five minutes past one. 
 
 149
 
 Olwen 
 
 OLWEN was eighteen, a Welsh girl, with 
 light brown hair so loosely coiled and so 
 abundant that no fancy was needed to 
 see it down to her knees; an oval face, 
 not plump enough to conceal the bones of 
 cheeks and bold chin ; a clear, wild-rose 
 complexion, lit up from within as by moon- 
 light ; dark eyebrows that had wild, clear 
 curves like the wings of some bird of 
 free waste lands, and curved lips that never 
 hid the perfect teeth when at rest. She 
 wore the clothes of a slattern. She walked 
 and stood still and sat down with the pride 
 of an animal in the first year when it has a 
 a mate. The curlew, the hare, the sheep 
 upon the mountain, were not wilder, or 
 swifter, or more gentle than she. Her face 
 and stature were those of a queen in the 
 ISO
 
 Olwen 
 
 old time, whose father was a shepherd on the 
 solitary mountains. Being as strong as a 
 man, she had finished her work early in the 
 factory and come straight home, and, tuck- 
 ing up her skirts, had scrubbed and polished 
 her mother's house. There was no pleasant 
 way of being idle in the daytime, for, except 
 with her lover, she did not care to walk to 
 the mountain or to the black village streets. 
 She laid tea, served it, and washed up. She 
 was the only one who was not going out for 
 the evening, for she had to bake the week's 
 bread. Before the lamp had to be lit, her 
 brother's wife came in with her baby. The 
 first batch of cakes was already out of the 
 oven. Their perfume streamed out through 
 the open door, which let in the song of the 
 blackbird, the wind from the mountains, 
 and the majesty of evening. Olwen could 
 rest now ; she took the baby, and they sat 
 down and began to gossip. 
 
 The married girl was a little older, slender 
 and dark-haired, with small, sharp features
 
 Olwen 
 
 and full lips, pleasure-loving, gay, and sharp- 
 tempered, rapid in her speech. This was 
 her first child, and she kept, as yet, all her 
 maiden attractiveness and irresponsibility, 
 and added to it the different power of 
 one who is captive but unconquered. She 
 sighed lightly now and then, as if she relished 
 and remembered over-much the youth she 
 retained. She seemed to feel the advan- 
 tages she had over the unmarried Olwen, 
 without being able to overcome a phantom 
 of admiration for her that might at any 
 moment turn to envy. 
 
 Olwen, being the eldest of ten, held the 
 baby like a mother. Her face bent down to 
 it, her shoulders and arms walled it, in an 
 experienced way. She knew all that she 
 would ever know about the care of infants 
 even their death. The young mother, watch- 
 ing her, would now and then cull the baby 
 from her lap and press it to herself, and 
 cover it with kisses. If there were cries, it 
 was Olwen who silenced them in her deep 
 152
 
 Olwen 
 
 breast ; but the mother had the craftiness to 
 let the maid seem to be their cause, and 
 when the child was with the other she would 
 tease it, in the hope of being the comforter. 
 It would have been hard for a stranger to say 
 whose was the child, since Olwen's attention 
 to this one baby out of many was as perfect 
 as the mother's to the only one. The mother 
 was lively and effusive, yet careless ; the 
 maid was calm and tender, and never forget- 
 ful. The mother could have been a model 
 for Aphrodite, the maid for Demeter. The 
 mother was a lover first ; the maid was born 
 maternal, and her heart could be stormed 
 by a sweetheart, but ruled only by a child. 
 The mother was destined for a man or for 
 several men ; there was somewhere a man 
 destined for the maid, to open for her a 
 kingdom which she would enter alone. The 
 mother pressed the child to her with a 
 luxurious smile, as if the lover were there, 
 too ; the maid resembled some noble animal, 
 calm, but with a half-hid ferocity that would 
 
 153
 
 Olwen 
 
 have talons if need were, even for the father 
 of its brood. The mother was an elf, a not 
 purely human creature, a haunting, disquiet- 
 ing form of life, a marshlight out of the wilds 
 of time, and to be blown away with time 
 again ; the maid was the beginning and the 
 end of human life, necessity itself made 
 beauty, mere humanity raised to a divine 
 height, the very topmost plume on the crest 
 of life's pride. And yet behind the physical 
 glory of Olwen, her bold, easy gait, her deep 
 voice, full of nobility and sweetness, behind 
 all her courage and robustness and inde- 
 pendence, there was a something like the 
 timidity of the stag who stands on the rock 
 in the moment of his greatest power and 
 joy, without fear, and yet with an ear and a 
 nostril for every breath of the summer gale. 
 
