THE POET’S SPRING AT LYDIARD CONSTANTINE
The perfume of the fur of the squirrel we skinned on that January
evening--when Ann teased Philip about High Bower--I well remember. I
liked it then; now I like it the more for every year which has since
gone by. It was one of the years when I kept a diary, and day by day
I can trace its seasons. The old year ended in frost and snow. The
new year began with thaw, and with a postal order from my aunt at
Lydiard Constantine, and the purchase of three yards of cotton wool
in readiness for the nesting season and our toll of eggs. On the next
day snow fell again, in the evening the streets were ice, and at
Abercorran House Philip and I made another drawer of a cabinet for
birds’ eggs. Frost and snow continued on the morrow, compelling us to
make a sledge instead of a drawer for the cabinet. The sledge carried
Philip and me alternately throughout the following day, over frozen
roads and footpaths. The fifth day was marked by a letter from Lydiard
Constantine, eighteen degrees of frost, and more sledging with Philip,
and some kind of attention (that has left not a wrack behind) to
Sallust’s “Catiline”....
Within a fortnight the pigeons were beginning to lay, and as one of
the nests contained the four useless eggs of an imbecile pair of hens,
we tasted thus early the pleasure of blowing one egg in the orthodox
manner and sucking three. This being Septuagesima Sunday, nothing would
satisfy us but an immediate visit to Our Country, where the jays’
nests and others we had robbed seven months before were found with a
thrill all but equal to that of May, and always strictly examined in
case of accidents or miracles. For there had now been a whole week
of spring sun shining on our hearts, and on the plumage of the cock
pheasant we stalked in vain. The thrush sang. The blackbird sang. With
the Conversion of St Paul came rain, and moreover school, Thucydides,
Shakespeare’s “Richard the Second,” and other unrealities and
afflictions, wherein I had to prove again how vain it is “to cloy the
hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast” at old Gaunt’s
command. But Quinquagesima Sunday meant rising in the dark and going
out with Philip, to watch the jays, always ten yards ahead of our most
stealthy stepping--to climb after old woodpigeons’ nests, to cut hazel
sticks, to the tune of many skylarks. Alas, a sprained foot could not
save me from school on Monday. But now the wild pigeons dwelling about
the school began to coo all day long and to carry sticks for their
nests. Out on the football field, in the bright pale light and the
south-west wind the black rooks courted--and more; the jackdaws who
generally accompanied them were absent somewhere. What then mattered it
whether Henri Quatre or Louis Quatorze were the greatest of the Bourbon
kings, as some of my school-fellows debated? Besides, when February
was only half through, Aunt Rachel formally invited Philip and me to
Lydiard Constantine for Easter. This broke the winter’s back. Frost
and fog and Bright’s “History of England” were impotent. We began to
write letters to the chosen three or four boys at Lydiard Constantine.
We made, in the gas jets at Abercorran House, tubes of glass for the
sucking of bird’s eggs. We bought egg drills. We made egg-drills for
ourselves.... The cat had kittens. One pair of Higgs’ pigeons hatched
out their eggs. The house-sparrows were building. The almond-trees
blossomed in the gardens of “Brockenhurst” and the other houses. The
rooks now stayed in the football field until five. The larks sang
all day, invisible in the strong sun and burning sky. The gorse was
a bonfire of bloom. Then, at last, on St David’s day, the rooks were
building, the woodpigeons cooing on every hand, the first lambs were
heard.
