series of experiences, and will leave conclusions to a final chapter.
I don't say that I have no others which could have found a
place--indeed, there are many others. But they were fitful, momentary
things, unaccountable and unrelated to each other, without the main
clue which in itself is too intimate a thing to be revealed just yet,
and I am afraid of compiling a catalogue. I have travelled far and
wide across Europe in my day, not without spiritual experiences. If at
some future time these co-ordinate into a body of doctrine I will take
care to clothe that body in the vesture of print and paper. Here,
meantime, is something of recent years.
My house at Broad Chalke stands in a narrow valley, which a little
stream waters more than enough. This valley is barely a mile broad
throughout its length, and in my village scarcely half so much. I can
be in the hills in a quarter of an hour, and in five-and-twenty
minutes find myself deeply involved, out of sight of man or his
contrivances. The downs in South Wilts are nowhere lofty, and have
none of the abrupt grandeur of those which guard the Sussex coast and
weald; but they are of much larger extent, broader, longer, more
untrodden, made much more intricate by the numberless creeks and
friths which, through some dim cycle of antiquity, the sea, ebbing
gradually to the great Avon delta, must have graved. Beautiful, with
quiet and a solemn peacefulness of their own, they always are. They
endure enormously, _in saecula saeculorum_. Storms drive over them,
mists and rains blot them out; rarely they are shrouded in a fleece of
snow. In spring the clouds and the light hold races up their flanks;
in summer they seem to drowse like weary monsters in the still and
fervent heat. They are never profoundly affected by such changes of
Nature's face; grow not awful, sharing her wrath, nor dangerously fair
when she woos them with kisses to love. They are the quiet and sober
spokesmen of earth, clad in Quaker greys and drabs. They show no
crimson at sunset, no gilded livery at dawn. The grey deepens to cool
purple, the brown glows to russet at such festal times. Early in the
spring they may drape themselves in tender green, or show their sides
dappled with the white of sheep. Flowers they bear, but secretly;
little curious orchids, bodied like bees, eyed like spiders, flecked
with the blood-drops of Attis or Adonis or some murdered
shepherd-boy; pale scabious, pale cowslip, thyme that breathes sharp
fragrance, "aromatic pain," as you crush it, potentilla, lady's
slipper, cloudy blue milkwort, toad-flax that shows silver to the
wind. Such as these they flaunt not, but wear for choiceness. You
would not see them unless you knew them there. For denizens they have
the hare, the fox, and the badger. Redwings, wheatears, peewits, and
airy kestrels are the people of their skies.
I love above all the solitude they keep, and to feel the pulsing of
the untenanted air. The shepherd and his sheep, the limping hare,
lagging fox, wheeling, wailing plover; such will be your company: you
may dip deeply into valleys where no others will be by, hear the sound
of your own heart, or the shrilling of the wind in the upland bents. I
have heard, indeed, half a mile above me, the singing of the great
harps of wire which stretch from Sarum to Shaftesbury along the
highest ridge; but such a music is no disturbance of the peace;
rather, it assures you of solitude, for you wouldn't hear it were you
not ensphered with it alone. There's a valley in particular, lying
just under Chesilbury, where I choose most to be. Chesilbury, a huge
grass encampment, three hundred yards square, with fosse and rampart
still sharp, with a dozen gateways and three mist-pools within its
ambit, which stands upon the ancient road and dominates two valleys.
Below that, coming up from the south, is my charmed valley. There, I
know, the beings whom I call Oreads, for want of a homelier word,
haunt and are to be seen now and then. I know, because I myself have
seen them.
I must describe this Oread-Valley more particularly, I believe. East
and west, above it, runs the old road we call the Race-Plain--the
highest ground hereabouts, rising from Harnham by Salisbury to end at
Shaftesbury in Dorset. North of this ridge is Chesilbury Camp;
immediately south of that is the valley. Here the falling flood as it
drained away must have sucked the soil out sharply at two neighbouring
points, for this valley has two heads, and between them stands a
grass-grown bluff. The western vale-head is quite round but very
steep. It faces due south and has been found grateful by thorns,
elders, bracken and even heather. But the eastern head is sharper,
begins almost in a point. From that it sweeps out in a huge demi-lune
of cliff, the outer cord being the east, the inner hugging the bluff.
