ON May Day, there being a deal of stuff for market, I borrowed the
Mill pony again and set out with Gideon very early, while yet the purple
blossom and the green leaves of the lilac trees were all of a grey blur.
I’d pulled some lilac overnight for market, so we rode with the sighing
of it and the good smell of it all about us. It was a very still
morning. Not a breath stirred the young red oak leaves, and even the
silver birches, that will shift and shiver in any breeze, like
water-weeds at the lake-side, were all becalmed like weeds far down
where not a ripple comes. Save for our horse-hoofs on the wet flinty
road there was no sound, neither from the grey fields on either side,
nor from the water, the woods or the sky. So still! It seemed to me some
miracle might come to pass on such a day. The dawn could not hold its
breath more if Judgment was to break that eve, and the dead rise. When
the colour came in the hedges, the bird’s eye, that was in great plenty,
looked upon us, very simple and innocent, as if thousands of blue-eyed
children watched us go by. The ollern-trees that fringed the road
dripped with yellow catkins. Beyond stood the hills, mounded out of
sapphire stones like the new Jerusalem, and all becalmed under a sky
without so much as a cloud. Not a bird nor a trail of mist or smoke
stirred in all the plain. It seemed to me, as I rode alongside of Gideon
without a word, while he frowned and darkened, thinking of Beguildy,
that it was like a great open book with fair pages in which all might
read. Only it was written in a secret script like some of Beguildy’s
books that he never locked away, knowing they were safe. For indeed
every tree and bush and little flower and sprig of moss, every least
herb, sweet or bitter, bird that furrows the air and worm that furrows
the soil, every beast going heavily about its task of living be to us a
riddle with no answer. We know not what they do. And all this great
universe that seems so still is but like a sleeping top, that looks
still from very swiftness. But why it turns, and what we and all
creatures do in the giddy steadfastness of it, we know not.