 The baby was with its mother when 
 Olwen's lover entered the room. It was 
 still half-lit by the great fire and the pale 
 sky after sunset. Seeing the two girls and 
 the child, he sat in the darkest of the 
 154
 
 Olwen 
 
 chairs and kept his cap in his fingers. 
 The mother gave the child to Olwen, and 
 the young man became silent. The maid 
 hardly looked at him, while the young 
 mother, glad to see a man, bantered her 
 visitor in vain even when she said laughing : 
 
 " Olwen has a baby now, John, and you 
 see she can do without its father." 
 
 The young man fingered his cap, but 
 looked musingly at Olwen out of the 
 shadow. She had no eyes or ears but for 
 the little thing that was now fully awake 
 and standing on her lap and putting its 
 hands into her mouth and eyes. Now she 
 caught it quickly under the armpits and, 
 throwing back her head, lifted it at arm's 
 length and let it plant its feet upon her 
 throat, then between her breasts, and so 
 down to her lap ; it crowed and waved its 
 limbs. The mother looked into the fire. 
 Again Olwen stood the baby upon her head 
 where its curled feet were entangled in her 
 hair ; her eyes were towards the young man 
 
 155
 
 Olwen 
 
 but not looking at him, though her thoughts 
 might have been of him. Still turned 
 towards him, she lowered the child to her 
 knees and jutted her bright face forward, 
 pouting her mouth for kisses while the child 
 tried to take away one of her glistening 
 teeth ; then she let it down flat on her knees 
 and buried her head in the laughing and 
 quaking form. The young man's dark eyes 
 fixed upon her grew more and more dark 
 and sullen, with admiration of her, jealousy 
 of the child, and indignation that she was so 
 careless. She had not given him a glance. 
 She sang, she talked, she laughed, she 
 feigned to cry, she cooed, for the child. 
 She allowed it to do as it liked and as 
 nobody else had done except in thought. 
 Her cheeks glowed with pleasure and 
 exercise and thoughts unexpressed ; the 
 white skin of her brows and throat gleamed 
 moist and whiter than ever ; her grey eyes 
 flamed softly. Never had she been happier, 
 and the happiness was at one with her 
 156
 
 Olwen 
 
 beauty, so that a stranger watching might 
 have thought that her happiness made her 
 beautiful, or even that it was the con- 
 sciousness of her beauty. She looked 
 taller and her shoulders more massive than 
 before, her back more powerful in the 
 gentleness of its maternal stoop, her breast 
 more deep, her dark voice more than ever 
 the music of her noble body and blissful 
 nature. Fit to be the bride of a hero and 
 the mother of beautiful women and heroes 
 and poets, she gave herself to the child. 
 
 Presently the child grew more silent, 
 playing with a lock of her hair which now 
 fell half over one shoulder down to her lap. 
 She smiled musingly and caught the eye of 
 her lover and began to tell him what she 
 had been doing that day how the manager 
 had told her not to work so fast, and then 
 asked her when she was to be married but 
 he remained silent. The child reared itself 
 up by her hair and pulled at her chin and 
 ears. She took no notice save to smile 
 
 157
 
 Olwen 
 
 good-humouredly and shake her head, and 
 continued to talk. Her two arms im- 
 prisoned the child ; her head was raised in 
 a pretence of keeping her chin from the 
 enemy. Cheated of the smooth chin and 
 soft ears the child was still a little while, 
 and remained so still and so silent that it 
 had been forgotten, when suddenly the 
 mother broke into a laugh and cried : 
 
 " Well, I never, Olwen, the impudence of 
 the child, you will be suckling her next ! " 
 
 Olwen rose up undisturbed, smiling to 
 herself, and then glancing over at John as 
 she fastened two buttons below her neck. 
 
 "Now, Caroline," she said, "you take a 
 turn with baby and let me talk to John." 
 
 John stood up and came forward very 
 slowly and very stiffly, and took the child 
 from her arms. It began at once to cry 
 and the mother, rising in a temper, carried 
 it swiftly away, leaving the lovers silent : 
 John was the first to speak, saying : 
 " And what did you say to the 
 158
 
 Olwen 
 
 manager, Olwen ? Shall we get married 
 this summer ? " 
 
 "Yes, she said ; waiting is not much fun 
 for you, John." And she gave him a kiss 
 that he was too slow to return, so that 
 she broke away, saying: 
 
 "And now I must take out these cakes. 
 You light the lamp, John. Yes, come 
 along, no nonsense. Bless me," she added, 
 opening the oven door and letting out a 
 smell as sweet as the first heat of May. 
 " It's lucky I wasn't a minute later. There ! 
 Take one while it's hot and don't burn 
 yourself. Hot cakes and maids' lips, John." 
 
