A pretty, Caldecott-like moment, or rather minute, when the huntsmen
stood on the green lawn round the moving, tail-switching, dapple mass
of hounds; and the red coats trotted one by one from behind the
screens of bare trees, delicate lilac against the slowly moving grey
sky. A delightful moment, followed, as the hunt swished past, by the
sudden sense that these men and women, thus whirled off into what may
well be the sole poetry of their lives, are but noisy intruders into
these fields and spinnies, whose solemn, secret speech they drown with
clatter and yelp, whose mystery and charm stand aside on their
passage, like an interrupted, a profaned rite.
Gone; the yapping and barking, the bugle-tootling fade away in the
distance; and the trees and wind converse once more.
This West Wind, which has been whipping up the wan northern sea, and
rushing round the house all this last fortnight, singing its big
ballads in corridor and chimney, piping its dirges and lullabies in
one's back-blown hair on the sand dunes--this West Wind, with its
many chaunts, its occasional harmonies and sudden modulations mocking
familiar tunes, can tell of many things: of the different way in which
the great trunks meet its shocks and answer vibrating through
innermost fibres; the smooth, muscular boles of the beeches, shaking
their auburn boughs; the stiff, rough hornbeams and thorns isolated
among the pastures; the ashes whose leaves strew the roads with green
rushes; the creaking, shivering firs and larches. The West Wind tells
us of the way how the branches spring outwards, or balance themselves,
or hang like garlands in the air, and carry their leaves, or needles,
or nuts; and of their ways of bending and straightening, of swaying
and trembling. It tells us also, this West Wind, how the sea is lashed
and furrowed; how the little waves spring up in the offing, and the
big waves rise and run forward and topple into foam; how the rocks are
shaken, the sands are made to hiss and the shingle is rattled up and
down; how the great breakers vault over the pier walls, leap
thundering against the breakwaters, and disperse like smoke off the
cannon's mouth, like the whiteness of some vast explosion.
These are the things which the Wind and the Woods can talk about with
us, nay, even the gorse and the shaking bents. But the hunting folk
pass too quickly, and make too much noise, to hear anything save
themselves and their horses' hoofs and their bugle and hounds.