WALKING WITH GOOD COMPANY
The lightning grows upon the sky like a tumultuous thorn tree of fire.
The thunder grumbles with interrupted cadences, and then, joyful as a
poet, hits the long, grave, reverberating period at last, repeats it
triumphantly, and muttering dies away. The pheasants in the woods have
got over their alarm and have ceased to crow, and for a time the heavy
perpendicular rain submerges the meadow and farmhouse and mid-field oak
and the steep downs with their cloudy woods; the birds are still.
Then the rain wastes away. I can count the drops on the broad burdock
leaves; and the evening sun comes through horizontally; and it is good
to be afoot and making for something remote, I know not why. Each
meadow shines amid its encircling hedges like a lake of infinitely
deep emerald. On the dark red ploughland the flints glitter with
constellated or solitary lights. In the sweet copses, where the willow
wren sings again in the highest branches, the thorn foliage is so
bright that the dark stems are invisible. The purple oak tops reach
wonderfully into the sombre, bluish sky, and over them the wood pigeons
turn rapidly from darkness to splendour--from splendour to darkness,
as they wheel and clap their wings. The cuckoos shout again; first
one, so far off that the character, without the notes, of the song is
recognised; then another with a wild clearness in its voice as if the
rainy air aided it; and then one just overhead, in the luminous grey
branches of an oak, so that it can be heard trying hard and enjoying
its own strength. The hills rejoice with long shadows and yellow light;
the tall hares stretch themselves and gallop. The little pools hum
pleasantly as the rain drips from their overhanging brier and bramble
into the leaden water with bright splash. And in our own muscles and
hearts the evening strives to form an aspiration that shall suit the
joy of the hills, the meadows, the copses and their people. We will go
on, they say; we will go on and on, through the beeches on the hill
and up over the ridge and down again through the grey wet meadows and
to the old road between hawthorn and guelder-rose at the foot of the
downs; and still on, not as before, but out of time and space, until
we come--home--to some refuge of beauty and serenity in the heart of
the immense evening. And so we will, though we shall be wise to find
our achievement in the rapture of walking, or in the short rest upon a
gate where we may surprise the twilight at her consecrating task. It is
well, too, to talk, not to walk silently and weave such dreams as will
make our host to-night intolerable; or if not to talk, then to sing
some old song whose melody finds a strange fitness to our minds, in
spite of the words, as for example--
“There’s not a drunkard lives in our town
Who is not glad that malt is gone down--
Malt is gone down, malt is gone down,
From an old angel to a French crown.” ...
Or,
“The fox jumped over the hedge so high.” ...
Or,
“Orientis partibus adventavit asinus.” ...
(Sung to the tune of the Welsh New Year’s Eve Song.)
Or,
“There was a farmer’s son kept sheep upon the hill,
And he went forth one May morning to see what he could kill,
Sing blow away the morning dew, the dew, and the dew,
Blow away the morning dew; how sweet the winds do blow.” ...
Or,
“Quand le marin revient de guerre--
Tout doux--
Quand le marin revient de guerre--
Tout doux--
‘Tout mal chaussé, tout mal vêtu,
Pauvre marin! d’où reviens-tu?--
Tout doux.’”
Then perhaps we will lazily inquire why songs about the price of malt,
or the coming of a Beautiful Ass out of the East should stir and
uplift and compose the hearts of men dreaming of an ideal beauty on an
April evening, and so to more songs and then to bed, finding at the
last moment the serene and beautiful, perhaps, in the glimpse of holy
evening landscape rich in unseen nightingales as we fall asleep.