My experiences at "The Stones" had left me with the idea that but for
the distracting company the hours I spent there would have been very
sweet and precious in spite of the cloud in the east. Why then, I asked,
not go back on another morning, when I would have the whole place to
myself? If a cloud did not matter much it would matter still less that
it was not the day of the year when the red disc flames on the watcher's
sight directly over that outstanding stone and casts first a shadow then
a ray of light on the altar. In the end I did not say good-bye to the
village on that day, but settled down to listen to the tales of my
landlady, or rather to another instalment of her life-story and to
further chapters in the domestic history of those five small villages in
one. I had already been listening to her every evening, and at odd times
during the day, for over a week, at first with interest, then a little
impatiently. I was impatient at being kept in, so to speak. Out-of-doors
the world was full of light and heat, full of sounds of wild birds
and fragrance of flowers and new-mown hay; there were also delightful
children and some that were anything but delightful--dirty, ragged
little urchins of the slums. For even these small rustic villages
have their slums; and it was now the time when the young birds were
fluttering out of their nests--their hunger cries could be heard
everywhere; and the ragged little barbarians were wild with excitement,
chasing and stoning the flutterers to slay them; or when they succeeded
in capturing one without first having broken its wings or legs it was to
put it in a dirty cage in a squalid cottage to see it perish miserably
in a day or two. Perhaps I succeeded in saving two or three threatened
lives in the lanes and secret green places by the stream; perhaps
I didn't; but in any case it was some satisfaction to have made the
attempt.
Now all this made me a somewhat impatient listener to the village
tales--the old unhappy things, for they were mostly old and always
unhappy; yet in the end I had to listen. It was her eyes that did it.
At times they had an intensity in their gaze which made them almost
uncanny, something like the luminous eyes of an animal hungrily fixed on
its prey. They held me, though not because they glittered: I could have
gone away if I had thought proper, and remained to listen only because
the meaning of that singular look in her grey-green eyes, which came
into them whenever I grew restive, had dawned on my careless mind.
She was an old woman with snow-white hair, which contrasted rather
strangely with her hard red colour; but her skin was smooth, her face
well shaped, with fine acquiline features. No doubt it had been a very
handsome face though never beautiful, I imagine; it was too strong and
firm and resolute; too like the face of some man we see, which, though
we have but a momentary sight of it in a passing crowd, affects us like
a sudden puff of icy-cold air--the revelation of a singular and
powerful personality. Yet she was only a poor old broken-down woman in a
Wiltshire village, held fast in her chair by a hopeless infirmity. With
her legs paralysed she was like that prince in the Eastern tale on whom
an evil spell had been cast, turning the lower half of his body into
marble. But she did not, like the prince, shed incessant tears and
lament her miserable destiny with a loud voice. She was patient and
cheerful always, resigned to the will of Heaven, and--a strange thing
this to record of an old woman in a village!--she would never speak of
her ailments. But though powerless in body her mind was vigorous and
active teeming with memories of all the vicissitudes of her exceedingly
eventful, busy life, from the time when she left her village as a young
girl to fight her way in the great world to her return to end her life
in it, old and broken, her fight over, her children and grandchildren
dead or grown up and scattered about the earth.
Chance having now put me in her way, she concluded after a few
preliminary or tentative talks that she had got hold of an ideal
listener; but she feared to lose me--she wanted me to go on listening
for ever. That was the reason of that painfully intense hungry look in
her eyes; it was because she discovered certain signs of lassitude or
impatience in me, a desire to get up and go away and refresh myself in
the sun and wind. Poor old woman, she could not spring upon and hold me
fast when I attempted to move off, or pluck me back with her claws; she
could only gaze with fiercely pleading eyes and say nothing; and so,
without being fascinated, I very often sat on listening still when I
would gladly have been out-of-doors.
She was a good fluent talker; moreover, she studied her listener, and
finding that my interest in her own interminable story was becoming
exhausted she sought for other subjects, chiefly the strange events in
the lives of men and women who had lived in the village and who had long
been turned to dust. They were all more or less tragical in character,
and it astonished me to think that I had stayed in a dozen or twenty,
perhaps forty, villages in Wiltshire, and had heard stories equally
strange and moving in pretty well every one of them.
If each of these small centres possessed a scribe of genius, or at any
rate one with a capacity for taking pains, who would collect and print
in proper form these remembered events, every village would in time
have its own little library of local history, the volumes labelled
respectively, "A Village Tragedy", "The Fields of Dulditch", "Life's
Little Ironies", "Children's Children", and various others whose titles
every reader will be able to supply.