Facing north from the valley, facing these two heads, you see the
eastern of them like a great amphitheatre, its steep embayed side so
smooth as to seem the work of men's hands. It is too steep for turf;
it is grey with marl, and patchy where scree of flint and chalk has
run and found a lodgment. Ice-worn it may be, man-wrought it is not.
No red-deer picks have been at work there, no bright-eyed, scrambling
hordes have toiled their shifts or left traces through the centuries
as at the Devil's Dyke. This noble arena is Nature's. Here I saw her
people more than once. And the first sign I had of them was this.
I
I was here alone one summer's night; a night of stars, but without a
moon. I lay within the scrub of the western valley-head and looked
south. I could just see the profile of the enfolding hills, but only
just; could guess that in the soft blackness below me, filling up the
foreground like a lake, the valley was there indeed; realise that if I
stepped down, perhaps thirty yards or so, my feet would sink into the
pile of the turf-carpet, and feel the sharp benediction of the dew.
About me surged and beat an enormous silence. The only sound at
all--and that was fitful--came from a fern-owl which, from a
thorn-bush above me, churred softly and at intervals his content with
the night.
The stars were myriad, but sky-marks shone out; the Bear, the Belt,
the Chair, the dancing sister Pleiades. The Galaxy was like a
snow-cloud; startlingly, by one, by two, meteors flared a short
course and died. You never feel lonely when you have the stars; yet
they do not pry upon you. You can hide nothing from them, and need not
seek to hide. If they have foreknowledge, they nurse no after-thought.
Now, to-night, as I looked and wondered at their beauty, I became
aware of a phenomenon untold before. Yet so quietly did it come, and
so naturally, that it gave me no disturbance, nor forced itself upon
me. A luminous ring, a ring of pale fire, in shape a long, narrow, and
fluctuating oval, became discernible in the sky south of my
stand-point, midway (I thought) between me and the south.
It was diaphanous, or diaphanous to strong light behind it. At one
time I saw the great beacon of the south-west (Saturn, I think)
burning through it; not within the ring, but from behind the litten
vapour of which the ring was made. Lesser fires than his were put out
by it. It varied very much in shape as it spread or drew out, as a
smoker's blue rings are varied by puffs of wind. Now it was a perfect
round, now so long as to be less a hoop than a fine oblong. Sometimes
it was pear-shaped, sometimes amorphous; bulbous here, hollow there.
And there seemed movement; I thought now and again that it was spiral
as well as circular, that it might, under some stress of speed,
writhe upward like dust in a whirlwind. It wavered, certainly, in
elevation, lifting, sinking, wafted one way or another with the ease
of a cloud of gnats. It was extraordinarily beautiful and exciting. I
watched it for an hour.
At times I seemed to be conscious of more than appearance. I cannot
speak more definitely than that. Music was assuredly in my head, very
shrill, piercing, continuous music. No air, no melody, but the
expectancy of an air, preparation for it, a prelude to melodious
issues. You may say the overture to some vast aerial symphony; I know
not what else to call it. I was never more than alive to it, never
certain of it. It was as furtive, secret, and tremulous as the dawn
itself. Now, just as under that shivering and tentative opening of
great music you are conscious of the fierce energy of violins, so was
I aware, in this surmise of music, of wild forces which made it. I
thought not of voices but of wings. I was sure that this ring of flame
whirled as well as floated in the air; the motion and the sound, alike
indecipherable, were one and the same to me.
I watched it, I say, for an hour: it may have been for two hours.
By-and-by it came nearer, gradually very near. It was now dazzling,
not to be looked at full; but its rate of approach was inappreciable,
and as it came on I was able to peer into it and see nothing but its
beauty. There was a core of intensity, intolerably bright; about that,
lambency but no flame, in which I saw leaves and straws and fronds of
fern flickering, spiring, heeling over and over. That it whirled as
well as floated was now clear, for a strong wind blew before and after
it as it rushed by. This happened as I sat there. Blinding but not
burning, heralded by a keen wind, it came by me and passed; a swift
wind followed it as it went. It swept out toward the hollow of the
eastern valley-head, seemed to strike upon that and glance upward;
thence it swept gladly up, streaming to the zenith, grew thin, fine
and filmy, and seemed to melt into the utmost stars. I had seen
wonders and went home full of thought.
