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Tatterdemalion, by John Galsworthy.
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A collection, at least in first part, of heartbreaking tales.
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CONTENTS
PART I.—OF WAR-TIME PAGE
I. The Grey Angel
II. Defeat
III. Flotsam and Jetsam
IV. The Bright Side
V. Cafard
VI. Recorded
VII. The Recruit
VIII. The Peace Meeting
IX. "The Dog It Was That Died"
X. In Heaven and Earth
XI. The Mother Stone
XII. Poirot and Bidan
XIII. The Muffled Ship
XIV. Heritage
XV. 'A Green Hill Far Away'
PART II.—OF PEACE-TIME
I. Spindleberries
II. Expectations
III. Manna
IV. A Strange Thing
V. Two Looks
VI. Fairyland
VII. The Nightmare Child
VIII. Buttercup-Night
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PART I.—OF WAR-TIME PAGE
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I. The Grey Angel
"Each newcomer to the wards was warned by his comrades that the English angel with the grey hair was to be taken without a smile, exactly as if she were his grandmother."
July 06, 2021 - July 06, 2021.
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II. Defeat
" ... And even for a woman “of a certain type” her position was exceptionally nerve-racking in war-time, going as she did by a false name. Indeed, in all England there could hardly be a greater pariah than was this German woman of the night."
" ... On this moonlight night by the banks of the Rhine — whence she came — the orchards would be heavy with apples; there would be murmurs, and sweet scents; the old castle would stand out clear, high over the woods and the chalky-white river. There would be singing far away, and the churning of a distant steamer’s screw; and perhaps on the water a log raft still drifting down in the blue light. There would be German voices talking. And suddenly tears oozed up in her eyes, and crept down through the powder on her cheeks. She raised her veil and dabbed at her face with a little, not-too-clean handkerchief, screwed up in her yellow-gloved hand. But the more she dabbed, the more those treacherous tears ran. Then she became aware that a tall young man in khaki was also standing before the shop-window, not looking at the titles of the books, but eyeing her askance. ... "
"This young man, Captain in a certain regiment, and discharged from hospital at six o’clock that evening, had entered Queen’s Hall at half-past seven. Still rather brittle and sore from his wound, he had treated himself to a seat in the Grand Circle, and there had sat, very still and dreamy, the whole concert through. It had been like eating after a long fast — something of the sensation Polar explorers must experience when they return to their first full meal. For he was of the New Army, and before the war had actually believed in music, art, and all that sort of thing. With a month’s leave before him, he could afford to feel that life was extraordinarily joyful, his own experiences particularly wonderful; and, coming out into the moonlight, he had taken what can only be described as a great gulp of it, for he was a young man with a sense of beauty. When one has been long in the trenches, lain out wounded in a shell-hole twenty-four hours, and spent three months in hospital, beauty has such an edge of novelty, such a sharp sweetness, that it almost gives pain. And London at night is very beautiful. He strolled slowly towards the Circus, still drawing the moonlight deep into his lungs, his cap tilted up a little on his forehead in that moment of unmilitary abandonment; and whether he stopped before the book-shop window because the girl’s figure was in some sort a part of beauty, or because he saw that she was crying, he could not have made clear to any one."
This has been also written and published as a play, fourth in
Six Short Plays
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4057729519
"Humanity, during wartime, back home and between strangers.
"GIRL. Defeat! Der Vaterland! Defeat!. . . . One shillin'!
"[Then suddenly, in the moonlight, she sits up, and begins to sing with all her might "Die Wacht am Rhein." And outside men pass, singing: "Rule, Britannia!"]"
June 14, 2021 - June 14, 2021.
July 06, 2021 - July 07, 2021.
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III. Flotsam and Jetsam
The title reminds one, more than anything, of a W. Somerset Maugham story, set in colonial plantations of Southeast Asia. There the similarity ends, as strongly reminded by the opening paragraph.
