WOOL-GATHERING AND LYDIARD CONSTANTINE
One day at Abercorran House I heard Aurelius, Mr Morgan, and Mr
Torrance in the Library, talking about wool-gathering. “Since Jessie
told us about that river in Essex with the Welsh name,” said Mr Morgan,
laughing, “we have travelled from Gwithavon to Battersea Park Road and
a fishmonger’s advertisement. Such are the operations of the majestic
intellect. How did we get all that way? Do you suppose the cave-men
were very different, except that they did not trouble about philology
and would have eaten their philologers, while they did without
fishmongers because fish were caught to eat, not to sell, in those
days?”
“Well!” said Aurelius, “we could not live if we had nothing in common
with the cave-men. A man who was a mere fishmonger or a mere philologer
could not live a day without artificial aid. Scratch a philologer
sufficiently hard and you will find a sort of a cave-man.”
“I think,” continued Mr Morgan, “that we ought to prove our
self-respect by going soberly back on our steps to see what by-ways
took us out of Gwithavon to this point.”
“I’m not afraid of you at that game,” said Aurelius. “I have often
played it during church services, or rather after them. A church
service needs no further defence if it can provide a number of boys
with a chance of good wool-gathering.”
“Very true,” said Mr Torrance, who always agreed with Aurelius when it
was possible. A fancy had struck him, and instead of turning it into
a sonnet he said: “I like to think that the original wool-gatherers
were men whose taste it was to wander the mountains and be before-hand
with the nesting birds, gathering stray wool from the rocks and thorns,
a taste that took them into all sorts of wild new places without
over-loading them with wool, or with profit or applause.”
“Very pretty, Frank,” said Aurelius, who had himself now gone
wool-gathering and gave us the benefit of it. He told us that he had
just recalled a church and a preacher whose voice used to enchant his
boyhood into a half-dream. The light was dim as with gold dust. It was
warm and sleepy, and to the boy all the other worshippers seemed to be
asleep. The text was the three verses of the first chapter of Genesis
which describe the work of creation on the fifth day. He heard the
clergyman’s voice murmuring, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the
moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth
in the open firmament of heaven.”
“That was enough,” said Aurelius, “for me it was all the sermon. It
summoned up before me a coast of red crags and a black sea that was
white where the waves got lost in the long corridors between the crags.
The moon, newly formed to rule the night, stood full, large, and white,
at the top of the sky, which was as black as the sea and cloudless.
And out of the water were rising, by twos and threes, but sometimes
in multitudes like a cloud, the birds who were to fly in the open
firmament of heaven. Out of the black waste emerged sea-birds, one at
a time, their long white wings spread wide out at first, but then as
they paused on the surface, uplifted like the sides of a lyre; in a
moment they were skimming this way and that, and, rising up in circles,
were presently screaming around the moon. Several had only risen a
little way when, falling back into the sea, they vanished, there, as
I supposed, destined by the divine purpose to be deprived of their
wings and to become fish. Eagles as red as the encircling crags came
up also, but always solitary; they ascended as upon a whirlwind in one
or two long spirals and, blackening the moon for a moment, towered out
of sight. The little singing birds were usually cast up in cloudlets,
white and yellow and blue and dappled, and, after hovering uncertainly
at no great height, made for the crags, where they perched above the
white foam, piping, warbling, and twittering, after their own kinds,
either singly or in concert. Ever and anon flocks of those who had
soared now floated downward across the moon and went over my head with
necks outstretched, crying towards the mountains, moors, and marshes,
or sloped still lower and alighted upon the water, where they screamed
whenever the surface yawned at a new birth of white or many-coloured
wings. Gradually the sea was chequered from shore to horizon with
birds, and the sky was throbbing continually with others, so that the
moon could either not be seen at all, or only in slits and wedges. The
crags were covered, as if with moss and leaves, by lesser birds who
mingled their voices as if it were a dawn of May....”
In my turn I now went off wool-gathering, so that I cannot say how the
fifth day ended in the fancy of Aurelius, if you call it fancy. It
being then near the end of winter, that vision of birds set me thinking
of the nests to come. I went over in my mind the eggs taken and to be
taken by Philip and me at Lydiard Constantine. All of last year’s were
in one long box, still haunted by the cheapest scent of the village
shop. I had not troubled to arrange them; there was a confusion of
moor-hens’ and coots’ big freckled eggs with the lesser blue or white
or olive eggs, the blotted, blotched, and scrawled eggs. For a minute
they were forgotten during the recollection of a poem I had begun to
copy out, and had laid away with the eggs. It was the first poem I
had ever read and re-read for my own pleasure, and I was copying it
out in my best hand-writing, the capitals in red ink. I had got as
far as “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest.” I tried to repeat
the verses but could not, and so I returned to the eggs. I thought
of April when we should once again butt our way through thickets of
stiff, bristling stems, through thorn and briar and bramble in the
double hedges. We should find the thrushes’ nests in a certain copse
of oak and blackthorn where the birds used hardly anything but moss,
and you could see them far off among the dark branches, which seldom
had many leaves, but were furred over with lichens. We would go to
all those little ponds shadowed by hazels close to the farms, where
there was likely to be a solitary moorhen’s home, and up into the
pollard willow which once had four starling’s eggs at the bottom of a
long narrow pocket. In all those spring days we had no conscious aim
but finding nests, and if we were not scrambling in a wood we walked
with heads lifted up to the trees, turned aside to the hedges, or bent
down to the grass or undergrowth. We were not curious about the eggs;
questions of numbers or variation in size, shape or colour, troubled
us but fitfully. Sun, rain, wind, deep mud, water over the boots and
knees, scratches to arms, legs, and face, dust in the eyes, fear of
gamekeepers and farmers, excitement, dizziness, weariness, all were
summed up by the plain or marked eggs in the scent box; they were all
that visibly remained of these things, and I valued them in the same
way and for the same reason as the athlete valued the parsley crown.
