THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 Rest and Unrest
 
 UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME 
 
 The Roadmender. By MICHAEL FAIRLESS. 
 The Grey Brethren. By MICHAEL FAIRLESS. 
 
 A Modern Mystic's Way. (Dedicated to MICHAEL 
 FAIRLESS.) 
 
 Magic Casements. By ARTHUR S. CRIPPS. 
 
 Thoughts of Leonardo da Vinci, as recorded in his 
 Note-bpoks. Edited by EDWARD M'CuRDY. 
 
 The Sea-Charm of Venice. By STOPFORD A. 
 BROOKE. 
 
 Longings. By W. DK KAY.
 
 Rest and Unrest 
 
 By 
 
 Edward Thomas 
 
 London 
 
 Duckworth (L Co. 
 
 3 Henrietta Street. W.C. 
 1910
 
 So 
 
 G. I. MACALISTER 
 
 861135
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Contents 
 
 PAGR 
 
 THE FIRST OF SPRING . 1 
 
 SUNDAY AFTERNOON 27 
 
 MOTHERS AND SONS 49 
 
 AT A COTTAGE DOOR 93 
 
 MILKING . .128 
 
 THE FOUNTAIN 137 
 
 THE MAIDEN'S WOOD 145 
 
 SNOW AND SAND 164 
 
 THE QUEEN OF THE WASTE LANDS . . 179 
 
 "Milking" has appeared in " The Nation" and "At 
 a Cottage Door" in "The Nationalist" (Cardiff), and 
 they are reprinted by permission.
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 ALICE LACKING had reached an age when 
 already one man had confided in her his 
 admiration for one of her friends scarcely 
 younger than herself, one of those friends 
 who already called her a dear old thing. In 
 comment she allowed herself one of those 
 faintly twitching smiles which seems to most 
 people exquisitely tender, resigned, and sweet. 
 Though but thirty-one years old she was one of 
 the goddesses of twilight, pensive restful 
 dim ; at least, she gave others rest. She was 
 tall but stooped ; her hair was black and 
 noticeable only for its sharp edge against her 
 pale face, which was bony and a little askew ; 
 her dark eyes were ardent, and constantly 
 rebelling against the tired expression which 
 her white eyelids tended to give by slipping 
 down. She talked little, but most of all 
 A i
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 when younger women and much younger 
 men chanced to speak to her of poetry. A 
 young wife suddenly thoughtful, with one 
 child and a hunting husband who drank, 
 would come to her with Browning's " Parting 
 at Morning " ; and Alice would look into her 
 eyes . . . and explain ... in a comforting 
 way : the young wife would look back and 
 press her child to her breast and give a glance 
 of perhaps melancholy discontent that the 
 unmarried Alice should be so wise and then 
 lastly smile with faint self- approval, as much 
 as to say, " At least, she cannot know every- 
 thing " : and Alice would caress the child. 
 Perhaps she gave such women a faint thirst 
 for revenge, and their way was to remark, 
 during a whole ten years, how extraordinary 
 it was that no man had insisted on marrying 
 her ; it was taken for granted she would be 
 fastidious, reluctant. 
 
 For a year Alice was seriously ill. She 
 became so much paler and her smile so much 
 more painful in its sweetness that everyone 
 2
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 was sorry, albeit pitiful. She kept more to 
 her bees now and talked less than ever. 
 She walked alone as she had always liked to 
 do. Every week she repeated the same three 
 or four walks several times, often the same 
 twice a day, though laughing at herself and 
 vowing not to do so again. Wet or fine she 
 walked, apparently with indifference, except 
 that her eyes were brightest in rain ; both soft 
 and stinging rain made her sing. She looked 
 forward to the spring as to a great certain 
 good, enjoyed all its tortuous approaches and 
 withdrawings, yes, every one, so that the 
 healthy fortunate men and women who went 
 about bluffly complaining that it was too cold 
 or too warm or too windy or too wet had 
 throughout February and March at least one 
 consolation, that they could joke at the ex- 
 pense of Alice who professed to like each 
 separate day and its ways ; and after hearing 
 the opinion from one clever man they all 
 agreed that she must be a pessimist at heart, 
 or she could never be so different from them 
 
 3
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 all, plain fox-hunting or agricultural or do- 
 nothing people, optimists, of course. 
 
 Spring really seemed to have come on the 
 twenty-seventh of March as Alice stepped 
 out of the house and saw, though it was only 
 two hours after sunrise, the single yellow 
 crocuses pressed flat by the kisses of the sun, 
 and one broad cluster of the same flowers 
 that could not open so wide because their 
 petals touched glowing as brightly as if 
 there, at the foot of the oldest oak, the 
 marriage of sun and earth had been con- 
 summated and was now giving birth to a 
 child as glorious as the sun himself and also 
 lowly and meek as earth, the mother. Beyond 
 the edge of the garden was the hollow vale 
 of grey-green grass, and dark woods each 
 slightly lifted up on a gentle hillock, and 
 water shining between, and jackdaws playing 
 half a mile high, so far away that they were 
 no bigger than flies and sometimes invisible, 
 and yet their joy as clear as if it were crying 
 out in her brain. The vale was bounded by 
 4
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 naked, undulating hills and, above them, 
 sunny white haze and, above that, layers of 
 rounded white cloud melting below into the 
 haze and behind into the blue that was 
 almost white. 
 
 The grass was not yet green, the woods 
 were still dark, but that could not postpone 
 the spring. The river shone in the vale, the 
 white roads on the opposite hills ; but that 
 did not make the spring. She knew it was 
 spring by a grey cart horse that went by 
 straining at a load : three brass bells tinkled 
 and glittered between his ears and three 
 behind his neck ; his brow carried a brass 
 crescent and four others hung before his 
 chest ; and there were scarlet ribbons about 
 his head. There was spring in the smoke 
 lying in a hundred white vertebra? motionless 
 behind the rapid locomotive in the vale. 
 There was spring in the crowing of a cock, 
 in the silence that followed, in the crunch of 
 distant wheels on the drying road, in the 
 voice of the horse whinnying in his dark 
 
 5
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 stall, in the childish blue of the sky between 
 the pure white flocks at the zenith. Two 
 girls, Alice's neighbours, dark bold girls, with 
 deep voices, who raced about the countryside, 
 kept poultry and dressed with an untidiness 
 which all ridiculed and envied, rushed by; 
 one said, " We're going to play tennis this 
 afternoon, and let the lawn go hang," and the 
 other," Come and look at our March chickens" : 
 and in them also there was spring. But 
 without these things there was a something 
 in the landscape which made her forget that 
 it had looked haggard yesterday, haggard 
 and drenched, hardly consenting to live; a 
 something in the mist of love faintly envelop- 
 ing the vale, not to be heard, seen, touched, 
 tasted or even smelt, that told her it was 
 spring; and with this inner certainty she 
 descended the hill from her gate almost 
 without using eyes and ears. 
 
 The steep road was disused, dry as a 
 bone, but lumpy and hard, its unbroken 
 flints polished like iron. Alice went down 
 6
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 faster than she wished, and half way down 
 she paused, already hot and fatigued. The 
 weather which filled her with a desire to do 
 more than she had ever done before, left her 
 at the same time as weak as a child and on 
 the edge of inexplicable tears. She went in 
 under the unfenced trees at the side of the 
 road, and sat down upon a trunk that lay 
 mossy among a thousand wide open yellow 
 flowers of celandine. Through the trees she 
 could see the valley again, spread out at the 
 foot of the hill which the road descended. 
 She looked at it without seeing it. She half- 
 closed her eyes to keep out the dazzle of the 
 celandines. Her flesh, her brain, her nature, 
 was sopped in spring like bread in wine. 
 Her shoulders drooped forward, her neck 
 bent, her hands supported themselves on the 
 fallen tree, her legs changed their position 
 slowly as if arranging themselves for sleep. 
 She seemed to be dissolving in the languid 
 air, her mortal flesh quivering as it acknow- 
 ledged the spiritual things. Two bright 
 
 7
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 chaffinches fighting and chirrupping as they 
 chased one another swiftly through the air 
 took her breath away. Nothing could have 
 been more intimately and exquisitely pleasant 
 than the first moments as she sat down, if it 
 had not been that something in her mind 
 rebelled, was discontented, tremulous, un- 
 happy, and that not on account of any thought 
 left in it from the remote or immediate past, 
 but only, as far as she knew, because along 
 with the surrender to the deep, rich, calm 
 flood of spring came again an aspiration as 
 in former springs, a desire as deep as her 
 nature, a strong but vague and wordless 
 desire to be something other than she was, to 
 do something other than she was doing or 
 had ever done an unsatisfied desire, a 
 worship without a skilled priest, nay ! with- 
 out a god even. 
 
 The laugh of a woodpecker awakened her ; 
 
 in her mood it was as if the laugh was her 
 
 own but none the less surprising ; she rose 
 
 and went on down the hill. The trees on 
 
 8
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 the side away from the valley were dark as 
 if winter hid there yet, but the hazels filled 
 the dark air with yellow and orange catkins 
 as with vibrating dancing flowers. Alice lifted 
 a hand as if to catch one of the loosest and 
 ripest of the catkins, but it hung high and 
 her hand fell again to her side. She started 
 to run, but her limbs were unwilling, and she 
 blushed at the ungainly failure as if she might 
 have been seen. She walked slowly, looking 
 down at the road and shutting out all thought, 
 remaining only just aware that but a feeble 
 crust covered over and kept down the seeth- 
 ing in her mind. Before reaching the bottom 
 she again sat down and gazed over the oak 
 tops of a little wood, waiting and not quite 
 unconsciously expecting that covering crust 
 to break, perhaps helping herself to break it. 
 And as she sat motionless the notes of a 
 travelling organ, played in the garden of one 
 of the houses hidden behind the oaks, rose up 
 to her ears. It was a too slowly played tune, 
 heavy to sickness with insincere emotion. 
 
 9
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 Unembodied, uncontrolled by any passion or 
 personality in the composer or the performer, 
 the notes were floating about the world in a 
 loose haze that might presently fade altogether, 
 or on the other hand take some human shape 
 by entering a human ear. Alice frowned 
 and yet at the same time gave to the music 
 just that shape which it desired in order to 
 live and work its proper enchantment. It 
 entered her spirit and she heard the organ 
 with her ears no longer. The old Italian 
 with one hand in his pocket and the other on 
 the organ handle was playing one tune in the 
 far-off garden, a different one in Alice. 
 
 To the sound of that music was painted 
 and sung and spoken a tale beginning when 
 she was eleven. 
 
 She saw herself a bright-cheeked girl, even 
 then too thin, her eyes much larger than now, 
 with a mane of heavy curling hair clipped short 
 at her shoulders because it was too heavy. 
 She wore a dress of green and yellow, as 
 green and yellow as a furze bush that is half 
 10
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 flowers. She was sitting curled up in a big 
 arm-chair by an open window. It was June 
 and not yet dawn, and all the house was 
 asleep except the Irish terrier who was 
 barking at her to come out again. But on 
 her knee she had a book ; it was open, and 
 she was writing in it ; and half of the book 
 was full. She had got up early every morning 
 that summer to write. And what she was 
 writing was poetry poetry in stanzas of 
 four lines, irregular in length and accent, but 
 rhymed alternately. She was happy. She 
 was not unhappy now, or had not been 
 a moment before ; and in the feeling that 
 possessed her while this picture stayed it 
 would be impossible to divide pleasure 
 from sadness, and both were pure and 
 profound. She tried to remember some of 
 the verses. They were about an oak tree. 
 Grown-up people had told her they were not 
 a mere senseless echo of some grown-up 
 poet's emotion or words, as a precocious child's 
 verses often are, but really seemed to shadow 
 
 ii
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 forth the child's impression of the life in 
 the big Briareus tree with its strange silences 
 and strange voices. For an instant she felt 
 herself standing under the tree as a child, but 
 she knew that she dreamed and in an instant, 
 all was gone. The pictures ceased while 
 she remembered simply the bliss which she 
 had in those days not recognised. Then 
 through that solemn haze of emotion many 
 scenes reassembled again a few people, 
 rooms, gardens, fields, and streets, shadowy and 
 precise, and strange too because all, animate 
 and inanimate, were equally alive like 
 shapes moving or still, seen through softly 
 drifting rain. Clearest of all was that child 
 that had been herself, a bold, strong, original 
 child it could not be denied passing 
 through that large many-coloured world as if 
 she had been the spirit of it all. Words were 
 spoken, little words surviving like poems out 
 of the ruins of a life ; actions were performed. 
 Books appeared, distinct passages, the very 
 language often, and then also the pictures 
 12
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 they had called up in that early time. 
 Everything had given way to her in that year 
 and the one that followed. The world was 
 made for her, it was hers. How confidently 
 she went about ! what joy, what power ! 
 And she carried with her a secret her 
 personality, her self, what made her the equal 
 of all men and things, even in a sense their 
 superior, since she grasped them and did not 
 feel herself grasped by them, not yet. She 
 and her mother possessed the world. Her 
 golden-haired mother she saw in one attitude 
 always, seated, curved graciously forward, 
 head slightly bowed, but eyes raised and 
 fixed upon nothing of this world, un- 
 conscious that the child beside her was 
 watching her through the hair which her 
 fingers were tangling amorously ; she also had 
 her secret, a mighty mother she seemed, 
 greatest of all the things that had life on 
 earth, who yet had nothing to do but to love 
 Alice who on her part had nothing to do but 
 to give her occasions for love, for love and 
 
 13
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 forgiveness. A greater painter than Titian 
 had painted those people and those days. In 
 their veins ran gold of June, and all about 
 them was poured an equal holy light. It was 
 to last and she was to live for ever. She had 
 heard the word, and the meaning, of death, 
 only to resolve that it was not in her destiny : 
 she was even sure that no one with whom 
 she was linked by any close bonds could 
 pass away; upon everything was a seal of 
 everlastingness. 
 
 Then a schoolroom, many books, grey 
 books, books that rasped the hand and the 
 soul, that were quite other than that fair 
 world. Several of the years that followed 
 were cut off, she knew not where or how, from 
 those when she wrote poems : she wrote no 
 more. She remembered other children, num- 
 bers of them, who were not as those of the 
 earlier time, but as if they had come out of the 
 grey books with which they were linked. She 
 read the books and listened to men and 
 women who explained them and asked her
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 questions. She forgot continually, but was 
 praised for what she retained, was given 
 prizes and talked about in her own hearing 
 as a clever child. She lost her secret ; her 
 mother had taken her own away and died. 
 She still enjoyed many things but not as 
 before ; she had a sense of something post- 
 poned ; the next day or perhaps the next the 
 veil would be lifted that had fallen in- 
 siduously, a veil of huge, dim, unintelligible 
 things, of mere greyness, having nothing to do 
 with life but acquiesced in as in a disease, 
 like which it brought its own opiate. 
 
 The veil was lifted, but underneath were 
 not the colours of the regretted time ; there 
 was pain, weariness, misery, ending in illness 
 from overwork. As she lay in bed she looked 
 back as she was doing now. The weakness, 
 silence, and solitude, the independence of the 
 sick room, seemed about to restore the old 
 time through the tears she wept quietly and 
 long in thinking of the grey shameful years. 
 Her window looked out upon the country 
 
 15
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 and the spring, upon a shallow river rippling 
 under alders, between meadows that rose 
 gently up from it to the steep wooded hill 
 which closed the view and shut out all of the 
 sky, except a narrow indigo band against the 
 dark trees and the firm snowy bases of the 
 freshest white clouds she had ever seen. 
 The alders had been lately cut to within two 
 feet of the earth and their sharp gashed stems, 
 moistened by rains, were orange ; at their 
 feet were primroses so numerous that she 
 could see them as far as where the river 
 wound out of sight. At the edge of the high 
 woods, which were of pine and very dark, 
 she could see shining almost white the breasts 
 of the two missel-thrushes whose songs she 
 heard, and of a wood-pigeon that had been 
 there since dawn. Within the wood there 
 was one bent silvery birch that seemed to 
 her every time she looked at it to be a lost 
 princess just about to run away from that 
 immense dark host of pines. The sun 
 burnished the white clouds, the grass now 
 16
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 green for the first time in the year, the ripples 
 at the curves of the river, and the breasts of 
 the three birds. The missel-thrushes had 
 repeated their wild sweet song over and over 
 since she awoke. There was only one 
 other sound and that was of the bees 
 which she knew must be at the crocuses out 
 of sight under her window. The air was 
 moist, cold, pellucid and so pure that as the 
 bees passed her window she thought she 
 could smell their fragrant burdens. She was 
 happy, or she was going to be very happy ; 
 she was expecting something which never 
 appeared, and she thought she wanted some- 
 one to be near her. She called out but when 
 someone came she knew there was no one she 
 was willing to have ; she sent for a doll she 
 had not seen for three years and fell asleep 
 with it before the missel-thrushes had ceased. 
 That night she was ill again and near death. 
 Thinking now of the years of crawling 
 convalescence, the arrested development, the 
 slight curvature of the spine, the drooping 
 B 17
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 eyelid (as if in that narrow room the pros- 
 trate child had been through all womanhood), 
 thinking of the isolation, of the childless 
 echoing house where she had rested a long 
 bitter rest, of the little country town's one 
 winding broad street a flock of sheep pressed 
 in between the high grey houses of melancholy 
 stone, very silent that passed at either end 
 quite suddenly into the purest country of 
 slow rivers and gradual hills, thinking of 
 things almost of yesterday, Alice became 
 fully awake and conscious of the organ music, 
 and tried to put it away from her, but failed. 
 Several times she dipped her fingers into the 
 wet grass and bathed her eyes. Then she 
 stood up straight, for a moment even on 
 tiptoe, slowly let her head fall back, fully 
 extended her arms with outstretched fingers, 
 and drew in a long breath as if drawing in, 
 with prayer and confidence, all the sweetness 
 and strength of the air, and, afraid of the 
 involuntary sigh of the expiration, began to 
 walk rapidly down the hill. 
 18
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 She did not stop until she came to a 
 cottage at the border of a green. The 
 children had rooted out a bat and ball and 
 some stumps, and with coats off were playing 
 cricket for the first time in the year. She 
 went round to the back of the cottage where 
 a woman of equal massiness and agility was 
 washing clothes in the open air, the hard 
 white linen and the loose froth mimicking the 
 heavy and the lighter clouds in the blue sky. 
 
 " Good morning, Mrs Appleyard," said 
 Alice. 
 
 " Good morning, miss," replied the cloud- 
 maker. 
 
 "What shall I do? play cricket with the 
 boys or help you ? " 
 
 " Won't you sit down, miss ? Tis weariful 
 weather. I feel myself as if I could sleep 
 for a week. Still, 'tis beautiful weather, 
 too." 
 
 " Yes,'' said Alice, lost for the moment in 
 following Mrs Appleyard's magnificent energy, 
 presently adding, " How is the baby ? "
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 " Wonderful well. Would you like to go 
 up and see her ? And Bessie would be glad 
 to see you." 
 
 In one of the two bedrooms in the attached 
 cottage Mrs Appleyard's daughter lay in bed 
 with her third child, new born. The coarse 
 red-faced cowman's wife, now pale and 
 languid, smiled faintly at Alice but let the 
 smile expand into a broad chuckling grimace 
 for the child to whom she turned immediately, 
 excusing herself by saying, " She's a beauty. 
 We are calling her Catherine Elizabeth." 
 
 "You're glad to have her, Bessie," said 
 Alice, smiling and taking up the child. 
 
 '* I should think so, miss. You don't know. 
 Don't you take any notice another time of 
 what a woman says seven or eight months 
 before her baby's born, when she doesn't 
 want another. It's just nature. Still, there 
 are mothers and mothers. Now my sister-in- 
 law at Woodford has just had her fifth and, 
 would you believe it ? she's been asking the 
 vicar if he knows anyone that wants a child. 
 20
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 A pretty child, too why, I'd like it myself, 
 but, Lord, what would Bill say ? all that 
 family's pretty, but this one is a white black- 
 bird, as you might say." 
 
 " Really," said Alice, slowly, " wants to give 
 it away ... or perhaps make a little money 
 out of it ... Well, I don't wonder. Times 
 are bad for workers. But does she really ? " 
 
 "But you would wonder if you was a 
 woman. I beg your pardon, I mean, you 
 know what I mean. But in her it's unnatural. 
 Only three months old, too." 
 
 " Is it a boy or a girl ? " 
 
 " A girl and the best of the bunch." 
 
 " What is her name ? " 
 
 " Rose Elizabeth, after me." 
 
 " And it is quite healthy ? " 
 
 " Yes, bless you, healthy, yes." 
 
 " But wouldn't she want it back again, 
 don't you think ? Supposing she grew up in 
 a good home now . . ." 
 
 " That's just what she wants. She'd make 
 a little lady and no mistake. Some old 
 
 21
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 couple, good people, gentry perhaps, would 
 be glad of her if they only knew. They have 
 their feelings, same as any of us." 
 
 "And is her mother all right, except for 
 this lack of affection ? " 
 
 " Annie ? Strong as a cart horse, a good- 
 looking woman, too, in her way she's 
 Suffolk bred but hard, or, well, the fact is 
 she doesn't like Ted." 
 
 " Your brother ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "Ah!" 
 
