IT was at a love-spinning that I saw Kester first. And if, in these
new-fangled days, when strange inventions crowd upon us, when I hear
tell there is even a machine coming into use in some parts of the
country for reaping and mowing, if those that mayhappen will read this
don’t know what a love-spinning was, they shall hear in good time. But
though it was Jancis Beguildy’s love-spinning, she being
three-and-twenty at that time and I being two years less, yet that is
not the beginning of the story I have set out to tell.
Kester says that all tales, true tales or romancings, go farther back
than the days of the child; aye, farther even than the little babe in
its cot of rushes. Maybe you never slept in a cot of rushes; but all of
us did at Sarn. There is such a plenty of rushes at Sarn, and old
Beguildy’s missus was a great one for plaiting them on rounded
barrel-hoops. Then they’d be set on rockers, and a nice clean cradle
they made, soft and green, so that the babe could feel as big-sorted as
a little caterpillar (painted butterflies-as-is-to-be, Kester calls
them) sleeping in its cocoon. Kester’s very set about such things. Never
will he say caterpillars. He’ll say, “There’s a lot of
butterflies-as-is-to-be on our cabbages, Prue.” He won’t say “It’s
winter.” He’ll say, “Summer’s sleeping.” And there’s no bud little
enough nor sad-coloured enough for Kester not to callen it the
beginnings of the blow.
But the time is not yet come for speaking of Kester. It is the story of
us all at Sarn, of Mother and Gideon and me, and Jancis (that was so
beautiful), and Wizard Beguildy, and the two or three other folk that
lived in those parts, that I did set out to tell. There were but a few,
and maybe always will be, for there’s a discouragement about the place.
It may be the water lapping, year in and year out—everywhere you look
and listen, water; or the big trees waiting and considering on your
right hand and on your left; or the unbreathing quiet of the place, as
if it was created but an hour gone, and not created for us. Or it may be
that the soil is very poor and marshy, with little nature or goodness in
the grass, which is ever so where reeds and rushes grow in plenty, and
the flower of the paigle. Happen you call it cowslip, but we always
named it the paigle, or keys of heaven. It was a wonderful thing to see
our meadows at Sarn when the cowslip was in blow. Gold-over they were,
so that you would think not even an angel’s feet were good enough to
walk there. You could make a tossy-ball before a thrush had gone over
his song twice, for you’d only got to sit down and gather with both
hands. Every way you looked, there was nought but gold, saving towards
Sarn, where the woods began, and the great stretch of grey water,
gleaming and wincing in the sun. Neither woods nor water looked darksome
in that fine spring weather, with the leaves coming new, and buds the
colour of corn in the birch-tops. Only in our oak wood there was always
a look of the back-end of the year, their young leaves being so brown.
So there was always a breath of October in our May. But it was a
pleasant thing to sit in the meadows and look away to the far hills. The
larches spired up in their quick green, and the cowslip gold seemed to
get into your heart, and even Sarn Mere was nothing but a blue mist in a
yellow mist of birch-tops. And there was such a dream on the place that
if a wild bee came by, let alone a bumble, it startled you like a shout.
If a bee comes in at the window now to my jar of gillyflowers, I can see
it all in clear colours, with Plash lying under the sunset, beyond the
woods, looking like a jagged piece of bottle glass. Plash Mere was
bigger than Sarn, and there wasn’t a tree by it, so where there were no
hills beyond it you could see the clouds rooted in it on the far side,
and I used to think they looked like the white water-lilies that lay
round the margins of Sarn half the summer through. There was nothing
about Plash that was different from any other lake or pool. There was no
troubling of the waters, as at Sarn, nor any village sounding its bells
beneath the furthest deeps. It was true, what folks said of Sarn, that
there was summat to be felt there.
It was at Plash that the Beguildys lived, and it was at their dwelling,
that was part stone house and part cave, that I got my book learning. It
may seem a strange thing to you that a woman of my humble station should
be able to write and spell, and put all these things into a book. And
indeed when I was a young wench there were not many great ladies, even,
that could do much more scribing than to write a love-letter, and some
could but just write such things as “This be quince and apple” on their
jellies, and others had ado to put their names in the marriage register.
Many have come to me, time and again, to write their love-letters for
them, and a bitter old task it is, to write other women’s love-letters
out of your own burning heart.
If it hadna been for Mister Beguildy I never could have written down all
these things. He learned me to read and write, and reckon up figures.
And though he was a preached-against man, and said he could do a deal
that I don’t believe he ever could do, and though he dabbled in things
that are not good for us to interfere with, yet I shall never forget to
thank God for him. It seems to me now a very uncommon working of His
power, to put it into Beguildy’s heart to learn me. For a wizard could
not rightly be called a servant of His, but one of Lucifer’s men. Not
that Beguildy was wicked, but only empty of good, as if all the
righteousness was burnt out by the flame of his fiery mind, which must
know and intermeddle with mysteries. As for love, he did not know the
word. He could read the stars, and tell the future, and he claimed to
have laid spirits. Once I asked him where the future was, that he could
see it so plain. And he said, “It lies with the past, child, at the back
of Time.” You couldn’t ever get the better of Mister Beguildy. But when
I told Kester what he said, Kester would not have it so. He said the
past and the future were two shuttles in the hands of the Lord, weaving
Eternity. Kester was a weaver himself, which may have made him think of
it thus. But I think we cannot know what the past and the future are. We
are so small and helpless on the earth that is like a green rush cradle
where mankind lies, looking up at the stars, but not knowing what they
be.
As soon as I could write, I made a little book with a calico cover, and
every Sunday I wrote in it any merry time or good fortune we had had in
the week, and so kept them. And if times had been troublous and bitter
for me, I wrote that down too, and was eased. So when our parson,
knowing of the lies that were told of me, bade me write all I could
remember in a book, and set down the whole truth and nothing else, I was
able to freshen my memory with the things I had put down Sunday by
Sunday.
Well, it is all gone over now, the trouble and the struggling. It be
quiet weather now, like a still evening with the snow all down, and a
green sky, and lambs calling. I sit here by the fire with my Bible to
hand, a very old woman and a tired woman, with a task to do before she
says good night to this world. When I look out of my window and see the
plain and the big sky with clouds standing up on the mountains, I call
to mind the thick, blotting woods of Sarn, and the crying of the mere
when the ice was on it, and the way the water would come into the
cupboard under the stairs when it rose at the time of the snow melting.
There was but little sky to see there, saving that which was reflected
in the mere; but the sky that is in the mere is not the proper heavens.
You see it in a glass darkly, and the long shadows of rushes go thin and
sharp across the sliding stars, and even the sun and moon might be put
out down there, for, times, the moon would get lost in lily leaves, and,
times, a heron might stand before the sun.