The effect of a long spell of listening to these unwritten tragedies was
sometimes strong enough to cloud my reason, for on going directly forth
into the bright sunshine and listening to the glad sounds which filled
the air, it would seem that this earth was a paradise and that
all creation rejoiced in everlasting happiness excepting man alone
who--mysterious being!--was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks
fly upwards. A pure delusion, due to our universal and ineradicable
passion for romance and tragedy. Tell a man of a hundred humdrum
lives which run their quiet contented course in this village, and the
monotonous unmoving story, or hundred stories, will go in at one ear
and out at the other. Therefore such stories are not told and not
remembered. But that which stirs our pity and terror--the frustrate
life, the glorious promise which was not fulfilled, the broken hearts
and broken fortunes, and passion, crime, remorse, retribution--all this
prints itself on the mind, and every such life is remembered for ever
and passed on from generation to generation. But it would really form
only one brief chapter in the long, long history of the village life
with its thousand chapters.
The truth is, if we live in fairly natural healthy condition, we are
just as happy as the lower animals. Some philosopher has said that the
chief pleasure in a man's life, as in that of a cow, consists in the
processes of mastication, deglutition, and digestion, and I am very
much inclined to agree with him. The thought of death troubles us very
little--we do not believe in it. A familiar instance is that of the
consumptive, whose doctor and friends have given him up and wait but
to see the end, while he, deluded man, still sees life, an illimitable,
green, sunlit prospect, stretching away to an infinite distance before
him.
Death is a reality only when it is very near, so close on us that we can
actually hear its swift stoaty feet rustling over the dead leaves, and
for a brief bitter space we actually know that his sharp teeth will
presently be in our throat.
Out in the blessed sunshine I listen to a blackcap warbling very
beautifully in a thorn bush near the cottage; then to the great shout
of excited joy of the children just released from school, as they rush
pell-mell forth and scatter about the village, and it strikes me that
the bird in the thorn is not more blithe-hearted than they. An old
rook--I fancy he is old, a many-wintered crow--is loudly caw-cawing from
the elm tree top; he has been abroad all day in the fields and has seen
his young able to feed themselves; and his own crop full, and now he is
calling to the others to come and sit there to enjoy the sunshine with
him. I doubt if he is happier than the human inhabitants of the village,
the field labourers and shepherds who have been out toiling since the
early hours, and are now busy in their own gardens and allotments or
placidly smoking their pipes at their cottage doors.
But I could not stay longer in that village of old unhappy memories
and of quiet, happy, uninteresting lives that leave no memory, so after
waiting two more days I forced myself to say good-bye to my poor old
landlady. Or rather to say "Good night," as I had to start at one
o'clock in the morning so as to have a couple, of hours before sunrise
at "The Stones" on my way to Salisbury. Her latest effort to detain me a
day longer had been made and there was no more to say.
"Do you know," she said in a low mysterious voice, "that it is not safe
to be alone at midnight on this long lonely road--the loneliest place
in all Salisbury Plain?" "The safest," I said. "Safe as the Tower of
London--the protectors of all England are there." "Ah, there's where the
danger is!" she returned. "If you meet some desperate man, a deserter
with his rifle in his hand perhaps, do you think he would hesitate about
knocking you over to save himself and at the same time get a little
money to help him on his way?"
I smiled at her simulated anxiety for my safety, and set forth when it
was very dark but under a fine starry sky. The silence, too, was very
profound: there was no good-bye from crowing cock or hooting owl on this
occasion, nor did any cyclist pass me on the road with a flash of light
from his lamp and a tinkle from his bell. The long straight road on the
high down was a dim grey band visible but a few yards before me, lying
across the intense blackness of the earth. By day I prefer as a rule
walking on the turf, but this road had a rare and peculiar charm at this
time. It was now the season when the bird's-foot-trefoil, one of the
commonest plants of the downland country, was in its fullest bloom, so
that in many places the green or grey-green turf as far as one could see
on every side was sprinkled and splashed with orange-yellow. Now
this creeping, spreading plant, like most plants that grow on the
close-cropped sheep-walks, whose safety lies in their power to root
themselves and live very close to the surface, yet must ever strive to
lift its flowers into the unobstructed light and air and to overtop or
get away from its crowding neighbours. On one side of the road, where
the turf had been cut by the spade in a sharp line, the plant had found
a rare opportunity to get space and light and had thrust out such a
multitude of bowering sprays, projecting them beyond the turf, as to
form a close band or rope of orange-yellow, which divided the white road
from the green turf, and at one spot extended unbroken for upwards of a
mile. The effect was so singular and pretty that I had haunted this road
for days for the pleasure of seeing that flower border made by nature.
