Afoot in England

by W. H. Hudson

Death is a reality only when it is very near, so close on us that we can actually hear its swift stoaty feet rustling over the dead leaves, and for a brief bitter space we actually know that his sharp teeth will presently be in our throat.

Out in the blessed sunshine I listen to a blackcap warbling very beautifully in a thorn bush near the cottage; then to the great shout of excited joy of the children just released from school, as they rush pell-mell forth and scatter about the village, and it strikes me that the bird in the thorn is not more blithe-hearted than they. An old rook—I fancy he is old, a many-wintered crow—is loudly caw-cawing from the elm tree top; he has been abroad all day in the fields and has seen his young able to feed themselves; and his own crop full, and now he is calling to the others to come and sit there to enjoy the sunshine with him. I doubt if he is happier than the human inhabitants of the village, the field labourers and shepherds who have been out toiling since the early hours, and are now busy in their own gardens and allotments or placidly smoking their pipes at their cottage doors.

But I could not stay longer in that village of old unhappy memories and of quiet, happy, uninteresting lives that leave no memory, so after waiting two more days I forced myself to say good-bye to my poor old landlady. Or rather to say "Good night," as I had to start at one o'clock in the morning so as to have a couple, of hours before sunrise at "The Stones" on my way to Salisbury. Her latest effort to detain me a day longer had been made and there was no more to say.

"Do you know," she said in a low mysterious voice, "that it is not safe to be alone at midnight on this long lonely road—the loneliest place in all Salisbury Plain?" "The safest," I said. "Safe as the Tower of London—the protectors of all England are there." "Ah, there's where the danger is!" she returned. "If you meet some desperate man, a deserter with his rifle in his hand perhaps, do you think he would hesitate about knocking you over to save himself and at the same time get a little money to help him on his way?"

I smiled at her simulated anxiety for my safety, and set forth when it was very dark but under a fine starry sky. The silence, too, was very profound: there was no good-bye from crowing cock or hooting owl on this occasion, nor did any cyclist pass me on the road with a flash of light from his lamp and a tinkle from his bell. The long straight road on the high down was a dim grey band visible but a few yards before me, lying across the intense blackness of the earth. By day I prefer as a rule walking on the turf, but this road had a rare and peculiar charm at this time. It was now the season when the bird's-foot-trefoil, one of the commonest plants of the downland country, was in its fullest bloom, so that in many places the green or grey-green turf as far as one could see on every side was sprinkled and splashed with orange-yellow. Now this creeping, spreading plant, like most plants that grow on the close-cropped sheep-walks, whose safety lies in their power to root themselves and live very close to the surface, yet must ever strive to lift its flowers into the unobstructed light and air and to overtop or get away from its crowding neighbours. On one side of the road, where the turf had been cut by the spade in a sharp line, the plant had found a rare opportunity to get space and light and had thrust out such a multitude of bowering sprays, projecting them beyond the turf, as to form a close band or rope of orange-yellow, which divided the white road from the green turf, and at one spot extended unbroken for upwards of a mile. The effect was so singular and pretty that I had haunted this road for days for the pleasure of seeing that flower border made by nature. Now all colour was extinguished: beneath and around me there was a dimness which at a few yards' distance deepened to blackness, and above me the pale dim blue sky sprinkled with stars; but as I walked I had the image of that brilliant band of yellow colour in my mind.

By and by the late moon rose, and a little later the east began to grow lighter and the dark down to change imperceptibly to dim hoary green. Then the exquisite colours of the dawn once more, and the larks rising in the dim distance—a beautiful unearthly sound—and so in the end I came to "The Stones," rejoicing, in spite of a cloud which now appeared on the eastern horizon to prevent the coming sun from being seen, that I had the place to myself. The rejoicing came a little too soon; a very few minutes later other visitors on foot and on bicycles began to come in, and we all looked at each other a little blankly. Then a motorcar arrived, and two gentlemen stepped out and stared at us, and one suddenly burst out laughing.

"I see nothing to laugh at!" said his companion a little severely.

The other in a low voice made some apology or explanation which I failed to catch. It was, of course, not right; it was indecent to laugh on such an occasion, for we were not of the ebullient sort who go to "The Stones" at three o'clock in the morning "for a lark"; but it was very natural in the circumstances, and mentally I laughed myself at the absurdity of the situation. However, the laugher had been rebuked for his levity, and this incident over, there was nothing further to disturb me or any one in our solemn little gathering.

It was a very sweet experience, and I cannot say that my early morning outing would have been equally good at any other lonely spot on Salisbury Plain or anywhere else with a wide starry sky above me, the flush of dawn in the east, and the larks rising heavenward out of the dim misty earth. Those rudely fashioned immemorial stones standing dark and large against the pale clear moonlit sky imparted something to the feeling. I sat among them alone and had them all to myself, as the others, fearing to tear their clothes on the barbed wire, had not ventured to follow me when I got through the fence. Outside the enclosure they were some distance from me, and as they talked in subdued tones, their voices reached me as a low murmur—a sound not out of harmony with the silent solitary spirit of the place; and there was now no other sound except that of a few larks singing fitfully a long way off.

Just what the element was in that morning's feeling which Stonehenge contributed I cannot say. It was too vague and uncertain, too closely interwoven with the more common feeling for nature. No doubt it was partly due to many untraceable associations, and partly to a thought, scarcely definite enough to be called a thought, of man's life in this land from the time this hoary temple was raised down to the beginning of history. A vast span, a period of ten or more, probably of twenty centuries, during which great things occurred and great tragedies were enacted, which seem all the darker and more tremendous to the mind because unwritten and unknown. But with the mighty dead of these blank ages I could not commune. Doubtless they loved and hated and rose and fell, and there were broken hearts and broken lives; but as beings of flesh and blood we cannot visualize them, and are in doubt even as to their race. And of their minds, or their philosophy of life, we know absolutely nothing. We are able, as Clifford has said in his Cosmic Emotion, to shake hands with the ancient Greeks across the great desert of centuries which divides our day from theirs; but there is no shaking hands with these ancients of Britain—or Albion, seeing that we are on the chalk. To our souls they are as strange as the builders of Tiuhuanaco, or Mitla and Itzana, and the cyclopean ruins of Zimbabwe and the Carolines.