 And John split the cake in two and 
 buttered it, and they ate the halves 
 together. 
 
 159
 
 The Attempt 
 
 SEVERAL seasons had passed since Morgan 
 Traheron had so much as looked at his 
 fishing tackle, and now he turned over, 
 almost indifferently, the reels and lines and 
 hooks and flies which had been carefully put 
 away in an old tool box of his great-grand- 
 father's. He looked at the name " Morgan 
 Traheron" cut neatly inside the lid, and 
 shivered slightly during the thought that one 
 of his own name had bought it in 1776 at the 
 ironmonger's and brazier's under the sign of 
 the " Anchor and Key " near Charing Cross, 
 and that the owner had been dead nearly a 
 hundred years. Cold, cold, must he be ! 
 Even as cold would be the younger bearer 
 of that name, and he anticipated, in a kind of 
 swoon, the hundred years that would one day 
 160
 
 The Attempt 
 
 submerge himself from all known friendliness 
 of sun, earth, and man. 
 
 He was seeking, not any of the fishing 
 tackle, but a revolver that lay amongst it, 
 and a small green box containing only one 
 ball cartridge. He had often thought of 
 throwing the revolver away. His wife 
 always looked wonderingly at him when he 
 cleaned it once every year or so, but if she 
 had urged him to throw it away he would 
 have scoffed at the fear which he detected, 
 all the more heartily because the sign of her 
 concern inflated his vanity. She, lest she 
 should provoke his mood in some way which 
 even her consideration could not foresee, 
 remained silent or asked him to tell again 
 how he shot the woodpigeon fifty yards off, 
 actually within sight of the gamekeeper's 
 cottage. It was a thrilling and well -told 
 tale, albeit untrue. 
 
 It was not a mere accident that one ball 
 cartridge was left. 
 
 Morgan took out the revolver and the 
 L 161
 
 The Attempt 
 
 cartridge and shut the box. The lock was 
 stiff and the chambers would not revolve 
 without the use of both hands. To fire it 
 off, it would therefore be necessary to twist 
 the loaded chamber laboriously round to its 
 place and then force back the hammer to full 
 cock. The barrel was brown from rust, but 
 probably the ball would force its way 
 through as it had done before. It was a 
 cheap, ugly, repulsive weapon ; it impressed 
 him with unsuitableness. He did not stay 
 to oil it, but putting it in a pocket and the 
 cartridge in another, he prepared to leave the 
 house. 
 
 "Won't you take Mary with you, 
 Morgan ? " said his wife. 
 
 " Yes," said Mary, his little daughter, 
 laughing not so much because there was 
 anything to laugh at as because she must 
 either laugh or cry, and certainly the chance 
 of a walk was nothing to cry for : " Take 
 me with you, father." 
 
 " Oh no, you don't really want to come, 
 162
 
 The Attempt 
 
 you only say it to please me," said Traheron, 
 mild but hard. 
 
 " Yes, I am sure she . . . Good-bye, 
 then," said his wife. 
 
 " Good-bye," said he. 
 
 The thought of kissing his daughter turned 
 him back for a moment. But he did not ; 
 the act occurred to him more as a part of 
 the ceremony of this fatal day than as a 
 farewell, and he feared to betray his thought. 
 She was the immediate cause of his decision. 
 He had spoken resentfully to her for some 
 fault which he noticed chiefly because it dis- 
 turbed his melancholy repose ; she had then 
 burst out crying with long, clear wails that 
 pierced him with self-hate, remorse, regret, 
 and bitter memory. 
 
 Why should he live who had the power 
 to draw such a cry from that sweet mouth ? 
 So he used to ask in the luxurious self- 
 contempt which he practised. He would 
 delay no more. He had thought before of 
 cutting himself off from the power to injure 
 
 163
 
 The Attempt 
 
 his child and the mother of his child. But 
 they would suffer ; also, what a rough edge 
 would be left to his life, inevitable in any 
 case, perhaps, but not lightly to be chosen. 
 On the other hand, he could not believe that 
 they would ever be more unhappy than they 
 often were now ; at least, the greater poverty 
 which his death would probably cause could 
 not well increase their unhappiness ; and 
 settled misery or a lower plane of happiness 
 was surely preferable to a state of faltering 
 hope at the edge of abysses such as he often 
 opened for them. To leave them and not 
 die, since the child might forget him and he 
 would miss many a passing joy with her, 
 was never a tolerable thought ; such a plan 
 had none of the gloss of heroism and the kind 
 of superficial ceremoniousness which was 
 unconsciously much to his taste. But on 
 this day the arguments for and against a 
 fatal act did not weigh with him. He was 
 called to death. 
 
