CHAPTER XVII

THE BROOK

The brook rises in a clear, grey, trembling basin at the foot of a chalk hill, among flowers of lotus and thyme and eyebright and rest-harrow. Here the stone curlew drinks, and above is the gently rounded encampment, ancient, and yet still young compared with the dusky spring which has something gnomish and earthy about it, though it takes the sun. It drops in thin, bright links over the chalk, and then for a time loses its way in playing with cresses and marsh marigolds, spreading out so finely that hardly will the ladybird drown that falls therein--falling at length in a cascade from one dead leaf to another down a hedge bank. Below, it nourishes the first forget-me-nots, by a gateway where it slips across the lane, and is dew-fed by the vetches and clovers that swaddle the posts of the gate. Now it is unheard and unseen in the darkness underneath dog’s mercury leaves until it has gained its first treble voice as, pausing by an interrupting branch, it fills a hollow and pours over in icy fingers to the ditch beneath. Here it has cuckoo flowers and creeping jenny and butterbur to feed; thrushes drink of it; beetles dart across it like scullers that dream now and then upon their sculls. It learns now to sway the cress, to bow the brooklime, to brighten the sides of the minnows; the fledgling of the robin that falls into it dies. It floats the catkin down, and out of it rises the azure dragon fly. Sometimes it muffles its going in moss, but in a little while it gushes through drains and falls and falls with a now unceasing noise in a land where all the hollows are full of apple trees, rough grey with dewy clover, and through all the hollows winds the brook, dappled by blossom, leaned over by the bee-cradling, sleepy, meadow cranesbill flower; in its green bed the watervoles wear their submerged pathways. Now men have laid a slab of elm or of rude stone across it, and from those they lean to drink at haymaking or harvest; the children float on it pinnaces of bent reed, or set it to turn waterwheels of ash bark, or dip their cans in it for curving minnow or twisting tadpole or the little black circlers that meet and divide and pursue for a few April days. Already it has ranged along its margin rough, leaning willows garlanded by purple ivy; and their leaves that dip to the surface it will never allow to rest. The briers still overleap it in their long dreaming curves. The kingfisher sits over it and the small trout nestle in its bed. It enters many an ash copse and fills it with willow herb and meadowsweet and all juicy plants, figwort and iris and orchis and hyacinth and reed, with osiers and their mists of crimson and gold. Nymph-like the brook brightens and curves its crystal flesh and waves its emerald hair under the bridges at field corners, where the brambles dip their blossoms, and the nightingale sings and the sedgewarbler has its nest. For it the lonely willows in the flat fields shed their yellow leaves most pensively, like maidens casting their bridal garlands off. Three flowering apple trees in one islanded angle on a lawn of perfect grass, a most dream-worthy place, fit for the footprints of the beautiful,

“White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,”

seem all its own; for there it first makes a deep sound in falling over a ledge among its own curded, quivering and moonlit yellow foam. Thereafter it opens wide between broad low banks from which the cattle can step and stand among the reeds under serene tall ashes, and the lily petals float upon it that catch against the branches and against the hearts of men in distant towns. There, too, among the lilies the brook first takes the stars into its heart, but gaily with all its flowers and thick herbage and its rippling fall never still amidst the arrow-headed reed. It moves like the high autumn wain, followed by many children, who have time to leave it and gather flowers and are yet never left behind. The heron comes to it at dawn, knowing from afar the dark pool where it curves under a steep bank and grim oak roots, and slopes down to it solemn and eager and alone in the winter morning. The sand-martin and wagtail often pause in their flight and hover above the placid water and the cool, reflected reeds and watermint. Where it is all of one depth, between straight banks of cowslip, the boys sit and let their feet waver in the flood and then roll or plunge in, with shouts and gurgling talk, while in the reeds, the dabchick waits with head just above water, trembling for her eggs or cheeping young. On Sunday the country lover, cruel all the week, brings his maid to the brook and, suddenly tender and a little proud, shows her the moist, weed-covered nest and delights in her melting eyes. Fed now by other brooks, from its own hills and from little woodland springs, the brook consents to spread into a pool in an old garden, and in the sweet imprisonment of lily and rose and iris and oleander lies as if asleep, an indolent Leda contented with the white swan, and yet escaping all the time, its wild soul rejoicing yonder beneath the heavily overhanging honeysuckled thorns of the wide meadows again. Under the white highway the brook runs and lures men to lean from the parapet by the milestone and look at the water and take up some coolness and some bitterness from it when they return to the blinding miles. Its course is marked by alders and willows, shaping cornfield and pasture in divine meanders that seem to have learnt rather to be contented with travelling than to be eager for the goal. Could a man but wander in that way once more, like the child in the field of flowers so multitudinous that she did not know what to do, but closed her eyes and was happy yet! Now the otter plays there, and where the ash roots twist into many a cave. Through leagues of country the brook runs, passing high, silent woods and misty, hot, luxuriant, flowering thickets and wet, cloudy copses full at evening of confused birds’ singing, which no one sees except the brook and the milk-white heifer who crowns herself in white roses in the shade as she stands in tall, moist, sumptuous angelica and watches her crowned image looking out of that fair sky in purest waters; then, suddenly emerging from this lowly country it falls into a river and is lost or seems to be lost in the turbid, serious flow that is soon to know the sea.