II
I first saw an Oread in this place in a snow-storm which, driven by a
north-westerly gale, did havoc to the lowlands, but not to the folded
hills. I had pushed up the valley in the teeth of the storm to see it
under the white stress. It was hard work for me and my dog; I had to
wade knee-deep, and he to jump, like a cat in long grass, through the
drifts. But we reached our haven and found shelter from the weather.
High above us where we stood the snow-flakes tossed and rioted, but
before they fell upon us being out of the wind, they drifted idly
down, _come ... in Alpe senza vento_. The whole valley was purely
white, its outlines blurred by the slant-driving snow. There was not a
living creature to be seen, and my dog, a little sharp-nosed black
beast, shivered as he looked about, with wide eyes and quick-set ears,
for a friendly sight, and held one paw tentatively in the air, as if
he feared the cold.
Suddenly he yelped once, and ran, limping on three legs or scuttling
on all four, over the snow toward the great eastern escarpment, but
midway stopped and looked with all his might into its smoothed hollow.
His jet-black ears stood sharp as a hare's; through the white scud I
was conscious that he trembled. He gazed into the sweep of the curving
hill, and following the direction he gave me, all my senses quick, I
gazed also, but for a while saw nothing.
Very gradually, without alarm on my part, a blur of colour seemed to
form itself and centre in one spot, half-way up the concave of the
down; very pale yellow, a soft, lemon colour. At first scarcely more
than a warm tinge to the snow, it took shape as I watched it, and then
body also. It was now opaque within semi-transparency; one could trace
an outline, a form. Then I made out of it a woman dressed in yellow; a
slim woman, tawny-haired, in a thin smock of lemon-yellow which
flacked and bellied in the gale. Her hair blew out to it in snaky
streamers, sideways. Her head was bent to meet the cold, her bare
white arms were crossed, and hugged her shoulders, as if to keep her
bosom warm. From mid-thigh downward she was bare and very white, yet
distinct upon the snow. That was the white of chilled flesh I could
see. Though she wore but a single garment, and that of the thinnest
and shortest, though she suffered cold, hugged herself and shivered,
she was not of our nature, to die of such exposure. Her eyes, as I
could guess, were long-enduring and steadfast. Her lips were not blue,
though her teeth seemed to chatter; she was not rigid with the
stiffening that precedes frozen death. Drawing near her by degrees,
coming within fifteen yards of where she stood and passioned, though
she saw me, waited for me, in a way expected me, she showed neither
fear nor embarrassment, nor appealed by looks for shelter. She was,
rather, like a bird made tame by winter, that finds the lesser fear
swallowed up in a greater. For myself, as when one finds one's self
before a new thing, one stands and gazes, so was I before this being
of the wild. I would go no nearer, speak I could not. But I had no
fear. She was new to me not strange. I felt that she and I belonged to
worlds apart; that as soon might I hope to be familiar with fox or
marten as with her. My little black dog was of the same mind. He was
glad when I joined him, and wagged his little body--tail he has
none--to say so. But he had no eyes for me, nor I for him. We stood
together for company, and filled our eyes with the tenant of the
waste. How long we watched her I have no notion, but the day fell
swiftly in and found us there.
She was, I take it, quite young, she was slim and of ordinary
proportions. When I say that I mean that she had nothing inhuman about
her stature, was neither giant nor pygmy. Whether she was what we call
good-looking or not I find it impossible to determine, for when
strangeness is so added to beauty as to absorb and transform it, our
standards are upset and balances thrown out. She was pale to the lips,
had large, fixed and patient eyes. Her arms and legs showed greyish in
the white storm, but where the smock was cut off the shadows it made
upon her were faintly warm. One of her knees was bent, the foot
supported only by the toes. The other was firm upon the ground: she
looked, to the casual eye, to be standing on one leg. Her eyes in a
stare covered me, but were not concerned to see me so near. They had
the undiscerning look of one whose mind is numbed, as hers might well
be. Shelter--a barn, a hayrick--lay within a mile of her; and yet she
chose to suffer the cold, and was able to endure it. She knew it, I
supposed, for a thing not to be avoided; she took it as it came--as
she would have taken the warmth and pleasure of the sun. We humankind
with our wits for ever turned inward to ourselves, grieve or exult as
we bid ourselves: she, like all other creatures else, was not in that
self-relation; her parts were closer-knit, and could not separate to
envisage each other. So, at least, I read her--that she lived as she
could and as she must, neither looked back with regret nor forward
with longing. Time present, the flashing moment, was all her being.
