Between the Boldre and the Exe--Abuse of the New Forest--Character of
the population--New Forest code and conscience--A radical change
foreshadowed--Tenacity of the Forest fly--Oak woods of
Beaulieu--Swallow and pike--Charm of Beaulieu--Instinctive love of
open spaces--A fragrant
heath--Nightjars--Snipe--Redshanks--Pewits--Cause of sympathy with
animals--Grasshopper and spider--A rapacious fly--Melancholy
moods--Evening on the heath--"World-strangeness"--Pixie mounds--Death
and burial--The dead in the barrows--Their fear of the living.
Between the Boldre and the Exe, or Beaulieu river, there is a stretch
of country in most part flat and featureless. It is one of those
parts of the Forest which have a bare and desolate aspect; here in
places you can go a mile and not find a tree or bush, where nothing
grows but a starved-looking heath, scarcely ankle-deep. Wild life in
such places is represented by a few meadow-pipits and small lizards.
There is no doubt that this barrenness and naked appearance is the
result of the perpetual cutting of heath and gorse, and the removal
of the thin surface soil for fuel.
Those who do not know the New Forest, or know it only as a
collecting- or happy hunting-ground of eggers and "lepidopterists,"
or as artists in search of paintable woodland scenery know it, and
others who make it a summer holiday resort, may say that this abuse
is one which might and should be remedied. {30} They would be
mistaken. What I and a few others who use their senses see and hear
in this or that spot, is, in every case, a very small matter, a
visible but an infinitesimal part of that abuse of the New Forest
which is old and chronic, and operates always, and is common to the
whole area, and, as things are, irremediable. To discover and
denounce certain things which ought not to be, to rail against
verderers, who are after all what they cannot help being, is about as
profitable as it would be to "damn the nature of things."
It must be borne in mind that the Forest area has a considerable
population composed of commoners, squatters, private owners, who have
inherited or purchased lands originally filched from the Forest; and
of a large number of persons who reside mostly in the villages, and
are private residents, publicans, shopkeepers, and lodging-house
keepers. All these people have one object in common--to get as much
as they can out of the Forest. It is true that a large proportion of
them, especially those who live in the villages, which are now
rapidly increasing their populations, are supposed not to have any
Forest rights; but they do as a fact get something out of it; and we
may say that, generally, all the people in the Forest dine at one
table, and all get a helping out of most of the dishes going, though
the first and biggest helpings are for the favoured guests.
[Sidenote: New Forest conscience]
Those who have inherited rights have indeed come to look on the
Forest as in a sense their property. What is given or handed over to
them is not in their {31} view their proper share: they take this
openly, and get the balance the best way they can--in the dark
generally. It is not dishonest to help yourself to what belongs to
you; and they must live--must have their whack. They have, in fact,
their own moral code, their New Forest conscience, just as other
men--miners, labourers on the land, tradesmen, gamekeepers, members
of the Stock Exchange, for instance--have each their corporate code
and conscience. It may not be the general or the ideal or
speculative conscience, but it is what may be called their working
conscience. One proof that much goes on in the dark, or that much is
winked at, is the paucity of all wild life which is worth any man's
while to take in a district where pretty well everything is protected
on paper. Game, furred and feathered, would not exist at all but for
the private estates scattered through the Forest, in which game is
preserved, and from which the depleted Forest lands are constantly
being restocked. Again, in all this most favourable country no rare
or beautiful species may be found: it would be safer for the hobby,
the golden oriole, the hoopoe, the harrier, to nest in a metropolitan
park than in the loneliest wood between the Avon and Southampton
Water. To introduce any new species, from the biggest--the
capercailzie and the great bustard--to the smallest quail, or any
small passerine bird with a spot of brilliant colour on its plumage,
would be impossible.
The New Forest people are, in fact, just what circumstances have made
them. Like all organised {32} beings, they are the creatures of, and
subject to, the conditions they exist in; and they cannot be other
than they are--namely, parasites on the Forest. And, what is more,
they cannot be educated, or preached, or worried out of their
ingrained parasitical habits and ways of thought. They have had
centuries--long centuries--of practice to make them cunning, and the
effect of more stringent regulations than those now in use would only
be to polish and put a better edge on that weapon which Nature has
given them to fight with.
