Edward Thomas

“ A robin sang at the edge of a holly, and a thrush somewhere remote, and the world had become narrow and homely, the birds sounded secure like happily tired boys lazily undressing, and evidently they did not expect men. Three-quarters of a moon hung at the zenith, cold and fresh and white like an early spring flower. We grew silent, but at tea were particularly noisy and excited, too excited and near to tears, when I rushed upstairs. In the library I found Aurelius reading, with his back to the uncurtained window, by a light that only illuminated his face and page. ”

“ If the lane was both muddy and new to us, and we two, Philip and I, turned into it, there was nothing which we should have thought out of its power to present in half a mile or so, nothing which it would have overmuch astonished us by presenting. It might have been a Gypsy camp, it might have been the terrestrial Paradise of Sheddad the son of Ad—we should have fitted either into our scheme of the universe. Not that we were blasé; for every new thrush’s egg in the season had a new charm for us. ”

“ He went up into the tower that he had built on a rock in his own mountains, to think about life before he began to live. Up there, said his mother, he hoped to learn why sometimes in a London street, beneath the new and the multitudinous, could be felt a simple and a pure beauty, beneath the turmoil a placidity, beneath the noise a silence which he longed to reach and drink deeply and perpetuate, but in vain. It was his desire to learn to see in human life, as we see in the life of bees, the unity, which perhaps some higher order of beings can see through the complexity which confuses us. ”

“ When she came to those last two lines I looked at her very hard, inspired by the thought that it was she had sucked dew out of the white flowers of April, the cuckoo-flower, the stitchwort, the blackthorn, and the first may, to make her voice clear and her lips sweet. While she sang it once Mr Stodham—a clerk somewhere who had seen a naked Dryad—bent his head a little to one side, perfectly motionless, the eyes and lips puckered to a perfect attention, at once eager and passive, so that I think the melody ran through all his nerves and his veins, as I am sure he was inviting it to do. ”

“ It was not the peevish silence of one too cautious or too fearful to speak; nor the silence of one who has suddenly become isolated and feels it, yet cannot escape. Up out of the silence rose the voice of Aurelius reading out of the book before him. Over my shoulder came the rustling of ivy, and the sighing of trees, and the running of the brook through the coomb; the moon, close at hand, out in the black garden, pressed her face against the window and looked in at me. ”

“ It had been arranged that on the next day I was to go round to Abercorran House.
Again and again Philip and I revisited that lane of larches, the long water-side copse, the oak wood out in the midst of the fields, and all the hedges, to find moorhen’s eggs, a golden-crested wren’s, and a thousand treasures, and felicity itself. Philip had known this country for a year or more; now we always went together. I at least, for a long time, had a strong private belief that the place had been deserted, overlooked, forgotten, that it was known only to us. It was not like ordinary country. ”

“ From floor to ceiling the eager flames leapt at a bound; a widening circle of carpet smouldered; and Mr Stodham, crouching low, shivering, holding his hands to the heat, muttered “More air,” like an incantation. “The Dryad must have more air. We must all have more air. Let the clean fire burn down these walls and all the walls of London. So there will be more air, and she will be free, all will be free.” ”

“ The children stood, pale and silent, watching the dead leaves swim by like fishes, crimson and emerald and gold, and they pretended that they were mermen and mermaids sitting in a palace under the sea. But the women took the children away along the road where the old men had already gone. Led by Ivor, the young men descended to the shore to repair the ship.
It was a winter of storm: men could not hear themselves speak for the roaring of sea, wind, and rain, and the invisible armies of the air. With every tide bodies of men and of the strange birds that had set out over the sea were washed up. ”

“ That also I knew, its four-and-twenty elms that stood about the one oak in the long grass and buttercups and docks, like a pleasant company slowly and unwillingly preparing to leave that three-acre field which was the garden of Abercorran House and called by us The Wilderness—a name now immortalised, because the christener of streets has given it to the one beyond Abercorran Street. Under the trees lay a pond containing golden water-lilies and carp. A pond needs nothing else except boys like us to make the best of it. ”

“ Knowing how we ourselves, walking or talking together, grew oblivious of all things that were not within our brains, or vividly and desirably before our eyes, feeling ourselves isolated in proud delight, deserted and forgotten of the multitude who were not us, we imagined, I suppose, that houses and other things could have a similar experience, or could share it with us, were we to seek refuge there like Morgan in his mountain tower. ”

“ All round the tree the muddy gravel had been trodden, by children playing, so hard that not a weed or blade of grass ever pierced it. Up to it and down to it led two narrow and steep flights of steps, the lower for the children and the mother ascending from the kitchen or living room, the upper for Mr Torrance who used to sit in the back room writing books, except in the mornings when he taught drawing at several schools. He wrote at an aged and time-worn black bureau, from which he could sometimes see the sunlight embracing the apple tree. ”

“ They cannot long do without us or we without them. Think of it. We have each of us some of the blood and spirit of Sir Thomas More, and Sir Philip Sidney, and the man who wrote ‘Tom Jones,’ and Horatio Nelson, and the man who wrote ‘Love in the Valley.’ Think what we owe to them of joy, courage, and mere security. Try to think what they owe to us, since they depend on us for keeping alive their spirits, and a spirit that can value them. They are England: we are England. Deny England, and we deny [224] them and ourselves. Do you love the Wilderness? Do you love Wales? ”

“ A man named Ivor ap Cadogan had come back who had been away in Arabia, Cathay, and India, in Ophir and all the East, since he was a boy. No man knew his family. He was a tall man with yellow hair and a long beard of gold, and he was always singing to himself, and he was like a king who has thrown away his crown, nor had he soldiers with him, but only the dark foreign men who followed him from the ships. All day long, day after day, they were unlading and carrying up beautiful white stone from the ship to build a great shining castle above the sea. ”