 Alice got up and looked out of the window 
 at the lambs, which had been separated by 
 hurdles from their mothers and turned into a 
 great field of swedes, and were nibbling the 
 tops of one and then another of the purple 
 roots for a moment, lazily, and now and then 
 sprawling down in the sun. She turned and 
 asked : 
 
 " What does the vicar say, Bessie ? " 
 
 "Oh, you're thinking of Annie's little 
 Rose ? He scolded her." 
 
 22
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 " You don't think he has found anyone ? I 
 was thinking I knew, I might find, somebody 
 who would be glad, who would consider 
 it . . ." 
 
 " Yes, miss ? " 
 
 "In fact you might mention it in case 
 there is no one already considering it. Or I 
 would write. My friend . . . the person 
 I had in mind ... I ..." 
 
 Alice stayed a little longer, but hardly 
 spoke, musing and pleased with the indolent 
 pressure of the baby in her arms. 
 
 "That baby's all right, miss," said Mrs 
 Appleyard as Alice came out into the yard 
 again, "and Bessie's doing well She'll 
 be all the better for the rest. Healthy 
 women like her never gets any other rest, 
 and having me close by she'll take a full 
 fortnight" 
 
 " And isn't she fond of the little one ! " 
 
 " Fond ! and why ever shouldn't she be, 
 miss. There's naught the matter with our 
 Bessie." 
 
 23
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 " Yes, but she was telling me about her 
 little niece, Rose Elizabeth." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " She says the parents are willing to let 
 someone adopt the child and . . ." 
 
 "So they were. I didn't want to upset 
 Bessie, miss, but little Rose fell off a 
 chair . . ." 
 
 "Dead! not dead?" 
 
 "No, she hurt herself though. She will 
 live, but they will have to keep her now." 
 
 "Oh . . ." sighed Alice in the struggle 
 between the suddenly swollen emotion and 
 the shock and the wish to say something of 
 the expected kind to Mrs Appleyard who 
 went on : 
 
 " It's a judgment on them. Why do they 
 want to go putting off the child on some- 
 body they don't know ? " 
 
 " Yes ... No ... It is very sad. A 
 crippled child . . . Most people would not 
 think of taking it, I suppose." 
 
 " I should think not, miss." 
 24
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 " But perhaps you would give me your 
 son's address, Mrs Appleyard. I think my 
 friend might still . . . thank you." 
 
 She was going away when she picked up 
 an egg-cup full of violets from the window- 
 sill and said : 
 
 " Violets ! how sweet ! I haven't found 
 any this late season. Where did you find 
 them ? " 
 
 " Mary found them. She always finds the 
 first. You see she is so little that she looks 
 the flowers in their faces almost. She is so 
 fond of them and says she likes their ' pale 
 calm blue/ funny little thing ! " 
 
 "Good-bye, Mrs Appleyard." 
 
 " Good morning, miss." 
 
 Never before had the homeward hill 
 seemed so long and steep as when Alice 
 climbed back again, wearied, pulled to pieces, 
 miserable over her new hope, her still newer 
 despair, the scent of violets, and now . . . 
 no ! it was impossible ... a crippled child, 
 and a girl . . . Rose Elizabeth ... its 
 
 25
 
 The First of Spring 
 
 brain might have been affected by the fall . . . 
 And yet was it not already in a sense hers ? 
 
 "I think, Alice," said Colonel Lacking 
 that evening, "you had better have a sea 
 voyage. We will take one together, I think. 
 Yes. This English spring is too much for 
 us when we are no longer young. You're 
 looking a fright." 
 
 " It's not the spring, father, it's myself." 
 " Where shall it be ? " he continued, look- 
 ing at a map of this world. 
 
 26
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 "FEAR of punishment," read Mrs Wilkins, 
 in a clear hard percussive tone like that of 
 two flints being struck together : " Fear of 
 punishment has always been the great weapon 
 of the teacher, and will always, of course, 
 retain some place in the conditions of the 
 schoolroom. The subject is so familiar that 
 nothing more need be said of it. The same 
 is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to 
 please those whom we love. ..." 
 
 Her voice burst through the ear into the 
 brain as if with an actual physical presence, 
 and the words themselves were apprehended 
 dimly and fitfully like those of a man who 
 guides us amid the whirr and hammer and 
 throb of a factory. She held the book level 
 with her eyes, which were for the most part 
 fixed on the page as if it were a poor living 
 
 27
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 thing whose life and death were in her 
 power : when for a moment they were re- 
 moved, it was without a change of expression, 
 to some one of her audience of six who had 
 seemed to betray inattention by a moving foot, 
 a sigh, or a closing of the eyes in search of 
 rest vain search. Once she stopped and said 
 to one child of the party, her granddaughter : 
 
 "Cathie, my pet, move your chair from 
 behind your grandfather's, then you will not 
 be so very near the fire and you will be able 
 to see grandmother." 
 
 Here she smiled by the mechanical act of 
 pressing the middles of her thin lips together 
 so as to elongate her mouth and protract the 
 line of it upward into her grey lean cheeks. 
 Then she continued to read with a frown at 
 the book or at fate for having interrupted 
 her, as in a short time happened once more. 
 Her husband laid his huge kind hand silently 
 upon his little grandchild's head, which it 
 almost enclosed like the husk of a hazel nut, 
 and there let it remain. 
 28
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 "Charles," she said in the same tone, 
 laying the book softly but firmly, and 
 as it were cruelly, upon the black silk 
 over her knees, "do you really wish 
 me to go on with this important book 
 or not?" 
 
 " Why, yes, my dear," he replied, instinc- 
 tively smoothing the infant's hair to protect 
 her and to encourage himself. 
 
 " Then may I ask you not to interrupt, and 
 not to set Cathie a bad example by apparent 
 inattention ? " 
 
 " Please go on, my dear," he said, removing 
 the offending hand with a slight sigh of 
 penitence and outward submission, and a 
 twinkle of the unconquerable mind in the gay 
 lifting of the brows over his large brown eyes 
 that knew so well the arts of brotherhood, 
 fatherhood, unclehood, and now for five 
 years, of grandfatherhood. 
 
 " Then I will continue," she said, with a 
 rustling gesture of imperfect appeasement, 
 " or rather I will go back to the beginning of 
 
 29
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 the chapter lest some of us should have 
 forgotten it by this time." 
 
 She read again : " Fear of punishment 
 has always been ..." and complete silence 
 was granted by everyone, and as far as 
 possible by the hollow fire itself, which was 
 now, in sympathy with the subdued audience 
 and respect for its instructor, growing every 
 minute more cold and black. The voice, 
 absolutely monotonous, seemed to build an 
 intricate structure of thin polished steel bars 
 in the air, like a high bridge, but without 
 obvious purpose. Most of the audience 
 were, however, too well used to the sound to 
 observe this effect. 
 
 Her husband was a country doctor now 
 retired from his practice, a man, with the pro- 
 file of an aged Jupiter and straight white 
 hair and beard, who had learned in forty 
 years of marriage to live at the same time 
 two lives, an outer one of many duties and 
 ceremonies for the benefit of his wife, and an 
 inner one into which she had neither the 
 30
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 leisure nor the curiosity to inquire, even if it 
 had once or twice occurred to her that there 
 was such a thing. This afternoon he was 
 chiefly occupied in recalling to his memory 
 Shelley's poem of " Rosalind and Helen." 
 
 Three of the unmarried daughters were 
 there. They were women of thirty-three, 
 twenty-nine and twenty-five years of age, 
 who spent nearly the whole of their year as 
 governess, schoolmistress and private secre- 
 tary, but came home regularly at about 
 Christmas time to worship out of long habit 
 the mother with whom they had no contact 
 at any other time, except by sending half of 
 their salaries for her to invest They ad- 
 mired their mother's force of character, her 
 power of management, her indifference to the 
 flight of time, and her clear fatigueless voice. 
 Nervous and intelligent they suffered from 
 the voice and the tyranny, but they, like 
 their father, were able to quench their suffer- 
 ing in memories and thoughts of the separate 
 worlds unknown to her. One of them, indeed, 
 
 31
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 gave a moment or two of real attention to 
 the words that were said, because the book 
 was her present to her mother and she hoped 
 to be able to say a few intelligible words in 
 any discussion that might follow. The faces 
 of all three were lined and thin, their black 
 hair was going grey, and all wore spectacles. 
 They were older than their mother. Their 
 bony painful hands were clasped tightly on 
 their knees ; their plain dresses were ruffled 
 over their flat chests, their heads bent. Two 
 at least would never marry now, for their 
 mother's knowledge of men and her exacting 
 standard, reinforced by that voice of steel, 
 had made it impossible for them to give way 
 to their desires, from which this discipline 
 was never removed. When the reader turned 
 her eyes upon them she was reassured by 
 three pairs of spectacles glittering attention. 
 In the background was another visitor but 
 an unconsidered one, a young artist of small 
 independent means who was supposed to be 
 in love with one of the daughters, no one 
 32
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 knew which. He was tall, dark, slender, mild 
 and obviously uncomfortable, but as he never 
 lost this expression it was unobserved, and 
 he also was well under Mrs Wilkin's control. 
 
 The little girl was the child of a daughter 
 who had run away to marry. The maternal 
 discipline was escaped only for a time. Letters, 
 visits, and that omnipotent voice had never 
 cease to besiege the girl after her marriage. 
 She had consented to leave her husband and 
 to come to live with her parents again. 
 There, one Christmas day, in a festive house, 
 while the north-east wind from the sea drove 
 the sand through fast shut windows on to 
 the hair and the sheets, into the food, into 
 the soul, she gave birth to a child who was 
 at once taken over by its grandmother with 
 the words : 
 
 " Poor Alice, you see, can know nothing 
 of children any more than she can of men. 
 I know. All will be well." 
 
 Mrs Wilkins took up this new interest in 
 her crowded life of visiting the poor, making 
 c 33
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 jam and marmalade, and sewing for befriended 
 unfortunate women, as eagerly as if it were 
 the only one. 
 
 Alice could not look after her baby, but 
 she could cook and give her mother's advice 
 to the neighbouring cottagers' wives. She 
 worked hard and was feverishly content with 
 having Cathie close at hand ; she acquiesced 
 with a faint humorous smile in her mother's 
 judgment, " We shall hardly make a little 
 lady of Cathie if she has much of her father's 
 blood." But she crumbled slowly under the 
 strain of her too great self-despair and self- 
 control. One day in the next winter, as she 
 was shutting the oven door on a half shoulder 
 of mutton, a strong thought came into her 
 head. She told the maidservant that she was 
 going to drown the old cat, which she put 
 softly into a basket with some hay and left 
 the house. It was the first day of a thaw : 
 the grey world dripped and reeked and gurgled 
 and the air made the warmest clothing seem 
 to be lined with ice. An hour later the 
 34
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 villagers were hurrying past the house, saying 
 that a woman had drowned herself in the 
 river. 
 
 " What a day for her to choose, to be 
 sure ! " remarked Mrs Wilkins. " Poor 
 thing! I wonder who it can be. The 
 poverty in the village is dreadful at this time 
 of year, and there is no religion worthy of 
 the name except in my little band. A love 
 affair, perhaps. Why didn't she come to me ? 
 That is the pity of life that we can't give 
 others the full advantage of our experience. 
 Each one wants to start afresh. The young 
 must needs be running off to get experience 
 for themselves, when if they only asked. . . . 
 Look at Alice, for example. She knew 
 nothing about men : how should she ? But 
 if she had come to me. . . ." 
 
 Then she pursed her lips with a short 
 smile, adding thereto, as a gesture expressing 
 modest approval of her own kindly thought, 
 a nod of singular bird-like prettiness for her 
 figure and head were of exquisite regularity 
 
 35
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 and proportion, well-carried and dressed with 
 unvarying grace. 
 
 It was Alice that lay in the river, dead, 
 with a satisfied expression. The cat came 
 running home miserable, tiptoe on wetted 
 paws. 
 
 Mrs Wilkins' grief at the suicide was 
 tempered and at last quenched in a grave 
 wondering why it should have happened, 
 and she therefore acquiesced in the verdict 
 of " during temporary insanity." " I cannot 
 believe it," she said at the first news, "she 
 dared not" And "I co.uld hardly believe 
 my eyes," she continued to say when describ- 
 ing the scene, which she would do in the 
 same manner as when she recited "The 
 Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold," 
 or, " Little lamb, who made thee ? " 
 
 "Now Cathie is ours to make a great 
 success of," said Mrs Wilkins. " That father 
 of hers was at any rate a strong man and 
 she inherits his physique. As for her char- 
 acter, I see she has the very ways of my own 
 36
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 sister, little Bess who died young. She 
 would have been the best of us all, and she 
 was as clever as she was good. She over- 
 worked herself, Charles ! and died out of her 
 mind, poor thing ; and she had a love affair, 
 too ; a young man pestered her with his 
 objectionable affections and she was too 
 weak to reject them altogether as we could 
 have wished, and it was too much for her. 
 But Cathie is strong and she will be with 
 me." 
 
 For a few years, nevertheless, Cathie was 
 snatched away to live in London with her 
 father in a golden age of health and wilful- 
 ness, four years that would be a possession 
 for ever, the richest jewel in a happy life, a 
 crown lying at the bottom of the well of an 
 unhappy one. But her father died and, 
 after being passed from relative to relative, 
 she had now arrived at her grandmother's by 
 the sea. 
 
 At first Cathie feared the sea because there 
 were no roads on it, and the moors round 
 
 37
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 the house also, because there were no pave- 
 ments on which she could get to avoid the 
 cows. Things were too large. The earth 
 was as large as the sky. But, on the other 
 hand, there were black cattle and windmills 
 on the glittering wide marsh below the house, 
 and there was always a flock of starlings 
 wheeling over the heather close to the door, 
 or perched in a row on the single telegraph 
 wire humming over the line of posts that 
 seemed to come out of the sky with 
 messages from her father, perhaps, mused 
 the child. Also there was a most ancient 
 man who leaned against a sunny bank, as 
 still as a tree but with a cheerful face 
 that was chiefly eyes and whiskers like 
 some very nice dog, clothes that were 
 more like an animal's coat than any she 
 had ever seen before, and a growl of a 
 voice which somehow she knew to be kind 
 when he said, "Good morning, little miss, 
 a pretty morning, little miss ! " She liked 
 walking in the little oak wood on the cliffs 
 38
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 at the edge of the sea, where the dead leaves 
 raced down the steep path as the rats ran 
 after the pied piper of Hamelin, and then 
 suddenly whirled up like butterflies and 
 almost smothered her. On the beach there 
 were many pebbles, and she thought that 
 if she did a little work daily she would be 
 able to finish a house by the time when she 
 would wear spectacles as her aunts did, and 
 there she could invite " Gyp " the dog and 
 " Tansy " the cow and kill anybody else who 
 tried to get in no! not quite kill them 
 because if they were dead they would be 
 like her father and nobody deserved to be 
 like that. But next day there was not a 
 trace of her pebbles nor any footmarks of 
 the thief, so perhaps it was her father and he 
 was making the house in some better place. 
 
 The day after was Sunday and it was 
 sufficiently near Christmas for sweets and 
 nuts to be eaten in the sitting-room after 
 dinner. She curled up in a warm chair 
 and stared at the fire and ate continuously 
 
 39
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 while the others talked and laughed more 
 than usual, and her grandfather pitched a 
 special sweet now and then into her lap and 
 evidently did not want her to say, "Thank 
 you, dear grandpapa " before she put it into 
 her mouth. One of her aunts played on the 
 piano and Cathie still stared at the fire, warm 
 and drowsy and sniffing the fruit, the wood 
 fire, the scents of the women, and listening 
 to the wind. She saw beautiful rockets 
 rising straight up and spreading out like a 
 palm tree among the stars, just as on the 
 night before her father died. By and by the 
 trees ceased to grow and an enormous bird 
 stood on the earth and touched the sky : it 
 had eyes all along its immense beak and all 
 down its long legs, so that it could see 
 everything as her grandmother had told her 
 God could ; so for fear lest the bird should 
 take her last sweet she bolted it and began to 
 cough, whereupon her grandmother said in a 
 voice that came shooting through the music : 
 " Cathie, my pet, you are disturbing your 
 40
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 aunt and spoiling our pleasure. You must 
 not always be thinking of yourself." 
 
 " I was thinking of God, grandmamma," 
 she said, but the music drowned her words. 
 The great bird was gone, and she wished she 
 had not swallowed the sweet because she 
 had meant to give it to " Tansy." She sobbed 
 a little and slept. 
 
 She was awakened by her grandmother 
 telling her to sit in another chair and keep 
 quiet while she read aloud. Again she saw 
 the palm trees of fire, and when the golden 
 fruit showered down there was a helter 
 skelter of dead leaves to save themselves 
 from being burnt, and they ran into a house 
 made of pebbles such as she had begun to 
 build on the beach. Now and then she 
 heard the voice of her grandmother who was 
 reading from a book about angels and war, 
 which appeared to be a wicked book, but 
 she understood little except certain familiar 
 words the word " victor," for example, re- 
 minded her of a little boy of that name and
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 she was all ear for what followed, but in 
 vain. 
 
 These thoughts were interrupted by her 
 grandfather saying quietly for the second 
 time that he could not hear, and her grand- 
 mother laying down the book and saying : 
 " Charles, I am reading for your pleasure, 
 and I do think it is inconsiderate of you to 
 interrupt ... I think I will read a little 
 from my own book now, Jenny's present." 
 
 Mrs Wilkins took up the other book and 
 read, " Fear of punishment has always been 
 the chief weapon of the teacher ..." twice 
 over, telling Cathie to sit in another chair 
 farther from the fire. 
 
 For some time Cathie thought about 
 nothing, and then again tried to puzzle out 
 who had disturbed her pebbles and fancied 
 the great bird had picked them up in his 
 great beak, and she hoped he would swallow 
 them and choke and be reprimanded by 
 her grandmother. In her new seat she 
 could see the young man, and wished she 
 42
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 could show him her doll which was 
 upstairs. 
 
 When the reading was over the young 
 man rose up and looked kindly at her, 
 and said he would go to his room and 
 read. 
 
 Cathie looked out of the window at the 
 moor which was now almost dark, and said 
 to everyone : 
 
 " Why do those trees look like that ? " 
 
 They smiled but made no reply, Jenny 
 alone remarking, " How sweet children are." 
 Mrs Wilkins was saying that they would 
 now sing some hymns, each one choosing a 
 favourite, when Cathie got up to follow the 
 young man and, seeing the door shut loudly 
 behind him, burst into tears at the thought 
 of him and her doll both out of reach in the 
 winter darkness. So wide opened her eyes 
 and so far fell her mouth, so loud was her 
 crying, that her grandmother was angry as 
 she sat down at the piano and began to turn 
 over the pages of the hymn book. The sound 
 
 43
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 of the crying brought back the young 
 man, and he offered to take her to his 
 room. 
 
 "That is very kind of Mr Cardew," said 
 Mrs Wilkins. " Do you hear, Cathie ? 
 But I think, Harry, she ought not to go. 
 It is so bad for her to have her own 
 way." 
 
 " Then you shall sit on my knee, Cathie,' 
 said Mr Cardew, in a vaguely protective gentle 
 voice, not without hostility to the ruling 
 power. He sat down and took her on his 
 knee and encircled her as much as possible 
 with his shoulders and both arms. She 
 ceased to cry but not to sob and to twist the 
 world into a tragic agony with the falling 
 corners of her mouth, her huge eyes and 
 lifted eyebrows of surprise. 
 
 The first hymn began : 
 
 Shepherd Divine, our wants relieve 
 
 In this our evil day : 
 To all Thy tempted followers give 
 
 The power to watch and, pray. 
 
 44
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 Long as our fiery trials last, 
 Long as the cross we bear, 
 
 O let our souls on Thee be cast 
 In never-ceasing prayer. . . . 
 
 It was the choice of one of her aunts. 
 Cathie sobbed all through it : her sweet 
 breath rose up to her protector and her con- 
 vulsive movements shook the hymn book 
 which he absent-mindedly watched, and 
 shook her little head and raven curls so that 
 she could see and think of nothing but her 
 grandmother's icy spectacles and moving 
 lips. At the end of each verse the aunts 
 and grandfather glanced at her furtively. 
 When five hymns had been sung, Cathie 
 still sobbed and shook, and Mrs Wilkins 
 offered to let the child choose the next 
 instead of her. 
 
 *' Now, Cathie, my pet," she said, using the 
 tone which she had always supposed to be 
 soothing and endearing, "which is your 
 favourite ? ' Christ who once amongst us 
 as a child did dwell'?" 
 
 45
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 Cathie sobbed and made no reply. She 
 was wondering why her grandmother's 
 spectacles looked grim as the trees out- 
 side, "like that" Mrs Wilkins con- 
 tinued : 
 
 "Shall it be 'All things bright and 
 beautiful,' or, 'Do no sinful action, speak 
 no angry word ? ' . . . What was father's 
 favourite ? " 
 
 Cathie did not hear, for the spectacles were 
 still icy and grim. 
 
 "Then I will choose for you, dear," con- 
 cluded Mrs Wilkins, removing the notes of 
 soothing and endearment from her voice ; 
 and so they sang : 
 
 Our God of love who reigns above 
 
 Comes down to us below ; 
 Tis sweet to tell He loves so well, 
 
 And 'tis enough to know. . . . 
 
 At the end Mrs Wilkins said judicially : 
 " I think Cathie ought to be very thankful 
 to us all for singing to her when she was a 
 46
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 disobedient child. But she had better go 
 early to bed now. Perhaps she is very tired. 
 . . . Kiss everyone ' Good-night/ Cathie. . . . 
 Good-night, child." 
 