This being the conclusion, namely, that "things are what they are,
and the consequences of them will be what they will be," some of my
readers, especially those in the New Forest, may ask, Why, then, say
anything about it? why not follow the others who have written books
and books and books about the New Forest, books big and books little,
from Wise, his classic, and the Victoria History, down to the long
row of little rosy guide-books? They saw nothing of all this; or if
they saw un-pleasant things they thought it better to hold their
tongues, or pens, than to make people uncomfortable.
I confess it would be a mistake, a mere waste of words, to bring
these hidden things to light if it could be believed that the New
Forest, in its condition and management, will continue for any length
of time to be what it is and has been--just that and nothing more. A
district in England, it is true, but out of the way, remote, a spot
to be visited once or twice in a lifetime just to look at the
scenery, {33} like Lundy or the Scilly Isles or the Orkneys. But it
cannot be believed. The place itself, its curious tangle of
ownership--government by and rights of the crown, of private owners,
commoners, and the public--is what it has always been; but many
persons have now come to think and to believe that the time is
approaching when there will be a disentanglement and a change.
[Sidenote: A change foreshadowed]
The Forest has been known and loved by a limited number of persons
always; the general public have only discovered it in recent years.
For one visitor twenty years ago there are scores, probably hundreds,
to-day. And year by year, as motoring becomes more common, and as
cycling from being general grows, as it will, to be universal, the
flow of visitors to the Forest will go on at an ever-increasing rate,
and the hundreds of to-day will be thousands in five years' time.
With these modern means of locomotion, there is no more attractive
spot than this hundred and fifty square miles of level country which
contains the most beautiful forest scenery in England. And as it
grows in favour in all the country as a place of recreation and
refreshment, the subject of its condition and management, and the
ways of its inhabitants, will receive an increased attention. The
desire will grow that it shall not be spoilt, either by the
authorities or the residents, that it shall not be turned into
townships and plantations, nor be starved, nor its wild life left to
be taken and destroyed by anyone and everyone. It will be seen that
the "rights" I have spoken of, with the unwritten laws {34} and
customs which are kept more or less in the dark, are in conflict with
the better and infinitely more important rights of the people
generally--of the whole nation. Once all this becomes common
knowledge, that which some now regard as a mere dream, a faint hope,
something too remote for us to concern ourselves about, will all at
once appear to us as a practical object--something to be won by
fighting, and certainly worth fighting for.
It may be said at once, and I fancy that anyone who knows the inner
life of the Forest people will agree with me, that so long as these
are in possession (and here all private owners are included) there
can be no great change, no permanent improvement made in the Forest.
That is the difficulty, but it is not an insuperable one. Public
opinion, and the desire of the people for anything, is a considerable
force to-day; so that, inspired by it, the most timid and
conservative governments are apt all at once to acquire an
extraordinary courage. Sustained by that outside force, the most
tender-hearted and sensitive Prime Minister would not in the least
mind if some persons were to dub him a second and worse William the
Bastard.
The people in this district have a curious experiment to show the
wonderful power of the Forest fly in retaining its grasp. A man
takes the fly between his finger and thumb, and with the other hand
holds a single hair of a cow or horse for it to seize, then gently
pulls hair and fly apart. The fly does not release his hold--he
splits the hair, or at any rate {35} shaves a piece off right down to
the fine end with his sharp, grasping claw. Doubtless the human
parasite will, when his time comes, show an equal tenacity; he will
embrace the biggest and oldest oak he knows, and to pluck him from
his beloved soil it will be necessary to pull up the tree by its
roots. But this is a detail, and may be left to the engineers.
[Sidenote: Overlooking Beaulieu]
Beyond that starved, melancholy wilderness, the sight of which has
led me into so long a digression, one comes to a point which
overlooks the valley of the Exe; and here one pauses long before
going down to the half-hidden village by the river. Especially if it
is in May or June, when the oak is in its "glad light grene," for
that is the most vivid and beautiful of all vegetable greens, and the
prospect is the greenest and most soul-refreshing to be found in
England. The valley is all wooded and the wood is all oak--a
continuous oak-wood stretching away on the right, mile on mile, to
the sea. The sensation experienced at the sight of this prospect is
like that of the traveller in a dry desert when he comes to a clear
running stream and drinks his fill of water and is refreshed. The
river is tidal, and at the full of the tide in its widest part beside
the village its appearance is of a small inland lake, grown round
with oaks--old trees that stretch their horizontal branches far out
and wet their lower leaves in the salt water. The village itself
that has this setting, with its ancient watermill, its palace of the
Montagus, and the Abbey of Beaulieu, a grey ivied ruin, has a
distinction above {36} all Hampshire villages, and is unlike all
others in its austere beauty and atmosphere of old-world seclusion
and quietude. Above all is that quality which the mind imparts--the
expression due to romantic historical associations.
