(TO THE SWEET MEMORY OF FRANCES WYNNE)
I felt jaded and dusty, I needed flowers and sunshine; and remembering
that some one had told me--erroneously, I have since discovered!--that the
pinewood wherein Sandra Belloni used to sing to her harp, like a nixie, in
the moonlit nights, lay near Oxshott in Surrey, I vowed myself there and
then to the Meredithian pilgrimage.
The very resolution uplifted me with lyric gladness, and I went swinging
out of the old Inn where I live with the heart of a boy. Across Lincoln's
Inn Fields, down by the Law Courts, and so to Waterloo. I felt I must have
a confidante, so I told the slate-coloured pigeons in the square where I
was off--out among the thrushes, the broom, and the may. But they wouldn't
come. They evidently deemed that a legal purlieu was a better place for
'pickings.'
Half-a-crown return to Oxshott and a train at 12.35. You know the ride
better than I, probably, and what Surrey is at the beginning of June. The
first gush of green on our getting clear of Clapham was like the big drink
after an afternoon's haymaking. There was but one cloud on the little
journey. She got into the next carriage.
I dreamed all the way. On arriving at Oxshott I immediately became
systematic. Having a very practical belief in the material basis of all
exquisite experience, I simply nodded to the great pinewoods half a mile
off, on the brow of long heathy downs to the left of the railway
bridge--as who should say, 'I shall enjoy you all the better presently for
some sandwiches and a pint of ale'--and promptly, not to say
scientifically, turned down the Oxshott road in search of an inn.
Oxshott is a quaint little hamlet, one of the hundred villages where we
are going to live when we have written great novels; but I didn't care
for the village inn, so walked a quarter of a mile nearer Leatherhead,
till the Old Bear came in sight.
There I sat in the drowsy parlour, the humming afternoon coming in at the
door, 'the blue fly' singing on the hot pane, dreaming all kinds of
gauzy-winged dreams, while my body absorbed ham sandwiches and some
excellent ale. Of course I did not leave the place without the inevitable
reflection on Lamb and the inns _he_ had immortalised. Outside again my
thoughts were oddly turned to the nature of my expedition by two figures
in the road--an unhappy-looking couple, evidently 'belonging to each
other,' the young woman with babe at breast, trudging together side by
side--
'One was a girl with a babe that throve,
Her ruin and her bliss;
One was a youth with a lawless love,
Who claspt it the more for this.'
The quotation was surely inevitable for any one who knows Mr. Meredith's
tragic little picture of 'The Meeting.'
Thus I was brought to think of Sandra again, and of the night when the
Brookfield ladies had heard her singing like a spirit in the heart of the
moon-dappled pinewood, and impresario Pericles had first prophesied the
future prima donna.
Do you remember his inimitable outburst?--'I am made my mind! I send her
abroad to ze Académie for one, two, tree year. She shall be instructed as
was not before. Zen a noise at La Scala. No--Paris! No--London! She shall
astonish London fairst. Yez! if I take a theatre! Yez! if I buy a
newspaper! Yez! if I pay feefty-sossand pound!'
Of course, as one does, I had gone expecting to distinguish the actual
sandy mound among the firs where she sat with her harp, the young
countryman waiting close by for escort, and the final 'Giles Scroggins,
native British, beer-begotten air' with which she rewarded him for his
patience in suffering so much classical music. Mr. Meredith certainly
gives a description of the spot close enough for identification, with time
and perseverance. But, reader, I had gone out this afternoon in the
interest rather of fresh air than of sentimental topography; and it was
quite enough for me to feel that somewhere in that great belt of pinewood
it had all been true, and that it was through those fir-branches and none
other in the world that that 'sleepy fire of early moonlight' had so
wonderfully hung.
After crossing the railway bridge the road rises sharply for a few yards,
and then a whole stretch of undulating woodland is before one: to the
right bosky green, but on the left a rough dark heath with a shaggy
wilderness of pine for background, heightened here and there with a sudden
surprise of gentle silver birch. How freshly the wind met one at the top
of the road: a southwest wind soft and blithe enough to have blown through
'Diana of the Crossways.'
'You saucy south wind, setting all the budded beech boughs swinging
Above the wood anemones that flutter, flushed and white,
When far across the wide salt waves your quick way you were winging,
Oh! tell me, tell me, did you pass my sweetheart's ship last night?
Ah! let the daisies be,
South wind! and answer me;
Did you my sailor see?
Wind, whisper very low,
For none but you must know
I love my lover so.'
I had been keeping that question to ask it for two or three days, since a
good friend had told me of some lyrics by Miss Frances Wynne; and the
little volume, charmingly entitled _Whisper_, was close under my arm as I
turned from the road across the heath--a wild scramble of scrubby
chance-children, wind-sown from the pines behind. And then presently, like
a much greater person, 'I found me in a gloomy wood astray.'
But I soon realised that it wasn't the day for pinewoods, however rich in
associations. Dark days are their Opportunity. Then one is in sympathy.
But on days when the sunshine is poured forth like yellow wine, when the
broom is ablaze, and the sky blue as particular eyes, the contrast of
those dark aisles without one green blade is uncanny. Its listening
loneliness almost frightens one. Brurrhh! One must find a greenwood where
things are companionable: birds within call, butterflies in waiting, and a
bee now and again to bump one, and be off again with a grumbled 'Beg your
pardon. Confound you!' So presently imagine me 'prone at the foot of
yonder' sappy chestnut, nice little cushions of moss around me, one for
_Whisper_, one for a pillow; above, a world of luminous green leaves,
filtered sunlight lying about in sovereigns and half-sovereigns, and at a
distance in the open shine a patch of hyacinths, 'like a little heaven
below.'
_Whisper_! Tis the sweetest little book of lyrics since Mrs. Dollie
Radford's _Light Load_. Whitman, you will remember, always used to take
his songs out into the presence of the fields and skies to try them. A
severe test, but a little book may bear it as well as a great one. The
_Leaves of Grass_ claims measurement with oaks; but _Whisper_ I tried by
speedwell and cinquefoil, and many other tiny sweet things for which I
know no name, by all airs and sounds coming to me through the wood, quaint
little notes of hidden birds,--and the songs were just as much at home
there as the rest, because they also had grown out of Nature's heart, and
were as much hers as any leaf or bird. So I dotted speedwell all amongst
them, because I felt they ought to know each other.
I wonder if you love to fill your books with flowers. It is a real
bookish delight, and they make such a pretty diary. My poets are full of
them, and they all mean a memory--old spring mornings, lost sunsets, walks
forgotten and unforgotten. Here a buttercup pressed like finely beaten
brass, there a great yellow rose--in my Keats; my Chaucer is like his old
meadows, 'ypoudred with daisie,' and my Herrick is full of violets. The
only thing is that they haunt me sometimes. But then, again, they bloom
afresh every spring. As Mr. Monkhouse sings:--
'Sweet as the rose that died last year is the rose that is born to-day.'
But I grow melancholy with an Englishman's afterthought, for I coined no
such reflections dreaming there in the wood. It is only on paper that one
moralises--just where one shouldn't.
My one or two regrets were quite practical--that I had not learnt botany
at school, and that the return train went so early.