“ The house itself was of grey-white stone, roofed with tiles; the barn and sheds, apparently tumbling but never tumbledown, were of dark boards and thatch, and surrounded by a disorderly region of nettles, remains of old buildings and walls, small ponds either black in the shadow of quince bushes, or emerald with duck-weed, and a few big oaks or walnuts where the cart-horses and their foals and a young bull or two used to stand. A moorhen was sure to be swimming across the dark pond with a track of ripples like a peacock’s tail shining behind it. ”

“ I knew the house down to the kitchen, because I knew old Ann, the one permanent—I had almost written immortal—servant, of whom it was said by one knowing the facts, that they also rule who only serve and wait. I knew the breakfast room where breakfast was never finished; the dark Library where they had all the magazines which have since died of their virtues; the room without a name which was full of fishing-rods, walking-sticks, guns, traps, the cross-bow, boxes of skins, birds’ eggs, papers, old books, pictures, pebbles from [3] a hundred beaches, and human bones. ”

“ THE MORGANS OF ABERCORRAN HOUSE In spite of old Ann and her kitchen fire I did not stay long in the house that day. The removal which had left it deserted and silent had made it also a little sordid: the family’s ways, for example, had not agreed with the wall-paper, and they had been no enemies to spiders. So I went out into the yard. There were no dogs; all had gone with the Morgans to Abercorran. The only life was a single homeless blue pigeon flying about in search of the home which had been sold. ”

“ MR STODHAM, THE RESPECTABLE MAN, AND THE DRYAD To Mr Stodham, I think, Mr Torrance’s books were the man. He—perhaps he alone in England—possessed a full set of the thirty-three volumes produced by Mr Torrance under his own name in thirteen years. “It is wonderful,” said Ann once, “that the dancing of a pen over a sheet of paper can pay the rent and the baker’s bill, and it hardly seems right. But, still, it appears there are people born that can do nothing else, and they must live like the rest of us.... And I will say that Mr Torrance is one of the best of us, though he has that peculiarity.” ”

“ Running at first to the window, I pressed my face on the pane to see the profound of deepening night, and the lake shining dimly like a window through which [55] the things under the earth might be seen if you were out. The abyss of solitude below and around was swallowing the little white moon and might swallow me also; with terror at this feeling I turned away. “What?” said Aurelius, without even looking round, but apparently aware of my feeling. ”

“ We would go to all those little ponds shadowed by hazels close to the farms, where there was likely to be a solitary moorhen’s home, and up into the pollard willow which once had four starling’s eggs at the bottom of a long narrow pocket. In all those spring days we had no conscious aim but finding nests, and if we were not scrambling in a wood we walked with heads lifted up to the trees, turned aside to the hedges, or bent down to the grass or undergrowth. ”

“ The morning had a low yellow roof of fog. About the heads of the crowd swayed a few gulls, inter-lacing so that they could not be counted. They swayed like falling snow and screamed. They brought light on their long wings, as the ship below, setting out slowly with misty masts, brought light to the green and leaden river upon the foam at her bows. And ever about the determined, careless faces of the men swayed the pale wings, like wraiths of evil and good, calling and calling to ears that know not what they hear. ”

“ We had taller trees in the neighbourhood, such as the wych-elms and the poplars by the brook, but this was a solitary stranger and could be seen several miles away like a black pillar, as the old cherry could in blossom-time, like a white dome. You were seldom out of sight of it. It was a station for any bird flying to or from the hills. A starling stopped a minute, piped and flew off. The kestrel was not afraid to alight and look around. ”

“ From my tower I look out at the huge desolate heaves of the grey beacons. Their magnitude and pure form give me a great calm. Here is nothing human, gentle, disturbing, as there is in the vales. There is nothing but the hills and the silence, which is God. The greater heights, set free from night and the mist, look as if straight from the hands of God, as if here He also delighted in pure form and magnitude that are worthy of His love. ”

“ Our own neighbourhood was by no means unproductive, and the only part of it which was sacred was the Wilderness. None of the birds of the Wilderness ever suffered at our hands. Without thinking about it we refrained from fishing in the Wilderness pond, and I never saw anybody else do so except Higgs, but though it seemed to me like robbing the offertory Higgs only grinned. But other people’s grounds were honoured in a different way. Private shrubberies became romantic at night to the trespasser. ”

“ NED OF GLAMORGAN Long after his celebrated introduction to Abercorran House, and soon after Philip and I had been asking old Jack again about the blackthorn stick, Mr Stodham was reminded of the story of the Welshman on London Bridge who was carrying a hazel stick cut on Craig-y-Dinas. “Do you remember it?” asked Mr Morgan.
“Certainly I do,” replied Mr Stodham, “and some day the stick you gave me from that same Craig-y-Dinas shall carry me thither.”
“I hope it will. It is a fine country for a man to walk in with a light heart, or, the next best thing, with a heavy heart. ”

“ The elms of the Wilderness have made coffins, if they were not too old. Where is the pond and its lilies? They are no dimmer than the spirits of men and children. But there is always Ann. When “Life of Life” is eclipsed and Spring forgotten, Ann is still in Abercorran Street. I do not think she sees those dim hazed spirits of men and children, dogs and pigeons. Jessie, she tells me, is now a great lady, but rides like the wind. Roland never leaves Caermarthenshire except after a fox. Jack has gone to Canada and will stay. Lewis is something on a ship. ”