 He was called to death, but hardly to an 
 164
 
 The Attempt 
 
 act which could procure it. Death he had 
 never feared or understood ; he feared very 
 much the pain and the fear that would 
 awake with it. He had never in his life 
 seen a dead human body or come in any 
 way near death. Death was an idea tinged 
 with poetry in his mind a kingly thing 
 which was once only at any man's call. 
 After it came annihilation. To escape from 
 the difficulty of life, from the need of de- 
 liberating on it, from the hopeless search 
 for something that would make it possible 
 for him to go on living like anybody else 
 without questioning, he was eager to hide 
 himself away in annihilation, just as, when 
 a child, he hid himself in the folds of his 
 mother's dress or her warm bosom, where he 
 could shut out everything save the bright 
 patterns floating on the gloom under his 
 closed eyelids. There was also an element 
 of vanity in his project ; he was going to 
 punish himself and in a manner so extreme 
 that he was inclined to be exalted by the 
 
 165
 
 The Attempt 
 
 feeling that he was now about to convince 
 the world he had suffered exceedingly. 
 He had thus taken up the revolver, and 
 blurred the moment of the report by think- 
 ing intently of the pure annihilation which 
 he desired. The revolver was the only 
 accessible weapon that entered his mind, 
 and he had armed himself with it without 
 once having performed in thought what he 
 had committed himself to do in fact before 
 long. 
 
 As he mounted the hill by a white path 
 over the turf, he felt the revolver strike 
 against his hip at each stride. He was in 
 full view of anyone who happened to be 
 looking out from his home, and he pressed 
 on lest the wavering of his mind should be 
 seen. Recalling the repulsiveness of the 
 weapon, the idea of a rope crossed his 
 mind, not because it was preferable, but 
 because it was something else, something 
 apart from his plans which now had a 
 painful air of simplicity. 
 1 66
 
 The Attempt 
 
 When he was among some bushes that 
 concealed him and yet still gave him a view 
 of his house, he paused for breath. He 
 half-longed for an invasion of sentiment at 
 the sight of his home ; but he was looking 
 at it like a casual stranger, and without 
 even the pang that comes when the stranger 
 sees a quiet house embowered in green 
 against which its smoke rises like a prayer, 
 and he imagines that he could be happy 
 there as he has not until now been happy 
 anywhere. The house was mere stones, 
 nothing, dead. He half wished that Mary 
 would run out into the garden and compel 
 him to a passionate state. His will and 
 power of action were ebbing yet lower 
 in his lifeless mood. He moved his eyes 
 from the house to the elder hedgerow 
 round it, to the little woods on the undula- 
 tions beyond, to the Downs, and, above 
 them, the cloudy sun perched upon a tripod 
 of pale beams. Nothing answered his 
 heartless call for help. He needed some 
 
 167
 
 The Attempt 
 
 tenderness to be born, a transfigured last 
 look to keep as a memory ; perhaps he still 
 hoped that this answer that was not given 
 to him could save him from the enemy at 
 his side and in his brain ; even so late did 
 he continue to desire the conversion, the 
 climacteric ecstasy by which life might solve 
 its difficulty, and either sway placidly in 
 harbour or set out with joy for the open 
 sea. 
 
 He mounted the upper slopes and passed 
 in among the beeches. He turned again, 
 but again in vain. There was little in him 
 left to kill when he reached the top and 
 began to think where exactly he should go. 
 He wished that he could hide away for ever 
 in one of the many utterly secret mossy 
 places known to him among beech and 
 yew in the forsaken woods ; the foxhounds 
 might find him, but no one else. But he 
 must go farther. The sound of the dis- 
 charge must not be heard in that house 
 below. Almost with tenderness he dreamed 
 1 68
 
 The Attempt 
 
 of the very moment when his wife would 
 hear the news and perhaps see his body at 
 the same time ; if only that could be put 
 off the announcement must not come 
 to-day, not under this sun in which the 
 world was looking as he had always seen 
 it, though more dull and grey, but on some 
 day he had not known, a black, blind day 
 yet unborn, to be still-born because of this 
 event so important to him. Who would 
 find him ? He did not like the thought 
 that some stranger who knew him by sight, 
 who had never spoken to him, should come 
 across the body, what was left of him, 
 his remains, and should suddenly become 
 curious and interested, perhaps slightly vain 
 of the remarkable discovery. If only he 
 could fade away rapidly. Several strangers 
 with whose faces he was familiar passed 
 him in a lane, and he assumed a proud, 
 hard look of confidence, as he hoped. 
 