 One of her aunts led her away. 
 
 " She has her mother's temper," said Mrs 
 Wilkins. " Her mother was just like that. 
 I am afraid we shall have some trouble in 
 bringing her up as we should like, but I do 
 not despair, Charles." 
 
 " No, my dear," said Mr Wilkins, not con- 
 vinced that by graduating grandmother a 
 woman became wise. 
 
 "No, she makes me feel young again," 
 continued his musing hopeful spouse, "and 
 I will bring her up as if she were one of 
 my own." 
 
 Cathie sobbed upstairs, and that evening 
 it was as if the sea, and the wind on the 
 moor and in the keyholes, were sobbing with 
 her, until at last she slept. The wind ceased 
 and all the house was still. About midnight 
 she woke again to see through her window 
 
 47
 
 Sunday Afternoon 
 
 the small bright moon flying up through 
 snowy clouds over the sea. It seemed to her 
 that it was the very same moon she used to 
 see at her father's house, and she smiled and 
 slept happily. 
 
 48
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 YEARS ago, continued my bald fellow- 
 passenger, lifting his fez, I used to think 
 that I had discovered youth. I went about 
 repeating such phrases as : " The respect due 
 to age is a ceremony carried out to weariness. 
 The respect due to youth is as great and is 
 never paid." I used to pretend to show that 
 the respect paid to old men arose from the 
 eloquence of the dying " old John of Gaunt, 
 time-honoured Lancaster," and I collected the 
 dying speeches of old men to confute my 
 many enemies. Along with this, and by 
 some mysterious process harmonised with it, 
 was a great sentiment for the old things, for 
 almost everything old in the ways of life. 
 The new things around did not please me : 
 I was in my own opinion born long after or 
 before my time. For some years I conducted 
 D 49
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 my attack with that cruel scorn of which 
 ardent youth, bearing no flowers without 
 thorns, is particularly capable. But gradually, 
 in the wilderness I created about me, I lost 
 sight of these sublime truths, except that I 
 continued to consider blasphemous the world's 
 way of not accepting the young until they 
 show that they are as harmless as the old. 
 
 It was when I was still young, not yet 
 thirty I should say, that I stumbled from my 
 lofty position, in a village or small town in 
 Wales. 
 
 I had been there many times before, but 
 never shall I forget that one visit. In order 
 to spend a long day there with my friend the 
 poet I had started on foot some hours before 
 sunrise. It was the beginning of winter. 
 The night was cold and clear and blue, lit 
 by a few stars and a moon so bright that it 
 appeared to throb in the sky. My road 
 climbed to the top of many a hill simply 
 because some farmer who, I suppose, some- 
 times stooped to the valleys, chose to live
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 there with his cows and sheep. In those 
 days they still used to kill a cow once a year 
 and the tallow made candles to light them 
 to the milking in the winter mornings, the 
 lambing at midnight, the reading of the 
 Bible and "The Sleeping Bard" in the 
 evenings ; and every two years the farmer 
 had a few yards of grey fleecy cloth for a suit 
 made at the mill below from the wool of his 
 own sheep. Probably there had been a 
 dwelling of some kind on those hill-tops ever 
 since the earth rose out of the waters. 
 
 The night was still and I was going to say 
 silent, in spite of the fact that little rivers 
 never ceased to roar and foam below me in 
 the ravines of the forest through which I 
 passed. This unchanging sound comforted 
 the ear more than silence ever can. 
 
 They had been felling much timber, and it 
 lay about on the steep slopes under the moon, 
 more like the crude shapes of chaos out of 
 which trees and men might some day be 
 made. But for the most part I saw nothing 
 
 Si
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 and thought of nothing. I was well and 
 warm and pleased by the ring of my shoes 
 upon the rocks of the wild roadways. I was 
 living that deep, beneficent, unconscious life 
 which is what after all we remember with 
 most satisfaction and learn, often too late, 
 to label happiness when the pleasures have 
 all fallen away. 
 
 It was the dawn that recalled me to my- 
 self. I was making for the east, and in the 
 south-east the sky, as quiet as my mind, had 
 brought forth a scene of clouds so harmonious 
 with my unconscious life that at first I looked 
 upon it rather as if it had been some noble 
 dream blessedly given to me than something 
 which all men might see ; and I was astonished 
 as perhaps a poet is when he has wrought 
 something lovelier than he knew out of a long 
 silent strife. 
 
 The sky before me, almost up to the zenith 
 
 and almost down to the rigid but tumultuous 
 
 line of hills, dark and far off, was lightly 
 
 covered with a cold marbling of bossy white 
 
 52
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 clouds slightly stained by the blue behind 
 them. Just below this and just above the 
 hills in the south-east the clouds ceased, and 
 there the blue had given way to a luminous 
 silver, very soft and cold. Slowly this silver 
 changed to a green of a saintly paleness, 
 majestic and innocent, and the lower surfaces 
 of the clouds above were more and more 
 tawnily fired, while the snow of those nearest 
 the zenith hardly flushed. 
 
 In the little white farms there were lights 
 stirring and a clink of pans and clatter of 
 hoofs, and many of the loops of the river 
 beneath had begun to gleam among the still 
 gloomy woods, but the farms and the river 
 were infinitely small compared with the great 
 spaces of the valleys and the dark mountains 
 beyond and the lightening sky, and their 
 sounds reached the ear but not the spirit, 
 and for some time it had seemed that the 
 brooks were hushed. 
 
 And now the green of the lower sky was 
 crossed by long flat clouds of the colour of 
 
 53
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 dark sand newly wetted by the tide, but 
 warm, and in a little while these clouds had 
 arranged themselves by imperceptible craft 
 into the likeness of an immense tract of 
 unpeopled country into which a green sea 
 ran far, in many a bay and estuary without 
 a sail. The clouds above had become more 
 closely packed, so that their prominences 
 made almost uninterrupted mountain ranges 
 of fire. 
 
 I know not how to explain it, but I felt 
 I was seeing this immense country and sea 
 before me inverted by some imperfection of 
 sight, that I was seeing only a reflection in 
 calm water, that it was a perhaps not un- 
 alterable weakness that prevented me from 
 seeing the thing itself. Thinking of a remedy, 
 by a sudden impulse I threw myself down in 
 the bracken and heather by the road the 
 better to enter into that kingdom of the 
 dawn. I thus shut out from my sight every- 
 thing but the open sea of pale and now 
 gleaming green, and its long inlets into the 
 54
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 land of tawny coast and fiery hills, and the 
 mountain ridges of the earth which were 
 dissolved to a thin vapour under the increas- 
 ing light. At first I had no doubt that I 
 was right. That kingdom became mine in 
 an oblivious ecstasy, just as the hills and the 
 fallen trees and the rivers in the woods 
 under the moon had been mine before the 
 dawn. I was wafted upon that sea to the 
 untrodden shore and among the hills where 
 not even wings might travel, and there I 
 heard the symphony which the stars and the 
 mountains of earth and the hearts of men 
 and the songs of rivers and birds make 
 together in immortal ears, but make, alas ! 
 only once or twice for mortals. I closed my 
 eyes and the scene remained. 
 
 And then, whether in an actual dream of 
 sleep I do not know, I found myself thinking 
 that I would take away with me the music I 
 heard and would be happy always and show 
 other men the way that looked so clear. But 
 I began to struggle against falling through 
 
 55
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 an abyss at some supreme command. I was 
 aware of anger and dismay. I believed 
 myself accused of being a spy and a contra- 
 bandist in that land which now veils of 
 smoke were concealing from iny eyes. I 
 awoke, crying aloud that I would not have 
 at all what I could not possess for ever, but 
 no answer came. When I sat up I saw that 
 the earth was below me and the sky above, 
 as on an ordinary day. Half of the sun was 
 crimson above a peak which his fire appeared 
 to burn right through, and from horizon to 
 horizon the grey clouds were consuming 
 themselves in crimson and in gold, except 
 where a valley opened wide apart in the east 
 and showed a giant company of chimneys, 
 black and sinister, plumed with smoke as 
 black. The earth itself was pleasant to see, 
 especially where the moss was golden in the 
 soft light of the old oak woods, but to my 
 eyes it looked invalid, pathetic, and bereaved, 
 as if that glory in the sky had been taken 
 away from it or were indeed the reflection of 
 56
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 something now withdrawn into the hollows 
 of the hills. I therefore walked rapidly on 
 towards the village dominated by those 
 chimneys, my destination. 
 
 It stands at the meeting of three rivers, 
 and the streets look up the crooked valleys 
 where those rivers leap down among oaks and 
 birches and alders, now deep enough for the 
 otter and now only a cascade and salmon 
 leap. Just outside the village the combined 
 waters form an estuary, a broad and steady 
 flood, sliding with solemnity between the 
 level marshes at the feet of lesser hills. At 
 my first visit fifteen years before I swam 
 gently down the ebbing tide and saw on one 
 side a belt of marsh divided by a road and a 
 thin chain of cottages from higher ground, 
 here ploughland, there craggy pasture, or a 
 scramble of oaks over a precipice, or the 
 gorse grown refuse of a deserted mine whose 
 chimneys the ivy had bewitched: on the 
 other side, the ancient church of the parish, 
 standing alone, four white walls and a grey 
 
 57
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 roof amidst a grave-yard encircled by white 
 stones ; then a high round barrow covered 
 with little old oak trees ; more marsh, and a 
 mile farther on a white farm called after the 
 name of the castle ruins at its gate ; and, 
 where the marshland narrowed, a hill of grey 
 crags and purple bracken almost at the 
 water's edge ; more hills and coombes con- 
 tributing rivulets, until the estuary wound out 
 of sight between round brown hills to the 
 rocks and the sea. Then I got out and ran 
 back, as anyone could then, three miles over 
 the close green turf, scattering the sheep and 
 the cattle from my nakedness. 
 
 A few years earlier still the parish had 
 consisted of three or four farms, three mills 
 (one among the oaks of each valley), the 
 church, a venerable chapel in a wood, and a 
 few cottages buried away all but their smoke 
 and their linen shining on the gorse in 
 brambly chasms reached by lanes that were 
 streams for half the year. Now only one 
 mill was left, the cottages were empty 
 58
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 and dislocated and long lost among the 
 brambles. 
 
 As I entered the village I began to lose 
 my way. In the old days the village was 
 clustered about the streams and every road 
 led down and across them. Their sound 
 and glitter could not be avoided. Salmon 
 big enough to make legends were taken 
 from under the bridges at night, almost in 
 the streets, and their heads, as likely as not, 
 impaled upon the railings before the police- 
 man's house. Xor had the huge boulders 
 been moved from the banks. But now the 
 streets went this way and that, according to 
 the whim or craft of those who had land 
 to sell, and when I came to running water 
 it was confined between straight banks and 
 lined with houses on both sides, in order 
 that the inhabitants might more easily throw 
 their filth in as well as draw out their drink. 
 The water looked colder and blacker, the 
 corpse of its old self, all savour of the 
 mountains departed. The boulders were 
 
 59
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 gone ; so, too, the stepping-stones. The 
 children could no longer walk half the way to 
 school in water. One of the rivers was now 
 increased by waste from the chemical works, 
 and the water was of mingled yellow and 
 red that suggested the fat and the lean of 
 carcases in a butcher's shop when " the time 
 draws near the birth of Christ." No salmon 
 would face such a flood, but one girl, I was 
 informed, had lately chosen the deep pool 
 where the poison entered to drown herself. 
 She was alone in this choice. Other suicides 
 preferred more luxurious deaths. A young 
 farmer had hanged himself in his barn and 
 was not found until days later when his hair 
 and beard had grown all over his face. 
 Nobody had anything against him save 
 debts but he was morose and discontented 
 with everything. And so he died. It was 
 considered an unlucky death because coal 
 was shortly afterwards found under his 
 land. Not long before, an innkeeper had 
 killed himself with fox-poison because 
 60
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 he had committed the sin against the Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
 The streets were oily black and deeply 
 rutted. Houses built twenty years before 
 looked old, so dark were they and so simple 
 compared with the new fashion which loved 
 painted woodwork, stained glass, large balls 
 of stone on the pillars of the gateways. 
 Some roads led only to the railway and you 
 crossed as you pleased. Others ended in 
 factory yards among rusty strips of tin-like 
 scimitars and creases, in heaps, among yellow 
 pools, where bright, pale work-girls were 
 going to and fro with black-faced men among 
 engines, truckloads of the rusty tin, wreckage 
 of machinery thrown down carelessly. An- 
 other passed alongside an ever-steaming pool 
 where gold-fish swam among pallid reeds in 
 water that never froze. 
 
 In the centre of the village stood its 
 principal public house that far outshone the 
 church, the chapels and the new school, with 
 its cut glass and its many lights in the 
 
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 windows of three storeys ; opposite stood two 
 others, close together, small and homely, no 
 longer rural though they belonged to the 
 rural days of the village, but squalid from 
 urban usage. 
 
 Luckily I met a youth who could show 
 me the way and explain the changes. He 
 told me that my friend, the poet, would not 
 be in until midday, and I decided to look 
 round and see the old church, the fulling 
 mill, the otter's holt as well as the new 
 things. 
 
 My companion knew the price of the 
 houses that were being built. He marvelled 
 at "the amount of money in the place." 
 In half the roads trenches were being dug 
 for the drainage, which ran at present 
 wherever it found a slope : tired and dirty 
 men just released from their work stood 
 outside their gates and ate bacon and pickles 
 while they watched the digging. The new 
 drains, "the pride of the village," were to 
 run into the estuary just past the meeting of 
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 the waters. At a corner there was an Italian 
 ice-crearn vendor, hands in pockets, by his 
 yellow hand-cart. Over all whirled the 
 smoke of the seven chimneys in tawny or 
 white or black clouds. Engines panted and 
 roared, and in black caves at the roadside 
 half-naked men moved in front of white-hot 
 fires and their boots squelched with sweat as 
 they walked. 
 
 Backwards and forwards went the workers 
 to and from their work, swift, thin men, 
 gossiping young women, children saluting 
 those who were lately their schoolfellows. 
 Cattle passed through and sometimes lost 
 their way among the planks and bricks 
 of half-built houses or the refuse of the 
 factories. 
 
 The streets ran in all directions, and 
 new gardens bordered on the moss and 
 whinberry of the bounding hills. And as 
 there were straggling lines of houses running 
 far out and up into the pasture and plough- 
 land and waste, so there were still open 
 
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 spaces among the streets where cows or 
 horses or pigs fed until the land was taken 
 up, while some pieces were unfenced and 
 trodden into mire or used for nothing or for 
 the deposit of rubbish. One such little 
 place was where "the murder" took place. 
 In the darkness, but close to the flare of 
 a fried-fish stall, two young married men 
 had battered the head of an older man 
 against a stone until he was dead. When 
 they were waiting on the platform for the 
 train that was to take them to the gaol, they 
 smoked cigarettes and joked with the crowd. 
 " When I was in the coalpit," said the lad, 
 "I knew one of them. He used to make 
 three or four of us get into an old truck with 
 him, and he stood up while we ran at him, 
 heads down like bulls. He liked it. We 
 couldn't hurt him. It's lucky he's gone so 
 soon, for he might have done more harm. 
 But you should see his whippets, regular 
 beauties. He was fond of them, too, 
 yes." 
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 Thence a footpath led us out through the 
 fields towards the old church, a beautiful 
 sloping walk that followed for some way the 
 windings of the chief river and its rustling 
 drab reeds. "There's nice the old church 
 looks," said my companion ; for it was bright 
 white amidst the green marsh turf, and the 
 grey estuary flowed close under the church- 
 yard walls to the bracken-coloured hills and 
 the white clouds over the sea. Just there 
 the sewage was to go out, and the lad laughed 
 at the discomfiture of the cocklers down there 
 on the coast whose trade would now be gone. 
 In the churchyard a few new graves had 
 been made under the sycamores, and all the 
 occupants were over eighty, at which the lad 
 observed : " 'Twas time for them to die, yes," 
 and smiled because it seemed absurd in this 
 brand-new hurrying world to live so long. 
 The old grave-stones leaned all ways, and 
 some were prone ; few kept their legends 
 readable. We peeped inside the church : 
 it was white and cool as a dairy, undis- 
 E 65
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 turbed by the violation of the river nymphs 
 yonder. 
 
 We ascended the gentle hill beyond the 
 church, once a favourite walk on summer 
 evenings, to see the sun set over the moun- 
 tains. A large field had been recently 
 enclosed as a cemetery on the brow, and 
 already it was sprinkled with white stones 
 and plumy sable trees. " It will come nice 
 in a year or two," said my companion. We 
 looked down at the estuary, and he showed 
 me with delight where the new railway 
 bridge was to be carried across it in order 
 to save London passengers three minutes in 
 a five hours' journey. I like to see a train 
 going swift and low above a broad water 
 against a background of hills, but I thought 
 it would spoil the old view. He on the 
 contrary was so lost in awe at the cost of 
 the short cut that he had no thought of 
 lesser things. 
 
 We returned by the fulling mill. There 
 the stream was as bright as ever and full of 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 dash and foam. The little house was cleanly 
 thatched and whitewashed, the wall round 
 it also was white, and the apple-tree beside 
 it was bushy with mistletoe. Brass and 
 steel and lustre ware shone in the firelight 
 within. There were wall-flowers as ever at 
 the gate, a handful only, but perpetual. 
 Picture postcards of the house were to be 
 bought in the village, I was told : everyone 
 bought them to send away to friends as 
 Souvenirs of D. 
 
 As we walked a stuck pig began to 
 scream, and continued to do so while we 
 travelled half a mile : " It takes a long time 
 dying," remarked the lad who was careless 
 of the marriage bells that accompanied the 
 unwavering scream. 
 
 Before entering among the streets again I 
 turned to see once more in the moist sunshine 
 the church and the sycamores and wall, the 
 tumulus and its oaks on one side, the river 
 winding bright and bowing its reeds, the 
 estuary, the mountains beyond, the white 
 
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 cloud mountains in the blue that spoke 
 clearly of the invisible sea below. 
 
 As I walked past the shops, neither urban 
 nor rustic, entirely new and as glaring as 
 possible, but awkward, without traditions 
 and without originality, I was full of magnifi- 
 cent regrets. I ought to have had a mantle 
 of tragic hue to swathe myself in mysterious 
 and haughty woe and to flutter ineffable 
 things in the wind, as I trod the streets that 
 were desolate for me. 
 
 It was now time to make for the poet's 
 house. This was one of the oldest houses, 
 about thirty years old, his age. It was a stone 
 building of displeasing proportions, meant to 
 be one of a row but standing alone, unlike 
 the native style, with iron railings in front on 
 the precipitous road. The vegetable garden 
 behind fell down to the least of the three 
 rivers, which as yet was almost undefiled 
 because it flowed for the greater part of its 
 course through a deep and narrow and very 
 steep-sided coombe whose rocks and spindly 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 but dense oaks and underwood of bramble 
 and hazel were impassable. 
 
 Inside, the house was divided strictly into 
 two, the poet's half and the other half. The 
 poet's half consisted above all of the largest 
 room in the house. The walls were hidden 
 by books and portraits of poets and bards. 
 Its floors were almost as densely overgrown 
 as the coombe, with oak armchairs whose 
 richness of decorative carving equalled their 
 discomfort. These were prizes won at Eistedd- 
 fodau by the successful poem on some religious 
 subject or subject which could be treated 
 religiously. The poet had written more poems 
 than there were chairs ; for he was well-read 
 in English and classical literatures and had 
 a boldness of imagery which the judges, 
 ministers of various sects, sometimes declared 
 in marginal notes to be affected. In spite of 
 anti-macassars on the chairs, in spite of 
 thousands of books which generations of 
 critics had approved (for the most part 
 complete sets in uniform and unworn bind- 
 
 69
 
 ings), in spite of the poet's ever boyish face, 
 his rough black hair and clothes that had 
 just scrambled up the river bed from stone 
 to stone and root to root of alder and oak, 
 and the deep melodious voice that turned 
 prose into epic poetry as he read it, in spite 
 of ferns in the fireplace, the room was cold 
 with a moral and spiritual chill. 
 
 I was glad of the voice which summoned 
 us into the next room, the long flagged 
 kitchen, a little dark, but lit as by lightning 
 from the great fire whose flames were re- 
 peated by lustre-ware and brass candlesticks 
 on the mantelpiece, a hundred brightly 
 coloured jugs upon the black dresser, a long 
 polished gun hanging from the rafters, and 
 the glass which protected the pictures of many 
 celebrities and the sheets of memorial verses 
 for dead members of the family. There, I 
 remember, I had read the Mabinogion long 
 before. . . . Mrs Morgan, the bard's mother, 
 greeted me as usual in Welsh and then 
 laughed in broken English at the fact that I 
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 seemed to know less Welsh than ever, though 
 I still knew the Welsh names for King 
 Arthur's sword, spear and shield. " But I 
 am glad to see you, dear Mr Philips." 
 
 She was a tall yellow-haired woman with 
 a family of children ranging from forty to 
 ten years of age. Her decided stoop seemed 
 the product rather of her humility of mind 
 than of decay, for her activity was endless 
 and never overtaxed. She had large bony 
 restless hands contrasting humorously with 
 the decent black of her dress. She talked 
 caressingly in Welsh to the silent beautiful 
 daughter who helped her in the work of the 
 house. 
 