Day after day left us indignant that, in spite of all temptations,
no thrush or blackbird had laid an egg, so far as we knew. But all
things seemed possible. One day, in a mere afternoon walk, we found,
not far beyond a muddle of new streets, a district “very beautiful and
quiet,” says the diary. Losing our way, we had to hire a punt to take
us across the stream--I suppose, the Wandle. Beautiful and quiet, too,
was the night when Philip scaled the high railings into the grounds
of a neighbouring institution, climbed one of the tall elms of its
rookery--I could see him up against the sky, bigger than any of the
nests, in the topmost boughs--and brought down the first egg. It was
the Tuesday before an early Easter, a clear blue, soft day which drove
clean out of our minds all thought of fog, frost, and rain, past or
to come. Mr Stodham had come into the yard of Abercorran House on the
way to his office, as I had on my way to school. Finding Aurelius
sitting in the sun with Ladas, he said in his genial, nervous way:
“That’s right. You are making the best of a fine day. Goodness knows
what it will be like to-morrow.” “And Goodness cares,” said Aurelius,
almost angrily, “I don’t.” “Sorry, sorry,” said Mr Stodham, hastily
lighting his pipe. “All right,” said Aurelius, “but if you care about
to-morrow, I don’t believe you really care about to-day. You are one of
those people, who say that if it is not always fine, or fine when they
want it, they don’t care if it is never fine, and be damned to it, say
they. And yet they don’t like bad weather so well as I do, or as Jessie
does. Now, rain, when it ought not to be raining, makes Jessie angry,
and if the day were a man or woman she would come to terms with it, but
it isn’t, and what is more, Jessie rapidly gets sick of being angry,
and as likely as not she sings ‘Blow away the morning dew,’ and finds
that she likes the rain. She has been listening to the talk about rain
by persons who want to save Day and Martin. I prefer Betty Martin....
Do you know, Arthur tells me the house martins will soon be here?”
We looked up together to see if it was a martin that both of us had
heard, or seemed to hear, overhead, but, if it was, it was invisible.
Every year such days came--any time in Lent, or even before. I take it
for granted that, as an historical fact, they were followed, as they
have been in the twentieth century, by fog, frost, mists, drizzle,
rain, sleet, snow, east wind, and north wind, and I know very well
that we resented these things. But we loved the sun. We strove to it
in imagination through the bad weather, believing in every kind of
illusory hint that the rain was going to stop, and so on. Moreover rain
had its merits. For example, on a Sunday, it kept the roads nearly as
quiet as on a week day, and we could have Our Country, or Richmond
Park, or Wimbledon Common, all to ourselves. Then, again, what a thing
it was to return wet, with a rainy brightness in your eyes, to change
rapidly, to run round to Abercorran House, and find Philip and Ann
expecting you in the kitchen, with a gooseberry tart, currant tart,
raspberry tart, plum tart, blackberry tart, cranberry and apple tart,
apple tart, according to season; and mere jam or syrup tart in the
blank periods. My love of mud also I trace to that age, because Philip
and I could escape all company by turning out of a first class road
into the black mash of a lane. If we met anyone there, it was a carter
contending with the mud, a tramp sitting between the bank and a fire,
or a filthy bird-catcher beyond the hedge.
If the lane was both muddy and new to us, and we two, Philip and I,
turned into it, there was nothing which we should have thought out
of its power to present in half a mile or so, nothing which it would
have overmuch astonished us by presenting. It might have been a Gypsy
camp, it might have been the terrestrial Paradise of Sheddad the son
of Ad--we should have fitted either into our scheme of the universe.
Not that we were _blasé_; for every new thrush’s egg in the season
had a new charm for us. Not that we had been flightily corrupted by
fairy tales and marvels. No: the reason was that we only regarded as
impossible such things as a score of 2000 in first class cricket, an
air ship, or the like; and the class of improbabilities did not exist
for us. Nor was this all. We were not merely ready to welcome strange
things when we had walked half a mile up a lane and met no man, but
we were in a gracious condition for receiving whatever might fall to
us. We did not go in search of miracles, we invited them to come to
us. What was familiar to others was never, on that account, tedious or
contemptible to us. I remember that when Philip and I first made our
way through London to a shop which was depicted in an advertisement,
in spite of the crowds on either hand all along our route, in spite
of the full directions of our elders, we were as much elated by our
achievement as if it had been an arduous discovery made after a
journey in a desert. In our elation there was some suspicion that our
experience had been secret, adventurous, and unique. As to the crowd,
we glided through it as angels might. This building, expected by us and
known to all, astonished us as much as the walls of Sheddad the son of
Ad unexpectedly towering would have done.
Sometimes in our rare London travels we had a glimpse of a side street,
a row of silent houses all combined as it were into one gray palace,
a dark doorway, a gorgeous window, a surprising man disappearing....