 He quickened his steps and turned into 
 a neglected footpath where he had never 
 
 169
 
 The Attempt 
 
 met anybody. He took out the revolver 
 and again looked at it. It was just here 
 that he had come in the hottest of the 
 late summer to show his daughter cinna- 
 bar caterpillars, tigerish yellow and black, 
 among the flaming blossoms of ragwort. 
 The ragwort was dead now, blossom and 
 leaf. He recalled the day without comment. 
 He was now hidden, on one side by a 
 dense wood, on the other by the steep slope 
 of a hill, and before and behind by windings 
 of the path which skirted the wood. He 
 inserted the cartridge and with difficulty 
 forced it into position ; the brass was much 
 tarnished. Now he revolved the chambers 
 in order that the cartridge should be 
 under the hammer, but by mistake he 
 turned them too far ; he had to try again, 
 and, losing count of the chambers, was 
 again defeated. Where the cartridge was 
 he could not be sure, and he looked to see ; 
 its tarnished disc was hostile and grim to 
 his eye, and he hid the weapon. 
 170
 
 The Attempt 
 
 Moving on, he now looked down upon a 
 steep wood that sloped from his feet, and 
 then rose as steeply up an opposite hill. 
 They were beech woods with innumerable 
 straight stems of bare branchwork that was 
 purple in the mass. Yews stood as black 
 islands in the woods, and they and the 
 briers with scarlet hips close to his eye were 
 laced with airy traveller's joy, plumy and 
 grey. 
 
 Traheron now turned the muzzle to his 
 temple, first letting the hammer down for 
 fear of an accident. He had only one 
 shot to fire, and he could not feel sure 
 that this would enter his brain. His ear ? 
 his mouth the thought was horrible, im- 
 possible. His skin ached with the touch 
 of the steel which was very cold. Next he 
 turned the weapon to his breast, and saw 
 that he had better pull the trigger with his 
 thumb. The hammer was now at full cock, 
 the cartridge in place. The hideous engine 
 looked absurdly powerful for his purpose. 
 
 171
 
 The Attempt 
 
 The noise, the wound, would be out of pro- 
 portion to the little spark of life that was 
 so willing, so eager, to be extinguished. 
 He lowered the weapon and took a last 
 sight of the woods, praying no prayer, 
 thinking no thought, perfectly at ease, 
 though a little cold from inaction. 
 
 Suddenly his eye was aware of someone 
 moving above the opposite wood, half a 
 mile away, and at the same moment this 
 stranger raised a loud halloo as if he had 
 sighted a fox, and repeated it again and 
 again for his own delight, feeling glad, and 
 knowing himself alone. Traheron had been 
 watching the wood with soul more and 
 more enchanted by the soft colour, the cold- 
 ness, the repose. The cry rescued him ; 
 with shame at the thought that he might 
 have been watched, he raised the revolver 
 and turned it to his breast, shut his eyes 
 and touched the trigger, but too lightly, and 
 breathless, in the same moment, he averted 
 the barrel and hurled it into the wood, where 
 172
 
 The Attempt 
 
 it struck a bough without exploding. For a 
 moment he dreamed that he had succeeded. 
 He saw the man who found him pick up 
 the revolver and examine it. Finding but 
 one cartridge in the chambers he concluded 
 that the dead man was a person of unusual 
 coolness and confidence, with an accurate 
 knowledge of the position of the heart. 
 Then, for he was cold, Traheron moved 
 rapidly away, his mind empty of all thought 
 except that he would go to a certain wood 
 and then strike over the fields, following a 
 route that would bring him home in the 
 gentleness of evening. 
 
 He opened the door. The table was 
 spread for tea. His wife, divining all, 
 said: 
 
 " Shall I make tea ? " 
 
 "Please," he replied, thinking himself 
 impenetrably masked. 
 
 173
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 THE young prince of Lostormellyn stood at 
 a window of his castle and looked out over 
 the world that was his. It was not yet the 
 dawn of the autumn day, and his bride sat 
 up in their bed and, as she mused and 
 watched him, drew the paws of a leopard 
 skin down over her shoulders to her breast. 
 Turning away from the valley and its 
 mountain boundaries and the clouds and 
 stars, he saw that she had drawn blood 
 with one of the talons, and asked her : 
 " Cariad, what is your desire ? " 
 To which she answered : 
 " That the stars also were mine." 
 Then she hid her face in the fur, and the 
 prince gazed out of the window again. He 
 was waiting for the sound of his huntsman's 
 horn to scatter the darkness and the many 
 174
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 stars, when suddenly he poised his javelin at 
 the sight of a strange, dark, small man look- 
 ing up at him from the rocks between the 
 tower and the abyss above which it was built. 
 