 The table was set for two : such was the 
 inevitable custom. The poet and I sat down, 
 and as we did so, his mother set a steaming 
 joint at a side table and carved it rapidly 
 while she stood and talked, the daughter at 
 the same time bringing two blue dishes of 
 leeks and baked potatoes to the white cloth 
 and returning, without an interval, for two
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 plates from the oven; these her mother 
 covered with meat, and they were immediately 
 laid before us. Then mother and daughter 
 stood, both silent now, at either side of the 
 fire while we ate and languidly talked. 
 
 The girl was black-haired, straight, and 
 well-proportioned, her cheeks rosy, her full- 
 dark lips eloquently curved, her eyes large 
 and brown like a child's, and her whole face 
 beaming with profound brightness, simplicity, 
 holiness. She might have been twenty-five 
 years old, and was one of those infinitely 
 tender, self-sacrificing girls in whom children 
 at once salute the spiritual motherhood, who 
 are learned in all mother's ways, can play and 
 nurse and manage, and yet, unconsciously 
 detecting some weakness in the awful 
 opposite sex, are destined never to be mothers 
 in the flesh. Love and fear melt their eyes 
 to a softness that is very wonderful and 
 govern their silent ways ; love is the stronger, 
 but the fear though it is often forgotten is 
 never destroyed. 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 When these two women saw that our plates 
 were nearly empty they came forward, one to 
 each of us, and helped us to more or took 
 away our plates ; and so long as I am ignor- 
 ant of what it is to be waited on by angels I 
 cannot forget this meal. They uttered no 
 word while we talked of Virgil and Alexander 
 Smith and the taxation of land-values, but 
 tut ! I was sick of such talk as I was of my 
 host's apple-green tie. As I got up from the 
 table I felt something between shame and 
 the pride of the convalescent in his tyrant 
 bed. We returned to the study. 
 
 Well, we talked, I know, but I have for- 
 gotten what. The poet recited some of his 
 own verses, and we complained together in 
 raptures of regret about the growth of the 
 village, and as we were doing so his mother 
 entered, but would not sit. 
 
 " I hear," said I, anxious to speak to her, 
 "that they are going to open a new coal 
 mine up by the Great Crag and the otter's 
 holt. It used to be a favourite place of yours, 
 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 Mrs Morgan, and mine too ; there was not a 
 nicer place in the country when the nuts were 
 ripe and the harvest ending." 
 
 " 'Tis beautiful, truly," she said gravely ; 
 "I hope the mine will give many men 
 work ; there are many needing it, Mr 
 Phillips." 
 
 " But they will spoil the beautiful angle of 
 the river there. Think of it your river, 
 your crag no more nuts, all the royal fern 
 buried in coal dust." 
 
 " Mother isn't a poet, are you, mother ? " 
 said my host. 
 
 " No, Willy," said she, " and if I were I 
 couldn't tell you the things I have seen and 
 thought about by the Great Crag. I am 
 sorry the fern will have to go, but, dear me, 
 the poor of us must have shoes and bread 
 and a pasty now and then, Mr Phillips, and 
 the rich must have their carriages and money 
 to buy the poetry books, Willy." 
 
 "You've a hard spot in your heart, 
 mother." 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 "Yes, and I daresay I need it, my son. 
 When a woman begins to work at six years 
 old like me and a man at five like your father, 
 they must get a bit hard if they are to keep 
 on, and there's many are all hard and small 
 blame to them. Yes, sure, I think the world 
 of these soft ladies, but I can't set myself up 
 against them ; I haven't had their privileges. 
 Oh, I look for wonderful things from you 
 young ones that have had your way made 
 easy. It will be a kind good world I am 
 sure, though I'm not grumbling at what 
 we're living in. We old ones didn't exactly 
 look to be happy in this world except on 
 New Year's Eve and the like, and yet it 
 came about that we were happy, too, beyond 
 our deserts, I daresay. I have seen changes 
 in my time, and wages have gone up and 
 food gone down, and glad I was when the 
 loaf came cheap and we could afford to fat 
 three pigs and sell one, but, bless you, it isn't 
 by wages and food that we are made happy. 
 They were good things, and I hope they will 
 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 stay and wages be higher and food as good 
 as it is cheap, but there's something else, 
 though what it is I'm not going to try to say ; 
 that's for the poets, Willy." 
 
 She went out to get tea ready and to leave 
 us to our loftiness. 
 
 After tea apple pasties, you know, home- 
 made bread, little flat currant cakes, all Mrs 
 Morgan's baking I had to choose between 
 staying indoors and talking about books and 
 going to see the Owens, Mrs Morgan's cousins. 
 She liked to show round a visitor from 
 London, and she could wear her best bonnet 
 with violets in it and gossip freely. It was 
 the beginning of the cooling of my friendship 
 with Morgan when I chose to go with his 
 mother : he saw that my love of poetry was 
 only skin-deep. But what was the good? 
 The mother was worth twenty of him though 
 she had only one high-backed chair without 
 arms were she never so tired. I never saw a 
 sweeter and nobler acceptance of life. She 
 welcomed the new without forgetting the old 
 76
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 and gave both their due because she felt she 
 would never have said it, for she would have 
 considered such high thinking arrogant that 
 the new and the old, the institutions, the 
 reforms, the shops, the drainage system, were 
 the froth made by the deep tides of men's 
 inexpressible perverse desires. On Sunday 
 she was a Methodist, but hers was a real 
 Catholicism. She saw good even in the new 
 drains, and as we crossed the bridge over 
 their little river she said : 
 
 "When the drain pipes are laid, I shan't 
 have to let the slops run into Willy's river. 
 He, good lad, doesn't know how should he ? 
 he doesn't see such things he doesn't know 
 they run in now. I told him he musn't drink 
 the water there, that is all. But soon he 
 will be able to. He is fond of the little river, 
 he calls it Castaly or something, and says it 
 is a poet's river. It runs from the little 
 lake by where I was born the pretty lake ! 
 have you been there in your long walks? 
 Willy never went so far and he declares it 
 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 runs from Mount Hel Helicon. He is a true 
 poet, I think, Mr Phillips. But the new 
 poets are different. There was old Mr 
 Jenkins, now, when he was a young preacher 
 and poet his sweetheart died, and when they 
 had let the coffin down into the grave he 
 jumped in after it lay down upon it and 
 never said a word, and when they took him 
 out, it was thought he would not be long for 
 this world. . . ." 
 
 The Owens' house stood opposite a waste 
 field where the neighbours threw broken 
 crockery, and a donkey grazed round the 
 broken shell of a factory lately deserted. In 
 ruins these mean buildings took on some 
 venerableness in my sight. 
 
 Mrs Owen knew less English than Mrs 
 Morgan. She greeted me so warmly that 
 I was abashed to think I brought nothing 
 but myself. 
 
 "How are you, Mr Phillips? No more 
 Welsh, I see, and I've forgotten my 
 English." 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 Here the children who spoke both lan- 
 guages laughed with good-humoured con- 
 tempt 
 
 " How are the children and Mrs Phillips ? 
 . . . How many children is it now ? " 
 
 " Still two," I said. 
 
 " Two ! " she replied with a smile, and 
 wiped the dough from her fingers in her 
 apron : she spoke in genial irony. 
 
 "You forget that Mr Philipps is a very 
 wise young man, Sarah," said Mrs Morgan, 
 chidingly. 
 
 "He will be wiser," snapped Mrs Owen, 
 " when he has had ten children and seen 
 five of them go away, and some not come 
 back. As for two, two is toys." 
 
 I wish I could paint that tin-plater's house 
 not the outside which was horrible, and 
 designed by Mr Owen himself, though I 
 noticed that two pairs of martins had blessed 
 its stucco with their nests in the past summer. 
 Inside there were two large rooms, cold and 
 stark and full of the best furniture, huge 
 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 chests of drawers for Sunday clothes, family 
 Bibles, photographs in gaudy frames, linoleum 
 like painted ice. They were the chapels 
 sacred to the family's respectability, and I 
 could not understand the rites and ceremonies 
 and sacrifices thereof. The third room had 
 a perennial broad fire, summer and winter, 
 for baking, cooking, and drying clothes, 
 Everything shone with use, and aloft in Mr 
 Owen's tobacco smoke piped the canary who 
 seemed to wish for nothing better. The 
 door opened into a little wash-house, where 
 they kept the flour and the enormous sides 
 of the last-killed pig lay white in saltpetre 
 and brine. Bacon hung from the rafters of 
 the kitchen itself, a whole side, a whole 
 ham, and a long thin strip that had just 
 supplied the frying pan which Mrs Owen 
 was holding. 
 
 " This frying pan has fried forty pigs," 
 she remarked, holding back her head from 
 the hissing rashers while she turned 
 them. 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 When she was not at the fire she was 
 opening the oven to take out an apple pasty, 
 or getting on with the spreading of the 
 table for the meal, or sorting the clothes 
 that overflowed two baskets of the largest 
 size, or buttering a slice of bread to silence 
 the youngest girl, or telling Tommy not to 
 play football in the room while visitors were 
 there, or preparing the supper of bread and 
 bacon and soup which Tommy was to take 
 for his eldest brother to eat at his night's 
 work, or wiping her grandchildren's noses as 
 they flocked in to get some bread and bacon 
 fat and stare at the stranger who knew no 
 Welsh : or she was sighing with a smile at 
 her weakness and lack of two pairs of hands 
 while she rested those she had upon her hips 
 for a moment only, and talking all the time, 
 asking questions, giving orders, describing 
 her visit to London which she detests ( " dear 
 me, Mr Phillips, however can you live in it ? 
 There isn't a loaf of bread fit to eat to be 
 bought there and scarcely a woman with 
 
 F Si
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 sense to make her own, and you daren't keep 
 a pig, nor yet breathe for fear of swallowing 
 what doesn't belong to you and you don't 
 want") or singing in a wild contralto the 
 most melancholy and most splendid of the 
 Welsh hymns. She weighed nearly twenty 
 stone, but she never sat down. 
 
 Her husband, a pale man whose work you 
 might think (if you hadn't seen him garden- 
 ing, or taking his children ten miles away 
 into the mountains with a present of seed 
 potatoes for a cousin) had worn out every- 
 thing in him but his good nature and love of 
 a pipe of shag. The words of his conversa- 
 tion came from a daily paper, but he had the 
 peace which passes understanding, and for 
 wisdom he could depend on his wife. 
 Neither she in her strength nor he in his 
 sensibility had ever struck one of their 
 children. He was whittling an oak stick, 
 but he stopped to take me up the garden 
 where he showed me by lantern light his 
 tomato plants in a green-house of his own 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 making, and then stirred out the vast pig 
 for me to admire. He seemed to regard the 
 pig as a kind of brother who sacrificed him- 
 self for the good of others almost willingly 
 out of consideration for the expensive food 
 which had fattened him ; and until the day 
 of the knife he was treated as a brother 
 seldom is. 
 
 On the wall of the kitchen there were a 
 few pictures, of Spurgeon, of Gladstone, of 
 the Crucifixion, and a portrait of the eldest 
 child, born out of wedlock and dead long 
 ago, a pretty maid, Olwen Angharad. Six 
 of the children were in the room, two of 
 them married sons, pale, overworked but 
 handsome, cheerful men who had dropped 
 in to ask questions about London, to tell 
 their father the weight of the pigs they were 
 fattening and ask after his, and to exchange 
 banter with their inexhaustible mother 
 their wives were not like that, but just pretty 
 slips of women beginning to bear children 
 and not baking their own bread, either. 
 
 83
 
 After their mother they admired most their 
 eldest sister, aged eighteen. She worked at 
 the tin- works all day and had done so for four 
 years and was now as busy as her mother 
 by the fire and at the table, talking little 
 except with her eyes which flashed a variety 
 of speeches between the look of command to 
 her youngest brother and sister and the look 
 of comprehension or expectancy to her 
 mother. She had reached the perfect height 
 of woman, which height I had never been 
 sure of until I saw her. Her hair was of the 
 nearest yellow to gold that is compatible 
 with great physical energy and strength. I 
 cannot explain how it was bound up in such 
 a way as to boast of its luxuriance and yet 
 leave the delicate even shape of her head un- 
 spoiled. Her face was rather long than 
 short, her nose of good size and straight, her 
 lips inclining to be full, kind and strong also, 
 her grey eyes burning with splendour, her 
 eyebrows darker than her hair and curved 
 like two wings of a falcon, her ears but 
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 such an inventory is absurd. Her face, 
 whether in repose or radiant, expressed 
 health, courage, kindliness, intelligence, with 
 superb unconscious pride. She could bandy 
 words with any man, and there were not 
 wanting men to tell her with a calculating 
 eye for the effect of their words that she 
 had reached physical perfection ; yet she was 
 not wanton, nor bashful nor vain. No 
 Roman woman could have excelled her in 
 power and dignity, no barbarian in exuberant 
 strength. She had grace but no graces, 
 beauty but no beauties. She ruled even 
 her mother ; but she did not know it So 
 much loved was she that her youngest 
 sister was heard praying that her lover 
 would die, lest he should take her away 
 from home. 
 
 Her three younger sisters showed what 
 she had been : the one of seventeen was still 
 too hesitating and slender in her grace ; the 
 next, of fifteen, was too impudent, though 
 for the moment she was quiet and sleeping 
 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 away her weariness on the horse-hair sofa 
 under the canary's cage ; the youngest, aged 
 thirteen, was still too much of a powerful 
 animal. 
 
 Her youngest brother was fourteen, almost 
 his eldest sister's equal in height, brawnily 
 made, unwieldy, fierce except at home where 
 at most he was lazily, laughingly truculent, 
 more often grumbling amiably over some 
 task. 
 
 They were all but pure Welsh, one grand- 
 mother being from Cornwall. The girls 
 were fair, the boys black-haired. 
 
 Admirable as they were apart they made 
 an indescribable harmony together. Some- 
 times all talked at once, the youngest boy's 
 deep brawl almost overpowering the rest. 
 Sometimes one told a tale and all attended. 
 Sometimes the talk travelled mysteriously 
 from one to another, and to and fro and 
 crosswise, as if some outside power had 
 descended invisibly in their midst and were 
 making a melody out of their lips and eyes, 
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 a melody which, I think, never ceased in 
 their hearts. Nearly always they smiled 
 and if the gravity of the talk seemed about 
 to extinguish this smile there was one pair 
 of eyes or lips at least sparkling or rippling 
 with the profound joy which no plummet of 
 sorrow sounded. Nor was this talk mild 
 gossip undertaken unconsciously to meet the 
 fact that they were all of one family and in 
 the presence of the father and the mother. 
 For it was fearless. The father spoke his 
 thoughts and the boy his, and there was 
 nothing which anyone of them would have 
 said or secretly laughed at with com- 
 panions which they would not say before 
 all. 
 
 There was noise and stir unceasing, but 
 no haste, no care. 
 
 "What a flower bed it is, to be sure," 
 whispered Mrs Morgan to Mrs Owen as we 
 concluded the skirmish of a crowded meal 
 of new loaves, seaweed " bread," bacon, apple 
 pasty, and plentiful thin tea. 
 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 "Ah, you are a poet's mother, Mrs 
 Morgan," she replied. 
 
 They gossiped in low tones. 
 
 " How is poor Mrs Ho well's son that lost 
 his arm in the works by you ? " 
 
 " Getting on well. He has two nurses in 
 the hospital and they are very kind. But 
 you know these women : he wants his 
 mother." 
 
 "Poor boy. He was playing when it 
 happened, wasn't he ? " 
 
 "Yes. They say it was his own fault, 
 as if that made it any better for him or 
 the manager who will prove negligence, of 
 course. It won't stop the boys playing, 
 and my husband wasn't playing when he 
 met his death. Never mind. They are 
 going to set him up in a fried fish shop, 
 a good idea." 
 
 While these two gossiped the eldest boy 
 sang " Morfa Rhuddlan " and " Hob y deri 
 dando " the most mournful and the merriest 
 of the old Welsh songs. 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 I was a little sad at times. I was disturbed, 
 as Mrs Morgan could not be, at all this gaiety 
 in the heart of the village darkness, partly 
 because I was unable to see why it should 
 exist, and as foolishly sure that there would 
 never be an end to the darkness unless it 
 eclipsed this gaiety in a revolution of some 
 kind impious thought and unpardonable if 
 it had not been vain. That gaiety cannot be 
 quenched. 
 
 I stayed that night with the poet, begging 
 to be allowed to sit in the kitchen, where his. 
 mother left us with a parting look of rever- 
 ence for those who would be talking about 
 books while she lay awake thinking of her 
 daughter in a London shop where she had 
 never been, her son in the far west, her 
 husband dead. 
 
 Next morning she took me by a long 
 way round to the station. I remember 
 I was wearing a coat which I had had 
 made for me five years before with three 
 pockets in it especially to hold copies 
 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 of the poems of Shelley, of Sophocles, of 
 Catullus ; even then I bulged with the books, 
 but carried them out of superstition, not 
 for use. 
 
 We passed the estuary, and she pointed out 
 the long barrow on one side and the tumulus 
 on the other. The men in the old time had 
 a bridge from one to the other, she had 
 heard. We emerged from the last clustered 
 cottages of the village on to a road high 
 above Castaly. There were the goldfinches ! 
 as many as ever in the rough pasture above 
 the copse : she knew them. Didn't I think 
 the copse the same, and the foaming river 
 in the heart of it ? One by one she named 
 the bright farms on the side of the Great 
 Crag opposite. White cloud rack was 
 decamping from the red bracken and yellow 
 larch on its flanks, and from the gaunt grey 
 humps and cairns of its summit. The 
 bracken was redder, the larch yellower, than 
 ever, as if all had been the work of the 
 spirits of the mist. The curlew's cry and 
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 Mothers and Sons 
 
 chuckle were more wildly sweet. Our feet 
 deep in the red mud of the road, we saw, 
 fresher than ever, the gleaming wavering 
 last hazel leaves and the stems of the oaks 
 and hazels. 
 
 " And that is pretty too, isn't it ? " asked 
 Mrs Morgan, pointing to the seven black 
 chimneys grouped just as I had seen them in 
 the dawn of the day before. " I can't walk 
 farther than this nowadays, but I like to 
 come here and look first at Great Crag and 
 then at the village, then at Great Crag and 
 then at the village again, and I don't turn 
 any more but go straight down hill and 
 home. You must go that way, too, to 
 catch your train. Leave me, I will go 
 slow and you must hurry. Good-bye, Mr 
 Phillips. Come again and bring your books 
 and stay a long time, and you shan't be 
 disturbed." 
 
 If I go again, I shall not trouble to take 
 my books. But I shan't go. She has left 
 the village. Her son tore himself away
 
 Mothers and Sons 
 
 with infinite tears of rhyme for the river, 
 and she silently. He got work elsewhere, 
 and she of course must follow with her 
 daughter, to bake the bread by which 
 poets live. 
 
 92
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 THE cottage was built upon the rock which 
 just there protruded from the earth; and 
 which was the rock and which the rough 
 stone of the walls could not easily be told, so 
 rude was the structure and so neatly was it 
 whitened from the low eaves down to the 
 soil. The threshold was whitened, so also 
 were the stones of the path, the low wall in 
 front, and several huge fragments here and 
 there both within and without the gate. 
 These white stones served instead of flowers. 
 Other ornaments outside there were not, 
 except stonecrop on the garden wall and at 
 the sides of the threshold flagstone, a tall 
 solitary spire of yellow mullein growing out 
 of the top of the garden wall, and on the 
 thatch itself a young elder tree against the 
 white chimney stump, and an archipelago of 
 
 93
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 darkest green moss which was about to be- 
 come a solid continent and to obliterate the 
 straw. Thatch and moss beetled over the 
 walls which were pierced by two small 
 windows of diamond panes. The chief light, 
 when the door between these windows was 
 shut, came from the fire-place which, with its 
 iron and brasswork and the door of the brick 
 oven adjacent, nearly filled one side of the 
 living room. But the door was nearly always 
 open, revealing most of the dark cave within, 
 its red flameless fire, its bright knobs and 
 bars of iron and brass, and the polished odds 
 and ends of copper and brass on the mantel- 
 piece or hanging on the wall candlesticks, 
 snuffers, horse-trappings, a gill measure, part 
 of an old pair of scales, a small shell from a 
 Boer battlefield. 
 
 The cottage must have been built before 
 the road was made, or the roadmakers had 
 omitted to notice it ; for it lay back a hundred 
 yards from the high hedge on top of a wall, 
 through which a stile led over a rough 
 94
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 meadow, between almost solid hillocks of 
 brambles and clusters of royal fern under 
 alder trees, to the white wall, the white 
 stones, the cabbage plot and the white house 
 itself. To a passing child it appeared that 
 the cottage had originally been built in the 
 heart of a stony wood ; gradually the larger 
 number of the trees had been cut down, thus 
 exposing the cottage to someone on the road 
 who had then been inspired to cut through 
 the hedge and its wall, to cross the field, to 
 drive out the savage or fairy inhabitants, and 
 to take possession of it. In the field there 
 were still great butts of oak visible, and on 
 the further side of the house, showing above 
 the chimney, were three dead trees close to- 
 gether raising a few shortened, stripped, and 
 rigid pale arms to the sky and to deities who 
 had long ago deserted them, the house and the 
 surrounding land of small fields as rough as 
 a windy sea, stone walls, hedges of aspen, oak 
 and ash, rocky rises clothed lightly in oaks of 
 snaky and slender growth, and beyond and 
 
 95
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 above, on all sides but one, hills so covered 
 with loose silvern crags among their bracken 
 and birch that they resembled enormous 
 cairns where perhaps those deities had been 
 buried under loads sufficient to keep them 
 dungeoned away from any chance of meddling 
 with a changed world. 
 