We looked, and though we never said so, we believed that we alone had
seen these things, that they had never been seen before. We should not
have expected to see them there if we went again. Many and many a time
have we looked, have I alone in more recent years looked, for certain
things thus revealed to us in passing. Either it happened that the
thing was different from what it had once been, or it had disappeared
altogether.
Now and then venturing down a few side streets where the system was
rectangular and incapable of deceiving, we came on a church full of
sound or gloomily silent--I do not know how to describe the mingled
calm and pride in the minds of the discoverers. Some of the very quiet,
apparently uninhabited courts, for example, made us feel that corners
of London had been deserted and forgotten, that anyone could hide away
there, living in secrecy as in a grave. Knowing how we ourselves,
walking or talking together, grew oblivious of all things that were not
within our brains, or vividly and desirably before our eyes, feeling
ourselves isolated in proud delight, deserted and forgotten of the
multitude who were not us, we imagined, I suppose, that houses and
other things could have a similar experience, or could share it with
us, were we to seek refuge there like Morgan in his mountain tower.
The crowd passing and surrounding us consisted of beings unlike us,
incapable of our isolation or delight: the retired houses whispering
in quiet alleys must be the haunt of spirits unlike the crowd and more
like us, or, if not, at least they must be waiting in readiness for
such. I recognised in them something that linked them to Abercorran
House and distinguished them from Brockenhurst.
Had these favoured houses been outwardly as remarkable as they were in
spirit they might have pleased us more, but I am not certain. Philip
had his house with the windows that were as the days of the year. But
I came only once near to seeing, with outward eyes, such a house as
perhaps we desired without knowing it. Suddenly, over the tops of the
third or fourth and final ridge of roofs, visible a quarter of a mile
away from one of the windows at Abercorran House, much taller than any
of the throng of houses and clear in the sky over them, I saw a castle
on a high rock. It resembled St Michael’s Mount, only the rock was
giddier and had a narrower summit, and the castle’s three clustered
round towers of unequal height stood up above it like three fingers
above a hand. When I pointed it out to Philip he gave one dark, rapid
glance as of mysterious understanding, and looked at me, saying slowly:
“‘A portal as of shadowy adamant
Stands yawning on the highway of the life
Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt;
Around it rages an unceasing strife
Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt
The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high
Into the whirlwind of the upper sky.
And many pass it by with careless tread,
Not knowing that a shadowy....’
A shadowy _what_, Arthur? At any rate that is the place.”
In those days, Philip was beginning to love Shelley more than he loved
Aurelius or me.
I had not seen that pile before. With little trouble I could have
located it almost exactly: I might have known that the particular
street had no room for a sublimer St Michael’s Mount. If we passed the
spot during the next few days we made no use of the evidence against
the tower, which satisfied us in varying degrees until in process of
time it took its place among the other chimney clusters of our horizon.
I was not disillusioned as to this piece of fancy’s architecture, nor
was I thereafter any more inclined to take a surveyor’s view of the
surface of the earth. Stranger things, probably, than St Michael’s
Mount have been thought and done in that street: we did not know it,
but our eyes accepted this symbol of them with gladness, as in the
course of nature. Not much less fantastic was our world than the one
called up by lights seen far off before a traveller in a foreign and a
dark, wild land.
Therefore Spring at Lydiard Constantine was to Philip and me more than
a portion of a regular renascence of Nature. It was not an old country
marvellously at length arraying itself after an old custom, but an
invasion of the old as violent as our suburban St Michael’s Mount. It
was as if the black, old, silent earth had begun to sing as sweet as
when Jessie sang unexpectedly “Blow away the morning dew.” It was not
a laborious, orderly transformation, but a wild, divine caprice. We
supposed that it would endure for ever, though it might (as I see now)
have turned in one night to Winter. But it did not.