The winning of this one or that was recalled with regret, sometimes
that I had taken more than I should have done from the same nest,
sometimes that I had not taken as many as would have been excusable;
I blushed with annoyance because we had not revisited certain nests
which were unfinished or empty when we discovered them--the plough-boys
doubtless had robbed them completely, or they had merely produced young
birds. How careless the country boys were, putting eggs into their hats
and often forgetting all about them, often breaking them wantonly. I
envied them their opportunities and despised them for making so little
use of them.
I thought of the flowers we tramped over, the smell and taste of
cowslips and primroses, and various leaves, and of the young brier
shoots which we chewed and spat out again as we walked. I do not know
what Aurelius might have been saying, but I began to count up the
Sundays that must pass before there would be any chance of finding
rooks’ eggs, not at Lydiard, but at the rookery nearest to Abercorran
House. Thus I was reminded of the rookery in the half-dozen elms of
a farm-house home field, close by the best fishing-place of all at
Lydiard. There the arrow-headed reeds grew in thick beds, and the water
looked extraordinarily mysterious on our side of them, as if it might
contain fabulous fish. Only last season I had left my baited line out
there while I slipped through the neighbouring hedge to look for a
reed-bunting’s nest; and when I returned I had to pull in an empty line
which some monster had gnawed through, escaping with hooks and bait. I
wonder Philip did not notice. It was just there, between the beds of
arrow-head and that immense water dock on the brink. I vowed to try
again. Everybody had seen the monster, or at least the swirl made as
he struck out into the deeps at a passing tread. “As long as my arm, I
daresay,” said the carter, cracking his whip emphatically with a sort
of suggestion that the fish was not to be caught by the like of us.
Well, we shall see.
As usual the idea of fishing was connected with my aunt Rachel. There
was no fishing worth speaking of unless we stayed with her in our
holidays. The water in the ponds at Lydiard Constantine provoked
magnificent hopes. I could have enjoyed fishing by those arrow-heads
without a bait, so fishy did it look, especially on Sundays, when sport
was forbidden:--it was unbearable to see that look and lack rod and
line. The fascinating look of water is indescribable, but it enables me
to understand how
“Simple Simon went a-fishing
For to catch a whale,
But all the water he had got
Was in his mother’s pail.”
I have seen that look in tiny ponds, and have fished in one against
popular advice, only giving it up because I caught newts there and
nothing else.
But to my wool-gathering. In the Library, with Aurelius talking, I
could see that shadowed water beside the reeds and the float in the
midst. In fact I always had that picture at my command. We liked the
water best when it was quite smooth; the mystery was greater, and we
used to think that we caught more fish out of it in this state. I hoped
it would be a still summer, and warm. It was nearly three quarters of
a year since last we were in that rookery meadow--eight months since
I had tasted my aunt’s doughy cake. I can see her making it, first
stoning the raisins while the dough in a pan by the fire was rising;
when she thought neither of us was looking she stoned them with her
teeth, but this did not shock me, and now I come to think of it they
were very white even teeth, not too large or too small, so that I
wonder no man ever married her for them alone. I am glad no man did
marry her--at least, I was glad then. For she would probably have given
up making doughy cakes full of raisins and spices, if she had married.
I suppose that what with making cakes and wiping the dough off her
fingers, and wondering if we had got drowned in the river, she had
no time for lovers. She existed for those good acts which are mostly
performed in the kitchen, for supplying us with lamb and mint sauce,
and rhubarb tart with cream, when we came in from birds-nesting. How
dull it must be for her, thought I, sitting alone there at Lydiard
Constantine, the fishing over, the birds not laying yet, no nephews
to be cared for, and therefore no doughy cakes, for she could not be
so greedy as to make them for herself and herself alone. Aunt Rachel
lived alone, when she was without us, in a little cottage in a row, at
the edge of the village. Hers was an end house. The rest were neat and
merely a little stained by age; hers was hidden by ivy, which thrust
itself through the walls and up between the flagstones of the floor,
flapped in at the windows, and spread itself so densely over the panes
that the mice ran up and down it, and you could see their pale, silky
bellies through the glass--often they looked in and entered. The ivy
was full of sparrows’ nests, and the neighbours were indignant that she
would not have them pulled out; even we respected them.
