My companion said to me that there was a doom over the day and the reign
and the times, and that the turn of the nation had come. He felt it in
the sky.
The day had been troubled: from the forest ridge to the sea there was
neither wind nor sun, but a dull, even heat oppressed the fields and the
high downs under the uncertain, half-luminous confusion of grey clouds.
It was as though a relief was being denied, and as though something
inexorable had come into that air which is normally the softest and most
tender in the world. The hours of the low tide were too silent. The
little inland river was quite dead, the reeds beside it dry and
motionless; even in the trees about it no leaves stirred.
In the late afternoon, as the heat grew more masterful, a slight wind
came out of the east. It was so faint and doubtful in quantity that one
could not be certain, as one stood on the deserted shore, whether it
blew from just off the land or from the sullen level of the sea. It
followed along the line of the coast without refreshment and without
vigour, even hotter than had been the still air out of which it was
engendered. It did not do more than ruffle here and there the uneasy
surface of our sea; that surface moved a little, but with a motion
borrowed from nothing so living or so natural as the wind. It was a dull
memory of past storms, or perhaps that mysterious heaving from the lower
sands which sailors know, but which no silence has yet explained.
In such an influence of expectation and of presage--an influence having
in it that quality which seemed to the ancients only Fate, but to us
moderns a something evil--in the strained attention for necessary and
immovable things that cannot hear and cannot pity--the hour came for me
to reascend the valley to my home. Already upon the far and confused
horizon two or three motionless sails that had been invisible began to
show white against a rising cloud. This cloud had not the definition of
sudden conquering storms, proper to the summer, and leaving a blessing
behind their fury. The edge of it against the misty and brooding sky had
all the vagueness of smoke, and as it rose up out of the sea its growth
was so methodical and regular as to disconnect it wholly in one's mind
from the little fainting breeze that still blew, from rain, or from any
daily thing. It advanced with the fall of the evening till it held half
the sky. There it seemed halted for a while, and lent by contrast an
unnatural brightness to the parched hills beneath it; for now the sun
having set, we had come north of the gap, and were looking southward
upon that spectacle as upon the climax of a tragedy. But there was
nothing of movement or of sound. No lightning, no thunder; and soon the
hot breath of the afternoon had itself disappeared before the advance of
this silent pall. The night of June to the north was brighter than
twilight, and still southward, a deliberate spectacle, stood this great
range of vague and menacing cloud, shutting off the sky and towering
above the downs, so that it seemed permissible to ascribe to those
protecting gods of our valley a burden of fear.
Just when all that scene had been arranged to an adjustment that no art
could have attained, the first great fire blazed out miles and miles to
the west, somewhere above Midhurst: I think near No Man's Land. Then we
saw, miles to the east again, a glare over Mount Harry, the signal of
Lewes, and one after another all the heights took it up in a
chain--above Bramber, above Poynings, above Wiston, on Amberley Mount (I
think), certainly on the noble sweep of Bury. Even in those greater
distances which the horizon concealed they were burning and answering
each other into Hampshire: perhaps on the beaten grass of the high forts
above Portsmouth, and to the left away to the flat Rye level, and to
the eastern Rother; for we saw the line of red angry upon that cloud
which had come to receive it, an endless line which suddenly called up
what one had heard old men say of the prairie fires.
It was easy, without covering the face and without abstracting the mind
from the whirl of modern circumstance, it was easy, merely looking at
the thing, to be seized with an impression of disaster. The stars were
so pale on the lingering white light of the pure north, the smoky cloud
so deep and heavy and steadfast and low above the hills, the fire so
near to it, so sharp against it, and so huge, that the awe and sinister
meaning of conflagrations dominated the impression of all the scene.
There arose in the mind that memory which associates such a glare and
the rising and falling fury of flames with sacrifice or with vengeance,
or with the warning of an enemy's approach, or with the mark of his
conquest; for with such things our race (for how many thousand years!)
has watched the fires upon the hills far off. It touched one as does the
reiterated note of a chaunt; if not with an impression of doom, at least
with that of calamity.
When the fires had died down to a sullen glow, and the men watching them
had gone home under the weight of what they had seen, the storm broke
and occupied the whole sky. A very low wind rose and a furious rain
fell. It became suddenly cold; there was thunder all over the weald, and
the lightning along the unseen crest of the downs answered the lightning
above the forest.