CHAPTER XXXVI
THE FIRST DAFFODILS
It was one of those early March days in a mountainous country when a warmly clothed man, in good health and walking rapidly, can just foretaste the spring. The icy dark water in stony brooklets shone golden whenever it could find the sun. This gold seemed a brand upon the winter that marked it for death. There was gold also on the turf between the walls and the roadways, for there were hundreds of celandine flowers: it was to be found also in the miniature forests of the moss that made detached and placid worlds upon every stone of the walls; in the little hollow woods, or steep and craggy orchard plots, where the first daffodils were unveiled; in the rickyards where fowls scattered the gleaming straw; in the fur of the squirrel that moved as if the swirling wind dissolved and shaped it again continually; in the warm ale at “The White Hart.”
But when the eye grew proud and the wind rose and every half hour the horizontal snow put out everything of the world except its noises--the cry of the curlew, the buzz of pewits’ wings, the song of the missel thrush that came through the storm like a mere ode to liberty in the midst of revolution--then it was winter still, and the rustling oak leaves talked of December. And when the snowfall ceased with a rush as if upon the wings of a peregrine, those small signs of spring were no more than a child’s sand castles on a vast sea shore, and not so noticeable as the thick suds and flakes of snow hanging from the hedges on the walls and turned to mists by the restless robins.
On one side, for some miles, ran a large fell that was a home and playground of winds, steep and long to be crossed, and all white and grim, shutting out home and the pleasures that are found among men. On the other side, steep also and widely shaped with small, precipitous crags and angry surf of heather and here and there haggish thorns, lay a moor. Between these two the road rose and fell over lesser but steep hills, and from one hilltop I could see the sea beyond the moor. It was grey, without light, with long quivering lines that never ended, but insubstantial; it seemed rather the grisly offspring of a mind made pregnant by the wintry melancholy. The mountains came down to the edge of it, like lions to drink, ten miles away. Not a house was visible, and on the sea the few ships were like the water itself, inventions of my own, as it were, which I had launched upon that infinite desolation for sport.
All day, ahead and always at the same distance, rose high mountains, with crude outlines as of heavy and frosty land fresh turned by the plough; the long ravines of snow upon their sides made their peaks more sharp and their heights more sudden. They haunted the day.
Now and then the snow fell, and in the weak sunshine that followed, the light struck up from the snow and made the white breasts of the gulls seem opal lanterns full of flame, and the hazel thickets were nets of silver and crystal branches, invisible in their own splendour.
I descended to a small deep river that ran, with noble curves of power, solemn and full of some inhuman simple purpose. For a moment the sunlight fell on one curve of it and the windy waves were now a stately glittering cavalcade, and now a dance of fairies into which some ass-headed Bottom suddenly intruded with a gust from a cloud, making them whirl faster and then disappear. But the river was careless of the light; it went on as before, unchanged even when for another moment all that grim, serious water was changed into white spray and light by a fall.
And there still were the mountains ahead. Their painful distances of long, white, houseless steeps made the mind suffer the body’s agony of toiling there, of being lost there in storm, of being there on a still, dark night. They bred--by means of natural, human sympathy with the difficulty of life among such heights, by the horror of the distance, the coldness, the whiteness--a languor out of which emerged infinite admiration and awe, a sense of beauty even, and unquestionably a kind of pride in the powers of the human spirit that can dwell upon the earth and be the equal of these things, sharing with them the sunlight and the darkness, enduring like them vicissitudes, decay, violent disaster, and like them disbelieving in the future and in death, except for others. So when at nightfall the snowy hills made a semicircle round the head of an enormous grey estuary, and couched there ten and fifteen and twenty miles away as if the sweep of a puissant arm had made them in clearing a space for the water, they were purely beautiful, while over them a large, simple sunset threw a golden bridge between towering, white, still clouds.
Then, at length, a hamlet on a hill; first, a farmyard on one side of the road and a farmhouse on the other; then four or five stone cottages; lastly an inn where I thought to sleep. Hardly had I sat down than a pedlar came in and sat beside me. He was a tall, grave man of a gritty, brown complexion and big, straight features; from his simple, heroic face, that seemed an animated piece of crag from his native hills, his blue eyes looked at me with that glance, fearless of any return, which the ordinary man gives to a dog or a labourer, but presently became more modest as I looked up and down the blue gaberdine which he wore down to his knees.
The gaberdine was of the stoutest linen, heavy and warm. It opened for about six inches down from the neck, back and front, and was fastened with small bone buttons. On each side of these openings it was smocked in an elaborate pattern nine inches deep; the wide, turn-down collar almost covered the embroidered shoulder straps and was itself adorned with seven rows of feather stitching. The sleeves were smocked both at the shoulders and the wrists, and were finished with broad, feather-stitched cuffs. He wore it because it was decent, and he would always wear one so long as the woman lived who could make it.
I asked him about his trade, and he said that he pursued it among these hills and valleys all the winter, setting it aside for work in the fields during the summer months. He was born in one of the cottages close by; so was his father before him and so were his children after him. They were happy there. Death alone disturbed them now and then; and death, he said, was incurable and to be expected. In the spring he spent less on candles and his orchard bloomed, and there was a marriage or two in the church and the ewes dropped their lambs. In the summer it was warm without fires, and they needed no candles, and he had what he desired--what that was he did not say. In the autumn he remembered that things were coming round again, winter soon and then spring again. In the winter his cottage walls were thick, and if the days were short he had always had a fire and some food, and had never yet refused a beggar something; there were songs also: and as to his trade, of course he liked it, and he did not think people could do without him.
