MARCH DOUBTS
All day the winter seemed to have gone. The horses’ hoofs on the moist,
firm road made a clear “cuck-oo” as they rose and fell; and far off,
for the first time in the year, a ploughboy, who remembered spring and
knew that it would come again, shouted “Cuckoo! cuckoo!”
A warm wind swept over the humid pastures and red sand-pits on the
hills and they gleamed in a lightly muffled sun. Once more in the
valleys the ruddy farmhouses and farm-buildings seemed new and fair
again, and the oast-house cones stood up as prophets of spring, since
the south wind had turned all their white vanes towards the north, and
they felt the sea that lay--an easy journey on such a day--beyond the
third or fourth wooded ridge in the south. The leaves of goose-grass,
mustard, vetch, dog’s mercury, were high above the dead leaves on hedge
banks. Primrose and periwinkle were blossoming. Like flowers were the
low ash-tree boles where the axe had but lately cut off the tall rods;
flowerlike and sweet also the scent from the pits where labourers
dipped the freshly peeled ash poles in tar. In the elms, sitting
crosswise on a bough, sang thrush and missel thrush; in the young
corn, the larks; the robins in the thorns; and in all the meadows the
guttural notes of the rooks were mellowed by love and the sun.
Making deep brown ruts across the empty green fields came the long
waggons piled high with faggots; the wheels rumbled; the harness
jingled and shone; the horses panted and the carters cracked their
whips.
Soon would the first chiff-chaff sing in the young larches; at evening
the calm, white, majestic young clouds should lie along the horizon
in a clear and holy air; and climbing a steep hill at that hour, the
walker should see a window, as it were, thrown open in the sky and hear
a music that should silence thought and even regret--as when, on the
stage, a window is opened and some one invisible is heard to sing a
heavy-laden song below it.
But as I walked and the wind fell for the sunset, the path led me under
high, stony beeches. The air was cool and still and moist and waterish
dark, and no bird sang. A wood-pigeon spread out his barry tale as he
ascended perpendicularly to a hidden place among the branches, and
then there was no sound. The waterish half-light seemed to have lasted
for ever and to have an eternity ahead. Through the trees a grassy,
deeply rutted road wound downwards, and at the edge the ruts were
broad and full of dark water. Still retaining some corruption of the
light of the sky upon its surface, that shadowed water gave an immense
melancholy to the wood. The reflections of the beeches across it were
as the bars of a cage that imprisoned some child of light. It was but
a few inches deep of rain, and yet, had it been a legendary pool, or
had a drowned woman’s hair been stamped into the mud at its edge and
left a green forehead exposed, it could not have stained and filled
the air more tragically. The cold, the silence, the leaflessness found
an expression in that clouded shining surface among the ruts. Life
and death seemed to contend there, and I recalled a dream which I had
lately dreamed.
I dreamed that someone had cut the cables that anchored me to such
tranquillity as had been mine, and that I was drifted out upon an
immensity of desolation and solitude. I was without hope, without even
the energy of despair that might in time have given birth to hope. But
in that desolation I found one business: to search for a poison that
should kill slowly, painlessly and unexpectedly. In that search I lost
sight of what had persuaded me to it; yet when at last I succeeded, I
took a draught and went out into the road and began to walk. A calm
fell upon me such as I had sometimes found in June thunderstorms on
lonely hills, or in midnights when I stepped for a moment after long
foolish labours to my door, and heard the nightingales singing out
from the Pleiades that overhung the wood, and saw the flower-faced owl
sitting on the gate. I walked on, not hastening with a too great desire
nor lingering with a too careful quietude. It was as yet early morning,
and the wheat sheaves stood on the gentle hills like yellow-haired
women kneeling to the sun that was about to rise. Now and then I passed
the corners of villages, and sometimes at windows and through doorways,
I saw the faces of men and women I had known and seemed to forget,
and they smiled and were glad, but not more glad than I. Labouring in
the fields also were men whose faces I was happy to recognise and see
smiling with recognition. And very sweet it was to go on thus, at ease,
knowing neither trouble nor fatigue. I could have gone on, it seemed,
for ever, and I wished to live so for ever, when suddenly I remembered
the poison. Then of each one I met I begged a remedy. Some reminded me
that formerly I had made a poor thing of life, and said that it was
too late. Others supposed that I jested. A few asked me to stay with
them and rest. The sky and the earth, and the men and women drank of
the poison that I had drunken, so that I could not endure the use of
my eyes, and I entered a shop to buy some desperate remedy that should
end all at once, when, seeing behind the counter a long-dead friend in
wedding attire, I awoke.
Even so in the long wet ruts did the false hope of spring contend with
the shadows: even so at last did it end, when the dead leaves upon the
trees begin to stir madly in the night wind, with the sudden, ghastly
motion of burnt paper on a still fire when a draught stirs it in a
silent room at night; and even the nearest trees seemed to be but
fantastic hollows in the misty air.