When I return to a London suburb I think I shall try to cultivate
something resembling one of the drains which occur here and there on
the lower slopes of the Wessex moorland above the Chesil Bank. These
ditches make our best horticultural efforts as vulgar as excessive
begonias. The effect achieved by a ditch comes, apparently, without
intent and labour. When a drain is constant over shelves of limestone
from an upper spring, and then gathers into a shallow basin before
losing itself in the porous desert near the sea; when it occurs so in
a narrow combe with a southerly descent and is sheltered from the hard
drive of westerly weather, then the still lower air is tropical, and
English weeds flourish with an extravagance which hints at a fearful
vitality suppressed by cultivation.
One such tiny combe is a short walk above the tamarisks and the white
wall of my house. It is easy and even pleasant to carry thither those
books some wilful editors consider that I ought to read, unluckily for
the books and for them; because if I get well above the ditch then the
smell of thyme makes the synthetic odours of a modern novel, as from a
dressing table, seem a little queer. No getting round that criticism.
And if I stay by the ditch then I waste all the morning standing about
in that luxuriant tangle, as fascinated by it as the hover-flies appear
to be. No good then to try to read any book. Foolish to expect the wit
of recent prose to prove like a dragon-fly, or a lyric to soar and
poise like a red admiral. On a hot day, too, the smell of the water
mint would make the strongest inducement of Mille Fleurs seem very
silly. Besides, one has first to get to the ditch. It is quite near,
but the time one takes to reach it is ridiculous. The ditch lies on the
other side of an old wall, which is built--or created, for the wall
bears no evidence of design--of loose slabs of a limestone of the Lias.
That wall is the trouble. It is hard to get over it, and impossible
to get round it. Most of it is hidden in a torrent of bramble, which
pours headlong downhill. That wild of bramble is itself a domain in its
own right. I have discovered that it is an inhabited tunnel, and the
waves of hooked branches form its roof. One morning a stoat, which
was leaping about in a game that needs but one player, saw me coming,
and dived into a lower door of the mass. Out of other doors, till then
unknown, rabbits shot at once, as by magic. It was as though this earth
could erupt all the life it needs, at any moment. I suspect these hills
could do very well without us, and if Downing Street were to become
permanently untenanted perhaps our island would not look any the worse,
from one point of view.
A good length of the wall is exposed, at one place. That part of it
is, as an orderly mind would say, in need of repair. I hope it will
never get it. It is a delightful ruin. Slabs of limestone are scattered
about the foot of a ruin of loose rock. They vary in colour. They may
be a pale buff, or a bluish grey. The surface of a slab is frequently
water-worn, and then it is smooth and silky to the touch, and is
lustrous. It looks warm and rich, as though the bones of earth had an
unctuous marrow. And any chance fragment makes the age of the tumuli
on the hill-top as recent as yesterday, for it will be loaded with
fossils, the relics of a sea in which the dinosaurs lived. The chance
cross-sections of many nacreous shells give such a tablet of rock the
appearance of being marked with shining hieroglyphics; what reading
matter for us! No wonder it takes some time to get over it, this wall!
Lizards whisk into its crevices, the flickering of shadows where all is
still.
Below the overturned wall is the combe in which runs the ditch. There
is a dark screen of stunted Scotch firs on the edge of its far side to
keep any of the Channel gusts from spilling over. The weeds below have
no need to adjust themselves to the draughts. They grow as they please.
Teazle and hemp-agrimony flourish into small trees. Once you begin to
climb uphill through that jungle, out of the lower fringe of mint and
flea-bane--it is time a better name was found for that pleasant little
yellow herb of the waste and damp lands--you feel that the heat of
the sun is really a direct and incessant burning. The air is humid,
and strongly aromatic. The growth in that hollow might be the work
of a spell. It does not move. It seems theatrical and even a little
threatening in its absolute quietude and stillness. Some resolution
is needed for an advance into it. The pinkish murk of the crowns of
hemp-agrimony rises above the cream plumes of the meadow-sweet, and
though one knows of no attraction in its flower-heads, the butterflies
do. I suppose it gives them an upper platform in the light. Out in
the wind you may not see a butterfly all day, but here it is usual on
a sunny morning to find a gathering of scores of tortoise-shells,
peacocks, and red admirals. Perhaps it is a tradition with them that
this is the best retreat on the coast. It is a good tradition and
should be preserved. I am not sure which of those insects is the most
handsome, but I think whichever one of them happens to be arranging
itself on the nearest crown, heliotropically, really presenting to the
sun its coloured design, yet behaving--if I remain as still as the
garden itself--as though it were doing its best to get into the right
light for my benefit. Well, it is for my benefit, as well as for my
humiliation, because I realise that such a design, though worked to
no useful purpose that I can guess, being in that respect inferior
to my own designs, yet still might be considered superior to the art
of my own well-directed efforts. In any case, while that assembly of
useless living colours is winged and convulsive above the weeds, on a
good morning, it seems a sort of idleness to make the usual notes of a
critic of books.