“And now, young man,” he said, “who are you, what have you seen, and what is your country?”
He looked at me with something like the benignity of a child accepting a spoonful of honey; but for that joy and expectancy I might have spoken easily. I hesitated between the truth, which was difficult and perhaps to him unintelligible, my own view of the truth, which would be so confused by reservations and after-thoughts that it could not please, and the picturesque. So I said:--
“I am a poor, modern man”--which was true--“I have seen nothing”--which was my view of the truth--and finally, “the great city of London is my country”--which was picturesque.
“What?” said he, not angrily, not pityingly, but inquiringly, “what do you mean by a ‘poor, modern man,’ and how is it that you have seen nothing?”
A thousand things crowded to my brain and contended on my lips. This was an opportunity, but too great a one, too sudden. I stifled my designs and decided to say nothing. He was kind; he nodded gracefully and continued,--
“Tell me about London.”
He did not say, “Do me an essay of fifteen hundred words by next week.” That might have been easy; writing--possibly even good writing--is comparatively easy; because the writer is alone while he writes and is not present while his work is read, and he can therefore withhold what seems difficult to express and he deceives without appearing deceitful; moreover, he writes at his ease, or should do, what is probably read in haste. But in conversation with an aged blue-eyed man, in a majestic blue gaberdine, who has an evening’s leisure and desires the truth, asking simply: “Tell me about London,” the difficulties in the way of a simple man are enormous. I said something about a book called _The Soul of London_; but he could not read. He wished again to be informed what the soul of a city was. Again I failed him.
“But you have actually lived in London,” he repeated, encouraging me.
“Yes.” He seemed to be proud, as who should say, “I sit with one who has lived in the most famous city in the world.”
I remembered that there are said to be five millions of human beings in London, and that its streets on end would reach to the moon.
Also I thought of the old song and the verse:--
“There be kings and queens in London town A-sitting all of a row.”
In despair I actually ventured to tell him that there were five million people there. But he seemed to be poor at arithmetic and he was frank.
“I beg you,” he said, “to speak simply and not all at once to a poor, remote old man. The evening is young yet,” he continued without heat and as if he were making all clear.
“There is a king there, is there not?” he said.
“There is.”
“And a queen?”
“Yes.”
“And a palace?”
“There are several palaces.”
“Then tell me about the king,” he said.
I have never seen the king, and I longed for the power of the Tempter to tell the old man of--
“Prætors, proconsuls to their provinces Hasting, or on return, in robes of state; Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power; Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings; Or embassies from regions far remote, In various habits, on the Appian road, Or on the Æmilian”--
But still his questions came. How did the ships come up and unlade again? What were the army and the navy like? Had I seen the famous men? Were the people noble as became a metropolitan race? Achilles questioning Ulysses in Hades could not have spoken more magnificently than this old man questioning me, though I seemed the ghost and he the visitor to the underworld. Yet in some sort his great questions, elevating his soul, seemed to supply him, if not with an answer, at least with some satisfaction. I would have spoken, if I could. But how short the evening! myself how unprepared and inadequate! I would have told him of Pimlico and Battersea which were not entirely unknown to me. I would have said that there were sorrowful and happy men there--thousands of both, unknown to me and unknown to one another; thousands of houses, beautiful, stately, pompous, indifferent, ugly, sublimely squalid; that upon them as upon him and his neighbours fell rain and sun and snow and the wind beat and death came suddenly, desired or undesired; that the city was as vast as Time, which had made it, and that to know it a man must live and die the lives and deaths of all that had ever lived and died there. But he ceased to regard me. He entered into talk with others that came in. One sang this ballad and he, like the rest, joined the chorus:--
“My clothing was once of the linsey woolsey fine, My tail it grew at length, my coat likewise did shine; But now I’m growing old, my beauty does decay, My master frowns upon me; one day I heard him say-- Poor old horse, poor old horse.
Once I was kept in the stable snug and warm, To keep my tender limbs from any cold or harm; But now, in open fields, I am forcèd for to go, In all sorts of weather, let it be hail, rain, freeze or snow, Poor old horse, poor old horse.
Once I was fed on the very best corn and hay That ever grew in yon fields, or in yon meadows gay; But now there’s no such doing can I find at all; I’m glad to pick the green sprouts that grow behind yon wall. Poor old horse, poor old horse.
You are old, you are cold, you are deaf, dull, dumb and slow, You are not fit for anything or in my team to draw; You have eaten all my hay, you have spoilèd all my straw; So hang him, whip him, stick him, to the huntsman let him go. Poor old horse, poor old horse.
My hide unto the tanners, then I would freely give My body to the hound dogs, I would rather die than live; Likewise my poor old bones that have carried you many a mile Over hedges, ditches, gates and bridges, likewise gates and stiles. Poor old horse, poor old horse.”
Terrible, noble old man! No doubt he expected me to speak as simply as that, so I slipped away from him and went to the next inn. A high, cloudy night hung over me, like a great yew tree in March, with stars instead of flowers. With those reticent, dark silences and spaces I tried to console myself.