 In the cottage lived a mother and son. 
 She was very little and very old. Her hair 
 was still dark brown, her eyes almost as dark, 
 her skin not quite so dark as her eyes, a nut- 
 brown woman, lean, sweet, and wholesome- 
 looking as a nut. She might often be seen 
 sitting and looking to the south-west when a 
 gap in the hills framed a vision of mountain 
 peaks twenty miles beyond ; and always she 
 smiled a little. A passer-by might have 
 thought that she never did anything but sit 
 inside or outside the open door unless he had 
 noticed the whiteness of the stones and the 
 polish on the metal in the room where she 
 had for fifty years collected things that could 
 be polished. Few ever saw Catherine Anne 
 96
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 at work save her son, and he not often, for 
 he was away early and home late. He left 
 her entirely alone, visited of none unless on 
 days when the smart tradesman strode up the 
 path, deposited her weekly packages on the 
 table while he commented on the weather, 
 and then replacing his pencil behind his ear 
 bade her " Good Afternoon " in English. It 
 was one of the few English remarks to which 
 she could reply in English. Her only other 
 English words were " beautiful " and " excur- 
 sion train." For though some of the brown in 
 her face was a gift of tropic suns in the days 
 when she sailed with her husband on his 
 ship, she had learned nothing but Welsh. 
 The old man, so she called him though dead 
 these forty years, had been against her learn- 
 ing English. A God-knowing and God-fear- 
 ing Methodist, he had seen in that tongue 
 the avenue through which his beautiful young 
 wife might receive the knowledge of good 
 and evil. After his death at sea she had of her 
 own accord refused all contact with the thing, 
 G 97
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 and now when it was all around her she 
 
 never moved from the house. Her son knew 
 
 it, but at home he spoke the native idiom, 
 
 and when she heard him she seemed to be 
 
 once more in her father's house, or in the 
 
 orchard where little red apples overhung the 
 
 rocky brook at the mountain foot. There it 
 
 was that she gained, no one knows how, the 
 
 nourishment from mother earth that gave her 
 
 the deep contentment expressed in her health 
 
 and her smile, in the shining metal, and in 
 
 her patience which was not endurance or 
 
 torpor patience of an order that seemed to 
 
 be all but extinct in the world. Memory and 
 
 hope were at balance in the brain that looked 
 
 out of her brown eyes, and the present 
 
 moment, often dull-seeming or even unkind, 
 
 did not exist for her. Those eyes never 
 
 closed while she sat by her door, and it might 
 
 be conjectured that as she gazed east and 
 
 north and west she saw more than the white 
 
 stones and yellow stonecrop, the alders and 
 
 royal fern, the hedge following the road, the 
 
 98
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 lean oak trees among the rocks, the farther 
 hills and their curlews and cairns, the sky, and 
 now and then the uttermost mountains, which 
 were all that an observer could see. If 
 the casual observer waited more than a few 
 moments in summer he might see that she 
 was never quite alone. The air between her 
 and the hills was the playground of several 
 pairs of black swifts, wheeling and leaping 
 round and up and down and straight forward, 
 so that the bluest sky was never blank or the 
 brightest grass without a shadow. Out of 
 these birds two often screamed down precipi- 
 tously to the white cottage and disappeared 
 in their nests under the thatch above her 
 head. Catherine Anne smiled a little more 
 at these sudden stormy visits, and there were 
 times when it seemed certain that she re- 
 ceived others, though neither visible nor 
 audible. 
 
 Some thought that she believed the swifts 
 to be some kind of spirits, and one who was 
 very wise said that if Catherine Anne Jones 
 
 99
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 had been cleverer she might have been a 
 wicked woman. 
 
 All the other swifts lived in the church. 
 These had singled out her roof. They always 
 returned to her ; they had been there, ever 
 since she came, every summer, singling that 
 little place out of the whole earth and sky. 
 She saw them high and swift and wild in the 
 blue, and then she felt the flutter of their 
 wings as they arrived at the eaves, and heard 
 their soft talk together in the darkness. On 
 summer evenings she saw them ascend into 
 the heavens and not return, as blessed spirits 
 might do; only on the morrow they were 
 back again. They were always young, always 
 equally dashing and j oy ous. It was whispered 
 that she believed them to be the souls of her 
 tvro children that died as babes, and they 
 had come to her soon after the loss. " They 
 were too young to know what to do in 
 Heaven," she was reported to have said, " and 
 so they were allowed to play about in Wales 
 all the summer. But at night they have to 
 100
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 return to see if they are wanted. Blessed 
 birds. I daresay all birds are good if we 
 only knew. I suppose I am too old to be 
 one, but if it were lawful I should like 
 nothing better than to live like them, passing 
 the time until Judgment Day. What a lot 
 of people there will be there to be sure 
 there were over three hundred in my native 
 place when I was a girl, and I don't think 
 there is one alive but me. I think some 
 ought to be birds. Birds take up so little 
 room, and they could not do any mischief if 
 they wanted to. Now, if only the town 
 people were all to be turned into birds. 
 Lord, such a fright I had two years ago last 
 February. I was sitting here, it being 
 fine, to see the sun rise, and up from the 
 town came a swarm of wings as many as 
 there are leaves in yonder wood, small dark 
 birds all close together and making a whist- 
 ling noise, and I thought to myself, It has 
 happened after all ; they have changed all 
 the people into blessed birds. No, I was 
 
 101
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 not afraid about my son, for, thought I, now 
 he will not be able to drink anything but 
 cold water, and perhaps he will come to live 
 in the church. I was glad. I thought of 
 taking a walk down there just to see how 
 the place looked, when along came the In- 
 surance man He isn't a bird, I thought to 
 myself and says : ' Are you looking at the 
 starlings, mam ? ' ' No,' says I, and I was 
 vexed. Dear me, all those birds was a 
 beautiful sight, and such a nice noise they 
 made between them as if they were glad to 
 be going away from that place. It is a funny 
 thing about birds, how different they are. 
 Mrs Williams said to me once when she was 
 courting, ' Why, Mrs Jones there are several 
 kinds of birds.' Several ! There are as many 
 different kinds as there are men, and that is 
 saying a lot, and remember I have sailed 
 over the ocean five years and went ashore in 
 all the ports of this mortal world. They are 
 like people, only they don't seem to do any 
 harm. Nice things ! I used to think they 
 102
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 must be very good not to be jealous of us 
 having all the houses and food and things, 
 but if people only knew they would be jealous 
 of the birds. They are all different, or else 
 how could He know when any one of the 
 sparrows falls to the ground. They don't 
 know what it is to be idle or too busy, 
 nor the difference between work and play. 
 There are not any rich and poor, and 
 they respect one another. They are not all 
 tangled up and darkened with a number of 
 things. Then look how few of them die 
 did you ever see a dead bird ? except 
 men shoot them. The reason is, they are 
 good enough for Heaven as they are, so 
 up they go like the dew when we are 
 not looking." 
 
 It was not entirely due to the position of 
 her front door that she always looked north 
 or east or west, and chiefly west. From the 
 back door her son's feet had worn a path 
 which could be seen winding south over 
 several fields until it was lost, by the next 
 
 103
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 cottage, in another road, also going south, 
 towards " that place." 
 
 She considered herself on the edge of the 
 town, but still distinctly out of it. The next 
 cottage, where the footpath joined the road, 
 was in the town, so she thought ; yet there 
 was no outward sign of it unless that its 
 low walls were not as clean, nor its 
 brass so plentiful and so bright, and that 
 its door, facing south, was often shut, 
 and always when the wind was from that 
 quarter. 
 
 From Catherine Anne's back door could 
 be seen the roof and part of the wall of this 
 cottage, another exactly like it a little beyond, 
 then a cluster, including one not of whitened 
 native stone, but of red brick and black mortar. 
 All these were on the road. On either side 
 of it, southward, there was a farm or two, 
 white, but with sheds of corrugated iron that 
 rattled under the mist drops from the ash 
 trees embracing the group. From these farm- 
 yards the geese strutted across wet meadows 
 104
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 in a line as if setting out on a long voyage. 
 Beyond, the rough land sank, hiding all but 
 the smoke of yet more houses in a hollow, 
 and rose again to an unbroken line of slate 
 roofs and dirty white walls, cutting into the 
 bases of snowy cloud mountains whose look 
 told that underneath them was the sea. 
 Similar houses in irregular lines and groups, 
 were dotted on the treeless fields to the east 
 and west of this main line. These were the 
 first houses of the town and they were not 
 a mile from the cottage. Beyond them the 
 land fell away but rose again after several 
 lesser rises and falls into great hills whose 
 tops commanded the sea to the south and 
 east and, on the clearer Sundays of the year, 
 the same mountains as Catherine Anne's 
 front door. These concealed rises and falls, 
 and the slopes of the great hills, were the 
 town. 
 
 From the brink, where that unbroken line 
 of roofs notched the white clouds with its 
 chimneys, the whole town could be seen. 
 
 105
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 Over this brink fell the southward road and 
 with it lesser roads which soon branched and 
 multiplied into the mass of the town which 
 choked the valleys as if it had slid down the 
 hills in avalanches. The hills formed almost 
 a circle, broken only by a gap on either 
 side letting in the river from the moun- 
 tains and out to the sea. Thus the town 
 sprawled over the sides of a rudely carven 
 bowl with deeply scalloped edges and 
 with a bottom flat nowhere save at 
 the narrow strip around the stream. The 
 summits of these hills were clear of 
 houses, and great expanses of their sides, 
 though obviously conquered by the town, 
 were still virgin and green and strewn 
 with great stones. 
 
 Two of the hills on one side, that farthest 
 from the stream, were not marked by a single 
 street. Of these one, the highest of all, was 
 clothed in grass from foot to ridge except on 
 a broad lap which it made halfway up, and 
 on that there was a house standing at the 
 106
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 edge of a field sometimes golden with corn, 
 and divided from it by a clump of black firs. 
 The house was huge, both tall and wide, 
 grey and square, with many windows towards 
 the sea lighted only at sunset and that by 
 the last beams in which a score of them 
 blazed together. No road was seen climbing 
 the steep slope to the house or leaving it for 
 the ridge above. Some poet or haughty 
 extravagant prince must have built it there 
 inaccessibly with windows for the great town, 
 the sea, the mountains. It was sombre and 
 menacing. It was empty. It scorned the 
 town. In its turn the town had left it up 
 there to perish like an eagle upon a mountain 
 ledge, shot by the hunter, but out of his 
 reach. The neighbour hill was not so high, 
 but it was bare not only of houses but of 
 grass and corn and every green thing, and its 
 only trees stood near the summit, leafless and 
 birdless, stark and pale as if newly disinterred 
 from an ancient grave. They were being slowly 
 buried by the brown and fatal refuse scarred 
 
 107
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 deeply by rains and by ever new cataracts of 
 the same substance which covered and 
 largely composed this hill. Out of its summit 
 stuck a chimney and round it the black 
 figures of men came and went against the 
 sky. At the foot were other chimneys, 
 gigantic and black, and below them black 
 buildings whose windows glowed night 
 and day with fire such as the old house 
 had for a few moments at sunset. The 
 smoke mingled with white rain, and mi si 
 wreathed wildly about the brown and the 
 green hill. 
 
 Through the river's entry below these 
 chimneys might be seen other hills that sent 
 down tributaries to its waters, green hills 
 with ravines of oaks and one or two 
 white farms, and far beyond these, more 
 like the dream of a dreamer than rock 
 and peat, the abode of raven, buzzard and 
 badger, of freedom and health the moun- 
 tains of the source of the river. 
 
 The stream itself, in the midst of the town, 
 108
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 was a black and at times a yellow serpent in 
 a cage of steep iron-bound banks, watched 
 by furnace, store-house, and factory. It was 
 allowed a mock liberty only to stray into 
 other cages of steep-sided wharves. The 
 blackened labourer stood on the edge and 
 spat at it where it writhed deep below. A 
 careless child or a desperate man was 
 engulfed by it on some night of fire and 
 blackness, but it remained sullen and re- 
 garded not the trivial offering. The embrace 
 with the sea was licensed, bridled, sternly 
 watched by tall cranes, a hundred ships, and 
 the long bleached spine of a breakwater 
 where sea-faring men, idlers, and fluttering 
 girls walked up and down. 
 
 The courses of the avalanches from the 
 opposite hills were marked by white, dirty 
 white, grey, and all but black, belts of houses 
 broadening out to the mass in the valley. 
 At the broad brow of the hills, in sight of 
 the sea and of violet hills across the sea, 
 a few farm-houses and their outbuildings still 
 
 109
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 shone, while others mouldered grey and 
 aghast and without tenants. Some of their 
 fields were still left between the streets, but 
 their barbed wire and patched hedgerows 
 and walls imprisoned only an old horse or 
 two, a temporary flock of sheep or of lean 
 American steers on their way to the slaughter- 
 house and the tables of the town ; and even 
 where there were no houses straight lines 
 of streets were waiting to be built along. 
 Across this tainted and condemned grass, 
 even between the houses, trotted narrow 
 brooklets over stony beds to their sepulchres 
 in the town sewers. The houses on the 
 upper slopes were like Catherine Anne's, 
 though most were slated, not thatched. 
 Fowls stalked or scuttered round about 
 and through the open doors. The gardens 
 were walled with once whitened stones 
 and contained a few twisted apple trees. 
 Old women of a former age stood on 
 the doorsteps or moved busily in scanty 
 undress, bareheaded. Old men pottered 
 HO
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 about, or leaned on their spades to talk or 
 look out to sea or at the pigs. The smell 
 of baking bread was blown from the doors. 
 Their furniture, their Bible and theological 
 works, were old. The cure were descended 
 from sheep dogs that once herded the 
 mountain flocks on these slopes. The road 
 was still a watercourse, and the unnecessary 
 tradesman could hardly ascend if he wished, 
 except on foot. There was always a robin 
 in the roadway, a wagtail in the glittering 
 streamlet, often a rook on the square stone 
 chimney, looking down at the town as if his 
 ancestors had told him that it was new and 
 might disappear any night but as he saw 
 that nothing was likely to happen immedi- 
 ately he turned his head, hopped into the 
 air, and flew away over the hilltop. 
 
 The streets beginning on the hill-ridge ended 
 in the thickest of the town, in a medley of 
 steep criss-cross streets interrupted here and 
 there by black squares of workshops with 
 ever-burning furnaces and ever-smoking 
 
 III
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 chimneys. Here every inch of the soil was 
 covered with bricks, stones, cement, asphalte. 
 iron-work, granite blocks. Not a tree or 
 blade of grass was allowed to appear any- 
 where but in the graveyards, and even there 
 the earth was plated almost entirely with 
 tombstones. They were afraid of leaving 
 any space unguarded lest Nature should 
 show a regret, a curse or a warning. The 
 river was unsightly, but must be tolerated 
 alternately with insult and respect. But 
 even here there was not an end of the 
 " country." Through many open doors could 
 be seen furniture like Catherine Anne's, and 
 old women of her period. Thousands passed 
 them many times a day, but they were built 
 in days when everyone knew everyone else, 
 and so the doors were still left open while 
 the baking and the washing were done. The 
 drunkard stumbled out of the crowd into 
 the warm and rustic seclusion of his home. 
 The child rushed out from the cradle he was 
 tending and was swept along by the pro- 
 112
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 cession to meals or work. Women stood at 
 doorways and talked, while one went on with 
 her knitting or suckled her babe. A half- 
 naked child wriggled through the crowd 
 carrying tins of dough, for if they could not 
 bake, at least they would knead and leaven 
 their bread, at home. Many of the children 
 were bare-legged and headed, dirty, hungry, 
 and quick. Out of one or other of the 
 houses would come a bent woman, wrinkled 
 and foul, holding a shawl over her head, 
 looking as if she had spent a thousand years 
 in the cellar, crushed down in rigid, idle 
 suffering like a toad embedded in an oak 
 root. Such creatures, chiefly women, were 
 not uncommon. They were small, grey- 
 skinned, with clotted grey hair; they had 
 scarred faces, had lost an eye and most of 
 their teeth ; they wore soiled print or black 
 dresses, bedraggled like the plumage of a 
 dead bird in the mud and in colour approach- 
 ing the foul dust of the pavement and the 
 garbage of the gutter. In appearance they 
 H 113
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 were genuine autochthons. This earth of 
 flagstone, asphalte, granite, brick, iron, and 
 ashes, might have protruded such a monstrous 
 birth on a night of frost, to prove that it was 
 not yet barren in its age and ignominy. One 
 such crone crawling out into the light, un- 
 clean, dull and yet surprised, had a look as 
 if she had just been exhumed ; she might 
 have been buried alive in the foundation of 
 the town for luck, and had now emerged to 
 see what had been done. They were seen 
 outside the taverns with their hands hidden 
 under the remains of aprons, or were questing 
 in the dustbins for food or unbroken glass ; 
 often they carried babies in whose shapeless 
 faces was hidden the power to excel their 
 grandmothers. When they were drunk in 
 an alley a crowd of labourers and shopkeepers 
 gathered to watch their waving arms and 
 poisonous faces and hear their blazing 
 curses screeched against some unlucky man. 
 " There will be murder," said one. " It is a 
 shame that such things are allowed," said 
 114
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 another. None dared to enter the mouth 
 of the alley. The crowd recognised that a 
 different species, a chance-begotten, mis- 
 delivered, and curse-nourished spawn of 
 humanity was living side by side with them, 
 farther removed than slaves or domestic 
 animals. It was sometimes proposed that 
 if the streets were kept cleaner and the 
 sewage improved this race might vanish, 
 as if in fact it ate filth and lived in the 
 drains. No one dared to interfere. Presently 
 a woman rushed after the man into a 
 house, and the door was slammed with 
 a sound not of wood but of flesh and 
 bone. 
 
 Such were not numerous ; the majority 
 were genuine villagers, but the minority was 
 representative and it alone truly belonged to 
 the place. They were villagers with a differ- 
 ence. One face expressed nothing but the 
 abstraction caused by solitude in the midst 
 of myriads. The next smiled with the 
 intimacy of home or inn. Few had yet quite 
 
 n5
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 realised that they were living not at the edge 
 of a field but in the bowels of a town, though 
 most days it was impossible to hang clothes 
 out to dry in the flagged or asphalted or 
 trodden mud yards, since the air was so foul 
 that it was worth while buying the head of a 
 sheep fed in the neighbourhood for the sake 
 -of the copper in its teeth. Every house be- 
 held chimneys and furnaces from one 
 window, from another the masts of the 
 docks or the sea and its little sails or the 
 brown and the green hill side by side, over 
 the ploughed sea of slate roofs. On pleasant 
 days the smell of the sea, modified by the 
 docks, mingled with the acrid smell and taste 
 of smoke from the smelting of copper or the 
 burning of carcases for manure ; but at night 
 either smell was drowned in that of fried fish. 
 Every other house had a large window to 
 expose fruit, vegetables, groceries, meat, 
 "herbal remedies," and above all fried 
 fish, for sale. Every corner house was a 
 tavern, its windows foul with breath and 
 116
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 steam within and mud, rain, and fine 
 ashes without. The houses were small, 
 so that tavern and church and school 
 were conspicuously islanded among the low 
 roofs. 
 
 But, towards the river, away from the 
 avalanches of buildings, the houses were 
 high and supported on plate glass windows 
 of immense size. The streets curved and 
 doubled after a pattern created centuries ago 
 by the neighbourhood of a castle whose 
 Norman masonry was still hiding in frag- 
 ments behind or within some of the shops. 
 Inns and shops were old but with glittering 
 new faces of glass, stone, ornamented tiles, 
 and vast gold letters. The wires of telegraph, 
 telephone, and electric light ran amongst and 
 over antique stone and timber work. Every 
 inch was obviously designed or converted 
 to serve an immediate purpose ; there was 
 no largeness, no waste, nothing haphazard, 
 no detail forgotten through the pursuit of 
 some ideal; all was haste, griin and yet 
 
 117
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 slatternly. Here and there an old house 
 had been pulled down, and its place 
 hidden by a temporary wooden fence, stuck 
 over with advertisements in black, white, 
 crimson, and blue, of drugs, infant foods, 
 political meetings, auction sales, corsets, 
 men's clothes, theatres these last showing 
 beauteous dishevelled adulteresses and heroic 
 gentlemen in white shirts threatening them 
 with revolvers men in diving costume 
 fighting for a bag of jewels at the bottom of 
 the sea. Everywhere the ideal implicit was 
 that of a London suburb. The shop walker 
 came nearest to achieving this ideal : suave 
 and superb in dress, manner, and speech, in 
 all but salary, he had been metamorphosed 
 from the son of a farmer, who spoke no 
 English, into an effigy that put to shame the 
 Pall Mall clubman, though he cost the nation 
 incomparably less. Pity that he had so poor 
 a world to shine in, and that his imitators 
 resembled him no more than they did the 
 figures exhibited in the tailor's advertisements, 
 118
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 figures created merely to hold a cigarette 
 between the lips and a whippy cane in the 
 fingers. His clients included women bent on 
 dressing extravagantly or even with aristo- 
 cratic sumptuous modesty, at a low price ; 
 young men with white faces, riding breeches, 
 cigarettes, and jaunty manners ; sober farmers 
 who had tired of wearing the same 
 old homespun so thick that they shiver 
 without it ; wives who have come to town to 
 sell butter and eggs ; sailors who have just 
 found a ship, sailors who have just been paid 
 off, sailors who have called first at " The 
 Talbot Arms " ; dark-eyed, clear-complexioned 
 girls swaddled in blouses of red and black 
 chequered flannel, blue and white flannel 
 skirts, variegated or black and red flannel 
 shawls, but, for all their natural and artificial 
 plumpness, gay and continually chattering in 
 musical voices as they move quickly about 
 carrying well-scoured buckets of white wood 
 on head or hips women resembling wood- 
 pigeons in their plumpness and quickness. 
 