[Sidenote: Swallow and pike]
One very still, warm summer afternoon I stood on the margin, looking
across the sheet of glassy water at a heron on the farther side,
standing knee-deep in the shallow water patiently watching for a
fish, his grey figure showing distinctly against a background of
bright green sedges. Between me and the heron scores of swallows and
martins were hawking for flies, gliding hither and thither a little
above the glassy surface, and occasionally dropping down to dip and
wet their under plumage in the water. And all at once, fifty yards
out from the margin, there was a great splash, as if a big stone had
been flung out into the lake; and then two or three moments later out
from the falling spray and rocking water rose a swallow, struggling
laboriously up, its plumage drenched, and flew slowly away. A big
pike had dashed at and tried to seize it at the moment of dipping in
the water, and the swallow had escaped as by a miracle. I turned
round to see if any person was near, who might by chance have
witnessed so strange a thing, in order to speak to him about it.
There was no person within sight, but if on turning round my eyes had
encountered the form of a Cistercian monk, returning from his day's
labour in the fields, in his dirty black-and-white robe, his
implements on his shoulders, his face and hands {37} begrimed with
dust and sweat, the apparition on that day, in the mood I was in,
would not have greatly surprised me.
The atmosphere, the expression of the past may so attune the mind as
almost to produce the illusion that the past is now.
But more than old memories, great as their power over the mind is at
certain impressible moments, and more than Beaulieu as a place where
men dwell, is that ineffable freshness of nature, that verdure that
like the sunlight and the warmth of the sun penetrates to the inmost
being. Here I have remembered the old ornithologist Willughby's
suggestion, which no longer seemed fantastic, that the furred and
feathered creatures inhabiting arctic regions have grown white by
force of imagination and the constant intuition of snow. And here
too I have recalled that modern fancy that the soul in man has its
proper shape and colour, and have thought that if I came hither with
a grey or blue or orange or brown soul, its colour had now changed to
green. The pleasure of it has detained me long days in spring, often
straying by the river at its full, among the broadly-branching oaks,
delighting my sight with the new leaves
against the sun shene,
Some very red, and some a glad light grene.
[Sidenote: Love of open spaces]
Yet these same oak woods, great as their charm is, their green
everlasting gladness, have a less enduring hold on the spirit than
the open heath, though this may look melancholy and almost desolate
on coming {38} to it from those sunlit emerald glades with a green
thought in the soul. It seems enough that it is open, where the wind
blows free, and there is nothing between us and the sun. It is a
passion, an old ineradicable instinct in us: the strongest impulse in
children, savage or civilised, is to go out into some open place. If
a man be capable of an exalted mood, of a sense of absolute freedom,
so that he is no longer flesh and spirit but both in one, and one
with nature, it comes to him like some miraculous gift on a hill or
down or wide open heath. "You never enjoy the earth aright," wrote
Thomas Traherne in his _Divine Raptures_, "until the sun itself
floweth through your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and
crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of
the whole world."
It may be observed that we must be out and well away from the woods
and have a wide horizon all around in order to feel the sun flowing
through us. Many of us have experienced these "divine raptures,"
this sublimated state of feeling; and such moments are perhaps the
best in our earthly lives; but it is mainly the Trahernes, the
Silurist Vaughans, the Newmans, the Frederic Myers, the Coventry
Patmores, the Wordsworths, that speak of them, since such moods best
fit, or can be made to fit in with their philosophy, or mysticism,
and are, to them, its best justification.
This wide heath, east of Beaulieu, stretching miles away towards
Southampton Water, looks level to the eye. But it is not so; it is
grooved with long {39} valley-like depressions with marshy or boggy
bottoms, all draining into small tributaries of the Dark Water, which
flows into the Solent near Lepe. In these bottoms and in all the wet
places the heather and furze mixes with or gives place to the bog
myrtle, or golden withy; and on the spongiest spots the fragrant
yellow stars of the bog asphodel are common in June. These spots are
exceedingly rich in colour, with greys and emerald greens and orange
yellows of moss and lichen, flecked with the snow-white of
cotton-grass.