That state will never be ours again.
I discovered before nightfall what she waited for there alone in the
cruel weather. A moving thing emerged from the heart of the white
fury, came up the valley along the shelving down: a shape like hers,
free-moving, thinly clad, suffering yet not paralysed by the storm. It
shaped as a man, a young man, and her mate. Taller, darker, stoutlier
made, his hardy legs were browner, and so were his arms--crossed like
hers over his breast and clasping his shoulders. His head was bare,
dark and crisply covered with short hair. His smock whipped about him
before, as the wind drove it; behind him it flacked and fluttered like
a flag. Patiently forging his way, bowing his head to the gale, he
came into range; and she, aware of him, waited.
He came directly to her. They greeted by touchings. He stretched out
his hands to her, touched her shoulders and sides. He touched both her
cheeks, her chin, the top of her head, all with the flat of the palm.
He stroked her wet and streaming hair. He held her by the shoulders
and peered into her face, then put both arms about her and drew her to
him. She, who had so far made no motions of her own, now uncrossed her
arms and daintily touched him in turn. She put both her palms flat
upon his breast; next on his thighs, next, being within the circle of
his arms, she put up her hands and cupped his face. Then, with a
gesture like a sigh, she let them fall to his waist, fastened them
about him and let her head lie on his bosom. She shut her eyes, seemed
contented and appeased. He clasped her, with a fine, protecting air
upon him, looking down tenderly at her resting head. So they stood
together in the dusk, while the wind tore at their thin covering, and
the snow, lying, made a broad patch of white upon his shoulder.
Breathless I looked at them, and my dog forgot to be cold. High on his
haunches, with lifted forepaw and sharp-cocked ears, he watched,
trembled and whined.
After a while, impatient as it appeared of the ravaging storm, the
male drew the female to the ground. They used no language, as we
understand it, and made no sign that I could see, but rather sank
together to get the shelter of the drift. He lay upon the snow, upon
the weather side, she close beside him. They crouched like two birds
in a storm, and hid their heads under their interlacing arms. He gave
the weather his back, and raised himself on his elbow, the better to
shield her. Within his arm she lay and cuddled to him snugly. I can
describe his action no more closely than by saying that he covered her
as a hen her chick. As a partridge grouts with her wings in a dusty
furrow, so he worked in the powdered snow to make her a nest. When the
night fell upon them, with its promise of bitter frost in the
unrelenting wind, she lay screened against its rigours by the shelter
of him. They were very still. Their heads were together, their cheeks
touched. I believe that they slept.
III
In the autumn, in harvest-time, I saw her with a little one. She was
lying now, deeply at ease, in the copse wood of the valley-head,
within a nest of brake-fern, and her colouring was richer, more in
tune with the glory of the hour. She had a burnt glow in her cheeks;
her hair showed the hue of the corn which, not a mile away, our people
were reaping afield. From where we were, she and I, one could hear the
rattle of the machine as it swept down the tall and serried wheat. It
was the top of noon when I found her; the sun high in heaven, but so
fierce in his power that you saw him through a mist of his own making,
and the sky all about him white as a sea-fog. The Oread's body was
sanguine brown, only her breast, which I saw half-revealed through a
slit in her smock, was snowy white. It was the breast of a maiden, not
of a mother with a young child.
She leaned over it and watched it asleep. Once or twice she touched
its head in affection; then presently looked up and saw me. If I had
had no surprise coming upon her, neither now had she. Her eyes took me
in, as mine might take in a tree not noticed before, or a flowering
bush, or a finger-post. Such things might well be there, and might
well not be; I had no particular interest for her, and gave her no
alarm. Nothing assures me so certainly of her remoteness from myself,
and of my kinship with her too, as this absence of shock.
