In the parlour of the inn the singer stood up and sang of how a girl was walking alone in the meadows of spring when she saw a ship going out to sea and heard her true love crying on board; and he sailed to the wars and much he saw in strange countries, but never came back; and still she walks in the meadows and looks out to sea, though she is old, in the spring. He sang without stirring, without expression, except in so far as light and darkness from his own life emerged enmeshed among the deep notes. He might have been delivering an oracle of solemn but ambiguous things. And so in fact he was. By its simplicity and remoteness from life the song set going the potent logic of fancy which would lead many men to diverse conclusions. It excluded nothing of humanity except what baseness its melody might make impossible. The strangeness and looseness of its framework allowed each man to see himself therein, or some incident or dream in his life, or something possible to a self which he desired to be or imagined himself to be, or perhaps believed himself once to have been. There were no bounds of time or place. It included the love of Ruy Blas, of Marlowe, of Dante, of Catullus, of Kilhwch, of Swift, of Palomides, of Hazlitt, of Villon.... And that little inn, in the midst of mountains and immense night, seemed a temple of all souls, where a few faithful ones still burnt candles and remembered the dead.
PART V
THE SEA
CHAPTER XLI
A MARCH HAUL
The white houses on the hill are whiter than ever before in the early light and the south wind from over the sea. The soft, wheat-coloured sand is inscribed far from the water by the black scrawl of the overpast storm. But now the sea is broken by sliding ripples so small that they seem only the last, discontented efforts of the wind to make the surface one perfect floor of glass. The curving, foamy lines waver and swirl and are about to disappear and leave the desired level when others are born unnoticeably. The black hulls of the leaning ships gleam and darken the water, and by their reflections give it an immeasurable depth which contrasts strangely with its lucid tranquillity and the drowned roses of the departing dawn, for in the high blue sky some of the sunrise clouds have lost their way and hang, still rosy, near the zenith, round the transparent moon. The mist over the sea at the horizon is golden.
Sea and shore are at rest, all but one group of men who are welcoming a little ship that comes in upon the tide, fragrant and stately and a little weary, as with folded arms, solemn also as if she were invading, or perhaps bringing mysterious gifts for the ancient, wintry land.
And now they are hauling in the deeply-laden boat that seems on this fair morning to have brought the spring out of the sea; and that is why they strain grimly to have her safe on the storm-strewn shore. She is laden with flowers, with anemones and primroses for the woods, violets for the banks, marigolds for the brooks and the ungrazed, rushy corners of long fields, daffodils for the stone walls and the short turf at the edges of copses, stitchwort for the hedgerows, bittersweet may for the hawthorns, gold for the willows, white and rosy blossom for the old orchards among the hills, mezereon, jonquils, rockets, plume poppies and snapdragons and roses for the gardens; and the men heave and groan as if they feared lest the sea should still rob them of some.
All the leaves are there—the sweet hawthorn green which the children chew, the dewy, pensile leaves of hazel and beech and lime, the palmy ash leaves still misty with purple flower, the oak leaves bronzed or gilded among their rosy galls, and the streamers of the willow, and all the grasses and reeds, and the tall young adder-headed bracken for the moor, and ferns for the dripping ledges of the waterfall; and the men heave without resting, lest any should escape and so cheat them of shaded ways for rest and sport and love.
There also are the birds—the gentle martins, swallows that will seem the perfect flower of the home sweetness in stern cottages on the heights and warm farmhouses in the valleys, the chiffchaffs that shall sing in the ash and the larch, the delicate wrens of the woodland crests and the tempestuous nightingales of the thick-budded copses, silent fly-catchers for the plum trees on southern walls, cuckoos to shout over the dim water-meadows and in the pearly lichened oak woods, ousels to flash on the moors, skiey swifts, doves to fill the green caverns of the beeches, and all the chatterers that hide in blackthorn and cornel thickets when it is best to walk among them; and the men heave, for they are coming to the land even now.