 " Before you slay me," he said quietly in 
 the tongue of the islands of sunset, " listen 
 to what I have come here to tell." 
 
 The prince hurled the javelin ; but, never- 
 theless, the small man having caught it and 
 leaned forward upon it to speak, he con- 
 sented to hear ; and the island voice said : 
 
 "Ride to the Castle of Atheen. Ride 
 alone, and you will have that which is most 
 worthy of your desire." 
 
 From his bed the voice of the bride 
 repeated the words : 
 
 " Ride to the Castle of Atheen." 
 
 The messenger had disappeared, and the 
 prince said to himself: 
 
 " I will lead the hunt that way and will 
 go to the Castle alone and hear what is to 
 be heard and see what is to be seen." 
 
 He mounted his horse and all day he 
 
 175
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 hunted ; and the huntsmen came up with the 
 wolf and slew it, and the prince came to the 
 Castle of Atlieen. There they poured for 
 him the restful mead and carved the boar 
 and gave him a bed such as was fitting for a 
 prince and he slept well. In the morning 
 they asked him concerning his bride and he 
 answered them, using the words of his chief 
 bard : 
 
 " The daughters of the mountain are the 
 most beautiful of women, and Cariad is the 
 most beautiful among them," and using the 
 words of the dark messenger, added, " I have 
 left her for a little while that I may find and 
 bring back to her that which is most worthy 
 of desire." 
 
 And the old queen of Atheen answered : 
 "I have heard of this from a dark 
 messenger, but I am old and I did not rightly 
 understand whereof he spoke, for it is a 
 new thing. You must ride to the Castle of 
 Morannog which is toward the sunset, and 
 there they will be able to interpret the words ; 
 176
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 for the dark messenger has been a sojourner 
 there many days." 
 
 So the young prince commanded a mes- 
 senger to carry his honour and love to his 
 bride, and mounted his horse and journeyed 
 many days and nights over wild ways until 
 he saw the Castle of Morannog above 
 the mountains under the setting of the new 
 moon. There he was entertained as a prince 
 ought to be. He thanked them and told 
 them wherefore he had ridden from Atheen. 
 To which the old king and the young princes 
 answered : 
 
 "We have a great kingdom and we are 
 about to conquer a new, but we know not 
 what it is that the dark messenger holds to 
 be most worthy of desire ; some say one 
 thing and some another, and a bard has 
 said that it is Cariad of the mountains, a 
 very beautiful woman ; but for us the next 
 year or the next after will bring all that we 
 have sought. Our young men are irresistible 
 and our old men are wise." 
 
 M 177
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 An old man spoke also, saying : 
 " We have heard of the Castle of Car- 
 thinnis which lies at the borders of the 
 West sea, and there it is said that the dark 
 messenger is ranked with their wise men and 
 that he has spoken familiarly with them of 
 the things that he has learned, yes, and of 
 the things that he has dreamed." 
 
 The young prince sent a greeting to his 
 bride by a man of Morannog and turned the 
 point of his spear towards Carthinnis. He 
 rode until it seemed to him that always 
 before him the sun was going down, and 
 always behind him it was rising up ; and 
 beyond the sunset was the horned tower of 
 Carthinnis. When he reached it he was 
 glad to be at rest, to be warm, and to eat 
 though it was but the flesh of a cormorant, 
 and to drink though it was but water salted 
 by the surf that blew over Carthinnis for 
 ever. He slept and dreamed that the Castle 
 was still before him, but when he awoke 
 nothing lay beyond save a dark sea where 
 178 *
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 the moon was descending. The kingdom of 
 the prince of Carthinnis was of rocks and of 
 what the sea bred and cast up over them ; 
 and he had gazed so long over the sea that 
 he cared little for speech, and he looked 
 upon a wandering man as upon a wonderful 
 thing that had not learned the ways of the 
 sea. Staring at the waves between his 
 wrinkles, he said that the dark messenger 
 had indeed stayed with him a day or two, a 
 year perhaps, or more how could he say, 
 but that it was long ago ? and all that he 
 had learned from him was to gaze over the 
 sea. He had spoken of ships ; he had him- 
 self arrived in a ship ; but who that knew 
 so much of this sea would put forth on it ? 
 And why should a man set sail with those 
 who fare over it when by waiting a few 
 days he would see their faces again upon 
 the rocks? It was from the Castle of 
 Brintacalleg that the dark messenger came, 
 but no man had ever spoken of it save him 
 and he spoke of many things that for aught 
 