Here, then, besides that cause of contentment which we find in
openness, there is fragrance in fuller measure than in most places.
One may wade through acres of myrtle, until that subtle delightful
odour is in one's skin and clothes, and in the air one breathes, and
seems at last to penetrate and saturate the whole being, and smell
seems to be for a time the most important of the senses.
Among the interesting birds that breed on the heath, the nightjar is
one of the commonest. A keen naturalist, Mr. E. A. Bankes, who lived
close by, told me that he had marked the spot where he had found a
pair of young birds, and that each time he rode over the heath he had
a look at them, and as they remained there until able to fly, he
concluded that it is not true that the parent birds remove the young
when the nest has been discovered.
I was not convinced, as it did not appear that he had handled the
young birds: he had only looked at them while sitting on his horse.
The following {40} summer I found a pair of young not far from the
same spot: they were half-fledged and very active, running into the
heath and trying to hide from me, but I caught and handled them for
some minutes, the parent bird remaining near, uttering her cries. I
marked the spot and went back next day, only to find that the birds
had vanished.
[Sidenote: Snipe: Redshank]
The snipe, too, is an annual breeder, and from what I saw of it on
the heath I think we have yet something to learn concerning the
breeding habits of that much-observed bird. The parent bird is not
so wise as most mothers of the feathered world, since her startling
cry of alarm, sounding in a small way like the snort of a frightened
horse, will attract a person to the spot where she is sheltering her
young among the myrtle. She will repeat the cry at intervals a dozen
times without stirring or attempting to conceal the young. But she
does not always act in the same way. Sometimes she has risen to a
great height and begun circling above me, the circles growing smaller
or larger as I came nearer or went farther from the spot where the
young were lurking.
It was until recently a moot question as to whether or not the female
snipe made the drumming or bleating sound; some of the authorities
say that this sound proceeds only from the male bird. I have no
doubt that both birds make the sound. Invariably when I disturbed a
snipe with young, and when she mounted high in the air, to wheel
round and round, uttering her anxious cries, she dashed downwards at
intervals, and produced the bleating or drumming {41} which the male
birds emit when playing about the sky.
In all cases where I have found young snipe there was but one old
bird, the female, no doubt. In some instances I have spent an hour
with the young birds by me, or in my hands, waiting for the other
parent to appear; and I am almost convinced that the care of the
young falls wholly on the female.
The redshank, that graceful bird with a beautiful voice, breeds here
most years, and is in a perpetual state of anxiety so long as a human
figure remains in sight. A little while ago the small vari-coloured
stonechat or fuzz-jack, with red breast, black head and white collar,
sitting upright and motionless, like a painted image of a bird, on
the topmost spray of a furze bush, then flitting to perch on another
bush, then to another, for ever emitting those two little contrasted
sounds--the guttural chat and the clear, fretful pipe--had seemed to
me the most troubled and full of care and worries of all Nature's
feathered children--so sorrowful, in spite of his pretty harlequin
dress! Now his trouble seems a small thing, and not to be regarded
in the presence of the larger, louder redshank. As I walk he rises a
long way ahead, and wheeling about comes towards me--he and she, and
by-and-by a second pair, and perhaps a third; they come with measured
pulsation of the long, sharp, white-banded wings; and the first comer
sweeps by and returns again to meet the others, clamouring all the
time, calling on them to join in the outcry until the whole air seems
full of their {42} trouble. To and fro he flies, to this side and
that; and finally, as if in imitation of the small, fretful
stonechat, he sweeps down to alight on the topmost spray of some
small tree or tall bush--not a furze but a willow; and as it is an
insecure stand for a bird of his long thin wading legs, he stands
lightly, balancing himself with his wings; beautiful in his white and
pale-grey plumage, and his slender form, on that airy perch of the
willow in its grey-green leaves and snow-white catkins; and balanced
there, he still continues his sorrowful anxious cries--ever crying
for me to go--to go away and leave him in peace. I leave him
reluctantly, and have my reward, for no sooner does he see me going
than his anxious cries change to that beautiful wild pipe, unrivalled
except by the curlew among shore birds.