To live there always, I thought, would be bliss, provided that Philip
was with me, always in a house covered with ivy and conducted by an
aunt who baked and fried for you and tied up your cuts, and would clean
half a hundred perchlings for you without a murmur, though by the end
of it her face and the adjacent windows were covered with the flying
scales. “Why don’t you catch two or three really big ones?” she would
question, sighing for weariness, but still smiling at us, and putting
on her crafty-looking spectacles. “Whew, if we could,” we said one to
another. It seemed possible for the moment; for she was a wonderful
woman, and the house wonderful too, no anger, no sorrow, no fret, such
a large fire-place, everything different from London, and better than
anything in London except Abercorran House. The ticking of her three
clocks was delicious, especially very early in the morning as you lay
awake, or when you got home tired at twilight, before lamps were lit.
Everything had been as it was in Aunt Rachel’s house for untold time;
it was natural like the trees; also it was never stale; you never came
down in the morning feeling that you had done the same yesterday and
would do the same to-morrow, as if each day was a new, badly written
line in a copy-book, with the same senseless words at the head of every
page. Why couldn’t we always live there? There was no church or chapel
for us--Philip had never in his life been to either. Sunday at Lydiard
Constantine was not the day of grim dulness when everyone was set free
from work, only to show that he or she did not know what to do or not
to do; if they had been chained slaves these people from Candelent
Street and elsewhere could not have been stiffer or more savagely
solemn.
Those adult people were a different race. I had no thought that Philip
or I could become like that, and I laughed at them without a pang, not
knowing what was to save Philip from such an end. How different from
those people was my aunt, her face serene and kind, notwithstanding
that she was bustling about all day and had trodden her heels down and
had let her hair break out into horns and wisps.
I thought of the race of women and girls. I thought (with a little
pity) that they were nicer than men. I would rather be a man, I mused,
yet I was sure women were better. I would not give up my right to be a
man some day; but for the present there was no comparison between the
two in my affections; and I should not have missed a single man except
Aurelius. Nevertheless, women did odd things. They always wore gloves
when they went out, for example. Now, if I put gloves on my hands, it
was almost as bad as putting a handkerchief over my eyes or cotton wool
in my ears. They picked flowers with gloved hands. Certainly they had
their weaknesses. But think of the different ways of giving an apple. A
man caused it to pass into your hands in a way that made it annoying to
give thanks; a woman gave herself with it, it was as if the apple were
part of her, and you took it away and ate it in peace, sitting alone,
thinking of nothing. A boy threw an apple at you as if he wanted to
knock your teeth out with it, and, of course, you threw it back at him
with the same intent; a girl gave it in such a way that you wanted to
give it back, if you were not somehow afraid. I began thinking of three
girls who all lived near my aunt and would do anything I wanted, as
if it was not I but they that wanted it. Perhaps it was. Perhaps they
wanted nothing except to give. Well, and that was rather stupid, too.
Half released from the spell by one of the voices in the Library, I
turned to a dozen things at once--as what time it was, whether one of
the pigeons would have laid its second egg by now, whether Monday’s
post would bring a letter from a friend who was in Kent, going about
the woods with a gamekeeper who gave him squirrels, stoats, jays,
magpies, an owl, and once a woodcock, to skin. I recalled the sweet
smell of the squirrels; it was abominable to kill them, but I liked
skinning them.... I turned to thoughts of the increasing row of books
on my shelf. First came The Compleat Angler. That gave me a brief entry
into a thinly populated world of men rising early, using strange baits,
catching many fish, talking to milkmaids with beautiful voices and
songs fit for them. The book--in a cheap and unattractive edition--shut
up between its gilded covers a different, embalmed, enchanted life
without any care. Philip and I knew a great deal of it by heart, and
took a strong fancy to certain passages and phrases, so that we used
to repeat out of all reason “as wholesome as a pearch of Rhine,” which
gave a perfect image of actual perch swimming in clear water down the
green streets of their ponds on sunny days.... Then there were Sir
Walter Scott’s poems, containing the magic words--
“And, Saxon, I am Rhoderick Dhu.”
Next, Robinson Crusoe, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the Iliad, a mass of
almost babyish books, tattered and now never touched, and lastly The
Adventures of King Arthur and the Round Table. I heard the Lady of the
Lake say to Merlin (who had a face like Aurelius) “Inexorable man, thy
powers are resistless”: moonlit waters overhung by mountains, and crags
crowned by towers, boats with mysterious dark freight; knights taller
than Roland, trampling and glittering; sorceries, battles, dragons,
kings, and maidens, stormed or flitted through my mind, some only as
words and phrases, some as pictures. It was a shadow entertainment,
with an indefinable quality of remoteness tinged by the pale Arthurian
moonlight and its reflection in that cold lake, which finally suggested
the solid comfort of tea at my aunt’s house, and thick slices, “cut
ugly,” of the doughy cake.
At this point Jessie came in to say that tea was ready. “So am I,” said
I, and we raced downstairs. Jessie won.