That Spring was a poet’s Spring. “Remember this Spring,” wrote
Aurelius in a letter, “then you will know what a poet means when
he says _Spring_.” Mr Stodham, who was not a poet, but wrote verse
passionately, was bewildered by it, and could no longer be kept from
exposing his lines. He called the Spring both fiercely joyous, and
melancholy. He addressed it as a girl, and sometimes as a thousand
gods. He said that it was as young as the dew-drop freshly globed on
the grass tip, and also as old as the wind. He proclaimed that it had
conquered the earth, and that it was as fleeting as a poppy. He praised
it as golden, as azure, as green, as snow-white, as chill and balmy,
as bright and dim, as swift and languid, as kindly and cruel, as true
and fickle. Yet he certainly told an infinitely small part of the truth
concerning that Spring. It is memorable to me chiefly on account of a
great poet.
For a day or two, at Lydiard Constantine, Philip roamed with me up and
down hedgerows, through copses, around pools, as he had done in other
Aprils, but though he found many nests he took not one egg, not even
a thrush’s egg that was pure white and would have been unique in his
collection, or in mine; neither was I allowed to take it. Moreover,
after the first two or three days he only came reluctantly--found
hardly any nests--quarrelled furiously with the most faithful of the
Lydiard boys for killing a thrush (though it was a good shot) with a
catapult. He now went about muttering unintelligible things in a voice
like a clergyman. He pushed through a copse saying magnificently:
“Unfathomable sea whose waves are years.”
He answered an ordinary question by Aunt Rachel with:
“Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs.”
Tears stood in his eyes while he exclaimed:
“Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
Or they dead leaves.”
Like a somnambulist he paced along, chanting:
“Earth, Ocean, Air, beloved brotherhood....”
The sight of a solitary cottage would draw from him those lines
beginning:
“A portal as of shadowy adamant....”
Over and over again, in a voice somewhere between that of Irving and a
sheep, he repeated:
“From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill,
Or piny promontory of the Arctic main,
Or utmost islet inaccessible....”
With a frenzy as of one who suffered wounds, insults, hunger and thirst
and pecuniary loss, for Liberty’s sweet sake, he cried out to the
myriad emerald leaves:
“Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle
Such lamps within the dome of this dim world,
That the pale name of _Priest_ might shrink and dwindle
Into the _Hell_ from which it first was hurled....”
He used to say to me, falling from the heights of recitation:
“Shelley lived in the time of the Duke of Wellington. He was the son of
a rich old baronet in Sussex, but he had nothing to do with his parents
as soon as he could escape from them. He wrote the greatest lyrics that
ever were--that is, songs not meant to be sung, and no musician could
write good enough music for them, either. He was tall, and brave, and
gentle. He feared no man, and he almost loved death. He was beautiful.
His hair was long, and curled, and had been nearly black, but it was
going grey when he died. He was drowned in the Mediterranean at thirty.
The other poets burnt his body on the sea-shore, but one of them saved
the heart and buried it at Rome with the words on the stone above it,
_Cor cordium_, Heart of hearts. It is not right, it is not right....”
He would mutter, “It is not right,” but what he meant I could not tell,
unless he was thus--seventy years late--impatiently indignant at the
passing of Shelley out of this earth. As likely as not he would forget
his indignation, if such it was, by whispering--but not to me--with
honied milky accents, as of one whose feet would refuse to crush a toad
or bruise a flower:
“Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart
Fell like bright Spring upon some herbless plain,
How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
Of custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,
And walk as free as light the clouds among,
Which many an envious slave then breath’d in vain
From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung
To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long....”
From Philip’s tone as he continued the poem, it might have been
supposed that he, too, had a young and unloved wife, a rebellious
father, a sweet-heart ready to fly with him in the manner suggested by
some other lines which he uttered with conviction:
“A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow;
There is a path on the sea’s azure floor,
No keel has ever ploughed the path before;
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles;
The merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?”
I have beside me the book which taught Philip this sad bliss, this
wild wisdom. The fly-leaves are entirely covered by copies in his
hand-writing of the best-loved poems and passages. Between some pages
are still the scentless skeletons of flowers and leaves--still more
pages bear the stains left by other flowers and leaves--plucked in that
spring at Lydiard Constantine. The gilding of the covers for the most
part is worn smoothly out; the edges are frayed, the corners broken.