 179
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 they knew were under the sea. Who knows 
 if there be such a place as Brintacalleg ? 
 He led the prince down to the sea where the 
 messenger's own ship lay still at the edge of 
 a haven that knew the sun only upon the 
 longest day of the year ; and only once in 
 his lifetime, said the lord of Carthinnis, had 
 that day been clear of cloud overhead and of 
 mist and rain between the earth and the 
 cloud, and that was when the messenger 
 had arrived. But the young prince sent off 
 one of the silent men of Carthinnis with a 
 message to his bride, and set sail for Brinta- 
 calleg, and for long, sleeping and waking 
 under the wild sails, he saw neither the 
 sunset before him nor the sunrise behind, 
 except in dream. So that he knew not at 
 last that what he saw was Brintacalleg itself, 
 perched above the sea upon a ledge taken 
 away from eagles, until he awoke in one of 
 its beds and heard the singing of the maids 
 of Brintacalleg and beheld the sun rising 
 over the sea that he had crossed. He had 
 1 80
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 already set out on foot and said farewell, 
 when he remembered that he had not asked 
 what they knew of the dark messenger, nor 
 ordered that a man should take his greeting 
 to Cariad. But he learned only that the 
 dark messenger had served here as a scullion 
 on his way to Carthinnis, and that no man 
 could take a message to Lostormellyn since 
 the sea was impassable. " Lostormellyn ? " 
 they asked, "Lostormellyn? Is it not a 
 Castle out of a song ? " And when they had 
 showed him the notch between the hills 
 where the dark man had passed through on 
 his way from the Castle of Caleeny, they 
 said farewell and he left them and walked 
 towards Caleeny. 
 
 When he began to walk they were reaping 
 the barley below him, and when he reached 
 the black walls at Caleeny, the barley was 
 tall again in the little enclosure amidst its 
 immeasureable woods. At Caleeny, seeing 
 that there was but a few grey hairs in his 
 beard, and that though on foot he was a 
 
 181
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 prince, the lord offered him his youngest 
 daughter for a bride. He told them that he 
 was lately married to the beautiful Cariad. 
 But as he had just told them that he had 
 come from Brintacalleg, which was a year 
 away to the east, nor was there such a 
 princess there as Cariad, they smiled at this, 
 for they knew that he had the madness of 
 roads and the youngest daughter laughed 
 aloud. He did not ask them the way ; he 
 had forgotten the dark messenger ; but the 
 maiden came running after him and said, 
 with a bold smile, to his face : 
 
 " You are on the right road. Ask for 
 Mentissat." 
 
 As he went he saw men ploughing and 
 some sowing seed, and others mowing 
 the hay, and others reaping. Some of them 
 stayed to watch him go by, and some 
 answered his questions and some did not. 
 Only the old women going along the road 
 at evening with faggots upon their heads 
 wished him " Good-night. " 
 182
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 At Mentissat, which was a white castle 
 at the end of a long lake, they gave 
 him to eat and drink, but because he mur- 
 mured only Galeeny, Brintacalleg, Carthinnis, 
 Morannog, Atheen, Lostormellyn, Lostor- 
 mellyn, they said : 
 
 " He is from Galeeny ; let us put him 
 upon the road to Sarnollyn ; for those 
 who come to Mentissat rejoice to go 
 forward to Sarnollyn. " 
 
 Sarnollyn was a red castle among snows, 
 and as he struggled to sleep there in the 
 cold he dreamed of Lostormellyn and of 
 his bride and of the dark messenger, and 
 he awoke and questioned everyone, asking 
 if they had seen this man. But none knew 
 save the ancient emperor of Sarnollyn, and 
 he replied : 
 
 " In our fathers' time such a one lived here 
 and fed the hounds. Yet he belonged not here 
 either, but to the Castle of Carno, which is 
 in the desert next to the edge of the world." 
 
 The young prince muttered over the 
 
 183
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 names of the Castles as he set out for the 
 Castle of Carno and remembering his bride, he 
 paused and would have gone back to beg 
 that a messenger should go to her and carry 
 his honour and love, but the emperor was 
 riding out from Sarnollyn to hunt with a 
 thousand of his kings and their young queens 
 and the prince was abashed and went on. 
 
 The Castle of Carno was at the extremity 
 of a desert across many mountains that 
 enclosed valleys as vast as a summer sky 
 and as deep. It was not a castle at all, 
 but a heap of stones that sheltered an old 
 woman whose fire had gone out. 
 
 " Is this Carno ? " he asked. 
 
 " It is Carno," she replied, " and beyond 
 this is Filontry." 
 
 " Carno, Sarnollyn, Mentissat . . ." he wa 
 murmuring. 
 
 " Ha, ha ! " laughed the old woman, " but 
 the jest is an old one, nevertheless." 
 