"The tides of the war were washing up millions of wrecked lives on all the shores; what mattered the flotsam of a conscripted deep-sea Breton fisherman, slowly pining away for lack of all he was accustomed to; or the jetsam of a tall glass-blower from the ‘invaded countries,’ drifted into the hospital — no one quite knew why — prisoner for twenty months with the Boches, released at last because of his half-paralysed tongue — What mattered they? What mattered anything, or any one, in days like those?"
July 07, 2021 - July 07, 2021.
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IV. The Bright Side
"A little Englishwoman, married to a German, had dwelt with him eighteen years in humble happiness and the district of Putney, where her husband worked in the finer kinds of leather. He was a harmless, busy little man with the gift for turning his hand to anything which is bred into the peasants of the Black Forest, who on their upland farms make all the necessaries of daily life — their coarse linen from home-grown flax, their leather gear from the hides of their beasts, their clothes from the wool thereof, their furniture from the pine logs of the Forest, their bread from home-grown flour milled in simple fashion and baked in the home-made ovens, their cheese from the milk of their own goats."
Travails of the simple family when war broke out in 1914, more so with sinking of Lusitania.
July 07, 2021 - July 07, 2021.
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V. Cafard
"... And the face of his mother came before him, as he had seen her last, just three years ago, when he left his home in the now invaded country, to join his regiment — his mother who, with all his family, was in the power of the Boche. He had gone gaily, and she had stood like stone, her hand held over her eyes, in the sunlight, watching him while the train ran out. Usually the thought of the cursed Boches holding in their heavy hands all that was dear to him, was enough to sweep his soul to a clear, definite hate, which made all this nightmare of war seem natural, and even right; but now it was not enough — he had “cafard.” He turned on his back. The sky above the mountains might have been black for all the joy its blue gave him. The butterflies, those drifting flakes of joy, passed unseen. ... "
July 07, 2021 - July 07, 2021.
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VI. Recorded
"He looked straight at me, and his eyes — Celtic-grey, with a good deal of light in them — stared, wide and fixed, at things beyond me, as only do the eyes of those who have seen much death. There was a sort of burnt-gunpowder look about their rims and lashes, and a fixity that nothing could have stared down."
" ... He had irregular ears, and no feature that could be called good, but his expression was utterly genuine and unconscious of itself. When he sat quiet his face would be held a little down, his eyes would be looking at something — or was it at nothing? — far-off, in a kind of frowning dream. But if he glanced at his babies his rather thick mouth became all smiles, and he would make a remark to his wife about them. ... "
"Oh! I’ve seen things — enough to make your ‘eart bleed. I’ve seen a lot of them country people. Cruel it is! Women, old men, little children, ‘armless people — enough to make your ‘eart bleed. I used to think of the folk over ‘ere. Don’t think English women’d stand what the French and Belgian women do. Those poor women over there — wonderful they are. There yu’ll see ’em sittin’ outside their ‘omes just a heap o’ ruins — clingin’ to ‘em. Wonderful brave and patient — make your ‘eart bleed to see ‘em. Things I’ve seen! There’s some proper brutes among the Germans — must be. Yu don’t feel very kind to ’em when yu’ve seen what I’ve seen. We ‘ave some games with ‘em, though” — he laughed again: “Very nervous people, the Germans. If we stop firin’ in our lines, up they send the star shells, rockets and all, to see what’s goin’ on — think we’re goin’ to attack — regular ‘lumination o’ fireworks — very nervous people."
"Very soon after that we arrived at where he changed, and putting on his goatskin, his cap, and overcoat, he got out behind his wife, carrying with the utmost care those queer companions, his baby and his rifle.
"Where is he now? Alive, dead? Who knows?"
July 07, 2021 - July 07, 2021.
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VII. The Recruit
" ... He could of course read no papers, a map was to him but a mystic mass of marks and colours; he had never seen the sea, never a ship; no water broader than the parish streams; until the war had never met anything more like a soldier than the constable of the neighbouring village. But he had once seen a Royal Marine in uniform. What sort of creatures these Germans were to him — who knows? They were cruel — he had grasped that. Something noxious, perhaps, like the adders whose backs he broke with his stick; something dangerous like the chained dog at Shapton Farm; or the big bull at Vannacombe. ... "
"His dumb sacrifice passing their comprehension, had been rejected — or so it seemed to him He could not understand that they had spared him. Why! He was as good as they! His pride was hurt. No! They should not get him now!"