Now all colour was extinguished: beneath and around me there was a
dimness which at a few yards' distance deepened to blackness, and above
me the pale dim blue sky sprinkled with stars; but as I walked I had the
image of that brilliant band of yellow colour in my mind.
By and by the late moon rose, and a little later the east began to grow
lighter and the dark down to change imperceptibly to dim hoary green.
Then the exquisite colours of the dawn once more, and the larks rising
in the dim distance--a beautiful unearthly sound--and so in the end I
came to "The Stones," rejoicing, in spite of a cloud which now appeared
on the eastern horizon to prevent the coming sun from being seen, that
I had the place to myself. The rejoicing came a little too soon; a very
few minutes later other visitors on foot and on bicycles began to come
in, and we all looked at each other a little blankly. Then a motorcar
arrived, and two gentlemen stepped out and stared at us, and one
suddenly burst out laughing.
"I see nothing to laugh at!" said his companion a little severely.
The other in a low voice made some apology or explanation which I failed
to catch. It was, of course, not right; it was indecent to laugh on
such an occasion, for we were not of the ebullient sort who go to "The
Stones" at three o'clock in the morning "for a lark"; but it was very
natural in the circumstances, and mentally I laughed myself at the
absurdity of the situation. However, the laugher had been rebuked for
his levity, and this incident over, there was nothing further to disturb
me or any one in our solemn little gathering.
It was a very sweet experience, and I cannot say that my early morning
outing would have been equally good at any other lonely spot on
Salisbury Plain or anywhere else with a wide starry sky above me, the
flush of dawn in the east, and the larks rising heavenward out of the
dim misty earth. Those rudely fashioned immemorial stones standing dark
and large against the pale clear moonlit sky imparted something to
the feeling. I sat among them alone and had them all to myself, as
the others, fearing to tear their clothes on the barbed wire, had
not ventured to follow me when I got through the fence. Outside the
enclosure they were some distance from me, and as they talked in subdued
tones, their voices reached me as a low murmur--a sound not out of
harmony with the silent solitary spirit of the place; and there was now
no other sound except that of a few larks singing fitfully a long way
off.
Just what the element was in that morning's feeling which Stonehenge
contributed I cannot say. It was too vague and uncertain, too closely
interwoven with the more common feeling for nature. No doubt it was
partly due to many untraceable associations, and partly to a thought,
scarcely definite enough to be called a thought, of man's life in this
land from the time this hoary temple was raised down to the beginning
of history. A vast span, a period of ten or more, probably of twenty
centuries, during which great things occurred and great tragedies were
enacted, which seem all the darker and more tremendous to the mind
because unwritten and unknown. But with the mighty dead of these blank
ages I could not commune. Doubtless they loved and hated and rose and
fell, and there were broken hearts and broken lives; but as beings of
flesh and blood we cannot visualize them, and are in doubt even as to
their race. And of their minds, or their philosophy of life, we know
absolutely nothing. We are able, as Clifford has said in his Cosmic
Emotion, to shake hands with the ancient Greeks across the great desert
of centuries which divides our day from theirs; but there is no shaking
hands with these ancients of Britain--or Albion, seeing that we are
on the chalk. To our souls they are as strange as the builders of
Tiuhuanaco, or Mitla and Itzana, and the cyclopean ruins of Zimbabwe and
the Carolines.
It is thought by some of our modern investigators of psychic phenomena
that apparitions result from the coming out of impressions left in the
surrounding matter, or perhaps in the ether pervading it, especially in
moments of supreme agitation or agony. The apparition is but a restored
picture, and pictures of this sort are about us in millions; but for our
peace they are rarely visible, as the ability to see them is the faculty
of but a few persons in certain moods and certain circumstances. Here,
then, if anywhere in England, we, or the persons who are endowed with
this unpleasant gift, might look for visions of the time when Stonehenge
was the spiritual capital, the Mecca of the faithful (when all were
that), the meeting-place of all the intellect, the hoary experience, the
power and majesty of the land.
But no visions have been recorded. It is true that certain stories of
alleged visions have been circulated during the last few years. One,
very pretty and touching, is of a child from the London slums who saw
things invisible to others. This was one of the children of the very
poor, who are taken in summer and planted all about England in cottages
to have a week or a fortnight of country air and sunshine. Taken to
Stonehenge, she had a vision of a great gathering of people, and so
real did they seem that she believed in the reality of it all, and so
beautiful did they appear to her that she was reluctant to leave, and
begged to be taken back to see it all again. Unfortunately it is not
true. A full and careful inquiry has been made into the story, of
which there are several versions, and its origin traced to a little
story-telling Wiltshire boy who had read or heard of the white-robed
priests of the ancient days at "The Stones," and who just to astonish
other little boys naughtily pretended that he had seen it all himself!