Moreover, the strange part of it was that as he sped down through the smiling green country that spring afternoon, armed from head to foot in the rigid steel casings of his disguise, he seemed to hear a faint singing deep within him, a singing that belonged to the youngest part of him and yet sprang from that which was vastly ancient, but as to the cause of which he was so puzzled that, in his efforts to analyse it, he forgot about his journey altogether, and was nearly carried past the station where he had to get out.
CHAPTER IV
No man worth his spiritual salt can ever become really entangled in locality.—A. H. L.
The house, like the description of himself in the letter, was big and old. It consisted of three rambling wings, each added at a different period to an original farmhouse, and was thus full of unexpected staircases, sudden rising passages, and rooms of queer shapes. It resembled, indeed, the structure of a mind that has grown by chance and not by system, and was just as difficult for a stranger to find his way in.
It stood among pine-woods, at the foot of hills that ran on another five miles to drop their chalk cliffs abruptly into the sea. Where the lawns stopped on one side and the kitchen-garden on the other began an expanse of undulating heather-land, dotted with pools of brown water and yellow with patches of gorse and broom. Here rabbits increased and multiplied; sea-gulls screamed and flew, using some of the more secluded ponds for their annual breeding places; foxes lived happily, unhunted and very bold; and the dainty hoof-marks of deer were sometimes found in the sandy margins of the freshwater springs.
It was beautiful country, a bit of wild England, out of the world as very few parts of it now are, and haunted by a loveliness that laid its spell on the heart of the returned exile the moment he topped the hill in the dog-cart and saw it spread out before him like a softly coloured map. The scenery from the train window had somehow disheartened him a little, producing a curious sense of confinement, almost of imprisonment, in his mind: the neat meadows holding wooden cattle; the careful boundaries of ditch and hedge; the five-barred gates, strong to enclose, the countless notices to warn trespassers, and the universal network of barbed wire. Accustomed as he was to the vast, unhedged landscapes of a primitive country, it all looked to him, with its precise divisions, like a toy garden, combed, washed, swept—exquisitely cared for, but a little too sweet and perfumed to be quite wholesome. Only tame things, he felt, could enjoy so gentle a playground, and the call of his own forests—for this really was what worked in him—sang out to him with a sterner cry.
But this view from the ridge pleased him more: there were but few hedges visible; the eye was led to an open horizon and the sea; an impression of space and freedom rose from the hills and moorlands. Here his thoughts, accustomed to deal with leagues rather than acres, could at least find room to turn about in. And although the perfume that rose to his nostrils was like the perfume of flowers preserved by some artificial process rather than the great clean smells of a virgin world such as he was used to, it was nevertheless the smell of his boyhood, and it moved him powerfully. Odour is the one thing that is impossible to recall in exile. Sights and sounds the imagination can always reconstruct after a fashion, but odour is too elusive. It rose now to his nostrils as something long forgotten, and swept him with a wave of memory that was extraordinarily keen.
‘That’s a smell to take me back twenty-five years,’ he thought, inhaling the scent of the heather. He caught his breath sharply, uncertain whether it was pain or pleasure that predominated. A profound yearning, too fugitive to be seized, too vague to be definitely labelled, stirred in the depths of him as his eye roamed over the miles of sunlight and blue shadow at his feet; again something sang within him as he gazed over the long ridges of heathland, sprinkled with silvery pools, and bearing soft purple masses of pine-woods on their sides as they melted away through haze to the summer sea beyond.
Only when his gaze fell upon the smoke rising from the grey stone roof of the house nestling far below did the joy of his emotion chill a little. A vague sense of alarm and nervousness touched him as he wondered what that grey old building might hold in store for him.
‘It’s silly, I know,’ his thought ran, ‘but I feel like a lost sheep here. It’s Nature that calls me, not people. I don’t know how I shall get on in this chess-board sort of a country. They’ll never care for the things that I care for.’