July 07, 2021 - July 08, 2021.
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VIII. The Peace Meeting
Ironies, subtle and profuse, abound throughout this sketch, of a meeting held in church, of citizens proposing peace talks to end the years of massacre during WWI, and broken up by young, calling them traitors for proposing dialogue with Germans.
Galsworthy didn't live long enough to know the overwhelming irony of the young being correct in their assessment of Germans, however concerned the elderly were for young lives everywhere.
July 08, 2021 - July 08, 2021.
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IX. "The Dog It Was That Died"
Once again, in reading this portrayal of a half German family in England, one becomes very aware that the author might have missed, completely, how short he fell of realities, in portraying British press and some of the people as hate-filled, however innocent most of their victims; Galsworthy died in 1933, and missed the rise of horror that Germany was turned into, and the heights of heroic stoicism and patience through years of a determined fight that most common British displayed during WWII.
"I am not sure what paper first took up the question of interning all the Huns; but I fancy the point was raised originally rather from the instinct, deeply implanted in so many journals, for what would please the public, than out of any deep animus. At all events I remember meeting a sub-editor, who told me he had been opening letters of approval all the morning. “Never,” said he, “have we had a stunt catch on so quickly. ‘Why should that bally German round the corner get my custom?’ and so forth. Britain for the British!”
"“Rather bad luck,” I said, “on people who’ve paid us the compliment of finding this the best country to live in!”
"“Bad luck, no doubt,” he replied, “mais la guerre c’est la guerre. You know Harburn, don’t you? Did you see the article he wrote? By Jove, he pitched it strong.”"
" ... I wrote to young Holsteig and asked him to come and lunch with me. He thanked me, but could not, of course, being confined to a five-mile radius. Really anxious to see him, I motorbiked down to their house. I found a very changed youth; moody and introspective, thoroughly forced in upon himself, and growing bitter. He had been destined for his father’s business, and, marooned as he was by his nationality, had nothing to do but raise vegetables in their garden and read poetry and philosophy — not occupations to take a young man out of himself. Mrs. Holsteig, whose nerves were evidently at cracking point, had become extremely bitter, and lost all power of seeing the war as a whole. All the ugly human qualities and hard people which the drive and pressure of a great struggle inevitably bring to the top seemed viewed by her now as if they were the normal character of her fellow countrymen, and she made no allowance for the fact that those fellow countrymen had not commenced this struggle, nor for the certainty that the same ugly qualities and hard people were just as surely to the fore in every other of the fighting countries. The certainty she felt about her husband’s honour had made her regard his internment and subsequent repatriation as a personal affront, as well as a wicked injustice. Her tall thin figure and high-cheekboned face seemed to have been scorched and withered by some inner flame; she could not have been a wholesome companion for her boy in that house, empty even of servants. I spent a difficult afternoon in muzzling my sense of proportion, and journeyed back to Town sore, but very sorry."
"“The man recovered from the bite,
"The dog it was that died.”"
July 08, 2021 - July 08, 2021.
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X. In Heaven and Earth
Another one, like some of his other stories about WWI, by John Galsworthy, that comes across as somewhat like a painting by Picasso where nose and other parts of face are placed incorrectly.
"“Just think of it!” he said: “The same creatures who are blowing each other to little bits all the time, bombing babies, roasting fellow creatures in the air and cheering while they roast, working day and night to inflict every imaginable kind of horror on other men exactly like themselves — these same chaps are capable of feeling like that about shooting a wretched ill cur of a dog, no good to anybody. There are more things in Heaven and Earth — !”"
He's remarking about men being emotional over dogs while being brutal to humans; in all fairness, British were civilised in treatment even of German prisoners of war, while Germans was brutal with all civilians, and animals, as they went through Europe. This is true of both WWI and WWII.
