He passed the mailcart and crossed the bridge; then he reached the woods and left the road. He wanted a quiet place in which to think; he had brought with him, in his knapsack, bread and cheese and apples,—enough food for two days. He walked down a turf path, climbed a gate, walked through two straight pine avenues, and gained the “open forest,” a great silent glade solemn and wonderful in the breathless waiting of dawn. Here companies of rabbits were feeding; here were huge spring-flushed oaks, twisted thorns, delicate birches glowing with the marvel of young leafage. Here too was gorse ablaze with the fire of God, and on the top-most twig of a larch, outlined against the sky, was a thrush, a-quiver with a passion of song, telling a marvellous secret of the heart of things, as only those can tell who do not understand the uttermost meaning of their speech.
He had walked through the place looking at nothing until now; he had an important decision to make. But now he stopped as though a great hand had gripped him, and he stared at the bird with his eyes half-shut. It was so clear; he could see the little feathers a-tremble at its quivering throat, as the notes bubbled up like drops of bright water from a well of joy.
He stared and listened till the thrush flew away.
He came to a little grove of holly trees; and there, on the round circle of oozing wood where a great apple tree had been felled, he lay down and ate some bread and an apple. Then he went to sleep, and when he woke it was noon; the glade was a marvel of dappled shade and shine.
There was a blue tit swinging on the holly bough above him; and a fox was trotting demurely through the fern a few yards away. It was all sacredly, wonderfully still. The place taught nothing; said nothing; it was itself—it was what it was. That was all.
He heard a quick patter of rain; and the leaves shone with diamonds; he watched them a-glitter in the sun, when it shone forth again. A drove of shaggy cream-coloured cattle came by, crashing through the tangle, and passing the little grove of hollies, all a-shine in the sun, where he lay.
When they passed he rose and wandered down a turf alley till the pines hid the wide stretch of the open forest; then he lay with his face hidden on the great cushions of the moss; and listened half-unconsciously to the silence—the wonderful sounding silence—of the wood.
There was a big beech tree near; it blazed with the green fire of spring; at its foot were the shining sticky brown sheaths that once shielded the young leaves. The oaks were pink, they were as rosy as the dawn sky when he reached the forest. From the wood—only he was too tired to rise and seek them—he could smell some late primroses yet lingering on the sweet wet earth, from which the young grass sprang. He heard a wood-pigeon’s slow, sleepy note a-purr from a little grove of larches. Presently, with a strong beat of blue-grey wings the bird flew between him and the sky. Then a jay swung silently from the pines and perched on a bough above him; the conscienceless bird chuckled and preened his feathers; a tiny blue black-barred wonder fluttered down on the man’s chest.
Lying so, he could see the stiff, straight stems of the uncurling bracken, quite differently from the fashion in which they are seen when they are looked at from above; they stood rank by rank, straight, stiff, and green, with their little brown cowled heads bent like monks in prayer.
There was a much bigger life than his unfolding its affairs there in the wood; and it made no turmoil or fuss about it; it lived and reasoned not; it kept the commandments because it was not aware they were apart from itself. And what were the commandments of the wood? Certainly they were kept, whatever they were, for the place was full of beauty and of rest.