For truth’s sake, what woe afterwards befell,
’Twould humour many a heart to leave them thus,
Shut from the busy world of more incredulous.”
The words were still fresh in my brain.
But, outside, the trees and barns and shed were quiet and dim, and as much submerged and hidden from the air in which I had been living as the green streets of motionless lily and weed at the bottom of some lonely pool where carp and tench go slowly. The road went straight away from the window to the invisible beyond; hard and dry, it was trying to shine, as if it recalled the sunlight. Half way along, at one side, under a broad oak, there was a formless but pregnant shadow. The farm buildings that lay about the road were huddled, dark, colourless and indistinguishable because of their shadows; they might have been heaped up by a great plough, of which the road was the shining furrow; they were not so much the vague wreckage of what I had known yesterday, as a chaos out of which perhaps something was to be born. Yet the outside world was vaster than it had seemed when I could see three ranges of hills and guess at the sea beyond; and strange it was when the words—
“She saw the young Corinthian Lycius
Charioting foremost in the envious race
Like a young love, with calm, uneager face,
And fell into a swooning love of him”—
came back to me. How frail and perilous and small was the poet’s shielded world! The outside world threatened it as the smooth escarpment of tall, toppling water threatens the little piping sea-bird. And yet this poet’s world was for the time being my life. Beyond his words there were, perhaps, the gay, the dear, the beautiful persons whom I knew; Nobby, the tinker, and many more; but probably they slept; they were vain if they were not fictitious; if they could be supposed to live, my only proof of it was that somehow they were connected with a very distant light that refused to go out among the westward copses. They were hardly more credible than the words of a stale preacher talking of charity, or an artful poet writing of love.