 119
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 All were buying what was very cheap, or 
 very showy, or very new, or very much like 
 something else, or much praised as a really 
 good thing. Cattle and their drovers looked 
 in at the gorgeous windows and spread over 
 the streets where a dozen knots of old 
 acquaintances were meeting for the first 
 time since last market day. Young working 
 men in black whose faces had clearly been 
 of another colour recently but were now very 
 white by contrast with dark eyes and black 
 moustaches and hair, walked up and down the 
 pavements doing nothing in a determined 
 fashion and smoking, men who might easily 
 have been changed into starlings in an age of 
 miracles. In nearly all, in men and women 
 except in the squalid hooded hags who crawled 
 by, or the work girls beside them carrying 
 younger sisters or bastards in shawls the 
 pallor, stiffness, and haste of the town were 
 modified by country ways, a rolling walk as if 
 on solitary roads, country gestures and speech 
 and quiet eyes. Young and old of all classes 
 1 20
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 mingled on an equality. There was no 
 inharmonious element, it was a village crowd, 
 and all were united by the fact that they had 
 been peasant born and that they were now 
 slaves to the town. They were fascinated 
 by the charm of the town, which is, that it is 
 there easy to fill the whole of life with a 
 rapidly changing round of duties and 
 necessities, w r here shops and all things are so 
 convenient that life, as Catherine Anne had 
 surmised, is swallowed up by its con- 
 veniences. 
 
 At one end of the glassy street the opposing 
 cliffs of the house walls framed a portion of 
 the brown burning mountain and white 
 clouds standing above it ; at the other end, 
 under a railway arch, was a maze of gulls 
 swaying between the steady masts of 
 ships. 
 
 In and out of the crowd, relentless but 
 polite, and turning round corners, passing 
 one another, climbing this way and that the 
 hills of the town, went the electric trams. 
 
 121
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 They were polished, compact, efficient, 
 without limbs. Like the machinery in the 
 factories they must be of the best material 
 and kept bright and oiled. They were 
 tended like idols and altars with hate and 
 fear that resembled love in its extremity. 
 Men and women might be maimed, deformed, 
 decrepit, pale, starved, rotten, but the wheels, 
 the brakes, the brass-work, the advertisements, 
 and the glass windows must be continually 
 inspected and without spot. 
 
 Two girls of seventeen or eighteen, fair- 
 haired just so tall that one who cared would 
 have said, Even so tall ought women to be 
 straight, quick, and graceful as mountain 
 sheep, walked down a bye street beside the 
 tram. They wore newly washed gay cheap 
 gowns. Their heads were bare and their 
 yellow hair drew down the sunlight. Their 
 clear, rosy, small-featured faces were fresh 
 and full of a boyish confidence like boys 
 among a crowd who are all companions. 
 Their full, parted lips wavered and disclosed 
 122
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 perfect teeth as they smiled and talked. The 
 exquisite balance of their heads might 
 have been called arrogant if it had not 
 been careless and unaffected by the admira- 
 tion, curiosity, and scorn of the crowd. 
 Sometimes they held one another's hands as 
 if unconsciously fearful of the town. It was 
 easy to imagine these two changed into such 
 birds of the sea-shore as terns, bright of 
 wing and foot, for ever flitting in the sun and 
 spray with merriment, speed and grace, and 
 without care. They belonged to some 
 wandering family encamped for a fair near 
 by. A chauffeur rubbed the metal of his 
 lamp till it flashed. There was no one to 
 take care of these two. Instead, the town 
 surged high above and around them to 
 destroy them if it could, to force them to 
 suckle gnomes at their delicate breasts. 
 
 Beyond these restless streets rose other 
 hills away from the docks into unpolluted 
 sea air. The town spread up on to the sides 
 of these first long rows of new clean houses of 
 
 123
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 one pattern and few shops ; above them long 
 terraces of houses of many forms, with 
 gardens, shrubberies, oak trees ; and still 
 higher isolated large houses hidden by 
 foliage, where parties played croquet and the 
 solitary lounged with a book among flower- 
 ing bushes and looked at the sea. The windy 
 crest was free, and the half-made road ended 
 in a deep overgrown track, now half a wood, 
 down which the men of the mountains used 
 to descend to the river and the ships and the 
 sea. The oaks here were but young, yet 
 they were stony and twisted and gaunt 
 with the sap of other trees, stony and twisted 
 and gaunt, that were descended from those 
 through which the ancient men had their 
 first glimpse of the river mouth, the small 
 ships and the fires of their adversaries, before 
 they plunged downward silently. Now be- 
 tween those twisted stems the eyes looked 
 one way over the town to the white walls of 
 Catherine Anne's cottage, the woods, the 
 lesser hills, the great mountains so far away 
 124
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 arid pure that the breast heaved an involun- 
 tary sigh ; the other way, in the gathering 
 darkness, at a pale half moon of sea bounded 
 just below by a curve of lamps low down as 
 far as the docks, and then by the cloudy 
 forms of hills with lights like stars upon 
 their sides. 
 
 But at night the town irresistibly confined 
 the gaze. It was a pit glittering with dis- 
 tinct small lights and glowing with the orange 
 and scarlet furnaces that seemed to have eaten 
 large squares out of the streets. Beyond, 
 based in fire, the brown hill and the green 
 hill rose indistinguishably dark into the 
 midst of the stars. The pit was sounding 
 with clanking and humming noises that 
 recorded the activity of a demon, not of men, 
 for not a whisper was heard of footsteps, 
 voices, blows, caresses, of the love, anger, 
 fear, anxiety, thought, argument, confusion, 
 of men and women. It was impossible to 
 remember that down there slept or waked 
 those thousands of dark men, the mixed 
 
 125
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 multitude, the buxom cockle worn en like 
 wood pigeons, those two fair ones like terns. 
 The demon was humanity, a demon not born 
 of woman, whose right hand knows not the 
 deed of its left hand, though every nerve in 
 its frame is a twitching soul. It knows not 
 and recks not what it is making, as it squats 
 there upon the earth. It feeds upon itself 
 day and night, loading an immeasurable craw 
 and looking up with small eyes on the sun 
 and stars as senselessly as they look down 
 upon it. It is cruel in ignorance, it is pitiful, 
 and it forgets. It is hideous and beautiful. 
 It would be noble but it must be vile. It 
 is winged but cannot rise, so many are the 
 claws that grapple into the earth. It is old 
 but it is as a babe. But at this hour of night 
 the pity and the vileness, the power and the 
 beauty of it were under a veil. It crouched 
 motionless, its bright eyes looked up, and 
 the stars looked back, neither understanding, 
 nor any longer questioning. It sang and knew 
 not what it sang. Down there in the glimmer- 
 126
 
 At a Cottage Door 
 
 ing darkness, the demon sang, and through 
 the obscurity of the song pierced the burden 
 that, with the river by which it is seated, 
 and the mountain standing by, and the 
 sea knocking without, and the ceiling of stars, 
 it had a common birth ; that their seeming 
 strife is but the rude play of giant children 
 nursed together and destined to one end ; that 
 the grass is waiting to grow upon it as upon 
 the hills and the wreckage of fallen stars, and 
 fire waiting to consume the grass, and the fire 
 to burn itself out ; and that in the meantime 
 life is an inspiration of matter and must 
 sing and must also make themes for songs. 
 So that it resembled nothing so much as the 
 old woman sitting at her cottage door and 
 looking at the coming and going of the swifts 
 from the eaves to heaven and from heaven 
 back again, in a mystery. 
 
 127
 
 Milking 
 
 THE end of April was sappy, careless, and 
 profuse. One day it was all eagerness and 
 energy and gave no rest to the wind and 
 the sun, on the earth or in the waters or in 
 the clouds of the sky, and the songs of the 
 birds were a mad medley. Another day it 
 was indolent : a soft grey sky without form 
 covered all ; there was no wind ; the birds 
 were still ; the lusty, buxom spring, a pretty 
 and merry slut, with her sleeves and skirts 
 tucked up and her hair down over her eyes 
 and shoulders, had fallen asleep in the 
 midst of her toil and nothing could waken 
 her but a thunderstorm in the night. The 
 next day she was simply at play with 
 showers and sunlight, sunlight and showers, 
 at play with sky and earth as if they were 
 but coloured silks and now she fluttered the 
 128
 
 Milking 
 
 white and blue and green together and then, 
 wearying of that, held up the grey and the 
 grey-white and the green, and lastly mingled 
 all together inextricably. For the most part 
 she preferred not to let either go quite out of 
 sight ; when the heavy rain fell on the 
 rustling wood it was out of a sky serene, 
 lustrous, and mild ; and when the light was 
 steady and the rain tripping away from it 
 upon myriad feet down among the leaves to 
 the earth, still the shadows of the rain clouds 
 stole over the hills like smoke. There was 
 a gamesome spirit abroad. It was seen in 
 the amorous conflict of rain and sun, and 
 heard in the cry of the titmouse along the 
 hedge: "Fitchy! fitchy!" 
 
 Rain or not, always far away in the 
 south there was a cluster of white peaks 
 apparently belonging to a land that knew 
 neither our sun nor our rain. Rain or sun- 
 shine or both made little difference to the 
 shed at the cross roads. It was shadowy and 
 old under a roof that was patched and 
 I 129
 
 Milking- 
 
 hollowed like the sail of a ship. The door 
 was open, but on either side the piles of dung 
 were high and long and allowed the sun 
 to enter the shed only for half an hour each 
 day. And now in that half- hour the farmer 
 Weekes was going to milk the last of his 
 seven cows. Until now he had known of 
 the afternoon only that the wind whined 
 in the roof and that the rain dripped through 
 on to his back at intervals. When the sun 
 at last stepped in between the banks of dung 
 he could see that it was a forward spring. 
 For his eye travelled up between the green 
 walls of the road to the hills four miles away, 
 and there the beech trees were almost in 
 perfect leaf and in their dense ranks re- 
 sembled a flock of sheep with golden fleeces 
 descending the slope. Yet it wanted a 
 week before May-day. The grass was good, 
 and already the cows were clean and bright 
 after their winter in the yard ; and, having 
 looked at his hands alongside the white and 
 strawberry hide of the cow, he got up and 
 130
 
 Milking 
 
 wiped them on a wisp of grass beside the 
 door. He stood there a moment a tall, 
 crooked man, with ever-sparkling eyes in a 
 nubbly and bony head, worn down by sun 
 and toil and calamity to nothing but a stone, 
 hollowed and grey, to which his short black 
 hair clung like moss ; in his starved fields 
 you might have found a weathered flint of 
 the same shape, and have said that it was 
 much like a man's head. He stretched him- 
 self, and then turned and called the cow by 
 her name in a voice so deep and powerful 
 that it was as if the whole shed and not a 
 man's chest had uttered it 
 
 He sat down again to milk and to think, 
 with his face turned to the sun. He was 
 thinking of the farmhouse under those woods 
 on the hill, where he used to go courting 
 twenty years ago, and of the girl, the only 
 daughter of that house, who was now his 
 wife. He had driven over there one day 
 in his father's cart to see about some pigs. 
 The old man had given him supper, honey
 
 Milking 
 
 and bread and butter, cold apple dumplings 
 with cheese, and cowslip wine. It was a 
 wonderful quiet house, very dark under tall 
 beeches, with a quality in the dark still air as if 
 it were under water, but very clean and bright 
 with china and brass and the white tablecloth 
 and the old man's white beard and glittering 
 blue eyes. He knew that the old man was 
 failing to make both ends meet, but there 
 was no sign of it, and he spoke with a 
 cheerful gravity, and there was a look about 
 house and man as if they were apart from 
 the world, and not subject to such accidents 
 as failure of crops, cattle disease, and the 
 like. They had done their business, and at 
 the end of a long silence he was thinking of 
 rising to go, when Emily, the daughter, came 
 in without noticing him, kissed her father, 
 and said, " Father, there is a white bird in 
 the old apple tree of the rickyard singing 
 ike a blackbird. Yet 'tis as white as 
 milk." 
 
 " Well, we will all come and see," said the 
 132
 
 Milking 
 
 old man, and then she saw that a stranger 
 was there, and with a blush she retreated 
 and opened the door. As she was shutting 
 it she turned round out of curiosity, thus 
 revealing her own face to the stranger, but 
 seeing nothing of his which was in shadow. 
 In a minute or two they went out into the 
 rickyard where the cart was waiting. Emily 
 was patting the horse's neck, but with her 
 face towards the old apple-tree where a 
 white blackbird was singing from the top- 
 most branch. " You will not let them shoot 
 it, father, will you ? " she said. The white 
 bird and its song, the girl's fair hair, and rosy 
 face very serious, the unbent old man soon to 
 die, the sombre smouldering old tiles and 
 brick wall of the house, and the high black 
 woods behind, were remembered now. Soon 
 afterwards he had returned to the house, and 
 again and again, avowedly to see Emily. In 
 the late summer they used to walk out after 
 the haymaking was all over, while the night- 
 jar sang and the woods were dark and 
 
 133
 
 Milking 
 
 discreet and the sky above them as pale green 
 as a new-mown field. They went in amongst 
 the untrodden bracken together. He could 
 recall the smell of the crushed fronds where 
 they sat, the light of the near planet between 
 the fox-gloves gushing from the violet sky, 
 and the kisses that were as sweet as the 
 honeysuckle overhanging them, and, unlike 
 that, could be tasted again and again with- 
 out cloying. 
 
 And now the cold whine of the wind in 
 the roof and the drop of the rain, and Emily 
 was lying at home, sick, with a dead new- 
 born child in the next room, and a child that 
 he was glad was dead, yes! that even she 
 would not be crying after if she knew what 
 a monstrous mistaken thing had come into 
 the world with their help. Weekes looked 
 at that old farmhouse and the rickyard, the 
 crushed bracken bower, as if to search among 
 these things engraved by joy upon his brain for 
 the devilish magic that had brought about this 
 wretchedness. He looked at her remembered 
 134
 
 Milking 
 
 face, scanning it for something to explain this 
 thing, looked closely and fiercely at the face 
 that was turned back towards him in her 
 father's doorway so that he loved her from 
 that day. What ? Why ? But neither in the 
 young girl nor in the worn woman could he 
 see what he sought. He thought of their 
 labours, of the six children she had borne 
 and reared, of her rough hands and wrenched 
 voice, of the smearing out of all her prettiness 
 except her hair. He turned it over and over, 
 ruminating, undisturbed by the spurting of 
 the milk into the pail, the trickle of the 
 shower, or the sight of the hills and the 
 clouds over the hills. Yet he did not take 
 his eyes off these hills, nor change the look 
 given to them by his pain and questioning 
 questioning he knew not what now the 
 whole order of things, perhaps, from which 
 the terror had sprung unexpected. Having 
 naught for his brain to grip and hold, but 
 only the dead ghastly child lying still, and 
 repeating the question, and round about 
 
 135
 
 Milking 
 
 it the moving world of men and Nature, 
 enormous and endless and careless, each 
 effort was weaker than the last and sorrow 
 brought its narcotic stupidity. It was some 
 time after he had drawn her last milk that 
 the cow licked his face impatiently. He kicked 
 away the stool and began singing a verse of 
 a ribald song which he did not know he had 
 remembered 
 
 Poor Sally's face is plain 
 But Sally's heart is kind 
 
 And it was so singing that, without wishing it, 
 he returned the question to the teeming womb 
 and grave of the earth, to be swallowed up in 
 the vast profusion of life and death, while the 
 merry maid waved to and fro the coloured 
 silks of the sunshine and of the rain, and 
 the titmouse crept through the hedge, crying, 
 waggishly, " Fitchy ! fitchy ! " 
 
 136
 
 The Fountain 
 
 IT was a month when the sun was as a lion 
 in the sky ... I was walking along the 
 beacli under a vertical sandcliff that shut out 
 all the laud except a fringe of heather over the 
 edge. A fish could have breathed as well as 
 I in the heat. There was no escape. The 
 cliff could not be climbed and it extended as 
 it seemed endlessly before and behind. The 
 sea itself simmered in the heat as it touched 
 the burning sand. There was not a bird, or 
 a sail, or a cloud to be seen. I could not 
 think or give up trying to think. The 
 solitude was unbearable. There was no rest 
 for body or mind. Sometimes I walked 
 quickly to make an end, sometimes slowly 
 in the hope that it would be less wearisome. 
 As always happens when you reach an end 
 which you have desired only because the 
 
 137
 
 The Fountain 
 
 approach is tedious, it was no better when I 
 came at last to the place where the cliffs 
 gave way to a level marsh. I meant to fling 
 myself down among the gorse between the 
 cliff and the marsh when I saw a girl. It 
 was as if a fountain had leaped out of the 
 sand. 
 
 She was standing not ten yards away with 
 her face towards me but looking at the sea. 
 She was dark, not tall, and slender, her eyes 
 blue and cold and still. Her brow was like 
 a half moon under her brown hair and was 
 of a most pellucid purity and utterly serene. 
 The blue of her dress was very cool against 
 the yellow of the gorse. She might have 
 been eighteen, not more. Her hair was wet 
 and fell down over her breast and beyond 
 her waist in two long plaits. She had sea- 
 weed in both her hands and it hung down 
 to the ground motionless, like dripping 
 bronze. 
 
 I thought at once of a fountain in a 
 desert. The purple heather and yellow gorse 
 138
 
 The, Fountain 
 
 were mistily and drowsily coloured and 
 fragrant, and their fragrance and colour 
 mingled and made one effect with the 
 murmur of bees. My path lay within a yard 
 of her, and I walked slowly up to her and 
 past her, bathed in the freshness of her 
 spirit. She moved a step or two forward 
 that the interruption might be over more 
 quickly. 
 
 My heart was beating fast, but not with 
 hope. She was in another world from mine. 
 I felt that there was no possible means of 
 contact with that form and the life which 
 it expressed. 
 
 Then I thought that if I were a sculptor 
 I should be able to imprison something of 
 that life in a bronze figure lying at full length 
 but raised on its elbows so that the outline 
 of the young breasts should not be lost, its 
 chin upon the linked palms of both hands, 
 presiding over the birth of a river at a spring 
 of sombre diamond among the mountains. 
 If a brook might attain in a human form the 
 
 139
 
 The Fountain 
 
 embodiment of its purity, coldness, light, 
 power, and desire to be ever moving, of its 
 mysterious transformations in clouds of 
 heaven and in caves under the rocks, it 
 would be in such a form as hers. The 
 gravity, the dark simplicity, above all the 
 exquisite combination of wildness and meek- 
 ness in the girl would be worthy of the most 
 sacred fountain, whether emerging among 
 moss and crags and the shadows of crags or 
 among sunlit grass. Surely, I thought, a 
 lymph of crystal ran in her veins. It was 
 the darkness of a hidden spring that chilled 
 her pellucid brow. The radiance of her eyes, 
 her face, her whole form, was of the dawn, 
 which I dreamed that she was one of the 
 few left to worship Yes ! She had listened 
 to the nightingales when the dew and the 
 hawthorn flower and the young grass were yet 
 dark ; and the thrill of their songs had entered 
 her eyes and lips without one passionate or 
 confusing thought. 
 
 I fancied that I could see the way of her 
 140
 
 The Fountain 
 
 life. She was meek at home and in the 
 company of others, as a large-eyed animal 
 is meek but without surrender, or as a fairy 
 bride was meek who consented in the old 
 days to live with a mortal husband until he 
 should have struck her three times, when 
 she would forsake him and return with all 
 the flocks and herds of her dowry to her 
 father's palace below the lake in the hills. 
 Only, this maid would not, like the fairy 
 bride, laugh at a funeral, cry at a wedding ; 
 she would do all things in order, obeying in 
 matters of the house and social life the father 
 and mother and brothers and sisters who 
 understood how such things should be, 
 because it was for these that they lived. 
 She would bound away in answer to a 
 summons, especially if it sent her out into 
 the air at night or in the very early morning, 
 when she could see the stars sailing over 
 broad blue fiords among the white clouds, 
 or the moon like a silver fish now and then 
 showing its side in the turbulence. And 
 
 141
 
 The Fountain 
 
 once away from these friends for whom she 
 would easily wear away her life she was as 
 if they were not. She plunged deep into 
 the oblivion of other loves, as now when 
 she looked out to sea. 
 
