j
 
 
 CLOUD CASTLE 
 
 AND OTHER PAPERS 
 BY EDWARD THOMAS 
 
 With a Foreword by W. H. HUDSON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 Printed in Great Britain by 
 Rilling and Sont, Ltd., Guild ford and Eshtr.
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 [A few days before his sudden death, Mr. W. H. Hudson 
 undertook to write an Introduction for this collection of 
 essays by the late Edward Thomas. This fragment was 
 found among his papers after his death, and is now 
 printed as being of interest to the admirers of both these 
 authors.} 
 
 THE writings of Edward Thomas are sufficiently 
 well known to readers of recent literature, and 
 much has been said in appreciation of his work, 
 both prose and verse, by several of the lead- 
 ing critics of the time. As an admirer, I am 
 pleased to find myself in such good company; 
 but as a practically unlettered person this is 
 all I can say on the subject. For me it is only 
 to speak in this Foreword of Edward Thomas, 
 the man, as I knew him, who was my friend and 
 one of the most lovable beings I have ever known. 
 It may be that our friendship was somewhat 
 unusual, as there was a considerable difference 
 in our respective ages, and we were poles apart 
 in the circumstances of our lives. He, an Oxford 
 graduate, and a literary man by profession; I, 
 unschooled and unclassed, born and bred in a 
 semi-barbarous district among the horsemen of 
 the pampas. But there were two or perhaps
 
 vi FOREWORD 
 
 three things that drew us together: first, our 
 feeling for nature, and, secondly, for poetry ; and 
 as his knowledge of poetic literature was so 
 much profounder than mine, and his judgment 
 so much more mature, I was glad to accept him 
 as my guide in that extensive wilderness. I 
 was not always a perfectly docile pupil, as he 
 was intolerant of inferior verse, while I took a 
 keen interest in the forgotten minor poets of 
 the last century. This was often the subject of 
 our conversation, and I had no objection to it. 
 I think, too, or, rather, I should say I know it, 
 that the chief reason of the bond uniting us was 
 that we were both mystics in some degree. He 
 was shy of exhibiting it, and either disguised 
 it or attributed it to someone he meets and con- 
 verses with in his rambles, as in " Cloud Castle," 
 the first sketch in this collection of papers which 
 he himself arranged for publication before 
 leaving England. It is more manifest in his 
 poetry, that being the medium through which 
 a man can best reveal his soul. And I take it 
 that all true poets are in some degree mystic, 
 that what we call inspiration in the poet, with- 
 out which his work can scarcely be poetic, is 
 mysticism.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PACK 
 
 FOREWORD, BY W. H. HUDSON - V 
 
 I. CLOUD CASTLE - I 
 
 II. AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE - - II 
 
 III. THE SHIP OF SWALLOWS - 33 
 
 IV. MORGAN - - - - - "43 
 V. HELEN - -63 
 
 vr. ISOUD - 79 
 
 VII. A MAN OF THE WOODS - 9! 
 
 VIII. SEVEN TRAMPS - - "101 
 
 IX. DEATH BY MISADVENTURE - - III 
 
 X. A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY - - 117 
 
 XI. FELIX - - 137 
 
 XII. BRONWEN ..... 155 
 
 XIII. MIKE ... - 167 
 
 XIV. SAVED TIME - ... j^g 
 XV. THE MOON ..... 193 
 
 [The papers entitled "Aunt Ann's Cottage" and 
 " Morgan " originally appeared as part of the author's story 
 " The Happy-go-Lucky Morgans." They were subsequently 
 revised by him and marked for inclusion in the present 
 volume.] 
 
 vn
 
 CLOUD CASTLE
 
 I 
 
 CLOUD CASTLE 
 
 ALL the life of the summer day became silent 
 after sundown; the earth was dark and very 
 still as with a great thought; the sky was as a 
 pale window through which men and angels 
 looked at one another without a word. The 
 two friends were now silently walking together 
 towards a house in the west, whose walls and 
 lights they now began to expect at any moment 
 in the distance. But instead of the abrupt 
 shaggy hill overshadowing the house, usually 
 a mammoth figure in the sky of evening, they 
 saw a hill many times huger and more 
 precipitous rising halfway up the heavens. It 
 seemed a mountain forest, craggy and so black 
 that in its flanks might have been carved the 
 caverns from which night now emerged so 
 superbly, and to which it would retreat at 
 sunrise and nurse itself against the evening and 
 the next summons. Round upon round it rose 
 
 3
 
 4 CLOUD CASTLE 
 
 up, nodding but secure, until its summit over- 
 hung the rocky base and on this ledge was the 
 likeness of a wall and turret in ruins. Such 
 a castle it might have been as a child draws 
 with its eyes out of nothing, when it reads for 
 the first time of the Castle Perilous or Joyous 
 Gard, set far above the farms and churches and 
 factories of this world, as those knights and 
 ladies are set above the earthly labourers and 
 clerks and policemen and servant maids. 
 And this mount, this mountain forest and over- 
 hanging brow, this incredibly romantic ruin 
 upon the shelf of it, were built out of cloud 
 in the violet western sky. In the folds of it, 
 above its trees, and in a niche of the Castle at 
 the crest, the stars came out. 
 
 The road gradually ascended, and often in 
 the series of long rises and shorter falls, that 
 vision in the west was for a little way shut out, 
 and more and more the hill of earth and trees 
 for which they were making increased upon the 
 sky. But the castled forest of the mountainous 
 dark cloud was fixed upon their brains and the 
 men began to speak of it, at first in careless 
 admiration mixed with talk of the weather, 
 and then more meaningly. One said that such
 
 CLOUD CASTLE 5 
 
 notable efforts of Nature were ennobling, that 
 they gave a religious uplifting to his thought, 
 that we could no more do without them than 
 without ceremonies on earth. In the presence 
 of these heavenly ceremonies no mean act or 
 thought was possible, and although the time 
 had long passed away when it was irreligious 
 to do certain things in the sight of the full moon, 
 yet he was sure that such prohibitions were not 
 superstitious but received a sanction that was 
 above reason and acquired knowledge, in his 
 own case and doubtless in others. His own 
 work was the instructing of young men in a craft 
 of which he was a master, and he trusted that 
 his power to respond to these things in a way 
 helped to justify a position which had something 
 of a priestly character for him. He cleared his 
 throat nervously, and with some shame, after 
 so pompous a confession. 
 
 ' You ask me what I think about it," said 
 the other, " but it is so very definite that I 
 expect you will put it down to my own irre- 
 sponsible fancy. When I see these things I 
 flush and shiver, as I have done ever since I can 
 remember, at contact with beauty in human 
 beings, or Art, or Nature, or with heroic conduct,
 
 6 CLOUD CASTLE 
 
 and then forthwith I begin to perform some 
 imaginary act which they inspire : for example, 
 I have just ridden at the end of a long day over 
 endless hills and arrived at nightfall under a 
 granite precipice so steep and huge that it 
 blackened half the sky, and at its edge, high as 
 the moon, was a battlemented and bannered 
 tower. I tethered my horse to an elder that 
 grew out of the cliff, the only tree in that barren 
 land, unlaced my helmet and threw it with my 
 lance among the nettles, and, not without my 
 sword, began to climb. On my way, I passed 
 several nests of falcons on ledges where I stayed 
 for breath, and sometimes the Castle was 
 hidden and so was the moon, and when I could 
 see anything but my own hands and the juts 
 of the granite in my grasp, it was only the 
 swelling round tower and the moon and the 
 banner that now and then blotted out the 
 moon in its fluttering. I reached an eagle's 
 nest, and there I fell asleep, and when I began 
 to climb again the moon was behind me and 
 very low, and all the cliff was bathed in light 
 and I seemed to hang like a carven imp on a 
 sublime cathedral wall among the incense. At 
 last I swung myself to where I could walk on
 
 CLOUD CASTLE 7 
 
 the turf among the yellow rock-rose flowers of 
 the narrow ledge which no foot had trodden, 
 between the Castle wall and the brink of the 
 precipice. I peered and listened at the windows 
 where the bowmen should have been, but I saw 
 and I heard nothing. I raised my sword to 
 strike against the gate, but without a blow it 
 opened wide and admitted me to a chamber 
 whose far sides were invisible, and whose roof 
 was the star-sown sky, and then along corridors 
 and up staircases and through dark chamber 
 after chamber, with doors ajar, or, obedient 
 to the clamour of my sword, I went eagerly 
 forward, and round about and back upon my 
 steps again and ever upward until I came near 
 to a chamber which I knew contained what I 
 sought, though what that was I knew not as yet. 
 The room was lighted, as I could see beneath 
 its closed door. Unlike the other doors this 
 was latched and small, and as I raised my hand 
 to open it, my fingers knew the smooth latch 
 and my feet the threshold and my nostrils the 
 fragrance and my eyes the fire that burned on 
 the hearth. The setting moon passed through 
 an open casement and lit up a little room, with 
 an old table piano at one side and a table with
 
 8 CLOUD CASTLE 
 
 a bowl of flowers at the other, and between the 
 two by the fire a boy, standing with his back 
 towards me. I could see only his short black 
 hair, red neck, blue jersey, and brown bare 
 legs, but the poise I knew at once was that of 
 a boy whom I had not seen since I also was ten 
 years old. Thirty years ago, I promised to go 
 with him to rob a kestrel's nest, but the day 
 appointed came and I did not go, I cannot 
 remember why. I never saw him again till 
 now. He seemed to be crying, and I thought 
 that it was because I had disappointed him. 
 And now I understood that it was no use. I 
 was sorry, and at first eager to ease myself 
 with the bitter happiness of telling him so, but 
 I did not move. He would not know me in my 
 absurd developments, my beard, my sword, 
 and all the rest. I hoped that perhaps his 
 tears were sweet by this time, and that he was 
 crying more for luxury than sadness, and I 
 started most silently to go out when he also 
 moved and said, ' You have come at last, let 
 us go.' I did not see his face as he spoke, and 
 before I could turn and look at him your 
 question, Oliver, took away both the room and 
 the dream. Now I can see the lights of Gordon's
 
 CLOUD CASTLE 9 
 
 house. I shall ask him if he remembers 
 Llewelyn that little boy in the jersey. All 
 those years I had forgotten him, but perhaps 
 Gordon knows something about him. I wonder 
 is he alive. Somehow, when I recall him, I 
 cannot believe that he ever grew up; he was 
 strong as a mountain pony and rash. Some- 
 thing I cannot explain; only I cannot picture 
 the man however much I try, it is as if his had 
 been a face and figure not destined to turn into 
 a man's, that is all. After all, I don't think I 
 will ask either. ..." 
 
 (1912.)
 
 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE
 
 II 
 
 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 
 
 Two of us were walking together and talking 
 nearly all the time, just as things occurred to 
 our minds which were at rest in beautiful 
 weather. 
 
 " Since we passed that white house behind 
 the cedars/' I laughed, " we have wandered 
 from Gwithavon, the pure British name of a 
 river in Essex, to a fishmonger's advertisement 
 in the Battersea Park Road. Such are the 
 operations of the majestic intellect. What 
 do you think ? Do you suppose the cave- 
 men were very different, except that they can 
 seldom have troubled about philology and 
 would probably have eaten their philologers, 
 and they did without fishmongers because fish 
 were caught to eat and not to sell ?" 
 
 "Well?" said Jones. "I daresay what we 
 have in common with the cavemen is what 
 most helps us to go on living except in so far 
 
 13
 
 14 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 
 
 as we are fishmongers and philologers. Scratch 
 a philologer and you will find a sort of caveman." 
 
 ' Yes : but isn't it a little disconcerting to 
 think that two men who have been to one of 
 our ancient universities should zigzag in this 
 fashion ? I think that to prove our self-respect 
 we ought to go soberly back on our footsteps 
 and see what sort of a pattern we made while 
 we were in charge of the cavemen's god." 
 
 " All right; but let it be simply for fun. It 
 is a game I am very well used to. When we 
 were children, my brother and I used to be 
 sent to chapel to represent our parents who got 
 up too late. After dinner we were put into a 
 room to write down the main points of the 
 sermon. My young brother who was destined, 
 as you now know, to be an atheist and a statis- 
 tician, could do this perfectly well, and I could 
 copy from him by right of primogeniture. 
 For I, on the other hand, never heard more 
 than a sentence at a time, and for that matter 
 if I go to a public meeting nowadays to please 
 a lady I never hear more than that. The 
 difference is that now I am bored and impatient 
 with myself and the lady for putting me into 
 a foolish position, whereas nothing was more
 
 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 15 
 
 delightful than the half hour during which my 
 brother listened to the sermon and I went 
 wool-gathering. ... I don't know who the 
 original wool-gatherers were, but I always think 
 they must have been uncommercial men whose 
 task it was to wander over the mountains and 
 be beforehand with the nesting birds, gathering 
 from rock and thorn the locks of wool left 
 by the sheep, a task that must take them into 
 many a wild new place without overburdening 
 them with wool or profit or applause at the end 
 of the day. . . . While my brother was writing 
 out the skeleton sermon, I used to wander 
 backward over the windings of my chapel 
 wool-gathering and of course strike out again 
 here and there to right or left after more wool 
 and more thorn and rock. 
 
 " The preacher was a mild, tall man, with a 
 mane of curling black hair, clean shaven, long 
 white face, thin exquisitely formed lips, and a 
 rich voice that murmured in a quiet musing 
 manner that enchanted me so much that I was 
 soon in a state of half dream. The light was 
 dim as with gold dust. It was warm. The 
 people around were soporific, too: I imagined 
 them to be asleep and I alone awake, and my
 
 16 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 
 
 first steps had something of the thrill one feels 
 in stealing out of a silent house at dawn. I 
 listened to the preacher's voice and fixed my 
 half-closed eyes on the ash-tree just outside one 
 of the windows on the south side. As a rule the 
 text alone was a sufficient portal to my wander- 
 ings. Alas ! of all of them I can recall only one, 
 and that because at the end of the sermon the 
 preacher was seized with a fit of sneezing and 
 I felt a slight pang because I finished my ramble 
 at this painful moment. It was not at all an 
 extraordinary wool-gathering, though. 
 
 " The text was the three verses in the first 
 chapter of Genesis that describe the work of 
 creation on the fifth day. In that musing way, 
 as if he were oblivious of all but his ideas, which 
 made me really fond of him, the preacher 
 murmured : ' Let the waters bring forth abun- 
 dantly the moving creature that hath life, and 
 fowl that may fly above the earth in the open 
 firmament of heaven.' 
 
 " That was enough. For me it was all the 
 sermon. I saw at once a coast of red crags and 
 a black sea that was white far below me where 
 the waves got lost in the long corridors between 
 the crags. The moon, newly formed to rule
 
 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 17 
 
 the night, stood full and large and white at the 
 top of the arch of the sky that was black as the 
 sea and without a cloud. And out of the waters 
 were rising by twos and threes, but sometimes 
 in multitudes like a cloud, the birds who were to 
 fly in the open firmament of heaven. Sea birds 
 with long white wings spread wide emerged 
 singly out of the black, and paused on the 
 surface and let their wings rise up like the sides 
 of a lyre and then skimming low this way and 
 that rose up in circles at last and screamed 
 around the moon. Several had only risen a 
 little way when they fell back into the sea and 
 vanished, and these I supposed were destined 
 to be deprived by the divine purpose of their 
 wings and to become fish. Eagles as red as 
 the encircling crags came up also, but they were 
 always solitary and they ascended as upon a 
 whirlwind in one or two long spirals, and blacken- 
 ing the moon for a moment they disappeared. 
 The little birds that sing were usually born in 
 cloudlets, white and yellow and dappled and 
 blue, and, after hovering uncertainly at no 
 great height, made for the crags, where they 
 perched above the white foam and twittered 
 in concert or, straying apart, sang shrill or soft 
 
 2
 
 i8 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 
 
 and low or in stormy luxuriance after their own 
 kind. And ever and anon the flocks of those 
 who had soared now floated downward across 
 the moon and went over my head with necks 
 outstretched and crying towards the mountains 
 and moors and pools or sloped still lower and 
 alighted and sailed on the waters, where they 
 screamed each time the black surface yawned 
 at a new birth of white or many-coloured wings. 
 Very soon the sea was chequered from shore to 
 horizon with birds, and the sky was heaving 
 continually with others, so that the moon could 
 be seen either not at all or in slits and wedges, 
 and the crags were covered, as if with moss 
 and leaves, with birds, chiefly those that sing, 
 and they mingled their voices as if in a dawn 
 of May. 
 
 " At a word from the preacher creeping in 
 upon me, I forgot about the fifth day of the 
 Creation, but not about the birds, and as it was 
 then February, I thought chiefly about their 
 nests and eggs. I went over in my mind the 
 different kinds I had taken the year before. 
 They were all in one long box procured from the 
 village shop where it used to hold bottles of 
 cheapest scent. I had not troubled to arrange
 
 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 19 
 
 them, and in the chapel I saw the confusion of 
 the moorhen's and coot's big freckled eggs, and 
 between these, often in double layers, the blue 
 and the white and the olive, the spotted, the 
 blotched and the scrawled eggs. For a minute, 
 I forgot the eggs by thinking of a poem I had 
 begun to copy out and had laid away with the 
 eggs. It was the first poem I had ever read 
 for my own pleasure several times, and I had 
 begun to copy it in my best handwriting, the 
 capitals in red ink. I had got as far as ' Some 
 mute inglorious Milton here may . . .' I tried to 
 repeat the verses but could not, and so I returned 
 to the eggs. I thought of the April past and the 
 April to come, when I should once more butt my 
 way through thickets of perpendicular and stiff 
 and bristling stems, through brier and thorn 
 and bramble in the double hedges; I would 
 find the thrushes' nests in a certain oak and 
 blackthorn copse where the birds used hardly 
 anything but moss, and you could see them far 
 away among the dark branches which seldom 
 had many leaves but were furred over with 
 lichens. I would go to all those little ponds 
 shadowed by hazels close to the farms, where 
 there was likely to be a solitary moorhen's home,
 
 20 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 
 
 and up into the pollard willow which used to 
 have four starling's eggs at the bottom of a long 
 narrow pocket. In all those spring days I had 
 no aim but finding nests, and if I was not scram- 
 bling in a wood I walked with my head lifted up 
 to the trees or turned aside to the hedges or bent 
 down to the grass and undergrowth. I was not 
 in the least curious about the eggs, or any 
 question of numbers or variation in size, shape, 
 or colour. Sun, rain, wind, deep mud, water 
 over the boots and knees, scratches to arms and 
 legs and face, dust in the eyes, fear of game- 
 keepers and farmers, excitement, dizziness, 
 weariness, all were expressed by the plain or 
 marked eggs in the scent box ; they were all I had 
 and I valued them in the same way and for the 
 same reason as the athlete valued the parsley 
 crown. I recalled the winning of this one and 
 that, repenting sometimes that I had taken 
 more than I should have done from the same 
 nest, sometimes that I had not taken as many 
 as would have been excusable: also, I blushed 
 with annoyance because I had never revisited 
 certain nests which were unfinished or empty 
 when I discovered them what a pity, perhaps 
 the ploughboy robbed them completely. How
 
 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 21 
 
 careless the country boys were, putting them 
 in their hats and forgetting all about them, 
 often breaking them wantonly. I envied them 
 their opportunities and despised them for taking 
 them as a matter of course. 
 
 " I thought of the flowers I trampled over and 
 the smell and the taste of the cowslips and 
 primroses and various leaves and the young brier 
 stems chewed and spat out again as I walked. 
 I began to count up the Sundays that must go 
 before there would be any chance of finding 
 rooks' eggs. And that reminded me of the 
 rookery in the half-dozen elms of a farmhouse 
 home-field close by the best fishing place of all. 
 The arrow-headed reeds grew in thick beds 
 here and there and the water looked extra- 
 ordinarily mysterious just this side of them, 
 as if it might contain fabulous fish. Only last 
 season I had left my line out there while I slipped 
 through the neighbouring hedge to look for a 
 reed-bunting's nest, and when I returned I had 
 to pull in an empty line which the monster had 
 gnawed through and escaped with hooks and bait. 
 It was just there between the beds of arrow-head 
 and that immense water-dock on the brink: I 
 vowed to try again. Everybody had seen the
 
 22 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 
 
 monster or at least the swirl he made as he 
 struck out into the deeps at a passing tread. 
 ' As long as my arm, I daresay/ said the 
 carter, and cracked his whip emphatically, with 
 a suggestion that the fish was not to be caught 
 by me. Well, we shall see. 
 
 " As usual, the idea of fishing was connected 
 with my Aunt Ann. There was none worth 
 speaking of unless we stayed with her in our 
 holidays. I often saw persons fishing, who 
 certainly did not stay with her and probably 
 would not have known of her if she was men- 
 tioned, but they never caught anything. The 
 way their floats swam had not the right 
 look. Now, I could have enjoyed fishing by 
 those arrow-heads without a bait, so fishy did it 
 look, especially on Sundays when no fishing 
 was allowed: it was unbearable to see that 
 look and have no rod or line." 
 
 " Yes," I interrupted, " that fascinating look 
 is quite indescribable, and I can quite under- 
 stand how 
 
 Simple Simon went a- fishing 
 
 For to catch a whale, 
 But all the water he had got 
 
 Was in his mother's pail.
 
 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 23 
 
 I have seen that look in tiny ponds and fished 
 in one simply on the strength of it and against 
 popular advice, but gave it up because I caught 
 newts continually and nothing else. Do you 
 know, when I lifted them up out of that strange 
 water I shuddered and felt as if I were being 
 punished by a spirit of the pond ?" 
 
 " I have the same feeling about eels and never 
 fish a second time where I have caught one: 
 their twisting is utterly abandoned and un- 
 mingled protest and agony, and I feel that if 
 men did not think even so, would they writhe 
 in pain or grief. 
 
