Between the Larch-woods and the Weir

by Flora Klickmann

At last I got to the top gate, which is about one hundred feet higher than the lower part of the garden. What a wonderful world I gazed upon, so weird, so immensely mysterious it looked under the great snow covering. The valleys where the sun did not penetrate were entirely blotted out by soft mist. One seemed to be alone, high up in space, girdled about by white and grey, gold and mauve and steely-blue; I wanted to push on and on, to walk miles and miles, to fly if I could. The fact was, the exhilaration of the keen pure atmosphere was already beginning to tell on me, and was fast mounting to my head.

One thing I caught sight of on the opposite hills gave me pause for thought: it was a larch-wood in which every tree was blown so far over to one side, that there would be but little chance of their ever recovering or getting into the upright. I remembered that the handy man had told us trees were lying in all directions out in the main road. I decided to climb still higher up the hill and see what my own woods looked like. First, however, I took off the big coat, and left it hanging on the under bough of a larch inside the gate.

Out of the top gate I went, and along the lane that now showed a moderately hard path along the centre, where one and another had trampled it down. A few yards brought me to a field that in June is one dazzling, waving mass of moon daisies, mauve pyramidal orchises, rich purple orchises, quaking grass, and a hundred other flowers besides. Not a first class hay-crop, I admit; still, a fair-sized rick stands in one corner. And although it may not possess strong feeding qualities for cattle, this field has wonderful feeding qualities for mind and soul; I’ve lived on it many and many a day through dreary London fogs and amid dirty City pavements and sordid-looking bricks and mortar. And when town has seemed unendurable, with its noise and its hustle and its brain-and-body-wearying chase after the unnecessary, I’ve thought of the brook that slips out from among a great mass of Hard Fern in the birch and hazel coppice up above, and wanders across the orchis field, with ragged robins fluttering their tattered pink petals beside the sterner browns and greens of flowering reeds, and broad masses of marsh mint—that is a mass of bluey-mauve in August—spreading in big clumps and bosses wherever it can find a bit of damp earth.

I’ve shut my eyes in the noisy City train, and in a moment I’ve gathered a big bunch of the quaking grass, brown, with a tinge of purple, and the yellow stamens dangling from each little tuft. And the comfort that the brook and the orchises and the reeds and the under carpet of tiny flowers have brought me, has been worth more to me, personally, than the money that twenty haystacks might have realised.

But to-day the field was just one white sheet, like all the rest of the landscape. Along the south side of the wall the snow was not so heavy, and using the broom as an alpenstock, I plodded up the field—giving a wide berth to the place where the brook was down below—till at last I reached the woods, first a coppice of birch and hazel and oak, and adjoining it a larch-wood.

Once under the trees, the going was “all according”! It depended on whether the snow was still on the branches, or had come down in small avalanches to the ground beneath. But I determined to struggle on. I was warmer than I had been since the previous summer, and more pleased with life than I had been since before the War started. The larch-wood offered the easier travelling, since there are not the down-drooping, low-lying branches of sundries that are always catching at one’s hat and hair in the mixed woods. With the larches you know just what to expect and where to find it. The needles make a fairly soft carpet, brambles are rare, and all you have to do is to gauge the level of the lowest of the bare brown branches, and pitch your head accordingly.

I looked at the wood before I ventured in. Everything seemed as usual. The outside trees that border the field are mixed firs, pines, and Wellingtonia. These do not shed their leaves as the larches do, and they stood up strong and erect, save where the heaviest laden boughs were bending under their weight of snow.

For the first few yards the trees were normal, standing in orderly ranks, much like the aisles of an old ruined cathedral, wherein the snow has freedom of entry. Every twig, every cone, had its glistening decoration. When a gust of wind shook tree or branches, down came the snow, in powder for the most part, for the under branches broke the masses as they fell, and sent them flying in all directions.

Suddenly I emerged from the sombre half light of the wood, into brilliant sunshine, with clear space above. Yet—I wasn’t through the wood; what did it mean? And what were these great white masses that blocked all further progress? I had never seen this spot before, though I know every tree in that wood; to me they are like individual children.