GARLAND DAY
The sun had not risen though it had long been proclaimed, when the
old road led us into a moist wood that grew on the hillside, and here
and there overhung a perpendicular chalk cliff. The soil was black
and crisp with old beech mast, and out of it grew the clear, grave,
green leaves of anemone and dog’s mercury and spurge and hyacinth and
primroses, in places so dense that the dim earth below them seemed to
be some deep lake’s water. All the anemones were bowed and rosy. The
blue bells were plated with rain. The dark spurge leaves were crowned
by pale green flowers. The primroses grew, twenty in a cluster, on
long flushed stalks; each petal was perfect, and down their leaves the
raindrops slid and glittered or gleamed duskily. Arching above these,
the low brier branches carried sharp green young foliage. A shadowed
pool in one of the hollows was hardly to be distinguished from the dark
earth, except that it was covered with white crowfoot flowers as with
five minutes’ snow.
From among the flowers ascended straight stony rods of ash, their
ancient stoles bossy and hollowed like skulls, and covered with moss;
and from the purple encrusted ash-flowers wood-pigeons shook the rain
down to the leaves beneath. Amongst the ash trees were hazels, new
leaved, their olive stems gloomily shining.
Over all, the ancient beeches stood up with hard sculptured holes
supporting storey after storey of branch and shade which were traversed
at the top and at the fringes by fair fresh leaves. The rain had run
down the main trunks for generations, and made paths of green and black
that tried to gleam. Here and there, low down, the beeches extended
long priestly branches clothed in leaf, still and curved, to call for
silence in the cool, shadowy, crystal air.
Far away among the branches whitened the chalk cliffs. On this side
and on that, immense mossy boulders made tables for thrushes and cast
perfect shadows.
High up in the beeches, the invisible wood-wrens sang, and their songs
were as if, overhead in the stainless air, little waves of pearls
dropped and scattered and shivered on a shore of pearls. Below them the
wood-pigeons began to coo--with notes that were but as rounded bubbles
emerging from the silence and lost again. Just within hearing, in the
hawthorn hedge of the wood, blackbirds were singing: they opened with
the most high, arrogating notes that slowly rolled on to noble ends,
when suddenly they laughed and ceased; again and again they began so,
and again and again they laughed, as if they had grown too wise to
believe utterly in noble things. As we went deeper into the wood they
ceased, and those moist shades welcomed us as if they held what we
desired.
The trees were very old; their leaves were fresh and wet as when beauty
and joy shed a few tears. The soil was centuries deep in black beech
mast; the herbage seemed to have been born from it in that very hour.
The boulders had stood among the primroses so long that the thrushes
had chiselled shallow cups in them as they fed there in the mornings;
they were embossed with the most tender green and golden moss. The
shadows were as solemn and imperturbable as to a child a cathedral,
when he first steps into its solitude alone, and a god is created
anew out of his marvelling; and yet the hems of their mantles, where
they swept the ground, disclosed a flashing underside of crystals
newly-born. And for ourselves--we seemed to be home from a long exile,
and the pains of it, such as they were, turned like the shadows into
crystal. Here, then, was the land to which had fled those children who
once bore our names, who were our companions in the days when sunshine
was more than wine had ever been since, and they left us long ago, not
suddenly, but so strangely, that we knew not that they were far off;
hither those children had fled, and their companions of that time; here
they had been hiding these many years; abiding here they had become
immortal in the green-fledged antique wood, and we had come back to
them. Perhaps they recognised us: perhaps they re-entered these bodies
of ours. For once more the cuckoo was clear, golden, joyous. When we
heard the blackbird again we did not quarrel with the laugh at his own
solemnity, since it was not there. It was not memory, nor hope. Memory
perished, and hope that never rests lay asleep; and winds blew softly
from over Lethe and breathed upon our eyelids, coming as delicate
intercessors between us and life. We forgot that ours had been the sin
of Alcyone and Ceyx who, in their proud happiness, called one another
_Zeus!_ and _Here!_ and for that were cast down by the gods. Once again
we did so, for this was the wood of youth, and in the old streets of
the soul where the grass grows among the long-untrodden stones, and in
the doorways of deserted homes, the sound of footsteps and the click of
a frequented latch was heard.
And yonder is the wide prospect again, and the dawn,--the green hedges
starred with white stitchwort flower, misty with the first hawthorn
clusters, a-flutter with whitethroat, wild with the warbling of the
blackcap in their depths; wide, lustrous meadows dimmed by cuckoo
flowers, and at the edges of them the oaks beginning to bud and their
branches like great black brands about to break into golden flame;
and about the oaks that stood in the midst of them the grass waving
in the sun like brooks plunging from their roots; farmhouses known
only by their encircling apple trees all in bloom; radiant pools where
the sand-piper laughed; woods where the oak and ash waded deep in the
translucent green of the undergrowth’s rising tide and even then glowed
with brown and unborn greens, and the nightingale sang far withdrawn,
and at the edge the hurdle-maker worked by his thatched cote; and ridge
beyond ridge of hills cloudily wooded; and over all the low sky like a
blue bowl just emptied of its cream.
And as we sat at breakfast the village children came up the path
between borders dense with tall yellow leopard’s bane and red honesty
and sang by the windows--
“Please to remember the first of May,
For the first of May is Garland Day.”
And they carried garlands of ivy entwined among bluebells and cowslips
from the moist warm copses and the meadows.
On the twin vanes of the oasts, one pointing east, one north, the south
wind and the west wind were asleep in one another’s arms.