 " To my wool-gathering. In the chapel I 
 could see that shadowed water by the reeds 
 and the float in the midst. In fact, I always 
 could see that picture in my mind. I liked the 
 water best when it was quite smooth ; the 
 mystery was greater, and I used to think I 
 caught more fish out of it in that state. I hoped 
 it would be a still summer and very warm. It 
 was nearly three-quarters of a year since I was 
 there by the rookery meadow last eight months 
 since I last tasted my aunt's doughy cake ! 
 I could see her making it, first stoning the 
 raisins, while the dough was rising in a pan by
 
 24 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 
 
 the fire; when she thought I was not looking 
 she stoned them with her teeth, but I did not 
 mind, and now I come to think of it they were 
 very white teeth, so that I can't think why 
 no man ever married her for them alone. I 
 suppose she was too busy, making cakes and 
 wiping the dough off her fingers, and wondering 
 if we had got drowned in the river, to think 
 about lovers. I am glad no man did marry her ; 
 I mean, I was glad then. For she would prob- 
 ably have given up making doughy cakes full 
 of raisins and spice if she had married. She 
 existed for that and for supplying us with lamb 
 and mint sauce and rhubarb tart with cream 
 when we came in from bird's-nesting. How 
 dull it must be for her, thought I in the chapel, 
 all alone there and the fishing over and no birds 
 laying yet, no nephews and, therefore, I supposed, 
 no doughy cakes, for she could not be so greedy 
 as to make them only for herself. She lived all 
 alone in a little cottage in a row at the edge of 
 a village. Hers was an end house. The rest 
 were very neat, but hers was hidden by ivy 
 which grew through the walls, up between the 
 flagstones of the floor, and flapped in at the 
 windows; it grew also over the panes, and was
 
 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 25 
 
 so dense that the mice ran up and down it, and 
 you could see their pale silky bellies as they 
 crossed the glass, if they did not look in over 
 the sill and enter. The ivy was full of sparrows' 
 nests, and it made the neighbours angry that 
 she would not have them pulled out. We never 
 thought of touching these nests, not if the 
 neighbours' sons, who were acquaintances, 
 suggested it. I wished I lived there always, 
 always in a house covered with ivy, and kept 
 by an aunt who baked and fried for you and tied 
 up your cuts, and would clean half-a-hundred 
 perchlings without a murmur, though at the end 
 she had half covered her face and the windows 
 with the flying scales. ' Why don't you catch 
 two or three really big ones ? ' she said, sighing 
 for weariness, but still smiling at us, and putting 
 on her crafty-looking spectacles. ' Whew ! if 
 we could !' we said to one another: it seemed 
 possible as we stood there, for she was a wonder- 
 ful woman, and the house wonderful too no 
 anger, no sorrow, no fret, such a large fireplace, 
 everything different from London and altogether 
 better. The ticking of her three clocks was 
 delicious, especially early in the morning as you 
 lay awake, or when you got home tired, and it
 
 26 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 
 
 was twilight and no lamps. Everything had 
 been like that in the house ' ever so long/ you 
 could not tell how long; it was natural, like the 
 trees; it was never stale; you never came down 
 in the morning and felt you had done the same 
 yesterday and would do the same to-morrow, 
 as if each day was like a new badly- written line 
 in a copy-book, with the same senseless, dismal 
 words at the head of the page. Why couldn't 
 we always live there ? There was no chapel 
 for us. Sunday was not the day of grim dulness 
 when everybody was set free from work, only 
 to show that he or she did not know what to 
 do or not to do; if they had been chained slaves, 
 they could not have been stiff er or more grim. 
 
 "In my fancy these adult people were a different 
 race: I had no thought that I should become 
 like that, and I laughed without a pang. How 
 different my aunt with her face serene, kind, not- 
 withstanding that she was bustling about all 
 day and had trodden down her heels and let her 
 hair break out into horns and wisps. I thought 
 of the race of women and girls. I thought (with 
 a little pity) they were very much nicer than 
 men, thought more of you and were kinder. 
 I would rather be a man, I mused, and yet I
 
 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 27 
 
 was sure women were better. I would not give 
 up my right to be a man some day, but for the 
 present there was no comparison between the 
 two in my affections; there was not a man I 
 should have missed. Odd things the women 
 did, though. They always wore gloves when 
 they went out, for example. Now, if I put on 
 gloves, it was almost as bad as putting a 
 handkerchief over my eyes, or cotton-wool in 
 my ears. They picked flowers with gloved 
 hands. Certainly they had their weaknesses. 
 But think of the different ways of giving an 
 apple. A man caused it to pass into your 
 hands in a way that made it annoying to give 
 thanks. A woman gave herself with it, and it 
 was as if the apple was part of her, and you took 
 it away and ate it, sitting alone very peace- 
 fully and thinking of nothing. A boy threw it 
 at you as if he wanted to knock your teeth out, 
 and, of course, you threw it back at him again 
 with the same intent. A girl gave it so that 
 you wanted to give it back, if you were not 
 somehow afraid. I thought of three girls who 
 lived near my aunt, and would do anything I 
 wanted, as if it was not I but they who wanted 
 it. Perhaps it was. Perhaps they wanted
 
 28 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 
 
 nothing except to give. Well, and that was 
 rather stupid, too. 
 
 "There the preacher's voice must have half 
 released me from the spell, and I turned to a 
 dozen things, as what o'clock it was, whether one 
 of my pigeons would have laid its second egg 
 when I got home, and how many I should have 
 altogether in a year's time, whether Monday's 
 post would bring a letter from a friend who was 
 in Kent, going about the woods with a game- 
 keeper who gave him squirrels, stoats, jays, 
 magpies, an owl, and once a woodcock to skin. 
 I recalled the sweet smell of the squirrels; it 
 was abominable to kill them, but I liked skinning 
 them. I went over the increasing row of books 
 on my shelf. First came ' The Compleat 
 Angler,' the thought of which gave me a brief 
 entry into an indefinite alluring world of men 
 rising early in the mornings and catching many 
 fish, and talking to milkmaids who had sung 
 songs with beautiful voices, and using strange 
 baits. I wish I could say now how that book 
 (a very poor edition) shut up between its gilded 
 covers a different, embalmed, enchanted life 
 without any care, from which life I emerged with 
 the words ' as wholesome as a pearch of Rhine,'
 
 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 29 
 
 which recalled actual perch swimming in clear 
 water in the green streets of the ponds on sunny 
 days. Then there were Scott's poems, a 
 book which then only meant a vision of armed 
 men rising suddenly out of heather and rocks 
 on a mountain side, and a fierce, plaided chief 
 exclaiming : 
 
 And, Saxon, I am Rhoderick Dhu. 
 
 Next ' Robinson Crusoe/ ' Grimm's Fairy 
 Tales/ 'The Iliad/ and a mass of almost 
 babyish books, tattered and now untouched, 
 but strictly preserved; and lastly, ' The 
 Adventures of King Arthur and the Round 
 Table.' As I reached this book, ' Inexorable 
 man/ I heard the lady of the lake say to 
 Merlin, ' thy powers are resistless ' ; moonlit 
 waters overhung by mountains and castles on 
 their crags, boats with a dark, mysterious 
 freight; knights trampling and glittering; 
 sorceries, battles, dragons, kings and maidens, 
 stormed or flitted through my mind, some 
 only as words and phrases learnt by heart, some 
 as pictures. It was a delicious but shadowy 
 entertainment with an indefinable quality of 
 remoteness tinged by the pale moonshine and
 
 30 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 
 
 the cold lake that finally suggested the reward 
 and solid comfort of tea at my aunt's house, 
 and thick slices, ' cut ugly/ of her doughy cake. 
 " Processions of living people, these also partly 
 in words and partly in pictures, passed through 
 my mind. They were faces peering above 
 bundles of clothes, but some crying out for 
 clearer recognition by means of tones of voice, 
 decided and often repeated expressions of all 
 the features acting together, and producing the 
 effect which was their soul. They came up to 
 me for judgment. Most I sent quickly away; 
 others I stopped and, like a schoolmaster, com- 
 pelled them to recite some chance word or deed 
 of theirs tarrying in my memory. On they 
 came, and I became conscious of the numbers 
 at that moment surrounding me in the chapel 
 seat. I looked at them and grew afraid of their 
 silent solitude, and tried to keep myself distinct 
 yet felt myself melting into the mass when the 
 preacher quoted the words : 
 
 He liveth best who loveth best 
 All creatures great and small. 
 
 What he went on to say was lost. I looked at 
 the people to see what they would do. The
 
 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 31 
 
 preacher said the words majestically, and I 
 supposed them to be true. I was sorry for those 
 squirrels which the gamekeeper shot, but I 
 wanted to have their skins : with all these others 
 I thought it must be different. They had 
 listened to the sermon, they came to listen, and 
 probably to learn and follow the true. I was 
 expecting them to get up and go out, and show 
 that they loved something very small, like an 
 ant or fly. At that moment a small moth 
 alighted on my knee, and I watched it creep and 
 flutter up my leg to my shoulder. I did not 
 feel that I loved it. The moth flew on to the 
 upper part of a man's sleeve in front of me. He 
 scarcely moved his head, but I knew he had seen 
 the flight; he lifted his hand slowly, dropped 
 it swiftly on the moth, whose scales powdered 
 his coat, and then became rigid again. Evidently 
 the words were not believed to be true. Why 
 did poets say so many things that people seemed 
 to like and did not believe, I wondered ? But 
 what if they were true, after all ? I resolved to 
 go on with my copying of Gray's ' Elegy ' that 
 very afternoon, also not to collect moths. It 
 entered my head that my aunt was merciless 
 to mice; it was a grave objection, for she was
 
 32 AUNT ANN'S COTTAGE 
 
 to me the corner-stone of the universe. Here 
 the sermon ended with a sneeze. I was very 
 sorry for the preacher, but I fear I did not 
 love him. As to moths, I never became a 
 collector." 
 
 "What a very consistent wool-gathering," 
 said I; " I don't suppose the sermon was more 
 so. And did you notice it was all pictorial ? 
 I'll be bound you don't go wool-gathering in 
 that fashion now, and if the child is so much 
 superior to us, how much more the caveman 
 may have been !" 
 
 " Except that I don't believe any caveman 
 ever had such an aunt as mine. There can have 
 been no superfluous good women in those days, 
 born simply to delight their sisters' and brothers' 
 boys." 
 
 " And now let us set out for Gwithavon !" 
 
 (1913-)
 
 THE SHIP OF SWALLOWS
 
 Ill 
 
 THE SHIP OF SWALLOWS 
 
 SOMEONE was talking in very glowing words 
 about a sunrise, and this set the artist raging : 
 
 " Hark at that gentleman talking about a 
 sunrise in October, too and his only one, I 
 warrant ! Half our modern verses and prose 
 for that matter would never have been written 
 if an unwonted early rising or late sitting had 
 not set the writer's nerves on edge, and made 
 their nasty vapours ' stream in the firmament/ 
 This Nature poetry-stuff is the jejune enthusiasm 
 of townsmen who are ashamed to confess that 
 they are such. It dates from the turning of 
 England into a town with a green backyard. 
 When men lived in the fields and rose early, they 
 cared too much for these things to think to 
 please one another by writing impressively about 
 them. Who of these men, or of outdoor men 
 to-day, can stomach fellows like that arum-lily 
 talking, and the poet he quotes, who at least 
 
 35
 
 36 THE SHIP OF SWALLOWS 
 
 has the wisdom to watch his dawns from a 
 comfortable bed ?" 
 
 The speaker was a little wiry man, with blue 
 eyes in a brown tangly face like speedwells in 
 a furze bush, whose fondness for being about 
 at all hours of the day and night was extreme 
 enough to explain the low repute of his can- 
 vases. 
 
 " But you go too far the other way," said a 
 mild, pale man with spectacles, whose body was 
 bent in a slight curve by his large head. " The 
 dawn has always been the same. ..." 
 
 " I deny that," said the youngest. " The 
 dawn changes as men change. Caractacus would 
 not recognize a dawn of Turner's, and I should 
 only be interested as a person with an historic 
 sense in the kind of dawn that lighted Caractacus 
 to his spear and his sword." 
 
 ' The dawn," continued the mild, pale man, 
 " has always been the same, and clothes the 
 passing of time for us, in spite of our clocks, as for 
 those who had none, with beauty and awe. It 
 will be some years before a man ceases to feel 
 himself a member of no mortal or only mun- 
 dane commonwealth, when he sees with what 
 ceremony the day begins. At this hour Nature
 
 THE SHIP OF SWALLOWS 37 
 
 wears the buskin, and justifies all poetry and 
 pride of man. I see chiefly sunsets myself. 
 It does not suit me to rise for sunrises in town 
 when I am working, or in the country when I 
 am trying not to work. Still, I have seen them. 
 My father farmed two hundred and fifty acres 
 in Kent, milked forty cows, and grew enough 
 hops to make half a hundred children happy 
 for a week in picking them. . . . No, well, 
 I don't pretend to be a countryman, except 
 while I am rheumaticky." 
 
 The artist was smiling good-naturedly now. 
 He liked the stiffly-curved man in spite of a 
 certain stateliness. The two took a turn round 
 the garden together. The artist was lured so 
 far as to talk about dawns simply for what 
 weather they foretold. The other went on: 
 
 " The beauty of a dawn in fair weather does 
 me good. I believe it liberalises my feelings 
 for the rest of the day. In spite of ill health 
 I think I may say I have no morbidity. I have 
 heard women speak as if they felt just what I 
 feel, and they have less morbidity and less 
 poetry than men. But I remember one in 
 particular, chiefly because of the extraordinary 
 unsought image by which it is now represented
 
 38 THE SHIP OF SWALLOWS 
 
 in my mind. You might do a painting of it, 
 though it is more suitable for a symbolist. 
 
 ' We lost our second child when she was only 
 a year old. She died in the afternoon, in the 
 middle of a shower that suddenly dashed down 
 upon the heat of July. Soon after midnight 
 my wife at last fell asleep. I could not sleep. 
 So I put on my clothes and read a book, a story 
 or two of very thin stuff as it seemed to me, 
 and I have never cared for that author since. 
 I put down the book and went out. Very soon 
 I left the streets and walked with the edge 
 of the common on one side, and on the other 
 the gardens of some old-fashioned houses now 
 demolished. There had been no more rain, 
 and there was no wind. There was no sky 
 visible. The air thickened into a downy grey, 
 motionless, and without either stars or forms 
 of cloud. A clock tinkled three. There was 
 just a pallor in the darkness. The dawn was 
 thinly and evenly poured into every inch of air 
 between earth and sky. The night was dying, 
 but instead of day replacing it, a neutral, soft 
 grey was succeeding that might be the end and 
 dissolution of all; as if all things were melted 
 down in this cup of grey air; and this idea was
 
 THE SHIP OF SWALLOWS 39 
 
 at the time not unpleasant. Some big trees 
 overhung a little cottage at one side of my path. 
 All their million leaves were still. 
 
 " I was tired, and I leaned upon the gate. 
 A thrush began to sing very clear. On the other 
 side of the common another sang, and a third 
 and perhaps a fourth farther away. There were 
 not so many as in May, yet enough to mingle 
 into a strange pleasing little medley. I knew 
 that if I could have travelled at that hour from 
 there to my father's house, there would be 
 thrushes all the way, in gardens, in roadside 
 trees, in hedges and thickets. 
 
 " I did not see them fly up, but presently 
 two swallows were twittering on the chimney 
 of the cottage. It was not the musical, happy 
 twitter of sunlight, but lower and perhaps timid : 
 they did not yet dare to launch themselves into 
 the air for the day's flight. It was sound, 
 nevertheless, that prevented me from thinking 
 of anything else I was very tired, you must 
 remember. I did not notice the thrushes any 
 longer whilst listening to this low twitter. It 
 was as soft and pallid as the light, and increased 
 with it in quality very slowly. I was now 
 leaning back and looking at nothing but the
 
 40 THE SHIP OF SWALLOWS 
 
 whitening grey sky. I do not think I closed 
 my eyes, but I found myself looking up at the 
 bows of a huge, dark ship, very high, and over- 
 hanging me, and gleaming as if with dew. 
 It rose up shadowy, and I could not see the 
 bulwarks. I cannot tell how I knew that it was 
 a ship, though I could see portions of a figure- 
 head, a woman's breast and throat and head 
 leaning forward. But it was a ship, and it 
 was just setting out on a voyage, as it seemed to 
 me, of peculiar solemnity and significance, like 
 that of Columbus or St. Brendan or Jason; 
 even the sea before it though it stood upon 
 the grassy land was infinite and mysterious. 
 Clinging about the ship's sides were many 
 swallows, hardly visible against the gleaming 
 black timber, but sharply outlined upon the 
 white and gold of the figure-head. They were 
 twittering low with clustering, sweet notes. 
 There was awe at the sea and the solemn voyage 
 in the sound of their little voices. There was 
 expectation also, and a sort of blind, gentle hope. 
 And I knew that I was to go on board of that 
 ship soon, and to share in the mystery and the 
 hope. When I opened my eyes the light was 
 beautiful, though the sun was not up in the
 
 THE SHIP OF SWALLOWS 4 1 
 
 gilt sky. The swallows were still twittering, 
 but they were flying now backwards and forwards 
 over the garden and along the roadway. The 
 feeling of expectation and hope remained, and a 
 subdued cheerfulness that must have had some- 
 thing to do with the tranquillity of those next 
 few days with all their gloom. ..."
 
 MORGAN
 
 IV 
 MORGAN 
 
 THE storm is over; Morgan is dead. Once 
 more we can hear the brook's noise, which was 
 obliterated all night by the storm and by our 
 thoughts. The air is clear and gentle in the 
 forest and all but still, after the night of wind 
 and of death. High up in the drifting rose of 
 dawn the multitudes of tall, slender trees are 
 swaying their tips, as if stirred rather by 
 memory of the tempest. They make no sound 
 with the trembling of their slender length : some 
 will never sound any more, for they lie motionless 
 and prone in the underwood, or hang slanting 
 among neighbour branches where they fell in 
 last night's storm, and the mice may nibble at 
 crests that once wavered among the stars. 
 The path is strewn with broken branches and 
 innumerable twigs. 
 
 The silence is so great that we can hear, by 
 enchantment of the ears, the storm that passed 
 
 45
 
 46 MORGAN 
 
 away with night. The tragic repose of ruin is 
 unbroken. One robin sings, and calls up the 
 roars and tumults that had had to cease 
 utterly before his small voice could gain this 
 power of peculiar sweetness and awe, and make 
 itself heard. 
 
 The mountains and sky, beautiful as they 
 are, are more beautiful because a cloak of terror 
 has been lifted from them and left them free 
 to the dark and silver, and now rosy, dawn. The 
 masses of the battlemented mountains are still 
 heavy and sombre, but their ridges bite sharply 
 into the sky, and the uttermost peaks are born 
 again. They are dark with shadows of clouds 
 of a most lustrous whiteness that hang, round 
 above round, like a white forest, very far off, 
 in the country of the sun, and the edges of the 
 rounds are gilded; seen out of the clear gloom 
 of the wood, this country is as a place to which 
 a man might wholly and vainly desire to go, 
 knowing that he would be at rest only there. 
 In the valley between this forest and the 
 mountains the frost is rosy with the roses of 
 the zenith. 
 
 As we listen, walking the ledge between 
 precipice and precipice in the forest, the silence
 
 MORGAN 47 
 
 seems to murmur of the departed tempest like 
 a sea-shell, and we also remember again the 
 sound of the dark hills convulsed with a hollow 
 roaring as of an endless explosion. 
 
 Trees were caught up and shaken in the 
 furious air like grasses; branches were stricken 
 and struck back, were ground and beaten together 
 and broken. The sound of one twig was 
 drowned by that of myriads; the sound of one 
 tree by that of leagues; and all were mingled 
 with the sound of the struggle in the high spaces 
 of the air. Between earth and sky there was 
 nothing but sound and darkness plunging 
 confused. Outside the window branches were 
 brandished wildly, and their anger was the more 
 terrible because the voice of it could not be heard 
 or distinguished amidst the universal voice. 
 The sky itself seemed to aid the roar. It was 
 dark with the darkness of black water, and the 
 planets raced over it among floes of white cloud ; 
 dark, menacing clouds flitted on messages of 
 darkness across the white. We looked out from 
 the death-room, having turned away from the 
 helpless, tranquil bed and the still wife, and 
 saw the forest surging under the wild moon, 
 but it was strange and no longer to be recognized
 
 48 MORGAN 
 
 while the earth was heaving and be-nightmared 
 by the storm. Yes, the forest is still under the 
 awe of that hour. That is why its clearness is so 
 solemn, its silence so pregnant, its gentleness 
 so sublime. But not for that only. It is fresh 
 after the sick room, calm after the storm and 
 after the vain conflict with death, sad because 
 every thought in it leads to death, and made 
 majestic by the character of the life that has 
 ended and never saw this dawn. It is as if his 
 soul had bereaved the forest also. The robin's 
 song is poured into the silence and shivers and 
 is chilled by falling into the dark cave of 
 death, as a brooklet falls over a cliff into a 
 sunless sea. 
 