Truth of his statement lies, not where Galsworthy places it in European arena of WWI much less WWII, but in British treatment of India.
July 08, 2021 - July 08, 2021.
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XI. The Mother Stone
"Ray said: ‘You let me take this stone away with me!’ And the old Boer went on smokin’, and he said: ‘One stone’s the same as another. Take it, brother!’ And Ray said: ‘If it’s what I think, I’ll give you half the price I get for it.’
"“The old Boer smiled, and said: ‘That’s all right, brother; take it, take it!’
"“The next morning Ray left this old Boer, and, when he was going, he said to him: ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I believe this is a valuable stone!’ and the old Boer smiled because he knew one stone was the same as another."
"“And Ray went down to Cape Town, and took the stone to a jeweller, and the jeweller told him it was a diamond of about 30 or 40 carats, and gave him five hundred pound for it. So he bought a waggon and a span of oxen to give to the old Boer, and went back to Jointje. The niggers had collected skinfuls of stones of all kinds, and out of all the skinfuls Ray found three or four diamonds. So he went to work and got another feller to back him, and between them they made the Government move. The rush began, and they found that place near Kimberley; and after that they found De Beers, and after that Kimberley itself.”"
"“Without that game of marbles, would there have been a Moer-Klip — without the Moer-Klip, would there have been a Kimberley — without Kimberley, would there have been a Rhodes — without a Rhodes, would there have been a Raid — without a Raid, would the Boers have started armin’ — if the Boers hadn’t armed, would there have been a Transvaal War? And if there hadn’t been the Transvaal War, would there have been the incident of those two German ships we held up; and all the general feelin’ in Germany that gave the Kaiser the chance to start his Navy programme in 1900? And if the Germans hadn’t built their Navy, would their heads have swelled till they challenged the world, and should we have had this war?”"
"“Well,” he said, “Ray told me the old feller just looked at him as if he thought he’d done a damn silly thing to give him a waggon; and he nodded his old head, and said, laughin’ in his beard: ‘Wish you good luck, brother, with your stone.’ You couldn’t humbug that old Boer; he knew one stone was the same as another.”"
July 08, 2021 - July 08, 2021.
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XII. Poirot and Bidan
Galsworthy used the name Poirot in another story too, which was slightly confusing there - especially for Agatha Christie's readers - since it was without context.
" ... Though he was several years younger than oneself, one always thought of him as “Old Poirot” indeed, he was soon called “le grand-père,” though no more confirmed bachelor ever inhabited the world. He was a regular “Miller of Dee,” caring for nobody; and yet he was likeable, that humorous old stoic, who suffered from gall-stones, and bore horrible bouts of pain like a hero. In spite of all his disabilities his health and appearance soon became robust in our easy-going hospital, where no one was harried, the food excellent, and the air good. He would tell you that his father lived to eighty, and his grandfather to a hundred, both “strong men” though not so strong as his old master, the squire, of whose feats in the hunting-field he would give most staggering accounts in an argot which could only be followed by instinct. A great narrator, he would describe at length life in the town of Nancy, where, when the War broke out, he was driving a market cart, and distributing vegetables, which had made him an authority on municipal reform. Though an incorrigible joker, his stockfish countenance would remain perfectly grave, except for an occasional hoarse chuckle. ... Bidan (Prosper) prospered more rapidly even than himself. That grey look was out of the boy’s face within three weeks. It was wonderful to watch him come back to life, till at last he could say, with his dreadful Provençal twang, that he felt “très biang.” A most amiable youth, he had been a cook, and his chief ambition was to travel till he had attained the summit of mortal hopes, and was cooking at the Ritz in London. When he came to us his limbs seemed almost to have lost their joints, they wambled so. He had no muscle at all. Utter anæmia had hold of all his body, and all but a corner of his French spirit. Round that unquenchable gleam of gaiety the rest of him slowly rallied. With proper food and air and freedom, he began to have a faint pink flush in his china-white cheeks; his lids no longer drooped, his limbs seemed to regain their joints, his hands ceased to swell, he complained less and less of the pains about his heart. When, of a morning, he was finished with, and “le grand-père” was having his hands done, they would engage in lively repartee — oblivious of one’s presence. We began to feel that this grey ghost of a youth had been well named, after all, when they called him Prosper, so lyrical would he wax over the constitution and cooking of “bouillabaisse,” over the South, and the buildings of his native Aix-en-Provence. ..."
