Part 18

That afternoon of August London was more arid than ever. I looked with despair for any sign of beauty, something that could take my mind away from dinginess. My mind was drouthy, and the roots of calm thought were sapped. The blue sky overhead made me miserable: I thought of the waves lapping the sunlit sands of the West Country that I knew so well. There the gray stock-doves flew from the bushes growing on the headland cliff sides, and the lark’s song was ever in the air. Here by the church of Mary-le-Strand all nature was dead. True, there were pigeons, but their wings were tinged with soot, and they were alienated from the wild dove whose nest was among the blackthorns. Even the bark of the plane trees was unrefreshed, and guarded by iron cages; my thought was shut in too. My mind was never in my drudge work, however much I tried to force myself to think in terms of sensation and factory-made phrases. Everything was ugly, the competition, the smoke, the grimy buildings.

And then I saw, floating across the shimmering roadway, a few downy seeds. They came from the direction of the Thames. They swung in the motion of the street-air, and the light glistened on their filaments. One drifted to the pavement at my feet, and released a curved brown seed. By its size I knew it to be that of the Yellow Goatsbeard, or John-go-to-bed-at-noon. Immediately the bus-rattle, the whirr of cab-wheels, and the burnt-oil smell sank away. The seed bloomed in the palm of my hand, and I saw its flowers of pure yellow, and a whitethroat was slipping through the nettles of the ditch. The city was old, but the brown seed was older. Men raised their buildings anew after the great fire, hundreds of years ago; the flower did not change. My mind reached back before the time of the Romans with their tiled baths and chariots; further still, when the first wild settlers made their hut circles by the marge of the wooded river. All the while the dandelion had been blooming so that the seed should be formed. No haste, no strife, no misery: growing in the sunlight. A lovely disk of gold, a summer day, a wandering bee, and the mother-beauty became the child-seed. And this common speck, coming with the moving air to my feet, was as old as the spirit that manifests itself through dull matter in a million million forms and ways.

I dropped the seed and went away, no longer stifled by the weary monotony of my useless work. Then I thought that I would like to keep it, and plant it in some known corner in order to watch its increasing joy as the plant grew in spring, and to take to myself some of its happiness. I searched on the pavement, but it was so small and commonplace I could not see it. A passerby asked if he might help me: had I lost anything and was it of any value--a gold ring, perhaps? I replied in my enthusiasm that it was of more value than a gold ring, hoping (as ever the dreamer has) that he would share my wonder of this seed in London. He was interested and puzzled, so I told him it was the seed of a sort of dandelion that I sought. He stared at me as though I had said that God was in the Strand, and had just spoken to me; and then he turned away with a smile.

THE CHANGE: A Fantasy of Whitefoot Lane

(To J. R.)

He was standing at the edge of the strip of wood, quite still, and looking towards the east as though at something far away. No wind was blowing.

As I approached he did not move, although my feet made a sighing in the long grass. Abruptly he turned.

“When I was last here, the field swept away, open and free, for many miles. In summer, the wheat grew yellow in the sunshine. Now the houses are nearly to the wood, and the little piece of land left is turned into allotments. But even those are deserted, for they are going to build shortly.”

Dreary patches of decaying cabbages, their leaves sodden and drab, were between the edge of the wood and the fences protecting the small back-gardens. Old broken pails and bundles of bean-sticks littered the allotments; sparrows chirped as they searched the backyards for crumbs.

“This was a field for poppies,” he said softly. “Before the stems of wheat stiffened, while the awns and flags whispered softly in the air, the poppies were among the green corn like blood-drops. What untamed colours there were amongst the civilised wheat! The yellow charlock grew every year; we hated the wild mustard, but still it grew. Everywhere the alien creeps in, and hangs fiercely to life. Great big thistles held their spears and purple plumes higher than the grain with the yellow ragwort in August. And the moon daisies, sought by the moths at night. But you think that I am talking foolishly. Perhaps wild flowers are nothing to you.”

He looked at me quickly, and in his face was youth. Yet he had said that he remembered the field before it became part of the suburb: that must have been many years ago.

“Sweetest of all things is wild-flower air,” I quoted from old memory.

“Ah! You have not forgotten!”

With a wild poignancy he spoke.

“I am remembering now.”

He faced me so abruptly that the hair flung over his forehead. Then he spoke again, and my heart was heavy.