 The blue smoke rises straight up as if nothing 
 had happened from the house of death, over 
 there among the white fields. As if nothing had 
 happened ! But we have been walking here an 
 hour, and have come to see even in that smoke 
 a significant tranquillity as of a beacon or 
 sacrifice. It comes from the room where the 
 wife sits and looks at the white face peering 
 through its black hair like seaweed, and still 
 speaking of the old ecstasy, solitude, and irony 
 that it had in life. A strange life of which
 
 MORGAN 49 
 
 the woman who shared without breaking his 
 solitude can tell nothing, and would tell nothing 
 if she could : for she wishes only to persuade us 
 that, in spite of his extraordinary life, he was 
 a good man and very good to her. She has 
 become as silent as he is and as he was. Never- 
 theless, they say that twenty years ago, when 
 she began to live with him on the mountain, she 
 was a happy, gay woman, the best singer and 
 dancer in the village, and had the most lovers, 
 while now her wholly black, small Silurian eyes 
 have turned inwards and have taught her lips 
 their mystery and Morgan's, have taught also 
 that animal softness to her steps and all her 
 motions. It would not be surprising were she 
 to strive to be buried along with him, if only she 
 had not lost so much of herself in losing him. 
 She guards him like a hound and like a spirit. 
 She shadowed and clung to the doctor and the 
 minister, so that their offices were a mockery, 
 yet they dared not attempt to keep her away. 
 Perhaps she will go back to his Tower and live 
 there alone. 
 
 If this winding path between two of the 
 forest precipices be followed to that bank where 
 the eastern sun now falls upon the dazzle of a 
 
 4
 
 50 MORGAN 
 
 myriad celandines, the top of Morgan's Tower, 
 or Folly, can be seen against a wedge of sky 
 among the hills ; there are no trees at that height, 
 and it is distinct and unmistakable. It is a 
 slender, square tower containing three rooms 
 one above the other, and above these an un- 
 covered look-out. If she returns there she will 
 be able to visit the upper room and the look-out 
 for the first time. 
 
 Morgan built the Tower before he was thirty, 
 and he dwelt there nearly thirty years ; whether 
 out of cruel constancy to his first resolution, no 
 one knows ; but once he had gone there he never 
 left it, except to die in the great house where 
 he was born, and where he chiefly lived, until 
 the building of the Tower. For a time he tried 
 to live entirely in London, devoting himself and 
 his riches to social reform, which seemed the 
 only way to gain some tranquillity and save 
 himself from too often remembering that he was 
 in hell. He drew back because he could not 
 understand the town life, and it was absurd to 
 reform what he could not understand. At first, 
 and for several years, the sight of the men and 
 women and children living a pure and simple 
 town life allowed him no rest. It was easy to
 
 MORGAN 51 
 
 provide them with things which seemed to 
 him to be good for them. But it was not easy, 
 it was in the end not possible, to put away the 
 thought that his motive was a false one, and yet 
 one for which he could see no practical alter- 
 native. He was trying to alter the conditions 
 of other men's lives because he could not have 
 endured them himself, because it would have 
 been unpleasant to him to be like them in their 
 hideous pleasure, hideous suffering, hideous in- 
 difference. He saw in this attitude a modern 
 Pharisaism, whose followers desired not merely 
 to be unlike others, but to make others like 
 themselves. It was due to lack of imagina- 
 tion, he thought, of imagination which would 
 enable the looker-on to see their lives as com- 
 pared with their conscious or unconscious ideals. 
 Did they, for example, fall farther short from 
 their ideals than he from his ? He had not the 
 imagination to see, but he thought perhaps not ; 
 and he did see that, lacking as their life might 
 be in antique beauty and power, it yet had in 
 it a profound unconsciousness and dark strength 
 which might some day bring forth beauty 
 might even now be beautiful to simple and true 
 eyes and had already given them a fitness to
 
 52 MORGAN 
 
 their place, such as he himself was far from 
 having reached. He never hesitated when it 
 was food and warmth that were lacking, but 
 beyond supplying those needs he could never 
 feel sure that he was not fancifully interfering 
 with a force which he did not understand and 
 could not overestimate. So leaving all save 
 a little of his money to be used for giving food 
 and warmth to the hungry and the cold, he 
 escaped from the sublime unintelligible scene. 
 He went up into the Tower, that he had built 
 upon a rock in his own mountains, to think 
 about life before he began to live. Up there he 
 hoped to learn why it was that sometimes, in 
 the London streets, beneath the new and the 
 multitudinous there was a simple and pure 
 beauty, beneath the turmoil a placidity, beneath 
 the noise a silence which he longed to reach 
 and to drink deeply and to perpetuate, but in 
 vain. He desired to learn to see in human life, 
 as we see in the life of bees, the unity which 
 perhaps some higher order of living beings can 
 easily see through the complexity that confuses 
 us. He had set out to seek at first by means of 
 science, but he found that science was only the 
 modern method of looking at the world, possibly
 
 MORGAN 53 
 
 a transitory method, and that too often it was 
 an end and not a means. For a hundred years 
 men had been reading science and experimenting, 
 as they had been reading history, with the result 
 that they knew some science and some history. 
 So he went up into his bright Tower. 
 
 From there he looked out at the huge, desolate 
 heaves of the grey beacons. Their magnitude 
 and pure form gave him hours of great calm. 
 Here there was nothing human, gentle, dis- 
 turbing, as in the vales. There was nothing 
 but the hills and the silence that was God. The 
 greater heights, set free from night and mist, 
 looked as if straight from the hands of God, 
 as if here He also delighted in pure form and 
 magnitude that was worthy of His love; and 
 the huge shadows moving slowly over the grey 
 spaces of winter, the olive spaces of summer, 
 were as His hand. While Morgan watched, the 
 dream came, more and more often, of a paradise 
 to be established upon the mountains when at 
 last the sweet winds should blow across a clean 
 world that knew not the taint of life any more 
 than of death, and then his thought swept 
 rejoicing through the high Gate of the Winds 
 that cleft the hills far off, where a shadow ten
 
 54 MORGAN 
 
 miles long slept across the peaks, but left the 
 lower wild as yellow in the sunlight as corn. 
 Following his thought he walked upward to that 
 Gate of the Winds, to range the high spaces, 
 sometimes to sleep there. Or he lay among the 
 gorse he could have lain on his back a thousand 
 years hearing the cuckoo among the gorse and 
 looking up at the blue sky above the mountains. 
 Or in the rain and wind he sat against one of the 
 rocks among the autumn bracken until the sheep 
 surrounded him, half visible and shaggy in the 
 mist, peering at him fearlessly as if they had 
 not seen a man since the cairns were heaped on 
 the summit; he sat on and on in the mystery, 
 part of it but divining it not, and in the end 
 went discontented away. The crags stared at 
 him on the hill-top, where the dark spirits of 
 the earth had crept out of their abysses into 
 the day, and still clad in darkness looked grimly 
 at him, at the sky, and the light. More and 
 more he stayed in his Tower, since even in 
 his own mountains, as in the cities of men, he 
 was dismayed by numbers, by variety, by the 
 grotesque, by the thousand gods demanding 
 idolatry instead of the One whom he desired, 
 Whose hand's shadow he had seen far off.
 
 MORGAN 55 
 
 Looking on a May midnight at Algol rising out 
 of the mountain, the awe and the glory of that 
 first step into the broad heaven exalted him; 
 a sound arose as of the whole of time making 
 a music behind him, a music of something 
 passing away to leave him alone in the silence, 
 as if he also were stepping up into the blue air 
 always to stumble back. Or it was the moon 
 rising. Then the sombre ranges to eastward 
 seemed to be the edge of the earth, and as the 
 globe ascended the world was emptied and 
 grieved, having given birth to this mighty child ; 
 he was left alone, and the great white clouds sat 
 round about upon the horizon and judged him. 
 For days he would lie desolate and awake and 
 dream and stir not. Once again he returned to 
 London and saw the city pillared, above the 
 shadowy abyss of the river, on columns of light ; 
 and it was less than one of his dreams. It was 
 winter and he was resolved to work, and was 
 crossing one of the bridges, full of purpose and 
 thought, going against the tide of the crowd. 
 But the beauty of the bridge and the water 
 took hold of him. It was a morning with a 
 low, yellow sky of fog. About the heads of 
 the crowd swayed a few gulls, interlacing so
 
 56 MORGAN 
 
 that they could not be counted, and they swayed 
 like falling snow and screamed. They brought 
 light on their long wings, as down below a great 
 ship setting out slowly with misty masts brought 
 light to the green and leaden river upon the foam 
 at her bows. And ever about the determined 
 careless faces of the men swayed the pale wings 
 like wraiths of evil and good calling, and calling 
 to ears which do not know that they hear. And 
 they tempted his brain with the temptation of 
 their beauty ; he went to and fro to hear and see 
 them until they slept and the crowd had flowed 
 away. He thought that they had made ready 
 his brain, and that on the mountains he would 
 find fulness of beauty at last, and simplicity, 
 so he went away and never returned. There, 
 too, among the mountains was weariness, because 
 he also was there. 
 
 But not always weariness. For was not the 
 company of planet and star in the heavens the 
 same as had bent over prophet and poet and 
 philosopher ? By day a scene unfolded, as when 
 the first man spread forth his eyes and saw more 
 than his soul knew. These things lifted up his 
 heart, so that the voices of fear and doubt were 
 not so much in that infinite silence as little rivers
 
 MORGAN 57 
 
 in an unbounded plain. There were days when 
 it seemed to him the sheer mountains were the 
 creation of his lean, terrible thoughts, and he 
 was glad, and the soft, wooded hills below and 
 behind were the creation of the pampered 
 luxurious thoughts he had left behind in the 
 world of many men. It was thus, in the style of 
 the mountains, he would have thought and 
 spoken but language, except to genius and 
 simple men, was but a paraphrase, dissipating 
 and dissolving the forms of passion and thought. 
 Then, again, time lured him back out of eternity, 
 and he believed that he longed to die, as he lay 
 and watched the sky at sunset, inlaid with swart 
 forest, and watched it with a dull eye and a 
 cold heart. 
 
 So much was known or could be guessed from 
 his talk. For in those early days of his retreat 
 he was not silent to those who met him upon 
 the mountains, nor did he turn aside so as not 
 to encounter them. And much more was told 
 in the legend that flourished about the strange 
 truth, and at last entangled and stifled it, 
 so that the legend was all, and no one cared 
 about the man. He was said to have buried 
 money somewhere in the caves of the hills. He
 
 58 MORGAN 
 
 was said to worship a God who had never 
 entered chapel or church. He was said to speak 
 with raven and kite and curlew and fox. He 
 was said to pray for the end of man and the 
 world. He was called atheist, blasphemer, 
 outlaw, madman, brute. But the last that was 
 known of him was that one summer he used to 
 come down night after night courting Angharad 
 who became his wife. One of the most per- 
 sistently reported of his solitary obsessions was 
 the belief in a race who had kept themselves 
 apart from the rest of men though found in 
 many nations, perhaps in all. Some said the 
 belief was from the Bible and that this was the 
 race that grew up alongside the family of Cain, 
 the guiltless " daughters of men " from whom 
 the fratricide's children took their wives. These 
 knew not the sin or the knowledge or the shame 
 of Adam, Eve, and Cain so he was said to 
 believe and neither had they any souls. They 
 were a careless and godless race, knowing 
 neither evil nor good. They had never been 
 cast out of Eden. Some of the branches of 
 this race had perished already by men's hands, 
 such as the fairies, the nymphs, the fauns. 
 Others had adopted for safety many of men's
 
 MORGAN 59 
 
 ways, and had become moorland and mountain 
 men, living at peace with their neighbours and 
 yet not recognized as equals. They were even 
 to be found in the towns. There the uncommon 
 beauty of the women sometimes led to unions 
 of violent happiness and of calamity, and now 
 and then to the birth of a poet or musician 
 or a woman who could abide neither with the 
 strange race nor with the children of Adam. 
 They were allowed to live and compelled to 
 surfer for their power and beauty. Their 
 happiness it was considered by men to be 
 something other than happiness, lighter, not 
 earned or deserved, mere gaiety was the 
 cause of envy and hate, and it met with lust 
 or with torture. They were feared, but more 
 often despised, because they retained what was 
 charming in the animal with the form of men, 
 and because they lived as if time was not, and 
 yet could not be persuaded to a belief in a future 
 life. Up in his Tower, Morgan came to regard 
 his father as one of these, the man who had 
 forsaken his wife before the child was born, and 
 left only a portrait behind. If only he could 
 capture one of this race, thought Morgan, 
 and make her his wife, he would be content.
 
 60 MORGAN 
 
 And Angharad, the shy and bold and fierce and 
 dark Angharad, whose black eyes radiated 
 light and blackness together, was one of them. 
 So he took her up to his Tower. 
 
 After that these things only were certainly 
 known: that she was unhappy; that when she 
 came down to the village for food she was silent, 
 would never betray him or fail to return; and 
 that he never came down, that he also was silent, 
 that he looked like a wild man with unshorn 
 hair. He was seen at all hours, always far 
 off, on the high paths of the mountains. His 
 hair was as black as when he was a boy. He 
 was never known to have ailed, until one day, 
 the wild wife knocked at the door of his birth- 
 place, and asked for help to bring him where 
 he might be tended as was necessary, since he 
 would have no one but her in the Tower. And so 
 he came and last night he died, having thanked 
 the Earth for its strength and its beauty, for 
 what it had given him and for what it might 
 have given had he been wise, having prayed 
 that his body might be dutiful to Earth in the 
 grave and bound up more purely than it had 
 been during his living days " in the bundle 
 of life with the Lord my God." She has not
 
 MORGAN 61 
 
 always been silent, but has cried aloud with a 
 voice far wilder than the curlew's because she 
 is left alone with the children of men. And 
 that is why this gentle morning is so grave and 
 so forlorn, and why Morgan's Folly stands up 
 so greatly and notably in its blackness against 
 this dawn. 
 
 (1913-)
 
 HELEN
 
 V 
 HELEN 
 
 TWENTY-FIVE years ago the chief inhabitants 
 of Crowbit lands were squirrels, the chief crops 
 hazel nuts and flints. To-day it is a forlorn 
 declining old-new settlement, with the look 
 of a wrecked suburb, and resembling a village 
 only in that it has one idiot and one great house, 
 every pane of every window in it broken by the 
 stones of happy children. In another twenty- 
 five years the old condition will probably be 
 restored. It is the highest land on a high plateau 
 and the plough has never been over it. The 
 greater part is treeless, but the slopes bear 
 copses of poor oaks and in the bottoms are 
 families of ancient beeches and enough grass 
 for many rabbits. One straight main road 
 crosses it now as it has long done, but for some 
 reason it is avoided, and in spite of an old man 
 always bent over it the weeds and grass grow 
 apace. The other roads are, and were, broad 
 
 6 5 5
 
 66 HELEN 
 
 green lanes deeply fringed with untended hazel 
 and bracken and the purple and gold flowers 
 that love to be among bracken. Even twenty- 
 five years ago no tract of southern England 
 was richer in green lanes almost without rut or 
 footprint. Perhaps a gipsy came one day, 
 but next day was not there. One farmhouse 
 there was, and the only reason for that seemed 
 to be to avoid the scandal of so large a district 
 in this prosperous country being without one. 
 Every year or two it was partly painted and the 
 garden half weeded, lest the predestinate tenant 
 should see it and pass by: once or twice there 
 were tenants not farmers, but a poor middle- 
 class family with an indigent mother or sister, 
 or children too young for school for not more 
 than six months. The great house was at the 
 very edge of Crowbit, turning its back on the 
 misty plateau, its face towards a better land of 
 dairy and corn in comfortable proportions. 
 It was a square grey house among oaks, dull 
 and substantial, a perfect breeding-place for 
 men about town, like the Salanders. They 
 could not live there because the consumption 
 of cigarettes and spirits which it enforced gave 
 it a reputation for unhealthiness and costliness;
 
 HELEN 67 
 
 but they had been happy there as children and 
 they liked to come down in the autumn for 
 pheasants, in the summer for trout not in 
 their own land, which had not one flash of 
 running water. The Salanders had some reason 
 for expecting trouble: in fact, the only reason 
 against it was that it had long been delayed. 
 The only way out was work and that was 
 impossible until one day a low, but amusing 
 friend of George Salander offered another. The 
 lord of the manor had just landed a game trout 
 and held it in his hand with a sunny hard smile, 
 saying in compliment " Jolly plucky little 
 beggar," before putting his thumbnail deep 
 into the spine of a creature which, he knew, 
 had done its best to give him pleasure. At 
 Johnson's proposal he smiled in the same way. 
 
 Within a year the plan was a success. The 
 healthy situation and lovely scenery of Crowbit, 
 the fitness for poultry and small fruit farms, 
 and the convenience of a five-mile-distant 
 railway station upon a branch line, were en- 
 thusiastically advertised by Johnson, the railway 
 company, the Press, and in a quiet way, by 
 Salander himself. The newcomers were old 
 and middle-aged men who had saved a little
 
 68 HELEN 
 
 money in shops, young men at their first venture 
 and men no longer young at their last. They 
 enclosed parallelograms of an acre or half-an- 
 acre with wire-netting; they planted trees 
 which died; they dug up plots of innocent grass 
 where forthwith exulted the hardiest and most 
 offensive weeds; they erected low buildings of 
 corrugated iron, white framed windows and doors 
 and many lace curtains. The old farmhouse 
 received a corrugated iron roof from ridge to 
 eaves over its thatch and the name of " The 
 Laurels "; and inside or outside of it could be 
 heard a cheerful baritone voice singing " The 
 Boys of the Old Brigade." Many lengths of 
 the green lanes were furrowed hither and 
 thither by heavy wheels, and the mud well 
 mixed with broken glass, crockery and coloured 
 paper. Gaps were torn in the hedges for gate- 
 ways and to allow a view when the mist cleared. 
 Everywhere, the sound of hammers on deal 
 and corrugated iron. Chickens made paths in 
 all directions. Faces of extreme cheerfulness 
 or extreme anxiety went up and down riding 
 bicycles or eagerly pushing them. 
 
 Salander had ready-money. He came down 
 to see the place and told Johnson, " It is like a
 
 HELEN 69 
 
 damned circus, only it won't go away." He 
 was genuinely enraged with Johnson. 
 
 Some of the people did, nevertheless, go away 
 before long. Some who had hoped they would 
 be isolated were wedged in a dense row: others 
 found it lonely in a lane with no sound but their 
 own chickens: some longed for the town, some 
 for the country. But enough had been sold 
 to overcome Salander's distaste; he was able 
 to send his idle eldest son, Aylwin Salander, 
 to a mining school, and later on to Canada. 
 
 Some of the invaders stayed. The Browns, for 
 example, kept to their little red house, and in ten 
 years' time they alone remained of the original 
 settlers. The slope up to their front door and 
 its white wooden steps was carefully mown and 
 broken into beds of lilac and laburnum, roses, 
 sunflowers and nasturtiums in their seasons. 
 Of the half-dozen spruce trees only one had lived 
 through the first summer, and this was the 
 nearest to the house. It was absurdly near, as 
 Mrs. Brown pointed out; it grew apace and its 
 branches brushed the wall of the house. On 
 the night when her first child was born, and on 
 other nights she could then remember, she was 
 tormented by this tree rasping the corrugated
 
 70 HELEN 
 
 iron in the rainy wind. " You devil," she said 
 to it when first she stepped out with little Helen 
 in her arms; but she let it remain, and it con- 
 tinued to flourish while its companions rotted 
 very slowly in the ground. Helen flourished 
 like the tree, which she watered all through the 
 summers; and Salander, passing by a shed one 
 day where she was playing, threw away his 
 cigar to have a good look at her. Outside, it 
 was a day of glory in the sky and of harvest 
 peace and abundance on the earth: inside, the 
 child was in deep shadow and looked down at 
 him with eyes bright, glowing cheeks, rosy lips, 
 and teeth glistening, all the more lovely for the 
 shadow which her face overcame and seemed to 
 illuminate like a lantern. He tried to talk to 
 her, and she said " Yes " or " No " or sometimes 
 nothing. He remembered as he looked at her 
 an old countrywoman's remark to him when 
 he was a boy: " Birds have great wisdom; not 
 one of them except the cuckoo has said a thing 
 men can understand, not since the Creation." 
 Before he left she reminded him still more of a 
 bird, for she suddenly put on a face like an owl 
 which was evidently a favourite accomplishment. 
 This she maintained for about half a minute
 
 HELEN 71 
 
 and then broke into laughter, under cover of 
 which Salander departed. He did not profess 
 to know anything about women until they were 
 seventeen or so, and none that he had ever 
 troubled with was like a bird; yet his compla- 
 cency was hurt by the bird-like Helen. She 
 grew more and more beautiful, to the confusion 
 of old and afterwards of young Salander. She 
 had a peering face, narrowing down to the chin 
 and sharpened forwards a face that asked 
 many questions no man could answer. She had 
 olive eyes, long dark lashes, and dark eyebrows, 
 a rather more than usually projecting mouth 
 which seemed to make the whole world wreathe 
 in a smile with it; her skin was nothing rarer 
 than damask; her pale yellow hair was open 
 to the imputation of tow, inclined to stick 
 together in tails, and only just rippled out of 
 the straight, yet radiant and original whether it 
 swished about her in running or was held across 
 her mouth for her to bite while she spoke ; perhaps 
 only her ears could be called perfect, being of a 
 unique simple curve up, round and down, and 
 within of a subtlety suggesting with even a 
 shade of painfulness in its subtlety, the hidden 
 brain which it furnished with the sounds of the
 
 72 HELEN 
 
 world. Many other women had some of these 
 elements in more perfection, not a few had them 
 all: there was never one who combined them 
 in these proportions to this result, which was so 
 much more than the sum of them all that one 
 like old Salander could pretend to see it as such 
 only when there was a Crowbit mist moaning 
 and shaking the spruce against Helen's home 
 and the rain drummed on corrugated iron, and 
 he felt in his teeth that he was old. He was, 
 in fact, deeply impressed by her beauty. It 
 was the most surprising fact within his knowledge 
 that this brand-new, rasping new, never-to-be- 
 old, settlement and two plain parents could 
 produce one like Helen, could nourish and 
 preserve her year after year, while she ran up 
 and down the deep-rutted lanes and over the 
 scratched flinty fields among the chickens, 
 climbed his great beeches in the bottoms still 
 mainly belonging to the squirrels, and later on 
 raced about on a rattling bicycle with a milk 
 can or a parcel from the station. She wore 
 bad clothes, always torn, often dirty but so 
 much the better ! they gave her laughing 
 loveliness another triumph. It was always 
 laughing, though not perhaps for what Salander
 
 HELEN 73 
 
 or most others would have called happiness. 
 Her mother was angry with her for laughing 
 at nothing: she did not know, she believed the 
 child did not know, why this laughter; and she 
 accused her of pretence, the more certainly 
 because the gravity of her eyes was never 
 disturbed by it. At school she learned only 
 to fear school-teachers and lofty rooms with 
 shiny pictures. All her wisdom was in the 
 quickness of her feet and the light of her eyes. 
 Some thought her daft. 
 