"Once, I regret to say, when spring was beginning to come, Bidan-Prosper returned on “le grand-père’s” arm with the utmost difficulty, owing to the presence within him of a liquid called Clairette de Die, no amount of which could subdue “le grand-père’s” power of planting one foot before the other. ... "
July 08, 2021 - July 08, 2021.
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XIII. The Muffled Ship
"The landing went on till night had long fallen, and the band was gone. At last the chatter, the words of command, the snatches of song, and that most favourite chorus: “Me! and my girl!” died away, and the wharf was silent and the ship silent, and a wonderful clear dark beauty usurped the spaces of the sky. By the light of the stars and a half moon the far harbour shores were just visible, the huddled buildings on the near shore, the spiring masts and feathery appanage of ropes on the moored ship, and one blood-red light above the black water. The night had all that breathless beauty which steeps the soul in a quivering, quiet rapture....
"Then it was that clearly, as if I had been a welcomer standing on land in one of the wharf gaps, I saw her come — slow, slow, creeping up the narrow channel, in beside the wharf, a great grey silent ship. ... "
July 08, 2021 - July 08, 2021.
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XIV. Heritage (AN IMPRESSION)
" ... And if a place be beautiful, and friendliness ever on the peace-path there, what more can we desire? And yet — how ironical this place of healing, this beautiful “Heritage!” Verily a heritage of our modern civilisation which makes all this healing necessary! If life were the offspring of friendliness and beauty’s long companionship, there would be no crippled children, no air-raid children, none of those good fellows in blue with red ties and maimed limbs; and the colony to which the Bishop spoke, standing grey-headed in the sun, would be dissolved. Friendliness seems so natural, beauty so appropriate to this earth! But in this torn world they are as fugitives who nest together here and there. ... "
" ... And life should have its covering of dream — bird’s flight, bird’s song, wind in the ash-trees and the corn, tall lilies glistening, the evening shadows slanting out, the night murmuring of waters. ... "
July 09, 2021 - July 09, 2021.
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XV. 'A Green Hill Far Away'
"Was it indeed only last March, or in another life, that I climbed this green hill on that day of dolour, the Sunday after the last great German offensive began? A beautiful sun-warmed day it was, when the wild thyme on the southern slope smelled sweet, and the distant sea was a glitter of gold. Lying on the grass, pressing my cheek to its warmth, I tried to get solace for that new dread which seemed so cruelly unnatural after four years of war-misery.
‘If only it were all over!’ I said to myself; ‘and I could come here, and to all the lovely places I know, without this awful contraction of the heart, and this knowledge that at every tick of my watch some human body is being mangled or destroyed. Ah, if only I could! Will there never be an end?’
"And now there is an end, and I am up on this green hill once more, in December sunlight, with the distant sea a glitter of gold. And there is no cramp in my heart, no miasma clinging to my senses. Peace! It is still incredible. No more to hear with the ears of the nerves the ceaseless roll of gunfire, or see with the eyes of the nerves drowning men, gaping wounds, and death. Peace, actually Peace! The war has gone on so long that many of us have forgotten the sense of outrage and amazement we had, those first days of August, 1914, when it all began. But I have not forgotten, nor ever shall.
"In some of us — I think in many who could not voice it — the war has left chiefly this feeling: ‘If only I could find a country where men cared less for all that they seem to care for, where they cared more for beauty, for nature, for being kindly to each other. If only I could find that green hill far away!’"
July 09, 2021 - July 09, 2021.
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PART II.—OF PEACE-TIME
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I. Spindleberries
"The radiance and the meandering milky waters; that swan against the brown tufted rushes; those far, filmy Downs — there was beauty!