Thus the book seems less the work of Shelley than of Philip. It embalms
that Spring. Yet why do I say embalmed? It is not dead. It lives while
I live and can respond to the incantation of one of the poems in this
little book, beginning:
“Life of Life, thy lips enkindle,
With their love the breath between them....”
When I first heard them from Philip, Spring was thronging the land with
delicious odours, colours, and sounds. I knew how nothing came, yet
it was a sweet and natural coming rather than magic--a term then of
too narrow application. As nearly as possible I step back those twenty
years, and see the beech leaves under the white clouds in the blue and
hear the wood wren amongst them, whenever by some chance or necessity
I meet that incantation: “Life of Life, thy lips enkindle,” and I do
not understand them any more than I do the Spring. Both have the power
of magic....
Not magical, but enchanted away from solidity, seems now that life at
Abercorran House, where Jessie, Ann, Aurelius, and the rest, and the
dogs, and the pigeons, sat or played in the sun, I suppose, without us
and Shelley, throughout that April. There never was again such another
Spring, because those that followed lacked Philip. He fell ill and
stayed on at Lydiard Constantine to be nursed by my Aunt Rachel, while
I went back to read about the Hanseatic League, Clodia (the Lesbia
of Catullus), and other phantoms that had for me no existence except
in certain printed pages which I would gladly have abolished. With
Philip I might have come to care about the Hansa, and undoubtedly about
Clodia; but before I had done with them, before the cuckoos of that
poet’s Spring were silent, he was buried at Lydiard Constantine.
At this point the people at Abercorran House--even Jessie and
Aurelius--and the dogs that stretched out in deathlike blessedness
under the sun, and the pigeons that courted and were courted in the
yard and on the roof, all suddenly retreat from me when I come to
that Spring in memory; a haze of ghostly, shimmering silver veils
them; without Philip they are as people in a story whose existence
I cannot prove. The very house has gone. The elms of the Wilderness
have made coffins, if they were not too old. Where is the pond and
its lilies? They are no dimmer than the spirits of men and children.
But there is always Ann. When “Life of Life” is eclipsed and Spring
forgotten, Ann is still in Abercorran Street. I do not think she sees
those dim hazed spirits of men and children, dogs and pigeons. Jessie,
she tells me, is now a great lady, but rides like the wind. Roland
never leaves Caermarthenshire except after a fox. Jack has gone to
Canada and will stay. Lewis is something on a ship. Harry owns sheep
by thousands, and rents a mighty mountain, and has as many sons as
brothers, and the same number of daughters, who have come to the point
of resembling Jessie: so says Ann, who has a hundred photographs. Mr
Morgan is back at Abercorran. When good fortune returned to the Morgans
the whole family went there for a time, leaving Ann behind until the
house should be let. She stayed a year. The family began to recover
in the country, and to scatter. Jessie married and Jack left England
within the year. Ann became a housekeeper first to the new tenant
of Abercorran House, afterwards to Mr Jones at Abercorran Street.
Otherwise I should not have written down these memories of the Morgans
and their friends, men, dogs, and pigeons, and of the sunshine caught
by the yard of Abercorran House in those days, and of Our Country, and
of that Spring and the “Life of Life” which live, and can only perish,
together. Ann says there is another world. “Not a better,” she adds
firmly. “It would be blasphemous to suppose that God ever made any but
the best of worlds--not a better, but a different one, suitable for
different people than we are now, you understand, not better, for that
is impossible, say I, who have lived in Abercorran--town, house, and
street--these sixty years--there is not a better world.”
PRINTED BY
TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
EDINBURGH
Transcriber's Note
The following apparent errors have been corrected:
p. 25 "fed the pigons she" changed to "fed the pigeons she"
p. 56 "they pased in deep water" changed to "they passed in deep water"
p. 68 "rounds islands of ash" changed to "round islands of ash"
p. 120 "time-worm black bureau" changed to "time-worn black bureau"
p. 155 "chief faculty. and there" changed to "chief faculty, and there"
p. 172 "“More air,” he shouted," changed to "“More air,” he shouted."
p. 283 "quiet, says the diary." changed to "quiet, says the diary.”"
Archaic or inconsistent language has otherwise been kept as printed.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Happy-go-lucky Morgans, by Edward Thomas