 When Helen was seventeen, old Salander died 
 suddenly. Aylwin had returned from Canada, 
 something worn by indolence, but still handsome. 
 He was a perfect Salander externally had a 
 neat head, close-cropped mouse-coloured hair, 
 regular features and excellent teeth, but also a 
 melancholy and rash futility that .grinned at 
 the masterly military exterior. He wooed 
 Helen outright. She was now a woman of a 
 great new beauty, neither of the town nor of 
 the country. She was the offspring of the 
 union or conflict between country and town, 
 the solitude of Crowbit and the corrugated iron. 
 The union showed itself in the astonishing 
 blend of the wild and the delicate in her beauty,
 
 74 HELEN 
 
 the conflict, in her uselessness she could do 
 nothing with her hands or her head, she could 
 not even sing, though her voice was worthy of 
 her in what the neighbours called her stupidity 
 or imbecility. She was like a deer enchanted 
 into a woman's form, nothing like a deer except 
 sometimes in her gesture of suspicion, and yet a 
 deer underneath. Salander used to come down 
 to the " King's Head " at Newton Salander for 
 several days at a time and make opportunities 
 to see the wandering Helen instead of fishing. 
 At some visits he sat down and drank peaceably 
 for hours, to fend off the sad looks of Crowbit ; 
 at others, he would not touch alcohol, for the 
 same reason; in both moods he would talk of 
 fitting out two rooms at the manor-house, of 
 keeping fowls and Arcadianising. It was pretty 
 well known why he came, and Mr. and Mrs. 
 Brown, though not yet consulted, saw no reason 
 to be sorry, since it might do them good and 
 would, at least, take the solitary and useless 
 girl off their hands. The neighbours blamed 
 sometimes them and sometimes Helen, when they 
 knew her entire liberty with Salander. They 
 accused the Browns of thrusting her upon him. 
 His friends, on the other hand, thought it
 
 HELEN 75 
 
 would be quite unnecessary for him to marry 
 her. 
 
 Helen herself seemed to take no notice of him, 
 to be the only person who could not see what 
 was happening. Then suddenly it was known 
 that she and Salander were to be married. 
 It was said that he had lain in wait for her in 
 one of her secret haunts, and that there for some 
 reason she had struck him so that he fell and 
 was stunned. It was said that his helpless body 
 had raised her pity; she had tended and kissed 
 him back to consciousness. After this he could 
 apparently do anything with her, except per- 
 suade her to leave " Fair View " where she was 
 born. She used to compare herself to the 
 solitary spruce-tree. She had never lived any- 
 where else, and she never could. But as soon 
 as possible Salander meant to take her right 
 away from it. 
 
 After the wedding Helen was gay and gentle 
 with all, until she came to the gates of the 
 manor-house. She trembled and leaned heavily 
 on her husband's arm, and he was all but carry- 
 ing her as they approached the door. At the 
 threshold she was powerless; he lifted her in, 
 helpless and drooping as a sheaf of barley.
 
 76 HELEN 
 
 She is now what all would call mad. She fell 
 into silence, untranslatable sounds, and her old 
 laughter. She refused to sleep anywhere except 
 in her birthplace, and as she was not admitted 
 there she stayed out of doors. She thought that 
 she was a spruce fir, and spreading out her arms 
 with a grave look she shivered and made a sound 
 like the wind in fir needles without opening her 
 lips, and having gradually become silent she 
 burst out into laughter and turned away. 
 Salander was much condoled with by her 
 parents, and in his watchfulness he was often 
 out all night, following her until he was tired 
 and she disappeared. His fowls arrived, but 
 he made a present of them to his father-in-law. 
 In a few weeks he departed, leaving the key 
 in the door with a hope that she might return. 
 He comes down now and then to see if she is 
 changed, but when he appears she runs fast 
 away. They have relented at " Fair View," 
 and she sleeps there once more. She works hard 
 in the garden and among the fowls, and goes 
 on errands. If the little boys of Crowbit stop 
 her and say, " Helen, what is that noise ?" she 
 stands still, slowly extends her arms and moans 
 like a fir-tree, and the boys grin at one another
 
 HELEN 77 
 
 until out comes her wild laughter, and they 
 grin no more. The people at Crowbit are not 
 proud of her, though she is still as beautiful as 
 the dawn ; but at the next village an old woman 
 says it is good to have one idiot in a place, and 
 very lucky " It keeps things quiet," she says. 
 
 (1911.)
 
 ISOUD
 
 VI 
 ISOUD 
 
 THE other day a thick snowfall whitened the 
 hills. Winter it is not yet nevertheless ; a black 
 insistence here and there of hillock or jag was 
 left to remind us of the living form; though 
 tucked down, stiff and angular like a corpse, in its 
 shroud, the earth still lived. It was buried, yet 
 buried alive; and it needed only a tumultuous 
 enthusiasm of sunshine to awaken what had 
 seemed the lifeless angles of knees and chin to 
 life. That enthusiasm came. First an icy fog 
 overclouded the pools, garrisoned by melancholy 
 lime and elm, mostly bare, and by gracious 
 poplars hardly wasted or discoloured, over and 
 among which floated three swallows continually. 
 But the light invaded and barred the beech- 
 trunks with the shadow of their own boughs. 
 Then rapidly the splendour drew off, only to be 
 followed by a sweet-tempered afternoon which 
 later on was visited by notable light, diluted and 
 
 81 6
 
 82 ISOUD 
 
 invisible, so homely and so companionable, as 
 though from a fountain closer than the sun, 
 from something on earth, something not far off; 
 a light under which the very asphalt of aching 
 streets will receive the shadows of tree and spire. 
 All the grim jewelleries of the hoar frost were 
 gone. Far off a sudden fusillade occasionally 
 surprised the air. Then the hour between light 
 and darkness was one of the holy eves of 
 autumn. . . . With sunset a vigorous gale 
 took flight from the north, and overthrew the 
 barriers of day and uplifted the heavens a league 
 higher, until the storm came, preceded, while 
 it was yet light, by a wonderful stir and freshness 
 of the air between those heaving bergs of cloud 
 immersed and reluctantly smouldering in blue 
 sky water east and west ; and this was the hour 
 for the unexpected, the marvellous, for the 
 extending of Nature's bounds. A moment or 
 two of sumptuous calm as if one slept upon 
 pillows of wild-hop blossom; the waterfall's 
 breath ceased to tease the ivy foliage, and the 
 storm whipped it instead. Thunder came, and 
 a wind that plucked out the poplar boughs as 
 if they had been hen feathers. That, too, gave 
 way with rumblings of retreat: and the rain
 
 ISOUD 83 
 
 was globed prettily on the silver underside of a 
 leaf that lay stiff. So the latest memory of that 
 day was powerful and sweet. We saw the 
 mighty motion of the steadfast tide as it 
 swerved, swerved slowly in echelon at the 
 broadest point of the river, where two streams, 
 both voices of the sea, though querulous, enter 
 it; we saw how the water, all red in the re- 
 current ardours of sunset, was burdened with 
 foam ; how the low grassy shore hissed, and the 
 big, tawny moon leant at watch as if with a 
 pensive arm on the hills, quite near. That night 
 also passed, the perfect silence of it expounded 
 by the unaccountable murmur as of gigantic 
 pinions beating slowly at the horizon, and the 
 black bars of midnight weighing heavily upon 
 the brow, until the white moon was deluged by 
 fiery clouds of dawn. Importunate sunlight 
 then called us forth early to a long day of 
 breezes that drove the lark giddily backward 
 in its song. With an imposing promise of the 
 far away spring, a great poplar, in a spurt of 
 delicate rain, rose up in magically aggrandized 
 magnificence into a lustrous pane of sky. But 
 most impressively the memory of that day is 
 inseparable from a reading of Malory's narrative
 
 84 ISOUD 
 
 of the knight Kehydius. Out of doors I had 
 read this story, which is an unimportant 
 appanage of Tristram's tragedy, and told frag- 
 mentarily over many pages after Malory's way 
 stealing like a meek rosy thread of silk through 
 the purple and sea-green pomps of a sombre 
 embroidered imagery. The open air endowed 
 it with what it lacked: not that it was without 
 art, though it is not purely art that gilds such 
 a history as Elaine's; he speaks, as it were, for, 
 he is the melodious mouth for, Nature herself. 
 Indeed, of all books none is so fitted for such 
 reading. One can fancy it the work of an old 
 woodlander who wrote in his splashed hunting 
 dress. His stories have all the carelessness and 
 haste of stories told by eager riders in a joyful 
 chase; that is how he came to add fondly to his 
 picture of a lion-guarded castle in the tale of 
 Galahad "and the moone shone clere"; and 
 Kehydius is one of those constellated knights 
 whom he just names, with sympathy, it is true, 
 but no more. So after a dreamy reading of the 
 book were my own thoughts of Kehydius and 
 Malory's ejaculations combined in one history 
 that came to me all day in intermitted harmony. 
 The sound thereof was as of distant music
 
 ISOUD 85 
 
 coming and going with the pulse of the breeze, 
 or like light 
 
 That from heaven is with the breezes blown 
 Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 
 
 One thought of the beginning of the life of 
 Kehydius in some towered town ; of his melan- 
 choly youth, full of hopes for a future that will 
 never be, and regrets for a past that has never 
 been. And one day Tristram and Lamorak 
 " took Kehydius at the fosters hous and soo 
 they rode with hym to the ship." 
 
 Underfoot one of the clear brown Gwili's little 
 tributaries all its course runs beneath close hazel 
 and thorn bushes, till it is unfettered into spark- 
 ling liberty over tumbled rocks, in a deep bed 
 whose sides were in September the home of the 
 finest ivy, of all plants indeed, refined to a 
 crepuscular paleness and frailness ; there, too, or 
 close at hand, was the hot pimpernel, hot as if 
 it had burnt like a tongue of volcanic flame from 
 the scorched pebbles. 
 
 There was Kehydius marching with the great 
 knights. Surely he will not long love his life ! 
 He is to love the highest and loveliest in all the 
 world. That soul was never wholly sincere
 
 86 ISOUD 
 
 except with Nature; and perhaps his eyes had 
 never opened with the fearlessness, the innocence, 
 the eternal surprise of childhood save to the 
 sky ! There would be days when the despotic 
 splendour of the sunlight never permitted him 
 to rest, but only to gaze and dream. And " the 
 fyrst time that ever syre Kehydius sawe la Beale 
 Isoud he was soo enamoured upon her that for 
 very pure love he myghte never withdrawe 
 it. ... And at the last as ye shall here or the 
 book be ended syre Kehydius dyed for love 
 of la Beale Isoud." 
 
 And Autumn came. Fine pale ferns nodded 
 beside the path; the red campions blossomed 
 with smaller and smaller flowers; children 
 harvested the blackberries from sprays of crisp 
 green arched over serpentining red stems; and 
 there were all the pleasures of a day abroad 
 the stepping-stones in lustrous brown water! 
 the fear of cattle too indolent to raise a horn ! 
 and the damp, cool crystal of the air before 
 evening below the oaks and hazels of a lane ! 
 
 Kehydius has written to Isoud, and drawn 
 replies from that stately queen. The events 
 following have all the sorrowful comedy of real 
 life: Tristram maddens with jealousy at Isoud's
 
 ISOUD 87 
 
 condescending response to Kehydius, who leaps 
 from the scene, but afterward goes on affectionate 
 search for his rival ; and not alone ; at least he is 
 pursued by one that loved him hopelessly, a 
 maiden named Summer Night, whose very step 
 was desirable and full of love and always tender 
 as if she feared to break the slumber of one 
 beloved and sick. From her Kehydius learned 
 to play upon Tristram's harp so faultlessly that 
 they drew him with tears to their side, only to 
 depart, however, with " The harp is the harp 
 of Tristram, but the harper . . . !" But 
 Kehydius " saide that he wolde goo in to 
 Bretayn." 
 
 Evening is at hand. Long, delicate amber 
 ribands of sunshine lie across the page in a quiet 
 sunset of misty gold, whose beams glance night 
 by night off a neighbouring window to this spot, 
 but soon, as now, escape along with the memor- 
 able splendour upon the book. 
 
 Night closes the story appropriately. Kehy- 
 dius has returned and after curing Tristram 
 with the herbs of the love-wise Summer Night 
 has gone forth, neglectful of her, with the knight. 
 Again they quarrelled over Isoud. One night, 
 therefore, Kehydius left Tristram asleep, harp
 
 88 ISOUD 
 
 at side, and rode with intent never to return. . . . 
 Let us not be content with Malory's allusion to 
 " the noble knyghte syre Kehydius that dyed 
 for the love of la Beale Isoud." 
 
 To what weird banquet are those gloomy 
 clouds journeying amid the firs, with bat and 
 with crow, in the fervid but lightless west ? 
 From what weird banquet or witching tryst in 
 the dead east are they returning like sullen 
 guests ? The year has " passed into many 
 yesterdays," and now the arborets of brier and 
 thorn that stagger up and down the acclivities 
 moan in the invectives of the wind. 
 
 Never had Sir Kehydius joy such as on that 
 night; there was joy even in the thought that 
 cropped up among his memories, the thought 
 
 that 
 
 Grief is to bliss a blindfold sister sweet. 
 
 Suddenly then came the fear that Tristram 
 might suffer harm in his sleep. He rode hot- 
 foot back, therefore, and sat to watch until day; 
 when he bethought him of the harp; he would 
 play once again a stanza only, perhaps of 
 the glade 
 
 Where light and white the wood nymphs go.
 
 ISOUD 89 
 
 Those tones were his own obsequies. . . . His 
 fingers and voice ran through all the subtleties 
 of delight and love. . . . The light of a sunken 
 moon was fading by delicate diminuendo among 
 the woods. . . . Even Tristram wondered and 
 admired. Finally, the recollection of Isoud ! 
 The tristful majesty of her praises could not 
 restrain his hand, the hand that presently drove 
 a sword, through the misty quivering chords, 
 into the heart of Kehydius. Summer Night 
 was close by. She took up the corpse, and her- 
 self scooped a grave in the forest's heart where 
 dew is dried not even at noon. But when the 
 grave was deep, she could not endure to loosen 
 those fair limbs into the pit; so, descending 
 herself and drawing his body over the edge, 
 she, crushed by the weight and effortless with 
 fright and grief, died; and no robins covered the 
 sorrow of those two; only when Tristram and 
 Isoud passed there in the chase, they found that 
 the hair of Summer Night had expanded over 
 all as if in pity ; and Isoud, with her elegiac voice, 
 praised the hair.
 
 A MAN OF THE WOODS
 
 VII 
 A MAN OF THE WOODS 
 
 LONG years of soldiering, tilling the soil, game- 
 keeping, and poaching o' nights, moulded our 
 man of the woods to what we find him now in a 
 hale, iron old age. In the education of such a 
 man, not one of these elements could have been 
 spared; all will be found deeply essential. 
 Without the drill and exposure of a soldier's 
 life, his back would never have been so straight, 
 nor his step so true, nor his eye so instantly 
 correct; and it again gave him an insight, also, 
 into phases of life on which he will begin to 
 dwell, in a chattering senility, when sermons 
 are uttered more and more frequently from the 
 grandfather's chair. Tilling the soil was slow, 
 certain preparation for the interchangeable crafts 
 of poacher and gamekeeper. It was then that, 
 in the lengthened dinner-hours under the summer 
 sky, he could glean unutterable lore of the hare 
 and his many ways. Partridges nested in his 
 
 93
 
 94 A MAN OF THE WOODS 
 
 master's fields, and it needed no more than 
 ordinary care to mark their lines of travel, their 
 hours of home-coming and outgoing, and their 
 favoured corners when the coveys packed in the 
 time of the ripening hazel-nuts. At odd hours, 
 in his tiny youth, opportunities were his to 
 learn something of the economies of the smaller 
 wild things of the hedgerows and leas; the 
 thronging of strange racketing birds to the red 
 October hips these, the fieldfares, he called 
 " felts " and the advent of the nightingale in 
 earliest April to the spinney or the hazel-nook. 
 He had been something of a favourite with the 
 hunt; received valuable commissions which 
 kept him in silent places, where the only stir was 
 the "rattle" which he whirled to turn the 
 followed fox from a known retreat of his that 
 could not be blocked. There, with occasions 
 innumerable, answered by desires, he learned 
 much, and reasoned, too, in his unguided way, 
 and developed a tenderness towards wild 
 creatures which was often in contrast with 
 freaks of heedlessness. This tenderness stays 
 with him now ; he remembers the caged dormouse 
 clicking for food over him, even in his nightly 
 armchair. Keepering and poaching rank to-
 
 A MAN OF THE WOODS 95 
 
 gether in his education. Both gave him in- 
 tricacies of knowledge in woodcraft that are 
 impossible otherwise. Had he been a worse 
 keeper, he would never have made so good a 
 poacher; a worse poacher, and he were a useless 
 keeper. Education, and " better manners/' he 
 will say, have been the means of reducing the 
 frequency of poaching, or, at least of the loud, 
 bold poaching which he knew desperate attacks 
 of desperate men. Many such he recalls when 
 the price of bread was high and wages low ; cruel 
 times for his class, he moans yet. Then a certain 
 moodiness took hold of the cottagers; a dull, 
 stubborn carelessness; and murderous affrays 
 were the results. Such times have gone, he 
 thinks, like the coast-war with smugglers. It 
 is a memory of his that banded labourers in the 
 cold winters of the years of the Crimea attacked 
 the game woods. The raids called for unusual 
 preparations against their success, and keepers 
 sat or stood up in the covers all night in silence 
 behind suspended sacks as protection from the 
 wind. Nights like these ruined and bowed many 
 good men. 
 
 Picture him in his woods; for he has been a 
 man of the woods all his life, and is so yet.
 
 96 A MAN OF THE WOODS 
 
 Wild, full locks whiten his brown neck and 
 cheeks; a beard graces his chin. His eyes have 
 the cold pale-blue brightness, suggestive of weak 
 or short sight, which is almost always noticeable 
 in men whose eyes are much used out of doors. 
 The power of these eyes is genius, or instinct; 
 their characteristic is that they realize everything 
 in their sweep, noting details which ordinary 
 vision would not appreciate or be conscious of. 
 His gaze is inevitably and surely arrested by 
 whatsoever moves within his ken ; he knows that 
 the rush-tufts dappling the hills are not the hares 
 he seeks, but he also knows that they are rush- 
 tufts; nothing can escape him, and he makes 
 certain, by an unconscious effort, of all he sees. 
 Yet his glance is as rapid as possible; taking in, 
 using or rejecting, what he sees, is the work of 
 an inappreciable moment of time. He is little 
 above the middle height, but his straight build 
 gives him the appearance of being taller, and 
 makes him what he is, a powerful man, whose 
 strength is accompanied by agility, weight by 
 speed. He has always been a runner; boasts, 
 too, of his father's prowess across country. 
 And one of the signs of his own enduring strength 
 is that his breath is still good; he can run, if
 
 A MAN OF THE WOODS 97 
 
 necessary, and mount the Downs, or climb a 
 pollard- willow yet. He may tell you that " the 
 rheumatics " trouble him, but we find how much 
 that means in a long tramp in the nutting 
 season, up and down, over brooks and ha-has: 
 then he is the last to complain, for the excite- 
 ment of youth over the gipsying is as strong as 
 ever in him. His dress, though he knows it not, 
 by a curious but natural adaptation to sur- 
 roundings, has become of unspeakable hues; 
 slowly he has taken the colours of the wildwood 
 in autumn's grey and brown, like the lizard in 
 its native fern and parched rock or sward. 
 Reminiscences of bird's-nesting raids are about 
 him; undoubted evidences of his trespassing, 
 in the stains of the keeper's " tar trap " ; sand, 
 from the quarries, where an owl occupied two 
 martins' tunnels whose partition slipped; lichen 
 from the oaks, and green mould from the beeches 
 where we sup. Many, many colours impress his 
 sunburnt coat, his hat no less; unlike the Downs 
 of his nativity, his cloth has emeralded in the 
 sunshine. 
 