July 09, 2021 - July 09, 2021.
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II. Expectations
"Nevertheless they retained their faith that some day they would get ahead of Providence and come into their own."
"After all there was her reversion! They would come into it some day."
July 09, 2021 - July 09, 2021.
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III. Manna
"His barked-out utterances, ‘I want a pound of butter — pay you Monday!’ ‘I want some potatoes — pay you soon!’ had sounded too often in the ears of those who had found his repayments so far purely spiritual. ... And yet it was impossible to let him and his old mother die on them — it would give too much pleasure ‘over the way.’ And they never dreamed of losing him in any other manner, because they knew his living had been purchased. Money had passed in that transaction; the whole fabric of the Church and of Society was involved. His professional conduct, too, was flawless; his sermons long and fiery; he was always ready to perform those supernumerary duties — weddings, baptisms, and burials — which yielded him what revenue he had, now that his income from the living was mortgaged up to the hilt. ... "
"‘You say you found the loaf under the cart. Didn’t it occur to you to put it back? You could see it had fallen. How else could it have come there?’
"The rector’s burning eyes seemed to melt.
"‘From the sky. Manna.’ Staring round the court, he added: ‘Hungry — God’s elect — to the manna born!’ And, throwing back his head, he laughed. It was the only sound in a silence as of the grave."
July 09, 2021 - July 09, 2021.
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IV. A Strange Thing
"She nodded. “I suppose you can say that. They made me bring an order against him. He wouldn’t pay up, so he went and enlisted, an’ in tu years ‘e was dead in the Boer War — so it killed him right enough. But there she is, a sweet sprig if ever there was one. ... "
" ... The blowing flames and the blue smoke were alive and beautiful; but behind them they were leaving blackened skeleton twigs.
"“Yes,” I thought, “but in a week or two the little green grass-shoots will be pushing up underneath into the sun. So the world goes! Out of destruction! It’s a strange thing!”"
July 09, 2021 - July 09, 2021.
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V. Two Looks
"“Neither of those women cried. The wife stayed there by the bed. I got the other one away to her carriage, down the street. — And so she was there to-day! That explains, I think, the look you saw.”"
July 09, 2021 - July 09, 2021.
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VI. Fairyland
"It was about three o’clock, this November afternoon, when I rode down into “Fairyland,” as it is called about here. The birch-trees there are more beautiful than any in the world; and when the clouds are streaming over in rain-grey, and the sky soaring above in higher blue, just-seen, those gold and silver creatures have such magical loveliness as makes the hearts of mortals ache. The fairies, who have been driven off the moor, alone watch them with equanimity, if they be not indeed the birch-trees themselves — especially those little very golden ones which have strayed out into the heather, on the far side of the glen. “Revenge!” the fairies cried when a century ago those, whom they do not exist just to amuse, made the new road over the moor, cutting right through the home of twilight, that wood above the “Falls,” where till then they had always enjoyed inviolable enchantment. They trooped forthwith in their multitudinous secrecy down into the glen, to swarm about the old road. In half a century or so they had it almost abandoned, save for occasional horsemen and harmless persons seeking beauty, for whom the fairies have never had much feeling of aversion. And now, after a hundred years, it is all theirs; the ground so golden with leaves and bracken that the old track is nothing but a vague hardness beneath a horse’s feet, nothing but a runnel for the rains to gather in. ... Now the fairies have got it indeed, they have witched to skeletons all the little bridges across the glen stream; they have mossed and thinned the gates to wraiths. With their dapple-gold revelry in sunlight, and their dance of pied beauty under the moon, they have made all their own.
"I have ridden many times down into this glen; and slowly up among the beeches and oaks into the lanes again, hoping and believing that, some day, I should see a fairy take shape to my thick mortal vision; and to-day, at last, I have seen."
"For just a moment I could see that spirit company, ghosts of the ferns and leaves, of butterflies and bees and birds, and four-footed things innumerable, ghosts of the wind, the sun-beams, and the rain-drops, and tiny flickering ghosts of moon-rays. For just a moment I saw what the fairy’s eyes were seeing, without knowing what they saw."