[Sidenote: Pewit]
Worst of all birds that can have no peace in their lives so long as
you are in sight is the pewit. The harsh wailing sound of his crying
voice as he wheels about overhead, the mad downward rushes, when his
wings creak as he nears you, give the idea that he is almost crazed
with anxiety; and one feels ashamed at causing so much misery. Oh,
poor bird! is there no way to make you understand without leaving the
ground, that your black-spotted, olive-coloured eggs are perfectly
safe; that a man can walk about on the heath and be no more harmful
to you than the Forest ponies, and the ragged donkey browsing on a
furze bush, and the cow with her tinkling bell? I stand motionless,
looking the other way; I sit down to think; I lie flat on my back
with hands {43} clasped behind my head, and gaze at the sky, and
still the trouble goes on--he will not believe in me, nor tolerate
me. There is nothing to do but get up and go away out of sight and
sound of the pewits.
It appears to me that this sympathy for the lower animals is very
much a matter of association--an overflow of that regard for the
rights of and compassion for others of our kind which are at the
foundations of the social instinct. The bird is a red- and a
warm-blooded being--we have seen that its blood is red, and when we
take a living bird in our hands we feel its warmth and the throbbing
of its breast: therefore birds are related to us, and with that red
human blood they have human passions. Witness the pewit--the mother
bird, when you have discovered or have come near her downy little
one--could any human mother, torn with the fear of losing her babe,
show her unquiet and disturbed state in a plainer, more
understandable way! But in the case of creatures of another division
in the kingdom of life--non-vertebrates, without sensible heat, and
with a thin colourless fluid instead of red blood, as if like plants
they had only a vegetative life--this sympathy is not felt as a rule.
When, in some exceptional case, the feeling is there, it is because
some human association has come into the mind in spite of the
differences between insect and man.
Walking on this heath I saw a common green grasshopper, disturbed at
my step, leap away, and by chance land in a geometric web in a small
furze {44} bush. Caught in the web, it began kicking with its long
hind legs, and would in three seconds have made its escape. But mark
what happened. Directly over the web, and above the kicking
grasshopper, there was a small, web-made, thimble-shaped shelter,
mouth down, fastened to a spray, and the spider was sitting in it.
And looking down it must have seen and known that the grasshopper was
far too big and strong to be held in that frailest snare, that it
would be gone in a moment and the net torn to pieces. It also must
have seen and known that it was no wasp nor dangerous insect of any
kind; and so, instantly, straight and swift as a leaden plummet, it
dropped out of the silvery bell it lived in on to the grasshopper and
attacked it at the head. The falces were probably thrust into the
body between the head and pro-thorax, for almost instantly the
struggle ceased, and in less than three seconds the victim appeared
perfectly dead.
[Sidenote: Grasshopper and spider]
What interested me in this sight was the spider, an _Epeira_ of a
species I had never closely looked at before, a little less in size
than our famous _Epeira diadema_--our common garden spider, with the
pretty white diadem on its velvety, brown abdomen. This heath spider
was creamy-white in colour, the white deepening to warm buff all
round at the sides, and to a deeper tint on the under surface. It
was curiously and prettily coloured; and, being new to me, its image
was vividly impressed on my mind.
As to what had happened, that did not impress me at all. I could
not, like the late noble poet who {45} cherished an extreme animosity
against the spider, and inveighed against it in brilliant, inspired
verse, remember and brood sadly on the thought of the fairy forms
that are its victims--
The lovely births that winnow by,
Twin-sisters of the rainbow sky:
Elf-darlings, fluffy, bee-bright things,
And owl-white moths with mealy wings.
Nor could I, like him, break the creature's toils, nor take the dead
from its gibbet, nor slay it on account of its desperate wickedness.
These are mere house-bred feelings and fancies, perhaps morbid; he
who walks out of doors with Nature, who sees life and death as
sunlight and shadow, on witnessing such an incident wishes the captor
a good appetite, and, passing on, thinks no more about it. For any
day in summer, sitting by the water, or in a wood, or on the open
heath, I note little incidents of this kind; they are always going on
in thousands all about us, and one with trained eye cannot but see
them; but no feeling is excited, no sympathy, and they are no sooner
seen than forgotten. But, as I said, there are exceptional cases,
and here is one which refers to an even more insignificant creature
than a field grasshopper--a small dipterous insect--and yet I was
strangely moved by it.