 He is a sportsman, with knowledge of a gun, 
 but a better poacher, we confess; a fisherman, 
 who can bait a hook, yet a better " tickler " of 
 
 7
 
 98 A MAN OF THE WOODS 
 
 tench and trout. In fishing he shows a failing 
 that is often conspicuous in men used, as he is, 
 to other methods and waters; he has too much 
 slow patience fonder, with rod in hand, of a 
 joke than of his sport, and of the moorhen 
 paddling than of either; he will sit for hours 
 with no encouragement but " something in the 
 air " to keep him at his work. David is a 
 naturalist, yet something of a quack knows 
 and loves the gold agrimony wand or the pile- 
 wort, February's star, but fears nightshade and 
 brooklime more. On the subject of herbs, he 
 is, of course, superstitiously old-fashioned, daring 
 not to doubt; to him they are infallible. The 
 same reverence for the sweet, small gifts of 
 Nature makes him over-ready oftentimes to find 
 " Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks; 
 Sermons in stones, and good in everything." 
 His " tongues," there found, are too often dumb 
 or vain; his "books" might be deemed idle; 
 but good he does find, and communicates with 
 rare simplicity. His love of the greenwood is, 
 in very fact, deep-seated. The superstition of 
 our man of the woods with regard to herbs is 
 allied to his speculation about birds; but it is 
 only the speculation of almost all dwellers in
 
 A MAN OF THE WOODS 99 
 
 the country. Just as the old people know there 
 are tree magpies, and bush magpies, so he will 
 have it that the " twink " is other than the 
 "piefinch"; yet his twink, evidently named 
 from the chaffinch's cry, makes a similar nest 
 to the piefinch, and is as dainty in its use of 
 lichen. " Piefinch " is a common West Country 
 name for the chaffinch. The songs, the call- 
 notes, the flights, the habits, sociable or solitary, 
 of wild birds are known to him. His imitations 
 of the cries of woodlanders and birds of the field 
 are exquisitely close; their consummation is in 
 his rendering of the bullfinch's melancholy 
 " pipe," and of the young rook's clamour, 
 swallowing a worm. 
 
 The old man's vocabulary is mixed and 
 strange; many of its words being untraceable, 
 most of them derived from contact with the 
 wandering gipsies. He knows something of 
 Romany, and speaks of the " Diddikai," as he 
 correctly calls him, or half-bred gipsy, as more 
 dangerous and fierce than the rest. David, the 
 old poacher and soldier, " traveller " once, 
 perchance, is keen-witted and thoughtful; at 
 times a light smile plays gracefully about the 
 wrinkles of time and trouble in his cheek. At
 
 TOO A MAN OF THE WOODS 
 
 night, when he gathers his boys about him, 
 there is grave talk and bandied jest, and thrusts 
 of wit. Perhaps in the midst of the " godship " 
 one is ailing, and inevitably he suffers doctoring 
 with long, dark, bitter draughts of mysterious 
 tea. 
 
 (1897.)
 
 SEVEN TRAMPS
 
 VIII 
 SEVEN TRAMPS: A STUDY IN BROWN 
 
 WE were a close-knit and easily divisible covey 
 of seven tramps a woman, two boys and a girl, 
 and three men; there was, too, an ass, but he 
 was a gentleman and had belonged to a great 
 house that lay near our path one summer night. 
 We were the most dirty of mankind. No tramp 
 ever joined us, except one, who was an artist. 
 He painted us and said that we might have 
 belonged to the middle ages. " Yes," said one, 
 demanding ale, " we have known better times." 
 We thought ourselves honest tramps; for we 
 never robbed a poor man, not even the artist, 
 who had art in his head instead of brains. He 
 could not paint dirt, he confessed, and he 
 unscrupulously invented and painted a sash on 
 the girl of eight, so that she cried when she felt 
 in vain for the pleasant crimson thing. 
 
 This girl was our only burden; she was like a 
 doll some child has defaced, and had a thin, 
 
 103
 
 104 SEVEN TRAMPS 
 
 coughing laugh that went into my heart like a 
 needle at tunes. 
 
 The two boys were in place of a dog. They 
 could clean a copse of pheasants' eggs, or mind 
 the camp. The arm of one of them, " Snag," 
 would go through a letter box, a natural gift 
 which he never abused. They lived more 
 wildly than we, having come to us from a 
 London working family, as apprentices or 
 " halves." The elder, " Hag," was sometimes 
 called grandfather; when he had been drinking, 
 he looked older than anyone I have ever seen. 
 
 Of Nell, the woman, it is hard to say anything 
 except that she was a woman and could weep. 
 She bore children who died, and helped the ass 
 up hill. She " married " Tim when she was 
 seventeen, a gay dairy beauty from Devon; 
 but when she was twenty she was " that ugly 
 that to see her when she got up in the morning 
 was a curse." She was foolish when drunk, 
 mad when sober, and talked continually at the 
 top note of tragical expression. None was 
 more cruel to her child than she. Our cruelty, 
 which I confess was great, she rather encouraged. 
 I hear her laugh sometimes; it walks in the 
 winter evenings and is all that is left of her now
 
 SEVEN TRAMPS 105 
 
 that she is dead. But she alone was kind to 
 the girl, and should any other use endearments 
 towards the child she became a fury. She 
 practised kindness as a secret indulgence; I 
 have overheard her making the child shriek 
 with her desperate caress. I have said that she 
 was a woman, mainly because she re-arranged 
 her rags with coquettish assiduity; her face 
 was not that of a woman so much as of a type 
 that had been created by an artist in love with 
 mere despair. 
 
 Her husband, a brown, haystack man, had 
 an almost romantic interest in female beauty. 
 Chamber maids, barmaids, and sporting women, 
 he worshipped, and would consequently attend 
 at meets of hounds. The white skirts and well 
 polished boots of servants raised his speech 
 to rhapsody. Yet he cared for his wife and 
 beat her only during periods of very good or 
 very bad fortune. He could snare a bird or 
 rabbit exquisitely, and a certain pedantic hate 
 of careless work sometimes left us supperless. 
 Had he been clean I should have said there was 
 a polish in his ways. " Not a pigeon, your 
 honour; 'twas a handsome cock pheasant," was 
 his scrupulous interjection in court. I believe
 
 io6 SEVEN TRAMPS 
 
 he gloried in the name of tramp and could have 
 confounded a clever man by a favourable com- 
 parison of his profession with the rest. " A 
 quart of six on a wet night a strange, neat girl 
 in a long, long lane to knock your man down 
 to have a bonny child on your knee on Christmas 
 day " such was his ode to life. 
 
 " Partridge " could make the most superior 
 farmer or gamekeeper impotently ridiculous 
 by touching his cap and keeping within the 
 letter of respect. The finesse of insult and 
 abjection were his life-study. He was master 
 of all the arts of eloquence that are not in Cicero. 
 For he had been a waiter and was a linen- 
 draper's son. But I will not attempt to put 
 his eloquence in print lest I should prove him 
 to have been second-rate. According to our 
 standard he was the gentleman of us all. He 
 stood five immaterial feet high; grasped an oak 
 wand taller than himself; and wore his hair over 
 his face. I value his memory for the way he 
 had of cajoling the basest of men, all the while 
 looking like an early Czar. . . . He had the 
 brow of a great man, a singular thing. Of old 
 the brow made the man and the God. It was 
 his natural gonfanon the brow of Jupiter
 
 SEVEN TRAMPS 107 
 
 of Aphrodite of Plato of Augustus was for 
 centuries an altar where human thoughts and 
 dreams did reverence. The history of sculpture 
 is a te deum laudamus to the brow. Now the 
 soul has descended a step of the temple and 
 dwells in the eyes. On the stock exchange, in 
 parliament, in the army and in literature, 
 victory is won by the eyes. " Partridge " 
 had that calm and ample span of curving bone, 
 but his eyes slept, and he was a failure. Having 
 once caught a partridge, the accident was 
 considered apt to give him the name by which 
 he was known. 
 
 As for " Mud " (short for Muddle), he was a 
 poor human creature, and a tramp by accident. 
 He would never tell the facts of his early life, 
 though his way and conversation made them a 
 subject for secure surmise. He had left his own 
 class and become a labourer. His health failing, 
 he had taken to the road with no certain aim. 
 After spending his money unadventurously he 
 lay dying when we passed near, and Nell lifted 
 him on to the ass and made him one of us. He 
 recovered, but always seemed to be dying; his 
 voice was a long sigh; yet was he the happiest 
 of us all. I have heard him utter sour words,
 
 io8 SEVEN TRAMPS 
 
 only against " the rich," " the world," and 
 " men," who were the mainstay of his incurable 
 pessimism of thought. His behaviour with men 
 and women belied the theory of this gentle 
 optimist in practice. Should any decisive 
 political or social movement stir the world, he 
 would not fail to point out its anti-human 
 tendency, its trifling probable influence upon the 
 sum of things. But the man the politician 
 or agitator at the helm even if he happened 
 to be well-fed, attracted his sympathy at once: 
 he would insist on the man's character as a man, 
 and on the way in which every man's actions 
 when extended out of the reach of his sight will 
 vary from their original cast. I believe he was 
 an idealist. He spent whole days in searching 
 for straight hazels in the copses and returned with 
 a bundle like Jupiter's quiverful of lightning. 
 " I tried to get them perfectly straight," he 
 explained. He seemed in truth to have in his 
 mind a long shelf of platonic ideas, dusty, 
 rusted, moth-eaten by sorrow and the ills of the 
 body. To these he referred all he saw in real 
 life. His ideas were castles, Dulcineas, Micomi- 
 conas; and since he rarely met anything better 
 than a Maritornes, his dull sight or perhaps
 
 SEVEN TRAMPS 109 
 
 his charity raised up the hands of these 
 mortal, rotten things to his cobwebs and his 
 gods, associating them. He would single out 
 some poor house or inn, some unlucky girl's 
 face, and transfer to them the glowing sentiments 
 which he had once reserved for his inner, ideal 
 vision of these things. He saw a miracle where 
 there was in truth but a second-rate dawn. 
 He felt an enchantment when everybody else 
 felt cold. He thought that the ways of a tramp 
 sorted better with the history of mankind than 
 any other. Responsibilities and duties he had, 
 but should he perish none would suffer. The 
 responsibilities were co-terminous with the length 
 of life which chance had planned for him. 
 Nomadic, unencumbered by property, relatives, 
 or social status, he was a creature in keeping 
 with an unaccountable world. No storm, no 
 social disaster, no philosopher or tyrant con- 
 cerned him save as a spectacle. The stars in 
 their courses were not more serene, more lonely 
 than he. Such a friend of night was he, the 
 stars were nearer to him than man. " If only 
 they would warm my hands !" he cried. When 
 the north wind blew, it killed someone's sheep, 
 broke windows, laid the corn; his ears tingled,
 
 no SEVEN TRAMPS 
 
 he grew silent, and I believe that he rode upon 
 the wind as happily as a witch or a brown leaf. 
 A noble sound, the sight of the sea, or the 
 perfume of a lane " I eat and drink them," 
 said he. Thus he seemed to me the half, as it 
 were the female half, of the greatest poet that 
 ever did not live. By difficult ways and strange, 
 such a man is made a poet. He was once 
 narrating the wonders of an evening in a wood; 
 he paused and paused as I became expectant, 
 and at last said with some shame that the very 
 trees were " like a church full of men when the 
 organ begins ; and I was no better than any one of 
 them." In outward appearance he was, like 
 the other six, a brown tramp. 
 
 (1902.)
 
 DEATH BY MISADVENTURE
 
 IX 
 DEATH BY MISADVENTURE 
 
 As the train slowed down between the long 
 grey platforms all the men in the carriage 
 dropped their newspapers to their knees and 
 raised their eyes, without any appearance of 
 thought or emotion, in short with a railway- 
 carriage expression, to scan the name of the 
 station, the small groups by the bookstall, the 
 two or three intending passengers just coming 
 through the doorway of the booking-office. 
 On steeply rising ground above the station 
 flocks of white linen flapped wildly and brightly 
 in the back gardens of rows of new cottages. 
 Above these, white clouds went nobly through 
 the sky like ships ages ago on some long quest 
 of love or of war. 
 
 When the train was still, there was not one 
 shout. No one called out the name of the town 
 or the place for which we were bound. No 
 one cried " Chocolate," " Paper " or " Violets " 
 
 113 8
 
 H4 DEATH BY MISADVENTURE 
 
 though the vendors of these things were at hand 
 a moment ago. 
 
 A stout man in black coat and black gaiters 
 opened the door of our carriage and got in 
 puffing, yet saying as he closed the door: 
 
 11 Man killed. Carelessness. Nobody's fault 
 except his own. Teach platelayers a lesson. 
 Smoker and drinker, I'll be bound." 
 
 People began to hurry past our windows to- 
 wards the engine. Those in the carriage who 
 sat nearest the windows put their newspaper 
 on their seats and in turn put out their heads 
 to look. " You can't see anything," said one. 
 
 The train backed slowly a few yards. " He 
 was under the engine," said the observer. Some 
 of us were dimly pleased to have had an experi- 
 ence which not everyone has every day; the 
 stout man was disturbed by the delay; others 
 were uncomfortable during this movement, as 
 knowing that they were in part the cause of 
 the accident and that their weight was now 
 helping to crush out the blood and life of a man ; 
 one wanted to jump out, but while no one was 
 willing to leave the carriage, all were bent on 
 taking their turn at the window. 
 
 A policeman walked smartly by, and one of the
 
 DEATH BY MISADVENTURE 115 
 
 seated passengers remarked that " on the Con- 
 tinent" they arrest the engine-driver as a matter 
 of course. Two porters followed with a stretcher. 
 
 " Now they are picking him up, but I can't 
 see for the crowd," said the one who now had 
 his head out. " Here he comes. ... No. 
 He must be dead. . . . There is some more." 
 The train backed yet a little again. ' They 
 have got all of him." 
 
 In the little gardens the housewives and 
 daughters were already watching. Old and 
 young, buxom and slender, fresh and worn, in 
 their white aprons and print dresses, leaned over 
 the low fences, one stood upon the fence and 
 stared. The scent of death had not taken a 
 minute to reach those women whose sons and 
 husbands and fathers and lovers include some 
 it is not known which of them who are destined 
 to die bloodily and unexpectedly. There was 
 not a sound except the hissing of the steam, 
 until the guilty train began to grunt forward 
 again and take us past a little group of uni- 
 formed men with ashen faces surrounding the 
 brown humpy cloth which covered the remains 
 of the chosen one. 
 
 (1911.)
 
 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY
 
 x 
 
 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 
 
 PERSONA: 
 Some Men; Many Books; Nature. 
 
 THE moon rose amid the comfortable, melan- 
 choly noise of rain in darkness, and it was near 
 the time I set apart for dreams, dreams in a 
 kind of mental euthanasia, which is as superior to 
 mere sleep as dining is to eating. If I remember 
 well, it was on such a chair as roused Evelyn's 
 wonder in Florence (before these dreams were 
 invented), " a conceited chair to sleep in with 
 the legs stretched out, with hooks, and pieces 
 of wood to draw out longer or shorter." In 
 the absolutely windless air there was a nervous 
 palpitation or fretting, more awful than ghosts. 
 The fascinations of pure nothingness gradually 
 overcame the fascinations of Robert Burton. 
 I laid aside the book. . . . Presently the 
 London midnight silence fell upon me with all 
 its spells. It was that silence in which how 
 
 119
 
 120 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 
 
 many hearts were breaking ! how many souls 
 passing beyond the veil ! and yet so quietly that 
 the clear note of a chapel bell arose above it all- 
 nay ! the ticking of my watch was louder far. 
 A puissant spell it was; by some means more 
 subtle and direct than thought, I realized my 
 own intense loneliness. Then the very rain 
 falling patiently had a magic hold upon me, 
 and I stopped my ears as if a Siren sang. . . . 
 The light went out. I had no will to trim it. 
 The darkness was suffocating. 
 
 So I rose and left the house, and the white 
 moon was genial by comparison. In Chapman's 
 phrase, the moon had comforted the night. My 
 path went towards the lodgings of a friend 
 who would, I knew, be awake among his 
 books. 
 
 That setting moon, seen through nocturnal 
 scud, was turbulently besieged by clouds, black 
 as pitch, plunging over the horizon. With its 
 ray, or with an illumination neither of star nor 
 sun that chances oftentimes by night, the 
 western sky was pale. Everything was quiet. 
 Sight of all save the moon and the wayside elm 
 grove was unaccountably soon lost. Now and 
 again the white derelict crescent foundered, and
 
 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 121 
 
 was gone among interminable precipices of 
 midnight; and no star shone; or, if one, it was 
 infinitely distant, and seemed no more than the 
 reflection of a star, as it vanished and reap- 
 peared in one of the lugubrious gulfs, among the 
 white floes of cloud at the zenith. A wind had 
 arisen; but, victorious over the storm, the dark- 
 ness made a strange peace. Everything was 
 quiet, though mighty trees were thrown down 
 and buildings moaned. 
 
 The clarity of the air and the insistent outlines 
 of things were remarkable, and as perfect as at 
 noon, though the clarity was different, different 
 in what it visited and what forgot. The elm 
 trees were aggrandised in majesty and ap- 
 parently in bulk, with all the mysterious aloof- 
 ness of trees. The great boles were massive 
 and near. Their delicate anatomy seemed to 
 reach into the sky. 
 
 " Sprites of the blest and every saint y-dead " 
 were abroad in that pure night, and by the time 
 
 I reached the study of my spirits were 
 
 recovered. 
 
 We talked of many things. We agreed (we 
 had need to) in cursing print for destroying in 
 part the individuality or value of handwriting
 
 122 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 
 
 by separating it from authorship; and - 
 became autobiographical. He began : 
 
 ' If I am no better than other men, at least 
 I am different/ said Rousseau. It was an 
 unnecessary preliminary. The least of us can 
 say as much. The poet fears that Nature has 
 broken the mould that shaped his mistress; but 
 the earth is littered with chrysalides: no two 
 are alike. Hence the folly of accusing anyone 
 of plagiarism. For when I have spoken a word 
 no matter who has spoken it before it be- 
 comes mine. The accent, the context, the 
 particular intention, shapes it anew. The 
 meanest can say this; and who knows so 
 thoroughly his neighbour's soul as to say truth- 
 fully, ' I understand thee ' ? Thus we are all 
 authors, all original. This man buys a book, 
 and it becomes his in every sense, when he has 
 read it, though it bears another's name on the 
 back. When I see my friend's bookshelves I 
 say to myself, ' These are - -'s or - -'s works. 
 The author has done nothing more than put on 
 paper what this man has put into his heart 
 and on his shelves: the more cunning he !' To 
 open a book is ever to go on a voyage of dis- 
 covery. The anchor is up, and you are adrift
 
 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 123 
 
 on the unknown. This is virgin soil you touch. 
 With your discoveries you deal as discoverers 
 have done before; you take possession of it in 
 the name of the king yourself; your possession 
 is confirmed by a bull from the Pope yourself; 
 you are Columbus and Ferdinand and Alexander 
 in one. You shall know a man by his books. 
 I was away from home once, and a lady I had 
 never seen occupied my room. She was taken 
 suddenly ill, and left an unfinished letter on 
 the desk which I read for good reasons. Judge 
 whether it was kind or unkind ! but the letter 
 contained a portrait of me, drawn in a page of 
 subtle sentences, from my books. . . . When 
 I see a fat russet folio make itself a home between 
 the gaudy fashions of to-day ragged and grim 
 
 In bearded majesty 
 
 I know how I shall greet the man that is owner 
 thereof. Moving often among books, I came 
 to see a likeness in them to men. Again, some 
 
 men resemble books. There is , enormous, 
 
 well-groomed, unsociable, inarticulate, but with 
 an expression that says ' Look within ' ; he is like 
 an old dictionary ' in one volume quarto, old 
 calf, neat.' To what, save Cato's f Agriculture '
 
 124 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 
 
 bound in pigskin, shall I compare - , blunt, 
 autochthonous, truthful to a fault ? Again - , 
 fantastic, always in mourning for a relative 
 whose ink runs dry when she should have put 
 him in her will but ever youthful and going 
 ' merrily to heaven ' ; he must go on the same 
 shelf as yonder duodecimo ' Elia ' in gloomy 
 levant. What gentle, tender damsels what 
 old maids, lachrymose and devout what red- 
 faced, stout-hearted housewives, are there 
 among books ! and great fellows with yard-long 
 oaths (writ with a sword), and melancholic 
 lovers. Like men, too, no doubt and not 
 unlike women the exterior often seems (only, 
 perhaps, because we know not how to judge) 
 to misrepresent the soul of the book, as must 
 happen more often as the binding becomes 
 wholly separate from the writing of a book ; and 
 as people come to look merely at the ' object ' 
 of a writer, and soon regard the book not as a 
 medium, but as an obstacle, between mind and 
 mind; ' c'est pourquoi,' says Rabelais half in 
 sadness, ' fault ouvrir le livre et soigneusement 
 peser ce que y est deduict.' 
 
 " The other day I saw a new whim in a library 
 that vastly pleased me. There were folios that
 
 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 125 
 
 might serve to prop a temple dear, old 
 malodorous, rain- worn ' Compleat Anglers ' ; 
 Spectators with breakfast stains; Lambs so 
 marked that only a line here and there was left, 
 and that found, after all, to be the best ! . . . 
 a nation of books, in perfect order, simplex, 
 munditiis. Such order, however, I had not 
 seen elsewhere. It was a concatenation in 
 which no book (had it lived and could say 
 Good-morrow !) would have disdained its neigh- 
 bour. Every book, indeed, seemed just to have 
 ceased talking to its neighbours when I came in. 
 Many of the books I knew. That Shelley, for 
 example, reminded me of days among the 
 caracoling birch trees of Wimbledon, and the 
 light grey lances of the hazels interwoven by 
 the wind. . . . Every shelf was a chord of 
 meditation. That ' Can a Thelyn,' again, un- 
 locked a Welsh vignette, seen from Bryn Gwyn 
 Bach (The Little White Hill) a moonlit estuary 
 like a shield of silver, emblazoned with sable 
 tree shadows. By reminiscential evocation, that 
 ' Temple ' seemed to bear the very scent of 
 Eton lime blossoms, an amber fervid evening, 
 and all the nuptial splendour of June. In that 
 way every shelf told in orderly fashion more
 
 126 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 
 
 truth than most autobiographies so called. But 
 one shelf contained a harlequinade of books. 
 I tried to reconcile them, but failed. The 
 editions spoke of no choice. For the most part 
 they were gay and cheap, and (strange for such 
 a good uncle of books) dog's-eared. The 
 ' Compleat Angler/ books of travel, King Arthur, 
 Scott this was strange harmony ! So I took 
 one down. The flyleaf bore my friend's name 
 in an unknown handwriting, very childish, 
 precise, yet awkward, with the early date of 
 18 . 
 
