CHAPTER XXI

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER

That first return to England after his long absence in the East always remained one of the land-marks in Ernie's life. It was a revelation to him, never completely to pass away.

The time was late April; the weather perfect. The song of mating birds rose from dew-drenched brake and bush on every hand; the spring lay like a dream of gossamer on the hedges and woodlands; the lambs and quiet cattle filled him with an immense content. His heart rose up in joy and thankfulness and humble love.

And his mates, it was clear to him, were experiencing the same transfiguring emotion. He was sure of it from the silence that grew on them as they travelled through the radiant country-side from the port at which they had landed, their noses glued to the windows of the troop-train. Gradually the vision possessed their souls like lovely music. The rowdiness, the silly songs, the bad jokes faded away. An awe stole over them as of men admitted into the Sanctuary and beholding there for the first time the beauty of the Holy One unveiled before them.

Now and then a quiet voice spoke out of the silence.

"Blime! There's a rabbit!"

"There's an English serving-maid!"

"Ain't it all solid-like?"

That solidity was one of Ernie's abiding impressions too--the massive character of this Western Civilization to which he was returning. And it stood, he was convinced, for something real: for it was based on a foundation that only the blind and gross could call materialism.

The big-boned porters trundling tinkling milk-cans along the platforms at a wayside station, the English faces, the square brick buildings, the substantial coin, confirmed the thought.

"Solid!" he echoed in his father's vein. "That's the word. Give me the West. Back there it's all a little bit o gilded gimcrack."

Once the train stopped in an embankment lined with primroses and crowned with woods, a sweet undercurrent of song streaming quietly up to heaven, like the murmur of innumerable fairy-bees.

Ernie removed his cap; and the unuttered words in his heart, as in those of his companions, were, "Let us pray!"

A few weeks later he stood on the platform of Victoria, discharged.

Deliberately he chose, to take him home, a train that stopped and browsed at all the stations with the familiar English names as it made its fussy way across the Weald through the very heart of Saxondom.

He sat in the corner, the window wide, the breeze upon his face, without a paper, reading instead the countryside as a man reads in age a poem beloved in his youth.

One by one he picked up the old land-marks--the spire of Cowfold Monastery, slender against the West, Ditchling Beacon, Black Cap, and the Devil's Dyke.

At Ardingly, where the train had stopped, it seemed, for lunch, he got out.

The Downs were drawing closer now, the blue rampart of them seeming to gather all this beauty as in a giant basin.

In the woods hard by a woodpecker was tapping. He saw a cock pheasant streaming in glorious flight over a broad-backed hedge. And across the hollow of the Weald cuckoos everywhere were calling, and flying as they called. He closed his eyes and listened. The Weald seemed to him an immense bowl of nectar, brimming and beaded. He was floating in it; and the tiny bubbles all about him were popping off with a soft delicious sound--_Cuck-oo! Cuck-oo!_

Then he came to earth to see the train bundling out of the station with a callous grin.

It was significant of Ernie's weakness and his strength that he didn't mind. Indeed he was glad.

He left the station and plunged like a swimmer into the sea of sound and colour, opening his chest and breathing it in. The wealth of green amazed him. It filled and fulfilled his heart. He caught it up in both hands, as it were, and poured it over his thirsting flesh. Abundant, yet light as froth, it overflowed all things, hedges, woods and pastures; splashing with brightest emerald the walls and roofs of the cottages, russet-timbered and Sussex-tiled.

Here and there in an old garden, set in the green, was a laburnum like a fountain of gold, a splash of lilac in lovely mourning against the yews, a chestnut lighted with a myriad spray of bloom. The pink May had succeeded the white; and clematis garlanded the hedges. There was a wonderful stillness everywhere, and the atmosphere was bright and hard. After a dry month the grass was very forward. The oak-trees stood up to their knees in hay that was yellow with buttercups, the wind rustling through it like a tide. The foliage of the oaks was still faintly bronzed. Steadfast, old, and very grim in all this faerie, they bore themselves as lords of the Forest by right of conquest and long inheritance. Ernie nodded greeting at them. Their uncompromising air amused him. They were not his tree: for he was a hill-man; and the oaks belonged to the Weald, which in its turn clearly belonged to them. He did not love them; but he admired and respected them for their sturdy independence of character, if he laughed a little at their English self-righteousness and dogmatic air. They were of England too in their determination not to show emotion: for they appeared not to be moving; yet he could see a wind was flowing through them, while in the shadow of them mares-in-foal were flicking their tails.

Ernie recognized with joy that he was returning to the country he had left.

The gang of men he came on at the end of a lane, asphalting a main-road, the rare car dashing along with a swirling tail of dust between green hedges, disturbed but little his peace of mind.

He was home again--in Old England--the heart of whose heart was Sussex.

In the train again he sank back in a kind of pleasant trance. Two country-men in his carriage were talking in the old ca-a-ing speech--_So cardingly I saays to herrr_.... Their undulating voices rocked him to sleep. He woke to find himself in Lewes, and his eyes resting on the massif of Mount Caburn.

The train wandered eastwards under the Downs, past Furrel Beacon, athwart the opening of the Ruther Valley. The Long Man of Wilmington stared bleakly at him from the flanks of hills that seemed sometimes scarred and old and worn, at others rich with the mystery of youth.

The train ran through Polefax, where the line to Romney Marsh turns off. Then with a belated effort at sprightliness it hurried through the sprawling outposts of Beachbourne.

The town had grown greatly, overspreading the foothills towards Ratton and the woods of the Decoy and skirmishing across the marshes beyond the gasworks, which, when he left, had marked the uttermost bounds of civilization.