In Pursuit of Spring

by Edward Thomas

The approach to West Quantoxhead and the great house of St. Audries was lined by fences, and I rode down past them with dread of the dismal walk back again. But at the foot the fence came to an end. The pale gorsy turf of the deer park fell away on the right to the great house and its protecting woods. Daffodils and primroses were thick on the left-hand slopes. And there was a fountain of ever-running water at the roadside. I took the water inwardly and outwardly, and no longer troubled about the difficulty of ascent and return, even when I found myself slipping down hill for two miles into Williton. The high beacons of Exmoor were hanging before me, scarfed and coifed by clouds of the sunset, and grand were these half-earthly and half-aerial heights, but lovelier was the gentle hill much nearer and a little to the left of my course. For the sun, sinking on the right side of it, blessed and honoured this hill above all other hills. Both its woods and pastures were burning subduedly with a mild orange fire, without being consumed. It was the marriage of heaven and earth. The grim beacons behind guarded the couch. A white farm below was as white as moonlight.

Williton begins with a railway station and a workhouse, yet the first half mile of it is a street without a shop, of white or pale-washed, often thatched cottages and small houses, each separated from the road by flowery gardens of various breadths, some mere flowery strips, all good. To the fact that it was on the main road from Minehead to Bridgwater it was as indifferent as to the marriage of heaven and earth. The straight road was smooth, pale, and empty. Where it runs into another road, as the down stroke runs into the cross stroke of a T, and has a signpost to Watchet on the right, Bicknoller and Minehead on the left, the shops begin. Here, though it was six, and notwithstanding the marriage of heaven and earth, I had tea, and furthermore ate cream with a spoon, until I had had almost as much as I desired.

Now although I had seemed to be riding continually downhill into Williton, I found it nearly all downhill back to Kilve. The road was like a stream on which I floated in the shadows of trees and steep hillsides. The light was slowly departing, and still on some of the slopes the compact gorse bushes were like flocks of golden fleeces. Robins and blackbirds sang while bats were flitting about me. Day was not dead but sleeping, and the few stars overhead asked silence. By the turning to East Quantoxhead some cottagers talked in low tones. Kilve, dark and quiet, showed one or two faint lights. Only when I lay in bed did I recognize the two sounds that made the murmurous silence of Kilve—the whisper of its brook, and the bleat of sheep very far off.

X.
THE GRAVE OF WINTER.

When I awoke at six the light was good, but it was the light of rain. One thrush alone was singing, a few starlings whistled. And the rain lasted until half-past eight. Then the sunlight enshrined itself in the room, the red road glistened, a Lombardy poplar at Kilve Court waved against a white sky only a little blemished by gray, and I started again westward. The black stain of yesterday’s fire on the hill was very black, the new privet leaves very green, and the stitchwort very white in the arches of the drenched grass. The end of the rain, as I hoped, was sung away by missel-thrushes in the roadside oaks, by a chain of larks’ songs which must have reached all over England.

I had some thoughts of branching off on one of the green lanes to the left, that would have led me past a thatched cottage or two up to the ridge of the Quantocks, to Stowborrow Hill, Beacon Hill, Thorncombe Hill, Great Hill, Will’s Neck, Lydeard Hill, Cothelstone Hill, and down to Taunton; but I kept to my road of last night as far as West Quantoxhead. There, beyond the fountain, I entered the road between ranks of lime trees towards Stogumber. Before I had gone a mile the rain returned, and made the roads so bad that I had to take to the highway from Williton to Taunton, and so saw no more of Bicknoller than its brown tower. But I had hopes of the weather, and the rain did no harm to the flowers of periwinkle and laurustinus in the hedges I was passing, and only added a sort of mystery of inaccessibleness to the west wall of the Quantocks, with which I was now going parallel. It was a wall coloured in the main by ruddy dead bracken and dark gorse, but patched sometimes with cultivated strips and squares of green, and trenched by deep coombs of oak, and by the shallow, winding channels of streams—streams not of water but of the most emerald grass. Seagulls mingled with the rooks in the nearer fields. The only people on the road were road-menders working with a steam-roller; the corduroys of one were stained so thoroughly by the red mud of the Quantocks, and shaped so excellently by wear to his tall, spare figure, that they seemed to be one with the man. It reminded me of “Lee Boo,” and how the Pelew Islanders doubted whether the clothes and bodies of the white men did not “form one substance,” and when one took off his hat they were struck with astonishment, “as if they thought it had formed part of his head.”

The rain ceased just soon enough not to prove again the vanity of waterproofs. I have, it is true, discovered several which have brought me through a storm dry in parts, but I have also discovered that sellers of waterproofs are among the worst of liars, and that they communicate their vice with their goods. The one certain fact is that nobody makes a garment or suit which will keep a man both dry and comfortable if he is walking in heavy and beating rain. Suits of armour have, of course, been devised to resist rain, but at best they admit it at the neck. The ordinary (and extraordinary) waterproof may keep a man dry from neck to groin, though it is improbable exceedingly that both neck and wrists will escape. As for the legs, the rain gets at the whole of them with the aid of wind and capillary attraction. Whoever wore a coat that kept his knees dry in a beating rain? I am not speaking of waterproof tubes reaching to the feet. They may be sold, they may even be bought. They may be useful, but not for walking in.

For moderate showers one waterproof is about as good as another. The most advertised have the advantage of being expensive, and conferring distinction: otherwise they are no better, and wear worse, than a thing at two-thirds of the price which is never advertised at all. In such a one I was riding now, and I got wet only at the ankles. It actually kept my knees dry in the heavy rain near Timsbury. But if I had been walking I should have been intolerably hot and embarrassed in this, and very little less so in the lighter, more distinguished, more expensive garment. Supposing that a thorough waterproof exists, so light as to be comfortable in mild weather, it is certain to have the grave disadvantage of being easily tearable, and therefore of barring the wearer from woods.