 " ' These, then/ I said, 'must be the books of 
 your childhood ?' 
 
 " ' You are right/ said he. ' Have you not 
 seen how a gardener lovingly permits some 
 ragged brier to wander free, because it was the 
 step-parent to those exquisite roses that cling 
 in December, like handfuls of early snow, to the 
 grey walls ? Well, for something like his reasons 
 I preserve these books. That Defoe, for 
 example, is father to every romance upon my 
 shelves ; that ' Compleat Angler ' to every book 
 of poems and philosophy to Shelley, Words- 
 worth, Dyer, to Coleridge, Ruskin, Lamb. I 
 could not live without them. It is true that
 
 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 127 
 
 I live, as Leonardo wrote, backwards; but even 
 were it otherwise, I should be like one bereft 
 of memory or her keys, without them, and life 
 would be more histrionic than ever. These are, 
 indeed, but ' bundles of cypress/ or locks of hair 
 from a life that is dead; but they save me from 
 the pain of feeling that death itself is dead. . . . 
 And as you have said, they seemed to be rather 
 my books than Scott's or Walton's; I should 
 resent their ill-treatment as if they were. For 
 between the lines are inscribed in subtle, in- 
 visible characters my earliest half thoughts ; the 
 backgrounds of the pictures are peopled by my 
 earliest dreams. The book is mine by inter- 
 change of thought. 
 
 He piped, I sung; and when he sung I piped. 
 
 " A book to me was a piece of enchantment 
 more fascinating than the monotonous miracles 
 of Grimm. It was quite possible for a dainty 
 sapient fairy as, indeed, I read somewhere 
 to emerge from the leaves of a reverend 
 book. The fairy was there, and marshalled hosts 
 of fantastic creatures, as real as the people 
 I saw around, and yet :
 
 128 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 
 
 As they please 
 
 They limn themselves, and colour, shape or size, 
 Assume as likes them best, condense or rare. 
 
 "I had few preferences at first; one book was 
 as wonderful as another; and I could have ill- 
 endured that holocaust suggested by Sir Thomas 
 Browne 'to condemn to the fire those swarms 
 and millions of rhapsodies begotten only to 
 distract and allure the weaker judgment of 
 scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery 
 of typographers !' The mystery of typo- 
 graphers ! there lay half the spell. The child 
 had only to read a few words and the charm 
 worked 
 
 And from these create he can 
 Forms more real than living man, 
 Nurselings of immortality. 
 
 The words might be never so poor, the print 
 never so faulty, the binding base it was ethereal 
 substance; I cared only for the characters. For 
 the fancy worked so finely, and took wing at the 
 barest suggestion. No matter how strange and 
 exotic the matter, I was at once at home. Was 
 it the polar world, the tropic forest and its 
 myriad rainbow wings, the sea ? I was not 
 surprised, I had been there long ago; all was
 
 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 129 
 
 as it should be; yes ! I had been there in my 
 dreams and anticipated the boldest explorers. 
 I might have safely shaken my head after 
 reading Sir Samuel Baker's Travels; ' but I 
 knew it all ' in fancy outstripping his painful 
 marches, like the swallows that fly overhead. 
 I should have greeted Man Friday with no more 
 surprise than I should my brother. I filled every 
 inch with living forms. No street was empty. 
 No sky was bare. I was never alone. Often, 
 indeed, I exchanged masks with the fictitious 
 characters. I lived their life: therefore, I find 
 myself now confusing the adventures of hero 
 and heroine with my own, and read of the deeds 
 of Amadis or Amaryllis as mine. Was it I, or 
 was it Lancelot, that carried Arthur's offer of 
 marriage to Guinevere ? . . . I was a tyran- 
 nous master of all puppets that books put into 
 my sway. If the author did not describe them 
 and probably also if he did I put them into 
 garments to suit my sense of fitness. I chose 
 their background: I knew, for example, the 
 sandy shore of a pond on a certain common, 
 where years ago, if you sought carefully, you 
 would find the cannibal footsteps that startled 
 Crusoe. I knew the very gap in the coppice of 
 
 9
 
 130 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 
 
 oaks through which Tristram appeared in his 
 armour, all dew-bespattered, as if with actual 
 fire. Even now as I pass I see Palomides, 
 pensively treading the forest walks, so tall that 
 his charger follows without drooping head. To 
 me the author was a magician as Virgil and 
 Horace were to the dark ages. I would have 
 credited sortes Maloriana. The watchful lamp 
 shining for miles over the sleepy land; the quill 
 (a rhabdomancer's wand) ; the library overhead 
 and around ; the white paper on which the mind 
 was casting lines of shadow; and he writing 
 alone in the hushed midnight with ' earthquake 
 and eclipse ' for ink, were no less impressive 
 than the crucible and enginery of alchemists, 
 elaborating puissant alcahests in olden times. 
 Every letter was a symbol whose import was 
 not fully interpret able even by sages. More lay 
 hid in printed pages than met the eye; and 
 authors found in me the perfect reader, who 
 read all ' en la perfectissime partie.' There was 
 vanity in my affection, too; so that I cared 
 for old quaint authors partly because I could 
 correct such ' errors ' of spelling as I found 
 in the ' Compleat Angler/ I was what quaint 
 John Earle calls ' the surgeon of old authors/
 
 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 131 
 
 who ' healed the wounds of dust and ignorance/ 
 Later on, when I made fishing an excuse for 
 many hours afield, Izaak had his revenge, for 
 I tried all the strange baits with which he 
 deluded himself, if not the fish; but at first 
 I was chiefly pleased by the visions of a sweet 
 life passed in the meadows and in rooms where 
 the scent of the meadows lingered. The scene 
 was indeed new, though I expected all as it 
 came. But in a life of disappointments, the 
 advent of the thing expected is really the finest 
 of surprises. So in many books I enjoyed the 
 matter even though my knowledge of it first 
 came through books. No wonders of tropic 
 sound and colour startled me. Great rivers 
 ' big as any sea ' ; infinite wilds of palm and 
 sand; olive and chestnut of Italy were no stranger 
 than the hollyhocks under the apple-trees in the 
 old Welsh garden. I suppose it was the 
 splendour of the dream world, 
 
 A prophet oft (and oft a historic), 
 
 that prepared my mind for the splendour of the 
 earth. When I crossed the Arctic deserts 
 (bolstered in an armchair by crimson cushions) 
 I felt as little surprised as the most battered
 
 132 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 
 
 mariner; I had seen ice-fields vaster. The Alps 
 were fine, but I knew finer hills than that. 
 Como was a dull puddle compared with what 
 I knew. 
 
 " And how deliciously books became incor- 
 porate with places ! with times of the year ! 
 with matins or vespers ! ' The Ancient Mari- 
 ner ' rests for ever in the setting (as of sombre 
 monastic illuminations) of the first midnight I 
 ever looked out upon a still midnight in black 
 and white in January with a few big stars 
 that withered one at a time occasionally under 
 invisible cloud. The house was nervously ex- 
 pecting a visitor. I was left to myself, forgotten. 
 The room was half lighted; many of the great 
 book-shelves were in gloom; outside, the world 
 of trees and roof ridges piercing the sky; be- 
 yond, the ghost of a great mountain, like a 
 cloud; and all dark to the grey edges of the sea, 
 on to where in the moonlight ' far off their 
 coming shone ' rollers fell with a roar every 
 now and then. And the mystery of the every- 
 day world seen thus, as I sat in the peopled 
 solitude of the library, has never quite departed : 
 
 There nothing common was or mean 
 Upon that memorable scene.
 
 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 133 
 
 At last I fell asleep and the great book almost 
 covered me as I lay. This copy of the ' Opium- 
 Eat er/ too, summons my thoughts ' to the 
 court of affection,' Sir Philip Sidney calls it, 
 ' held by that racking steward Remembrance.' 
 My fancy wandered at the passage ending: 
 ' '. . . In the very aspect and the sepulchral still- 
 ness of the motionless day, as solemnly it wore 
 away through morning, noontide, afternoon, 
 to meet the darkness that was hurrying to 
 swallow up its beauty, I had a fantastic feeling 
 as though I read the very language of resigna- 
 tion when bending before some irresistible 
 agency. And at intervals I heard in how 
 different a key the raving, the everlasting 
 uproar of that dreadful metropolis, which at 
 every step was coming nearer, and beckoning 
 (as it seemed) to myself for purposes as dim, 
 for issues as incalculable, as the path of cannon- 
 shots fired at random and in darkness.' Forgive 
 me another trifle from the rue and lavender of 
 memory. 
 
 "It was a Sunday evening; I was left 
 quite alone, though rather unwell feverish and 
 excited, seeing visions. ' Everybody was gone !' 
 as I cried whimpering in the folds of a curtain,
 
 134 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 
 
 where long after dark a visit or found me out. . . . 
 It was ' Robinson Crusoe ' that produced the 
 exaggeration of irritability and implacable lone- 
 liness that were so stamped upon my mind. 
 Outside, swans floated shadowless on a moonlit 
 pool. Pale summer lightning winked low down 
 at intervals. With what mystery (remembering 
 afresh and with pleasure ancient matters) the 
 whole scene now returns myself strangely 
 isolated and belittled, as England seemed in the 
 great globe of the library. 
 
 " I had almost forgotten this Hazlitt remind- 
 ing me of a great lover of books ; Corydon of - 
 College, Oxford, with whom I dined as a small 
 boy. Corydon was a notable youth, his chest- 
 nut hair gadding about a delicate face, his 
 voice like the after sound of a bell, his intellect 
 developed in the lines of a Grecian rhapsodist, 
 but with a certain lack of articulation and 
 wildness of habit through which his written 
 work savoured of wine more than the lamp. 
 We and Corydon made a party of six. His 
 gestures, particularly a gracious way of bowing 
 his head as he smiled, had a magic that quickly 
 made our number seem inevitable and right 
 (so that one more or less would have spoilt
 
 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 135 
 
 the whole), much as the outstretched arms of 
 Mary in ' Our Lady of the Rocks/ harmonize 
 and unify the group. Very soon everyone 
 was talking eagerly in turn. A choicely laden 
 board, of which I probably alone took notice, 
 was cleared, before anyone was aware. Cory- 
 don only was now speaking, I remember, when 
 hardly to our surprise, the servant carried in a 
 strange, but noble course; my portion was a copy 
 of ' Elia,' and I think there was nothing but 
 Lamb upon the dish; however it was, we had 
 each a memorable book I put mine in my 
 pocket and the conversation ran happily into 
 every nook that rivers from Helicon visit. 
 Again and again the old servant came in with a 
 great smile, bearing now a dish of folios, and 
 now, as the lights in the candlesticks began to 
 struggle ere they went out, a plate of dainty 
 duodecimos. Some of them, as I hear, were 
 from the inmost very kernel of Corydon library, 
 priceless gifts. Then indeed it was fine to see 
 the connoisseurs tasting and quickly devouring 
 the new, ancient volumes that he provided. 
 Wine was also on the table. One said that 
 Shelley and champagne were excellent; and a 
 compote of port, Montaigne and pomegranates,
 
 136 A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY 
 
 incomparable. One old bookworm, whom I 
 may not omit, drew away into a delicious chair, 
 with a long sought volume, like a dog with a 
 bone, and would not be distracted. Even at 
 the mid strokes of midnight we lingered and 
 retiring to our rooms, when I kept feverishly 
 awake on my father's knee, talked until the 
 earliest swallow twittered, and we felt that last 
 night we had truly ' dined.' ' 
 
 (1900.)
 
 FELIX
 
 XI 
 FELIX 
 
 FELIX was greatly to be envied, as everyone 
 said. He had just inherited from his father a 
 beautiful realm, so governed by old ministers, 
 that the late king seemed to be living still, 
 with all his virtue and wisdom. A noble, 
 happy people dwelt in the fields and cities of 
 that land. The fairest women of the world 
 were to be found in its country-sides. Every 
 year the harvest was large and golden; the 
 granaries ever being emptied, always full. 
 Inter-swaying masts crowded the harbours; 
 the seas around were aflower with white sails. 
 Everywhere, the joyful sound of toil. The 
 memory of a line of mighty kings made safe 
 the uttermost capes even, though a ship had 
 to be at least one New Year's Day afloat in 
 putting a girdle round about the coast. 
 
 At nineteen Felix was king. As much in 
 beauty as in rank he surpassed all of his race. 
 
 139
 
 140 FELIX 
 
 The slenderness and length, the plump tenuity, 
 of his limbs were those of a statue; seeing him 
 stripped, for the bath or for games, his friends 
 praised him beyond all women. For hours he 
 used to lie upon purple cushions, and gaze upon 
 himself until he laughed, out of joy and pride. 
 His chestnut-coloured hair with paler lights as 
 in the grain of a chestnut 
 
 Cast in a thousand snares and rings 
 For Love's fingers and his wings, 
 
 falling lightly and massily upon his shoulders, 
 lay there in changeful curls. His flesh was like 
 a white rose where habitually clothed, like a red 
 rose upon his cheeks. A certain posture of the 
 head when thrown slightly back, pommettes 
 smiling, and lips not parted but raised at the 
 corners seen in profile, was irresistible to man 
 and woman. His breath came from his mouth 
 as odour from the calyx of a flower. There was 
 no flaw in his voice, which never failed to be 
 sweet, to what depths of passion soever it fell, 
 and tender, like that of one who is dying for 
 love. So modulated his laughter, you could 
 almost make words of it. 
 From boyhood he had made verses, and
 
 FELIX 141 
 
 would spend hours in moulding the sense and 
 motion of a line. It was his delight, to choose 
 a plain, common word, and fitting it into a 
 line, to evoke its divinity. He used to say 
 that every word was divine. The same youth, 
 Lucian, was his best friend, and favourite poet. 
 Many a time and oft, they sat up so late, their 
 cheeks were blanched a little, and they saw the 
 labourers pacing heavily to work; then retired, 
 to sleep until music awakened them. After a 
 cold swim, a suspicion of fruit and milk, and a 
 race in the quiet air, they returned, to ivory 
 tables upheld by rods of glass, with gold feet, 
 and thereon the choicest fruits, from vine, tree, 
 and bush; and milk, and red or amber wine, 
 and spring water in goblets, whose crystal 
 stained the pure liquid. Then recumbent, they 
 hearkened to sweet, passionless boys' voices, 
 or courted silence until they were giddy at the 
 precipices to which it brought them ; or laughed 
 as they saw in mirrors, through minute gaps, 
 left by the cooling vanes that revolved outside, 
 the ugly labourers fall swooning or dead, from 
 heat, from slipping masonry, or from the fangs 
 of beasts they were taming for the pleasure of 
 Felix. Sometimes they sipped dark, poisonous-
 
 142 FELIX 
 
 looking draughts, auburn or purple coloured, 
 from the cups of lilies. Next, the singing boys 
 danced, scattering the delicatest perfumes from 
 all their limbs. In the suspended mirrors a 
 painter's line and colour might be seen develop- 
 ing on canvases that were far off. . . . 
 
 They talked of magic, alchemy, astrology, 
 divinations, and music; and mixed with their 
 talk of draughts that should give immortality 
 were thoughts of a subtle fatal draught by 
 which they should die " exquisite deaths." 
 In that very hour they trembled at a great, 
 distant cry, a cry that stabbed them with its 
 appeal. So they bade the musicians play again. 
 But the cry penetrated like a blood spot on 
 some choice embroidery. All day long, sage 
 chemists were busy in subterranean vaults, 
 experimenting upon animals of every kind. 
 These creatures were forced to take draughts, 
 and the effect, the convulsions, the length of 
 their agony, the cries, the attitudes when dead, 
 were all carefully written down. Something 
 that should kill rapidly and leave the body as if 
 asleep was sought, or cause a slow dissolution 
 of the senses one by one, painlessly. Anything 
 that might soil the sweet flesh or strain the
 
 FELIX 143 
 
 features, or in any way fret the last repose, was 
 at once dismissed. 
 
 Felix himself looked far from death. That 
 mettled freshness of his brain was physical, as 
 much as the pride of his limbs. On death he 
 doted merely as a " romantic " contrast with 
 the life which the serenity of his health seemed 
 ready to prolong for ever. 
 
 At his command a chosen maiden, pale and 
 drooping from the vales, or impetuous and red 
 from the mountains, came in, on certain days, 
 ushered by grimacing blacks, as the evening star 
 appears among the first dragon clouds that 
 night sends forth against it. Felix bowed low 
 to her several times. He complimented her 
 ivory features, the lustre of her eyes, her dewy 
 voice, the fragrance of her garlands. Then he 
 guided her from place to place about the ornate, 
 lonely chambers, and let her taste their marvels. 
 But the end was always the same. " Thou art 
 very beautiful," he said to her. " Less beautiful 
 than thou, my Felix !" said Lucian, the poet. 
 So the prince went with her to the palace gate- 
 way, loaded her with presents and praise, and 
 bade her farewell. " Less beautiful than thou !" 
 echoed Felix.
 
 144 FELIX 
 
 It was at such a time, if at all, that a shadow 
 fell upon his cheeks a moment, saddening the 
 roses there. But very soon he would be as 
 blithe as ever, with his verses " On Tears," 
 though he never shed one; " On the Pains of 
 Separation," though he loved truly none save 
 himself; on " The Skull," though he knew not 
 what it was like. The verses were carved by 
 his slaves in marble, straight from his lips, 
 after long thought. 
 
 Should melody cloy, Felix and Lucian fled 
 again to the tables. This time the flesh of 
 daintiest birds, of strange beasts, of deep sea 
 and river fish, covered the board. A servant 
 entered, who carefully blindfolded them with 
 silken bandages, perfumed so as to overpower 
 the savour of the flesh. For they never saw 
 the meats, nor smelt them. Sometimes they 
 spent whole days blindfolded so, or moved 
 about only at night, and thus the other senses 
 were perhaps more profoundly stirred. How 
 much more impressive, they remarked, was the 
 autumn wind in birch-trees at night, if the eyes 
 were closed ! "It were sweet," one day said 
 Felix, " to be blind, for I think the joys of touch 
 and smell would be pro founder, that way."
 
 FELIX 145 
 
 After the warm, scented bath, whose sunlit 
 waves wrought wonders on the marble, it was 
 pleasant to sip hot draughts, followed by 
 sherbet, out in the tempered splendour under- 
 neath the cedars. In the distance a Circean 
 lady would be seen, swaying over her music. 
 She could have made them swine. She made 
 them gods. And when, in a blue room, half 
 darkened, with wide windows opening upon a 
 starry river and sombre trees, they sat and still 
 hearkened, they felt as dead leaves or as clouds 
 in the hands of that strong harmony that rose 
 and fell, tender, minatory, turbulent, hypnotic, 
 vast. . . . 
 
 If it rained at sunset, half an hour later, 
 in a crystal, beamless light, they looked long 
 at the daffodils in virgin grass under black elms. 
 Or in a delicate going down of the sun, when a 
 green colour as on the sunless half of a peach 
 overspreads the north in bands, they read the 
 poets. Or long after nightfall they watched the 
 west, where there tarried a pane of white sky, 
 that resisted the showers and perforated the 
 clouds, though it gave no light. Or they sat in a 
 seaside palace and marvelled at the galloping 
 breakers and the great ships foundering. Then 
 
 10
 
 146 FELIX 
 
 to bed, through echoing corridors, full of the 
 scent of flowers, and of spices cinnamon from 
 India and the Pacific, cassia from China, cam- 
 phor from Japan, cloves and anise, and faded 
 petals of pomegranate. For these a thousand 
 men and a thousand women laboured with tears, 
 upon the sea or in terrific foreign forests, or in 
 sweet home valleys among the dew on briers 
 and grasses. A thousand more strained for 
 an early grave, at work on the palaces that 
 rose beside the most crystal rivers, in the re- 
 motest and loveliest woods, by the bluest seas. 
 Thousands that knew not Felix brought ex- 
 quisite feathers from Africa and the Pacific, 
 rubies and lapis lazuli from Tartary, oranges 
 and citrons and lemons from Spain and Persia, 
 dates from Mesopotamia, flowers from Japan. 
 
 Felix derided the far-heard curses of these 
 people. 
 
 Had he not a myriad troops, accomplished 
 in dazzling armour, sagely captained, and all of 
 a bodily vigour and grace approved by himself ? 
 
 He knew no fear. 
 
 The people's murmurs added but a remote 
 thundering bass to the great music which all 
 his days he loved and listened to.
 
 FELIX 147 
 
 However, this bass by degrees became a 
 discordant part. It rose above the delicate 
 trebles and languid tenors; and he would fain 
 have retreated unto where the harmony would 
 again have been perfect. But presently they 
 saw sharp flames devouring the sky at the 
 horizon, and clear even at sunset. Some of his 
 warriors arrived with ugly purple stains across 
 their armour: one of them never came back. . . . 
 The season was autumn, fast changing to 
 winter. In the wood the leaves twitched. 
 Winds blew in gusty circles and on the water 
 left traces like a serpent's. Now and then a 
 leaf dropped, and trundled along the ground, 
 hopping, quaking, never at rest. There was a 
 gloom about the forest that inspired a vague 
 foreboding. Thunder or the echoes of it more 
 than once skirted the bounds of hearing. 
 
 One day a snake, only half torpid, was found 
 in a fruit-basket meant for the palace. 
 