 Then the young prince said that he would 
 go to Filontry. And as he went he did not 
 184
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 see the roses over his head, but he saw those 
 that had fallen to his feet. 
 
 At Filontry, which was upon a grey hill 
 surrounded by waters, there had never been a 
 Castle, but nevertheless in the mist the rocks 
 had the likeness of one, and a hermit lived 
 among them. When he saw the hermit, the 
 young prince chanted, "Carno, Sarnollyn, 
 Mentissat, Caleeny. ..." but the hermit 
 waved his arm, saying: 
 
 " I know that song. I learnt it from the 
 dark man of Colommen. Once upon a time 
 I knew the tongue in which it is written. 
 There was more of it, for it ended Lar- 
 montandro, Colonagry, Colommen. They say 
 that Larmontandro is the name of a Castle 
 like this over there but I have never seen 
 it. You are used to the road : go then and 
 discover Larmontandro and bring me word." 
 
 When the young prince came to Larmont- 
 andro, there was a bird that sang the name, 
 " Larmontandro," upon a withered oak that 
 was one of three in a valley running from
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 there down to the sea, and at its end there 
 was a pile of rocks like a castle above the 
 sea. The mountain side was too steep, so 
 he followed the valley towards the rocks. 
 
 On his way he passed a well that bubbled 
 and seemed to say " Colonagry, Colonagrv," 
 and as he walked he kept time to his steps 
 with the song, "Colonagry, Larmontandro, 
 Filontry, Carno, Sarnollyn, Mentissat, Cal- 
 eeny, Brintacalleg, Carthinnis, Morannog, 
 Atheen and Lostormellyn, Colommen, " and 
 he said : " I have learned a jest and a song." 
 
 The nearer he approached to the sea the 
 more like a castle was that pile of rocks, 
 but a castle so huge that it could not have 
 been raised by hands. As the road wound 
 he thought, " It is the Castle of Brintacalleg" : 
 and again, " It is Atheen " ; and not once 
 only he thought, "Lostormellyn was like this 
 if I both see and remember right." The 
 farther he went the more like was it to 
 Lostormellyn, except that Lostormellyn was 
 not by the sea. The road wound far under 
 1 86
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 the walls, and he thought that Cariad was 
 looking out of a window and looking for him 
 and he shouted, but it was too high. He 
 quickened his pace and climbed round and 
 round the rocks until he was before the gate 
 which was like that of Lostormellyn as a 
 poplar tree is like the flower of the grass. 
 
 He struck upon the door and it was 
 opened by the dark messenger who greeted 
 him with a smile of welcome but not of 
 recognition, saying only : 
 
 "You have come, O prince, to what is 
 most worthy of desire." 
 "Lead me," said the prince, "to 
 Cariad." 
 
 "Yes, to Cariad," said the dark man as 
 they mounted the stairs, " Cariad is queen." 
 
 At last they came to a great room like his 
 own, and at the window he saw Cariad and 
 the back of her beautiful head was towards 
 him. He tried to speak, but he could not, 
 and still she did not turn. He thought that 
 she dreamed, and when he reached the bed, 
 
 187
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 because he was weary, he lay down upon it 
 and drew the leopard skin over his shoulders. 
 Then she bent her eyes full of love upon 
 him and said : " Lostormellyn is fair to- 
 night and it is as if the stars also were ours 
 between this and the mountains. Sweetest 
 after hunting is rest with the beloved. This 
 hour is most worthy of desire." 
 
 But the young prince had begun to say 
 over the names of the Castles upon the road, 
 and suddenly exclaimed : 
 
 " But Colommen ? Where is Colommen ? 
 I did not go to Colommen." 
 
 " It is, " said Cariad, "it is the name I 
 bore when I was among the mountains be- 
 fore you carried me down to Lostormellyn." 
 
 " You know not what you say," he said, 
 repeating the name. 
 
 "It is the name also," said Cariad, "of 
 a city in a song." 
 
 " In a song ! " he cried. " That is what 
 they said of Lostormellyn when I was at 
 Brintacalleg." 
 1 88
 
 The Castle of Lostormellyn 
 
 " And so it is," she mused aloud : " for 
 there are many songs." 
 
 "Are you then," he murmured half to 
 himself, "are you then a woman in a song 
 or Cariad ? They will tell me you are in a 
 song some day." 
 
 Then he leaped up to clasp her. But she 
 was gone without a sign, and he cried : 
 
 " It is a dream. It is a song." 
 
 The dark messenger at his side also said ; 
 
 " It is a dream. It is worthy of a man's 
 desire. " 
 
 The horns of morning sounded round 
 Lostormellyu, but could not waken the 
 prince. 
 
 189
 
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