The insect was flying rather slowly by me over the heath--a thin,
yellow-bodied, long-legged creature, a _Tipula_, about half as big as
our familiar crane-fly. Now, as it flew by me about on a level with
my thighs, up from the heath at my feet shot {46} out a second
insect, about the same size as the first, also a Dipteron, but of
another family--one of the Asilidæ, which are rapacious. The
_Asilus_ was also very long-legged, and seizing the other with its
legs, the two fell together to the ground. Stooping down, I
witnessed the struggle. They were locked together, and I saw the
attacking insect raise his head and the forepart of his body so as to
strike, then plunge his rostrum like a dagger in the soft part of his
victim's body. Again and again he raised and buried his weapon in
the other, and the other still refused to die or to cease struggling.
And this little fight and struggle of two flies curiously moved me,
and for some time I could not get over the feeling of intense
repugnance it excited. This feeling was wholly due to association:
the dagger-like weapon and the action of the insect were curiously
human-like, and I had seen just such a combat between two men, one
fallen and the other on him, raising and striking down with his
knife. Had I never witnessed such an incident, the two flies
struggling, one killing the other, would have produced no such
feeling, and would not have been remembered.
We live in thoughts and feelings, not in days and years--
In feelings, not in figures on a dial,
as some poet has said, and, recalling an afternoon and an evening
spent on this heath, it does not seem to my mind like an evening
passed alone in a vacant place, in the usual way, watching and
listening and {47} thinking of nothing, but an eventful period, which
deeply moved me, and left an enduring memory.
The sun went down, and though the distressed birds had cried till
they were weary of crying, I did not go away. Something on this
occasion kept me, in spite of the gathering gloom and a cold
wind--bitterly cold for June--which blew over the wide heath. Here
and there the rays from the setting sun fell upon and lit up the few
mounds that rise like little islands out of the desolate brown waste.
These are the Pixie mounds, the barrows raised by probably
prehistoric men, a people inconceivably remote in time and spirit
from us, whose memory is pale in our civilised days.
[Sidenote: "World-strangeness"]
There are times and moods in which it is revealed to us, or to a few
amongst us, that we are a survival of the past, a dying remnant of a
vanished people, and are like strangers and captives among those who
do not understand us, and have no wish to do so; whose language and
customs and thoughts are not ours. That "world-strangeness," which
William Watson and his fellow-poets prattle in rhyme about, those, at
all events, who have what they call the "note of modernity" in their
pipings, is not in me as in them. The blue sky, the brown soil
beneath, the grass, the trees, the animals, the wind, and rain, and
sun, and stars are never strange to me; for I am in and of and am one
with them; and my flesh and the soil are one, and the heat in my
blood and in the sunshine are one, and the winds and tempests and my
passions are one. I feel the "strangeness" {48} only with regard to
my fellow-men, especially in towns, where they exist in conditions
unnatural to me, but congenial to them; where they are seen in
numbers and in crowds, in streets and houses, and in all places where
they gather together; when I look at them, their pale civilised
faces, their clothes, and hear them eagerly talking about things that
do not concern me. They are out of my world--the real world. All
that they value, and seek and strain after all their lives long,
their works and sports and pleasures, are the merest baubles and
childish things; and their ideals are all false, and nothing but
by-products, or growths, of the artificial life--little funguses
cultivated in heated cellars.
[Sidenote: The barrow on the heath]
In such moments we sometimes feel a kinship with, and are strangely
drawn to, the dead, who were not as these; the long, long dead, the
men who knew not life in towns, and felt no strangeness in sun and
wind and rain. In such a mood on that evening I went to one of those
lonely barrows; one that rises to a height of nine or ten feet above
the level heath, and is about fifty yards round. It is a garden in
the brown desert, covered over with a dense growth of furze bushes,
still in flower, mixed with bramble and elder and thorn, and heather
in great clumps, blooming, too, a month before its time, the fiery
purple-red of its massed blossoms, and of a few tall, tapering spikes
of foxglove, shining against the vivid green of the young bracken.
All this rich wild vegetation on that lonely mound on the brown heath!
{49}
Here, sheltered by the bushes, I sat and saw the sun go down, and the
long twilight deepen till the oak woods of Beaulieu in the west
looked black on the horizon, and the stars came out: in spite of the
cold wind that made me shiver in my thin clothes, I sat there for
hours, held by the silence and solitariness of that mound of the
ancient dead.
