Hampshire Days

by W. H. Hudson

Here, sheltered by the bushes, I sat and saw the sun go down, and the long twilight deepen till the oak woods of Beaulieu in the west looked black on the horizon, and the stars came out: in spite of the cold wind that made me shiver in my thin clothes, I sat there for hours, held by the silence and solitariness of that mound of the ancient dead.

Sitting there, profoundly sad for no apparent cause, with no conscious thought in my mind, it suddenly occurred to me that I knew that spot from of old, that in long-past forgotten years I had often come there of an evening and sat through the twilight, in love with the loneliness and peace, wishing that it might be my last resting-place. To sleep there for ever—the sleep that knows no waking! We say it, but do not mean—do not believe it. Dreams do come to give us pause; and we know that we have lived. To dwell alone, then, with this memory of life in such a spot for all time! There are moments in which the thought of death steals upon and takes us as it were by surprise, and it is then exceeding bitter. It was as if that cold wind blowing over and making strange whispers in the heather had brought a sudden tempest of icy rain to wet and chill me.

This miserable sensation soon passed away, and, with quieted heart, I began to grow more and more attracted by the thought of resting on so blessed a spot. To have always about me that wildness which I best loved—the rude incult heath, the beautiful desolation; to have harsh furze and ling and bramble and bracken to grow on me, and only wild creatures for visitors and company. The little stonechat, the tinkling meadow-pipit, the excited whitethroat to sing to me in summer; the deep-burrowing rabbit to bring down his warmth and familiar smell among my bones; the heat-loving adder, rich in colour, to find when summer is gone a dry safe shelter and hibernaculum in my empty skull.

So beautiful did the thought appear that I could have laid down my life at that moment, in spite of death's bitterness, if by so doing I could have had my desire. But no such sweet and desirable a thing could be given me by this strange people and race that possess the earth, who are not like the people here with me in the twilight on the heath. For I thought, too, of those I should lie with, having with them my after life; and thinking of them I was no longer alone. I thought of them not as others think, those others of a strange race. What do they think? They think so many things! The materialist, the scientist, would say: They have no existence; they ceased to be anything when their flesh was turned to dust, or burned to ashes, and their minds, or souls, were changed to some other form of energy, or motion, or affection of matter, or whatever they call it. The believer would not say of them, or of the immaterial part of them, that they had gone into a world of light, that in a dream or vision he had seen them walking in an air of glory; but he might hold that they had been preached to in Hades some nineteen centuries ago, and had perhaps repented of their barbarous deeds. Or he might think, since he has considerable latitude allowed him on the point, that the imperishable parts of them are here at this very spot, tangled in dust that was once flesh and bones, sleeping like chrysalids through a long winter, to be raised again at the sound of a trumpet blown by an angel to a second conscious life, happy or miserable as may be willed.

I imagine none of these things, for they were with me in the twilight on the barrow in crowds, sitting and standing in groups, and many lying on their sides on the turf below, their heads resting in their hands. They, too, all had their faces turned towards Beaulieu. Evening by evening for many and many a century they had looked to that point, towards the black wood on the horizon, where there were people and sounds of human life. Day by day for centuries they had listened with wonder and fear to the Abbey bells, and to the distant chanting of the monks. And the Abbey has been in ruins for centuries, open to the sky and overgrown with ivy; but still towards that point they look with apprehension, since men still dwell there, strangers to them, the little busy eager people, hateful in their artificial indoor lives, who do not know and who care nothing for them, who worship not and fear not the dead that are underground, but dig up their sacred places and scatter their bones and ashes, and despise and mock them because they are dead and powerless.

It is not strange that they fear and hate. I look at them—their dark, pale, furious faces—and think that if they could be visible thus in the daylight, all who came to that spot or passed near it would turn and fly with a terrifying image in their mind which would last to the end of life. But they do not resent my presence, and would not resent it were I permitted to come at last to dwell with them for ever. Perhaps they know me for one of their tribe—know that what they feel I feel, would hate what they hate.

Has it not been said that love itself is an argument in favour of immortality? All love—the love of men and women, of a mother for her child, of a friend for a friend—the love that will cause him to lay down his life for another. Is it possible to believe, they say, that this beautiful sacred flame can be darkened for ever when soul and body fall asunder? But love without hate I do not know and cannot conceive; one implies the other. No good and no bad quality or principle can exist (for me) without its opposite. As old Langland wisely says:

For by luthere men know the good;
And whereby wiste men which were white
If all things black were?