She allowed me to come nearer, and nearer still, to stand close over
her and examine the child. She did not lift her head, but I knew that
she was aware of me; for her eyelids lifted and fell quickly, and
showed me once or twice her watchful eyes. She was indeed a beautiful
creature, exquisite in make and finish. Her skin shone like the petals
of certain flowers. There is one especially, called _Sisyrinchium_,
whose common name of Satin-flower describes a surface almost metallic
in its lustre. I thought of that immediately: her skin drank in and
exhaled light. I could not hit upon the stuff of which her shift was
made. It looked like coarse silk, had a web, had fibres or threads. It
may have been flax, but that it was much too sinuous. It seemed to
stick to the body where it touched, even to seek the flesh where it
did not touch, that it might cling like gossamer with invisible
tentacles. In colour it was very pale yellow, not worn nor stained. It
was perfectly simple, sleeveless, and stopped half-way between the hip
and the knee. I looked for, but could not discover, either hem or
seam. Her feet and hands were very lovely, the toes and fingers long
and narrow, rosy-brown. I had full sight of her eyes for one throbbing
moment. Extraordinarily bright, quick and pulsing, waxing and waning
in intensity (as if an inner light beat in them), of the grey colour
of a chipped flint stone. The lashes were long, curving and very dark;
they were what you might call smut-colour and gave a blurred effect to
the eyes which was strange. This, among other things, was what set her
apart from us, this and the patient yet palpitating stare of her
regard. She looked at me suddenly, widely and full, taking in much
more than me, yet making me the centre of her vision. It gave me the
idea that she was surprised at my nearness and ready for any attack,
but did not seek to avoid it. There I was overstanding her and her
offspring; and what was must be.
Of the little one I could not see much. It was on its side in the
fern, fast asleep. Its arms were stretched up the slope, its face was
between them. Its knees were bent and a little foot tucked up to touch
its body. Quite naked, brown all over, it was as plump and smooth and
tender as a little pig. But it was not pink; it was very brown.
All nature seemed at the top of perfection that wonderful day. A hawk
soared high in the blue, bees murmured all about, the distance
quivered. I could see under the leaves of a great mullein the bright
eyes, then the round body of a mouse. Afar off the corn-cutter rattled
and whirred, and above us on the ridgeway some workmen sat at their
dinner under the telegraph wires. Men were all about us at their
affairs with Nature's face; and here stood I, a man of themselves, and
at my feet the Oread lay at ease and watched her young. There was food
for wonder in all this, but none for doubt. Who knows what his
neighbour sees? Who knows what his dog? Every species of us walks
secret from the others; every species of us the centre of his
universe, its staple of measure, and its final cause. And if at times
one is granted a peep into new heavens and a new earth, and can get no
more, perhaps the best thing we win from that is the conviction that
we must doubt nothing and wonder at everything. Here, now, was I,
common, blundering, trampling, make-shift man, peering upon my
Oread--fairy of the hill, whatever she was--and tempted to gauge her
by my man-taught balances of right and wrong, and use and wont. Was
that young male who had sheltered her in the snow her mate in truth,
the father of her young one? Or what sort of mating had been hers?
What wild love? What mysteries of the night? And where was he now? And
was he one, or were they many, who companioned this beautiful thing?
And would he come if I waited for him? And would he share her watch,
her quiet content, her still rapture?
Idle, man-made questions, custom-taught! I did wait. I sat by her
waiting. But he did not come.
IV
A month later, in October, I saw a great assembling of Oreads, by
which I was able to connect more than one experience. I could now
understand the phenomenon of the luminous ring.
I reached the valley by about six o'clock in the evening. It was
twilight, not yet dusk. The sun was off the hollow, which lay in blue
mist, but above the level of the surrounding hills the air was bathed
in the sunset glow. The hush of evening was over all, the great cup of
the down absolutely desert; there were no birds, nor voices of birds;
not a twig snapped, not a leaf rustled. Imperceptibly the shadows
lengthened, faded with the light; and again behind the silence I
guessed at, rather than discerned, a preparatory, gathering music. So
finally, by twos and threes, they came to their assembling.