July 09, 2021 - July 10, 2021.
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VII. The Nightmare Child
" ... Behind healthy relationships between human beings, or even between human beings and animals, there must be at least some rudimentary affinity. That’s the tragedy of poor little souls like Em’leen. Where on earth can they find the affinity which makes life good? The very fact that they must worship is their destruction. It was a soldier — or so they said — who had brought her to her first grief; I had seen her adoring the judge at the trial, then the handsome uniformed Sister. And I, as the village doctor, was a sort of tin-pot deity in those parts, so I was very careful to keep my manner to her robust and almost brusque."
July 10, 2021 - July 10, 2021.
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VIII. Buttercup-Night
" ... The moment I got into that field I felt within me a peculiar contentment, and sat down on a rock to let the feeling grow. In an old holly-tree rooted to the bank about fifty yards away, two magpies evidently had a nest, for they were coming and going, avoiding my view as much as possible, yet with a certain stealthy confidence which made one feel that they had long prescriptive right to that dwelling-place. Around, far as one could see, was hardly a yard of level ground; all hill and hollow, long ago reclaimed from the moor; and against the distant folds of the hills the farm-house and its thatched barns were just visible, embowered amongst beeches and some dark trees, with a soft bright crown of sunlight over the whole. A gentle wind brought a faint rustling up from those beeches, and from a large lime-tree which stood by itself; on this wind some little snowy clouds, very high and fugitive in that blue heaven, were always moving over. But I was most struck by the buttercups. Never was field so lighted up by those tiny lamps, those little bright pieces of flower china out of the Great Pottery. They covered the whole ground, as if the sunlight had fallen bodily from the sky, in millions of gold patines; and the fields below as well, down to what was evidently a stream, were just as thick with the extraordinary warmth and glory of them."
" ... Climbing over the bank at the far end, I found myself in a meadow the like of which — so wild and yet so lush — I think I have never seen. Along one hedge of its meandering length were masses of pink mayflower; and between two little running streams quantities of yellow water iris—”daggers,” as they call them — were growing; the “print-frock” orchis, too, was all over the grass, and everywhere the buttercups. Great stones coated with yellowish moss were strewn among the ash-trees and dark hollies; and through a grove of beeches on the far side, such as Corot might have painted, a girl was running with a youth after her, who jumped down over the bank and vanished. Thrushes, blackbirds, yaffles, cuckoos, and one other very monotonous little bird were in full song; and this, with the sound of the streams, and the wind, and the shapes of the rocks and trees, the colours of the flowers, and the warmth of the sun, gave one a feeling of being lost in a very wilderness of Nature. Some ponies came slowly from the far end, tangled, gipsy-headed little creatures, stared, and went off again at speed. It was just one of those places where any day the Spirit of all Nature might start up in one of those white gaps which separate the trees and rocks."
"When dawn comes, while moonlight is still powdering the world’s face, quite a long time passes before one realises how the quality of the light has changed; and so, it was day before I knew it. Then the sun came up above the hills; dew began to sparkle, and colour to stain the sky. That first praise of the sun from every bird and leaf and blade of grass, the tremulous flush and chime of dawn! One has strayed far from the heart of things that it should come as something strange and wonderful! Indeed, I noticed that the beasts and birds gazed at me as if I simply could not be there at this hour which so belonged to them. And to me, too, they seemed strange and new — with that in them “which passeth show,” and as of a world where man did not exist, or existed only as just another sort of beast or bird.
"But just then began the crowning glory of that dawn — the opening and lighting of the buttercups. Not one did I actually see unclose, yet, of a sudden, they were awake, and the fields once more a blaze of gold."
July 10, 2021 - July 10, 2021.
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June 15, 2021 -
July 06, 2021 - July 10, 2021.
Purchased August 12, 2013.
Kindle Edition, 316 pages
Published March 30, 2011
(first published May 1st 2001)
ASINB004UJKML4
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