In Pursuit of Spring

by Edward Thomas

As far as Hilperton and the “Lion and Fiddle,” houses and fields alternated along the road, but after that I entered a broad elmy country of young corn and new-ploughed land sweeping gradually away on my right up to grass slopes, and to the foot of dark Roundway Down and pale Beacon Hill, above Devizes. Far to the left the meadow land swelled up into the wooded high land above Lacock, Corsham, and Bath. Under elms near Semington the threshing-machine boomed; its unchanging note mingled with a hiss at the addition of each sheaf. Otherwise the earth was the rooks’, heaven was the larks’, and I rode easily on along the good level road somewhere between the two.

Motion was extraordinarily easy that afternoon, and I had no doubts that I did well to bicycle instead of walking. It was as easy as riding in a cart, and more satisfying to a restless man. At the same time I was a great deal nearer to being a disembodied spirit than I can often be. I was not at all tired, so far as I knew. No people or thoughts embarrassed me. I fed through the senses directly, but very temperately, through the eyes chiefly, and was happier than is explicable or seems reasonable. This pleasure of my disembodied spirit (so to call it) was an inhuman and diffused one, such as may be attained by whatever dregs of this our life survive after death. In fact, had I to describe the adventure of this remnant of a man I should express it somewhat thus, with no need of help from Dante, Mr. A. C. Benson, or any other visitors to the afterworld. In a different mood I might have been encouraged to believe the experience a foretaste of a sort of imprisonment in the viewless winds, or of a spiritual share in the task of keeping the cloudy winds “fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.” Supposing I were persuaded to provide this afterworld with some of the usual furniture, I could borrow several visible things from that ride through Semington, Melksham, and Staverton. First and chief would be the Phœnix “Swiss” Milk Factory where I crossed the Avon at Staverton. It is an enormous stone cube, with multitudinous windows all alike, and at the back of it two tall chimneys. The Avon winding at its foot is a beautiful, willowy river. On the opposite side of the road and bridge the river bank rises up steeply, clothed evenly with elms, and crowned by Staverton’s little church which the trees half conceal.... This many-windowed naked mass, surmounted by a stone phœnix, immediately over the conspicuous information that it was burnt on November 5, 1834, and rebuilt on April 28 of the next year, is as big as a cathedral, and like a cathedral in possessing a rookery in the riverside elms behind it. With the small, shadowed church opposite, I feel sure that it would need little transmutation to fall into the geography of a land of shades. But the most beautiful thing of all was the broad meadow called Challimead on the west of Melksham, and the towered church lying along the summit of the gentle rise in which it ends. I bicycled along the north-west side of it immediately after leaving Melksham on the way to Holt. Elms of a hundred years’ growth lined the road, some upright, most lying amid the wreckage of their branchwork far out over the grass. Parallel with the road and much nearer to it than to the church the Avon serpentined along the meadow without disturbing the level three furlongs of its perfect green. The windows of the church flamed in the last sunbeams, the tombstones were clear white. For this meadow at least there should be a place in any Elysium. It would be a suitable model for the meadow of heavenly sheen where Æneas saw the blessed souls of Ilus and Assaracus and Dardanus and the bard Musæus, heroes and wise men, and the beautiful horses of the heroes, in that diviner air lighted by another sun and other stars than ours.

But our sun was fading over Challimead. The air grew cold as I went on, and the pewits cried as if it were winter. The rooks were now silent dots all over the elms of the Trowbridge rookery. A light mist was brushing over the fields, softening the brightness of Venus in the pale rosy west, and the scarlet flames that leapt suddenly from a thorn pile in a field. Probably there would be another frost to-night.... People were returning to the town in small and more scattered groups. At corners and crossways figures were standing talking, or bidding farewell. I rode on easily through the chill, friendly land. Clear hoofs hammering and men or girls talking in traps were but an added music to the quiet throughout the evening. I began to feel some confidence in the Spring.

I went out into the village at about half-past nine in the dark, quiet evening. A few stars penetrated the soft sky; a few lights shone on earth, from a distant farm seen through a gap in the cottages. Single and in groups, separated by gardens or bits of orchard, the cottages were vaguely discernible: here and there a yellow window square gave out a feeling of home, tranquillity, security. Nearly all were silent. Ordinary speech was not to be heard, but from one house came the sounds of an harmonium being played and a voice singing a hymn, both faintly. A dog barked far off. After an interval a gate fell-to lightly. Nobody was on the road.

The road was visible most dimly, and was like a pale mist at an uncertain distance. When I reached the green all was still and silent. The cottages on the opposite side of the road all lay back, and they were merely blacker stains on the darkness. The pollard willows fringing the green, which in the sunlight resemble mops, were now very much like a procession of men, strange primæval beings, pausing to meditate in the darkness.

The intervals between the cottages were longer here, and still longer; I ceased to notice them until I came to the last house, a small farm, where the dog growled, but in a subdued tone, as if only to condemn my footsteps on the deserted road.

Rows of elm trees on both sides of the road succeeded. I walked more slowly, and at a gateway stopped. While I leaned looking over it at nothing, there was a long silence that could be felt, so that a train whistling two miles away seemed as remote as the stars. The noise could not overleap the boundaries of that silence. And yet I presently moved away, back towards the village, with slow steps.

I was tasting the quiet and the safety without a thought. Night had no evil in it. Though a stranger, I believed that no one wished harm to me. The first man I saw, fitfully revealed by a swinging lantern as he crossed his garden, seemed to me to have the same feeling, to be utterly free of trouble or any care. A man slightly drunk deviated towards me, halted muttering, and deviated away again. I heard his gate shut, and he was absorbed.

The inn door, which was now open, was as the entrance to a bright cave in the middle of the darkness: the illumination had a kind of blessedness such as it might have had to a cow, not without foreignness; and a half-seen man within it belonged to a world, blessed indeed, but far different from this one of mine, dark, soft, and tranquil. I felt that I could walk on thus, sipping the evening silence and solitude, endlessly. But at the house where I was staying I stopped as usual. I entered, blinked at the light, and by laughing at something, said with the intention of being laughed at, I swiftly again naturalized myself.