Sitting there, profoundly sad for no apparent cause, with no
conscious thought in my mind, it suddenly occurred to me that I knew
that spot from of old, that in long-past forgotten years I had often
come there of an evening and sat through the twilight, in love with
the loneliness and peace, wishing that it might be my last
resting-place. To sleep there for ever--the sleep that knows no
waking! We say it, but do not mean--do not believe it. Dreams do
come to give us pause; and we know that we have lived. To dwell
alone, then, with this memory of life in such a spot for all time!
There are moments in which the thought of death steals upon and takes
us as it were by surprise, and it is then exceeding bitter. It was
as if that cold wind blowing over and making strange whispers in the
heather had brought a sudden tempest of icy rain to wet and chill me.
This miserable sensation soon passed away, and, with quieted heart, I
began to grow more and more attracted by the thought of resting on so
blessed a spot. To have always about me that wildness which I best
loved--the rude incult heath, the beautiful desolation; to have harsh
furze and ling and bramble and bracken to grow on me, and only wild
creatures {50} for visitors and company. The little stonechat, the
tinkling meadow-pipit, the excited whitethroat to sing to me in
summer; the deep-burrowing rabbit to bring down his warmth and
familiar smell among my bones; the heat-loving adder, rich in colour,
to find when summer is gone a dry safe shelter and hibernaculum in my
empty skull.
So beautiful did the thought appear that I could have laid down my
life at that moment, in spite of death's bitterness, if by so doing I
could have had my desire. But no such sweet and desirable a thing
could be given me by this strange people and race that possess the
earth, who are not like the people here with me in the twilight on
the heath. For I thought, too, of those I should lie with, having
with them my after life; and thinking of them I was no longer alone.
I thought of them not as others think, those others of a strange
race. What _do_ they think? They think so many things! The
materialist, the scientist, would say: They have no existence; they
ceased to be anything when their flesh was turned to dust, or burned
to ashes, and their minds, or souls, were changed to some other form
of energy, or motion, or affection of matter, or whatever they call
it. The believer would not say of them, or of the immaterial part of
them, that they had gone into a world of light, that in a dream or
vision he had seen them walking in an air of glory; but he might hold
that they had been preached to in Hades some nineteen centuries ago,
and had perhaps repented of their barbarous deeds. Or he might
think, since he {51} has considerable latitude allowed him on the
point, that the imperishable parts of them are here at this very
spot, tangled in dust that was once flesh and bones, sleeping like
chrysalids through a long winter, to be raised again at the sound of
a trumpet blown by an angel to a second conscious life, happy or
miserable as may be willed.
I imagine none of these things, for they were with me in the twilight
on the barrow in crowds, sitting and standing in groups, and many
lying on their sides on the turf below, their heads resting in their
hands. They, too, all had their faces turned towards Beaulieu.
Evening by evening for many and many a century they had looked to
that point, towards the black wood on the horizon, where there were
people and sounds of human life. Day by day for centuries they had
listened with wonder and fear to the Abbey bells, and to the distant
chanting of the monks. And the Abbey has been in ruins for
centuries, open to the sky and overgrown with ivy; but still towards
that point they look with apprehension, since men still dwell there,
strangers to them, the little busy eager people, hateful in their
artificial indoor lives, who do not know and who care nothing for
them, who worship not and fear not the dead that are underground, but
dig up their sacred places and scatter their bones and ashes, and
despise and mock them because they are dead and powerless.
It is not strange that they fear and hate. I look at them--their
dark, pale, furious faces--and think that if they could be visible
thus in the daylight, all {52} who came to that spot or passed near
it would turn and fly with a terrifying image in their mind which
would last to the end of life. But they do not resent my presence,
and would not resent it were I permitted to come at last to dwell
with them for ever. Perhaps they know me for one of their
tribe--know that what they feel I feel, would hate what they hate.
Has it not been said that love itself is an argument in favour of
immortality? All love--the love of men and women, of a mother for
her child, of a friend for a friend--the love that will cause him to
lay down his life for another. Is it possible to believe, they say,
that this beautiful sacred flame can be darkened for ever when soul
and body fall asunder? But love without hate I do not know and
cannot conceive; one implies the other. No good and no bad quality
or principle can exist (for me) without its opposite. As old
Langland wisely says:
For by luthere men know the good;
And whereby wiste men which were white
If all things black were?
{53}