IN A FARMYARD
We waited to let the forty cows go past, each of them pausing to
lick the forehead of the strawberry cow that leaned over the gate
of her stall and lowed continually concerning her newly-born white
calf. But so slow they were in their wanton, obedient movement to the
milking-shed that we turned and found another path, and thus surprised
a pond lying deep among tansy flowers, grey nettles and billows of
conquering bramble and brier.
The farmyard was always dusty, or deep with ridgy mire, from the
trampling of men and horses and cows in the streets that wound
among its cart-lodges, stables, stalls, milking-sheds and barns all
glowing with mature tiles, and ricks gleaming with amber thatch. But
in a corner lay unused, older than them all, the long-headed and
snaky-bodied pond. We learned to know that pond.
Sometimes, when summer has honoured the water with a perfect suit
of emerald green, that pond shows itself to be a monstrous, coiled,
primæval thing, lying undisturbed, and content to be still and
contemplative. Often has the monster been driven away--by draining;
often has it returned, still a green, coiled, primæval being that
disappears suddenly in November and leaves a soft, dark pool. Some
have ventured to intrude upon the monster, to fish for the sleepy carp
which are found when it has been driven from its nest of purple mud;
but they fish in vain.
The solitary, dying ash tree at the edge of the pond seems, by day,
when the monster is powerful there in the summer, to be but the
skeleton of an old victim; or, in the winter, the sad and twisted
nymph of the water. But every night, like any dreaming child or musing
lover, though not perhaps so happily, is it let into a varied, strange,
exalted paradise.
You may see it--on still evenings when the mist prevails over all
things except the robin’s song, and makes even that more melancholy--or
when the songs of many nightingales besiege, enter and possess the
house and the deserted farmyard--or when the cold and entirely silent
air under a purple November sky chills the blood, so that friendship
and hope and purposes are all in vain as in an opiate dream--then you
may see the ash-tree take heart. It has the air of one going home upon
a lonely road that will not end in loneliness. Those bare and stiff,
decaying branches are digits pointing homeward through the sky; the
tree forgets the monster at its feet and the children who laugh and
the supremacy of the buildings round about. It might seem, with those
extended branches, to be a self-torturing and aspiring fanatic who had
endured thus for uncounted days and nights, and has his vision at last.
For, when night is perfect, the tree exults, and though it is perhaps
not joyous, it is as one of those great sorrowful temperaments--of
soldier, or explorer, or humorist--so active and inexorable that they
may claim kinship with the truly joyous ones. If it is still sad, it
is “endiademed with woe.” How large and satanic it is beside the heavy
rounded oaks and the stately, feminine elms and the lovely limes.
Even so might a philosopher heighten and lord it, travelling in
Charon’s ship along with deflated tyrants and rhetoricians and bold and
crimson animals born to eat provinces and to poison worms; even so,
Ossian and Arthur and Cuchullain and Achilles triumph over men that
were yesterday on thrones and chariots.
Often have I seen the tree, and it alone, giving character to the whole
valley and filling the land as a bell fills a cathedral or as the
droning of a bee fills a lily.
“With him enthroned
Sat sable-vested night, eldest of things,
The consort of his reign.”
My little thoughts seem to be drawn up among the black branches like
twittering birds going to rest in some high cliff that is a chief
pillar of the fabric of the night. Half dead and threatened though it
be, surely the spirit of it, which is to many a broad and tragical
night as the arm of a great painter to his picture, will survive not
only me and my words but the tree itself. I have approached it on
some moonlit midnights, when the sky was so deep that the tall oaks
were as weeds at the bottom of an unfathomed sea, and it has stood
up erect and puissant, as if it were the dreamer at one with all he
sees, in a world of blind men with open eyes. Then, as the autumn dawn
arrived it was still looking towards Orion; defrauded, indeed for a
time of its vision, but not of its glory. The swaying cows wandered
to the milking-sheds. The little bats ran to and fro in the air and
made their little snipping and drumming sounds. It was light; but the
ash tree was not utterly cast down; it still walked in the way of the
stars; it was inscribed in solemn characters upon the sun that rode up
red in the mist.