The pond at the end of the row of cottages was reduced to little more
than a margin of yellow mud, tough as putty. The mud framed an oval of
green slime, which might have been solid, for several tin cans were
resting on it, unable to sink. The cottages were hoary with the dust of
constant motor-traffic, and the small strip of paled ground in front of
each was a desert in which nothing but a few tall hollyhocks survived.
The market-gardener, whose tanned face made his beard as delicate as
snow, and gave his pale blue eyes a disconcerting beauty, stood at the
gate to the gardens just beyond the pond. Over the gardens, held aloft
so that the passengers on the motor-buses from London could see it, was
a new notice-board announcing that freehold building plots were for
sale.
A stack of bricks was dumped on the potatoes near the notice-board.
The gardener saw that I had observed this novelty in the village, and
turned his head and glanced that way. He crinkled his eyes at the
bricks in ironical disfavour. “That’s the first lot,” he said. “Can’t
be stopped now. Better look round if you want to remember us. Wonderful
how things move, once they start. One time, nothing much along here but
farm wagons. Now you must hurry, crossing this here road. Specially
Sundays. London ain’t far away now.”
“It never was very far, was it?”
“It was all right where it was. I never thought,” he mumbled, “that
anyone ’ud want to live here, except us folks. I almost wish I’d
guessed it long ago. Might have bought this field. Never gave it a
thought. Rent was cheap. I could only think of the green stuff, and
that’s how we get caught, attending to one thing. You city folks are
too quick.”
“No, we’re not. It’s the years that are quick. We get hurried along and
pushed out, and most of the time we don’t know where we are.”
“Well. Maybe. But here you are. Seems as though them motor-buses
blasted even the taters. ’Tisn’t only the dry summer. Everything
lost heart after they put up that notice-board there. This place is
different.”
The old man took off his cap and put it on again. “Well, you come in
and have a cup of tea, on the way down. Don’t go to the village hall
and ask the young ’uns whether they like the difference. Sometimes I
fancy the motors have served them like the taters.”
At the end of the market gardens, where the contractors are assembling
their material, a footpath passes some recent villas built in the Tudor
style, with black planks, to represent timber work, embedded in cement,
and begins a long ascent of the open downs. Above the last house you
can see the upward track dwindle in the distance to a white thread,
which is occasionally lost to sight. And, beyond, where that thread
vanishes, a wood is a dark crown to the downs, but so remote, so near
to the glaring sky, that the eye says it is inaccessible.
The lower slopes of the upland have been worn by the holiday-makers.
The relics of the last week-end picnic littered the dry grass. Nobody
was in sight then. Nothing moved, except the air over the warm ground
in the distance: the down, a light inflation of chalk, vast and still,
might have been quivering under its spell. At least there was a hint
of its eager and tremulous spirit under the iron control of its
enchantment. You thought, when watching it, that you might presently
see the earth change more rapidly, and that dilation increase or
collapse. For the chalk country, with its faint hues and its clean
rondures, gives a curious sense of buoyancy and volatility. That high
and distant clump, that dark raft of trees, could be sweeping forward
on an immense green billow. It might slither over and vanish.
Above the litter of the picnic-makers the hill rose at a sharper angle.
The dry herbage was as slippery as ice. That sharp slope appeared to be
a barrier to the holiday folk. Their tide does not rise above it. Above
that escarpment the life of the valley never flows; and, looking down
from it, the market gardens in the valley bottom, with the tiny mark
which was a notice-board adding insult to the injury of the potatoes
in a dry season, were seen to be the less significant. They were of no
extent. The village itself, even with the bright red rectangles of the
villas which betrayed its growth, was obviously incidental. Above the
escarpment, too, the wild crops on the down were superior to anything
which afflicts cabbages. They knew nothing of a drought. As a cooling
breeze passed over the body of the hill the silky herbage stirred like
long brown fur. The skin of the earth was soft and healthy. It smelt of
thyme and marjoram.
And the wood, that raft on the crest of the billow of chalk, was
reached at last. No drought was there. There was an outer wild of the
smaller trees, guelder, wayfarer’s tree, white beam, holly, cornel
and alder buckthorn, bound together with wild clematis, and brambles
that sounded like dynamos with a multitude of bees. Inside the wood,
wherever there was a clearing in the timber on a slope, the colours of
the wild flowers fell away in a cascade. That seclusion might have been
tranquil and confident with a knowledge kept secret from the fearful
and anxious. Its life sang and hummed in innumerable tiny voices. It
will last a long time, and it will not need to change. A yew kept a
space for itself, a twilight area through which fell rods of light. One
side of the yew was splashed by the sun, and then the sooty trunk was
seen to be of madder and myrtle green. Its life, though ancient, could
not have been more robust. In the shade of it a company of hover-flies
were at play, as though they had been doing that from the beginning,
and would do it forever. They poised motionless or slightly undulated,
and gyrated sideways and vanished, to reappear instantly in the same
place, atoms joyous and sure in a changeless world. Sometimes one of
them was caught in a beam of light and then that morsel of life became
a bubble of gold in the air. It went out. It appeared again. It could
shine when it pleased.
The ship of trees was actually afloat. Its course was set high in the
tides of the ether. It only seemed motionless. The murmuring of its
secret power could be heard, if you listened for it.