 I thought of her discovering one by one 
 with serious joy the strange responses made to 
 her heart by the earth and to the earth by her 
 heart : how, for example, she would listen to 
 the nightjar churring on the bough above a 
 house where all were asleep ; or watch the 
 owl gliding over the graves softly, bene- 
 ficently ; or, at first fearfully, then wild with 
 delight, follow the fox that yelled his love and 
 hate over the winter hills at night when all 
 that remained of the world of day was the 
 faint light here and there in the valley which 
 one leaf could extinguish. She tasted un- 
 familiar leaves and fruit, buried her face in 
 bracken or flowers or foliage for their scent, 
 ran and leaped and lay in far places where 
 the sun, the clouds, the stars, the rivers, the 
 sea, the endless wind, were her company. 
 142
 
 The Fountain 
 
 Her whiteness, though it was not the same 
 and was contrasted with her dark hair and 
 flushing cheek, called to my mind the beauty 
 of white on an October morning, the white of 
 mushrooms in the short turf, of the horse- 
 chestnuts' newly cloven husks, of the fresh 
 walnuts opened and eaten where they fell, of 
 the nearly full moon alone in the huge blue 
 sky an hour after dawn. As a boy it was of 
 such a being that I used to think though 
 my imagination was not energetic enough to 
 body it forth quite clearly when I felt, in 
 loneliest places among the woods or clouds, 
 that my foot-falls had scared something shy, 
 beautiful, and divine. And more than so, 
 she was akin to the spirit abroad on many 
 days that had awed or harassed me with 
 loveliness to the spirit on the dewy clovers, 
 in the last star that hung like a bird of light 
 scattering gold and silver from her wings in 
 the cold blue and gloomy rose of the dawn ; 
 to the spirit in mountain or forest waters, in 
 many unstained rivers, in all places where 
 
 143
 
 The Fountain 
 
 Nature had stung me with a sense of her own 
 pure force, pure and without pity. . . . 
 
 These were the fancies of the moment. 
 She was in sight for less than a minute as I 
 went up from the sea over the moor, and 
 when I turned in one of its hollows she had 
 disappeared and I saw nothing but sea and 
 sky, which were as one. 
 
 144
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 AT the upper end of a long beecheu coombe 
 that narrowed and wound and rose as it 
 penetrated the hills, was a high ledge that 
 looked southward down the coombe to a broad 
 plain, an opposite range of bare and smooth 
 hills, to other isolated hills seen above the 
 lowest parts of the range, and, on a clear 
 day, when the brain was tranquil and the eye 
 at its full power, the sea beyond. This ledge 
 was a few acres in extent, full of hollows and 
 mounds and given up to beech, oak, and wild 
 cherry, and it was protected from the north 
 by a steep bank rising behind to the highest 
 point on the hills. It was untouched by 
 roads. The great highway that rose from the 
 plain to the high land by a gradual ascent 
 along the winding edge of the valley turned 
 abruptly away from it. Once upon a time, 
 K 145
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 indeed, a track had been worn from this high- 
 way to a gravel pit under the steep bank ; 
 but the pit was overgrown with bushes and 
 fern, and, as the way led nowhere beyond, it 
 had long been disused. The land all round 
 was poor and mostly wild. The few inhabi- 
 tants went where they liked ; and the foot- 
 paths were trodden so rarely that they were 
 slender as hare-paths and hardly distinguish- 
 able from them, and none seemed to lead to 
 the ledge, which I discovered by following 
 the uneven track where the branches did 
 not turn me aside among the trees in search 
 of orchises. Once there I saw that it was 
 traversed by many faint unreasonable paths 
 leading into one another, which from a 
 little distance could not be seen, for the 
 foliage of dog's mercury, everywhere of equal 
 height, gloomy and cool and tinged with a 
 lemon hue, almost closed over the narrow 
 grassless ribbons of brown earth and dead 
 leaves, though once the feet rather than the 
 eye had revealed them they were easily 
 146
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 followed. If they had any centre of radiation 
 it was an impenetrable thicket of brier and 
 hazel all overlaced by the cordage of honey- 
 suckle and traveller's joy, in the midst of 
 which there were a few moss-covered rotten 
 posts, all but one lying prone ; and these, 
 hardly different from the many dead and 
 mossy stems of trees already decayed, did not 
 arouse my curiosity. One only of the paths 
 was broad enough not to be mistakable. It 
 ran along the brink of the ledge and appeared 
 to have been artificially banked up. It was 
 from here that the view was most perfect to 
 the sea, or, on days less clear, to the long 
 range and to the low plain, or merely to the 
 wooded coonibe where all the mists of the 
 world seemed to be born and to return 
 time after time like the sea. Once the 
 ledge was left behind by only a few yards 
 the view was gone, and nothing seen but 
 the surface of the woods on the slopes below 
 and the clouds on the blue over the topmost 
 trees. 
 
 147
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 But the little wood was as a mountain 
 kingdom apart, not merely on account of what 
 could be seen from it and from it alone. It 
 was divided from the woods of the coombe 
 sides by earth walls, still high and once hedge- 
 grown, like ancient fortifications ; from the 
 high lands behind by the precipitous bank ; 
 from the treeless trough of the coombe by the 
 all but impassable steepness at the beginning 
 of its descent. It was the home of the sun. 
 East, south, and west, the sun never forgot 
 it, and the twisted lean trees, many of them 
 dead, did nothing to keep it out. So used 
 was it to the sun just here, the great bee was 
 careless of the heavy spring rain as he went 
 feeling from white bloom to bloom of the 
 dead-nettle. 
 
 The path at the brink was cut off short by 
 the earth walls at either end. I thought that 
 the whole ledge had been forgotten : the 
 estates on these miles of half-precipitous 
 wooded declivities were very large, and 
 entirely neglected, the fallen trees lying 
 148
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 where they fell because they were inaccess- 
 ible ; and there were no gamekeepers what 
 then could these two or three acres matter, 
 even supposing that they were duly distin- 
 guished from the surrounding country on the 
 maps locked up half a century ago by a 
 lawyer? There were long days of every 
 season when I believed it my own, or what 
 was better even than possession, I felt entirely 
 free there and alone and without responsi- 
 bility. I used to wander idly and without 
 asking who the owner was, for I concluded 
 that it had an owner in the sense that my 
 occupation could be disputed if it were 
 avowed. Day and night I used to go. In 
 all those enormous woods there were only two 
 sounds by day the sudden laughs of the 
 green woodpecker and the oceanic music of 
 the wind which, even when it slept, seemed to 
 dream there aloud. There was one other 
 sound, but it w r as not often heard simply 
 because it was always there, the noise of a 
 streamlet running down among the woods ; 
 
 149
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 seldom did I notice it except in still cold 
 nights when the huge forest hills were black 
 and the sky starless and grey, and then the 
 harsh sound was unceasing and ghostly, as of 
 a river running in the sky. Once when the 
 trees were all white under silent snow one 
 heron came up the long empty coombe, grey 
 and lean and slow and like a solitary ship enter- 
 ing the keelless foam between the untrodden 
 shores of some mighty estuary long ago ; and 
 he also was silent. But on that ledge 
 between the forest and the high open land 
 no bird was afraid to come, and whether that 
 long kingdom of green leaves was roaring or 
 silent I could always hear a bird singing 
 among these trees or stirring the dead leaf. 
 The stillest days of Spring, when the leaves 
 could yet be numbered, were best savoured 
 here where the enormous silence of the world 
 was threaded by rivulets of song. By night 
 there was the hoot and the shriek and the soft 
 chuckling of the owls. Many a windy, cold 
 night, dripping and black, I climbed up there 
 150
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 and heard the owl crying his loudest and 
 clearest into the echoing coombe, a strong 
 happy voice when all other life but that in 
 my own breast seemed to have passed away 
 into the wind and rain. 
 
 Now and then I tried to picture the man 
 or woman who had been there last. Whose 
 were those footpaths ? or were these ribbons 
 of earth, always bare among the green, not 
 footpaths at all, but to be explained some 
 other way ? 
 
 I had been there a score of times without 
 making anything like a full survey and 
 inventory of my kingdom. It was becoming 
 part of me, a kingdom rather of the spirit 
 than of the earth, and I was content to see 
 what I had seen on my first visit. In the neigh- 
 bouring woods I had sought for orchises but 
 after finding half a dozen kinds here at that 
 time I had not looked for more. The other 
 flowers were the usual flowers of the woods, 
 the minute green moschatel, the stars of 
 stitchwort and later woodruff, the bluebell
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 and a few more, such as I was glad to greet 
 for the twentieth time with more familiarity 
 than ceremony. But one day I not only 
 learnt that the wood was not my own, but 
 that there was a further mystery. At the 
 first moment the other visitor seemed to be 
 its possessor, so much at home was she and 
 so strange did I suddenly feel. It was a 
 woman, how much past middle age I could 
 not guess. Her hair was flaxen, her face as 
 much weathered as it was possible to be 
 without ceasing to be pink and fresh, her 
 thin mouth at once childlike and shrewd, her 
 eyes of a sparkling grey so that in each of 
 them seemed always to be a drop of quick- 
 silver sliding. She was short and plump and 
 had a kind of briskness that I imagined to 
 mean a nature of the utmost independence 
 and unworldliness. She came towards me 
 gathering flowers which she put into a basket 
 on one arm. She looked at me with those 
 intensely brilliant eyes that certainly saw me 
 as I had never been seen before and saw in 
 152
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 me something of which I was unaware ; she 
 curtsied and went on picking flowers. I was 
 just about to step off the narrow path so as 
 not to disturb her, when, still bending and 
 without looking at me, she hopped aside and 
 I passed by. Indeed I should not have 
 spoken to this extraordinary human being, in 
 spite of her rarity and fascination, if it had 
 not been for the flowers which I caught sight 
 of under her face. Though I am not a 
 botanist I see most of the flowers in my 
 path and I know the names of most ; but I 
 recognized none of these. They were bells 
 and cups and stars clustered or single, in 
 spires and bunches, that I had never seen 
 growing wild before. 
 
 " There are many here in this wood," she 
 said in answer to my questions. " Yes, only 
 here." 
 
 " Can you tell me their names ? " I 
 asked. 
 
 "No. They have never been christened 
 that I know of," she replied. 
 
 153
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 Seeing some orchises among them I 
 said : 
 
 " But you know these ? " 
 
 " Yes, they are fly-hawkins and butterflies' 
 nests," she said, perverting the names of the 
 fly-orchis and bird's nest and butterfly 
 orchises. She smiled, I did not know why ; 
 but it was a smile as fitting to her as her 
 childlike mouth and complexion, her quick- 
 silver eye, her briskness, and her hop to one 
 side. I asked her the name of the wood. 
 "The Maiden's Wood," she said, "It has 
 always been called the Maiden's Wood. . . . 
 I do not know the meaning of the name." 
 And she went on picking flowers. I now saw 
 that these unfamiliar kinds were to be found 
 everywhere in the little wood. 
 
 Twice again I saw her in the wood, and I 
 liked to see her alone and undisturbed, at 
 ease and at home there like a bird questing 
 among the dead leaves when it has no fears 
 of being observed. 
 
 Now that I saw the wood was not un- 
 154
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 known I did not hesitate to ask questions at 
 the nearest inn, several miles away, in the 
 hope of learning more. I asked a young 
 labourer. Yes, it had always been the 
 Maiden's Wood. Old Mrs Malkin knew all 
 about it, he said, for she went everywhere 
 for flowers, and she got the curious ones in the 
 Maiden's Wood, so they say for he had 
 never been there himself. I next asked an 
 old man. He gave it the same name. 
 There was a story, he said, but he did not 
 belong to these parts, and he did not rightly 
 remember it something about a great 
 lady, he believed, who had a garden 
 there, hundreds of years ago it must have 
 been. I asked him had there been a 
 house there. Xo, no house ; she did not 
 live there ; in fact he thought she was a 
 ghost, though he had not seen it, or a 
 fairy, or something. 
 
 Another old man said it was a queen 
 had owned the place, he did not rightly 
 know which queen, but she had stayed 
 
 155
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 at the big manor house, now a farm, 
 with the ancient wall round its orchard, 
 which was the nearest building to the 
 Maiden's Wood. 
 
 The farmer was a young man with a fine 
 chestnut horse and a polished trap that was 
 always rushing here and there on its bright 
 yellow wheels. I hardly expected him to be 
 able to tell me more. But I caught him out 
 of his trap one day, having come to look at 
 the wool in a barn where there was a boast- 
 ful shearer who cut the flesh every minute in 
 his effort to show himself the swiftest of his 
 craft in the county, when he was being 
 watched. The farmer was a practical man 
 of few words, but he said that his father 
 would be glad to have a talk, so he took me 
 upstairs, backward and forward, as it seemed 
 to me, the whole length and breadth and 
 height of the big house that looked as if it had 
 grown by some natural process of conglomera- 
 tion, room by room ; and at the top, in a 
 corner no one could have suspected from the 
 156
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 outside, he showed me iu to the old man. 
 He was sitting iu a high-backed chair, 
 as stiff and as rugged as a tree, a huge 
 grey-bearded man, as still as a tree too, 
 for he could not rise to show his pleasure, 
 which he did, however, by very soon setting 
 out to talk very slowly in a voice that 
 seemed to echo in his head before it left 
 his lips, but without noticing any of my 
 interruptions. 
 
 " I cannot tell you," he said, " when it was 
 first called the Maiden's Wood, but I knew 
 the Maiden. This was her room when she 
 came to stay at the farm when I was a boy. 
 The estate belonged to her and two brothers, 
 this long bit from here up to the brow and 
 that little bit you were speaking of as well, 
 the Maiden's Wood. She was the Maiden. 
 Some call it the Maiden's Garden. But her 
 real garden was out there " and looking out 
 I saw a long wide border, under a fruit wall, 
 full of flowers such as I had noticed in the 
 wood " and it was her fancy to take the 
 
 157
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 seeds out there into the wood and sow them 
 there. She did it all herself. Many's the 
 time, when they were ploughing up to the 
 edge of the steep bank there, that they could 
 see her down below in the wood as they 
 were turning the horses round to begin 
 another furrow. She used to walk up and 
 down, up and down, and round and back again, 
 rain or shine, no matter. She never had anyone 
 with her there, and never would let anyone 
 else go in except when we built the arbour 
 for her in the middle of the wood : you have 
 seen the posts of it, I dare say, but the 
 thatch has gone long ago. Are the roses 
 there now ? I suppose not oh, dear me, no, 
 what am I thinking of? They would not 
 last, pretty lady's roses they were with Jong 
 Jerusalem names. She was pretty herself, 
 too not what everyone would like, you 
 know, and some of them saw nothing in her, 
 but like one of these ladies in pictures. She 
 always wore the same kind of dress ; like a 
 maybush she looked in it, and one of the men 
 158
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 seeing her and not knowing who it was took 
 her for a blessed ghost. I was about eighteen 
 then, and she was not any older. No. I 
 liked to see her down there. But she wasn't 
 our sort. Queer, something wrong or funny 
 about her, and a well-born lady, too. The 
 young have not any business to be like that. 
 I never saw her speak to anyone. She always 
 came here alone to stay. She used to talk 
 to herself a lot, and it sounded as if she was 
 saying poetry and lots of outlandish words 
 out of books. She would have a book with 
 her and hold it in her hand hanging down, as 
 she walked back and forth. I laughed to 
 myself about her many a time, I did. I and 
 my brother helped to put up the arbour. It 
 wa.s her idea. What did a young thing want 
 to be playing about by herself in the wood 
 like that, I should like to know ? It was the 
 time of the Crimean war. She didn't care. 
 I remember one day I was just turning the 
 plough at the top by that bank above the 
 Maiden's Wood when Jacob Stout went by 
 
 159
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 galloping on the hard road a good mile away. 
 He saw me and the team and he stopped his 
 mare, and shouted 'Victory,' so that the 
 horses pricked up their ears, wondering 
 what was up, and off he went again. Now 
 it so happened that Miss West was walking 
 down below at the time, and having nobody 
 to talk to after I had told the horses all 
 about it and promised them an extra sieve 
 of oats to eat Her Majesty's health with, I 
 shouted ' Victory ' myself, pretty loud. She 
 stops dead, looks up at me, and says : ' John ! ' 
 So I scrambles down, and there was she 
 standing like a queen, and she gives me a 
 crown. ' That's for the good news, John ; ' 
 but I would sooner not have had it if only 
 she had spared me the look she gave when 
 she said, ' But I don't like to be disturbed, 
 John.' I was feeling proud, too, and my 
 view halloo used to be a good one, I promise 
 you. You might have thought she was at 
 her prayers, or courting. She might have 
 been in love with somebody that had not the 
 1 60
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 sense to love her back again she was a 
 beauty, dear me ! such waste of time it was 
 for her to be walking there all alone and 
 looking for the sea, if you please. ' A clear 
 morning, John/ she used to say some days, 
 'I ought to be able to see the sea this 
 morning.' Funny thing. There was she 
 with health and strength, riches and good 
 looks, everything mortal wants, and not un- 
 happy either, walking up and down among 
 those trees just as if she was on a ship. 
 She made those paths, every one of them, in 
 her idleness. The only thing she ever did 
 was to sow seeds there. She used to go out 
 into the garden there after a warm day at 
 harvest time and fill her pockets with seeds 
 from her fancy plants, and then she would 
 scatter them in the wood. It looked pretty 
 for a time, but there are only a few left for 
 Jenny Malkin by this time, I doubt. It was 
 not one year only you might have under- 
 stood that. These young ladies with nothing 
 to do must have their whimsies. But one 
 L 161
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 two, three, four, five the year I was married 
 yes ! five years she was there, and all the 
 spring and summer, half the autumn too, 
 and Christmas time. What can you make 
 of it ? And then she did not come any more. 
 The estate had to be sold. The brother went 
 abroad. We missed her, too. She was kind 
 and sensible in her talk ; and then her looks 
 did you good, ay ! a bonny face. I never 
 set eyes on her again. It was just after this 
 we opened the gravel pit, and many a joke 
 the men had about the arbour. The children 
 found it out when they got a bit venturesome, 
 and they pulled it about sadly. But after 
 they began to work about the farm they 
 never went more, not till my eldest went 
 courting there, and then it was a rare 
 sort of a lovers' nest for them all in a 
 smother of weeds and climbers and roses, 
 and the flowers there still ; and when 
 Mary came in wearing the pretty things I 
 used to fall awondering what might have 
 happened to Miss West that planted them. 
 162
 
 The Maiden's Wood 
 
 That must have been how it came to be 
 called the Maiden's Wood, I should say. 
 Albert and his sweetheart used to call it 
 that, I recollect, and that is what we 
 always call it." 
 
 163
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 THE wind has as many voices as men have 
 moods, and more. It can whimper like a 
 child hiding alone. It can rave as if it was 
 one of the gods of the early men, running 
 wild in the night over a diminished world. 
 It can whisper love and hate and satiety. It 
 will breathe of doubt, apprehension, trepida- 
 tion. Now it seems the youngest thing 
 between earth and heaven, new made and 
 fresh as bubbles on the brook. And now 
 again it is an old wind. Hundreds of times 
 it is an old wind, so old, that it has forgotten 
 everything except that it is old and that all 
 other things among which it wanders are 
 young and have changed and will change ; 
 and it mumbles fitfully that what is young 
 now will in a moment be old, and that to be 
 old is nothing, nothing ; and then in one 
 164
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 breath it scatters the last handful of the dead 
 tree's dust and flutters the first leaf of spring. 
 While it covers up in sand the castle ruins 
 that stood, like the two last teeth of an old 
 hound, on a hillock above the sea, it thinks it 
 was but yesterday that it unloosed the hair of 
 the princess looking from the new-built tower 
 of that castle towards the west. She sighs 
 with fulness of beauty but ceases not to watch 
 from the high window. The wind powders 
 her hands and dulls her eyes with sea sand. 
 She droops her eyelids yet looks still to the 
 west. But now her eyes are fast shut and 
 it is only her soul that can see through the 
 milky blue lids of her blind eyes. The sand 
 is hissing about her hair, but she cannot hear 
 it; it is poured into the room like water. 
 For the wind has filled itself with sand as but 
 a little while before it filled itself with the 
 gold of sunset and the scent of the rose ; and 
 the heavy billows of sand are drowning the 
 sea-birds. The princess cannot hear the 
 wrath of the sea any more than if she had 
 
 165
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 eyes she could see it, through the sand storm, 
 baying at the foot of the tower. She cannot 
 feel the sand rising above her waist. She 
 cannot cry out or fly ; she has no desire or 
 motion. There is not one left in the castle to 
 cry out to her or to come to her door ; for 
 some have broken forth to die in the sea, and 
 some have drunk the sand and have died like 
 her amid the mist and hiss of the floating and 
 whirling dunes. The tower plunges through 
 the solid air into the black sea and buries the 
 corpse of the betrothed. The wind blows her 
 dust into my face as it shakes the drab grass 
 on the last stones of the tower. It is an old 
 wind. A minute ago it had forgotten such a 
 little thing as the tempest of sand and sea, 
 the overthrow of the tower, the maiden's 
 death, and her black hair spread out by the 
 slow wave. But now it has remembered as 
 it whirls the sand and the crossing flakes of 
 snow together, above the ruins of the tower, 
 the drab grasses, the homeless dunes. There 
 is nothing else to do but to remember here. 
 166
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 It is a sea of solid waves, of sand hills that 
 behold the mountains, the sea and the sky, 
 and of sand valleys that behold only the sand 
 hills and the sky. Some of the hills are stony 
 grey or brown with dead bracken, some of 
 the valleys yellow-green with moss and with 
 moss-like turf, or grey with the sprawling 
 roots and the flaked leaves of little willows. 
 But most are bare of all but the corpse tresses 
 of yellow grass, and the wind carves cease- 
 lessly and erases its carving, and in small 
 hollows bows the pointed stem of the grass 
 and guides it so as to draw a circle upon the 
 sand. Many skeletons of birds lie on the 
 sand, but there is not a bird in the air, no 
 sound but the shifting of the grains as the 
 wind broods. There is nothing but change, 
 unresting, monotonous change. The wind is 
 counting the sands and going over memories 
 which are as the sands. One hill is like the 
 next and all the valleys are the same except 
 one, wider and more level than the rest It 
 is paved with blue rippled water and on the 
 
 167
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 water are myriads of pale birds that are send- 
 ing up myriads to whirl and cry in the wind. 
 The rushy margin is strewn with delicate 
 bones and feathers among the snowflakes. 
 The pale multitude rises and circles and 
 descends and rises again to and from the 
 solitary water. They are the souls of them 
 who have loved nothing overmuch, who have 
 lived on one another's breath and have floated 
 hither and thither about another's business. 
 They must keep together. They are drawn 
 to the waste pool among the dunes as in life 
 they were drawn to nothing, and a footstep 
 drives them away, to return inevitably again. 
 They desire only not to be alone. I recognise 
 many, and not one of them is strange. They 
 never change. As they are to-day so they were 
 when the maiden's tower was overwhelmed, 
 and will be so long as there is water in the 
 pool and safety and solitude around. Old 
 men and young men and maidens, generation 
 after generation, are indistinguishable in their 
 grey and white plumage and wandering cries. 
 1 68
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 They suffer a contentment that is not happi- 
 ness. Their pale wings all together are 
 beautiful. If they were not haunted by the 
 living they might even be happy also, and 
 float upon the water until they were weary, 
 and then upon the wind until the water once 
 more seemed better than the wind. 
 