 Servants at very distant stations began to 
 disobey. A spice galleon was decoyed to a reef, 
 and everything on board was sunk with the 
 wreck. 
 
 A slave, in the palace itself, killed another, 
 who had undertaken a peculiarly humiliating
 
 148 FELIX 
 
 task at the command of Lucian. He was re- 
 warded in the dungeon by the fate of the 
 beasts. But the experiment was frustrate. 
 
 Something was amiss with Lucian even. It 
 was autumn with him, though his locks were 
 glossy black and his feet rapid in the dance. 
 He wrote, forsooth, 
 
 Lo ! in the heart of summer buds the worm, 
 
 and though he laughed, a sigh followed. 
 
 Felix was a little anxious, thinking of the 
 experiments. Once, indeed, he descended to 
 watch the poisoning of a favourite panther that 
 was ageing. "I would die an exquisite death," 
 he said. Yet the experiments were very barren 
 so far. 
 
 A little after this, news came that the people 
 had created chiefs of their own and were clearly 
 marching toward the palace. There was no 
 doubt of it. The villagers on their line of march 
 made no resistance. A skirmishing company 
 of royal soldiers fell into their hands and was 
 destroyed, to a man. 
 
 By Lucian's order, the music in the palace 
 was loudened, and now continued day and night. 
 
 At last, in the mirror, the king himself saw
 
 FELIX 149 
 
 a buckler flash. There were swords in the wood 
 near by. So the royal army surrounded the 
 palace with their lines; and the siege began. 
 
 Within, a picture absorbed every effort of 
 the artists, and Felix watched it coming as it 
 were nearer and nearer each day or as if the 
 painters did but uncover the details artfully 
 one by one. A set of verses, by himself and 
 Lucian, was nearly finished ; the slave had begun 
 to carve them on marble. Felix and Lucian 
 had sunshine all day in the purple winter 
 chamber : and as the siege developed, the season 
 sank into a wonderful golden calm, pleasanter 
 than all those remembered by king or poet. 
 Shrieks of pain, explosions and the following 
 crash and fall, the shouts of rage or exhortation, 
 were the same when they reached the secluded 
 chamber; they became a mere ghostly tapping 
 at window or wall. Roused by a louder tap, 
 the king opened the door and looking out saw 
 nothing. " Ah me !" he said, " who was that ?" 
 With white face, a slave answered: " The rebels 
 give way." 
 
 A great defensive bastion had fallen, and one 
 of the rebel chieftains killed, with difficulty, at 
 the palace-door.
 
 150 FELIX 
 
 The music rose louder still, though Lucian 
 foresaw that in spite of all things the sterner 
 music of the conflict must triumph. 
 
 Not long afterwards, the chemist sent a slave 
 to announce that his wildest hopes had been 
 fulfilled. "Ralph," he explained, "lies dead 
 like a statue." The corpse was brought up, 
 and it was a noble sight. Ralph was a famous 
 rebel captured lately: his white limbs were 
 crossed and somewhat bent, without a stain; 
 his back was upright, and his head, though 
 leaning sideways lather, so that his hair lay all 
 on one shoulder, seemed to sleep, very peace- 
 fully; his eyes were half opened, of a sparkling 
 grey. " My good chemist henceforth shall 
 rest until death, in luxury," exclaimed the 
 delighted king. 
 
 In the night, however, the body vanished, 
 and next day led once more the rebel onset. 
 
 The good weather continued, and the delicate 
 poplar near the prince's window had not let 
 fall one leaf, though every one was of gold. 
 So " Come," said the king one day, in his 
 naturally even mood, " come, let us ascend to 
 the armoury of my forefathers, the kings. 
 This fellow will show us the way, which I forget ;
 
 FELIX 151 
 
 for since my father carried me there and put old 
 Stephen's helmet upon my head it covered 
 my shoulders and I screamed in the darkness 
 I have never returned. At that time, he said 
 he would wish me to die with that on my head 
 the dear, brave madman ! he died at forty, 
 and his black hair was always grizzled. Come, 
 dearest Lucian." 
 
 The slave walked first, with ponderous keys; 
 Felix came after, bandying a tune; the poet 
 far behind, at a pensive pace, with bended neck. 
 At the door they paused all together, and silent. 
 The key would not be turned in the lock. 
 
 " Burst the door," said the king. 
 
 They burst the door, but all saving Felix 
 drew back. The armoury was pitch-black, hard 
 wings beat their eyes, soft wings lifted the dust 
 of years. A bat squeaked. Owls hooted. A 
 starling, perched somewhere, called out: " This 
 is the day \" 
 
 " I taught her that myself," said Felix. 
 
 ' The day of victory !" continued the starling. 
 
 Presently bat and owl were gone, and the 
 slave went forward and let in the day by a 
 narrow window, then took the coverings one 
 by one from the armour, that began to gleam
 
 152 FELIX 
 
 in a lengthening line, as when lamps are lit 
 beside a great river at nightfall. 
 
 There was tawny blood on one sword, which 
 the king sat down to clean, while the slave 
 told the legend of this and that piece of armour. 
 To Felix it was a somewhat wearisome roll; 
 and he scarce looked up from the sword, until 
 the slave said sonorously: " These greaves your 
 father wore when he broke the pirate legions. 
 This helmet was cloven on your grandfather's 
 head at the same battle. The breastplates 
 
 here " Felix heard no more, except the 
 
 slave's admiration "What a blow! how vast 
 a shoulder !" 
 
 Outside, there was a shout of victory, to which 
 the starling answered, in delight: " This is the 
 day of victory. ' ' Doors were being forced, below. 
 
 The sword flashed as Felix laid it down. 
 " Save yourself !" he cried to the slave: " But 
 no, stay: close the door: bar it with your 
 arm: and do you, Lucian, Lucian, my dearest 
 friend, bring me my father's armour. Come, 
 my poet ! we shall die an exquisite death. 
 You are grandly dressed as you are: that azure 
 garment well becomes you. But bring me the 
 armour quickly !"
 
 FELIX 153 
 
 He put it on, carefully, slowly, like a brides- 
 maid dressing before a mirror. 
 
 " Now the crown. . . . That is well," said 
 Felix. 
 
 Lucian praised him, and he seated himself upon 
 the throne, the sword across his knees unscab- 
 barded. One delicate hand was free, a mailed 
 gauntlet upon the other. His flushed cheek and 
 winged eyebrows were just visible. In that 
 attire, he looked like Cupid, masked as Mars, 
 and far unlike his father, the tall, straight hero 
 with a black beard, grim and like a grave- 
 digger's shovel. 
 
 By this time the enemy was at the door. They 
 demanded a surrender, and hearing no reply ? 
 burst open the door. The slave lay writhing. 
 The invaders could see nothing, and drew back 
 in a sort of fear. Then first one, afterwards 
 another, and finally a host, crept in and lined 
 the wall opposite to Felix and Lucian. Both 
 were silent; though now and then the king 
 whispered a jest. Their calmness was torturing 
 the rebels, who stirred neither hand nor foot, 
 when their captain bade an archer take his 
 stand over against the throne and shoot. The 
 string had ceased to quiver. . . .
 
 154 FELIX 
 
 Felix turned to his friend, saying, " Would 
 that Clement were here, with his canvas ! I 
 have a mind to ask the rebel's leave." He 
 laughed. " But now," added he, " take the 
 chisel and finish this verse." 
 
 " Your rhyme is at fault, my Felix. I swear 
 your rhyme is at fault," said Lucian. 
 
 Here the rebels gave a cry. The archer had 
 fired, striking the king upon the temple, so 
 that his head fell upon his shoulder. Again 
 he fired; the arrow tore its way through the 
 poet's silken raiment into his side, and caused 
 a groan. The rebels had now come forward. 
 
 " Now, by Apollo !" murmured Lucian, " you 
 must not rhyme Romeo with row; you must not, 
 Felix." 
 
 (1899.)
 
 BRONWEN
 
 XII 
 BRONWEN: A WELSH IDYLL 
 
 IT was cool dawn on the summits of the hills. 
 The daisy was unawakened yet in the glen, and 
 a light mist slept across the fields beneath. Low 
 down in the rosy drift of sunrise hung the new 
 moon, on tip-toe, as it seemed, for flight ; a brief 
 time only it hung; and at length it dropped as 
 the light added, on the purple peals of comfrey, 
 bell to bell. Now, too, lark met nightingale 
 for the last time of the year in song. For the 
 season was the midst of June. It was the time 
 of the white wild rose and the purple cranesbill, 
 and the streaked convolvulus braiding dry 
 paths. 
 
 And already Bronwen is in the grass beside 
 her home. Lonely and content, she leans with 
 a whisper of singing over her sweet toil, looking 
 up seldom, and then only to number the stars 
 that die one by one in the hot sky, or to answer 
 the honied tones of the swallows passing her
 
 158 BRONWEN 
 
 head. Or she plucks a blossom for her brow. 
 So, all the time, she is happy, thinking sweet 
 thoughts in her loneliness, and in the shade of 
 her own wild hair. For about her neck the 
 weight of yellow hair dropped and spread, and 
 upon the flowers, as she bent shoulder-deep 
 in the June grass. Like marble is her form 
 as she stoops still at her toil : like a cloud when- 
 ever she turns in her place. Her skin is like 
 a lily; but the summer has found out the rosy 
 life of her veins; and Bronwen is like the 
 anemone of March. She is beautiful. But she 
 is alone. Perhaps the light poplar-tree beside 
 the mere longs to throw its shadow in the 
 crystal; with her was it even so. And the 
 agrimony wands have taken fire in the green 
 grass. 
 
 So Bronwen sings and toils; and now, as she 
 sits, a white star broadens and grows bright 
 towards her out of the east, like Mercury 
 kindling through a purple that deepens on to 
 moonrise. She has seen this star and looks. 
 What is it ? Sometimes it burns, and some- 
 times it fades from sight ; yet it is too constant 
 for a sea wave catching the sunbeam at slowly 
 returning intervals. A star of heaven it can
 
 BRONWEN 159 
 
 scarce be. Nor certainly is it a swell of the 
 crystal air of summer flashing as oftentimes it 
 will like a shifted shield. How like it is to the 
 shimmer of battle steel ! But then it moves 
 slowly and alone and steadily; and for a time 
 there is peace between the Round Table and the 
 world. A shield, nevertheless, it is, coming 
 to her out of the silver distance of dawn. 
 
 Looking wistfully and placidly toward the 
 shield, like a child staring at vacancy, Bronwen 
 pauses but a moment ; then gathers up the web 
 and instruments of her toil into her grasp; and 
 so vanishes through the purple gloom of the 
 ivy at her porch. Nor does she stay at the wide 
 opened door, though the shield flash to her from 
 the foot of the hill. 
 
 Knight and steed and shield are crossing the 
 grass beside the home. 
 
 A bough from the fresh wood is in his hand, 
 drooping across the saddle. His lips murmur 
 with song momentarily, but mostly are still. 
 And he comes out of the fastnesses of dawn clad 
 in a liquid splendour as if bathed in that pure 
 light which made silver of the raindrops along 
 the moss of the wall. Eager to taste the rich 
 morning air, he has doffed his helmet, thus dis-
 
 160 BRONWEN 
 
 closing his face. Mark the placidity with which 
 dawn has moulded it, and the keen lines drawn 
 by the desire of all the features to drink to the 
 uttermost what the hour gives. Save behind, 
 where it will escape mercurially from the clasped 
 helm, his gold hair is close. Black, however, is 
 the hue of his brows, and arched in tranquil 
 purity. At first glimpse, everything shows 
 immense capacity for delight; at the next, a 
 tyrannous self-mastery, a strenuous content 
 with disappointment, which would be sad but 
 at such an hour. But his face ripples and shifts 
 with expression in the manner of pools where 
 gusts chase the lines of waves with changing 
 shade and light. By the fashion of it, he has 
 listened to many sounds, bitter and sweet. 
 Sights without number, too, he has seen, many 
 a sunrising and sunsetting. 
 
 Now he halts with a happy sigh like one 
 baiting at a well-known door. 
 
 So he stands beside Bronwen's home ; he gazes, 
 and for him the flowers are shining from the 
 garden, for him the dark ivy leaf turns to silver 
 as it winks in its own massed glooms. Thus he 
 waits. Waits ? But he knows not that he waits, 
 nor why he unlinks his steel and stops his horse.
 
 BRONWEN 161 
 
 Meantime, like one who goes on an errand 
 long before appointed, Bronwen has stepped to 
 her bower and laid by her toil. Quietly and 
 without haste, carefully as if she robed herself 
 for bridal, she has put off her antique silk in 
 exchange for a festival raiment of white, drawing 
 it from the spicy darkness with the joy of a 
 village maiden on her rare holiday. For one 
 minute only she stays proudly in her loneliness, 
 without glass or mirror. Then she sweeps to 
 the gate, to meet a guest that might have been 
 accustomed and well known. She is there. 
 And how her arms rise in unconscious welcome 
 as she notes the smile meeting her own at their 
 first sight ! "A fair journey, Sir Knight !" 
 cries Bronwen, " and may our country be kind 
 to you." He laughs, and in reply, "Good 
 day, lovely maiden!" cries he, "and may men 
 be kind to you, as Heaven is kind. Wish you 
 happy, I cannot ; for I see you full of the summer 
 and the fair weather and the dawn and this 
 sweet place, happy thus beyond the might of my 
 wish." Joyously she answers him. "It is fair, 
 indeed, on my hillside this month, but lonely. 
 Many days I see naught that moves. The 
 knights are in the wars beyond Gwynedd.
 
 i62 BRONWEN 
 
 How, then, has a hoof from Camelot reached me 
 and stayed even a moment? On our festival 
 day, too, finding me thus alone, the festival at 
 the quieting of the nightingale in the hazels 
 beside the brown Gwili the beautiful Gwili !" 
 Here she follows the swift's flight as it reels to 
 the Gwili river in the south. "I am indeed 
 from Camelot, and in peace, happily. On a 
 blithe errand, too, I come: to carry a missive 
 of betrothal between a lord of the white south 
 shore and a princess of this land. I shall have 
 toil to find her; I have seen none for leagues. 
 Lovely she must be, if you are one of her 
 maidens." So speaks Sir Agravaine. " Come ! 
 you will never find her. Let me have the 
 missive. I promise, I will guard it with care 
 from messenger so welcome as yourself. For 
 you would never find her. The land, as you say, 
 is lonely. Besides, for to-day, you shall be my 
 guest: it is our wont: never would June be kind 
 to us if we forgot her festival, which, being 
 alone, I was like to do." He answers quickly, 
 " On such an errand, you must needs be a sure 
 messenger. And, as to your asking, Lady ! 
 I am glad to stay on my march. When others 
 are thus arranging their pleasures through us,
 
 BRONWEN 163 
 
 surely their ministers may rejoice together. 
 And may I see you at Camelot for the bridal !" 
 She looks again to the Gwili. " As to that last, 
 who knows what our Princess will grant ? Be- 
 sides, I love my home: there I was born, there 
 I ply my sweet toil : my mother, too, sleeps there 
 in the sun even now; and with her my baby 
 sister, who cries now hark ! Let me go. I 
 will haste. Now also I will hide the scrolls 
 safely; for a day they shall stay closed; we will 
 not risk chance under such heavens. See ! 
 the lark is weary with over- sweet. He does but 
 flit singing from tuft to tuft: yet I think the 
 voice sweeter thus than in soaring. Let me 
 guard, also, that fresh bough in your hand, lest 
 the sun looks on withered green before it is 
 midsummer." So Sir Agravaine gives her the 
 bough. " You shall take the larch sprig," he 
 cries, " but at my gift. Keep it. I wait." 
 
 She runs: and when she is lost to his eyes, 
 he rapidly lightens himself of the great steel 
 and stalls his horse on the dry brown beneath 
 the beech. A while he stays beside the crystal 
 beginnings of a stream, his soul swayed and 
 mazed by the motion of the waters, when, 
 swift as a great liking, she returns to him. The
 
 164 BRONWEN 
 
 green larch twig is at her girdle. Let the June 
 sun be tender to it ! 
 
 Together they seek the alders of Gwili, the 
 hazels of its raised banks, and the windy gorse 
 beyond. Talking sweetly, and sweetly making 
 silence, they go. At one time she points him 
 the gathered children plucking flowers in the 
 field. " How they hasten, leaving half the host 
 of flowers, in their gay strife ! They cross the 
 field, passing and repassing one another, and 
 again overtaken, carelessly and hastily, like 
 a flock of starlings." And one of the sweet 
 small voices from the south sings hidden in the 
 green leaves overhanging Gwili. They reach 
 the moneywort gold of the banks, and her first 
 care is to bury his armour in flowers. " There ! 
 You shall not go from me until they fade." 
 So she cries. " I have had a care; be sure; 
 the alders of the Gwili are close, and the sun 
 will be tender to these, ay ! and to me." White 
 wild rose, therefore, heavy purple crane's-bill, 
 gold and green gorse picked easily by fine 
 fingers, yellow flag, honeysuckle, and all the 
 heaped sweets of summer, dim the great steel 
 which blood only has dimmed before this. 
 
 They try together the forgotten path of the
 
 BRONWEN 165 
 
 ancients, or pass where only the children of 
 future time will again make a way. Now they 
 stop to look on the sparkling fords, or where 
 girls dip pitchers in the fast water; and the 
 water shines as it drops from the mouth of the 
 pitcher; and the girls laugh as they wait. Now 
 they see a lonely child in robes of white sailing 
 flat reeds for boats in the reaches of calm. 
 And far off, at intervals so long that each is 
 forgotten before one succeeds, great seas fall 
 heavily on the shore. Masts cross and interlace 
 on the shining sea. At times they see a white 
 cloud scale the immense sky, hover thinned 
 almost to nothing by the sun, and dip to hills 
 and sea, leaving the sky bare for hours. Once, 
 as she threads a thicket of fern, she cries aloud 
 with a cry of pain. He is with her. " Is it 
 a snake ?" She has crushed a flower. And so 
 they pass: and the dew is dry almost in the 
 coolest hollows of the wood. 
 
 Sweetly they talk of the sweets of silence, 
 they brood sweetly in silence over the sweets 
 of past speech. They are happy. She shows 
 him the lonely footprints of her childish walks, 
 or fears for her baby sister, or laughs at to-day. 
 As they pause together on the green steeps, he
 
 166 BRONWEN 
 
 names to her knight after knight travelling 
 the pass with song. Here, men are charging 
 beneath them, but as in dream: they see only 
 the flash of armour. Here white maidens 
 dance, but as in dream. Masts, clouds, hosts, 
 all move like stars. 
 
 Dusk mellows into evening, and the lily over 
 the steel smells once more of the earth from 
 which it came, pleasant in death. The moon 
 rounds the forest slowly from tree to tree. 
 The lonely night passes, while the home of 
 Bronwen paves the rising white footsteps of 
 the moon. And the knight rides quietly into 
 the blue west: and Bronwen is lost awhile to 
 the south wind: and the bee swoons in the 
 meadowsweet beside the brook Gwili. But, 
 as they tell, Bronwen the Princess, on Mid- 
 summer Day, married Sir Agravaine at Camelot, 
 before the larch spray had lost scent in her 
 girdle. 
 
 (1903.)
 
 MIKE
 
 XIII 
 MIKE 
 
 FOR two or three years it had begun to be 
 assumed and the probability even mentioned 
 aloud that Mike would some day die. Not 
 that there was any evidence that would bear 
 sifting by one who was intimate with him. 
 He was strong and hearty, and never had any 
 wretchedness except when I threw a stick at 
 him in anger. Looking back, we could say 
 that his life's thread was spun " round and full 
 out of their softest and their whitest wool " 
 by the Fates. He could still walk as far as ever. 
 If I travelled twenty or thirty miles over the 
 Downs he would walk and run two or three 
 times as far. For he was nearly always hunting 
 at full speed, visible or audible half a mile away, 
 or he was examining every inch of the path, 
 seeking an excuse to be off; and if that was not 
 to be found he would look up to see whether 
 I was thinking or otherwise inattentive to him, 
 
 169
 
 170 MIKE 
 
 and then, his thievish thighs endued suddenly 
 with all the wolf, he was off at his best speed 
 which no shout could stop. In the rapture 
 of the hunt his bark became a song, but as a 
 rule it was hard and explosive. 
 
 Seven years before, when he became mine for 
 five shillings he was a stray I used in my 
 ignorance to beat him for hunting. Never 
 having thought about it, I took it for granted 
 that the habit was bad because dangerous and 
 forbidden, and also a piece of wantonness and 
 defiant self-indulgence. I did not cure him; 
 I did not even make him dislike me; and there- 
 fore I began to laugh at the folly of lashing 
 myself into a fury at the vice of disobedience 
 under the pretext of improving the morals of 
 an excellent dog. He forgave me so readily 
 that it took some time for me to forgive myself. 
 And so for seven years not a day passed but 
 he hunted, and many were his whole nights 
 spent in the woods. It was he who discovered 
 for me that a partridge is eatable in May. He 
 had no evil conscience by nature or from me, 
 and so was often superficially unwise in choosing 
 his bird ; he would make his leap into the hedge 
 where the partridge lay when the landlord was
 
 MIKE 171 
 
 only a few seconds distant. But I learnt that 
 there is a providence watching over such simple 
 wants. However much the pheasant screamed 
 as it flew a few yards and then dropped with 
 fear to run certain other yards before the dog, 
 no harm came except to the bird; as the glade 
 rang with screams of alarm and yelps of delight 
 I tried to look as if Mike was not mine; the 
 keeper was beneficently detained or deaf. 
 
