Chapter Twenty-Two: The Village and "The Stones"
My experiences at "The Stones" had left me with the idea that but for the distracting company the hours I spent there would have been very sweet and precious in spite of the cloud in the east. Why then, I asked, not go back on another morning, when I would have the whole place to myself? If a cloud did not matter much it would matter still less that it was not the day of the year when the red disc flames on the watcher's sight directly over that outstanding stone and casts first a shadow then a ray of light on the altar. In the end I did not say good-bye to the village on that day, but settled down to listen to the tales of my landlady, or rather to another instalment of her life-story and to further chapters in the domestic history of those five small villages in one. I had already been listening to her every evening, and at odd times during the day, for over a week, at first with interest, then a little impatiently. I was impatient at being kept in, so to speak. Out-of-doors the world was full of light and heat, full of sounds of wild birds and fragrance of flowers and new-mown hay; there were also delightful children and some that were anything but delightful—dirty, ragged little urchins of the slums. For even these small rustic villages have their slums; and it was now the time when the young birds were fluttering out of their nests—their hunger cries could be heard everywhere; and the ragged little barbarians were wild with excitement, chasing and stoning the flutterers to slay them; or when they succeeded in capturing one without first having broken its wings or legs it was to put it in a dirty cage in a squalid cottage to see it perish miserably in a day or two. Perhaps I succeeded in saving two or three threatened lives in the lanes and secret green places by the stream; perhaps I didn't; but in any case it was some satisfaction to have made the attempt.
Now all this made me a somewhat impatient listener to the village tales—the old unhappy things, for they were mostly old and always unhappy; yet in the end I had to listen. It was her eyes that did it. At times they had an intensity in their gaze which made them almost uncanny, something like the luminous eyes of an animal hungrily fixed on its prey. They held me, though not because they glittered: I could have gone away if I had thought proper, and remained to listen only because the meaning of that singular look in her grey-green eyes, which came into them whenever I grew restive, had dawned on my careless mind.
She was an old woman with snow-white hair, which contrasted rather strangely with her hard red colour; but her skin was smooth, her face well shaped, with fine acquiline features. No doubt it had been a very handsome face though never beautiful, I imagine; it was too strong and firm and resolute; too like the face of some man we see, which, though we have but a momentary sight of it in a passing crowd, affects us like a sudden puff of icy-cold air—the revelation of a singular and powerful personality. Yet she was only a poor old broken-down woman in a Wiltshire village, held fast in her chair by a hopeless infirmity. With her legs paralysed she was like that prince in the Eastern tale on whom an evil spell had been cast, turning the lower half of his body into marble. But she did not, like the prince, shed incessant tears and lament her miserable destiny with a loud voice. She was patient and cheerful always, resigned to the will of Heaven, and—a strange thing this to record of an old woman in a village!—she would never speak of her ailments. But though powerless in body her mind was vigorous and active teeming with memories of all the vicissitudes of her exceedingly eventful, busy life, from the time when she left her village as a young girl to fight her way in the great world to her return to end her life in it, old and broken, her fight over, her children and grandchildren dead or grown up and scattered about the earth.
Chance having now put me in her way, she concluded after a few preliminary or tentative talks that she had got hold of an ideal listener; but she feared to lose me—she wanted me to go on listening for ever. That was the reason of that painfully intense hungry look in her eyes; it was because she discovered certain signs of lassitude or impatience in me, a desire to get up and go away and refresh myself in the sun and wind. Poor old woman, she could not spring upon and hold me fast when I attempted to move off, or pluck me back with her claws; she could only gaze with fiercely pleading eyes and say nothing; and so, without being fascinated, I very often sat on listening still when I would gladly have been out-of-doors.
She was a good fluent talker; moreover, she studied her listener, and finding that my interest in her own interminable story was becoming exhausted she sought for other subjects, chiefly the strange events in the lives of men and women who had lived in the village and who had long been turned to dust. They were all more or less tragical in character, and it astonished me to think that I had stayed in a dozen or twenty, perhaps forty, villages in Wiltshire, and had heard stories equally strange and moving in pretty well every one of them.
If each of these small centres possessed a scribe of genius, or at any rate one with a capacity for taking pains, who would collect and print in proper form these remembered events, every village would in time have its own little library of local history, the volumes labelled respectively, "A Village Tragedy", "The Fields of Dulditch", "Life's Little Ironies", "Children's Children", and various others whose titles every reader will be able to supply.
The effect of a long spell of listening to these unwritten tragedies was sometimes strong enough to cloud my reason, for on going directly forth into the bright sunshine and listening to the glad sounds which filled the air, it would seem that this earth was a paradise and that all creation rejoiced in everlasting happiness excepting man alone who—mysterious being!—was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks fly upwards. A pure delusion, due to our universal and ineradicable passion for romance and tragedy. Tell a man of a hundred humdrum lives which run their quiet contented course in this village, and the monotonous unmoving story, or hundred stories, will go in at one ear and out at the other. Therefore such stories are not told and not remembered. But that which stirs our pity and terror—the frustrate life, the glorious promise which was not fulfilled, the broken hearts and broken fortunes, and passion, crime, remorse, retribution—all this prints itself on the mind, and every such life is remembered for ever and passed on from generation to generation. But it would really form only one brief chapter in the long, long history of the village life with its thousand chapters.
The truth is, if we live in fairly natural healthy condition, we are just as happy as the lower animals. Some philosopher has said that the chief pleasure in a man's life, as in that of a cow, consists in the processes of mastication, deglutition, and digestion, and I am very much inclined to agree with him. The thought of death troubles us very little—we do not believe in it. A familiar instance is that of the consumptive, whose doctor and friends have given him up and wait but to see the end, while he, deluded man, still sees life, an illimitable, green, sunlit prospect, stretching away to an infinite distance before him.