I hope that I have secured for myself a haven, a yet more impenetrable
shade than this, against the time when, having seen four generations
of men, two behind and two beyond, I may consider in silence what is
likely to be the end of it all. It is true that I am getting old, but
I am not yet prepared for a lodge in the wilderness. My present house
has a wall on the village street. The post-office is a matter of
crossing the road; the church is at the bottom of a meadow. I like all
that, because I like all my neighbours and the sound of their voices.
At eleven o'clock in the morning I can hear the children let out from
school, "as shrill as swifts in upper air." That, too, I like. But the
time will come when silence is best, and, as I say, I believe that I
have found the very place. I have had my eye upon it for years, and
seldom a month passes but I am there. A small black dog and I once saw
Oreads there, or said we did, and in print at that. This very year
the farm to which it belongs came into the market, and was sold; the
purchaser will treat with me. I have described it once, nay twice,
and won't do it again. Enough to say that it is the butt end of a deep
green combe in the Downs, that it is sheltered from every wind, faces
the south, and is below an ancient road, now a grass track, and the
remains of what is called a British village on the ordnance maps, a
great ramparted square with half a dozen gateways and two mist-pools
within its ambit. All about it lie the neolithic dead, of whose race,
as Glaucus told Diomede, "I boast myself to be."
We are all Iberians here, or so I love to believe, grounding
myself upon the learned Dr. Beddoes--a swarthy people, dark-haired,
grey-eyed, rather under than over the mean height. The aboriginal
strain has proved itself stronger than the Frisian, and the Danish
type does not appear at all. There are English names among us, of
course, such as Gurd, which is Gurth as pronounced by a Norman; but it
is understood that we are neolithic chiefly on the distaff side. The
theory that each successive wave of invasion demolished the existing
inhabitants is absurd. Not even the Germans do that; nor have the
Turks succeeded in obliterating the Armenian nation. No--in turn our
oncoming hordes, Celts, Romans, English, Danes, enslaved the men and
married, or at least mated with, the women. And so we are descended,
and (let me at this hour of victory be allowed to say) a marvellous
people we are. For tenacity, patience, and obedience to the law--not
of men, but of nature--I don't suppose there is another such people
in the world. Those characteristics, for which neither Celt nor Roman,
Teuton nor Dane, as we know them now, is remarkable, I set to the
score of the neolithic race, whose physical features are equally
enduring.
When you get what seems like a clear case in either sex, you have a
very handsome person.
The most beautiful woman I ever saw in my days was scrubbing a kitchen
floor on her knees, when I saw her first--not a hundred miles from
here. Pure Iberian, so far as one can judge--olive skin, black hair,
grey-green eyes. Otherwise--colouring apart--the Venus of Milo, no
less. I don't say that she was very intelligent. I wonder if the Venus
was. But she was obedient to the law of her being--that I do know; and
it is a matter of faith with me that Aphrodite can have been no less
so.
Neither a quick-witted nor an imaginative race are we; but we have
the roots of poetry in us, and the roots of other arts, for we have
reverence for what is above and beyond us. Custom, too, we worship,
and decency and order. We fight unwillingly, and are very slow to
anger; but we never let go. Witness the last four dreadful years;
witness Europe from Mons to Gallipoli. The British private, soldier
or sailor, has been the backbone of the fight for freedom. But I am a
long way from my valley in the Downs.
I shall first of all sink a well, for one must have water, even if one
is going to die. Then I shall make a mist-pool--that art is not lost
yet--because as well as water to drink I like water to look upon.
Lastly, I will build a hermitage of puddled chalk and straw, and
thatch it with reeds, if I can get them. It will consist of a single
room thirty feet long. It will have a gallery at each end, attained
by a ladder. In each gallery shall be a bed, and the appurtenance
thereof, one for use and one for a co-hermit or hermitess, if such
there be. I leave that open. There must be a stoop, of course. Nothing
enclosed. No flowers, by request. The sheep shall nibble to the very
threshold. I don't forget that there is a fox-earth in the spinney
attached. I saw a vixen and her cubs there one morning as clearly as
I see this paper. She barked at me once or twice, sitting high on her
haunches, but the children played on without a glance at me. They were
playing at catch-as-catch-can--with a full-grown hare. Sheer fun. No
after-thoughts. I watched them for twenty minutes.
If I grow anything there at all I shall confine my part of the
business to planting, and let Nature do the rest. It may be
absolutely necessary to keep the sheep off for a year or two, and the
rabbits--but that is all. And what I do plant shall be deciduous, so
that I may have the yearly miracle to expect. It is a mighty eater of
time--and there won't be much of that left probably; yet a joy which
no man who has ever begotten anything, baby or poem, can deny himself.
If anybody wants to see what Nature can do in the way of a season's
growth, I can tell him how to go to work. Let him plant on the bank
of a running water a root of _Gunnera manicata_. Let him then wait ten
years, observing these directions faithfully. Every fall, after the
first frost--that frost which blackens his dahlias--let him cover
the crown of his _Gunnera_ with one of its own leaves. Pile some
stable-stuff over that, and then heap upon all the leaf-sweepings of
that part of the garden. Growth starts in mid-April and proceeds by
feet a week. Mine, which is about ten years old now, is thirty-five
feet in circumference, nearly twelve feet high, has flowers
two-feet-six in length, and in a hot summer has grown leaves seven
feet across. You can go under one of them in a shower of rain and be
as dry as in church. And all that done in five months. The plant is
a rhubarb of sorts and comes from Chili. I should like to see it over
there on the marge of some monstrous great river. In another order,
the _Ipomoea_ (Morning Glory), which comes from East Africa, runs it
close. I had one seed in Sussex which completely overflowed a garden
wall, smothering everything upon it. A kind of Jack's beanstalk, and
every morning starred with turquoise blue trumpet mouths of ravishing
beauty, which were dead at noon. The poor thing was constrained to be
a hierodule, gave no seed. Nature is the prodigal's foster-mother.
I have a plant whose seed is much more beautiful than its flower.
By the way, I have two, for the Spindle Tree is in seed, which has
a quite insignificant blossom. But the plant I mean is a wild peony,
which I dug up in a brake on the slopes of Helikon. It is a single
white whose flower lasts, perhaps, three days. It makes a large
seed-pod, which burst a short time ago, and revealed blue-black seeds
sheathed in coralline forms of the most absolute vermilion. You could
see them fifty yards away. It seems to have no purpose in life but
to pack the seeds--or perhaps, they are beacons for the birds. I took
pains to be beforehand with the birds, having no desire to see Greek
peonies in my neighbours' gardens. The seeds are safely bestowed,
though their fate has not been Jonah's. There's a spinney of
elder-trees in the combe of my hermitage, which, I am told, was
planted entirely by magpies. And I suppose it was wood-pigeons who
planted two ilex trees on the top of the Guinigi tower in Lucca; and
some bird or other, once more, which is answerable for a fine
fig-tree growing in the parapet of the bridge at Cordova, in no soil
whatsoever. It was loaded with fruit when I saw it. But fig-trees are
like poets; if you want them to sing you must torture their roots. The
parallel wobbles, but will be understood.