 He was a magically fortunate dog, and it was 
 fore-ordained, that however boldly he might be 
 leaping through a wood, he was always to alight 
 with his four feet clear of traps. Wire nooses 
 he often ran into, and many a hare and rabbit 
 he must have saved by first entering a snare 
 intended for them and then freeing himself by 
 force or subtlety, returning sometimes with the 
 wire and its peg still fastened on his leg as an 
 inconvenient decoration. As he hunted in his 
 first year so he did when the judicial minds, 
 who knew nothing of him except what they 
 believe to be common to all dogs, began to aver 
 that he was getting old, with a kind of smile 
 that one so mighty and so much vaunted should 
 be giving way before them. They pointed out 
 that he was silvering everywhere, that his head
 
 172 MIKE 
 
 was almost pure white, that he lay dozing long 
 after the house was astir; but I could see no 
 real reason for believing that this change might 
 not go on, as the phrase is, " for ever," and then 
 when he was all silver he might have another 
 life as a silver dog. So with his teeth. It was 
 evident that the fangs which held on to a stick 
 while humorists swung him giddily round and 
 round were now very much shorter (I concede 
 this), but still they held on; he ate as well as 
 ever; he drew blood from the enemy as before. 
 If a stump was as useful as the polished and 
 pointed fang, why should not the bare gum of 
 the hero be equal to the stump ? 
 
 Gradually I got into the frame of mind which 
 was no longer violently hostile to the proposition 
 that one day Mike would die. But this did 
 not affect my faith; it was an intellectual 
 position with no influence on life. 
 
 He was no ordinary dog. That, the sceptics 
 tell me, goes without saying: they argue that 
 because all people regard their favourite dogs 
 as extraordinary, therefore all, including 
 Mike, are ordinary and will turn white, lose 
 their teeth and die. In the main he was an 
 Irish terrier. But his hair was longer than
 
 MIKE 173 
 
 it "should have been/' and paler and softer. 
 His face was more pointed than was right; his 
 ears, darker than the rest of him and silky (so 
 that a child once fell asleep sucking one), usually 
 hung down. His hindquarters approached those 
 of a collie. Also his tail when he trotted along 
 curled over his back and made children laugh 
 aloud; but when he was thinking about the 
 chase it hung in a horizontal bow; when stealing 
 away or in full cry it was held slightly lower 
 and no longer bent, and it flowed finely into the 
 curves of his great speed. He was eloquent; 
 his yawn alone, or the twitching of his eyebrows 
 as he lay with head between extended paws, 
 expressed a score of shades of emotion. He 
 was very excitable, very tender-hearted, very 
 pugnacious. He was a rough, swift dog, 
 yellowish-brown above and almost white be- 
 neath, who was here, there and everywhere at 
 once, importunate yet usually welcome and 
 always forgiven. He would attack any dog of 
 equal or greater size, and test the magnanimity 
 of the mastiff and the churlishness of curs running 
 behind carriers' carts. But if a little dog 
 attacked him, he lifted up his head, fixed his 
 eyes on me, and looked neither to left nor right,
 
 174 MIKE 
 
 but muttered: " You are neither dog nor cat; 
 go away." As for a mouse, he thought it a 
 kind of beetle, and was curious but kind. He 
 would, however, kill wasps, baring his teeth to 
 avoid the sting and snapping many times before 
 the dividing blow. 
 
 I should like to be able to say that he had no 
 tricks. The most splendid array of tricks only 
 gives colour to the vulgar notion that a dog is, 
 as it were, a human being manque, a kind of 
 pitiable amusing creature unfortunately denied 
 the gifts of Smith and Brown. But this loud- 
 voiced dog of violent ways, who leaped through 
 a window unscathed, this fighter, this hunter, 
 had been taught one trick before I had him: 
 he would beg when commanded, but unwillingly 
 and badly. The postman, cobbler, and parish 
 clerk, a little wizened philosopher, would never 
 let him beg for the lump of sugar which he 
 carried as a daily gift: "I would never beg 
 myself," he said, " and I don't like to see a 
 noble animal beg neither." As for faults, I think 
 he had them all, the faults, that is, which human 
 beings call such in dogs abruptness, invariable 
 vivacity, the appetites . . .; they merged 
 charmingly into his other qualities; isolated,
 
 MIKE 175 
 
 they looked like faults, but good and bad together 
 swelled the energy, courage, and affection of 
 his character. Wondering wherein lay my 
 superiority to Mike, I found that it was in my 
 power to send him out of the room as it lay in 
 Alfonso's power to shackle Tasso. 
 
 Once in his life he became, for one hour, a lap 
 dog. A child had just been born in the house. 
 In the evening all was very still and silent; 
 strangers flitted up and down stairs and along 
 passages; Mike's mistress was not to be seen 
 as she lay motionless in bed, but from her side 
 came cries which he had never before heard 
 therefore he leapt up into my lap and would not 
 move for an hour. Seldom did he do a thing 
 which harmonized so well with those soft brown 
 eyes in a face that was all eyebrows. 
 
 So long as he was out of doors he was inex- 
 haustible, and he took every opportunity of 
 trying his strength by hunting, racing to and 
 fro, and asking even strangers (with head on 
 one side, eyes expectant, forelegs stamping as 
 he alternately retreated slowly and leapt for- 
 ward) to throw him a stick or stone. Perhaps 
 it was in this expectant attitude that he looked 
 his best, every limb braced, his steps firm and
 
 176 MIKE 
 
 delicate as he tripped backward obliquely, his 
 ears erect, his mouth open, and white teeth, 
 flame-like tongue and brown eyes gleaming to- 
 gether as he repeated his commanding bark. 
 ' What a nice piece of lean bacon it would 
 make/' said a child, looking at his tongue. He 
 fought with every inch of his body, and his 
 movements were no more to be followed than 
 those of a wheel. His fury and alacrity never 
 ceased until intervention ended the fight, how- 
 ever long. And as profound as his energy was 
 his repose. After a fight or a night in the wood 
 he showed no fatigue until he was indoors. 
 Then he fell flat on his side and slept with 
 quiverings and snuffling yaps; and even then 
 anyone's movement of preparation for going out 
 discovered a new fount of activity, and he was 
 up and had burst out of the door before the latch 
 was released. 
 
 When he was at least ten years old and looked 
 very white slipping through the beeches and 
 troubling the loves of the foxes under a full moon 
 I confess that even I used sometimes to say that 
 I hoped he would die in full career with a charge 
 of shot in his brain. He never began to grow 
 stout, and was never pampered ; it could not be
 
 MIKE 177 
 
 thought of that he should come down to lying 
 in the sun and taking quiet walks of a mile or 
 so, and living on pity and memory and medicine, 
 though memory, I think, he would have been 
 spared. Better far that, if he had to make an 
 end, one of the keepers (a good shot) should 
 help him to it in the middle of his hunting. 
 That would have been a fortunate death, as 
 deaths go. 
 
 But he did not die. He forced himself through 
 a dense hedge of blackthorn, came out combed 
 and fine, stood hesitating among the first 
 celandines, and was off after a hare. He never 
 came back. If he could not bolt out of this world 
 into a better, where there is hunting for ever, 
 yet with his head on one side, ears cocked, eyes 
 bright, he would not be refused entrance by any 
 quadruped janitor of Paradise. But then we 
 do not know what stage the belief in a future 
 life has reached among dogs, and whatever 
 the dogmas, heresies, scientific doctrines (that 
 the fleshly dog manifestly does not survive, 
 etc.), they doubtless have no power to influence 
 the law and lawgiver, which are unknown to 
 those it most nearly concerns. I only hope 
 Mike is or, rather, I wish he were somehow, 
 
 12
 
 178 MIKE 
 
 still hunting. There seemed no reason why 
 he should not go on for ever. 
 
 I tried to believe that each one of the Cleeve 
 houses had a canary, or a book, or piece of 
 furniture, or an Irish terrier, to slip a kind of a 
 soul in among its walls that is in the case of 
 houses not occupied by persons whom Chris- 
 tianity or Maeterlinck has gifted with souls. 
 
 (1911.)
 
 SAVED TIME
 
 XIV 
 SAVED TIME 
 
 I DREAMED that I walked far along a solitary 
 and unknown road. Nobody met or passed me, 
 and though I looked through many gateways 
 on either hand I saw nobody at work in the vast 
 plains. Nor had I passed or seen anywhere in 
 the land one house, one coil of hearth smoke, 
 or even one ruin, when suddenly at the roadside 
 between two trunks of oak, and under their 
 foliage two small windows gleamed faintly in the 
 shadow. The glass was dark with cobwebs, 
 dead spiders, and dead flies caught in the webs of 
 the dead spiders ; nothing could be seen through 
 it but vague forms, yet darker than the darkness 
 within, such as are to be seen under water in a 
 momentary half calm. But there was a door 
 between the two windows, and I entered as if 
 I had been expected, though never had I seen 
 or heard before of a house in the heart of an 
 empty and boundless wilderness, but resembling 
 
 181
 
 182 SAVED TIME 
 
 a low second-hand furniture or marine store 
 in a decayed part of London. 
 
 The door would not open wider than just to 
 admit me sideways, so full was the room of its 
 shadowy wares. These were all objects for 
 holding things cupboards, chests, and nests 
 of drawers of all kinds, delicate cabinets, heavy 
 oak chests, boxes massive or flimsy and of 
 every material and workmanship, some no bigger 
 than children's money-boxes, iron safes, small 
 decorated caskets of ivory, metals, and precious 
 woods, bags and baskets, and resting in numbers 
 or solitary on the larger articles were trinkets 
 with lids, snuff-boxes, and the like. They were 
 clear and dark in a light of underground, the 
 rows and piles that I could see mysteriously 
 suggested one invisible infinity of others. As 
 I trod a haze of dust rained and whispered un- 
 ceasingly down upon them and from off them. 
 Through this haze, or out of it in some way, like 
 an animal out of its lair, appeared a small old 
 grey man with cobweb hair, whiskers, and 
 eyebrows, and blue eyes that flashed out of the 
 cobwebs and dust whenever they moved. His 
 large long grey hands wriggled and twitched 
 like two rats cleaning themselves. He was all
 
 SAVED TIME 183 
 
 head and hands, and shadowy grey clothing con- 
 nected him with the carpetless floor of rotten 
 planks on which he made no sound. The 
 dust fell upon him unnoticed and from time 
 to time dribbled from his hair and beard to the 
 ground. 
 
 " This," said I suddenly, " is a useful kind 
 of box. I should like to open it, if I may, to see 
 whether it would suit me. It is for papers that 
 I shall never look at again, but may serve to 
 light a fire or make a footnote for an historian 
 in my grandchildren's time. If you would brush 
 the dust off ..." 
 
 " Have you the key ?" he asked in a voice 
 that made my throat itch into a cough. Did 
 he think me a locksmith, or what ? I was 
 annoyed, but said questioningly, " No." 
 
 " Then I am afraid it cannot be yours." 
 
 " But of course not. I wish to buy it." 
 
 " It is not for sale." 
 
 " It is reserved then for one of the multitude 
 upon this highway ?" 
 
 " Well, yes. But I hardly expect the owner 
 to come for it now. It has been here some fifty 
 years." 
 
 " You can't sell it ?"
 
 184 SAVED TIME 
 
 " Oh, no ! I assure you it would be of no 
 use except to its owner. It is full." 
 
 I rapped it, thickening the haze of dust and 
 glancing at him to see the effect of the hollow 
 sound on his expression. It had not the effect 
 I expected, but he raised his eyes for a moment 
 and said: 
 
 " You hear ? It is quite full." 
 
 I smiled with a feeling in which amused ex- 
 pectation swamped my contempt for his deceit. 
 
 " You have made a mistake. Try one of the 
 others," he said patiently. 
 
 I cast about for something as suitable, and 
 having found an old oak tool-box of not too 
 heavy make, I pointed to it and asked if he 
 would open it. Again he replied simply: 
 
 " Have you the key ?" 
 
 " Naturally not." 
 
 " Most unnaturally not. But if you have not, 
 then the box cannot be opened. I am afraid, sir, 
 you have come under a pretence or a mistake. 
 This box, like all the other receptacles here is 
 owned by someone who alone has the power to 
 open it, if he wishes. They are stored here 
 because it is found that they are seldom wanted. 
 All are full. They contain nothing but time."
 
 SAVED TIME 185 
 
 " Time ?" 
 
 " Yes, time. It is abundant, you perceive. 
 All those boxes, bags, etc., contain time. Down 
 below " here he pointed to the decayed floor 
 " we have more, some of them as much as 
 fifty thousand years old." 
 
 " Then probably you have time to explain," 
 I said, hardly covering my amazement, and in 
 a moment awed by the reverberation of my 
 words in a cavern which the echoes proclaimed 
 as without end. The planks rippled under me. 
 My eyes wandered over the shop until they 
 stopped at a very small copper box enamelled 
 on the sides with a green pattern as delicate as 
 the grass- blade armour of a grasshopper; the 
 top had the usual grey fur of dust. 
 
 " What is here?" I asked. 
 
 ' That is the time saved by Lucy Goldfinch 
 and Robert Ploughman twenty years ago. 
 They were lovers, and used to walk every 
 Saturday afternoon along the main road for a 
 mile, and then by green lanes three miles more, 
 until they came to a farm where her uncle kept 
 twenty-five cows, and there the old man and his 
 wife gave them tea. After they had been 
 doing this for two years Robert learnt a path
 
 186 SAVED TIME 
 
 going straight from the main road to the farm, 
 thus saving a mile or nearly an hour, for they 
 kissed at the gates. By and by they gave up 
 kissing at the stiles and found that they could 
 walk the whole way in three-quarters of an hour. 
 Soon afterwards they were married. She died 
 long ago, but he probably has her key. Neither 
 of them has ever called here. This/' he con- 
 tinued, touching a plain deal box with iron 
 edges, " This is another box of his. After they 
 had been married a little while he thought there 
 was no good reason for walking three miles into 
 the town to his work, so they moved into the 
 town. The time thus saved was deposited in 
 this box and it also has not been called for." 
 
 Against Robert Ploughman's box was a 
 solemn chest of oak with panelled sides, and I 
 asked what it was. 
 
 " This may have to go back at any time," 
 said the manager. " Many times Mr. Beam 
 has been expected to send for it, though it is 
 only three or four years old. He was a squire, 
 whose day was full from morning till night 
 with country works and pleasures, mostly 
 the same thing. There was no doubt that 
 he did very much, what with planting, building,
 
 SAVED TIME 187 
 
 and so on, and that he liked doing it. Some- 
 times he used to turn his horse Fencer up an 
 old road and let him do as he liked, while he 
 himself sat on a gate and read Virgil, at least 
 such parts as he had succeeded in thoroughly 
 understanding at school. But at last the horse 
 died and before he had begun to remember 
 at the thought of the old road that Fencer really 
 was dead, a kind friend gave him a motor car. 
 He could not read Virgil in a motor car nor could 
 he go up the old road, so that it was clear that 
 he saved many hours a week. Those saved in 
 this way are sent down here, but as he has 
 not yet learned what to do with them or had 
 any need of them, here they remain." 
 
 He spoke with the same grey voice, scattering 
 dust from his beard as his lips moved. I 
 glanced here and there. The boxes were with- 
 out end and I could no longer see the windows 
 and door. The room was vast, and neither 
 walls nor ceiling could be seen through the 
 rows and piles. Most were of similar pattern. 
 They were square, made of yellowish brown tin, 
 or deal, or wicker, of about the size which holds 
 the property of a young general servant. In 
 the midst of some of these monotonous groups
 
 188 SAVED TIME 
 
 were chests or cabinets of more massive or 
 more delicate make. I pointed to one of the 
 groups and asked what they contained. He 
 thrust his finger through the dust on top of the 
 master box which was an iron safe. 
 
 " This/' he said, " holds the savings of a man 
 who invented machines for saving time. In a 
 few years he grew rich and bought the chief 
 house of his native parish. He employed four 
 gardeners. He did not live there, but occasion- 
 ally paid visits with business friends. The boxes 
 you see round about belong to his less fortunate 
 neighbours in the parish. They also have saved 
 time. For when he went out into the world 
 the women used to bake their own bread, make 
 most of the family clothes, and work in the fields 
 half the year. Now they do none of these 
 things, but they have saved time." 
 
 No ordinary shopman could have refrained 
 from pride in the neat regiment of boxes over 
 which he waved his hands at these words. 
 But he turned with me to a solitary cabinet at 
 the side of another group. It might have been 
 supposed to hold letters or a few hundred 
 cigars, and was scarcely large enough for my 
 purpose.
 
 SAVED TIME 189 
 
 " It contains," he said, " the savings of a 
 young journalist. He was an industrious youth, 
 earning a living without quite knowing why or 
 how. He bit off the ends of many penholders, 
 and often blackened his mouth with ink. He 
 had an old pewter inkstand, once the property 
 of a great-great-grandfather who was a pirate. 
 He used to say that out of this inkstand he got 
 more than ink, but his friends proved that this 
 was not so by emptying it and showing that it 
 was free from sediment. They advised him 
 to buy a fountain pen because it wasted no 
 time and it was impossible to bite the end of it. 
 This he did. He no longer bit his pen or paused 
 with the nib in his inkstand which was now 
 put on his mantelpiece and polished faithfully 
 once a week. He saved a quantity of time 
 as his friends told him ; but he did not notice it, 
 for he continued to be industrious and to earn 
 a living just as before. His friends, however, 
 were right, and that box is full of the hours 
 saved by him in ten years. It is not likely 
 that he will come in search of them. He is busy 
 saving more time. There are thousands of 
 similar cabinets, saved by fountain pens, type- 
 writers, cash registers, and the like. We have
 
 190 SAVED TIME 
 
 also some millions ready for holding the hours 
 to be saved by the navigation of the air." 
 
 He became verbose, enumerating tools, pro- 
 cesses and machines for time saving. In one 
 parish alone enough time was saved to extend 
 back to William the Conqueror ; in some cities 
 it went beyond the landing of Caesar to the 
 Stone Age and even, according to some cal- 
 culators, to the Eolithic Age if such an age 
 there ever was. But most of this time was now 
 in the underground chambers that gave so 
 solemn a resonance to my footsteps. To this 
 too mathematical monologue I was indifferent 
 and I strayed here and there until I seemed to 
 recognize a home-made chest of deal. I had 
 made several myself of the same pattern in 
 former years. The proportions and peculiar 
 workmanship marked this one surely as mine. 
 I felt in my pocket for my keys and with some 
 agitation chose one from the bunch. Yes ! . . . 
 No, not quite. Or ... I could not open it. 
 Yet I could have sworn. . . . Meantime the 
 manager had come up. 
 
 ' This is my chest," said I excitedly. 
 
 " Have you the key ?" he asked. 
 
 " This almost fits."
 
 SAVED TIME 191 
 
 " Then you must wait until you have found 
 the right one. People sometimes lose their 
 keys. This chest contains ..." 
 
 But what he said was so absurdly true that I 
 raised my hand to strike him. He fled. I 
 followed, thundering after him through the haze 
 of dust and the myriad chests and caskets. I 
 slid, I waded, I leapt, with incredible feats of 
 speed and agility after the silent grey man until he 
 went perpendicularly down. I plunged after him 
 into space, to end, I suppose, among the boxes 
 containing hours saved in the time of Lear; but 
 I awoke before I had touched ground in that 
 tremendous apartment. Forcing myself asleep 
 again I recovered the dream and heard much more 
 from the shopman which it would be tedious 
 or ridiculous to mention. 
 
 (1911.)
 
 THE MOON
 
 XV 
 THE MOON 
 
 As I could not sleep indoors, I thought I might 
 be able to out of doors. The host and hostess 
 were not yet in bed so I told them of my plan 
 and went out. The full moon was halfway up 
 the sky behind a sheet of gauze here and there 
 gathered into folds. It was as white as the 
 few clouds about it in the low sky. The earth 
 was a massive black island in space with lakes 
 of moonblaze on the plains and mists of moon- 
 lit chalk on the hills amid the blackness. My 
 road was a river of light that gave no light as 
 it wound into black and out to white. And 
 there, low down beneath me or high above, I 
 saw light on a portion of the trunk of one tree 
 only in the dark wood. Low down it was like 
 a fire burning without a sound or a motion, 
 and no figures of men around it. To express 
 the mystery of it a man would have to use 
 better fairies than were ever yet seen or, at
 
 196 THE MOON 
 
 any rate, depicted in book or poem. Those 
 fairies would have to express the gaiety in what 
 is solemn, a kind of comedy and even frivolity 
 of law. In Rossetti's "Match with the Moon " 
 there is too much of the man and too little of 
 the moon, but it is a kind of beginning of what 
 I want. I was a pure accident: there was no 
 one whatever to see, and the moonlight was 
 playing alone among the trees. If I had fancied 
 it was playing for me and that I imagined the 
 playing it would have been different. It would 
 not have been the same if it had amused me: 
 it was no more amusing than the majesty of the 
 moon. I suppose I was near to imagining a 
 deity with as little anthropomorphism as pos- 
 sible, certainly without personification. This was 
 the kind of play that makes the frost flowers 
 on dead sticks in the woods on winter nights. 
 It had a kind of divine prettiness, a holy tricki- 
 ness as of an angelic columbine. But the 
 solemnity had always the upper hand whether 
 the white fire was at a tree foot or nested just 
 under the ripples of the wood surface. 
 
 I buried myself in a haycock not far from 
 the trees and fell asleep thinking that the sky 
 was a pool strewn with swansdown along the
 
 THE MOON 197 
 
 currents. The wash of waves among the reeds 
 at the edges of the land was, I suppose, the 
 unceasing rhythmless sound of wind in the trees. 
 I awoke several times in the face of the same 
 white moon and immense woods, seething always 
 in the light continuous wind.
 
 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY 
 BILLING AND SONS, LIMITED, 
 GUILDFORD AND ESHBR
 
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