 A few of them are still drifting overhead 
 like larger snowflakes as I dip into the next 
 valley, but in the next I am alone again 
 among the sandhills, listening to the two 
 gentle dissolving murmurs of the gliding 
 sand and the kissing flakes, sounds that 
 are taking possession of all things as of me, 
 so that in all the drowsy world there seems 
 nothing but the formless mazy snowfall and 
 the vague changing dunes ; and then, cross- 
 ing a stream that flows among alders, in the 
 fields between the dunes and the mountains, 
 I find that I am upon a footpath hidden 
 before but now revealed by the light snow 
 lying close and pure white on the short grass 
 or bare earth of its winding course. The 
 
 169
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 water is full of yellow reeds, the catkins on 
 the dark alders are blood red, the fields are 
 very green, and the life in their longer grass 
 has all but melted the snow. Already the 
 light is fading from grass and reed and tree, 
 and from the robin who, a moment ago, 
 swelled an orange breast as he sang in the 
 alder. He sings no longer but flits from the 
 tree to the low stone wall of a garden that 
 follows several loops of the stream. Between 
 the water and the wall creeps the path, and 
 on this path the robin suddenly appears, 
 visible not in his flight but at the moment 
 when he flutters before alighting. When he 
 stands still I can hardly see him, and his 
 black eye and hard ejaculated chirp emerge 
 out of the dark air. But he seldom stands 
 still. He flits ahead a few steps, or to one 
 side, or to the wall, and from there to a 
 branch, and back again, very suddenly and 
 unexpectedly. He is more like the embodi- 
 ment of a thought than a bird coming thus 
 out of darkness, announcing himself and dis- 
 170
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 appearing again a thought that is out of 
 control and is living its own life, moving to 
 some end which you cannot foresee though 
 you may dread. Now I have eyes and ears 
 only for this brown, shadowy, uncertainly 
 moving thought that is one moment so 
 still, another flickering, like a flame or a 
 dead leaf. I watch for his movements, yet 
 each one startles me. He enters a garden 
 the gate has rotted from its hinge and I 
 follow up a straight weedy path between 
 thickets that were once vegetable plots ; 
 flowers of snow hang on the skeleton plants. 
 Five stone steps lead up to a narrow door 
 in a porch, with a window above it. On 
 either side there are three windows one 
 above the other in the old white wall, and 
 on one side the dairy and sheds adjoin the 
 house. The roof is thatched, and the porch 
 and room above it have a roof of their own. 
 A low stone chimney rises above the thatch 
 at either end. It is certain that I have seen 
 or known the house before this twilight 
 
 171
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 House and garden are haunted. They are 
 haunted by something quiet and small by the 
 robin and his gusty flight by my thought 
 haunted by myself. I am the ghost in that 
 snowy garden path outside the house, and 
 my thought wanders helplessly about and 
 around it like the white birds over the 
 pool. 
 
 The house has never been unfamiliar to 
 me. Since childhood it has been as clearly 
 in my mind's eye the seven windows, the 
 door and the five steps, the garden on either 
 side of the straight path up to the porch as 
 any house which my eyes have seen and my 
 feet entered. Seven windows, seven eyeless 
 sockets where there had been eyes. 
 
 A little time ago, ninety years, when the 
 birds were flying up and down over the 
 dunes, a bridegroom and bride had come 
 home to that dark door on an evening of 
 February. Ninety years ago the robin ceased 
 singing and flickered about the path, and up 
 the path towards the newly painted white 
 172
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 house with bridegroom and bride. Ninety 
 years ago a thought haunted them as now I 
 am haunting the silent house ; it may have 
 been the same thought. The difference 
 between the living and the dead is little at 
 such times ; there may be no real difference. 
 My uncontrolled thought, born without any 
 wish of mine, is chirping and flitting there on 
 the path, or is gathered up into the twilight 
 gusts in which sea-birds are wailing. At the 
 top of the steps a man pauses, a tall pale 
 man, black-haired, copper-bearded, dressed 
 as a farmer should be who has just been 
 married and has ridden home with his bride ; 
 he turns and looks over the dunes and then 
 to the mountains above the curve of the bay, 
 with a look as of one to whom the scene is 
 familiar and yet foreign ; that he was not 
 born between the mountains and the dunes, 
 and has not spent his childhood there, is 
 clear from his uncomprehending and restless 
 eyes. The small fair-haired woman at his 
 side, well wrapped against the snow, looks 
 
 173
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 so happy and at ease, while taking the same 
 brief slow glance, that it may easily be known 
 she is not so blessed by her marriage but 
 that she is glad of a further blessing from 
 this native coast. The wheeling birds com- 
 plete her sense of the beauty of the day and the 
 hour, the mountains, the dunes, and the sea, 
 while they carry her husband's thought away, 
 so that for a moment he is lost, lingering 
 after she has passed into the house and 
 not seeing the robin on the step below, my 
 ghost in the path. Having looked long, too 
 long, he follows his bride through the dark 
 door. No light appears, and when he has 
 gone I can no longer see the robin, and I hear 
 only the shivering of the seedless dead stalks 
 in the garden. My thought has gone in after 
 those two. I stare at the windows behind 
 which it has followed them. The door is 
 closed. My thought is pleading with them, 
 troubling them, as the robin, so restless and 
 quick and then suddenly still, troubled me. 
 It is troubling them, this little thought of 
 174
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 the unborn, of one who is to come after 
 them when they are in their graves. Can 
 they in that solitary house foresee anything 
 from the wheeling of the birds, the mazy fall 
 of the snow, the rustling grass, the flickering 
 flight and talk of the robin at the gate ? A 
 window is lit up and I see them seated 
 together he with bowed head watching her 
 hands, which he is holding in his own over 
 his knees ; she looking straight out towards 
 where I stand. She is silent while he speaks. 
 He is reminding her that the farm is now 
 his for ever, that they are not now any more 
 just two persons content with one another, 
 but two in the perhaps endless chain of 
 destiny. He foresees the day when the land 
 will be improved and a new house built to 
 take the place of the old farm-stead 
 that belongs to the old times, the old ways 
 now passing ; he is almost ashamed to bring 
 her to the old place, but he will give up 
 wandering now, he will be able to save, and 
 their children will be better off than they are 
 
 175
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 now, and their children's children. . . . He 
 is talking to himself a moment. Then he 
 says he half wishes he had taken her to his 
 own land. He can never be quite at peace 
 with all these barren sands at the edge of the 
 land, and all those useless birds roving about 
 the sand and the sky. Hark ! They 
 will not end their clamour. He takes 
 down his gun from over the fire and goes 
 out, and stepping swiftly over the dunes 
 reaches the pool and fires into the multitude. 
 They scream as if the firmament had a myriad 
 voices and all of misery. They wheel about 
 him as if they would lift him up in their 
 anguished rush. The air is of wings. And 
 in the house she hides her eyes from nothing, 
 and waits. She smiles at his return. He 
 drops a white bird into her lap and she smiles 
 no more ; nor yet does she reproach him, 
 though she will not look at him, while she 
 tells him the tradition among her father's 
 people that those birds are the spirits of 
 the men and women who were buried in the 
 176
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 sand hundreds of years ago. She says that 
 she can think of nothing sweeter than to 
 hover as a spirit over the pool near where 
 she. was born, and where perhaps her children 
 will be keeping sheep and ploughing the good 
 land and cutting fern from the mountain and 
 gathering whinberries, for ever. She takes 
 up the bird in her two hands, setting free her 
 wrists from his, and says that some day, who 
 knows, she will be like that and so will her 
 children and children's children, flying and 
 floating about their native land and ocean. 
 She wipes the crimson from the white breast 
 with her handkerchief. But he says that he 
 will never be one of the long-winged homeless 
 creatures that threaten to alarm their em- 
 brace, but rather a robin that likes men and the 
 houses of men ' Do not sigh, my wild, beauti- 
 ful, white bird.' Is that the robin still loitering 
 outside the window, he wonders. He rises 
 and presses his face against the pane and 
 sees me not He is troubled by the white 
 wings in his mistress' lap and the calling of 
 M 177
 
 Snow and Sand 
 
 its companions. He draws the curtains close 
 over the window and shuts out all that he 
 can of the haunting night, the soft-fingered 
 snow, and me, and whatever in that altogether 
 white world might prey upon those two even 
 in their sleep. 
 
 178
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 IT was the end of May and some hours be- 
 fore noon, and above the dark green wet 
 earth was a dome of many greys descending 
 at almost every point to the horizon. It no 
 longer rained, and the sun which had poured 
 into the intervals of the showers seemed to be 
 taking counsel with the rain in the south- 
 east, and they had not yet resolved which of 
 the two should next dance upon the grass, 
 and there was a hope that they would come 
 both together and blend their dancing with 
 their indistinguishable laughter. And as I 
 lay and looked at fold beyond fold of high 
 land so remote that I had never seen it 
 before, high land airier than cloud, I was 
 disturbed but not awakened when suddenly 
 a heavier gust of the light wind shook all 
 rain from the trees at the wood margin, and 
 
 179
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 out of it, or out of the wind, or out of the 
 raindrops, floated a woman's form, apparelled 
 in violet and grey as of blossoms half-hid in 
 dew. She looked towards me with eyes of 
 the same doubtful grey and violet under 
 golden hair, and she was a queen ; though 
 she wore no crown and was unattended, I 
 knew that she was a queen. 
 
 The wind did not die away but rose and 
 spoke with a voice that I had heard in a 
 desolate palace and on a coast inaccessible 
 either from land or sea but audible from 
 both continually. At first I could do nothing 
 but hear. My eyes forgot the meadow and 
 the far land and even that strange queen. 
 But just as when a man, half sleeping and 
 half waking all night, hears all night the 
 tumult of wind and rain and sea, the noises of 
 the rain and the wind fretted against a back- 
 ground of the noise of waves, and he cannot 
 recall the silence that used to be, and slowly 
 he makes a scene out of the sounds and sees 
 as with the eyes of a flitting bird the forms of 
 1 80
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 the shore, the still crags, and the black waves 
 beating themselves to whiteness and leaping 
 up from mountainous bulk into thin foam : 
 so out of this wind from the east, out of this 
 raving and over-arching forest of sound, grew 
 a waste of grey land, of seas and islands, of 
 seas encompassed with many rocks, of islands 
 in the midst of shipless seas, of clouds travel- 
 ling to and fro and round about but never 
 away, and full of the wild peace of rain fall- 
 ing for ever upon rock and upon water. 
 The wind also was never anywhere silent in 
 this land. The wind going up and down 
 made a cry of mourning, of a woman among 
 sepulchres ; and sometimes it was the cry 
 of a young high queen, most strong and defiant, 
 and sometimes of an ancient so old and so 
 often smitten that she has forgotten every- 
 thing but her sorrow, which is her single joy 
 as she wanders from memorial to memorial. 
 And many were the memorials. For it 
 was a land of sepulchres and of dwellings 
 empty but fuller of death even than the 
 
 181
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 graves, and of a more bitter desolation 
 because they hungered after the living or 
 the dead, while the graves at least had 
 their own portion. 
 
 The shores, the peaks of the mountains, the 
 valleys, and the ledges between the peaks 
 and the valleys, were strewn with graves, 
 very placid in the eternal rain. And when 
 the wind storming down from the mountains 
 drove away the mist it disclosed yet other 
 graves, domed cairns high against the waste 
 sky, little forgotten heaves and ripples in the 
 turf, and under trees shivering ceaselessly at 
 the borders of tarns, and above precipices 
 and gulfs whose depth sinking away into 
 night was clearly proclaimed by the sound of 
 the wind imprisoned there for an age, coiling 
 and coiling without hope of escape. Island 
 after island lifted such mountains into the 
 sky and opened such abysses into the dark. 
 On others the forest had grown wide and 
 had covered the earth from the edges of the 
 winding estuaries up to the clouds and above 
 182
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 them, and here the dead trees were as the 
 living for multitude. As I watched the white 
 and the grey birds sailing over the rivers 
 and the skiey tracts of forest, under the 
 precipices and round the buttresses of the 
 unapproachable coast, and as I heard them 
 wailing in their flight, it seemed to me that 
 their voices, always forlorn, were more forlorn 
 than ever, and that the reason was that for 
 ages they had not seen men, the men who 
 had tormented them or lived apart from 
 them and yet had loved them and changed 
 them with their love nevertheless. Yes, the 
 lovers and the poets and the mothers and 
 the captains in those graves had deprived 
 them of something, and the birds bewailed 
 it, and the showers falling upon their ashes 
 were bitterer than the tears of mourners 
 who, for all their moan, are alive and have 
 hope. 
 
 But if all the islands were alike in their 
 sepulchres, their forests, their rain and wind 
 and voices of birds, each was unlike the 
 
 183
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 rest. The sepulchres were the same, but 
 the houses that had no dead were different 
 At first the rain had submerged most of these 
 houses out of my sight, mingled as they were 
 with trees and rocks and confused with 
 them by great age and the naturalness which 
 comes of it. Yet some hillsides that seemed 
 one forest were half the ruins of a city. The 
 waterfalls raving into barren gorges bedewed 
 the moss and ivy of a hamlet or solitary house. 
 Where I had seen a moment ago only the 
 crag that was an eagle's watch-tower stood a 
 castle upon a hill. The cliff that was never 
 left silent by the falcons or their quarry was 
 pierced by windows from which girls once 
 looked out and listened for the singing of 
 lovers returning to their pleasure palaces. 
 The beacon rock over the sea, circled by 
 white gulls, was once a farmhouse, with 
 massy chimneys, with barns and stalls of 
 ponderous stone. And each island had its 
 own peaceful high halls, white and many- 
 windowed, its homely farm or clustering 
 184
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 village, its huge vaunt of castellated declivities, 
 its sea sand littered by domes, pillars, and 
 pinnacles among the dark weed and pale 
 foam. Of these things only the winds and I 
 were left to make inventory, to spell out the 
 epitaph, to tell over the solemnity, the shame, 
 the pride, the tenderness, the universal 
 calamity. Wherever my vision swept were 
 forsaken habitations, cities, villages, solitary 
 courts and always seen through the mist, 
 or the rods of the rain, so that they appeared 
 to be under water in the fastnesses of those 
 islands and on the shores of those seas round 
 about, between rock spires oozing with rain 
 or salt foam, or deep among the everlasting 
 drip and hiss of forests upon the mountains, or 
 along hillsides seamed with uncounted cata- 
 racts that swayed in the wind. Grass spread 
 over the pavement of chamber and courtyard 
 like a prayer that had been answered, or the 
 creeper climbed and nodded heavily in place 
 of the smoke of hearth and oven ; and the 
 brightness of the flowers was such that the 
 
 185
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 stones and timbers seemed to cry out. 
 In others, no spider, not even the web of the 
 dead spider, had been spared by the rain and 
 wind. In some, a hearth was known only 
 by the nettles possessing it, and porch and 
 tower only by the triumph of brier and ivy 
 and convolvulus over and around. 
 
 It was at the furthest and one of the 
 least of the islands that I looked with most 
 care. It had been severed by earthquake or 
 by a thousand storms from a much larger 
 island close by. On the side nearest to that 
 it rose sheer away from the white waves 
 that gnashed and gnawed between the two. 
 But on the other side it descended with a 
 gradual staircase of lesser precipices, their 
 brinks overhung by clouds of golden and of 
 white flowers, down to the sea. Each ledge 
 between one stair and the next was of 
 smooth sward and almost level, and on most 
 there was a cluster of rustling trees, half 
 emerald and half silver in the windy rain. 
 Upon that ledge which was midway between 
 186
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 the cloudy summit of the island and the 
 grey and foam-laced sea, stood a house, 
 clearly visible through a parting among the 
 trees. It was not a large house ; it was of a 
 size sufficient for stateliness, and not too 
 great to be possessed utterly and loved until 
 death by a small group of children, of grow- 
 ing men and women and an old man. It 
 had little windows high up for meditation 
 and amplest prospect, ranges of great 
 windows for music, feast, and dance, and 
 below these again a portico divided by tall 
 columns where the spirit of home mingled 
 with and in some degree gave way to the 
 spirit of the broad sky, the sea, and the wind 
 that was lord of both. In and out of the 
 portico and the great and the lesser windows, 
 swallows were flying busily. In the trees at 
 one side a cuckoo called and called to an 
 echo somewhere among the walls. Then it 
 was that I knew of a sudden, and not before, 
 that behind all those windows there was 
 not one to listen to the caUing of the bird 
 
 187
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 and its echo, no heart to rejoice with it or to 
 learn from it the unfathomableness of a grief. 
 There was not one left. The cuckoo had 
 come, and they had gone away. The rain 
 and the wind, and not a lover's or mourner's 
 ear, swallowed up the sweet cry. 
 
 As I sighed with listening to the bird 
 that grey queen came near to me and 
 asked : 
 
 "Why do you sigh?" 
 
 And I answered : 
 
 "Because of that house and the cuckoo 
 singing in the rain." 
 
 I now looked steadily at her and saw that 
 she was beautiful. As the beauty of the red 
 stag belongs to the moorland of the moun- 
 tains, so hers belonged to the waste land of 
 islands and seas : the very colour of her eyes 
 and of her cloudy dress seemed to have been 
 born of that land just as the seaweed is born 
 of the sea. She spoke again, saying : 
 
 " But this is a fair land, so fair that sun 
 and rain are contending for it." 
 1 88
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 "You speak of one land," I answered, 
 " while I am thinking of another, a waste of 
 grey land, of seas and islands, of seas en- 
 compassed with many rocks, of islands in the 
 midst of shipless seas, and lastly one little 
 island and that fair house where the cuckoo 
 is singing in the rain among the trees." 
 
 " That," she said with pity in her voice, " is 
 my land." 
 
 " And who," I asked, not looking at her 
 but at the islands, "and who are you that 
 seem to be a queen ? " 
 
 "As you say, so it is. I am a queen." 
 
 " And your realm ? " 
 
 " Is the Waste Lands, and the seas that 
 keep them." 
 
 " Queen of the Waste Lands," said I, 
 " where is your realm ? How may it be 
 reached and ..." 
 
 " It is everywhere. You are in the midst 
 of it This is but one of its provinces." 
 
 " But the land where I now am is an 
 imagination of my heart," said I, not to be 
 
 189
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 deceived, " and I am its king. You speak, 
 holding something back. Where is your 
 capital ? " 
 
 " The capital of my realm is now here and 
 now there among these islands. It is in 
 your heart this day. Many times it has been 
 in a poet's heart, but there is no heart where 
 it has not been, either in sleep or in solitude, 
 for a little while." 
 
 Very sweet was her voice, and as the 
 plover's voice utters the nature of the marsh 
 so hers uttered that of the Waste Lands, of 
 the islands, their graves and desolate walls, 
 and of the seas. I loved her, and thinking 
 that she also might love me, I spoke again, 
 saying : 
 
 "Since you have made your palace, 
 Queen, in this empty heart, make me, I 
 beseech you, one of your company that I 
 may serve you and dwell in your realm for 
 ever and be, under you, one of the lords of the 
 Waste Lands." 
 
 " You ask," she said, pitifully, " what is 
 190
 
 The Queen of the Waste Lands 
 
 impossible, as others have done before you, 
 and will again. For I dwell alone and have 
 no company among the living. Yet a little 
 while and you shall have your will, though 
 you cannot know it when the day comes. 
 Farewell." 
 
 The word sundered me from her and from 
 her realm, and left me discontented with 
 the meadow and its green grass and golden 
 flowers, and the white sheep under the wood, 
 with May and its fulness, with life itself 
 that had the Waste Lands among its many 
 kingdoms. 
 
 191
 
 FEINTED BT 
 
 TtTENBCLL AND SPEARS, 
 EDINBUBGH
 
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 date stamped below. 
 
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