“In the early morning the birds sang sweetly, and the air was pure. I used to creep down the stairs, holding my boots in my hand. The third step from the bottom creaked and had to be avoided. The cat asleep on its rug in the kitchen stirred and stretched and yawned as I opened the door, then curled and slept again. It’s funny how I remember things like that so vividly. When my boots were laced, I used to tiptoe to the door, draw the bolt and turn that creaking lock with its huge key, and then outside into the morning. Sometimes I came to this very place, listening to a nightingale, and his song then was not yearning as it was at night. I watched the warblers at their work of weaving cradles among the brambles. I had a friend in those days, a true friend, to whom I told all the things in my heart. Together we wandered and explored the big woods in the country.”

He sighed, while a little wind stirred a leaf upon the oak tree above, a leaf alone among the guarded buds of next spring and the buff oak apples upon the twigs. The leaf made a faint risping as it spun and shook, and he looked up at it, and never had I seen a face so sad.

“Not so long ago that leaf was a bud, opening timorously to the spring sunshine and the lark-song far up into heaven. I wonder if, in its own obscure way, it wondered about the world, and wove a little dream of happiness for ever, like the dream of a child. The nightingale sings no more when it is spring; he is gone like the wheat and its silky wind-wave. Terry--that was the name of my friend--came to me one day and held out his hand, and said shyly, ‘I say, shall we swear life-friendship?’ He had been reading some romantic book. After that we went everywhere together. Ah, now you begin to remember the round pond over by the Seven Fields.”

“Terry and I would go and fish there at five in the morning. Yes, well may you remember those lovely summer morns, the sun staining the air and charging its loveliness with light and life. We made our own rods of hazel wands, and floats from gray goose-quills and corks. The eagerness with which we put ground bait down the night before in the hope of snaring one of the monster carp that lurked in that little pond! I suppose really that none were there at all, but all through those springs and summers of boyhood we fished, never catching anything bigger than a small roach or dace. We used to argue about the merits of different baits: aniseed paste, small boiled potatoes, brandling worms and broad beans. Do you know what that pond is like now?” he cried, tragic eyes looking into mine. “All the people from the suburbs have cast their unwanted cats and split boots into the water. There are no fish in it now, not even an eft remains to float to the surface, turn over and show a stain of fire as he swims to the bottom. Everything is dead, dead! When the sun slants through the trees at its edge, you can see the blur of rusting tins and papers deep underneath. But in those days it was beautiful and beloved of a wandering kingfisher. By the shallow drinking-place the cattle came down to ponder, as with soft stare they stood in the mud. Sometimes a bullfinch came, and a turtle dove from the hawthorn: all the birds loved to splash and ruffle in the water. That little lake in the wood was a place of glamour and romance, especially in later years when I was deeply in love.”

The sun came over the houses, the starlings whistled and clucked among the smoke-burnt and red chimney pots. Wives in the houses were preparing breakfast for their men who soon would walk quickly down the pavements towards the station; another day’s work in London was beginning.

“Yes, I was deeply in love,” the pale stranger continued, “with Louise. That was her name to me, a name I gave her because----”

He faltered and ended. I looked away, for pain had come into his eyes and his voice. The heaped bean-sticks became indistinct as I looked. Again he spoke,--

“When I first saw her, I knew that I would love her, and that she would love me. The bluebells had drooped and faded, their spirits gone to make the sky a deeper hue, and somewhere in the wind pealed the ghostly chimes of their fragrance. The meadow was glorious with buttercups, and the light reflected upwards from so thick a cluster of golden rivets driven into the grasses glowed on her face as she walked slowly across the field. She wore a print dress, and her brown hair was thick and loosely coiled. But it was her eyes that made her face so sweet--they were gentle like those of a hare. I just stood and looked at her. Then she was gone, and I hid behind a hedge, but she did not look back. Her father was an artist living in a cottage by the farm, and she was his only daughter. When we knew each other, I used to talk a lot with him, and she would listen with earnest eyes upon me, as I could see without actually looking at her. When I did glance at her, she would look on the ground, and then we smiled, and in her cheeks I saw the bramble blossom steal and die. Her father sang the song of Julien in the opera Louise, and would think of his dead wife as he sat at the piano. And I would think of Louise as I first saw her, in her simple dress, bareheaded in the meadow, with a rich golden-brown light on her cheeks like the lacquered ripples of a stream hovering and gleaming under a bridge.”

“You are very sad,” I said.

“A poet is always sad,” he answered.

“Then there should be no poets if that is so. Happiness is greater than poetry.”

“You are right,” he whispered presently, “but let me tell you my tale before it is too late, for shortly the wood will be down, and on the place where we stand will be houses. And when that happens the last link will be broken.”